Next Tuesday, it is anticipated that the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors will come through with a final $11 million installment to allow the City of San Bernardino to proceed with the San Bernardino Hope Campus.
The navigation center is intended to serve as an effective remedy to the unending proliferation of homelessness in and around the county seat.
Considerable effort and tens of millions of governmental dollars have gone into continuous but most uncoordinated homeless relief efforts locally. While a few of those have proven effective, there has been extensive criticism of those efforts overall, which their critics have blasted as vehicles for the diversion of funds into the pockets of individuals exploiting an unregulated system.
San Bernardino municipal officials say they are committed to finding a real solution to the challenge of homelessness in their city, which is more acute than it is anywhere else in the county. They say that if entrusted with funding, they will not squander it and the programs they will put in place will consist of tangible buildings in which people will be able to reside and not have to be on the streets.
In February 2023 the San Bernardino mayor and city council declared homelessness a local emergency and three months later announced plans to create the 200-bed San Bernardino Hope Campus on the site of the former School of Hope, formerly an educations center for special needs students located at 796 East 6th Street in San Bernardino that had closed down in 2022 and had been purchased by the city.
The city forthrightly pursued tapping into various forms of revenue to complete the project and fund its operations, including seeking state and federal grants, some which entailed matching funds to be put up by the city. This activity was carried out, despite substantial chaos in the city at the administrative level because of the November 2022 resignation of former City Manager Robert Field in the aftermath of Mayor Helen Tran’s election earlier that month and the city’s seeming inability to land a permanent city manager replacement.
In January 2024, the city was provided with a $34,944,702 Project Homekey program grant from the California Department of Housing and Community Development, the largest such grant ever received by any city in California, to undertake the development of the San Bernardino Community Wellness Center, a large-scale interim housing facility for chronically homeless men, built at the existing Lutheran Social Services campus on G Street, consisting of 140 modular interim housing units to complement an existing 70-bed emergency shelter there.
Thereafter, the city applied for another state grant to assist with the funding of the Hope Campus.
In July 2024, the State of California offered the City of San Bernardino another $17 million grant to help fund a comprehensive, full-service homeless shelter on the Hope Campus.
Interim City Manager Rochelle Clayton, however, was concerned about the strings that were attached to accepting the money from the state. On August 23, 2024, Clayton wrote a letter to California Department of Housing and Community Development’s Homekey Program manager Connor Leahy stating the city did not want the money.
Clayton’s refusal to accept the $17 million state offer sparked anger and discontent with her among four members of the city council, who as a result did not finalize her promotion to the full-fledged city managerial position as they had previously intended.
The loss of state funding for the Hope project has remained a sore spot for the city council and the city in the two years that have passed.
The city did not give up on the project concept. As recently as six months ago, the city had cobbled together $12.3 million from disparate external and internal sources toward the projected $21 million the project would cost, leaving the city some $8.7 million short.
Since then, three of the members of the council who have been in favor of the project and who were very sore at Clayton when she rejected the $17 million in state funds in 2024 – First Ward Councilman Ted Sanchez, Second Ward Councilwoman Sandra Ibarra and Fourth Ward Councilman Fred Shorett – stood for reelection. Sanchez and Ibarra were defeated outright. Shorett is locked into a runoff election against challenger Joe Salas in November. All three thus face the possibility that one of the legacies each wanted to leave the city – the creation of the Hope Center – will elude them.
It seems the County of San Bernardino, in the form of the county board of supervisors, is poised to resurrect the prospects of the Hope Center in such a way that Sanchez, Ibarra and Shorett can have the annals record them as having voted to proceed with the project before Sanchez and Ibarra, for sure, and Shorett, possibly, must leave the council dais in December.
On Tuesday, August 18, the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors will consider a resolution “committing up to $11,000,000 as a one-time capital contribution to the City of San Bernardino to develop the City of San Bernardino’s homeless outreach prevention and education campus, a regional low-barrier homeless and recuperative care navigation center,” according to the language contained in that resolution.
The resolution states that the navigation center, which is to be regional in nature, will provide “200 interim housing beds consisting of 180 congregate and 20 non-congregate beds, including up to 70 recuperative care beds, on-site supportive services, and resources for individuals experiencing homelessness.”
The resolution noted that previously, in October 2023, the board of supervisors earmarked $3 million to be given to the city for the SB HOPE Campus project but that the offer of that money expired on September 30, 2024.
With the city again intent on completing the project, its estimated cost having escalated to $23.7 million, such that there is now a funding gap of roughly $11 million funding gap for the project, county officials are now prepared to leap into the breach.
The resolution states that “before any county funds are obligated, disbursed, reimbursed, advanced, or otherwise made available to the City of San Bernardino,” the county officials will carry out “financial, legal, operational, and project-readiness due diligence,” which is to include ascertaining that “that the portable buildings have been installed at the project site.”
The resolution made clear that the county is providing the money to complete the physical construction of the center and does not intend to fund the program beyond that at this time.
“This commitment does not create any ongoing County obligation to fund operations, supportive services, maintenance, future capital improvements, operating deficits, or the replacement of reduced or unavailable operating revenues,” the resolution states.
On January 22 of this year when the annual count of the homeless in the county mandated by the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development was undertaken, there were 1,172 homeless individuals tallied within the city limits, a reduction of 363 from the 1,535 total homeless counted in January 2025. Of those 1,172, at least 737 were unsheltered, without a roof over their heads an no access to even temporary quarters in which to sleep.
-Mark Gutglueck