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Supervisors press agencies for cross-department benchmarks on homelessness, childcare and language access
Summary
Committee members urged departments to provide interdepartmental benchmarks showing unmet need for homelessness services, childcare slots, and language access; agencies said much of that reporting requires cross-agency data and will be developed for February submissions.
Supervisors used the special hearing to press departments to produce cross-department benchmarks that show unmet need and outcomes rather than isolated program outputs.
Multiple speakers — including Fred Blackwell (Mayor’s Office of Community Development), Phil Arnold (Human Services Agency), and representatives from First 5 and DCYF — agreed that many important outcomes (homelessness prevalence, childcare slot shortfalls, and the quality of early-childhood services) cannot be understood in departmental silos and need combined reporting.
Supervisors requested that agencies compile the best available “need” benchmarks so that outputs (for example, units created, clients served, preschool enrollment) can be read against an estimate of community need. On homelessness, HSA and DPH were asked to explore shared measures that capture people not enrolled in city programs; HSA acknowledged that some homeless individuals are not captured in agency program metrics and said a cross-department homelessness metric would be useful.
On language access and cultural competency, several departments (Rent Board, HSA, Status of Women, Human Rights Commission) agreed to add or expand measures tracking provision of services and documents in languages other than English. First 5 and DCYF said they will work together to align early-childhood measures across agencies.
The committee asked the Controller’s Office to help compile reliable benchmarks and performance-data templates so departments can submit comparable measures with their budget packages.
