Analyzing the Mayor’s Proposed Budget: Funding the Correct Priorities
Mayor London Breed announced her proposed budget last week, and there’s a lot to dig into. TogetherSF Action has been focused on pushing City Hall to end the city’s open-air drug markets this year, with events, an ad campaign, and social media dedicated to this cause. The budget provides funding for the city’s plans for the next two years—it’s crucial that funding for effective programs to end the drug crisis is included in this budget.
There are two major components to our coalition’s demands for the budget this year—additional law enforcement for drug dealers and funding true treatment on demand for people with substance use disorder to recover. Mayor Breed has addressed a good amount of our community’s requests in this budget draft, and we’re pleased the Mayor is taking meaningful steps to fund solutions to end San Francisco’s fentanyl epidemic.
Funding for Law Enforcement
The law enforcement section of the Mayor’s budget proposal is comprehensive, feels robust, and covers everything that we asked for in one way or another, and then adds more to allow law enforcement more flexibility when responding to emergencies.
Funding to meet the recommended number of sworn SFPD officers, adding staffing aides to allow officers to answer high-priority calls, and investment in personnel training and narcotics equipment will make a real difference in law enforcement’s efforts to close San Francisco’s open-air drug markets. We appreciate the Mayor hearing our coalition’s calls for action, and look forward to seeing a robust strategy and implementation plan to disrupt drug dealing in San Francisco’s neighborhoods.
Funding for Recovery and Treatment
Mayor Breed’s proposed budget delivers on a number of our community’s requests for funding for true treatment on demand. Funding has been allocated to expand completely drug-free therapeutic teaching communities for justice involved people, and money is set aside to expand the capacity of the Billie Holiday Center to serve more justice involved people. Funding is allocated for 50 new dual diagnosis treatment beds, and the proposed budget makes it easier for recovery service providers to offer competitive jobs. We’re thankful that Mayor Breed recognized that San Francisco needs to do more to address recovery for people with substance use disorder.
However, true treatment on demand means that anyone who wants treatment gets it immediately, with no one being sent back out to wait on the street or in jail. San Francisco needs to deliver a continuum of care, from harm reduction supplies as the baseline to full recovery as the goal, and we are not confident that the current budget investments make the right choices to fully close these gaps in the continuum of care.
A major component to effective recovery treatment is the ability for a person with substance use disorder to get into treatment immediately, when they ask for it. People currently have to wait days to get into programs—this doesn’t work when recovery is a matter of life and death. After analyzing the budget, we didn’t identify new funding allocated for intake into recovery programs that are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Currently, there are a number of 24/7 treatment hotlines available, and various street teams combine to offer a 24/7 intake method via taxi vouchers. But this patched-together network isn’t easy to navigate, especially for someone who may have impaired functions. Do these teams have the ability to transport people to a place where they can be processed for drug treatment? Is there enough staffing on these teams to take people who want to enter treatment at odd hours? These are questions that still need to be answered.
San Francisco does have funding dedicated to a planned crisis stabilization center that’s set for completion in 2024. This center will operate 24/7, which again, is critical to getting people with substance use disorder the help they need when they need it. However, it is slated to only fit 16 people—for this to be worthwhile, significant investments should be made to ensure the center has greater capacity.
One of our community’s biggest requests for the next budget is funding for more treatment beds. The most important aspect to fulfilling treatment on demand is actually having a bed available when a person needs treatment. Unfortunately, the Mayor’s proposed budget doesn’t provide a clear picture of how many treatment beds are going to be created or funded in the next budget. In a June 1 newsletter, Mayor Breed indicated the city is working on adding beds, but there’s not a specific allocation of resources to increase the city’s stock of treatment beds—we need clarity on this point.
Finally, we’re concerned that spending $18.9 million in opioid settlement funds to fund three Wellness Hubs is not the best use of this money, since the Wellness Hubs are intended to provide overdose prevention resources and safe consumption sites to enable overdose reversals. Overdose prevention and reversals are critical, but other city services already offer these more efficiently. This money should be directed to programs that will help people get healthy and sheltered, like additional intake centers and more drug treatment beds. One good example is SoMa RISE, which connects drug users to services and offers them care during the sobering process.
With that said, we are grateful to Mayor London Breed for taking steps to end San Francisco’s drug crisis with this proposed budget. We know that completely eradicating drug use is unrealistic. But in the next budget, City Hall has the opportunity to improve the lives of all San Francisco residents by slowing the rate of overdose deaths and overdoses as well as reducing the open-air drug sales and drug use that are eroding our city. The Mayor and Board of Supervisors must keep critical public safety funding in the budget, and prioritize funding true treatment on demand for recovery.
TogetherSF Action is making advocating for an end to the drug epidemic in San Francisco a top priority this year. Our first step? Flooding inboxes at City Hall. We need thousands of concerned San Franciscans to send letters to their leaders demanding they end open-air drug markets in 2023. Are you in?