City to decide which services get block grants

After what some considered a grueling and even biased interview process, the Costa Mesa City Council will vote tonight on how to distribute about $210,700 in federal grants to nearly two dozen social service organizations.

The redevelopment and residential rehabilitation committee, a council-appointed group known as the 3R committee, interviewed 21 applicants in February and recommended which groups should get a share of the city’s Community Development Block Grant funds for next year.

Costa Mesa will get $1.4 million in funding, and 15% of that can go to social service programs for low- and moderate-income residents. The remainder will go to administrative costs, code enforcement, street improvements in certain areas and events that include community clean-ups.

The money for social services is a fraction of the total funding. But the grant application process has led to complaints of bias against organizations that draw people to the city who rely heavily on social services, or that help a high percentage of Latinos.

If the council follows the committee’s recommendations, nearly 45% of the money would go to senior services, while 20% would benefit services for the homeless and 16% would go to youth programs.

“I understand the need for a lot of the money to go to the senior organizations. I’m president of the senior center,” said Mike Scheafer, a former City Council member who also is on the board of the Boys & Girls Club, another grant applicant.

“The problem, I think, is that the groups representing seniors didn’t get asked the same questions that the youth groups got asked.”

Save Our Youth director Trevor Murphy said he’s satisfied with the $7,500 recommended for his group, but he’s unhappy with the grant interview process. Committee members who conducted the interviews have pointed out that Murphy’s group had an apparently large number of police calls and suggested that the group helps a disproportionate number of Latinos ? to the exclusion of other young people.

“It is supposed to be for low-income communities,” he said. “Is it anyone’s fault that in Costa Mesa the low-income communities happen to be Latino?”

Murphy thinks the grant proposals this year are particularly skewed toward senior programs, though he pointed out that Mayor Allan Mansoor has said he supports such programs. Mansoor could not be reached for comment Monday.

The bulk of the $94,500 recommended for senior programs would go to three programs operated by the city’s senior center.

Bill Turpit, vice-chairman of the 3R committee, said that’s not a surprise because committee members have said they want to increase funding to senior programs. In the past the council had a requirement that a percentage of the grant money go to homeless services, but that was abolished last year.

He said he does take issue with using police calls as a reason to downgrade a group’s grant applications, because the calls may just be to the group’s address and not because the group is attracting crime.

“It’s bad public policy for the city to even suggest that funding is based on just a bulk number of police calls without even investigating the basis for those calls,” Turpit said.

The city did receive complaints about rudeness of people interviewing grant applicants, but Turpit said that problem was addressed when Mansoor sent out a memo a few weeks after this year’s interviews in February.

Council members last year changed some of the funding amounts before approving the list of grants, and that could happen this year.

For the future, Councilwoman Katrina Foley said she’d like to see a fairer distribution of the money. While the senior center has needs, she said, so do other groups ? and the senior center already gets city funding.

“I don’t like how the process has pitted groups against each other,” she said. “It has sort of pitted the seniors against the youth, it should just review the applications and find a way to equitably distribute the money to all of them that qualify.”