Safety, Housing, Education & Homelessness Committee - Regular Meeting

Welcome to the safety, housing, education, and homelessness committee of Denver City Council. The safety, housing, education, and homelessness committee begins now.

Okay. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to safety housing education and homelessness committee. Today is Wednesday, May 21, also known as one of my council aides' birthdays, Sina. It's his birthday today. Wish him a happy birthday. And then tomorrow is my brother's birthday. So lots of birthdays in May. And it was councilwoman Torres' birthday last week or last weekend. Yeah. It's my

birthday in November.

Yeah, I know.

And I wished you a happy 100

birthday, sir. I'm November too, but here we are in May. With that said, welcome today. My name is Serena Gonzalez Gutierrez. I am one of your council members at large and also serve as the chair of this committee. We'll start with introductions of council members, and then we'll go on with the agenda today. I will start over here on my right.

Woah. Mixing you up. Good morning, everyone. Kevin Flynn, Southwest Denver's district two.

Good morning. Amanda Sawyer, district five. Damon Torres, West Denver district three. Almost.

All cashmen, South Denver District six.

Good morning, Madam Chair. Stacy Gilmore, District eleven.

And good morning, Madam Chair. Darrell Watson, fine District nine.

Great. Is there anyone online? Just making sure. Nope. Nobody online. So we'll go ahead and get started with our items on the agenda. We have first an action item from Host, our housing stability office. And then we also have a briefing on family homelessness. And it

looks like the same folks will probably be at

the table this entire time. So we'll go ahead and get started with our action item, which is the service agreement with the Salvation Army to continue services at Crossroad. So if you'd like to introduce yourself and then go ahead and proceed with the presentation, I'll be taking the queue from my colleagues, and we'll do questions at the end.

Okay. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. And sorry that you're stuck with me for most of the meeting today. We are here for this agenda item to talk about the Salvation Army agreement to add $4,550,000 for a total of 19,350,000 and for a and adding twelve months to the contract with an ending date of 12/31/2025.

Can I just? I'm sorry, I'm gonna stop you just for a quick second. I do wanna welcome council president Sandoval and council pro temer Marrow Campbell. But if you could actually both just do introductions first and then

Oh, my apologies.

Yeah. Thank you. Please.

Hello. Poly Kyle, government affairs officer with host.

Jeff Kaczynski, deputy director at Host.

Thank you so much.

Yep. Sorry. Okay. No. My apologies. Okay. The contract is for the operations and provision of social services, operating the shelter and provision of social services at Crossroads, which is a twenty four seven low barrier emergency congregate shelter with a 300 bed capacity. Crossroads is in Council District 9 and operates out of a city owned building. What this funding will provide is the operation of that shelter, the 300 beds, with additional beds added during severe weather. A 100 of those beds are accessible under ADA, and the building includes accessible the building itself is accessible and the restrooms are as well.

Recent improvements to the building include or or projects that are in progress include electrical connections for a portable generator power, building envelope repairs, addition of emergency exits, accessibility restroom upgrades, upgrades to the floors, and roof repair. It's an older building as you all know, but we've made some substantial improvements to it. Guests at the shelter must be unhoused, an unhoused male, or identify as a male and be over the age of eight 18 or over. Bed availability and intake begin at 10AM on their on a first come and first serve basis. Guests must follow community guidelines that are established by Salvation Army and approved by host.

And Salvation Army is expected to be a good neighbor, monitor the perimeter of the building, and address any concerns that the community has about the sites. A little bit more detail on the contracted shelter operations. One is that they must be provided regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, color, or national origin, including but not limited to homeless adults who identify or express or present as men or non binary, gender nonconforming, transgender men. Guests are provided breakfast, lunch, and dinner, as well as blankets, towels, hygienic supplies in the restrooms and laundry service. TSA performs cleaning and maintenance adhering to all public health guidance for sanitation of surfaces, toilets, showers.

They're also required to monitor shelter attendance or occupancy with the city's homeless manager or the state's homeless management information system, enrolling clients in that system, providing them with clarity identification cards, and then meeting host's data quality and expectations. They are also required to ensure the facility is safe and secure and must provide a security plan for review and approval by host. And in this particular shelter, Salvation Army manages security for the site themselves. They must have documented accessibility and grievance procedures that are reviewed and approved by hosts. They have to in partnership with hosts, they must provide customer feedback through kiosks that we're setting up at all of the shelters.

They must follow host shelter program standards, including staff training requirements. And we also have put in improved outcome measurement. And all those things on this slide are new this year. They're things that we added to the contracts at for 2025 with feedback from members of city council and and, of course, host staff. Just really quickly, I think this is really an important factor and this is for all host shelters now.

We have required trainings. I won't go over this long list, but we require that staff have all staff have a certain number of trainings. I believe it's about nine hours of training and then renew the training about three hours every year. Leadership and management as well as case management staff are required to have specific trainings that we worked on with the shelter access group, or sorry, the Shelter Success Task Force that Doctor. Reif set up last summer.

And a little bit about social services at Crossroads. This is a list of services that they provide there. One is rapid resolution, which is oftentimes family reunification or one time assistance provided to people experiencing homelessness to help divert them from shelters and from the homelessness response system. This is operated under a separate contract, but it's an integral part of all of our shelter operations. They're required to conduct needs assessments of the people staying at the shelter, providing case management referrals to services such as behavioral health, substance misuse, and health care services, strong focus on housing focus case management and housing navigation.

We also ask that they work to help clients, guests at the shelter, maintain or increase their income or their benefits, help them with employment and other direct client support, which really depends on the client's needs. Little bit about how the shelter has performed in the past. These are just a few things that we were looking at in 2024. We have a lot more data that we're collecting in 2025, but sort of our our main items that we're concerned about are shelter occupancy. Are are they using all the beds?

There's plenty of people who need shelter beds, so we want them to be as full as they can be. As you can see, Crossroads is about 2% higher than most of our other congregate shelters at 98.3%. They served in twenty twenty four eleven hundred 1,194 unique clients, about 3.98 per bed per year, which is a little bit less than the average that we see, meaning that people are staying longer at crossroads than at the other shelters. And positive exits, were 69 or 6%, which is, you know, admittedly low, but higher than what we see across the system. And also wanna just be clear, our shelter providers don't have direct access to housing resources besides rapid resolution, so it's hard to hold them accountable.

You know, they refer people to housing, and then other programs take people the next step of the way. And then moving on to the twenty twenty five outcomes. At the request of some members of city council as well as working with the mayor's office and host staff, of course, and our providers. We have a more extensive logic model that we've put in all of our contracts that talks more about what our expectations are for 2025. I won't go too much into the details of this.

Moving on moving on to the budget. So you'll see 2024, the budget for the shelter was 3,550,000.00. Ninety three percent was spent. It's an average cost of $33 per bed per night. Average cost was $37. Sorry. $33 per bed per night. But they the average for the system is 37. So they were actually making $4 per bed per night less than the average in our system. TSA made a substantial contribution of their own resources to operating the shelter, $3,700,000.

