Correspondence - #24 - Laserfiche WebLink

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May 18, 2021 Mayor Sarmiento and City Council Members City of Santa Ana 20 Civic Center Plaza Santa Ana, CA 92701 Re: Item 24- Draft Revive Santa Ana and Draft Fiscal Year 2021-2022 City budget Dear Mayor Sarmiento and City Council Members, We would like to thank the City of Santa Ana for all your efforts in addressing the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on our community. This past year has been particularly difficult for our families and further revealed the inequities that our community faces on a daily basis. As we move toward the recovery phase of the pandemic, the City has an incredible opportunity with the adoption of the Fiscal Year 2021-22 Budget and the receipt of $128 mill well as the long term recovery of our most vulnerable families. As you know, Latino Health Access has been at the forefront of the COVID-19 response, and providing direct services to the most impacted Orange County communities. Santa Ana was amongst the most affected with high transmission, case, and death rates, and we have been working hard to address the factors that were making our community hot spots for transmission. The support and collaboration with the City, the Orange County Health Care Agency, community clinics, SAUSD and others were key in bringing mobile testing sites followed by vaccine clinics to the neighborhoods. We also established a bilingual COVID-19 Call Center that continues to operate 7 days a week to connect residents to much needed services. Many of these services are directly related to COVID-19 and requests for basic needs services, with the top three services requested in 2020 being food, financial assistance and mental health (compared to mental health, health education and prevention programs in 2019). Moving forward, it is important that we analyze the factors that put our community at such high risk and vulnerability in the first place as well as the services requested by the community, and use it to plan for recovery and improvement. This will require investment in the following: Addressing short-term needs: establishing and sustaining a safety net for families to work towards a fully recovery financially and improving food and housing security (e.g., rental assistance, universal income regardless of immigration status, free child care). We have seen families fall further into poverty, lose wealth, and fall further into debt with looming evictions. Long-term solutions to address the compound effects of the pandemic: o Chronic disease prevention and management. We know that the prevalence of chronic diseases in our community was high prior to COVID-19 and the number of people at risk has likely increased. o Access to long term health care and services, especially for those that are more likely to be uninsured due to immigration status or job-loss.