Here & Now

Noon Wednesday: Homeless Funding Stuck in Senate

Marisa Wojcik:

Welcome to Noon Wednesday. I’m Marisa Wojcik, a multimedia Journalist with Here & Now on PBS Wisconsin. So yesterday the Wisconsin Senate unanimously passed a bill that would add $500,000 annually to homeless shelter funding in Wisconsin. The bill is now going to head to Governor Evers’ desk for its final passage, and it was one of eight total Republican bills seeking to address homelessness in the state. The other seven bills remain in limbo at the moment, still stuck in various areas of committee in the Senate. Joining me to talk about the story behind all of this legislation, and the state of Wisconsin homelessness in general is Joe Volk, he’s the Executive Director of the Wisconsin Coalition Against Homelessness, an agency that has advocated for this legislation, and thanks so much for joining us.

Joe Volk:

Well, thanks for having me.

Marisa Wojcik:

I want to ask you to start, why only one bill to increase funding for homeless shelters? Why was that the only one passed yesterday?

Joe Volk:

Well essentially because we have three Republican Senators that are opposed to the package as a whole, which is ironic because this whole package of bills comes out of the Walker administration, a Republican governor. Championed in the assembly by the Republican leadership. Passed the assembly 99 to zero. Most of the Republican members of the State Senate are in favor of it, and yet there’s two or three senators that, because they’re opposed to it, are because of the procedures by the majority party in the senate, we just can’t get these bills to floor. It is very very clear, all of these bills would pass the senate if they were to go to the floor.

Marisa Wojcik:

Why this one particular bill, though, if all the rest are kind of similar, but different?

Joe Volk:

Well, I think we were able to make the case over the last few months. So this is money that goes to expand shelter beds throughout the state. The State Shelter Subsidy Program, which this funds, is an existing program. Helps to fund shelters throughout the state. This would have been new money to expand shelters throughout the state. So we’re able to make the case, obviously, in a very cold season, when it’s minus zero in many parts of the state, we’re able to basically make the case to the leadership of the senate, as well as newspapers around the state, they were clearly hearing that they needed to deal with this emergent problem of there’s not enough shelter beds in the state, so people are having to sleep outside. So that’s I think why they finally passed this bill.

Marisa Wojcik:

So the idea that this emergency funding needed to help emergency shelters really hit home. So the rest of the package, based off of recommendations of a council that was started under Former Governor Walker, and it was chaired by Former Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch.

Joe Volk:

Yes, mmhm.

Marisa Wojcik:

And then the proposals were written by Republicans from the assembly. Democrats support them, they were unanimously passed in the assembly. So if it has so much bipartisan support, why isn’t the whole package of bills going through?

Joe Volk:

Well, to get into the weeds a little bit, the senate operates under a rule that’s called the Rule of 17, and what that basically means is that, the Republican leader of the senate is not going to bring any bill to the floor that he needs Democratic votes to pass. So he needs at least 17 Republicans willing to vote for the bill. With these three that he doesn’t have, that would not be the case. They would clearly pass. He would need some Democratic votes to help them pass, but because of the Rule of 17, he just simply will not bring them to the floor.

Marisa Wojcik:

So you’re saying these bills have almost unanimous support amongst Republicans and Democrats, minus just a few key Republican senators?

Joe Volk:

That’s right, these bills passed the assembly back in June, on a 99 to zero vote. The current Governor, Governor Evers, has endorsed these, in fact, made these bills part of the budget. The Joint Finance Committee this last June set aside the money. One has to be clear, the money is in the budget for these bills. It was set aside during the Joint Finance process in June. Eight of the sponsors in the senate, the sponsors of all eight bills in the senate, have a Republican sponsor, and yet we just can’t seem to get over the bridge here.

Marisa Wojcik:

So the one that passed yesterday, again, is about emergency shelter funding. Tell us a little bit about what some of the other bills are hoping to do.

Joe Volk:

Well, we’ve got workforce training money as part of the bills. We’re very much into making sure that many of these people who are able-bodied can get employed. That’s the best way to not be homeless, is to have a good job, to be able to pay rent. There’s some prevention money that would help families especially not become homeless. There’s case management dollars to help families that do become homeless, and people that do become homeless find their way back into permanent housing. Essentially what we’ve done with the shelter bill is that we funded the ER. But you don’t cure anybody in the Emergency Room, you have to fund the rest of the hospital. So unfortunately, while we funded the ER, with the state shelter funding that they passed yesterday, we still need to start to cure the patient, and that’s what these other bills do.

Marisa Wojcik:

Looking at their specific wording, though, most of them say increase funding for this, increase funding for that. So it’s all of these programs, services, resources, that already exist, already go to help people, and it seemed like some of the argument that we were hearing from Republicans on the senate floor during session yesterday while they were debating, before they unanimously passed, was that they don’t want to keep throwing money at the problem. So does that kind of give that argument validity, is that each one of these bills is just adding more money to programs that already exist, do we know if those programs are working?

Joe Volk:

Actually, about half of the money would be money for new programs that aren’t in place. Shelter works. You know, it gets people out of the cold, and into a warm place. We just don’t have enough shelter beds, especially when you get into the rural parts of the state, where people have to go two, three counties over, just to find a place. Wisconsin currently spends about $3 million in this area. Minnesota spends $40 million per year.

Marisa Wojcik:

Just on state funding.

Joe Volk:

Yes, yeah, yeah. So it’s a little bit unfair, you know, if you’re trying to turn water blue, and you put a few drops in it and it doesn’t turn blue to say that the solution doesn’t work. We just haven’t had enough money to really make an impact in Wisconsin, whereas other states, you know, Illinois is up to $22 million, Michigan’s up to $26 million. Again, Minnesota over $40 million, they are having an impact in those states.

