'A lifeline': Lodi mayor says funds for homeless center vital for region
"Contrary to recent claims, the access center project has been consistently and meticulously planned over the last four years, with a clear timeline, dedicated staff, and a broad community input," Mayor Cameron Bregman said. "This facility is not simply a project — it is a lifeline. If withdrawn, these funds would not go back to the county to still be used in our broader San Joaquin County community, but rather go straight back to the federal government and provide no service to our local residents."
Bregman's comments come after San Joaquin County Supervisor Steve Ding said he would be asking the board to take back some $8.2 million in funding allocated to the center during Tuesday's meeting.
Ding said the City of Lodi is currently lacking leadership, internal controls and has no plan to spend the funds.
The supervisor's remarks came a week after the Lodi City Council was scheduled to discuss canceling a previous request for proposals to operate the access center and consider either leasing or selling the facility to a third party for $1.
The discussion was tabled to a future meeting so the entire council could vote on the item, as only three members were present.
Bregman said selling or leasing the site would require the new operator to provide services for five years, adding the city would be using the asset to repay any funding received.
The county allocated $2.8 million in to the city for the access center in 2021. Another $5.3 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding was allocated the following year. Bregman said pulling the $8.2 million funding Ding referenced would force the city to use general fund dollars to complete the access center, as well as cause it to lose the ability to address homelessness.
He added the city's community development department, which has guided the project since its 2021 inception, has devoted hundreds of hours planning, securing funding, and coordinating logistics for the project with many agencies, including county staff.
To halt it now, he said, would undermine years of hard work and relationships, as well as deny critical services to vulnerable residents.
And while the city is currently experiencing executive transitions with the recent decision to place city manager Scott Carney on administrative leave, Bregman said the core group of city and county staff members are still working together to complete the project.
"The city's acting leadership team has not only maintained city operations but has continued to move key initiatives forward, including the access center," he said. "We, the city, the staff, and this council are not only managing, but in full force, with highest work ethics, driving forward our goals and objectives."
While Bregman said funds withdrawn would be returned to the federal government, the project's MOU between the city and county state they would be returned to the latter if not used for the approved project by Sept. 30, 2025.
In addition, the MOU states the city "agrees to maintain all program, fiscal, statistical and management records and make such records available for inspection by county representatives," and that those records include "property documents, any and all costs associated with the project, opening of the access center, and learning and job training readiness center invoices, records of services rendered, and receipt/contractor service-related correspondence."
Failure to comply with county requests and inspections results in a breach of the MOU.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Federal Assistance Management, the federal government retains a reversionary interest in real property constructed, acquired, or improved with federal funds.
Modernization projects totaling $500,000 or more are required to file a Notice of Federal Interest against the property title, and all construction projects are required to file an NFI. In addition, the NFI requires prior written approval in order for a property owner to mortgage, sell, transfer or use the property for a purpose inconsistent with the award.
The HRSA said while leasehold improvements — modifications made to a leased property to accommodate the specific needs of a tenant — are allowed under federal funding, property owners must provide a landlord letter of consent and agree in writing to allow the recipient to undertake the proposed project; acknowledge federal interest and file an NFI against the property title in the local jurisdiction before the project begins; and agree to modify the lease with additional terms that indicate the continued rights of the recipient or federal government in the event that the lessor of record changes.
Construction on the permanent access center, located at 710 N. Sacramento St., was scheduled to begin this month and last about a year. The planned 23,000-square-foot center would include overnight space for about 100 individuals, which could be expanded to 200 if needed.
Plans also call for a commercial kitchen, space for as many as four classrooms, a medical clinic and offices.
The council is expected to receive an access center progress update at a future meeting, and Bregman invited supervisors and county staff to attend.
"The city is committed to completing the access center and strengthening our partnership with the county," he said. "We believe in a shared responsibility to serve all residents, especially those in greatest need. We urge the board of supervisors to continue on the path already set forward for this vital regional project."
