Health Safety Education and Services - Regular Meeting

Welcome back to this weekly meeting of the Health and Safety Committee with Denver City Council. Coverage of the Health and Safety Committee starts now.

Good morning. Today is February 25. This is a I can't speak. The health and safety committee. My name is Darryl Watson. I'm honored to serve as the chair of the health and safety committee as well as city council member representing all of the fine District 9. We have two briefings this morning and two consent items before we go into the presentations. Why don't we have city council member introductions? I'll start on the right.

Oh, sorry on the left.

Alright. Good morning. Laura Vitres with Lucky District seven.

Sarah Parity, one of your council members at Larch.

Paul Cashman, South Denver, District 6.

Good morning, everyone. Serrano Gonzales Kukiadis, your

other council member at Larch.

Jamie Torres, West Denver District three.

And Alyssa, it appears we have some council members online. Is council member Flynn online?

Yes, I am. Hi. Kevin Flynn, Southwest Denver's District 2. Thank you.

Is there anyone else virtual? Do a little teacher pause. I'm hearing feet. Sorry. No. You're right on time. You're right on time. We're just checking with virtual. We have councilor Flint and then council member Sawyer.

Hi. Amanda Sawyer. District map.

Map. Well, thank you so much everyone for being here. We're kicking off let me just see. I just got a notice. Alright. No one else is online. We're kicking off with a briefing from our friends at Caring for Denver, Lores Meinhold. Do you mind introducing yourself and any other members of your team? And the floor is yours.

Thank you. Lores Meinhold, executive director of Caring for Denver Foundation. I'm joined by Kendall Morell, who's our director of communications and community engagement. So I think we have and so part of the really always appreciate the opportunity to be in front of city council and share the work that we are doing. And so today, we're talking about as part of our ordinance, we are required to engage community into the use of the funds, and that really informs our community strategic funding.

And so that's what we're here to present today as well as so share what we've heard from Denver residents and partners, show how that's shaped the strategic funding plan, and also a brief update on the audit and answer any questions committee members may have. So really wanted to center it again about how we work. And so the center of everything we do is community, really meeting community where they're at to really identify solutions that work best for them. So community directly evolves and adapts how we fund, helps us identify gaps in funding resources and connections, and also keeps our work relevant to emerging issues. It also shapes our call for proposals so that when we put something out, it's really reflecting what community told us was most important.

So inform what we're asking from organizations and provides input on what should we be asking organizations. And then also informs our outcomes. So really gives us the community context to make sure that we can make meaningful change and helps us interpret progress, results, and success measures. And that's ever evolving and ever changing. So how we listen is in a variety of ways.

So we are involved in year round engagement. So we meet with all of you at least once a year to understand what are the community events, what are community partners that we should be reaching out to. We have those district level conversations. We have a survey that's always on that people can always doesn't require them to show up somewhere, but a way they can give us input, and it's both in English and Spanish. We hear from our grantees themselves about what's important.

Community events and trusted spaces, so what events are already going on that we can be a part of, and really introducing also that third party data, what exists outside of us, to help us inform some of those access care issues, and really that experience of those that are living with mental health and substance misuse is an important part to inform the work that we do. So what we've learned is that access matters most. Still, that's one of the most important issues. And then in that, it really broke down into three buckets. It's that care that fits.

So how do we make sure we have trusted providers, that really they respond to the community they're serving, they reflect the community that they're serving, that we have that sort of youth and family voice so people can be seen even though they're separately. It can look at the the family, the unit, how people come to care. No one heals in isolation. They heal in community. And so how do we really understand the community that they're in? And then there has to be a sense of safety and trust in that care. And then also, people talked about those care transitions. So those are the times where people who are most likely that can lose access to care is that as you're transitioning. So you may be going from hospital level care to community. You may be going from community to hospital.

You may be going from community to another community organization. How do we make sure during those transitions, which are sometimes the most vulnerable points of time, that people don't lose their access to care. So it's really looking at those gaps during discharge. Some of the fragmentation across systems, and again, that safety and dignity. How do people feel trusted and respected in that care as they are transitioned, that they are actually the important part of identifying how they heal.

And then also looking at stronger care systems. So, as we've talked to community, there are also other things that have shown up that may be beyond a single organization doing, but people have really talked about those workforce shortages. So how do we really look at the workforce that is reflective of community being served, and how do we grow that workforce? Look at the capacity constraints of both nonprofits and organizations, and then look at the geographic and demographic gaps that have existed. So across all the conversations we had, people pointed to that same truth.

What matters most is being able to access trusted care and being able to stay connected to that. What we're doing and continue to do is look at those trusted community models that work, invest in workforce pipeline and diversification, support those transition focused navigation needs. So how do we really help in those transitions and make sure that it's not a sheet of paper, but there's actually these warm handoffs to get people connected to the right care that fits. Funding system capacity and innovation and aligning grants with documented community priorities. And then we continue to center on community led trauma informed care, continue to focus on underserved communities with limited access to care, youth and families affected by trauma or violence.

We heard a lot about supporting LGBTQIA individuals and community and families, older adults, people experiencing substance misuse and severe persistent mental illness, as well as immigrant linguistically diverse and unhoused communities. So those are always things that we looked at and as we lift up funding and funding priorities. And so accountability and community for voice work together. So public reporting ensures transparency. That's how we try to show up here.

We do that in our annual report. All of our information is also available on our website. We evaluate and measure impact. So we work with grantees to understand what is the impact and outcome they want to have, and then we aggregate that to lift that up in the annual report. Community engagement, again, that's this is a presentation of of what that looks like.

And then audit strength and how we operate. So we both have an annual annual audit that we perform with, right now it's Cottinger, and those audited financial statements are always available on our website. And we participate in the city's audit process. And we just recently completed an audit, and we take that very seriously, both the ability to improve. We're always about continuous learning and improvement.

And so how do we have that accountability and focus on what we all care about is stewardship of dollars? So we align our policies with nonprofit best practice, with grant making best practice, and the audit identified areas we could improve. And we are looking to do better, be better. And for that, we are grateful. One of the issues I'll just address head on, because I know it's come up a few times, is the issue that we reimbursed approximately $1,000 a year over three years for alcohol.

And that was really in in community settings for folks that and it's a small portion of our 2 and a half million administrative budget. What I'll say is it was allowable under our nonprofit financial policies, but we also recognize that we're when we're entrusted with public funds that no matter how large, even small symbolic contradictions matter, which we are also changing our policy going forward that we'll not be reimbursing any alcohol. And so with that, I will just open it up to questions.

Alright. That was very quick and to the point, Flores. Thank you very much. I'd like to welcome council president Sandoval to the meeting. And looking at the queue, just make sure and see who we have. We do have a queue. We'll start off with council member Torres and then council member Flynn and council member Alvederis.

Thank you so much. Thank you both, for being here. So, as as you all know, as my colleagues hopefully remember, president Sandoval and I have been looking at all of the sales taxes that we collect, the entities that they go to, specifically the external nonprofit entities. And there are three. For the Caring for Denver component, we've definitely been interested in how the audit from the auditor was going to shake out, what it was going to reveal.

