Public Amenities Committee - Regular Meeting

Officials starting now.

An important North Northfield soccer update you might have caught at the beginning of our mayor council. If not, councilman Gonzalez can share that update you later. Great to see you all. Welcome to mayor council. Thank you for joining us on this lovely Tuesday morning. We'll start with introductions, and we have a general session update this morning on our goals for quarter one that we'll walk you through, and we'll send you off to your wonderful post Nuggets victory Tuesday morning. Councilman Gonzalez Gutierrez, you wanna start with introductions?

Yep. Good morning, everyone. Serrano Gonzalez Gutierrez, one of the council members large. Laura Almitres, lucky district seven.

Good morning. Diana Romero Campbell, Southeast Denver district four.

Good morning. Amanda Sandoval, Northwest Denver district one.

Great. Welcome. Let's start with announcements. Any announcements folks would like to make for the listeners at home or for any of your fellow council members to update us

on? Yes.

Yes. Madam president, I think I know what your update's gonna be.

Join us Friday at 04:30 for the ribbon cutting for Larasa Park. $2,000,000 worth of improvements. And then the next morning, I was just informing the mayor, I about 10,000 bikers will descend at Larasa Park. They'll be coming down Federal, down 38th, and then to another stop within Denver. So if you see tons of Chicano bikers, it's called the Chicano Pride Ride, and they give all of their money that they raise for the Chicano Pride ride to inspire, which gives scholarships to Latino kids in the community so they give directly back. So hope to see everyone at the festive festivities this weekend.

Thank you so much. Councilman Torres, you are encouraged to bring your motorcycle when you come.

You don't even know me on the back. Any

other announcements this morning? Fantastic. Alright. We will head into an update that we have on our quarterly goals. As you all may remember, we launched at the beginning of the year each year a set of big citywide goals that we're focused on across all 15,000 employees and 27 agencies. And so we'd like to give quarterly updates to the public about what's happening on each of these. We want you to be able to track them at home, know how we're doing, what's going well, what's not. We've also launched now a public dashboard. So if you wanna keep track of the progress, you can any day. Just like checking on your favorite sports scores in Denver, you can also check on your city's goals.

And so that's also public if you wanna track it. Let me walk you through where we are in each of these. I'm happy to take questions if council members have them, and we will jump in. So first, I'm starting with our overall set of goals for the year. Councilor Torez, I'm reminded of the work you keep reminding us on around the community health assessment and how we believe that those priorities should be aligned to what the city is working on each and every day.

And so I think you'll see a number of those here. Obviously, called out in the health assessment this year, we're of course improving access to affordable high quality childcare. You'll see that here as one of our goals. Increasing the quantity and safety of affordable housing, that you'll see here. Focusing on firearm related homicides has been a continued focus of the health assessment.

You'll see that as one of our goals. Of course, the continued focus on reducing overdoses, particularly among folks who are potentially unhoused or living outdoors. That, you'll see that as part of our focus. And then focused on dropout rates among our vulnerable youth populations where you'll see a number of our focus on both after school programming and youth works are directly linked to that. So just wanted to name council Tore's as helpful reminder that these are linked to the broad feedback we've gotten from people all around the city and that we hope will drive change in an ongoing way.

So let me walk you through where we are. First one, this is the the two components of our vibrant goal. One was about filling the 3,000,000 square feet of office and retail space. As you may remember, about 25% of our tax base comes from downtown. And like many downtowns, we have more and more empty commercial office space.

So we're looking to fill that office space by converting it into housing, by attracting new businesses, by keeping existing businesses, by helping create more public spaces like childcare facilities or space for artists. So we wanna really activate that space for the city as well as for the tax base. Our goal was to build 3,000,000 square feet this year. The great news is we've done of that already in just the first quarter. So about 1,500,000 of square feet has already been committed in the first quarter.

Big part of that is the 1,100,000 square feet of the high fidelity project. That's 700 units of new housing, and that will also include on-site childcare at that site. Thank you to the DDA and the council president's leadership on that. A thing I wanna name for you in this data that people might not see is we have 14 new retail openings. That's been helpful.

Five new office deals for folks that have moved to downtown for the first time. And a lot of you have asked about retention, what are we doing to retain the people that we currently have? Separate from this 1,500,000, we've also retained 241,000 square feet of leases. So those are businesses whose leases were up. They could have chosen to leave the city or leave the neighborhood, and we've extended those 241,000 square feet.

And so that's in addition to the 1,500,000, but I think it's really important if we're adding new space but losing the space we have, it's not a net win. So we focus on both of those. In terms of our second goal, which is continue to focus on delivering the catalytic developments on time in 2026, that includes all of our bond projects where you can see the bond dashboard where you can track each of the projects and their progress there. It also includes some of our other significant projects. I think councilwoman Alvedrez has been very involved.