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Vox
20 minutes ago
- Vox
Why America is murdering less
is a senior producer and reporter for, Vox's daily news podcast. These days, Miles is mostly focused on economics stories, but he has reported and produced episodes on topics ranging fromto the campaign of Over the last two years, a quiet miracle has been playing out across the United States: People are killing each other far less often. Murder and other types of violent crime spiked across the country in 2020, when the pandemic closed down schools and recreation centers and the police murder of George Floyd fueled a collapse in community trust in policing. Violent crime stayed high for the next two years. But murders fell by about 12 percent in 2023 — the largest drop ever recorded in federal crime statistics — and may have declined even further in 2024. Federal data for the year has yet to be released, but murders likely fell around 14 percent in 2024, according to data compiled by the Real Time Crime Index. This year, they're down roughly 20 percent. Jeff Asher, a crime analyst who helps run the index, said 2025 is on track to have the lowest murder rate since 1960, when the FBI began keeping reliable records. Today, Explained Understand the world with a daily explainer, plus the most compelling stories of the day. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. One of the most remarkable examples of this trend is Baltimore, Maryland, which in the first six months of this year has had its fewest homicides in five decades. Baltimore, like many other cities in the US, received a massive influx of federal funding in 2021 from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). In the last few years, the funding paid for things like new recreation centers and street lights in high-crime areas. At the same time, the Biden administration distributed billions in grants to nonprofit violence reduction groups. That funding, Asher told Vox's Today, Explained podcast, may be part of the answer. He described an 'everything but the kitchen sink' theory of gun violence reduction, with a tide of federal money addressing multiple potential factors, directly and indirectly. 'It's a lot of slop being thrown against a wall, but it's also, I think, well-informed slop, if that's a thing,' Asher said. 'And it is the thing that I think helps to explain why we're seeing [a decline in murder rates] everywhere.' How Baltimore got a handle on gun violence Baltimore's murder spike began earlier than the rest of the country. It came in 2015, after a young Black man named Freddie Gray was killed in police custody. Violent crime shot up to historic highs and stayed elevated through 2020, when Brandon Scott was elected mayor on a platform of reforming how the city approaches gun violence. 'The goal was very simple,' Scott told Vox. 'We were going to reduce the number that has sunk many Baltimore mayors for years by 15 percent from one year to the next, and that was homicides.' Scott's team has leaned into a strategy called 'focused deterrence.' It calls for concentrating resources on the small group of people — mostly young men and boys — who are most likely to be both victims and perpetrators of gun crime. Baltimore's police have tried focusing on these high-risk young men before; what's new here is the carrot: Baltimore partners with nonprofits to offer them job training, mental health support, housing assistance, and other services to try and head off gun crime before it happens. 'What we were doing [before] is we were trying to arrest the criminals who were committing the acts, but there were no wraparound services,' Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard Worley told Vox. 'There was nothing offered for them to get out of the game.' The effort was initially funded by tens of millions of federal dollars. 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They cut…people that are out here helping to prevent violence simply because they don't believe in the methods that they use.' Asher, the crime analyst, cautioned that it's difficult to predict what is going to drive gun violence up or down. It may continue to trend downward even if the funding cuts force Baltimore and other cities to scale back the anti-violence strategies developed over the last few years. But, he said, if history is any guide, gun violence will likely begin to trend back up at some point — and that's when the loss of those programs will be felt the most acutely.
