This topic was at the Housing Dept and covered Child Support Services and the new Housing Dept. There was so much information on this night that I was unable to keep notes because there were a lot of handouts. Hopefully I'll be able to link to them.
Some highlights:
* The Child Support services dept acts like a collection agency for parents who are owed child support. They are more effective at collection (current & arrears) than the California average and the National average. Pretty darn impressive. They server 14,500 clients a year, helping the clients get child support from a parent (usually a father) who owes that child support to the other parent. On average, family gets $3000 a year. Most of the clients are or have been on public assistance. There were a lot more numbers given, but I one important fact is that the money collected by this department often goes to pay back the welfare being received by the client, saving the state money. The CSS dept is mandated in every county in the country. They are going to be migrating to a centralized collection system where employers, etc can pay all the withheld paycheck money to a central system.
* Housing Department. Brand new department trying to address issues of housing. Several orgs within - doing traditional low income housing but also focusing on "workforce housing" (read: housing for "middle income" people). 13% of families in the county can afford to buy a median-priced house. The rental market is working OK. Byproducts of constrained housing market is traffic, hard time recruiting employees, sharing housing. Interesting note: even income at 120% of median cannot afford median house. Interesting note: our little county got 4% of the total Section 8 voucher money in the *entire* country (consisting of 3200 other housing authorities)!!! And there is something like 6000 people on the wait list, which has been closed since 2002. Currently there are 3723 families in SMC getting Section 8. There was some interesting points made that once you are on Section 8, there is no requirement for you to work... There was a lot of presentation about the various programs for first time buyer assistance (e.g. down payment assistance, etc). Too much for me to follow.