There's a healthy amount of discomfort that I have around the distance between, I think, where our nonprofits and I'll just say you guys for right now because you're in front of us. Caring for Denver feels like you have autonomy to create the rules, your understandings of how you govern, all of those things as an independent nonprofit. But when your sole source is tax dollars, sales tax dollars that we've collected, that we've transmitted to you, in my eyes, it creates a different kind of relationship. And so I wasn't put at ease with some of the responses to the auditor's findings, I will say that. So there was disagreement about changing the city's contract or the ordinance to align with city fiscal policy.

So let me maybe ask you about that because you came into that with a disagree position.

Sure. And that response came from DDPHE, so I can't completely speak to the Department of Public Health Environment's response on that one. But what I can say is we did agree to the two following financials. So we had financial policies in in place, and they are similarly aligned to the other nonprofits. The auditor made recommendations about how we could improve it, including itemized receipts and a business purpose, and we agreed to that.

And in fact, we made those changes back in August. And so I think it was a review of the city fiscal accountability rules are broad and big and intended for a city, maybe not always, even for these in between organizations. Again, I think we are open to to conversations around what what might be needed. And I think DDPHG's response was and and what I will just acknowledge is the responses, we are limited to 500 characters in the response to the auditor's findings. So we can't also say a lot so that we had more discussion of this in the city audit hearing.

But I think what we said is that the contract gets renewed in 2027, and we'll look at that. And I think we're also talking to you all even next week to talk about those alignment issues and how we better do that. So we are always here in partnership and happy to align where it makes sense and where it's appropriate and what can we do as a 13 person organization versus the policies that govern a city.

Well, I will say the letter, though, responding back was jointly signed by you and DDPHE. So this looks like it is both from Caring From Denver

and DDPHE. Because the yes. I appreciate that question. The respond there were 15 recommendations, some directed at DDPHE, some directed at us. Yeah. And so that's why we both signed the letter because we were responding jointly, but to in that particular I I am trying not to speak for the department in that particular response. Okay.

We'll be looking at I'm sorry. Oh, Alex wants to say something. Come on up, Alex.

Just mention Alex Udall, legislative liaison for the Department of Public Health and Environment. We do have some folks here from the department that can answer questions.

Okay. Well, let

me ask then. Megan, did you want to respond to any of

that? Sure. Hi, everyone. Good to see you. Megan Pariso. I'm a division director at the Department of Public Health and Environment. And the team that supports caring for Denver in the contract are in my division. And I think Lorez sort of summarized it without trying to speak for us. We fully acknowledge that financial policies and fiscal policies that are robust and thoughtful and track expenses at a detailed level are important. They have updated their policies. DDPHE reviewed them and helped work with them in August on those. And so those are updated and in place in response to the audit. We talked a lot with the audit committee last

week.

It feels like it was a while ago about the fact that you can only agree or disagree. You can't agree with a part of the audit finding. And our challenge was not we did not disagree with the idea of updating fiscal policies and being thoughtful and accountable and thinking about what fiscal accountability rules that the city really apply to a 13 person organization. What we disagreed with was an immediate opening of the contract and ordinance ahead of opening it alongside you all, counsel and the mayor's office doing it thoughtfully and in concert with you so it's aligned with any other changes we'll be doing. So that's the reason we had to disagree is that we just think we want to do it in alignment with the city council process and make sure we're encompassing all of those changes at the same time and being really thoughtful about how audit changes are updated alongside changes that council and the mayor's office are looking for.

Okay. That context makes a lot of sense, and I appreciate that. And I think that leads to, I think, what we're doing, right? And there are differences in some of the contracts between the three when we look at similar areas where we might expect some alignment, like what records might be available not just to the city but to the public, what fiscal accountability rules exist and what do they say. And I think it gets a little dicey when those three entities have three different ways of doing things.

Okay, thank you so much. You're welcome. So for my colleagues, we're also working with Children's Affairs, who are the stewards of Prosperity Denver and Denver Preschool Program, which are the other two nonprofit entities that receive sales tax funds. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Councilmember Torres, Councilmember Flynn and Councilmember Al Beatriz.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And Juarez, maybe it just goes along with the answer that Megan was providing or the additional context that Megan was providing. But I too like Councilwoman Torres was very concerned about the disagreement with half of the, nearly half of the recommendations that the auditor made. And so maybe Megan's context applies to this one as well, but I wanted to focus in the limited time we have for this because there's something after in the same meeting.

The 2.1, the due diligence process where recommendations were made that Caring for Denver should expand to do more confirmation and verification of the applicants before awarding their grants. And I think he relied a lot on the Colorado Public Radio series that was done on the backgrounds they found on some of the applicants and some of the organizations. So it looks like your disagreement might be limited only to and I'm reading from it to conducting financial and legal background checks on African staff members. Was that the only element to the due diligence recommendation with which you disagreed, or is there more to that?

No. Yes, sir. That is the only so it's four bullet points. And and, again, in our last audit, there was the ability to agree or partially agree, and that was no longer our opportunity. And so, again, we we work to try to help understand that background checks from a foundation and even from the city perspective is done on the organization.

So city grant making doesn't do background checks, background legal or financial checks on individuals, but they do it on the organization. And so this one was specifically to do legal and financial checks on individuals associated with the organization. And so that is the point we disagreed with. We did agree with the the other findings. And so even if you again, in our 500 character limited response, you can see that we tried to, even when we disagreed, to talk about what steps we would be taking even with the other ones that we did agree with.

Let's see. I noticed in your response also that you highlighted that the city in its own grant making doesn't do this sort of thing. I don't know if that was meant as snark or if you wasted your some of your 500 words on that little bounce back on the city. But is that something that you think you ought to be doing?

No, sir. We were trying to really reflect that we are doing best practice of the field so that these background checks aren't required in city grant making. And and especially as we talked about, a lot of these findings are how do we better align with city processes. And so the city doesn't do background checks, neither does the state nor federal government or other private grantmakers. And so I think we were just trying to lift up that this is not a common or best practice that we've seen.

Thank you very much, Loras. And I think, Mr. Chair, in the interest of time and moving on, I will rely on doing follow-up in our the briefings that we regularly have with Loras in my office and with other members. Thank you.

Thank you, council member Flynn, council member Alvederis, Parity, and Sandoval.

Thank you, committee chair. Thank you all for coming and being open and having this conversation for the public. And thank you for all you do. I think, you know, last year, I remember being with you all at Metro and working on getting people into these careers that look like our community because one of the biggest struggles I've experienced in the last three years on council is we have, like, these shelters and these things, and we don't have the services that we need. And a lot of that is mental health.

And so I think along with a lot of Denver voters when I saw this on the ballot and knowing the mental health needs of our youth, the mental health needs across our city are so great, it was an easy yes. And with that, I also share a lot of my colleagues' concerns, of course. I think particularly I really appreciate you just naming the alcohol thing, especially when we're trying to help people with substance abuse issues. I think that was a disappointing thing to see. But I did wanna ask about one of the things that hasn't been brought up yet, which is the seven grants that were awarded to Caring for Denver itself and how that fits into the ordinance and what was going on there instead of, you know, using administrative costs for those expenses?

Those were grants that were used for capacity building for nonprofits. And so what we saw, you know, our due diligence, we meet with a grantee at the beginning of the year to say, what is you know, let's build out this framework of what you're gonna do. We check-in halfway and say, barriers exist for you being able to deliver on this? And then we check at the end of the first grant you know, each grant year to say, okay. What were you able to achieve?

