Gainesville City Commission extends contract with GRACE, says farewell to GFR Chief Joe Dixon

BY JENNIFER CABRERA

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – At the September 5 Gainesville City Commission meeting, the Commission approved a one-year extension of the City’s contract with GRACE Marketplace, allocated an additional $100k to GRACE and indicated their intention to add a second $100k, and thanked GFR Chief Joe Dixon for his service after he announced he would be resigning to be closer to his family.

Contract extension with GRACE

The City originally had a five-year contract with GRACE to provide homeless services, and the same contract will be extended for one more year for $1.5 million. In February, the Commission also allocated $700,000 in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds to GRACE to add 20 beds and some additional services; GRACE is in the permitting process now and will begin construction soon on the dormitory that will house the new beds. On top of the $1.5 million for the contract extension, staff recommended allocating $350,000 from Gainesville Community Reinvestment Area funds to help fund the operation of those 20 additional beds, for a total of $1,850,000 in FY25.

The chart below shows the City’s funding of GRACE since 2019; the County paid an additional $500,000 in 2023-24 ($150,000 in gap funding and $350,000 for street outreach).

GRACE Executive Director Jon DeCarmine told the Commission that GRACE is asking for $2.05 million this year to provide sheltered and unsheltered services. He said that the $1.85 million offered by the City would provide “very high-quality shelter services for 120 people every night with City-funded beds – that’s a 20% increase in shelter beds over what we have been providing in the current contract. But at $1.85 million, we would have to reduce or eliminate altogether the services that we have for unsheltered people, just on account of not being able to have both the staffing and the operational dollars available.”

Commissioner Reina Saco asked DeCarmine about the total budget of GRACE, and DeCarmine said, “This year, it’s about $4.5 million.” Saco responded, “So we are about half of it on a good day.”

City Manager Cynthia Curry said that in an ARPA update (next on the agenda), she would be recommending an additional $100,000, for a total of $1.95 million.

Saco said she would be happy to approve the contract extension, and added, “I will be wholeheartedly asking that we look for more funding because I do not think we can let GRACE operate below a certain standard.”

DeCarmine: About 70% of GRACE clients say they lived and worked in Alachua County before becoming homeless

In response to a question from Commissioner Ed Book, DeCarmine said GRACE is one of 35 or 40 agencies that provide homeless services in Alachua and surrounding counties, but “we are the only shelter that is targeting single adults, which is the not only the largest portion of the homeless population but the most visible portion as well. We ask people,… as they’re coming into the shelter, where did you live and work before you became homeless this time? On average, we hear from them that about 70% of people tell us that they lived and worked in Alachua County before they became homeless. Another 20% tell us that they lived and worked in Florida but not Alachua County prior to becoming homeless. When we have dug into that a little bit more, we find that that does not reflect people hopping on buses from Pensacola or Miami or Tallahassee, but most often becoming homeless in Bradford County or Levy County or Putnam County and having exhausted the very minimal services that are available to them there, coming to a place where they have found that they could get services. And then beyond that, there’s about 10% or so of people who say that they lived and worked someplace else in the country prior to becoming homeless but are now homeless in Alachua County.”

DeCarmine said the shelter has a diversion program that enables about 20 people a month to travel to a friend or relative who is willing to take them in. He said sometimes that is a bus ticket across town, sometimes it is a Greyhound ticket, and occasionally it is a plane ticket.

In response to a question from Commissioner Bryan Eastman, DeCarmine said that if the City allocates an additional $100,000 but not $200,000, he would be able to provide funds that help people move into housing (first month of rent, last month of rent, and security deposit) but would not be able to provide the day services they currently offer to unsheltered individuals.

New law on public camping takes effect on October 1

Eastman said that a new law going into effect on October 1 will make local governments liable if they do not move people into safe shelters, “so I think now is not the year to be underfunding GRACE to any large amount.”

Mayor Harvey Ward said the new law says counties “may” set up homeless camps that provide the required services, but “it doesn’t say the counties shall do a darn thing… And to my knowledge, Alachua County has not had conversations about setting up any of these very expensive camping areas – because the camping areas described in the… law… require plumbing and other infrastructure, require on-site services that… are very expensive, and… I could be wrong, but I don’t believe Alachua County has had those conversations, because they’re not required to.”

Ward said the law says that if someone is sleeping on public property, a nearby property owner can file an affidavit with the municipality or other government, and the government has five days to ask those individuals to move. Due to a recent Supreme Court decision, a local government is not required to have a place for them to go before asking them to move.

Ward said he’d had a conversation with a legislator who promised to file a bill “taking additional positive actions to be helpful and to appropriate funding for some of these things… I’m very hopeful that we can use the next few weeks and months to craft a narrative that we can take to the legislature.”

Ward: “there are very few cities anywhere near our size that are using the percentage of their budget that we are on this issue.”

After public comment, Ward said, “This is all about dollars, and there are very few cities anywhere near our size that are using the percentage of their budget that we are on this issue. There’s got to be help from other entities… We need all the institutional partners to show up with money. I’m saying that again: this is not just a City of Gainesville thing. It could be Alachua County, it’s got to be the University of Florida, it’s got to be Santa Fe College… It’s got to be all the outlying communities. Because, as you heard from Mr. DeCarmine earlier, there are people sleeping at GRACE Marketplace tonight that aren’t from Gainesville, but they’re from the nearby communities.”