Marisa Wojcik:

Some of what was again spoken by some Republicans on the floor, Senator Darling was saying, we need a full court press on this issue, we need a more comprehensive look at mental health, at things like employment, addiction. Are those things being addressed in any of this legislation? Is that really what we should be looking at? How is the actual problem versus proposed solutions matching up?

Joe Volk:

Well there’s no doubt that the reason people become homeless to some extent is that there’s, especially when you’re talking mental health and alcohol and drug abuse is because those bigger systems haven’t worked. People have fallen through the cracks. But to say you’re not going to work to help those people climb back out of the cracks, because the bigger system doesn’t work doesn’t make any sense. Do those systems need to be reformed, in terms of mental health and things of that sort? Absolutely. You know, I would love for them to take that on, but then you’re talking a lot more than $4 million. You’re talking millions and millions of dollars. You get into the Medicaid expansion issue, all of those kinds of things. This is a really simple issue that a big dent can be made in with a fairly small amount of money in terms of what the state budget looks like.

Marisa Wojcik:

And so we spoke about funding a little bit. So the funding does technically already exist. There were attempts yesterday to change where the funding is coming from. Why, in kind of the political realm, does that matter?

Joe Volk:

Well, it matters long-term, because what they did is even though the money, called general purpose revenue, which is our state tax dollars, even though that was set aside, and it’s just sitting there in some account somewhere, basically. Senator Nass decided to put forth a proposal to use some money that was in the WHEDA, Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority budget that had been unspent from last year. So they moved $1 million over to there. In the long-term, it has some problems in terms of how do you fund it next year, if that surplus isn’t there? And quite frankly, I think it was a little bit of a poke in the eye at the Governor, basically saying that, well, you’ve got this money anyway. But frankly, as you look across state government, every agency has money in their accounts that hasn’t been spent yet.

Marisa Wojcik:

From your perspective in what your agency does, is this something that should be put into the budget every year, is this something that taxpayers can expect to be putting money towards every two years?

Joe Volk:

Well, as long as we’re able to show results that the programs work, and that we are in fact reducing homelessness in the state, then, you know, we support programs that work. One of the things that is in the task force legislation that Governor Walker started was that every year, the administration has to report to the legislature as to the progress. That’s a good thing, and if we’re funding stuff that doesn’t work, we need to fund other stuff.

Marisa Wojcik:

So in terms of kind of understanding the scope of the problem and metrics, and reporting, as you just said. You know, it seems like it’s difficult to even quantify the problem. The Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development said that Wisconsin had 4,243 homeless people residing in shelters. The Homeless Management Information System said there’s 22,000 people in Wisconsin experiencing homelessness, and then the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction says that there’s almost 19,000 homeless student enrollments just in students. There’s a lot of difference in those numbers. So, how can we fund things, and how can we find solutions, when we have a hard time even understanding where the numbers lie?

Joe Volk:

Well, we’ll try to unpack this without getting into the weeds too much. Basically, the problem starts in that the federal government has two definitions. One with HUD, and one with the Department of Education. The way that HUD measures homelessness is that twice a year, volunteers go out, and count the number of homeless people they see that are under bridges that we know that are in shelters, at least government-sponsored shelters. That’s where that 4,000 number comes in, and so that’s primarily going to be skewed towards single adults. The first 20,000 number that you talked about, coming from ICA, is that 4,000 number over a year. ‘Cause that 4,000 number, based upon what’s called the point in time survey where volunteers go out is just a snapshot, it’s just one day. If you take that 4,000, look at it over a year’s time, that’s the 20,000. The Department of Public Instruction number, again keeping in mind that it’s a different definition, that’s actually an annual number, looking at the number of homeless children that are in school systems as identified by social workers in that school system. That number of course skews really heavily towards families. My organization, the Coalition, believes that when you make some assumptions, do some extrapolations that there’s probably, on any given night, using the Department of Education definition, about 20,000 people in the state of Wisconsin, half of which are probably kids, that don’t have a place to stay.

Marisa Wojcik:

Is there some concern that, and this was brought up a little bit in session yesterday, that money towards this problem are only going to go towards cities that are bigger, with higher numbers of homeless populations? And kind of gets back into this idea of, you’re just going to go towards Milwaukee and Madison, and the bigger cities, but this problem exists in other places? Do we have an idea of what it looks like in the rest of Wisconsin, and how much of that money would actually go towards other places?

Joe Volk:

Well, we do. That’s one of the nice things about the state Department of Public Instruction data, and if you look at that data, which goes by school district, not necessarily by city, what you’ll see is that homelessness is in every county in the state. You can pick any school district you want, and there will be homeless kids that they’ve seen attending school during that year. The legislature is able to create formulas, as to how this money gets spent. They do it all the time. This is a Republican-led legislature, both in the assembly and the senate, so it means it’s not very urban in terms of the Republican representation. You know, they can pass these dollars, create whatever allocation system they want in terms of what parts of the state get what, so that’s really not an excuse for not passing these funds. They’re basically in charge of where these moneys go.

Marisa Wojcik:

Do you see hope for any of the seven other pieces of legislation? Do you see an ability to push those through?

Joe Volk:

Well, we think there’s a few that we still have a shot at. We’ll be doing a lot of advocacy over the next month, the senate has a floor session again in February. And we’ll just be making the argument, saying well done, you finally got this passed. A little late, but you got it done, but there’s still a lot more to do. And keep reminding them that pretty much everybody agrees on this set of bills, and that it’s just time to move forward.

Marisa Wojcik:

Alright, Joe, thanks very much.

Joe Volk:

Thanks for having me.

Marisa Wojcik:

For more from Here & Now and PBS Wisconsin, you can visit PBSWisconsin.org, and thank you so much for joining us on Noon Wednesday.