And in 2024, they had 34 staff. In 2025, we've added a million dollars to the budget. And as you see, that brings it up to $41 per person per night, which is still a little bit lower than the average system wide. And TSA is estimating that they're gonna spend over $4,000,000 of their own funds for the operation of the shelter and also have added four staff into the into the budget with the funds that we have added this year. The salary and fringe benefits are the majority of the budget.

About 2,460,000.00 is salary and fringe. Other costs are 1,500,000.0 and that includes maintenance meals, supplies for the guests, and then indirect costs for a total of 4,550,000.00. A little bit about monitoring and accountability. I know that this has come up, you know, numerous times and just wanted to lay out sort of how we hold Salvation Army as well as our other providers accountable. They are required to enter data into HMIS daily, which allows us to see who's staying there, what services they're receiving, and that's how we populate the dashboards that you may see that are on the city's website on shelter access and usage.

Host program staff are assigned to the site. We have one program officer who's assigned to the site along with some contract administration staff. Program officers visit the staff at least monthly. We also do a monthly contract monitoring meeting where we're reviewing program information, looking at their outcomes, looking at their invoices and spending, looking at risk management issues, compliance. And then if there are any performance issues, we'll write up corrective action plan to resolve concerns.

We meet monthly between TSA staff at the crossroads and host. Also, have mandatory quarterly reporting and monitoring that occurs. And that should also point out that host contract all host contracts contain the ability for us to cancel the contract with notice if the providers are not meeting our expectations. Few other additional considerations. Wanted to point out that despite that this the fact that this shelter is one of the older shelters that we have, it is actually the most popular congregate shelter that we operate based on daily average daily occupancy.

It's almost always full. Host receives the fewest number of complaints about Crossroads than any other shelter in our entire system. However, I wanna acknowledge that TSA and TSA acknowledges as well that there's been numerous complaints regarding operations of some of their other programs, primarily the hotels and also the connection center. You know, that's real and we are working on that. TSA's leadership meets with myself and other host leadership.

Doctor Rife often attends those meetings as well on a weekly basis to both look at their contracts and look at areas where we need to make some improvements. And also wanna point out that host will be issuing in early twenty twenty six an RFP for all congregate shelters. So we will be relooking at all of our congregate shelter. This year, we're looking at all the non congregate shelters that RFP gets issued next Friday, May 30. And then next year, we'll be doing RFP for all congregate shelters.

Just to sum up, the request that we're asking today is to add 4,550,000 to the contract. There was an amendment of 10,000,000 and then 4,100,000.0 in 2023 and 2024 respectively. So the total contract amount will be 19,350,000.00. And today's requested action is to fund the extension of their contract through 12/31/2025 for 4,550,000.00 with the funds coming from the general fund. I hope I didn't go too quickly through that. That is our presentation.

That was perfect because it leaves the time we need, I think, for questions. I have quite a few members in the queue here. So we'll start off with Councilman Flynn followed by Councilman Cashman.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Jeff, on Slide number two, but it's actually the third slide, what this funding provides, you list on the third bullet recent improvements in projects and progress include electrical connection, building envelope repairs. Salvation Army is not doing that

work for us. No, I'm sorry. That was probably the wrong place to put that bullet point. But that's correct. The city owns the building and does all of

this work.

That's what I figured, but when the title of the slide said what this funding provided is a little bit confusing. There any other bullet there should not be under what the funding provides? That's right. That's correct. And then the other question I had was on Slide number six, but it's actually the seventh slide. And that is the asterisk on positive exits. And I know you explained this does not include rapid resolutions. What is the range of exits that are considered positive? What variety of outcomes would be a positive exit versus a negative exit?

Yeah. It's essentially two types of positive exits. Folks either move to some permanent stable housing, whether the city has helped them find it or they have found it on their own, as well as folks are moving into like an institution like board and care type facility or long term care due to physical or behavioral health needs that requires them to live in a more supportive Right. Environment. Sort of things.

Correct. Something like that. Okay. When you report sixty nine or 6% from Crossroads are positive exits, you said that Salvation Army doesn't actually do those placements. How do we keep track of that then? How how do we know? Is it through HMIS? Is it

Yes. Okay. Correct. And it is a little bit confusing because there also are rapid resolutions that are coming out of Crossroads and all of our other shelters. But a few years ago, those were separated out from the shelter contracts and they're reported separately. It's a little bit hard to with

with rapid re housing.

I could probably go back and find out for rapid resolution how many exits came from Crossroads specifically under that contract.

Okay. Do we know what the negative exits were? Yes. For Crossroads and for all?

For all of them?

For both.

Yes. I yes. Hang on. I do have that.

Oh, if you have

it right here, I

was gonna

ask to be sent separately. Yep.

At least I thought I did. My apologies. I I have it on a spreadsheet. It's I don't wanna have to spend time searching it, but we can send it to all of you That's right after this is over.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank

you so much, councilman. Next is councilman Cashman followed by councilman Watson.

Thank you, madam chair. Can you go to your slide nine? Tim's getting that one. There we go. Okay.

Total FTEs. That's for Crossroads alone, not the other. How does that break down? It breaks when I'm yeah. Tell me how how how many people are there, what hours of the day, And and I will throw in excuse me for being a bit cranky, but to call Crossroads popular doesn't sit well.

Most used, perhaps. But that is not a desirable building. So the the word popular is kind of offensive.

I'm sorry.

Yeah. So how many people are there, what shifts?

Yeah. That is gonna break down to an average of about eight people per shift. There's more during the day when there's service provision occurring, probably 10 to 12 and then fewer fewer at night. But 38 FTEs for a twenty four seven operation is about

eight Can point I get a breakdown of people by shift and what they're doing?

Yeah. Absolutely. I don't have that with me right now, but we can provide that for you right after this meeting.

Yeah. And, you know, we all recently got the latest communicate from house keys stating some very disturbing allegations on what does go on there. So I'm trying to figure out, are they lying? You know, I'd like I'd like y'all to take a look at the communication we got today. Glad to forward it your way.

And you I'd like to know your assessment of truth, exaggeration, right on the money, etcetera.

Certainly. Yeah. It's in my inbox, but I did not have a chance to read it before I I came over. And apologize for the use of the word popular, but if I could just expand a little bit on really what I I mean. When I go into that shelter, there's definitely sense of community that exists there that maybe doesn't exist in all of our other shelters.

And the guests there, you know, whether I mean, I think Salvation Army is partly responsible. I think the fact that there's a lot of folks who have been in that shelter for a while and they're very comfortable there and they've built community, you know, and a vibe isn't like an official word, but I the environment in that shelter from my observation is is actually quite good despite the fact that the physical condition of the building is Horrible. Not what it should be. It's an

old flour mill, isn't it?

Yes. Yeah.

Yep. And and we are looking at right now whether it makes sense to invest the money that the city would need to into that building to bring it up to a standard that we would all be, and I'm sure Salvation Army as well, would be happy with or whether it makes sense to find a different location for that shelter. So that's in progress right now.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you so much, Councilman. Next is Councilman Watson, followed by Councilwoman Torres.