Motion and vote

Eastman made a motion to approve the staff recommendation for the extension of the contract with GRACE, and Commissioner Cynthia Chestnut seconded the motion. The motion passed unanimously, with Book participating remotely.

ARPA update

The next agenda item was an update on the City’s remaining ARPA funds, with the staff recommendation shown on the slide below.

Executive Chief of Staff Cintya Ramos said roughly half of the City’s $32.4 million in ARPA funds have been spent, with a little less than a million not yet allocated. Funds must be allocated by the end of 2024 and spent by the end of 2026.

Ramos said that about $800,000 remaining in the funds allocated to Aid to Nonprofit Organizations could be moved to a different category, and staff recommended moving that to the unallocated category, which would then total a little under $1.7 million. Staff recommended allocating $1.6 million of that to GRACE Marketplace, which would be $100,000 more than the amount just discussed by the Commission. $1.5 million in the General Fund that was originally allocated to GRACE could than be allocated to affordable housing. The $350,000 from GCRA would bring the total funds for GRACE to $1,950,000, still $100,000 less than DeCarmine was requesting.

Saco said she would prefer to move $100,000 – “from $1.5 [million] to $1.6 [million].” Ward asked whether she intended to give GRACE $1.6 million or $1.7 million, and she said, “$1.7 – so move $100,000 from 1.5 to 1.6, making it 1.7.”

Curry said that her staff’s “sweep” of ARPA funding had identified $273,760 in unallocated funds, and they recommended giving $100,000 of that to GRACE and the rest to their gun violence prevention program. She said that giving another $100,000 to GRACE would reduce the gun violence funding to $73,760. Saco said she wanted to give $100,000 from affordable housing to GRACE, but Curry explained that GRACE was coming out of ARPA funds, not the General Fund, and the affordable housing money would now be in the General Fund. Curry explained that the only money they could allocate would be from that $273,000, although they could reallocate General Fund money in their September 12 budget meeting.

Curry said $150,000 had previously been allocated to gun violence, but once that is gone, the program will need to start getting grants or possibly get funding from the Children’s Trust. Ramos said about $100,000 of the original $150,000 “is about to be under contract that we plan on spending before the end of this calendar year.”

Ward said the Commission could give Curry “a general idea” that they would like her to find an extra $100,000 for GRACE (on top of the recommended $100,000 on the slide above) and bring that to them on September 12. Curry said, “I would not be coming back with an additional recommendation of 100 because the budget is balanced,” but the Commissioners could “shift things around” on the dais.

Commissioner Casey Willits supported the staff recommendation to allocate an extra $100,000 to GRACE but reiterated that that will not fund “their full suite of day services.”

Eastman said he supported the staff recommendation of an extra $100,000, but he thought the Commission should have prioritized “capital in the ground” with ARPA funding: “I really wanted to see some capital, like some physical infrastructure, come out of the ground, that was going to alleviate kind of a core issue that we have with homelessness, which is that it is, at its core, a housing issue. People need to get homes. We cannot continue to give people vouchers to subsidize housing that does not exist while the rent keeps going up on those low-income houses,… and I know that we’re working in that direction. And so I’d like to have that conversation, you know, when we come around to it.”

Ward: Gun violence funds are “sacrosanct”

Ward said the additional money for gun violence “is sacrosanct. We are making great progress in that area, and we need to not take our foot off the gas.” He also said that if they don’t fund the final $100,000 for day services at GRACE, that would lead to “more folks hanging around downtown… and that is likely at odds with our stated goals of improving downtown.” He said he hoped they would find another $100,000 for GRACE at their September 12 budget meeting, possibly out of the $1.5 million allocated to affordable housing, “and I’ll then go look for other ways to fund that and more, because a million and a half is not enough for that either, but there is a proximate result of not funding day services at GRACE that we will experience fairly quickly after October 1.”

After public comment, Ward said, “I believe from previous conversations that if we were funding around $10 million a year in homelessness, we’d probably be pretty close to to where we would like to be. But that ain’t on the table, and our partners to this point have not stepped up in those kinds of numbers.”

Motion and vote

Saco made a motion to approve staff’s recommendation “with an additional request that at our next meeting, staff bring us options for an extra $100,000 for GRACE.” Willits seconded the motion. The motion passed unanimously.

GFR Chief Joe Dixon resigns

At the beginning of the afternoon session, Ward thanked Gainesville Fire Rescue Chief Joe Dixon for his service to the City. According to a memo sent out by Curry on September 5, Dixon has resigned to move closer to family, and his last day on the job will be September 20. In the memo, Curry recognized Dixon for prioritizing the Community Resource Paramedicine program and for his service as Special Advisor to the City Manager on issues of Public Safety: “In this role, he shaped the City’s efforts to support neighbors experiencing homelessness and our initiatives to address gun violence – overseeing the coordinated effort that has become IMPACT GNV.”

Ward invited Dixon to the podium, and Dixon said,  I certainly appreciate the opportunity that was afforded by the City of Gainesville when I came here in 2021, and until the day that I leave, I certainly will continue to serve in a manner that I feel best. You know, shows how I care about every member – LGBTQ, red, white, black, blue – that we’re going to serve. The standard is excellence, and excellence is standard.” He said he wanted to spend more time with his “grandbaby.”