What we've noticed is sometimes there were barriers for organizations as holds. So it was we talked to you know, within a year, we talked to 90 organizations. We noticed trends. And some of those were really related to capacity, both in terms of how do they strengthen their systems for data tracking, how do they and it was really to the benefit of the grantee, not to the benefit of caring for Denver. Anything that we do that's related to the benefit of caring for Denver would always come out of administrative dollars, but the beneficiary of those particular grants was actually organizations.

And so we never made a grant to ourselves. What we did is we tied it to a scope of work and a contractor. So we worked with organizations that would provide that technical support, that capacity building support, that communication support directly to the organization. And so there was never an exchange of money that came to us. It really it stayed, and it stayed only to the benefit, and it was paid out on invoices to that scope of work. So all of those grants actually have a scope of work and a contractor tied to them.

I appreciate that. Thank you for the clarity there. Just wanna give a moment. You mentioned that you are making changes. You spoke to some of those. Are there other changes that you are making that you haven't mentioned? I'm curious about that part.

Sure. You know, again, the audit finding was around process improvements. Where could we do better documentation? So, again, a lot of these processes, whether that be our criteria. I think there was one that was too related to scoring in particular. We didn't agree disagree with that criteria based assessment. It's what we do. But what we could do is better document that and have those criteria. So we do look at the alignment with the mission vision. So that list actually came from our tool.

So it's looking at the alignment with the mission. It's looking at their financial health. It is looking at their capacity to do the work. It's looking at the work itself and how they're engaging community into the work itself and the evolution of it. What we didn't do a great job of having a document of that tool. That is what we are gonna do. We disagreed in that particular one, the scoring. Numeric scoring isn't best practice in grant making. It has been shown to disadvantage smaller and more diverse organizations. Scoring can't always capture that trust in community, and scoring has that potential individual bias.

So the scorer will come and score that. And so how do you ensure that we eliminate the bias is that we have a tool that really helps us lift up who are the strongest organizations that are gonna make the impact. So, again, we'll have better documented tools around the prioritization and how we do it. It isn't that we didn't do it, but, again, a lot of these recommendations were about what processes could we improve, how could we improve our financial policies? And we've already done that.

We'll continue to always look to learn. And so even some of the issues that were identified happened in 2022. And we had already changed some of our policies and procedures, and so it wasn't really present in '23 and '24. And so, again, when you have a three year audit, it it doesn't always give you the context of when some of these issues happen.

I appreciate that. Thank you for clarifying that, and I just wanna thank you for the work that you are doing. I think it's making a big difference in my district. I can speak to even just opportunities that we see and even recently, like I mean, we're experiencing financial cuts everywhere. And so every dollar you all have is, like, worth $2 to the community now, whether it's talking to the people that were laid off from the aid center who are trying to still provide those services in community. Who are they turning to? Right away, they mentioned caring for Denver. How are we gonna continue to support these people that need help? And so I wanna lift that up even when we had conversations around the JID, the general improvement district on South Broadway. It was right away noted.

If you wanna provide services, caring for Denver could be an opportunity to actually help provide those services now that we have an entity to receive funds to help people experiencing homelessness on Broadway. And so I think that this is something new. I wanna commend the creativity around using organizations that don't normally get this kind of funding. I think back to when I was on the board of the Latino Cultural Arts Center. They did some amazing work with getting Latino men to care about their mental health through art, and that was thanks to a caring for Denver grant.

So I think that you're being innovative. It's new, so people are gonna freak out. I think we have to do better with processes, and it sounds like you're in alignment there. And so I just wanna also uplift the work that you all are doing and and how important it is to these nonprofits and small organizations, especially at a time where everyone's struggling for money. So thank you.

Thank you, committee chair.

Thank you, council member Alvederez. We've got about fifteen minutes. So just so we have four other members in the queue. So we have council member Parity, council member Sandoval, council president Sandoval, and council member Gonzales Gutierrez.

Thank you. I'm not straight. Yeah. I was making notes because I there's a lot of topics here. I I first wanted to say that I really the audit process has this built in back and forth. So there's an audit. There's a response. There's more responses. Sometimes they do follow-up audits. We often have these kind of conversations in counsel, and it tends to help us kind of start to dive in a little bit more. And I think there's pieces of this audit that I react to. My initial reaction is I don't feel like I agree. There's pieces of it that I my initial reaction is I do feel like I agree, but it's really helpful either way. And I really appreciated in this audit that the auditor actually directed some recommendations at City Council because it just then tells us where to pay attention. I thought that was lovely.

So one question I wanted to bring up is knowing that we are already in the process of revisiting the ordinance, and I say we, you know, specific colleagues, before 2027 when the contract would be up. I just wanna make sure that I wanna make sure that council and Caring for Number sort of put our minds to figuring out, is the language of the ordinance actually ambiguous enough in any way that there's, like, a risk in some context of a court actually disallowing some of what's been funded? And if so, maybe we do need to think about that a little sooner. That to me is a legal question, which isn't what the auditor does. So, I mean, they not to say they have no role in sort of assessing whether an ordinance is being followed because they do, but ultimately, I think there's a question of interpretation here.

You know, the purposes are broad. The things that you have funded, I can absolutely see the argument that they contribute to those purposes. And then it's just this question of, like, are they sort of close enough to be within the four quarters of the text? That's probably really a question for legal advice, we don't need to talk about it in this committee. But I want to make sure both counsel and Caringford Denver probably separately are getting that advice. So maybe for those that have been dug in on this, it's something to, like, talk to our city attorneys about so we can all just feel assured that that we don't need to be looking at anything like that sooner, if that makes sense. Mhmm. So that's more of a it's a comment, but I if you have any response to Alarez, I No.

I mean, I think we we have checked in with attorneys to talk about capacity building in particular. Okay. I think the, again, we are part of the reason we fund a whole set of organizations is then we can measure impact. And what we can show is that there's been increased access, reach, and outcomes for the organizations that have had that additional support. And so it's in alignment with and I think some of what we Could

see that? I'm sorry? Could we see that?

Yes. I will get that. Great. Yes. I would like that. Yeah. And then the second part is that, again, within and I I don't wanna overstep my bounds as an individual for city council because you all have the authority over the ordinance and and the language. What we heard too is that language is meant to be enduring, is meant to say the maze and you may not, and then leave to that administrative interpretation with clear oversight from DDPHE and the city. So that's why we're always very clear about all the grants we make. And if there are questions, that's what we wanna answer and and interpret how we've aligned it.

And if that's wrong, I think that's where we would, you know, love, you know, to continue to have the conversation.

I think there's two layers. I think if we if we wanna make different policy choices about what's in the ordinance, then that's we don't need to do that at any particular time, and there's already a process happening. I think if there's any risk that we could be, you know, sort of found to be outside the ordinance, then I would be more concerned about that right now. So two different things. Right? But I agree that any policy reassessment does not need to happen before the timeline that it's on because that's sort of how long that's going to take. I mean, it's a fine timeline. Then another thing is in this area of you are a five zero one(three). I know that in nonprofits, it's common to pay for meals for staff. It does land a little hard because our public health agency, all of us as council members, don't do that very often.