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Yahoo
The real effects of the Wisconsin state budget on children
As federal aid ran out, advocates called on lawmakers to fund the Child Care Counts program using state dollars, as Evers proposed. (Baylor Spears | Wisconsin Examiner) This summer Democratic and Republican legislators along with the Gov. Tony Evers participated in closed-door negotiations to come up with the 2025-27 state budget. All of the parties involved are touting the budget as a historic advance for children and patting themselves on the back for compromising with each other and the work they accomplished. In other words, they played well in the sandbox together. While yes, the state budget has never included funding for child care in its history, as we were one of only six states that didn't, crowing about it now is kind of like touting the fact that you've just changed a diaper for the first time when your child is 2 years old. It's not something to brag about, and the new state budget is nothing to brag about either. On the surface, as you read the claims about historic investments in child care and K-12 schools, you might think the budget really solved some big problems. Take Evers' statement celebrating 'Over $330 million to support Wisconsin's child care industry and help lower child care costs for working families, a third of which is in direct payments to providers.' That means only $110 million is to continue the direct investment to all 4,700 eligible regulated child care programs. The original amount for this program was $480 million. Child care is receiving less than 25% of the requested amount. You might have surmised from Evers' victorious statement that parents will see a decrease in tuition costs with the new budget. However, the opposite is going to be occurring, and tuition increases will start in August. The $110 million will cause child care rates to increase next month because the new state investment is less than a third of what Child Care Counts, funded through the American Rescue Plan Act, originally provided. The purpose of that money was to stabilize a field that had been declining for decades. It increased teachers' wages while holding down tuition costs for parents. It worked. The data showed a decline in closures and it raised the average child care educator's wage from $11 an hour to $13 an hour in Wisconsin. (In our state, over 50% of early child care teachers have some college education or degree, with an average of 10 years experience.) This month the ARPA funds run out, and for the past few years, knowing the federal funding would be ending, families, child care providers, and businesses have been advocating for the state to fill the gap and to subsidize child care. 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A $66 million state investment for 4-year-olds to access 'school readiness' in their child care program. This will help parents as the state will pay for their 'preschool' time, but it replaces tuition for part of the school day. Child care programs that have school districts with all-day, free 4K will likely find it almost impossible to compete with public schools when they still need to charge for the remainder of the day plus wrap-around care. In addition, there is a $28 million pilot project to deregulate the child care field, which ends in July 2027. This move comes directly from the Republicans' playbook. The pilot project will incentivize providers to increase their ratios, meaning more children per teacher, lower quality and safety for children and more stress on teachers. Another harmful policy in the new budget is that 16-year-olds are now allowed to be assistant teachers and count as adults in the ratio. Coupled with the pilot project mentioned above, this means a classroom of 14 toddlers can be supervised by one 18-year-old and one 16-year-old. This reduces the quality, safety, care and education for the children in our programs. Recall that while these decisions were being made behind closed doors, there were no experts in child care policy in the room. This policy was made without consideration of our state accreditation program, YoungStar, and our national accreditations. Any program that participates in the pilot project will no longer qualify to be accredited. And in Wisconsin, accreditation is not just a certificate to state you are following high safety standards, but our YoungStar program is tethered to our Wisconsin Shares (subsidy for child care). Programs with a five or four-star rating receive a bonus subsidy rate. It can mean a considerable loss of funding for providers to participate in the new pilot project. The politicians who wrote the budget deal behind closed doors neglected to consider the increased cost or loss of insurance for providers when we increase the teacher-to-child ratio and when we allow 16-year-olds to count as adults. The same group of non-experts also decided to allow policies that, in 2023, were already proposed and had failed to become law due to the overwhelming outcry from families, providers and the medical field against a policy that reduces quality and safety for our children. The state is throwing millions of dollars in the garbage for these policies, which won't benefit child care programs and will cause actual harm to Wisconsin children. Enacting policies like these without holding hearings raises the question: Who is representing us? The public already overwhelmingly said no to these policies two years ago. Furthermore, funding for child care is one of the top priorities that the JFC heard from voters throughout the state at budget listening sessions. Surveys show that the majority of both Republican and Democratic constituents support funding early child care. The only real compromise made in this budget was the compromise of safety and quality of our youngest children in the state. So how did school-age children fare in the state budget? Again, we are reading about record-setting investments in schools, along with the biggest investment our state has ever made for children with disabilities. Evers proclaimed that the new budget 'secures the largest increase to special education reimbursement rate in