Thank you so much, Committee Chair. Jeff and Polly, thank you for the presentation. I appreciate the fact that there was a focus on outcomes and data in this presentation, unlike other presentations that we've received. But I want to build on some of the questions that were asked by Councilmember Cashman. And I don't know, Madam Chair, if there are folks from Salvation Army that so is it appropriate for me to ask for

I think if they can answer the questions, then, yeah, absolutely. So

specific to the security plan process that that is internal to between hosts and Salvation Army. Can you talk through what is the difference in that the outcomes you're expecting from that agreement as far as resident impact, resident experience at Crossroads as compared to prior to having that security agreement and talk through a little bit of that participation with Denver police. How are we knowing that there are positive outcomes from that agreement between host and Salvation Army, and maybe provide us a little detail of what that that agreement requires.

You know, we essentially are asking our providers to tell us how they're gonna be providing security at the site and specifically, different providers do it different way. In fact, different providers do it differently at different sites. So, like, All In Mile High, the hotels in Salvation Army is running general services with Securitas, runs the security there. At Crossroads, Salvation Army is doing that themselves with minimal use of security guards, I think, only on an as needed basis. And our metric is really around critical incident reports that we receive and calls to the site, which I apologize for not having that information, but we can get that for you.

And then we are in the process of also implementing this customer satisfaction component at all of our shelters across the board, but that is new this year and don't have data yet. We'll start q we'll start having data in q three so that we can hear directly from the guests themselves as to how they're feeling about their experience at the shelter. So those would be the metrics that we look at to understand how safe both the clients feel, the guests of the shelter feel based on their own reporting as well as critical incident reports that we get from Salvation Army and then calls to 911.

Okay. And so I I'll take a personal privilege and ask if someone from Salvation Army can come up. If you don't mind introducing yourself at the mic microphone there and provide us a little bit of from your experience based on what we've been hearing, and we hear a lot from community about the the how shelters run by Salvation Army look and feel. The security agreement is specific to some specific outcomes. Talk through what that security agreement processes as Jeff alluded to and give us a sense of really what the work is that Salvation Army is doing to ensure you're maintaining security at Crossroads specifically.

My name is Tyler Burwell.

I'm the interim director for Denver Metro Social Services for the Salvation Army. With Salvation Army, I mean, historically, we provided security. I mean, what we're looking for, yeah, is to make sure that we are providing access for clients to be able to report things to us and really truly trying to integrate our staff with our clientele so that they have a a close understanding of what what needs to be addressed in a given time frame. We work very closely with DPD. The security agreement is something that we've had in different forms. There's a new form this year that I think is going to be more in detail, more thorough, and we look forward to implementing it.

I think it's gonna be important for for us to see the outcomes of kind of what the security experience has been for clients at Crossroads. I I should have sent that email earlier to Jeff, to you, and Polly. So and so I did have request to the administration now that we can actually see what incidents we're seeing that are happening at Crossroads as far as documented. The other question on the good neighbor agreement, does Salvation Army specifically have a good neighbor agreement with the neighborhood and neighbors surrounding Crossroads?

We do have them with most of our all the Alvin Mile High sites. Jeff, do you yeah. I believe so. Nothing established with Crossroads. Yeah.

Okay. So my ask will be, and my my office is going around to all of the shelter spaces in District 9. We haven't gotten to Crossroads. Would you commit to working with community to have a good neighbor agreement?

Yes. I mean, that is something that Salvation Army has done with all of our other sheltering, and we'd be happy to do so.

Okay. Correct. Thank you so much. One last question, Madam Chair. This is to Jeff and Polly. For HMIS, and the updates of kind of the end to end support data that you are pulling out from HMIS as far as how service is being provided to these residents, what's the rating currently for Crossroads and Salvation Army through the kind of whether it's HMIS or I think it would be HMIS, it wouldn't be MDHI, it would be HMIS system. What would you what's the current rating that we have for Crossroads based on the outputs they're leveraging of that system and providing kind of the end to end view of of of services to clients?

Yeah. I can provide MDHI does run that system, the HMIS and the coordinated entry system. We can get you data on so we look at a couple things like the simple one is the adoption is everybody enrolled in HMIS. And then the other is that we have a data quality standard. I don't know what it is off the top of my head. My my apologies. And then we can also pull, like, service encounters. How many service encounters are they having with their clients compared to other shelters are sort of the three main things we're able to pull out of HMIS.

Okay. Thank you so much, Jeff. And I'm assuming most of counsel would love to see that. You can provide that. Would greatly appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you, madam chair.

Great. Thank you. I do want to welcome councilman Hines. Thanks for joining us this morning. And just a quick time check. We have until around 11:10 for for this subject. So we're going go to Councilwoman Torres followed by Councilwoman Sawyer.

How many in the queue after me, Sawyer?

Two more.

Okay. So I'll just be brief. I think Councilman Cashman mentioned we're already starting to get some requests not to approve this contract. And so before it gets to the floor, which is often where we end up seeing some of those calls for change, Salvation Army has been the contractor for Crossroads for over a decade, perhaps. They had the prior multiyear contract for this location. What happens if counsel does not approve this? Also, I'll say we're five months into what we're being asked to extend.

Yeah. That's a good question. I think the same thing that happened with previous contracts. We would need to make arrangements to compensate Salvation Army for the work they've done for the past, you know, almost, you know, five months at this point. And we would need to figure out, like, an emergency solution with probably a staffing agency that we've used for cold weather shelter to try to operate until we're able to select another provider to we'd have to go through another procurement process to select another provider to operate the site.

Would it mean emptying Crossroads for a period of time?

No. Okay. No. We would not let that happen. I mean, it would disrupt we would have to reassign staff from host across basically, host staff would end up needing to run the shelter for a period of time. So it would have impacts on other programs that we operate. It would be, I'm not gonna lie, be incredibly disruptive if that were to occur, but we would never empty out a shelter. You know, if I have to me and Polly have to run it ourselves. Well, you know, we would keep the shelter open. It's a critical resource to the community.

It is well utilized. And we can't put 300 people out onto the streets. Agreed.

When you mentioned the weekly meetings between host and TSA. Is it just about Crossroads, or is it about the whole array of contracts that they

have? It's about whatever. So there's monthly meetings that occur and probably daily phone conversations between the program officer and Tyler and staff who are running Crossroads. Doctor. Reif and I are meeting with Tyler and with Major Gina and other Salvation Army staff just to talk about whatever we need to talk about that day.

Okay. Tyler, can I ask you to come up again real quick? I want to understand what Salvation Army does when it comes to complaints about staff, poor behavior from staff. Is there anything that's being modified as of recently, say, in place this year to address issues?

Sure. So we take all complaints about staff very seriously. I mean, you know, we've had, as many of you know, some pretty serious issues over the course of the last year. We've, you know, changed our HR department a bit so that they are more focused on adding investigations if necessary onto their plate, things of this nature so that people don't just have to go to their supervisors. There's also other ways for people to file complaints.

