The city of Palm Springs, Calif. recently granted $200,000 to two nonprofit groups looking to design a pilot program to offer a universal basic income (UBI) of up to $900 per month to transgender and nonbinary Palm Springs residents who meet a poverty threshold.
City Council members voted unanimously last week to pay DAP Health and Queer Works $200,000 to design the program and apply for state funding. The six-month design phase is the first of three phrases outlined in a city report to implement the proposed project, the Los Angeles Times reported. The design period will occur under the guidance of Mayors for a Guaranteed Income.
The proposed pilot program would see 20 transgender and nonbinary Palm Springs residents receiving the taxpayer-funded UBI for 18 months, according to Fox News. It would also include a second group of 20 transgender and nonbinary people who would not receive the UBI and would serve as a control group to see how impactful the payments and services are, the Desert Sun reported.
While the city council agreed to the $200,000 to jumpstart the program, the council members would not approve the larger sum of $900,000 that DAP Health and Queer Works have suggested would be needed for the project to ultimately move forward. The council also expressed reservations about committing more money to the project in the future.
The two groups will use the $200,000 allocation to put together an application to receive some of the $35 million California has budgeted to offer grants for groups looking to create guaranteed income programs in the state.
Queer Works CEO Jacob Rostovsky said the city would likely need to agree to match any funds provided by California for the state to agree to fund the program.
“Our project’s budget is estimated at about $1.8 million,” he said. “And so when we look at what other [programs] that have been successfully funded have done, their local cities have provided nearly a match to that funding.”
DAP Health CEO David Brinkman told reporters that the transgender community is “one of the most marginalized populations in our city who face some of the highest levels of housing insecurity, joblessness and discrimination.”
Palm Springs Mayor Lisa Middleton, who is transgender, noted in an email to Fox News that during the council’s March 24 meeting, the mayor “expressed strong reservations in general to guaranteed income programs.”
“I specifically stated that I did not believe such programs could scale up to adequately respond to the over 37 million Americans living below the poverty line, the over 6 million Californians or the over 400,000 in the County of Riverside living below the poverty [line],” Middleton said in an email.
“Transgender Americans suffer extremely high rates of under and unemployment. Transgender Americans face enormous challenges living full and authentic lives,” the mayor added. “Those challenges have increased substantially in the past few years as transgender children and their families have been targeted by extremist legislators and governors.”
However, Middleton expressed a belief that a UBI program is a “county, state and federal responsibility,” not a “municipal” one.
“My vote to affirm that evening was procedural to provide $200,000 to DAP in order to help them in the application for state funding,” the mayor said. “In advance of the vote I specifically stated my belief that guaranteed income programs were not the long-term way to proceed. I did not commit to any future funding of guaranteed income programs.”
Meanwhile, councilmember Christy Holstege said the project is an opportunity to “participate in a cutting-edge, state-of-the-art pilot program which will help get quantitative and qualitative data to show how this [guaranteed income] impacts futures and lives,” according to the Desert Sun.