Obviously, we're really excited that the Denver Summit completed their land purchase at Santa Fe Yards. Good progress on that one. Still ongoing conversations in the community about the Bronco site at Burnham. That includes that they both submitted their large development review and the infrastructure master plan. And then we have the small area plan at Burnham Yards that's continuing through a community process that's moving forward. And so those are just some individual updates on those on those projects. Next slide. On affordability, we have two components here. One is bringing on 2,500 new affordable units for those folks watching from home. An affordable unit means the rule of that unit is that you don't pay more than 30% of what you make to rent.

And so if you make $60,000 a year as a teacher, your rent would not go above around $1,500 a month and the rent cannot go up unless your income goes up. So this is really affordable units targeted at all of working Denverites who want to be able to afford to live here. You can see this graph is is very helpful. Megan and our amazing team made this. What this shows you is we are on track, but it also shows you the slope of when those units are set to come on. So that curve tells you when we should see units coming on based on the deals we know are coming through. And so you'll see a lot of these units will be opening in the latter half of the year. We know that. We're planning for that. So you might say, gosh, it seems like that graph is not very big in March.

That is true, but we are on path to where it's supposed to be. As long as these other units come in on time, we will still hit hit that goal. Good news is this year we added a goal to just permit more units of all sorts so we could get more and more supply into the housing stock because we saw a lot of slowdown in number of people that were they were permitting new units. And so the goal was to bring on 5,000 units this year. This we're now almost 2,100 actually, exactly 2,157 in the first quarter, so that puts us on track to meet that goal.

We hope we'll see more and more of the market recovering, which means more folks being able to build. So that's a little of the updates on on the affordable. Obviously, work going that you all know about on unlocking housing choices and doing work right now with extending the STP deadlines for folks that have projects in the queue that we wanna make sure actually get financed. To let you all know, we have about 20,000 project 20,000 units that are in the queue at our planning department that have been stuck because of hard interest rates, hard to finance. And so our hope is we can meet a lot of the need in housing and we can just unstick a number of those 20,000 units that are stuck.

Next one. SAFE. I'll give you an overview here. We have two goals here. One is decreasing gun related homicides, which as I mentioned comes straight out of our community health assessment. Second is on reducing shootings in high risk areas and those are our place network investigation sites. I'll I'll name for you the this is the data by the end of q one. You'll see we're flat on citywide firearm homicides at end of q one. We are still down on number of people shot about 17% and citywide violent gun crime is still down about 35%. That is the good news.

I'm gonna give you an update in a minute because as you know, we've been concerned about some of the violence in the last month of April. It's been our worst month of the year. And so I'll come back and show you the updated what we have is updated in the last month because this was as of March 31. But in terms of the unmitigated good news is our place network investigation sites are working really well. We continue to see dramatic drops in those places year over year.

And so happy about that success and we'll continue to support that work going forward. The added one I'll mention to you is if you just look at this, this is where we are as of right now, almost at the end of April. And you'll see the difference here is that we had we had seven homicides in the month of April alone. And so that is by far the worst month we've had in the last two and a half years. It is what pushed these numbers now so that we are at 18 total homicides for the year.

That is up from last year, which was historic low at this location. Still significantly down, almost 50% down from either '23 or '24. So the year to date, we are up. Three year averages were still significantly down, but we're obviously both heartbroken and very, I think feel a sense of urgency about action to make sure we can reverse that trend of April. But that has been our most dangerous month maybe since we've all been on this council together. But that gives you a little more in case you say, wait, it doesn't feel like it's been a great quarter. It was through March 31. April 1 to today is where we've had the challenge. Okay. Next slide.

This is an update on our all in mile high. Just a reminder for folks watching at home, the council members know this very well. Our homelessness count is a little different from the rest of our metrics. We get safety data daily. The formal homelessness count is a point in time count that happens once a year.

And so we set this goal in December to reduce it by 75%. That will include both a count that we did in January '25, which we'll have data from in the next few months. And then the whole year's worth of work will be measured in a point in time count that happens next January in '26, so in '27. So this will be a goal we'll be tracking progress on really into '27 because the count is a little bit delayed. But right now, we have about 539 folks moved into our all in locations or moved to what we'll call non congregate shelter.

About 604 moved up and out to housing. That's what we wanna keep moving more and more the access to housing number because that creates more units to move people off the street and into. That includes, by the way, the closure of the Comfort Inn where we have transitioned all those folks into either permanent housing or to another transitional housing site. Our goal the other thing added this year was that we were responsive to people's reports or concerns around folks that were homeless and how we could get them the services they needed. Our goal was to get this to a one day response.

We've been building the data system with our team for how to both track our responses and how to track the final outcomes of those of those interactions. And so right now we're on track. The goal is to be to one day by the end of this year. We wanna do that even faster. We're at about two point three days right now.