So it's not just supervisors or even to myself that they can go directly to people who are outside of that chain of command so that they don't have to worry that there's any kind of vested interest. And, you know, if necessary, we've hired outside folks to come in and consult and do investigations as well. So and with guests filing complaints, so anyone who needs information outside organizationally wise, we try to make sure they understand how to go up the chain of command and who to talk to. Guests also, of course, have the reporting process that Jeff talked about. We also very traditionally still have paper forms who can fill out if they're more comfortable with that.

We also make sure that if somebody is unsatisfied with the response that they're getting, that they don't just have to stop there, that they're allowed to continue to go up that chain of command as well. If they wanna talk to me, I I talk to folks from Crossroads on a semi regular basis about issues that they're having.

Is Host aware of complaints that come in, or is it only internal to Salvation Army?

I think both. Oftentimes, complaints make it to us. But we don't necessarily receive we receive critical incident reports that may be occurring at our shelters, but we won't

by Salvation Army?

Correct. Yeah. And that's why we're putting in the kiosks and a different QR code and other ways where we can just hear directly from guests. And Salvation Army will get that data as well.

When are those going in?

I believe next month.

Okay. Okay. Thank you.

Yeah. Across the entire shelter system. We've piloted that in partnership with MDHI at a few shelters, and now it's gonna be implemented actually across all of our programs. So when programs don't have a physical site, there'll be a link that clients can click on and then answer answer a survey online. So we'll be able to have much better eyes on what our guests or clients are feeling about the services host and our contractors are providing.

Okay. Thank you, Jeff.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you. Councilwoman Sawyer followed by Pro Tem Romero Campbell and then Council President Sandoval.

All

right. Thank you, Madam Chair. I really appreciate this. I have a lot of reservations about Crossroads Shelter, but I have to compartmentalize them. So Crossroads Shelter as a facility needs to be a separate conversation because something needs to be done about it.

Crossroads Shelter, as we're looking at it right now in terms of a contract with Salvation Army, I also have to compartmentalize because I have been extremely frustrated with some of the situations that we have had with the Salvation Army over the last couple of years. But I also recognize that Salvation Army runs Crossroad Shelter, and we have to have Crossroad Shelter. It is too well attended, unfortunately, and too consistent. There is a community of people who regularly access it and who live there for whom if Crossroads Shelter were to be shut down would be disrupted in ways we cannot even imagine. And I think we need to keep that in mind, too, when we are talking about a contract that is contentious but has significant ripple effects throughout the community and unintended consequences should we say, we don't want to do this anymore.

So not a question, but I will say I know that the Salvation Army has been working very hard to change some of their practices and to do a better job across the spectrum. I have to compartmentalize this piece separately because it is too important for us to let some of those other kind of concerns get in the way of maintaining this contract, maintaining the services that are provided at Crossroads Shelter. Do I think we should have an additional question about what to do about Crossroads Shelter moving forward? 100%. But I want to just say this is one of those moments where we have we are faced with a very uncomfortable reality and that there's no great options no matter how we go forward.

Right? And so it has to be, for me, protecting the people who use crossroad shelter regularly as their stable form of housing and as what has become a community. We have to do what is best for them, which is to keep Crossroads Shelter for now and keep Crossroads Shelter partnership with Salvation Army for now. So I just want to be very clear about that. Thank you.

All right. Thank you for that. And next up, I have Council Pro Tem Romero Campbell followed by Council President Sandoval.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I think a lot of the comments that I had have already been made by my fellow council members. I just have one additional one in the response to what would we do if we did not go forward with a contract and how would we cover that. And I think I know over the past couple of years, Host has been covering shelters when they haven't had the staffing that they need. And that's just not sustainable.

I know that you had mentioned we contract with an agency or organization to come in and provide services. But I also know that that isn't always readily available, and the staffing and the expertise and the competency, of those who come in, working in a shelter, it's a it's a specialized skill and talent to be able to do that. So I just wanted to also put into that conversation that we as a body need to think about the sustainability of the kind of patchwork that Host has been coming in to do over the last couple of years for our sheltering system. And I appreciate your dedication to trying to do the work of 38 people, the two of you trying to do the work of so many people. But it also, to your point, takes you away from the other important work that needs to happen.

And so just wanted to make the point that although it is a solution, it is a last resort solution and not one that we want to go down the path to see happen. I think that your time could be better spent in doing some of the other important work that we have in front of us. So just wanted to put that out there. Thank you, madam chair.

Alright. Thank you. Council president Sandoval followed by councilman Hines.

Thank you. One question per host. I know that we're having a new contracting system come through. Just wanna go on the record saying, yeah, I don't like having to pay in arrears like this. It just it's really bad practice, and it doesn't open up the opportunity to contract with anybody other than who can have the really large and and and operate for five months.

Any other if we we couldn't pay our bills, like, right at your house, you can't pay five months late. So I think that we just need to operate in a different way. Given that, what is unless I missed it on the slide deck, if we're five months in right now and this contract goes to the December, are we putting out an RFP for this this month? Because it seems like if it's taking this long for us to get here right now, what's the future of Crossroads look like? Are you gonna bring a contract extension? I'm I'm thinking since we're having this conversation five months into the year, I really wanna be proactive. Is that in the slide deck or no?

No. But thank you for the question. And we talked about that a little bit at the meeting last week. And just wanna acknowledge and apologize for the fact that this puts the council in a really difficult position that you're tasked with making decisions on these contracts. And we're kind of putting in a situation where it's very difficult to say no. So a couple things that we're doing to avoid that in general. We're we're starting negotiating our twenty twenty six contracts in June. So next month, we'll begin the process. We didn't start until October year. Just gonna be honest, we have a, you know, rookie executive team at host.

This is a lot of our it's first time around with these contracts, and we were waiting till we were closer to having an approved budget. And that was frankly a really terrible mistake that, you know, we take ownership of and will correct by starting much earlier this year. As far as Crossroads goes, that will be one of the the 2026 contracts. We will start negotiating in June or July of this year. We will not be RFP ing out congregate shelters until 2026 so that there will be a whole new process for twenty twenty seven contracts.

However, we will present the Crossroads contract to you much before December 2025. So there'll be a lot more flexibility in terms of if the council isn't comfortable moving forward with the 2025 contract, we could do, like, an we could do an emergency procurement. But we are trying to get into a more systematic way of bringing our contracts to you and doing a third each year as opposed to almost every contract every year. So it'd be about 40 a year as opposed to, you know, 100 over a 100 each year. And we've got it kinda teed up in a schedule in congregate shelters 2026.

So I I appreciate that, and I appreciate you taking ownership and acknowledging that that this puts us in a hard position to say no to because to councilman Sawyer's point, this is heavily utilized. I've toured it. I would it's very uncomfortable space. I think if you all have toured it, I'm sure you've been there. I feel like you feel like it probably an uncomfortable space.

And so I feel like if our priority is to make sure that we're providing services, this space matters. And so I just wanna support you all in making sure that we are having an operator. I don't know any other operator who's run Crossroads, and I've been I was a council aid in that area for since 2012. I don't think anyone has has operated it other than The Salvation Army. And I think that sometimes we get really comfortable in that space, and we need to think about it differently.