We have very limited cases where we can. So I share that sort of feeling about that. And I think one of the things that would help me sort through that because it was intentional that voters set you up as a c three, so I wanna say that too. You're not a city mean, you know, it's the nature of things. You are, in fact, a c three, not a city agency. But given that all of your money is from tax dollars, that they're very stretched, etcetera, one of the things I wonder about is, like, we give out tons of grants as the city to all kinds of different things, and I'm just curious what we do and don't dictate about that kind of use in in other grant making context. So that's a question probably for DDPHE that you don't have to answer on the spot, Ken, if you want to. I see Megan getting up.

What I might just if you might just I'll So those meeting expenses that were identified about 9,300 approximately per year, those were all or a majority of those are community facing. So when we do that, it's two thirds of those were coffee meetings, and we do that for a variety of reasons. So I I wanna just at least state why we do it. First is conflict of interest policies. We just cover any meeting with anybody because we never wanna have the perception of undue influence, meaning somebody, because they bought coffee or didn't buy coffee, got a grant, didn't get a grant.

And so conflict of interest, take very seriously. That is in our ordinance. It's actually related to even three of the findings. So first and foremost is that secondarily is an equity issue for community. We don't want our who we meet with over coffee or anything to be restricted by who has a budget to do it or not to do it, as well as best practice right now in foundation space.

And, again, this is not city space, I'm I'm it's this mushy world of all the spaces we live in, is to recognize the sort of the value that community brings in terms of the whole community engagement plan that we just talked about. We're asking people to spend time with us, share their their knowledge and resource. It's our constituent work. And so a a meal or a coffee is a simple expression of that. And so, again, those I just wanna clarify. Yeah. Actually, I'm

glad you said that, Lois, because I think one thing I mean, we I'll just speak for myself. I never pay for coffee with city dollars. I just pay for it personally as opposed to my, you know, city council member salary. That's where that comes from, and I will often pick it up for who I'm buying coffee for if I need to do that. That doesn't mean Caringford Denver staff should have to do that, and I think I hadn't appreciated that if you're having a coffee meeting with someone, you're sort of paying one tab, and so it's picking up the Caring in front of staff member and the other person. I do appreciate that. I had the thought that like, I would want Caring in front of her to pay for, like, food at focus groups and things like that to enable people to be there and you know? But I do yeah. Again, within the city, we don't typically do that. And and so I understand the reasoning.

I'm still a little, you know, fuzzy on that. And and, yeah, Megan, if you have thoughts about what happens with other grantees, would appreciate it.

Yeah. I don't have to reintroduce this, do I? No. I don't want to speak for all citywide rules or all contracts across the city or grants across the city for DDPHE and for other special revenue funds within DDPHE, like Healthy Food for Denver Kids, providing food is a pretty common thing. I think that it allows, especially for something like Healthy Food for Denver kids, they're all about food.

And they want to make a space where community is comfortable, where community can come and be, where folks can show up and not worry about whether their kid has child care or their kid has food. But they can participate in a focus group or in a conversation or in a meeting, whether it's one on one or whether it's as a group. And so DDPHE, as an entity, doesn't have a strict policy across every grantee that says you can or cannot spend money on food. Well, know

it's more specific to the grantee staff, though. And again, I understand your I think what Larissa told us and I would actually really like to see a little more info about this if you have it post the audit. A lot of this food and beverage is there's a community members of whatever company you're meeting with and a staff member. Yeah. But do we ever have policies that say that we won't just cover staff meals through our grant or something like that?

I don't think so because of this exact scenario. Again, I think our Healthy Food for Denver staff that are internal to the city, they sit at the same table as a grantee or as a community partner, and they also get food provided for them. So I think that it's really nuanced and would be really hard to set a policy that's really strict about a staff member. Can't be reimbursed or paid for it, a community member can. But I appreciate JULIET the sentiment. I think it would be really hard to set a strict policy

J. For very, very helpful. I appreciate that. I may have some follow-up questions about that, but that's really helpful. Last very quick thing because I know we have a queue. I just wanted to say I don't like the language in the audit about problematic grantees. And I just have to say that because, of course, you guys are giving grant money to organizations that have people that work with them that have felony convictions. You should be doing that. Please continue doing that because that's where I mean, we want people to be able to have a conviction, start doing something that they have expertise on in the community, productively do a good job of it, and be able to benefit from this fund. I mean, that's that's integral to what you do.

If and I I also didn't like the auditor flagging an instance where someone had been, I think, charged but not convicted because, of course, a charge is a charge, not a conviction. I would like to know more. I would like to see the copies of the policies that you all use for due diligence. It helps me to know what the city's own practice is when making grants because, of course, we wouldn't want any risk that we were funding someone that was actively engaging in their professional, you know, conduct in some kind of violence. I think that goes without saying, so I I do wanna look at those policies. But the inference that because someone has a prior conviction, they're likely to do that kind of thing is not an inference that anyone should be doing. So thank you. Thanks, mister chair.

Thank you, councilmember Parody, councilmember president Sandoval, and councilmember Gonzales Gutierrez. We've got about ten more minutes. Council president still on.

Sorry. Thank you. Thank you, Lorez, and thank you, DDPHE, for coming. As someone who started an audit as council pro tem and finished the audit as council president, I can relate to some of the frustrations that you feel, Loreez, on the responses and whether you agree or or it it did agree or disagree. We got partial agree and partially compliant on ours because we were in the process of making changes.

So we just finished our audit. And, also, some of the recommendations for the from the auditor were not feasible because they literally were went against what was in charter for some of like, for our executive director, and so I pointed that out. My questions to you are more along just some process safeguards. A lot of them have been covered by councilman Parity and councilman Torres, to be 100% honest. But I just think that we can I I just fundamentally, I have?

I don't understand, and I've been doing research in this since I've started opening up these special sales tax measures. I don't understand how you're a foundation. So a foundation isn't don't know any other foundation in all of the research I've been doing that is a 100% public dollars. It's usually a a a mixture of two. And from the research I've done, having a foundation is actually costlier than, like, the Denver preschool program, which is a five zero one c three.

So I don't quite understand the whole foundation concept when it is a sales tax measure compared to I don't think any of the other sales tax measures that we work with consider themselves a foundation. Just wondering why I think we could we don't have to have that answer today, but I just wanna say some of the recommendations in the audit, I think, lead to that, whether it's a foundation or whether you all feel like you're an independent foundation because of that that term foundation, which has a little bit more separation from the city. So I would just love to dig into that more because I don't think from the research I've done that I can't figure that out. And but most importantly, I think that the work that you all do and the the puzzle piece that work puts it's all together a whole big puzzle piece that you all fill in is so very important. It really is.

There's no doubt in my mind how important this is. My concerns about the audit and my concerns about any audit are gonna be taxpayers' dollars. I I have office hours. And when I first started setting up office hours for council member Espinosa, he was the first council member I knew who did office hours. We used to have him at a coffee shop, and we used to pay for the coffee.

And when I got elected, I actually have them down at my office. And so if somebody wants coffee, they can have a cup of coffee so it creates an even playing field. Because I understand I didn't want someone to have to meet me at a coffee shop and feel like they have to pay. And at the same time, I don't wanna use tax dollars at a coffee shop numerous times to be paying for a meeting where I just wanna get to know someone. So I think that there's just some some practices.

