This week’s whopper appears in a San Jose Inside column by Josh Koehn which discusses the recommendation by county staff that Measure A funds be allocated to the Healthier Kids Foundation, headed by Kathleen King. Noting that King played a significant role in the campaign to pass Measure A, Koehn asks – coincidence or kickback?
A kickback? Webster defines a kickback as “a secret payment to a person who is in a position to influence a source of income.” But King’s role in the Measure A campaign was totally public. Also completely public was the fact that her foundation applied for Measure A funds, the content of her proposal, the identity of competing proposals, and the staff recommendations that ranked the applications. And who had the capacity to make this allegedly secret but completely in the public deal?
Between King’s support of Measure A and the county staff recommendation the voters had to approve Measure A, the state legislature had to leave the county with enough revenue to spend the Measure A funds on new programs, the initial Measure A allocations had to leave enough money unspent to warrant a request for proposals, and dozens of other groups had to generate competing ideas for funding. To allege that all of this was orchestrated in some gargantuan scheme qualifies as a whopper par excellence.
I might add that most of the non-profits in the County strongly supported Measure A precisely because it might generate more resources for the health and human services programs to which they are dedicated. Many urged voter approval for this very reason. Obviously, once the measure was adopted, these organizations sought funds for their priority programs. For people to support higher taxes for the services they care about is not unethical; it is sanity.
Koehn’s column is also inaccurate in its understanding of the challenges to the Healthy Kids program, but not at the level of a whopper. The program was “wildly successful” as Koehn states, but not as he implies because of the security of its funding. Its success was in the improvements in the lives of Santa Clara County children. But its fiscal stability was jeopardized because of the loss of millions of dollars from statewide foundations that moved on to other priorities and the City of San Jose’s decision to leave Healthy Kids out of the base budget, requiring an uncertain budget augmentation every year.
What eventually solved the problem of fiscal security for this “wildly successful” program was the dedicated and determined efforts of leaders from the Santa Clara Family Health Plan, the South Bay Labor Council, the Healthier Kids Foundation, the VMC Foundation, PACT, Working Partnerships USA, and others. They struggled for years as a team with the overriding goal of assuring first rate health care for every child in our county. And they prevailed, a fact about which they justifiably take great pride.
Their arduous effort and the satisfaction their success engendered in those who fought the good fight may possibly be something that METRO has difficulty understanding. After all, there are words to describe the self-image of organizations involved with websites in which young women in various stages of undress offer to sell “services” to the public. But I don’t think pride is one of them.
Bob Brownstein is Director of Policy and Research for Working Partnerships USA.
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