It takes a lot of time to open it. It's not like we have hundreds and thousands of nonprofits coming to us saying this work. This work is very defined work. It's very challenging work. It can be very rewarding at the same time, but we're helping the one of our most vulnerable populations. So and I just wanna say I there there has to be some we have Securitas. Right? And we have general services who holds that contract. General services has figured out how to do complaints so that they get their the complaints from Securitas if you're if something happens at the Webb Building or something happens at the City And County Building. I feel like we should we have to figure that out with our vendors as well.

Maybe you could reach out to Al Gardner and Adrina and see what their process has been. We should be able to note be notified as well if there are complaints with our vendors and and our contractors when there's a complaint against the Salvation Army. The letter that we received from House Key, it is concerning, and I don't think it's I can't remember the the wording that council member Cashman used yesterday. It's not far fetched. I know he he is more eloquent than that, but I do think there is some validity in in in what they're saying to us.

I we've all experienced that place. So I just hope that we can think a bit different, And I do think as a landlord, I am a landlord. If someone was email sending me messages about my tenant, I I would just have to take that very seriously. And because we are the landlord, we bought the building a while ago, I think we have to hold ourselves to just a different standard because we are responsible who who our tenants are. Right?

And then how our tenants treat their customers. So if we if the shoe was on the other foot and we were this was a private property, we would be holding them accountable as well. So just thank you, madam chair. Just wanna make sure that we're all saying that publicly. Thank you, madam president. Next is councilman Hines.

Thank you, madam committee chair. The you made a comment about we we would if we didn't vote this contract forward, that we'd have to make The Salvation Army whole. Just to compartmentalize, to use your word, no. You know, any officer of a city has to make tough calls, and we can say no to a contract. And that's kind of I would say you have an uncomfortable position in in asking us to retroactively pay a vendor.

Any vendor who's operating without a contract is operating in a risky environment. And so so we have to, as a as a council, as officers, approve contracts, and we wanna make sure that we do what's best for the city. But I would say you're in an uncomfortable position and so is Salvation Army because you're asking us to to approve a contract that's already underway. Thank you, committee chair.

Thank you. I just wanna make sure, councilwoman Gilmore, that there wasn't anything you wanted to add.

Thank you, madam chair. Appreciate it. I wanted to just ask to get more information. I know time is short, But two questions, and please send it to the committee so we all have it. There was a mention of a critical incident would be reported to the city.

And so my question is, what is the definition of critical incident that the city is required to be informed about by the provider? And then what is the process that both The Salvation Army and Host implement to track and prevent those incidents? And then a third part to that, when you define critical incident, the information that was provided at 07:03AM in our email inboxes, those are serious incidents with vulnerable populations of traumatized people. And so I understand the necessity of the services and the facility, but I am really struggling with not having the full scope of how the Salvation Army and the city are preventing these incidences from happening. And I think we need to do that through data tracking.

And if that needs to come to us in executive session so that we're aware of possible risk and liability to the city, so be it. I'd be at that briefing quarterly to know that people that we're serving are safe. And so thank you for that. And thank you, manager.

Thank you. All right.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank Thank for the briefing, for the presentation, and answering a lot of these questions. I appreciate my colleagues asking a lot of these questions and for the statements that have been made and understanding the dilemma that we all find ourselves in. I'm sure that there is more conversation to come as this potentially makes its way through the process. And I think council members are very engaged and want to be part of those conversations.

At least that's my takeaway from this today. And figure out how we can not only be, as a quoting council president, better business partners, but also just better stewards of how we're utilizing these dollars and also how we're treating human beings in our city and and what we're setting up for them. So with that said, this is an action item council members who sit on this committee. So I am looking for a motion and a second. Moved by councilman Hines, seconded by councilwoman Sawyer. With that said, do we need a roll call vote? No roll call vote. Alright. This will move forward to the full council. So the next item on our agenda is our briefing on the family shelter.

So we just don't have to do any transition because you're already here. And you don't need to do any reintroduction. But go ahead and go right into that presentation. And then we'll take questions at the end as well.

Sure. Okay. You all set?

I am.

It's presenting a little odd.

Oh, it's like in a PDF.

I'll go ahead and jump in while we're figuring that out. So thanks for the opportunity to speak about family homelessness. It's an issue I know that all of us care about in the city. It's a hard issue to talk about because we're talking about children who don't have stable places to live and want to provide you all with an overview of what's going on in the city around this issue. Just three main agenda items.

I want to provide some data on family homelessness, talk about hosts family homelessness programs, and then also discuss some challenges that we're currently grappling with and some proposed solutions that we're working on. All right. The next slide's pretty tedious to read anyway.

Interesting protest.

I wanted to start out by talking about what family homelessness actually means because the federal government has like five different definitions of what family homelessness is. And I think it's important that we're all talking about the same thing. Department of Education talks about people not having a regular place to live or who are staying in a shelter, but they also include people who are doubled up, who are living in motels or hotels or are living in campgrounds for economic reasons. Social Security doesn't count folks who are doubled up or in hotels, but they do count people who are at imminent risk of losing their housing within fourteen days. And HUD really is focused on people who are either living in shelters or who are living on the streets or other places not meant for human habitation.

And that's important, I think, just to consider because people all have different ideas what we're talking about when we talk about family homelessness. And I want to just be clear that hosts focus, or at least our homeless programs, are focused on the HUD's definition of homelessness. Families that are literally sleeping on the streets in tents and cars, squatting in buildings that are not meant for human habitation, or are staying in one of our shelter programs. We weren't designed or resourced to serve as a general anti poverty program for families who are unstably housed. The homelessness response system is really the social safety net of last resort in our country, our city, and our country.

And we are really focused on people who are experiencing homelessness. Host, of course, does have, through our other programs, eviction prevention, housing stability, affordable housing programs. And the city, of course, has larger programs that address poverty and economic mobility and housing instability. We do that internally and along with other city departments. But today, I'm really going to be focused on hosts response to family homelessness as it's defined by HUD.

Happy to talk about the other definitions and other programs, but that's really what we'll be focusing on today. So just some characteristics of families experiencing homelessness in Denver. And this is a self reported data that comes from HMIS and from the homelessness point in time count. 74% of the households in 2024 that identified as being homeless were homeless for the first time. Twenty six percent of them had at least one person in their household that had a disabling condition.

Average household size was 3.56%. And the top three reasons why families reported experiencing homelessness were health related issues, employment related issues, or unable to pay rent or mortgage. I know we talked at the last meeting about eviction. Eviction is actual eviction is at fourteen percent. However, many of these folks, we don't have a way of tracking this, will just self evict or leave their housing because they just can't pay the rent anymore.

So the Pit count is one metric that we can use to see what's happening in family homelessness in Denver. And you'll see pretty and these are households, not individuals. Basically multiplied by about four, and that's the individuals. But in 2022, there were 234 sheltered households and one unsheltered household. 2024, we saw five seventy nine with nine unsheltered households, a really significant increase.