And to councilman Parady's point, if I go out and I pay for if I meet my colleagues or I go out, I pay for it myself. I never use my p card. I just it's just part of me doing business. So I think that there's some best practices that we can look at in the ordinance, but I appreciate you coming here. Is there a report attached in registrar? I thought part of the ordinance required a report attachment. Am I missing that?

You are not yet. We have not come to that date yet. So March 31, so we'll be back to committee in in April. And we are a five zero one c three. So we are actually, we have the same designation as Prosperity Denver and Denver preschool program.

We just our name includes the word foundation, which means we give money away. I think Denver Preschool Program and Prosperity Denver have slightly different functions. But, again, we operate just like a five zero one c three and have, again, our admin spend, the amount of money we're allowed to keep for spending towards administrative expenses is 5%. And so we live within that 5%, similar to, I think, Denver preschool program is seven and a half, and I think Prosperity is Denver. So we are following the exact same fiscal sort of accountability as both of those organizations.

I understand that giving money away, I feel like that is a nuance. It there's tons of nonprofits that give services and money away. I think the foundation title actually causes more from the research I've done, I'm not a subject matter expert on this, but I have been thinking about this since the Colorado Public Radio article came out because one of the comments that came back from one of the founders was like, oh, well, we act different because we're a foundation. And I was like, I don't think that's actually a 100% accurate, but let me dig into that, which had me digging into the ordinance. So I understand the mission, but I also understand that these are tax dollars.

And so how do we spend them? And I also understand the due diligence around having to get an itemized receipt. I don't go places that don't have itemized receipts because I just it's so much work on my council aides to figure out all the itemized receipts that I just I think spending on some of these. But we can have a I know councilman Torres and I have a follow-up meeting with you. So I'll dig into some of these concerns that I have so then we could have just a different type of conversation about just the nuance of what does it mean to have this go through the city of Denver and be a special tax entity that is sales tax.

Because it I I want you all to be able to do the work you need to do, and I also wanna be able to protect this the sales tax that we need so that people know that feel like their sales tax is going to where they had voted on. That's all my concern is. Thank you, mister chair. Thank you, Luis.

Appreciate that. Appreciate that and look forward to I mean, this is a continued partnership, and we're committed to that.

Thank you so much, council president. Councilmember Gonzalez Gutierrez?

Yeah. Thank you, mister Charles. I'll be really quick here. Some of this stuff could be follow-up if that's possible. I appreciated seeing it looked like there was there was a grantee selection process.

So I'm curious of when that change happened. Having been worked for an organization who did receive funds from Caring for Denver after applying three times, I recall in one of the, like, interviews that I had as a director, I asked what is the the selection process. And at the time, it was that the board basically decided. And I know that is still part of the process and seeing kind of the the outline that's detailed in the report. And so I'm curious, like, when that changed because I think there are some additional steps that weren't initially provided in that initial interaction.

And then the second part is around the scoring. So you indicated that that you'd you all don't utilize that scoring design. When I sat on the Tony Gramsys youth services board at the state before he ever getting elected, one of the that was one of the things we grappled with because we had grantees who maybe applied for, you know, a very small amount because they are a grassroots community organization that maybe doesn't have the capacity to apply for a million dollar grant. Then we had bigger organizations, and I'm trying hard to not, like, name specific organizations, but organizations that are well known and and maybe have national standing that are applying for more. And so we were able to utilize scoring in a way that met the needs of those different types of grantees so that it wasn't just a catch all.

Like, you have to be able to provide all of these details in your application, but instead, instead, it it was was understanding, understanding, like, like, this organization is way smaller. They only have 20 staff, and they're applying for, you know, a $50,000 grant. And I see that there is a difference in the process there in decision making, but I think there is some helpful it could be helpful to still have some type of scoring mechanism and maybe even looking at how you implement that for those different types of grantees. So I'm just curious if that's something because I know that was called out also in the audit. I'm just curious if that and then as well as the selection process, like when that decision was made.

Appreciate it. So we've had a pretty similar process all along. We leverage so the application comes in, so the call for proposal dictates that. We have community viewers that look at proposals and tell us strengths, challenges, things they'd like to see improved. That then moves on to the program officer to do that additional due diligence.

And we have a whole sort of PO playbook that we're happy to share that talks about what we do. We provided that all to the audit office as well. And then there's a prioritization meeting and sort of how do we prioritize from that to that. That's the place where we are doing what I'll say is additional documentation to say how did we go from '25 to 15 or 23,000,000 in requests to 13 that we have to give away, and how do we better document that process. They could see that we did it.

It just wasn't in as well of a document. So we will do that. That is the part that is changing. We've always used an assessment tool Mhmm. That more ranks somebody high, medium, low versus in a category versus saying, you get this score or that score. Because, again, we know no organization is perfect. And so how do we recognize where they can improve? But if they really have the community trust, if they're the organization that is doing the important work, how do we recognize that, but also recognize and evaluate risk? Because I think that was what some of the audit was. It wasn't that there couldn't be risk, but how do you make sure that they can see that we've identified that risk?

And so I think that's what we're talking about, documenting. That is the part that is is potentially changing.

Okay. That's helpful to know because, yeah, I don't want, like, these kind of grassroots organizations that are doing really, really great work in our community to be left out of that, but I think there is a balance so that it is not, you know, biased in, you know, the people that are sitting around the table making the decision of who gets the grants because of maybe potential relationships or things like that that they might have. Mhmm. I I just wanna make sure it's a equal process Correct.

In that respect. It's the criteria based that that is really the basis of our system is to make sure that it is universally applied and it can be equitably applied. And it recognizes the value of even folks that we don't fund doesn't mean that they're not doing great work. It's just limited resources and what's gonna have the most impact. So, again, I think that's super important to us and always has been and continue will be.

Thank you so much. Thank you, mister chair.

Thank you. Council member Gonzalez Gutierrez. I have just one question, Lorez, and then I have a comment, and then we'll transition to the next briefing. The one question, it's it's outside of the audit questions that folks have had specific to your funding of types of organizations. And I'm curious for organizations that do corresponder support that are tied to mental health, Is there, has there been a consideration, a thought process of, caring for Denver providing, that level of support? We know there are gaps within the city that we have not been able to meet, and we expect to have some budget impacts this year as well. Just curious from your perspective.

Sure. So we are a significant funder of both the city co responder program and the STAR program, and I think we see those both as important places and ways to divert folks with mental health and substance misuse needs away from the legal system into that. We have embedded and will continue services in the public defender's office, the DA, those peer specialists that also divert people away. We have funded organizations like Vivet that does a mobile service as well. The Wellness Winnie, which is part of the city, they're looking to evolve in partnership with Denver Health on that one.

So we are always looking for what are those ways that we can connect with people and meet people where they're at to get them the services, and again, as much as possible, divert them away. So that'll be our next funding area is that alternatives to jail. So that will open up in the March, and then applications will come in in April, the April, May, and then those awards are made in July.

