Sonoma County moves away from embattled homeless services provider

Disaster response and homeless services nonprofit DEMA will continue running Sonoma County's emergency shelter site and Mickey Zane Place on a week-to-week basis.

photo credit: Noah Abrams/KRCB
The Sonoma County Administrative Campus in Santa Rosa.

Sonoma County is breaking up with its current homeless services provider.

At the April 16 meeting, county supervisors voted not to award the nonprofit an extended contract to run a 44-unit interim housing site, and the county's emergency shelter site, both in Santa Rosa.

DEMA is a disaster response and homeless services nonprofit formed in 2019.

It has been operating the two sites - Mickey Zane Place and the emergency shelter site on the county campus - without contract since the start of April.

The nonprofit played a key role in operating some of the county's emergency homeless services during the Covid-19 pandemic, but a Press Democrat investigation , and subsequent audit of DEMA's conduct and finances, exposed a lack of proper accounting and documentation.

An issue Supervisor Chris Coursey felt could not be overlooked.

"We're talking about lack of documentation that was required by the original contract here," Coursey said. "Fraud was not found by the audit, but the questions weren't answered either, because the documentation was not available."

DEMA founder Michelle Patino maintains DEMA's innocence and has defended the company's record of providing service to vulnerable and homeless individuals; and it's distinction as an LBGTQ-owned company in a field normally dominated by religious charities.

Regardless, county supervisors voted against awarding a new contract to DEMA, or any of the other competing bidders.

Instead the supervisors moved to have county staff, or a service provider besides DEMA, run the emergency shelter site and Mickey Zane Place temporarily until a new long term service provider can be found.

DEMA will continue to run both sites in the interim on a week-to-week basis. That's until either county staff are reassigned following conference with labor negotiators, or an alternative independent service provider is contracted short term. Site administration could turn over to county staff by the end of May.

Sonoma County health department head Tina Rivera said Sonoma County will include stronger language around record keeping and conduct in any new service contracts going forward.