A portion of the funding originally allocated for the project will now be put toward the Yolo County welfare budget deficit
By SONJA WOOLEY — city@theaggie.org
The Pacifico Project, a five-year joint effort between the city of Davis and Yolo County, has been indefinitely postponed, as announced at the Oct. 15 Davis City Council meeting. This project originally aimed to rehabilitate and upgrade empty apartments at the South Davis Pacifico Co-op into CalWORKs affordable housing units. Yolo County anticipates being unable to use its $1.4 million in CalWORKs grant money for the Pacifico Project, due to state-level changes in funding implementation rules.
The state of California, which allocates CalWORKs welfare funding to counties for families in need of housing, food, utilities, clothing and medical care, has required that the $1.4 million grant allocated to Yolo County for the Pacifico Project be spent by the end of this calendar year. It has not yet been decided whether the Pacifico Project grant money will go toward welfare projects in Davis or other cities in the county.
The Yolo County Chief Administrative Officer Michael Webb spoke about the changes in the use of funding.
“The timeline makes it effectively impossible to accomplish [the Pacifico Project],” Webb said. “We are in the process, now, of formulating what a pivot looks like […] We will be focused almost entirely upon funding program service locations that already exist within the network, so that we can get the money out the door in time.”
Webb outlined another roadblock to the Pacifico Project.
“The state is very adamant that a 20-year covenant needs to be put in place where the county would have to commit to housing CalWORKs families on the property for a full 20-year period minimum,” Webb said. “However, there is no funding guarantee of CalWORKs funds coming from the state. There’s a lot of volatility in a number of revenue streams coming from the federal and state government […] We received word that the state is reducing CalWORKs funding for roughly $42 million across the state for the current fiscal year; the Yolo County share of that is a $600,000 reduction. […] So effectively, the $1.4 million that we have from the CalWORKs grant may serve as a very important lifeline to our county budget in order to help shore up what is now a $600,000 hole.”
Monica Morales, the director of Yolo County Health and Services, also provided a report to the Davis City Council. Her department is currently experiencing a $4 million deficit in their California Mental Health Services Act (MHSA) funding. The MHSA was approved by voters in 2004 and established a 1% tax on incomes in excess of $1 million to support county mental health services. The deficit has been caused by a combination of reduced tax revenues and a reallocation of funding through the Behavioral Health Services Act (BHSA), a part of Proposition 1 passed in 2024. Proposition 1 requires that counties spend 30% of their MHSA funds on affordable housing initiatives, as opposed to other programs, shifting funding from preventative care to individuals with the most immediate and severe mental health treatment needs.
The county and city leaders discussed how local mental health providers, like the Davis School District could apply for California Advancing and Innovating Medi-Cal (CalAIM) funding to fill in the gaps left by the MHSA deficit. CalAIM is a program passed in 2022, meant to help high risk Medi-Cal beneficiaries navigate the complex system of welfare programs and provide preventative healthcare and housing services.
Updates on these topics will be discussed at the Oct. 21 Davis City Council meeting and the Oct. 20 Davis Social Services Commission meeting.
Written By: Sonja Wooley — city@theaggie.org
