SANTA CRUZ >> After giving the final approval to codify two new city ordinances at its meeting Tuesday, the Santa Cruz City Council heard a presentation about and discussed the Collective of Results and Evidence-based Investments or CORE program, which is used to allocate public funding to community-minded organizations and programs.

Before providing guidance about the way that the limited CORE funding is apportioned to organizations in the city and county that bolster the wellbeing of residents, the City Council received a presentation on the status of the program, which is managed and funded by the Santa Cruz County Human Services Department in partnership with the city.

According to the item’s agenda report, the program has a total of about $6 million in funding available to invest with $4,879,000 from the county and $1,080,000 in funding provided by the city of Santa Cruz. With about $1.5 million of the funding already set aside for shelters with supportive services, and about $670,000 set aside for elected officials to address emerging needs, $3,790,025 is available for competitive funding to local organizations through the program’s request for proposals process.

The request for proposals for recipients was put out to local nonprofits in early June and were due back in August. According to the agenda report, a total of 100 proposals were submitted by 75 organizations requesting approximately $15 million. However, the program only has about $3.8 million in funding available.

“One hundred were received totaling over $15 million worth of requests or over four times the amount of funding available,” said Santa Cruz County Human Services Deputy Director Kimberly Petersen. “For reference, during the last (request for proposals) cycle, the requests represented 2.5 times the amount of available funding.”

The CORE requests are broken into four conditions or categories: Lifelong Learning and Education, Thriving Families: Children and Youth, and Thriving Families: Older and Dependent Adults.

Among those four categories, the requests are further organized into three tiers based on the amount each organization requests, with Tier 1 consisting of requests for $150,001 to $500,000. Tier 2 is made up of requests ranging from $25,001 to $150,000 and Tier 3 consists of requests for 25,000 or less.

The agenda report states that more than 65 panelists representing a cross-section of county residents volunteered to review the 100 proposals. The panelists received training and a scoring matrix from Santa Cruz County Human Services Department to determine the recipients and all panelists signed a conflict-of-interest policy.

Petersen mentioned during the presentation that one of the primary asks from the City Council is to receive direction about how to make award recommendations considering the large disparity in the program’s available funding and the requests made by local organizations. The county and city staff recommendation sought the council’s guidance in picking between two options.

“Option 1 would distribute the available funds across the CORE conditions and tiers based on the dollar amount of funding requested in each category,” said Petersen. “And Option 2 distributes the funding based on the number of applications in each category.”

According to the presentation, the first option would fund about 16 to 36 proposals while the second option is predicted to fund 22 to 40 organizations. The recommendation by city and county staff was for the City Council to go with Option 2 because, according to Peterson, it funds more applications and “because there’s been an interest in spreading the funds more broadly.”

“I also want to briefly highlight why we are asking for some direction today,” said Petersen. “If we don’t get guidance on how to spread the funding across the tiers and the CORE conditions we could theoretically come back in November with recommendations that are solely based on the highest scoring applications without any distinction between CORE condition or tier.”

After the presentation by county and city staff, City Council members expressed their concerns about the CORE program such as Santa Cruz City Councilmember Shebreh Kalantari-Johnson, who said that by no fault of the staff, the request for proposals process for the CORE program is confusing and cumbersome to navigate for local nonprofits with limited resources.

“I don’t have a solution,” said Kalantari-Johnson at the meeting. “But I just really feel strongly that what we’re doing isn’t really working for our service providers.”

Santa Cruz City Councilmember Sandy Brown agreed with Kalantari-Johnson about the cumbersome request for proposals process and said the City Council should be making decisions about allocating the funds based on applications after they are scored.

“I think that these are decisions that should be made after the proposals are ranked because then councilmembers would have a better sense of where agencies are doing well and in what categories,” said Brown. “But we have no ability to make those decisions in an informed way.”

After further discussion Santa Cruz City Councilmember Scott Newsome made a motion to accept the staff recommendation and move the date from when the council is given recommended awards from Nov. 19, when the Board of Supervisors will hear the awards, to February 2025. Newsome said the purpose of pushing the date was so the two new councilmembers who will take office in December will have a say.

Kalantari-Johnson added an amendment that the new City Council should work with city staff to reconsider the entire CORE Investments process and that the council stick to the November date and Newsome agreed.

The motion passed 6 to 1 with Brown voting no.

To watch the meeting, visit cityofsantacruz.com.