state history.' You might think, great, finally children with disabilities will receive the support and resources they need. But you would be wrong. Evers' budget request was for a 60% reimbursement for children with disabilities. After all, 90% reimbursement is the amount that Wisconsin voucher and charter schools have already been receiving for children with special needs. Unfortunately, the new budget allows public schools a maximum of 42% in 2026 and 45% in 2027 reimbursement, which is a far cry from the 60% request — the rate of the 1980s. Yes, the increase in this budget is technically the largest increase in recent years, but it is still miles away from the finish line. To make matters worse, the budget also provided a $0 per-pupil increase in general aid funding to public schools; however, a provision was placed in the budget paperwork that guaranteed voucher and charter schools would receive additional funding for their general aid in the budget. I can't recall a year when no new general funding was provided in a budget to public schools in Wisconsin. Last year Wisconsin saw a record number of public schools go to referendum to squeeze additional funding from their communities to compensate for the lack of state and federal funding. Under the new budget, we will see another record number of schools going to referendum next year. We will also likely see more schools close, specifically in rural, poorer areas where the communities cannot be squeezed any more than they already have been. As you can imagine, this budget will only continue to widen the education gap in quality between the wealthy and the poor. Not to be all doom and gloom, there was one category of children that fared quite well with the new budget: our juvenile offenders. The budget will invest $1 million per juvenile offender. Yes, $1 million per kid. Remember when it was mentioned that investing in our youth early on saves us tenfold later on? The children in our juvenile justice systems are children who were not given the opportunity for quality early child care, children who were raised in poverty, children who have been abused, children who experience trauma, children with mental health issues. The children in our juvenile systems are those who have been failed by our state. Their families could not afford child care, so they were shuffled from one person to another. They lived with violence and addiction in their homes. And when they got to school at age 5, they were already on a trajectory of despair; the school systems cannot afford to provide all the services and support these children need, especially for those who have suffered trauma at an early age. Our new state budget only prioritizes these children once they are ready to be locked away. Unfortunately the hype about Wisconsin making record investments in our children is terribly overblown. Instead, the truth of the matter is that we are putting in the minimum, and this budget keeps us on the lowest tier as a state for investment in our public schools and our young children compared to other states. Meanwhile, we continue to be among the biggest spenders on our juvenile offenders. Our political leaders have misled us. I don't think most Wisconsinites care whether their representatives can compromise or not. I think we would all rather have elected politicians who will actually represent us with integrity. Represent us with values that prioritize our children, families, workforce and our economy. This is our common humanity. We can stop generational poverty. We can stop children from going hungry, we can support children who have been abused and neglected, and we can give children a chance in life. But we just made the choice not to do that. Correction: An earlier version of this commentary misstated the amount of Gov. Tony Evers' budget request as 90% instead of 60%. We regret the error. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX Solve the daily Crossword
Dominion Post
17-07-2025
- Dominion Post
Popenoe Run project completion date pushed to Aug. 31
MORGANTOWN — Steady progress is being made, but there's likely six weeks of work remaining on the Morgantown Utility Board's sewer line and stream restoration project along Upper Popenoe Run. MUB Communications Director Chris Dale said the substantial completion date for the work has been extended to Aug. 31. In his most recent update to the board, General Manager Mike McNulty indicated contractor Laurita Inc. has three crews at work. 'Crew No. 1, they continue to install the sewer main along the stream and have made it to the Hoffman [Avenue] crossing. The No. 2 crew has completed the Hoffman sanitary and storm sewer installation and have moved just above Bradley Street to install the sewer main toward Stewart Street. Crew No. 3 is completing the restoration of yards and disturbed areas along Hoffman, where the sanitary and storm installation was completed,' McNulty said. Further, Laurita has contracted with Appalachian Stream Restoration and Reclamation Specialists to begin the stream restoration process, starting at the Willowdale Road end of the project. Overall, the project stretches from the stadium parking lot side of Willowdale Road and runs between Richland Avenue and Randolph Road to Hoffman Avenue, where it bends and runs behind the homes on Amherst Road to Stewart Street, near Shorty Anderson Auto Service. The work includes the installation of thousands of linear feet of new sanitary sewer and stormwater infrastructure as well as the restoration of more than 2,300 feet of the Popenoe Run stream and hundreds of tree plantings. The Upper Popenoe Run stream restoration and sewer line replacement project dates back to 2021, when the city of Morgantown and Monongalia County each pledged $1 million in American Rescue Plan Act money to address a small portion of MUB's combined sanitary/stormwater system overwhelmed during historic rain events earlier that summer. In July 2022, MUB approved a $420,000 contract with E.L. Robinson Engineering for planning, design, bid administration and construction monitoring of the project. In August 2024, a contract worth $3,228,528 was approved with Laurita Inc. to construct and install the improvements.
