Novato's Homeless Advisory Committee Went Dark for Nine Months.

The city's own Housing and Homeless Committee canceled two straight meetings and went silent from September 2024 to June 2025, the exact window when the council voted to close the Lee Gerner Park camp over the county's objection. A year later, a second warning sign, a $93 million funding question, went unanswered too.

A committee that wasn't there when it mattered

Novato has a standing Housing and Homeless Committee, created to advise the council on exactly this subject. Its own meeting record shows it held a special meeting on September 18, 2024, then went dark. The next two regularly scheduled quarterly meetings, December 11, 2024 and March 12, 2025, were both canceled outright, with no substitute meeting held for either. The committee did not meet again until June 11, 2025, nine months after its last session.

That nine-month silence covers the single most consequential homelessness decision the council made in years. On February 11, 2025, the council voted to close the sanctioned encampment at Lee Gerner Park, rejecting Marin County's explicit recommendation to let the final seven residents remain on their existing housing pathways, and gave them 60 days to leave. The city's own advisory committee on homelessness had no meeting scheduled anywhere near that vote to weigh in, ask questions, or put its concerns on the record. It had been dark for five months already and stayed dark for four more.

An advisory committee that goes silent for nine months during the city's biggest homelessness decision is not a scheduling accident. It is a body that was not doing the one job it exists to do, at the one moment its job actually mattered.

The previous chair of the Housing and Homeless Committee reached out to clarify that during the nine-month period mentioned in this article, the committee wanted to continue meeting, but the city stopped the meetings.

A year later, the same pattern showed up again

Fast forward to 2026, and the warning signs are still going unanswered. At the June 23 council meeting, Novato resident Heidi Merchen filed a written public comment stating that the city had withdrawn from working with Marin County on the state's Encampment Resolution Funding Round 5 grant application for the Hamilton Marsh encampment. She wrote that when she raised concerns about the withdrawal, city staff told her Novato planned to apply in a second funding round instead, in September, even though the state offers no guarantee a second round will open. Her comment noted the Round 5 deadline was June 30, five business days after the meeting, and that the county remained willing to partner on an application.

That comment is now part of the official record of a meeting Mayor Rachel Farac chaired. No staff correction appears in the minutes. No council response is recorded. As of this writing, I have found no public statement from the Mayor or the city answering the question either way. The state made $93 million available statewide in this funding round. Novato already knows what it costs to run an encampment without help like that: $13,000 to $15,000 a month to operate the Lee Gerner Park camp while it was open, and by February 2025 the city's one-time grant reserve had fallen below $300,000.

Either Novato withdrew from a live grant opportunity or it did not. That is a factual question with a one-word answer, and eight weeks after it was asked in writing, the city still has not given one.

The council's response was another committee

On July 28, the City Council did not answer Merchen's question. It created a second, separate ad hoc committee on homelessness, appointing Councilmembers Tim O'Connor and Sandeep Karkal to conduct outreach and coordinate with regional partners. Councilmember Pat Eklund noted at that meeting that Novato had a homeless committee decades ago that helped give rise to Homeward Bound of Marin, now the county's main shelter provider. That history is worth remembering, because it shows these bodies can matter when they actually meet and actually get used.

But layering a new committee on top of a standing one that went dark for nine months during the city's last major homelessness decision is not the same as fixing the problem. The new committee's job is outreach, coordination, and recommendations that come back to the council later. None of that answers whether Novato walked away from $93 million in state funding. That answer does not require a committee. It requires someone at City Hall reading a file and saying, in writing, yes or no.

What the pattern shows

Look at the two data points together. In 2024 and early 2025, the city's homelessness advisory body went silent for nine months and the council made its most consequential decision of the era without it. In 2026, a resident asked a direct funding question in writing, and two months later the city's answer is still silence, followed by the creation of another committee.

That is not one bad meeting schedule and one slow email. It is a pattern of a council that treats homelessness oversight as optional right up until residents force the issue, and even then, the instinct is to create structure rather than give an answer.

What I would do

As a councilmember, I would require the Housing and Homeless Committee to certify at every council meeting that it has met on schedule, and if a meeting is canceled, the council would need to explain why in public before its next vote on a related item. I would treat a $93 million question the way it deserves to be treated: answered immediately, in public, with a name attached, not folded into a new committee's eventual work plan. And I would send both the standing committee and the new ad hoc committee the same instruction before either does anything else: get a written, on-the-record answer from staff on the ERF withdrawal, and report it back within two weeks, not months.

Novato does not need another committee to discover what it already knows. It needs a City Council that keeps its own oversight bodies running, especially in the months when the decisions are hardest, and that answers a direct question instead of scheduling around it.

Mike Little, Candidate for Novato City Council District 2