Excellent. Excellent. Thank you so much, Flores. I just wanna say, personally, thank you for the work that Caring for Denver does in all of our communities, especially on the East Side. Thank you also for taking the opportunity to elevate nonprofits that are ignored by other funding sources.

You will continue to be scrutinized because of that, and I as a city council member will continue to support you, especially because that's what you're doing. Many of these organizations don't have alternatives. Thank you for the clarification on the agree and disagree process. It's a construct of an audit. And for someone reading it in a newspaper article, it may be a little bit hard to see the nuance of agree, disagree over a three year period.

I appreciate that clarification and that from DDPHE. Thank you so much for providing the full report that council president asked about. We know that comes in about a month. We look forward to peering into that a little bit deeply. Look around the room if there are no other questions. I appreciate it. Thank you all so much. Look forward to seeing you all in another thirty or so days. We are speedily transitioning to our next presentation. Thank you so much everyone from from Carrington for being here.

We have a presentation from our friends from the Department of Public Health and Environment. You're ready to go. Danica Lee and Nicole Caldwell will be presenting. I'll give you a few moments to set up, and I look forward to hearing your briefing. The floor is yours.

Thank you, chair Watson. Good morning, everybody. My name is Danica Lee, and I'm the director of the public health investigation division with the Denver Department of Public Health and Environment.

And I'm Nicole Caldwell. I'm the Healthy Families, Healthy Homes section manager within the Public Health Investigations Division, and it includes our Residential Health and Housing Program, which we're here to talk to you about today.

So today we're going to share with you some exciting work that we've done that many of you have supported, as well as our member's office has supported over the last year plus. So going back oh, so this is an overview of our presentation. We are a little short on time, so I will just cruise through some of this, and you'll get to see the content as we get to it. Just a little bit of context setting, though. There is, I believe, an increased awareness now more than ever that residential health is a social determinant of health, and so the places that people live have a huge impact on where they end up in life and their health, and having that awareness and continuing to see council offices, our department leadership, and then community groups, the mayor's office elevate this work because it is so important helps us get our work done.

So thank you to to all of you for your support with this work.

Alright. So let's talk a little bit about the work that we do. We are mainly a complaint based program, and we respond to residential health and housing related complaints. Last year, our team conducted approximately a 100 well, they investigated approximately 1,800 complaints. That is not how many investigations conducted because oftentimes these complaints require multiple reinspections.

They also, on top of that, do routine inspections of shelters, boarding homes. They do proactive property inspections monthly at large multiunit dwellings. And we also do consultation visits at emergency and transitional housing, so safe outdoor spaces, microcommunities, AMH sites. The team is often involved in very complex residential health cases that involve a require a multi agency approach. So for example, when it comes to a meth contaminated unit, we often work with DPD narcotics to investigate those.

If it's a hoarding situation, we wanna ensure that we have representatives who can support on the mental health side of things. So we will work with Wellpower or the fire department if there are fire concerns. Denver Animal Protection often comes out with us if there is animal hoarding involved, etcetera. Neglect and derelict properties. And then, as I mentioned, many of these are joint and referrals from other agencies, including the medical examiner, police, community planning, and development.

Next slide, please. So our authority and our purpose, chapter 27 is the housing code, and that's what grants CDPHE the authority to enforce minimum housing and habitability standards. And then the details of those requirements are found in our residential health rules and regulations. Some of the things that we look at include pest infestations. So that picture at the top is a bed bug infestation, just one little corner of that home.

We look into mold and water damage, sanitation concerns. That picture at the bottom is a hoarding case and there were significant sanitation concerns as well as lack of utilities, plumbing, and other basic needs. We'll look into heating, like I said, lack of utilities, and methamphetamine contamination. So what do we do when we come across a health or safety violation? We follow our compliance process.

So that starts with issuing an order, which is called a notice of violation, and that order cites exactly what regulation is in violation of the code or the regs and then how long they have to fix it. Those are often issued to the property owner or the property manager. Sometimes if it's an owner occupied property, it would go to the owner the occupant. We have there are times where we have to placard a residence and that is when, like those two pictures that you saw, the conditions are so hazardous that it's creating an imminent health hazard and it is not safe for the occupant to live there. Failure to correct a violation that we've cited on an order can lead to escalated enforcement actions such as administrative citations or a court summons, which carries a criminal charge.

And repeat issues will also impact their residential rental license. We've been working closely with DLCP, with the licensing agency, and coordinating with those properties that have outstanding and egregious violations. We do not have direct involvement with warranty of habitability. We don't enforce the warranty of habitability, but many of our codes and regulations do align with the standards and the warranty of probability. And then here's a little background.

So we've come a long way since 2022. Five years ago, our fines were manual. Our reports were written in a Word document and saved as a PDF and sent in the mail. So we we've come a long way. And

at that point, we

were only able to find for the most egregious situations because we just didn't have a way to sort through all of the data and all of the inspections and orders that were being issued. We didn't have reporting functions related to case history. And, also, to add to that, our staff were redeployed to COVID response for two years from 2020 to 2021, so we had to significantly scale back on our complaint response to just the most egregious issues. In 2022, towards the end, we became fully automated, and that has changed our world for the better. We are now able to assess fines more regularly.

We can follow cases closely. The system will flag for us cases that have multiple reinspections and orders being issued so we can, in real time, intervene with escalated enforcement actions if we need to. And then in 2024, we started applying our $5,000 cap on fines, whereas previously, our cap was $999. So now we can fine up to $5,000 per violation per day. That makes a big difference in many cases.

So let's see. We had nine investigators last year. They investigated 1,800 complaints. We issued 99 administrative citations for failure to comply, which totaled about $415,000. We also implemented a lien process for unpaid fines, and that totaled 520,000 as of last year.

We've been able to date to recover a 128,000 from the lien process, process. So that seems to be working well as well. And as I mentioned, we've been working closely with the licensing department to also intervene on properties that have a lack of license. So that's something that our investigators will include during their routine inspections is just, do you have a license? So that's been working well

as well. And then just one more word about enforcement tools. So the goal here is not to just leverage enforcement tools, right? It's to actually have effective change. And we're working on changing a system here in the city and county of Denver.

We'll talk about that a little bit later, but as you're looking at these numbers, I think that's an important thing to remember. So now we're going to talk about the exciting work we've done over the last year with a group of stakeholders, and thank you to all of you for your support through the 2025 budget process to procure the resources to help us do this work. So throughout pretty much the last year, we started in February 25 with our first meeting, and we just had our fourth meeting, fourth and last formal meeting of this stakeholder series this week. We have partnered with a number of different tenants advocacy organizations, some of your offices, mayor's office, and we've had a lot of participation from our team members as well. And this was really an opportunity for us to receive recommendations, understand where there's pain points, opportunities for improvement and empowerment for tenants.

So I did mention a timeline here. Work has happened over the last year, while there's only been four of these large stakeholder meetings, we've actually had over 50 smaller meetings, planning meetings with external stakeholders. So, you know, several of the tenants unions have been primarily involved in this, but there is just a ton of work and engagement. And where it's gotten us is we really, I think, have a good understanding. We've built trust, and we have good pathways of communication and I think some really clear steps that we all agree on moving forward that we're going to talk about.