Maybe not in, well, to me, like any family that's homeless is a significant and an emergency. Maybe by percentage wise by number wise, it's maybe not that significant or doesn't feel that way. But percentage wise, it's a pretty big jump. And it's, you know, almost 2,000 households that are people living in in households who are struggling either in our shelters or or outdoors. The family shelter and because the definitions are kind of hazy around family homelessness, it's helpful to look at a bunch of different metrics.

I think the family wait list, shelter waitlist is a really important metric to look at. You'll see in June 2023, there were 89 families. And it was twenty twenty four, 89. And then it has jumped, and it has stayed above 125 since the past six to eight months, it's been above one twenty five. Today or yesterday, it was one thirty six.

But it's been fluctuating between like one twenty five and one ninety really since I've been here, so for almost the past year. I want to point out, because this question came up when I met with some of you, average length of stay in family shelters has increased significantly. I think that's an important metric as well. It's gone from a 2023, the average stay in a shelter was eighty four days, and now it's a hundred and twenty one days. And the average waiting list, the average amount of time you have to wait to get into a shelter from the wait list is forty four days.

Just another data point to help us all really understand better what's happening. You'll see there was a really large jump in utilization of cold weather shelter this year. One of the reasons is that we were activated for many more days and twenty five more days of activation than the previous year because we changed temperature threshold. So there were a lot more unique households that were served. You see last in 2023, 2024 is an average of 43 households per night we were serving, and this year, it was an average of one eighty three, which is a significant jump, which kind of follows all the trends that we're seeing around this particular issue.

Although I do think it's important to note a couple of things that in the cold weather shelter system, twenty one percent of the people who were in that system came from other counties. Thirty one percent are newcomers, we'll get into a little bit more later. But fourteen percent of the families did not meet the HUD definition of homelessness, meaning they were doubled up or staying in a hotel and they decided to take advantage of a cold weather hotel voucher. So I think it's important. Certainly, don't blame anybody for doing whatever they need to do to stay warm and stay safely housed, I but think it's important to know those numbers when comparing this year to last year and how this compares to the other two data points that we shared with you.

Moving on to hosts current programs that we have in place to help address family homelessness. We have a small targeted homeless prevention program that's run by Jewish Family Services that's serving about 30 households per year. We're currently running a pilot program with the Denver Public Schools, which so far has been very successful, but it's too early to tell. It's a pilot. We're waiting for evaluation, but that's serving 50 households a year.

And this doesn't include TRUA because TRUA is an eviction prevention program which is different from a homelessness prevention program, which we can talk about a little bit more. We also have three outreach workers and a supervisor that focus primarily on newcomer families. They also have funds for rapid resolution, might be onward travel or helping with security deposit. They also have funds for a bridge hotel. If somebody needs they encounter a family that's literally sleeping outside, we can put them in a hotel.

And then all host outreach teams respond to unsheltered an unsheltered child as an emergency. So if we find out there's a family that is unsheltered, it's kinda all all hands on deck to to try to respond to that to the best that we can. We also provide shelter and bridge housing for about 400 families a year. There's 333 beds in six shelters, which is up from two seventy one in 2024. And despite those investments, we also are seeing an increase in the in the wait list, which, you know, is is something that we're we're thinking at about a lot.

But we did expand significantly between 2024 and 2025, but we also have some bridge housing programs. One that's run by the main one is run by Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, which can help about 30 families. And then there's a domestic violence shelter as well as hotel vouchers that we have available. So we're we're providing shelter. We have we have enough slots.

This is actually it's not 400 families. It's really 400 slots. So at any given time, we are able to shelter 400 families. And based on our turnover, you know, of a hundred and twenty days, we're we're essentially able to, in any given year, it's probably about 1,200 families that we're sheltering, although some may be return customers to the shelter system. And then we have rapid resolution specifically for families that has been pretty successful because many families are able to find ways to resolve homelessness with just a little bit of help from the city.

Last year, we helped 244 households exit homelessness this way. There we have funds for a 140 rapid rehousing slots, which are one year rent subsidies with support services attached to them. We have about six ninety permanent supportive housing units that are set aside for families that the turnover rate's about 10% a year, so we can place about 70 families there. And then we have other housing programs, housing choice vouchers, other affordable housing programs. And so we're able to provide direct housing assistance to 490 families a year.

But I also wanna point out that approximately 65% of families self resolve each year, which is important to note because it's the same for single adults. Most people who are experiencing homelessness self resolve. And I want to be clear, though, about what self resolve means. It doesn't mean necessarily that their problems have been solved or that they are now stably housed. It means that they're not showing back up in the HMIS system again.

So we've provided them assistance or they've been on the waiting list for shelter or they've been in our shelter, and then we're constantly looking to see if people are showing back up again. And our assumption needs to be that the you know, so that's that's kind of what it's that's the lingo in the field. So it's self resolution. So if the numbers aren't making sense in terms of mapping how many people are becoming homeless and how many people are exiting, If people weren't self resolving, the numbers would be tremendous, frankly. But generally, households do individuals and families find ways to resolve homelessness on their own.

The budget that we're spending on the programs that I just mentioned is roughly $23,800,000 a year. The majority of it going to shelter. A small portion, 500,000 of that is going to the connection center. So it's, you know, 12,400,000.0 roughly is going to for the shelter system. Significant investment this year in cold weather shelter given the numbers that I showed you is a lot of people get served.

And then I'm showing the outreach rapid res, rapid rehousing, the permanent housing. And just to also be clear, this permanent housing number, it's not the full cost of providing housing. It's what host is supporting our it's mostly support services being provided to nonprofits who are running housing. And again, they're operating six ninety units and where the turnover is only about 10% a year. So that is the budget.

Moving on to challenges and solutions. That's the data part. This is the hard part. So while we did see an 83% decrease in unsheltered homelessness in 2024, Overall, family homelessness has gone up a 150% between 2022 and 2024. Family shelter waitlist has increased an average of 78% in the last twelve months.

And we believe that the increase, not the cause of family homelessness, that the increase is being driven by three factors. One is increased number of evictions that are occurring, the growing number of unhoused newcomers, although that number is starting to to go down, but it has had had an impact. And then just a general deterioration of the social safety net that's been occurring, especially since January. And I'll talk about each of those and what our responses has been or is going to be. But I also just wanna share kind of what our vision is.

We'll say I've presented this data along with doctor Reif to the mayor, he's directed us to take some immediate action. Host, in thinking about this and I want to be clear, these are kind of host's goals. This is our best thinking on this as we're trying to deal with what's you know, potentially growing well, is a growing problem and potentially an emergent problem. One is that their goal should be no child should ever have to sleep outside in Denver, ever, ever. In a vehicle, outside, there should never be a circumstance where a young person has to sleep outside, or anybody for that matter.

But I think start with children. We want to reduce the waiting list for family shelters to under 100 households back to where it had typically been over the years because I think our shelter capacity is more aligned towards a waiting list that's below 100. And we'd like to see a reduction in the number of families experiencing homelessness in the 2026 count if we're able to reverse that trend that's been going on since 2022. That's what we're thinking about as far as what do we want to try to accomplish and would love to hear from all of you what you think we should be trying to accomplish. That's our vision.

