By admin 
For years, Sacramento County’s Board of Supervisors has refused calls to work with other local governments in a united authority to manage homelessness. On Sunday, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill that will push them to do so. It’s about time.
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SB 802, authored by Sacramento Sen. Angelique Ashby, is as much a win for her as it is a rebuke of Sacramento supervisors Phil Serna and Patrick Kennedy for resisting routine meetings with local leaders confronting this humanitarian crisis on the front lines.
“Homelessness does not stop at jurisdictional boundaries,” Newsom wrote in his signing message. “No city or county can solve this crisis alone.”
It is embarrassing that a sitting governor would have to sign a bill forcing elected leaders in Sacramento to do their jobs, but that’s where we are. Senate Bill 802 and this directive from the Capitol places the next steps squarely in the hands of local elected officials.
“See it through,” Ashby said of her bill. “Talk to the public and share resources and ideas. Work together!”
This county is one of the largest in the state where the population of the unhoused appears to be going up, not down, based on biennial “point-in-time” counts. And the primary response to homelessness in California falls to each and every county, given its responsibility to provide safety-net services such as drug and mental health treatment.
Yet Sacramento supervisors distanced themselves from the capital city, Sacramento, due to the increasingly reclusive behavior of outgoing District 1 Supervisor Serna. He turned his back on the city’s growing homeless challenge as his relationship openly soured with former Mayor Darrell Steinberg. And no other supervisor, particularly Kennedy, stepped in to fill the breach.
The county supervisors managed to meet with city leaders about homelessness in October 2025. Yet the agenda, orchestrated by the county, did not include a discussion of when to meet next. There has been no subsequent public meeting, and only one task force meeting involving a limited set of local officials in private.
Ashby decided to take matters into her own hands last summer. The original SB 802, which caught supervisors and Mayor Kevin McCarty by surprise, mandated this joint powers authority and directed that it be managed by the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency. But SHRA is only a joint powers authority between the city of Sacramento and the county. And its management of affordable housing and other efforts has been rightfully under scrutiny by Kennedy and other supervisors, who deserve credit here for some appropriate oversight. What’s more, the original legislation redirected some coveted pots of affordable housing funds from local cities to SHRA. That set many cities on edge.
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It’s unsettled law whether the state can force local governments to participate in a joint powers authority, and the county seized on this as a reason to oppose SB 802. But underneath it all, the county has been resisting this type of collaboration on homelessness altogether while suggesting nothing of equal substance or formality. Serna has had this board in a bunker for years, with no way out.
Then Ashby in recent months began to get her bill into ready-for-prime-time shape. She eliminated SHRA as the governing vessel. She allowed the cities to keep their affordable housing funds. And she softened the mandate, requiring only that the local governments “participate in and work together to establish a joint powers authority.”
Newsom has been rightfully critical of Sacramento County on its homeless response. One of his signature achievements, for example, is legislation that allows counties to compel treatment of homeless people and others suffering from mental illness and addiction by expanding the state’s official definition of “gravely disabled.” Sacramento County in 2023 signaled that it would delay implementing this legislation, catching the governor’s attention.
“We need to see a sense of urgency,” Newsom said at the time. He was right then. And he is right now to sign Ashby’s SB 802.
Her ultimate bill was eerily similar to one authored in 2024 by then-Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, which died in the Senate. It’s no secret that the political relationship between McCarty and Ashby has been marked by years of friction. It may explain why the Sacramento City Council did not formally support SB 802, despite a council majority supporting it.
“Bottom line, we’ll make it work, and doing all this at a local level,” McCarty said recently. Is it too much to ask of McCarty and Ashby to set an example when it comes to collaboration?
Meanwhile, we have homeless people walking down our streets, screaming at the top of their lungs, sometimes with little clothing, and Newsom has given Sacramento County the tools to get these souls the care they need. And our elected officials are not having formal conversations about why this isn’t happening to any substantive extent. That’s because the county has resisted this conversation with its local peers in settings they cannot control.
SB 802 isn’t about piling on the county. It’s about learning from our successes and our failures. That’s the only way out of this, if there is one.
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SB 802 calls for collaboration by 2028. It should start now.