So last June, the stakeholder kind of coalition of stakeholder groups that we're working with submitted to the city agencies involved with the stakeholder group, primarily DDPHE, Endeavor Licensing and Consumer Protection, 40 pages of recommendations that they grouped into eight different suites. Some of these were outside the scope of DDPHE's current role, which is focusing on health and sanitation and public health laws. And so what we did was respond and really pare it down to identify the priorities that were within our scope. And so you'll see those listed up here, tenant protection, empowerment, reporting and accessibility of the information that we're generating, the inspection reports, violations, enforcement actions, and then how we're actually conducting that enforcement and engaging both tenants and responsible parties and what follow through looks like.

So these stakeholder meetings have been very informative and productive as well as the planning meetings and a lot of collaboration along the way. And what we have heard, we have tried to implement also along the way the things that we can in terms of internal policies, and then we'll get into other policy changes such as code and regs. But this is what we've done so far because we can control it. We are now copying complainants on every order that we send so they know in real time what their landlord is being ordered to do and when it needs to be done by. We are confirming corrections with tenants.

Sometimes it's difficult to schedule an in person reinspection with them because they have other obligations and work and whatnot. So we're confirming with them before we close anything out even if we see receive evidence from a landlord stating that it's been corrected. We want the complainant to confirm that. Our reports and violations are now posted publicly, and I will get into that as well. That relates to the public facing dashboard that our new analyst has been able to create for us in partnership with these stakeholders.

We are including our tenant rights resources in everything that we pass out. It's in our emails. We hand out hard copies after inspections, and these resources include everything from housing to pest control to substance use support and and so on. And then, like I said, we've we've had this ongoing collaboration with tenant unions, community advocates, and we will get into the regulations that we are contemplating changing as a result of their feedback.

Thanks, Nicole. So we actually originally had responsive changes across four slides. So please know this is just the highlights here, and we wanted to focus on the responsiveness to what we'd heard about how we were interfacing with tenants. I think there's some more work that we plan to do there, but we are proud that we've been able to make these responsive changes and focus on the things within our control to make improvements. Looking ahead and I also want to talk about some of the other areas we're working on.

We are all fortunate to have the support of you all and the mayor's office with establishing and moving forward with priorities that came out of this stakeholder convening and that the mayor is also on board with. So Nicole mentioned revising the residential health regulations. There's some things that we can do there in terms of landlords being required to post and share information. A lot of what we hear about is disempowerment of tenants through silo communication and not acknowledging or working with tenants as a group. So requiring landlords to post certain information is we think a really great suggestion from our stakeholders.

We are also working with some of you and the mayor's office and advocacy organizations to research a possible meet and confer policy and ordinance. And so this is something that potentially would require property management companies and or owners to meet with a group of tenants. Because, again, where we see that disempowerment is just by interacting on a one on one basis and sort of kind of denying that larger issues exist. And so having a meet and confer requirement sounds simple. We take it for granted.

You meet with people when there's an issue. Well, it is a strategy to kind of like keep folks, you know, you know, a bit unempowered to deal with the the violations in housing conditions. Nicole's gonna show you some snapshots from our violation enforcement dashboard. We have the our analysts that's doing this work is funded through the end of this year, and so we're also working on longer term strategies to retain her because she is critical to the progress that we've been making. This is the first time that anybody can just get online and easily, like, use a map and look at different addresses and see violations and see complaints and see enforcement actions.

We're still working through some of the challenges. There's a it's a complicated system, and there's limitations that to protect the city's security systems. So we're still working through those, but very excited. And that has been what many of those smaller meetings with stakeholders have been about over the last year. And then focusing continuing to focus on proactive property inspections and try to make them as effective as possible.

And we are also continuing to work with the licensing, Denver Licensing and Consumer Protection, to make sure that if there's outstanding fines and violations, we are holding property managers and owners accountable, not renewing that license or not issuing that license until those issues are taken care of. All of these things are part of what's just changing that system. And we're I think we're all impatient that we don't see change more quickly. And this is where I was talking about the goal isn't just to see fines go up every year, right? The goal is to see that there's a message that gets across about things that are not acceptable in Denver.

In Denver, if you are going to offer a space for somebody to rent, you you need to be accountable for maintaining that space in a habitable and safe condition. And so I think over the next couple years, we're gonna continue to see a shift in the the system here, the ecosystem. Some of the additional focus areas I wanna touch on real quick is we see some of our biggest challenges with out of state investor owners. Many of you know this, and many of you have, you know, helped us understand this. And what we've learned is that there are these kind of protective layers of LLCs and property management companies, and so we're working with the city attorney's office because there's some broad information in the municipal code identifying who a responsible party is.

And so if we can identify the principles of these out of state investment companies that are not following through on their commitment to tenants, there's a real opportunity for us there to make a much greater impact by directly assessing fines potentially to those principles. And, you know, we are seeing a little bit of movement there and working excited to be working with the city attorney's office to explore, you know, how that authority can be fully optimized so that we're being as effective as possible. And then one more thing here. We've received a lot of feedback from tenants that going in in response to a single complaint and just following a single violation through and then finding when that violation is corrected is a really missed opportunity when you're having facility wide issues. So if we're just addressing kind of each unit separately, it's not taking a holistic approach to understanding what the landscape is there in terms of the violations and habitability issues.

So I want to give a huge shout out to Nicole and Tara and Ananda on our team who've been really innovative in working through some of our technological challenges to take a different lens and take a more holistic lens to evaluating repeat violations across a property. And then also looking at these violations in public areas, we should not be going out and seeing dumpster areas en masse every time. And if we're going out for a complaint in a unit, we can check on that dumpster area because that is low hanging fruit. If you can't take care of your dumpster area, it's sort of a red flag that there's other issues. If there is animal feces all over your property, improperly discarded syringes, trash.

All of that, you know, we can check on and we are now checking on those things in our egregious properties. So just making a lot of progress and changes here thanks to all of the feedback that we've received. Is this me? Yes. Okay.

So we are kicking off now or we will be in the coming months leveraging all this work we've done with stakeholders over the last year to kick off a more formal process to revise our regulations. We are going to be much quicker than we were with our noise ordinance, we promise, but still have the same level of focus on feedback about those changes. So all of you will be hearing from us and then you know the stakeholder groups and certainly we want to make space and be talking to property management companies and owners as well. There's a lot of great you know practitioners out there in that space and so we look forward to engaging them as well to make sure that we're taking a balanced approach. These are just some of the areas that we're looking at and I won't read through all of them.

We'll keep going here in light of the time.

Okay. Let's get to the fun stuff, the dashboard. So what are we gonna use it for? Really, we want you all in this room and everyone in our community to be able to see what we see. We want everyone to know what's going on at any property at any given time in Denver.

So it will enable tenants to assess the conditions of the property that they're in and also track if they have filed a complaint, the progress of that. Prospective tenants can make informed decisions before they sign a lease. It'll enable other organizations to identify higher risk properties that maybe need other interventions besides just residential health. It informs legal housing cases often, and we can just communicate the impact of our work on a dashboard that's easy to read and easy to follow. Here is a picture of one of the dashboards.

