State must have solid spending plan for homeless funds

In order to execute, the executive branch needs resources sufficient for the task at hand. Having greater means to tackle the problem of homelessness — more money, as well as the removal of bureaucratic fetters — represents a critical step toward progress.

But that won’t do the job unless there’s also the will to act, to carry out a well-defined plan.

On the one hand, the move by the legislative branch to loosen the purse strings for the fight against homelessness sends a positive signal to the public, a commitment to scale up the government response to match the magnitude of the problem.

But on the other is concern over whether Gov. David Ige’s team, given more discretion over how millions of dollars are spent, will make headway gauged by the only benchmark that matters to the public: moving more of the homeless off the street to a place where many of them can work toward self-sufficiency.

So far, despite four extensions of the state’s emergency declaration for tackling its homelessness crisis, the pace of progress has been frustratingly slow.

There’s been, for example, outreach to landlords who could provide rentals in a subsidized “Housing First” program, but ramping that up is taking time.

There’s been a $5 million grant to Aloha United Way, largely to be funneled into existing social programs, but no clear game plan for making that investment pay off optimally.

There’s a family shelter in the works for Kakaako, but planners encountered plumbing problems at the facility planned for refurbishment, and other hurdles to surmount.

That’s seriously discouraging to the public, hoping for a straightforward strategy for success. Even given the fact that homelessness is an endlessly complicated set of social problems to unravel, the taxpayer needs to know that the money is being well spent, reducing the numbers of people living on the streets.

At the Legislature this week, top budget conferees decided to give Ige full latitude on how he could spend the appropriation for homelessness.

On top of that, state Rep. Sylvia Luke and state Sen. Jill Tokuda, who respectively chair the House and Senate money committees, are positioned to boost the allotment by a third: Ige’s requested $9 million cache for the 2017 fiscal year budget for a variety of homeless programs is likely to be fattened to $12 million.

The full Senate and House will finalize the state budget by May 5. But on Monday, Luke and Tokuda upped Ige’s itemized request with $12 million in general funding to address homelessness.

The lawmakers said that rather than erecting “silos” for the spending, they would leave it to Scott Morishige, Ige’s homeless coordinator, as well as the state Department of Human Services, to determine how the funding should be used. The administration will have to report back to the Legislature.

Allowing for discretion, they added, can result in more efficient use of funding. One certainly hopes that’s true.

At the very least, the conflicts over homelessness planning and spending at City Hall, with the mayor and the City Council at odds over a game plan, stands as testament to the need for more executive leeway.

Even so, it’s easy to worry about how this may play out at the state Capitol, where having a plan at the front end is preferable to a report after the money is spent.

Yes, the Ige administration has plans for which programs will get the money, but no real strategic plan about how all the moving parts will work together — and make gains against homelessness.

Whenever government issues grants to the private, nonprofit sector, the recipient needs to first define its goals, and explain the rationale for spending the money according to its plan.

It’s a shame that the same mandate isn’t placed on the government itself, before such invest- ments are made.