www.montereycountyweekly.com september 21-27, 2023 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 17 During the pandemic, typically slow-moving government agencies acted with urgency. School districts scrambled to get laptops to students. And hotel operators were invited, by the state of California, to house indigent people. Project Roomkey was meant to achieve two goals: Provide limited government reimbursement revenue to otherwise-empty hotels, and give people in need a place to quarantine or isolate. One local hotel that signed up was the Country Inn in Marina. “We were trying to be good neighbors and help everybody out, while also trying to keep our head above water,” says Tony Ng, vice president of operations. “There were ups and downs, sure. But it was a way to pass through the pandemic.” The downs of Project Roomkey at the Country Inn have become a flashpoint in Marina. City Council discussed the program on Tuesday, Sept. 12, mostly covering that councilmembers had no idea it was happening and that during the three years Roomkey was operating, 911 calls to the property skyrocketed. Police Chief Steve Russo told council that a typical hotel generates 30-40 calls a year to police and fire; this one was generating 300-400 calls a year. There were investigations into alleged drug sales, and there were fatal overdoses. “The call volume is significant on a small police department,” he said. Roomkey came to a close this spring and already, Russo said, the call volume has tapered off. But just in recent months, Marina officials have come out swinging. On June 19, Marina City Manager Layne Long sent a letter to Salinas City Manager Steve Carrigan asking Salinas to consider reimbursing Marina for “the cost impacts of locating this program in our city.” Long’s letter is shocking for a few reasons. First, Salinas— which successfully ran Roomkey in its own city—was just a contractor. Salinas city officials ran an updated version of the program for its last 18 months, after previous contractors Coalition of Homeless Service Providers and Dorothy’s Place. Second, Long estimates Marina lost out on $100,000 in transient-occupancy tax revenue due to the rooms being utilized this way. But Roomkey was meant to generate some revenue, better than zero. (Country Inn still has not rebounded to pre-pandemic occupancy.) Third, Long suggests nobody notified Marina officials about the initiative. There was open public discussion about it—it’s just that Marina officials weren’t at the table tuning in. (The board for the Continuum of Care in Monterey and San Benito counties, overseen by the Coalition of Homeless Service Providers, is composed of government officials and meets publicly.) And fourth, most jarringly, it reveals that Long doesn’t get how homelessness works. It’s a regional problem that requires regional solutions. Sending a nasty demand letter to your neighbor is not the way to encourage cooperation. Salinas Mayor Kimbley Craig serves on the Continuum of Care board. She shared a brief story with me about a former constituent who, with her disabled husband and three children, had been living in Marina, and lost their home there; then they found a place in Salinas and lost that, too. Craig helped point them to the SHARE Center—a joint county/city shelter, managed by a third-party nonprofit contractor—where they lived for a time. The SHARE team helped the family find long-term housing in King City. “Who do we bill for that?” Craig says. “How about we just take it on as a community and as a region.” Long might know some of this if he participated in the Continuum of Care’s regional discussions, but he seems preoccupied with throwing others under the bus. (He did not respond to my request for an interview.) In the Sept. 12 discussion, he blamed the now-sheriff and former Marina police chief. “Tina Nieto used to attend those meetings, but she quit after five or six months,” Long said. (I asked Nieto about it, and she says that’s untrue—he asked her to attend one meeting and she did.) “We need to stop yelling at each other and start working with each other,” Craig says. Marina could better serve its constituents, both those who are housed and those who are not, by joining in a regional effort to address the hard challenge of homelessness. Sara Rubin is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@mcweekly.com. Staff writer Pam Marino contributed to this report. Under the Bus City of Marina blames everyone else for homelessness. By Sara Rubin Stars Struck…Squid’s never much cared about being famous—Squid gets to squirt enough ink around—and furthermore, Squid prefers to ooze around town under the radar when Squid has to go on a run for shrimp-flavored popcorn. But Squid was nonetheless crestfallen when Squid’s application for a star on Seaside’s Broadway Walk of Fame was roundly denied. The sad news came via an email Seaside Recreation Director Dan Meewis sent to Squid on Aug. 30 which read, “Because of the high caliber of the [14] nominated individuals…It is with regret that we inform you that you were not selected.” A cephalopod can’t get no respect. The Seaside City Council—which first approved the Walk of Fame concept in February 2022 and installed the first six stars earlier this year—considered its second slate of six (maybe seven) nominees on Sept. 1, along with a construction budget. But before Squid gets into how much it will cost, get this: The city is changing the name of the program from “Walk of Fame” to “Seaside Stars.” Squid’s colleague inquired about why the branding is changing, only to be told it cannot be discussed at the moment, because it’s a legal matter the council, city manager and attorney discuss behind closed doors. Wait, what? Turns out that on May 8, Derek Yee, general counsel for the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, sent the city a cease-and-desist order demanding that Seaside both change the name of the program, remove the existing stars and redesign new ones. Should the city not comply, the letter lays out a litany of trademark law violations that the chamber will sue Seaside over (plus attorney’s fees). Whoopsies! So over the past months, the city has redesigned a new, different style of star. What’s more is that the city must rip out all the old stars and replace them with new ones for an estimated $58,784, which was not in the budget (staff recommends pulling from the general fund). That’s on top of the $42,574 approved for this year’s stars, plus another potential $6,000 or so for a seventh candidate who didn’t make the cut, barely (environmental activist Kay Cline, whose star the council ultimately approved). So less than two years into the program, it’s sapped countless hours of staff time and to date, more than $100,000 of treasure. There are plenty of laudable, err, “high-caliber” names on this year’s nominees—Mel Mason of The Village Project stands out—but the one that sticks in Squid’s craw is Tim Brown, who served as Seaside’s city manager from 1994-1998, but resigned after his staff issued a vote of no confidence against him, and after then-mayor Don Jordan, a Brown ally, lost re-election. Furthermore, audits of the city’s finances from 1995-97 showed $3.6 million in deficit spending. High-caliber, indeed. the local spin SQUID FRY THE MISSION OF MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY IS TO INSPIRE INDEPENDENT THINKING AND CONSCIOUS ACTION, ETC. “We were trying to be good neighbors.” Send Squid a tip: squid@mcweekly.com
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