The things you can look for, you can look for the number of complaints we've received and investigated. You can see how many inspections it took to conduct these investigations, how many citations we've issued, and the amount, and to who, and when. You can search for a specific complaint or a specific address if you want and see all the orders, all the fines, and all the inspections that are related to it. Program metrics, you can see our own metrics, quickly we're responding to complaints, the most cited violations, things like that. Two of our three dashboards are up and running, and we're working on a third, which I think you all will be excited about because it's a really cool heat map by council district.

So you can zoom in on just dive on. And, yes, I'll

end it there so that

we have time for questions, but definitely. A

quick thank you again to all of these partners, and I want to talk about next steps. We are part of our last meeting with stakeholders on Monday focused on how do we memorialize this series, memorialize the work that we've done together, how do we acknowledge where the areas that we have gaps in terms of maybe our capacity or our authority to take on some of these issues. And so we are working, and it'll be kind of a bit of an iterative process over the last few months working with our participants in that stakeholder series to generate a document that talks about that and also includes many of the products that we've worked on over the last year. This is not the end of our work with this group. Okay?

This is the end of the step. And so we would be foolish if we walked away from the partnerships that we've made and just all the work that we've done. This group is gonna continue to be important, and we're still going to have these smaller convenings and really, I think both as we go through the regulation revision process and then any time an issue comes up that is a policy issue, there's problems, this is the group that we're going to bring together to convene. I would love to see a similar group on the property ownership management side that can come to the table with solutions and best practices. So that's an area for us to work over the next year.

But this group of organizations have this I can't say enough about just how passionate they've been. Many of them are not getting compensated like the city staff are for participating in all this work, and so we just really recognize and appreciate all the contributions. And that is what we have for you today. Happy to take questions.

Thank you so much, Danica, Nicole, your entire team. Probynissa, keep those names up. We don't applaud.

But put those names back up. Jim,

last slide. I wanna say thank you to all of those folks and those applause in committee. It doesn't happen often, but that work has been extraordinary. We've got two members in the queue, council member Gonzalez Gutierrez and council member Parady. And then checking for any of the folks who are virtual. If you wanted to join in, please let us know. Sorry.

Alright. Thank you, mister chair. And I don't really have questions, but more so comments. So the lots of I think city council members had aides attend these task force meetings over the last year. I do appreciate the recognition around, you know, how we actually how this group actually formulated.

And so I do also wanna thank Angela from the mayor's office for being part of that effort because if it weren't for for us trying to figure out how we address tenant protection issues and the fact that every year, right, we're coming back and asking for temporary rental and utility assistance, which is still a a piece of the puzzle. Right? That we know that there is so much more that we could be doing policy wise, administratively to address the needs for for renters, their experience, and also prevent eviction if you know, with different types of just different tools that we can give ourselves and we can give them. So I'm incredibly thankful that this has been happening. I am so proud of the relationships that have been built with these community partners.

I'm so proud of the work that they have brought to the table and and the their expertise and experience into the fact that they are not being compensated, right, in the same way that we know our our city folks are this is part of your job and and and work. So I cannot say how much I appreciate their time and talent that they have brought to this process and will continue to bring. And I'm really, really happy to hear that this is this doesn't end here. It's not like, oh, we did these things, and the mayor wrote a letter, and everything's fine now, and we're just gonna move on. But we're continuing this partnership, and I will just say I wanna thank councilman Sawyer for step for leaning in on this as well.

And so just kind of a preview, you kind of heard some of the things that may be coming through from council members. Councilman Sawyer and I have joined forces and are working with the agencies, the mayor's office, with the community partners on some policies that that you all should stay tuned for, and we'll be bringing forward when we to budget and policy. And, yeah, I I just really I I can't say enough. Like, I I'm actually really excited about this, and I hope that some of the groups are tuning in and seeing this work come to fruition. And also just even going back to conversations I've had with, you know, like, council member Fotas saying, you know, understanding the the reason why we keep asking for more funding for rent use rent assistance.

And she was like, is there anything else that we can be doing to address this issue policy wise? This is where we're going. This is the this is the road that we're taking. And so I can't wait to continue this work and and know that there's a lot more

to be done.

Yes. Thank you so much, councilmember Gonzalez Gutierrez. Thank you so much, councilmember Sawyer, for your leadership on this as well. Councilmember Parity?

Yeah. I'm really glad to be getting this update because I seeing the bars of just, you know, being able to actually impose fines more successfully, I mean, that's, like, the proof that, know, like, so much more to do, but that increase, I know that's so much hard work by you guys and and by this, like, this this coalition. Councilmember Gonzalez Gutierrez, you did such a really, really good job not only making sure that we had the money budgeted for the positions that tenants were telling us were needed, but then also making sure that that this, like, forum happened, you know, because we've just gotten so much good information from it. And I've shared the, like, excitement to see it starting to, like, bear fruit. There are always millions of next steps, the nature of, like, our these partner organizations is that they're all, like, on to the next thing, you know, because their members are still living in really bad conditions a lot of the time, and and we all know that.

But this is a lot of progress. I had another issue come up recently that Danica and I have been talking about and that you've been really helpful on. And it just goes to show how much the, like, the data work that you all do is is so meaningful. I I have been curious about what happens when a property gets placarded for one of these really severe violations. Like, it is often methamphetamine contamination, that kind of thing, where it's just it's just not inhabitable because, of course, it's highly likely that if you gave me the stats on how many of those properties that get placarded are rentals, and it's most of them.

It's like 75%, I think you told me. And, of course, those are probably people that are renting a really rough spot because they don't have somewhere else to be. You know? So I learned that when we have to essentially just immediately shut down someone's unit it could be a little house, could be an apartment, whatever for one of those reasons that you all have a packet of housing advice that the person gets. It's a good packet.

I looked at it and was like, Okay, this is where people should go to. And I do want to follow-up a little bit on the thought of whether there could be a little bit more of a direct connection to host or to some kind of person to help people navigate because they're just in such a vulnerable position. And so I feel sure that that's a moment when we're having people who may get lost into homelessness or into other really bad living conditions. So I want to bring that up just because we've been talking about it, and you've been so helpful. If you have any desire to talk about that a little bit, feel free. But it's also just sort of a fresh issue that I will want to bring up with host. So don't feel like you have to have any response there.

It's it's a it's a really valid issue. And we do see you know, we're seeing people oftentimes at one of the worst points in their life. Usually the people who are displaced are also directly impacted by substance misuse. And so we are kind of always trying to work on the connections that we have there. We work with Wellpower, as Nicole stated. Sometimes there's connections with Denver Human Services. And certainly, any opportunities that you see, I would love to get together and and talk about that. And thank you again, Ananda, Tara, and Nicole for pulling together all that information that Councilman Parity gave.

It was so it was so helpful to see, so I just wanted to thank you for that. And I had a couple of constituents sort of asking me about that, and so it was really nice to be able to give them that information back. So that's it's really not much of a question. I just thought it would be of interest to everybody here and wanted to thank you for the really good info, And thank you in general. Thanks.

Thank so much, council member Perity. And once again, just thank you both. The good work we did in collaboration with council member Lewis Washer and Housing Habitability, and and all of that movement continues with those folks. I mean, you save lives and you provide dignity beyond simply the utility of the work you're doing at DDPHE, and we are so grateful for your leadership. And with that, thank you. We're looking forward for more information. We have two items on consent. And with that, the meeting is adjourned. Thanks so much.