And then we get into the details of sort of the problems, the challenges that we're dealing with, and what some of our solutions are. One is that evictions prior to COVID were about eight thousand eight hundred annually and are now we're over fifteen thousand in 2024, and we're not seeing that abating. Last year, the truer program received 13,000 applications, and we're only able to support a quarter of the people who needed assistance. And as I'm sure you all know, now it's, I believe, it's now it used to be one in four. Now it's only one in five families living below poverty are actually receiving any kind of housing support in The US.

This is, you know, much bigger than Denver or Colorado. This is a big systemic thing that we're we're struggling with. Some data I wanted to share from our last meeting because some questions were asked. So we wanted to find out of the people who received TRUA, what was happening with them as far as homelessness goes. And what we saw is we looked at everybody who received TRUA and everybody who applied and did not receive it.

And we saw that people who received TRUA were 14% less likely to appear in the HMIS system or to experience homelessness or to come ask for help around homelessness, which is not as high as I think it would be, but that's also partly, and I'll talk about that a little bit, about how we might want to think about targeting some of our resources at least around homelessness prevention. One of the things that we would like to do in 2026, and this is just a proposal that I'm sure we'll be talking about, is to direct some more money from TRUA to do this, to provide the same services, but really target it at families who are at imminent risk of experiencing homelessness so that we can slow down the inflow more directly since TRUA doesn't necessarily have that. It certainly helps. And I'm not dunking on TRUA. It's an amazing, important program.

And hosts, our jobs are beyond we're not just focusing on homelessness. We're also focusing on housing stability. And it's a critical program for that, but to direct some of those resources. And the best and we're running a pilot evaluation with the Harvard People Lab right now. But most data around the country shows the number one predictor is if somebody's experienced homelessness before and they're about to get evicted, they're going to become homeless again.

So we're working with wanna continue that program that we're doing with Denver Public Schools. They've been a really good partner on this, and I think we would like to expand that and make it more not a pilot, but we're gonna prevent homelessness for Denver Public School families to at least a 100 a year using what we're calling like TruAplus. So that's a proposal that we have there, kind of riffing off of work we're already doing. Around newcomers. Wanted just I think it's important just to know all the facts as clearly as we can.

30% of the families on the shelter wait list were newcomers. It was 45 families. And this is data from March. Just wanna be clear, we've not collecting data the same way we were previously. So that's the last time, honestly, that I trust that data.

35% of the families in shelters are newcomers, and there's about a 140 families. We have data on people who, you know, identify as as Spanish speaking, but that's not a proxy. That's I don't think that's a great proxy. So we're kind of and we think about a third is probably the right number. I think it's really important to point out that over 40,000 newcomers came through Denver, and we believe there's two to 300 newcomer families that are struggling with homelessness.

I think there's some pride we should take in the success that the city did achieve, but I also feel like we still have work to do to help these families who are who are struggling. Couple of things that we are going to do and are currently doing. One is we are expanding, starting in August, our rapid rehousing program to serve 50 families. We're gonna focus on newcomer families that are kinda stuck in the shelter system to get them into stable housing. It'll be wanna be really clear, it's twelve months.

It's different from the program that was implemented for newcomers before. This is more traditional rapid rehousing with twelve months in a very robust service package to make sure that they are able to stay housed after twelve months. We are currently HRCP has been an amazing partner. They are hosting monthly meetings in all of our six shelters with newcomers and the staff to kind of just let people know what resources are available, maybe make connections with those families in ways that they're more able to do given their, you know, both life and work experiences. That has been really promising.

We also are doing case conferencing between host and HRCP. There's about two dozen families that are really struggling with really complex situations related to disability and inability to work due to physical or mental health issues and trying to find the right place for those folks to land. So we're really appreciative of their work. Those two and three are already happening. One will start in August.

And hopefully, we'll be able to house all 50 families by the 2025. Social safety net issues are definitely becoming an issue. Child care assistance program has been put on pause since 01/01/2025. Denver Public Schools are struggling with resources and has had to reorganize their homeless education network program. We are already seeing a reduction in housing choice vouchers coming out of the housing authority.

Programs like Head Start and others are either being reduced or are being threatened, this is going to put further pressure on families. That's a hard thing for all of us in any city or state to to think about, but we are trying to make do some things. One thing I'm really excited about is we're working more closely with the DHS right now, exploring homelessness prevention and how we can plug into their programs so that when they're working with families who are struggling with housing instability that they can get access to homelessness prevention. We're also exploring a potential partnership to serve families who have intellectual or developmental disabilities. So really excited about that work.

But again, like all of you, we're really concerned about what's gonna be happening with human service programs in general. There's some other work that we're doing, a lot of other work that we're doing. One is this summer, we're implementing an RV outreach program with the goal of helping at least a 100 families, a 100 households who are staying in their vehicles exit homelessness. I don't have great data on this, but we believe at least a third of those, it's possible it's going to be more, are going to be families. So pretty confident that at least 35, in addition to the 50 more rapid rehousing slots, we're going to have an additional 35 families who are currently living in vehicles on the streets.

If there are that many that we find, that we'll be able to get them into rapid rehousing. Or also, we'll be able to provide shelter opportunities for them as well. We were hoping excuse me. I'm getting over a nasty cold. We are hoping to but I'm not contagious, I promise.

Getting over it.

I

stayed home the last two days just to make sure. So we are we're hoping to redirect 20 housing choice vouchers that we get a 100 assigned by the housing authority this year. And they've been amazing partners to us. But unfortunately, due to no fault of their own, they've had to put that in pause. We won't know what 2026 looks like until fourth quarter of this year.

We have a plan to meet again, but we're gonna add more vouchers to families. Right now, a lot of them have been going towards single adults. And then we're also working they've left, but Salvation Army on redesigning the connection center. We can have a whole hearing, I'm sure, about the connection center. I've learned a ton about it and happy to answer questions about the connection center, but wanna make it more more functional both for our clients as well as for the staff who are running that program.

And then some other things we're doing, we're just constantly working on making sure our protocols around unsheltered family homelessness are tight, that police, that basically any city partner or community partner knows what to do if they encounter somebody who is experiencing homelessness, especially a child, which is basically our referral form. We are working on improving our rapid we're redesigning rapid rehousing to make sure that the services that are being provided to families are, I would say, consistent across all of our providers. We want to make sure they're at the highest level, not the lowest level of services. So we're going to have to redesign and, frankly, may have to serve fewer people so that we have enough money to make sure that those households are more successful. And also starting to work with surrounding counties to kind of better coordinate our efforts with them.

And thanks to council member Watson for getting kind of some wind at our backs on working with our surrounding counties. That is our presentation. I'm sure you have a lot of questions.

Thank you so much. I do want to just say I think we had had a conversation around having a presentation about the DPS pilot. So I think it's been mentioned a few times. I think it was in a prior presentation as well. And I think there is some curiosity about what that actually is and what it entails. With that said, I have counsel pro tem Romero Campbell in the queue. And if anybody else wants to get in, let me know.

Great. Thank you, Madam Chair. I could talk to you about this for hours, and I have a lot of questions. What is our time frame? No, I mean, really, I'm

We have until noon. And I have a few questions too.

