Reprieve for Neil Good Day Center?

Earlier this month, when the city of San Diego put together its list of Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) recipients, missing was the Neil Good Day Center, a 20-year city program that offers a few hundred homeless folks a place to shower, pick up their mail, access social services or just hang out. Without funding, the day center would be forced to close on July 1. 

CDBG is a federal program under which cities receive money to prevent or eliminate blight and meet urgent health and safety needs in low- and moderate-income communities.

Even though no members of the City Council initially recommended that Neil Good be funded, at a March 10 meeting, they asked staff to explore whether the city's Redevelopment Agency could make available additional money to keep the day center open. The city's Redevelopment Agency has used CDBG money to jump-start redevelopment areas and, after a 2008 HUD audit, was asked to set up a plan to repay those loans (see chart below). Councilmembers wanted to know if it was possible to accelerate those payments. 

Beth Murry, deputy director of economic development, told me that a combination of loan-repayment money ($404,081) and proceeds from the recent sale of a Golden Hill property purchased with CDBG money ($95,919) will cover the cost of keeping Neil Good open.

But that leaves several equally worthy programs without funding. Among them the Interfaith Shelter Network, a program that provides shelter for the homeless in local churches, which has received funding from the city for the last 25 years; a meal program for seniors; a Barrio Logan after-school program; and the city's clean-syringe-exchange program, among others.

Folks advocating for these sorts of programs have wondered why the Redevelopment Agency can't make additional loan-repayment money available to fund Neil Good as well as these programs. Murray said that the money, which is coming from the city's various redevelopment project areas, simply doesn't exist.

"We've got a repayment schedule and that was based on the maximum that these project areas can afford," she said. "They said they could pay a portion of the [2012] payment early in the fiscal year to cover Neil Good Day, but they're not sure about the total cash flow."

The city's also limited by the fact that only 15 percent of CDBG dollars can be spent on social services. The rest must be spent on administration (20 percent, per HUD's recommendation) and bricks-and-mortar projects. There are also restrictions on how much CDBG money the city can have on hand within a year of it being allocated.

The City Council will vote on the funding recommendation on Monday.

This post was updated after its initial publication to include additional information about CDBG funding restrictions.