The Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 on Tuesday to end supervisor sponsorship for individual grants and make other revisions to the county’s Community Services Program, which distributes $300,000 a year to nonprofits but has been criticized in the past for how it allocates the funds.
Supervisor Steve Kinsey dissented, harshly denouncing the changes as a capitulation to the idea—which he said has been perpetuated in the press—that the program operates as a “slush fund” or a form of bribery for votes.
“It is absolutely none of those things,” he said, “and yet it’s being framed that way to be able to embarrass us, to shame us…[These revisions] will not be enough either. It will never be enough until the name Board of Supervisors is not associated with this program.”
The program provides low-level support for nonprofits around the county. Two years ago, supervisors approved a round of changes to the program after the Marin County Civil Grand Jury criticized it for a lack of transparency in how the grants were awarded, for its potential to help incumbents remain in office and for the fact that some groups received grants for multiple fiscal years or more than once in a fiscal year. (The jury released another report in 2001, which spurred changes, too.) Subsequently, supervisors approved rules requiring the county to post the application for the program online, which drew more nonprofits to apply in recent years; restrict grant amounts to between $1,000 and $10,000; reduce the total amount distributed from $350,000 to $300,000; and cease allocating the funds by district.
The changes approved this week include eliminating a requirement that a supervisor sponsor requests for grants. Instead, at public workshops, the entire board will evaluate all requests that meet the program’s guidelines. Afterwards, the county administrator will present the board with recommendations made by staffers at a regular supervisors meeting. The new changes also favor grants for “one-time needs or projects” over operations, and encourage grants for less than 50 percent of a project’s cost, to push nonprofits to leverage the grant for more money elsewhere.
Matthew Hymel, the county administrator, said the funds had not been used inappropriately in the past but argued that the changes created “greater transparency and a more open process around how those funds are allocated.”
Supervisor Kinsey supported the initial changes two years ago, but feared the proposal on the table this week would “pit our community organizations against each other…begging for this small contribution.” He concluded his comments by saying, “I find this whole thing offensive and I have no ability to support it. Thank you.”
The only person to speak during public comment, Linda Davis, the head of the Center for Volunteer and Nonprofit Leadership, said the changes made the distribution process “way more complicated” than it needed to be, particularly given the relatively small amounts of money at stake. “The attention you’re putting on this $300,000—put it on pension reform, for god’s sake,” she said.
Supervisors did promise to revisit the issue in a year to consider the effect on nonprofits.