Another committee.

Yeah. No, I know it. That's why I was

I don't want to

have all But I have a question.

No, I want to prioritize which questions I

have. Yes, gotcha.

So I was doing a

time stamp. So I do want to go back. And this one, I think, is just on the table to talk about as far as what the DPS pilot is. The Tamarack Family Shelter is in District 4. I think that there are tremendous wins and also some challenges that the shelter faces.

One data point that I would like to make sure that we're connecting is what the age of the children are. So you have to be 18 or under to have a child that you come into the shelter with. I think what is often many are going to school, but we still have a lot that are in transition. And we also have a number of families that are experiencing homelessness that are pregnant. And so I think that when you think upstream as to how do we make sure families and kids are getting what they need, I think the connection that we have with an early childhood community, with the supports that are needed through Head Start, through home visitation, and other nontraditional family support mechanisms are extremely important.

So that was more of a statement. But my wondering is the connection center. The slide that you showed, it's a pretty big line item. My understanding is with the connection center is that a big issue that they have their phone system and its efficiency. I know there's only a handful of staff that that actually staff the connection center.

And I'm wondering if we are at a point where we need to think about how do we pivot, how do we streamline, where is their current capacity, and how might like, do we continue to invest in the connection center and try to build it up? Or we know that there are other organizations, other call centers, the 311 center or a 211 center that do have capacity. And so I don't know if you've had that conversation.

Yes.

So about a month ago, we started a series of meetings with the Connection Center staff that I've been attending along with a lot of our experts at Host on Family Homelessness and have learned quite a bit about the Connection Center and what their scope of work is. And also just got a better understanding of how quickly they actually are responding to calls. And I have a bunch of data in front of me that I can share on that because I assumed this was going to come up. Boy, where do I start? I think that that program is really important, but I think it needs to be redesigned.

I think there needs to be a physical location that families can go to as a drop in center. I think it would make things go a lot more smoothly, but I do think we also need the call center. Salvation Army and through Connection Center and through the $500,000 grant that we're providing them is also doing they're not just doing talking to families who are experiencing homelessness. They're also talking to families who need other resources and prevention services. So actually, a relatively small percentage of the calls that they're receiving are for families experiencing homelessness.

So our thinking is generally we have a I wish we had had this before this hearing, but we have a big staff meeting next week to kind of debrief on what we've learned. But I think we either need to reduce their scope of work and maybe look at a standalone number that's specifically for populations who are literally homeless, or we need to expand the scope of the contract. And whether it's with them or somebody else, like, we need to do one of those two things. Either either give them more money or or reduce their scope of work. And we're I don't have an answer yet as to what we think is the right way to go.

But a couple things I did learn is that their goal is to respond to all calls within twenty four hours. If people leave messages, they they they make that almost a 100% of the time, and and a 100 of the calls are responded to within forty eight hours. I'm not saying we couldn't do better than that, but it's not like people are waiting, you know, weeks and weeks to hear back from them. And I think that was a those are the two things that, you know, I really jumped out at me is that the volume of calls that they receive is extraordinary, way beyond the number of families who need assistance with homelessness. And that but despite that, they still are responding in a relatively reasonable amount of time.

It should be immediate. So another thing that we're looking at is they're looking at at a phone they've given us a proposal for an upgraded phone system. But we're also looking at is there a way to use existing city resources like Sunny to, like, help sort calls up front. Like, that there would be and we have to think about it whether this makes sense. Like, I don't want don't I don't know if AI is a good idea or not.

I'm just saying it's something that we're thinking about. Like, is there a way to be able to sort the calls before an operator picks up so that if you're, you know, coming from outside of the county of Denver, you're gonna go to this person. And if you're going to if you need prevention assistance, you're going here. And if you're a family who's experiencing homelessness, the call would go here. And that's another option that we're thinking about. But again, it's just early stages. But everybody, including Salvation Army, agrees we need to make some changes, again, either to the scope or the budget.

Thank you. I know we're on limited time. I don't know the details about the DPS pilot. But I think extremely important to be able to coordinate all of those services because there are that's where you get your early screening. That's where you have that consistency for the day for you know, there's access to food and other other additional support systems through the school system and then coordinated with housing. And I get there's I think that that is just a critical point that often gets missed. And you have two different systems that aren't coordinating and talking to each other about the same child or the same family. So

go ahead. Yeah. I'm sorry. I think we're making progress. And we can check-in with Melissa to see when Omni is doing the evaluation is when they can do an initial data pull. I think it would be helpful to have that data before we come back and and give a presentation. I just don't know when the first like, when they're gonna do their first look. But but it has been very successful. We've had some good success stories, you know, anecdotally. And I 100% like schools are always you know, the people sitting at the front desk at the school are oftentimes the people who know who's in trouble first.

And the more we can work with the school district and with Denver Human Services, the better we'll be able to stretch our limited resources.

Thank you. I will thank you for your work on this. I really appreciate the presentation. If we can, I would love to see this come through more often and an update? I will follow-up, but just thank you for your work on this. It's a lot.

Great. Thank you, council pro tem. I have Councilwoman Sawyer next.

You know what? I know you have a couple

of questions too. So I will just ask, could we have a briefing on the Connections Center? I think just specifically, I have a lot of questions about that. I know how stressful it is to receive the call or text message from someone at 9PM on a Friday night where there is no help until Monday morning. So I think we need to have a broader conversation around what this looks like.

I think that's great.

Think that's probably the best thing to do, because I could ask a half an hour worth of questions myself. I won't.

Yeah, I think it does sound like the connection center is definitely I think we've all had some experiences or have heard from constituents or people calling our offices and asking, how do I get through or who can I get through to and how long is it going to take for them to get back to me when I get the voicemail and knowing the limitations there? I think that would definitely be be helpful. And I think Anne will will take note of that. And so maybe that could be a DPS pilot and connection center kind of briefing. With that said, my my only question right now because of time is and thank you, councilman Sawyer, is, about the hotel vouchers because we know there have been instances where families, they can't get in touch with the connection center or they're put on a wait list, but they're given this, like, kind of, you know, temporary hotel voucher for, you know, maybe a few date few nights or something like that.

I'm curious if we know, and we can also you can provide this later to us, is how much have we spent in hotel vouchers since the beginning of this year, since January? And, you know, what are those funds looking like? You know, how much do we have sitting there? And just thinking about is there any conversation around additional family shelters, being that if we are constantly doing these hotel vouchers and how much money are we spending there, would it be almost more efficient to have more shelter options versus constantly doing these hotel shelters for just a few nights? So that's just something that I wanted to impose here.

I know that we don't have time to really get into that conversation, but maybe something we can do some follow-up on. Okay. Alright. Well, this isn't an action item. This was just a briefing. And so we thank you, host, for being here and providing these updates. And we look forward to ongoing conversation. We have one item on consent, just one. And so that will move forward to the full body. Did you want to call that out, councilman?

She pulled one.

No. Thank you. Thank you so much. With that, that will move on to the full body, and we are adjourned. Thank you.