Continuing from the last post, I’m taking the opportunity before budget season is upon us to tick through some of the matters brought up in public comment in the past couple of months.

Last month, I was bumping along through the public comments when a young lady stepped to the mic to ask that the city clawback $50,000 from Someone Cares Soup Kitchen, which had received a city grant last Fall.

What could that be about?! I wondered. Someone Cares Soup Kitchen is one of the most uncontroversial, low-key charitable organizations in the city (and, in full disclosure: they get a nice Christmas bonus from us each year). What could have happened that would have the soup kitchen at the center of a public complaint? And the critic wasn’t alone: the commenter that stepped up one speaker after her asked for the same thing.

But, outside these two public commenters, that was that. Then, at the last City Council meeting in April, the Chair of the Board of Directors of Someone Cares Soup Kitchen, Debbee Pezman, stepped to the mics to defend her organization’s reputation and mission:

So… what on Earth is going on here?

It’s worth getting caught up because, although this controversy is pretty small, it might end up being relevant to some future initiatives we might see.

The controversy: Were the funds earmarked for immigration relief, or to feed anyone in need?

You may recall that last fall that, in a discussion of the impact of the Trump Administration’s immigration enforcement surge, the Costa Mesa City Council decided to provide tangible support to the affected communities both through food relief and legal aid. This policy sent $50,000 each to the Enough for All Fund, a charitable fund run by a handful of local churches, and the Someone Cares Soup Kitchen.

The grant to Someone Cares Soup Kitchen seemed a bit strange on the surface, as it has not historically participated in targeted immigration relief efforts. But, as reported in the LAist (and as I’ve heard independently), it sounds like it wasn’t that odd: the soup kitchen had been quietly allowing “mutual aid” volunteers to use its facilities to pack food boxes for families affected by ICE raids, and also it facilitated financial donations earmarked for this purpose.

So, when the $50,000 grant came along, mutual aid activists assumed that the money was supposed to support the food box effort. Someone Cares Soup Kitchen, however, believed that the funds were meant to support its general operations, which had been under pressure from increased demand created both by the ICE raids and cuts to federal food aid funding. So, when mutual aid volunteers came to Someone Cares Soup Kitchen and its Chair, Adam Ereth (yes, the same Adam Ereth that was previously the Chair of the Planning Commission and a 2024 candidate for City Council District 1) turned them down for reimbursement, anger ensued.

So who is right here? Let’s go to the video replay.

Schrödinger’s charitable purpose

The $50,000 grants to the Enough for All Fund and Someone Cares Soup Kitchen didn’t have the cleanest path through City Hall. First, it wasn’t clear that either organization could actually accept the funds — the Enough for All Fund’s religious affiliations could trip Constitutional Establishment Clause issues, and Someone Cares Soup Kitchen had never previously accepted government support. Concerns about the Enough for All Fund’s eligibility prompted Mayor John Stephens, the author of the original motion to provide the grants, to stipulate that, in the event the city could not provide the grant to the Enough for All Fund, all $100,000 should instead be sent to the soup kitchen.

This prompted a “friendly amendment” to that motion from Council Member Andrea Marr, who requested that, in the event the Enough for All Fund couldn’t accept the grant, its $50,000 portion be brought back to City Council for reallocation rather than defaulting the funds to the soup kitchen. “I think we want to make sure that we are kind of narrowly directing those funds in a way that will be most impactful,” Council Member Marr remarked. To me, she seemed to be implying that grants to the Enough for All Fund would be targeted to ICE-impacted families while funds sent to the soup kitchen would be spend on more generalized relief.

Council Member Arlis Reynolds then also chimed in, stating that she was skeptical that the soup kitchen needed such a large grant, and implied that the entire $100,000 grant should be directed to the Enough for All Fund. “The Enough for All Fund are trusted partners who can be much more flexible in using those funds across the needs that we’ve heard from the community including rental support and the food box program and other essential needs. So it just provides a lot more flexibility.”

Although Mayor Stephens accepted this friendly amendment — prompting the Daily Pilot to report that all $100,000 of the grant had been given to the Enough for All Fund — this wasn’t the final word. Possibly motivated by a desire to clean up the grant giving from a Brown Act perspective, City Council was asked to ratify the grants at the September 9, 2026 meeting. By that time the staff’s recommendation had reverted back to Mayor Stephens’s original motion, sending $50,000 to each organization, and that recommendation passed with minimal discussion on a 5-2 vote (Council Members Mike Buley and Jeff Pettis voting no).

What was interesting about that September 9th staff report, though, was that the intent of the funds had completely disappeared:

Residents… impacted by what? The report doesn’t say. The LAist article, however, claimed that this ambiguity was intentional. “The language used to earmark the funds was intentionally vague, meant to keep the small, politically divided city out of the crosshairs of the Trump administration and local MAGA,” the article reported.

So, after parsing through all of this, it seems pretty clear that we have a case of Schrödinger’s charitable purpose: the $50,000 grant to Someone Cares Soup Kitchen both was and was not earmarked for targeted immigration enforcement relief, and we couldn’t know which one until the receipts were sent for reimbursement. If activists were relying on friendly council member comments, they had ample reason to feel swindled. If the soup kitchen was relying on the plain language of the operative staff report, then it was perfectly justified to put the funds towards general operations.

Personally, I’m somewhat more persuaded by the soup kitchen’s argument here. It seems clear from Council Member Marr’s and Council Member Reynolds’s comments in August that both of them were well aware that funding the soup kitchen would not be a “narrow” grant, which is why they wanted to limit funds going to that organization and redirect the money to the more “flexible”, and presumably more targeted, Enough for All Fund. And, reading between the lines, it sure looks like City Hall was trying to be clever by recasting fairly aggressive anti-Trump Administration activism as generalized “impact relief”, so as to avoid unwanted scrutiny from pro-Trump activists and the federal government itself. But if you make that bed, you have to lie in it, too.

Closing note: the rift that just won’t close

So, if this is all just a misunderstanding, why not just work with the soup kitchen to quietly clean it up? Why am I reading about this controversy in the LAist, of all places, which is a regional nonprofit news organization that rarely reports on our city?

There are clues within the story itself. It’s worth mentioning that the LAist article did go back to the source to see what the council members involved felt about the controversy, and they had plenty to say:

But not everyone felt that way. Further along in the article, LAist also got a quote from Mayor Stephens, who told the outlet that city funding for the soup kitchen had “absolutely” gone to its intended use. “The Someone Cares Soup Kitchen has been a part of the Costa Mesa community for decades,” Mayor Stephens told LAist. “They serve lots of populations in need, including this group impacted by ICE activity.”

So, it seems, the soup kitchen grant has become somewhat political. Once again we have Mayor Stephens lining up against Council Members Reynolds and Marr, which has been a consistent theme of this City Council since the dramatic ouster of former city manager Lori Ann Farrell Harrison last year. And that might be the real significance of this episode: it is yet another chapter of the conflict between the primary factions within the Council “majority”.

And that rift seems to be getting worse (or at least, not better) with time. It is now spilling out into print. Someone tipped the LAist off to write about this very local issue, with a very specific framing. My guess is that it wasn’t the soup kitchen. And while my suspicion is that mutual aid activists have the best motive to do so, the fact that Stephens, Marr and Reynolds were all willing to comment says something.

Let’s hope they can come together when budget time rolls around.