Gang Prevention Coordinator Al De Vos recently gave a presentation to the Hollister City Council about an application for a Promise Neighborhood planning grant due by the end of July. It would encompass work to the west side of Hollister, including the neighborhoods surrounding Calaveras and R.O. Hardin schools. It would provide $500,000 for planning and then open up the county for additional implementation funding of up to $20 million from future grants.
But some city council members expressed concern that the grant has a lead agency from outside the county – with which the San Benito Health Foundation has been at odds. The lead agency for the grant application is Salud Para La Gente, a Watsonville-based clinic, that is federally-funded to serve low income residents. The Health Foundation fears that if Salud makes a move into the county, they will lose funding.
For more than a year, a dozen partners have been meeting as part of the Dunne Park Neighborhood collaborative. From those meetings an advisory council executive committee of four people was created to apply for the planning grant.
“I am familiar with the three agencies,” said Doug Emerson, of San Benito County, First 5 San Benito and the Youth Alliance, “but not with Salud Para La Gente. Where are they and what do they do?”
De Vos explained that during the process of preparing for the grant application, they needed a partner that would hold primary management and fiscal responsibility for the grant.
“One of the assets of having them on a project like this is we needed an organization that we were not having to drag along, but that was willing to do that,” De Vos said.
“We have the Health Foundation that serves that part of the community – dental health with federal funding – and I have gotten calls of concern,” Emerson said. “We have a local organization that provides those services. Is there a problem with our local organization losing funding or do they coexist without any loss of federal funding to our local health foundation?”
Councilman Robert Scattini expressed the same concerns and said he had also been contacted by concerned residents.
“I don’t want to jeopardize our health [foundation] down here,” Scattini said. “Did you talk to them about partnering with them?”
De Vos said Health Foundation representatives had attended some of the meetings, though Executive Director Rosa Vivian Fernandez had not been in attendance. He said the collaborative asked for a local agency to take on the lead agency role and to be fiscally responsible for the grant, but no one had stepped forward.
“This collaborative has been in place for quite a while and we had a need to get a partner in place since we had to start working,” De Vos said. “We hadn’t found a local agency – we did not have anyone step up. In terms of timing we had to keep looking, so we did contact other agencies.”
He said at the collaborative meetings, they have been asking for one of the local partners to step up.
“The grant is due on the 27th of July,” De Vos said. “It is pretty late for someone coming forward now who had representatives at the meetings.”
De Vos also stressed that the grant would be coming from a different funding stream than the federal funding that provides for the Health Foundation. The planning grant is funded through the United States Department of Education.
“This is a planning grant so no funding coming through this grant would jeopardize Health Foundation programs,” De Vos said. “If there are some programs we want to offer as we get into the planning and implementation, they will be able to participate and get additional support for it.”
Zettie Page III, the executive director of Salud Para La Gente, talked briefly at the meeting about his agency’s involvement.
“We do have a perspective of Hollister right at the front,” Page said, of the agency’s fiscal manager Carlos Garcia, who was born and raised in the city. “The Department of Education is one of the many offices that has one way of doing things. We are familiar with them.”
Jim Gibson, a board member for the Health Foundation, said the week after the meeting that he is concerned with Salud Para La Gente’s involvement in the grant.
“I don’t have a problem with the goals (of the grant,)” Gibson said. “I’m not really sure why we (the Health Foundation) couldn’t have pursued that. The problem we have as the Health Foundation is that Salud Para La Gente is trying to get ready for the advent of the new health law so they are trying to come into this county despite being told by (Congressman Sam Farr) that it wasn’t a good idea.”
The federally funded clinics from Monterey, Santa Cruz and San Benito met in Farr’s office earlier this year and were tasked with creating a committee that would look at the needs in the region to determine the best way to provide healthcare to low-income residents.
Gibson said he is concerned that Salud’s involvement with the grant will set them up to offer services in San Benito when the planning phase is complete, which could draw patients from the San Benito Health Foundation.
“We’ve just bought a new mobile unit – it has not been delivered yet – but we are very proud of it,” Gibson said. “We are trying to actively serve the whole county.”
Gibson said he did not think the San Benito Health Foundation was asked to be the fiscal partner for the grant.
“My understanding is that that is not the case,” he said, adding that he did not believe it was a hard grant to get.
He said he did not know if a representative of the Health Foundation had been attending the monthly meetings.
San Benito Health Foundation’s Executive Director Rosa Vivian Fernandez did not return calls for comment.
Council members Victor Gomez and Pauline Valdivia expressed support for the grant, while Mayor Ray Friend said he did not support an effort that would serve only part of the community.
Council members were expected to review a memorandum of understanding for the grant application and discuss approval of the MOU at a meeting before the July 27 deadline for the application.
