Encinitas opposes bill requiring homeless data in housing element

By Gary Warth

May 27, 2026

The Encinitas City Council is opposing a state bill that would require small cities in California to include information about homeless services in their housing plan.

Council members on May 27 voted 4-1 to send a letter opposing Senate Bill 866 following a staff recommendation that found it too burdensome and potentially costly.

SB-866 was introduced by Sen. Catherine Blakespear, who was mayor of Encinitas from December 2016 to November 2022.

The bill would require most jurisdictions in the state to include in their housing elements an itemized list of available homeless resources such as housing and behavioral health services. Cities also would be required to describe actions they took to connect unhoused individuals to the resources.

Other requirements call for cities to have updated and disaggregated data on their homeless populations, including the average length of time they were unhoused, movements into and out of permanent housing and the number of people who became homeless after exiting jails, prisons or hospitals.

Fifty-eight other cities also oppose the bill, with Oceanside the only other city in the county to send a letter in opposition so far.

The League of California Cities also opposes the bill over requirements that cities report new metrics in their housing elements.

In their argument against the bill, the staff report to the council said much of the data that would be collected by the city is already being collected and reported to the Regional Task Force on Homelessness. Cities do not have access to records from jails, prisons or hospitals, which would place an additional burden on cities required to collect the information, the staff report stated.

Council and staff members also had a problem with placing an additional requirement on the city’s housing element, a state-mandated document that outlines a city’s plan for housing people of all income levels.

“The City wholeheartedly understands the goal of increasing transparency to showcase the positive outcomes of the City’s Homeless Action Plan to our community,” the opposition letter read. “However, it can’t be at the expense of unduly burdening the City with new housing element requirements that could jeopardize the City’s compliance with the State’s requirements.”

Diana Kutlow, senior district representative from Blakespear’s office, attended the meeting and urged council members to support the bill.

“The senator and staff have been listening to your comments and your concerns and will continue to do so as the bill goes through the Assembly process and then back to the Senate, should it get that far,” she said.

Encinitas would be among 469 small cities in the state that would be affected by the bill’s requirements, while the 14 large cities that receive funding from the Homeless Housing, Assistance, and Prevention (HHAP) program would not be affected because they already do the required reporting.

“The rest of the state is not held to the same standard, meaning that most cities do not have clear, comprehensive homeless strategies,” Kutlow said, arguing that the bill would create a better statewide approach to addressing homelessness.

“I would say based on what I’ve seen, Encinitas is an exception to that,” she continued. “You guys do have a really good homeless action plan, in which case I do believe you’d be able to transfer that information easily into the housing element, where it can be aggregated by the state and looked at both on a state level and a regional level.”

Kutlow further praised the city by saying it would benefit Encinitas by having surrounding cities do planning as well as they do.

“And I think that it’s important to really think of the planning being the focus of this bill more than the data,” she said. “The data is what’s going to be used to do the planning.”

Mayor Bruce Ehlers said the data already is aggregated by the county’s Homeless Management Information System and RTFH, and the city should not be required to also do it.

“I see this as an unfunded mandate,” he said. “It’s not really the small cities data. It really is aggregated at a higher level, and it really ought to be pulled from the HMIS at the county level.”

Councilmember Joy Lyndes cast the only vote against sending a letter of opposition to the bill, but said she would have supported a letter that instead said “oppose unless amended.”

“I think it is one of our legislative priorities to act as a regional partner, and I’m willing to continue the dialogue to see if there’s a way we connect as a statewide partner,” she said. “I think it’s valuable for us to continue to share our HHAP information, but I do agree with staff in that there’s too much burden on a city our size.”

The League of California Cities also advocates for amendments to the bill to ensure smaller cities would have a seat at the table in the regional planning process for the HHAP program.