David Michael Dobbins
Bakersfield, California · 661-585-6557
1 September 2026
To the offices of Kevin McCarthy and Steve Hilton
Doing the same thing again is how you classify yourself a fool
Los Angeles and the rest of the urban grid are still paying billions to warehouse people. City and county homelessness
budgets sit near three billion a year. Beds stay empty. Hotels stay expensive. The curb does not move. Repeating that
appropriation and expecting a different street is not policy. It is the definition of a fool’s errand.
I am not asking you to own a page, a poll, or a list. I am sending a necessary alternative: a community first-step path
that government may print on a report card and may not capture. Campaigns may stand next to it. They do not buy the
questions or the names.
We Care More — the door
Willing entry only. No cargo. No ticket to Oregon. No camp. Walk in, receive an address, a bunk, food, a shower, and
a seasoned hand on the floor. Look away from private vice that is not violence or a blocked sidewalk. Dangerous is a
different column.
Then three questions in order: what can they do now; how many days to teach the next thing; where is the open job.
First-step work is real demand — kitchen and Meals on Wheels (three shifts, a knock that proves an elder is alive),
laundry, cleaning, colony and TNR stewardship (cats are not owned), steel frame and hemp-lime walls (labor packs the
wall; an engineer stamps the frame). After twelve months on the roster the path is a unit they helped stand, not a house
sold to a file that does not exist.
Prison last twelve to eighteen months can teach the same care — foster and wean with a vet on the calendar, not a
pregnant queen left alone when a kitten dies. Helplessness is not training.
The number
Publish job-90 and address-90 every quarter. Denominator is people who started a paid job with an address. Target
band 50–75 percent at day 90. Below 50 the lead is missing. Sixty percent is already how serious training contracts
hold the last check. Hold public dollars the same way: no day-90 file, no last payment. Then publish 180-day and one-
year. Adjust the trade mix when the year-number dies. Do not adjust the consent rule.
Report card and re-green
City, county, state — one grid. Warehouse dollars down. Program dollars that only release at day 90. Walk-ins and
free exits. Who got paid. Re-green mapped from the city core outward toward the mountain ring: living trees, cleared
ditches, first-step shops, colony routes. Beautification that stops at the civic center is a parade. Bakersfield already
speaks of canopy and cleanup. Apply that work to the basin, not only Truxtun.
Community that stops caring becomes the next contractor. Mandate without wealth at the base of the labor force does
not fly. The affluent get a street that works. The investment is the productive anonymous — unhoused, destitute,
coming home from jail — who will walk in. Second, third, and X chances with a lead still standing. Idiots who will not
work and will not leave others alone get the same written ritual every time. After Grants Pass that ritual is camping on
public property with notice and storage — not 19th-century vagrancy.
July 2028 is an inspection, not a mural. If the curb between the airport and the Coliseum is still a warehouse, the
programs that got fat on the wheel have failed in public.
What I am asking of your camps: read it. Do not take the names. If you speak, say the page and the program belong to
the people who walk in. If you spend, buy an ad beside a sourced Q&A — Printed Press Proposal — not a wrap that
turns this into a flyer. Repeating the present machine is optional. Calling it compassion while the till pays for empty
beds is not.
Respectfully,
David Michael Dobbins
Bakersfield · We Care More