So we're on track. We wanna continue to see that response time come down and to see our closure rate continue to go up. That that is a little of the data on where we are, and we've launched this integrated system for the first time where we have a software that tracks all of our engagement with all our individuals, whoever responds, whether it's a public health worker, whether it's a host worker, whether it's a star van, whether it's a police officer. So that's now finally channeled into one database we can track and and share with you. Alright. Next one. Bit of updates on climate. We have two components here. One is 5,000 new clean energy systems citywide on track here. We have about 1,300 done so far.

This will break down for you what those are, water heaters, space heaters, electric heat pumps, solar panels, EV chargers. If you want to do this in your own home, please reach out to our climate office. Someone will text me the website they should go to to find any of the services that exist because these are easily available and a lot of them are subsidized to make them cheaper for you to implement. We wanna really focus on that you can get to cleaner energy and cheaper energy at the same time is our goal. The second one is our 50 acres of green infrastructure.

That helps protect against heat islands across the city where temperatures are increasing, adding more green infrastructure. The first one of these projects you probably see, council members right in front of your front yard, is the the the sort of reactivation of the of the green space in front of city hall, which will now be moved to native grasses that consume much less water but are equally beautiful. So that's up and moving. Finally, our young people, last goal. Child friendly, two components here.

One is we are working with a set of community members and nonprofit partners around a plan for comprehensive citywide framework for affordable, reliable childcare. We're doing one on one conversations. We're meeting with small groups. We have a work group working on plans for what the long term strategy can be to how to make sure childcare is affordable for everyone from from birth really up to high school graduation. And then for those of you at home, if you have a young person in your home who is looking for a job, whether it's a niece, a nephew, a grandparent, a child, a sibling, we are doing intensive focus on hiring up for summer work.

We have the mayor's summer youth work program, our and goal is that every high school student will have a chance to get a work experience before they graduate. And that will be about 5,000 more young people will put into out of school and work opportunities this year. 2,500 young people is our goal to be on the job at work. And if you are a small business owner, mid sized business owner, we would love to have you sign up to be someone to host and hire a a young person this summer. It can change their lives and we think make your life a lot more enjoyable along the way. So that is the that's our final on the sixth. With that, I will stop and happy to open for questions that we might have or any comments if you do before we I'll ask councilman Albydress.

Thank you. My question is about the affordable housing goal. You mentioned 20,000 units. Are those a 100% affordable? Are those mixed income?

Thank you. For those of that are following at home, councilor Vidroj talking about, we have 20,000 units that are stuck in our planning department queue. It means someone applied to build some units, and then they have let that application languish. They've not come back. They've not moved it forward. So they kinda started the application, never finished it. And those are units of all income levels. Those are market rate units. They're affordable.

Single family home. It could be a high rise.

Yeah. It could be anything. That's literally any housing unit in the city county Denver.

And do we have any information on what the different issues are? I know you mentioned interest rates. I know you mentioned other things.

The biggest one overwhelmingly, and you Brad Buchanan from CPD could certainly counsel will give you a deeper debrief on this, but when we've talked to them, overwhelmingly, the issue is financing as they can't find a way to finance the projects they're trying to get through because either the cost of borrowing money is too high or they don't have the investors that are that are there yet to move it forward. So we do with the permitting timeline has not been a problem for those folks. They've all stalled for financing is the feedback we've gotten. So we're trying to see if there are ways in which there are any buckets of dollars that we have that could help specific projects move forward or if there are things we can do to make the designs cheaper, but that's been the biggest challenge. Great.

And then I just wanted to bring up that we had a rezoning on South Beacon Street for Colorado Coalition for the Homeless in 2024. They don't have funding, so there's that. And we have two Archway developments in my district that are, you know, are they're all through the process, but they don't have funding. So if you're looking to fund any affordable housing, we have a few projects in the district. Just wanted to update that.

I appreciate that. Thank you. Madam Preston.

So, also, it's not just the funding. It's the LITECH projects. So the the low income tax credits, they've actually been awarded outside of Denver. Historically, they've been awarded more in Denver. And so what we're seeing is that we're not getting the awards in the time that we want to, so we're having to push those awards out.

The one on South Federal or North Federal where I'm have one working on the Colorado Coalition from the homeless. We don't think we're actually gonna be applied being able to apply for those low income tax credits until 2028 because the awards are going out different, and CHAF is looking at things. So it's it's a complicated capital stack, and then drawing down the prop $1.02, $3 has also been more complicated than people have thought. So I keep putting pressure on the state because we're doing our part here. We have AHART. We have all the things. We actually need our other partners to show up too. So put pressure on your state reps. Right. Yeah. For real.

Yeah. And our friends at the housing and financing authority, we think that we are building higher density of affordable housing than anybody We think a disproportionate amount of resources should be in the places where the most units are being built, and so we're gonna keep pushing both for a chapter funding, for prop one twenty three funding, for state funding. We think that that's really important part of the puzzle for a lot of these folks.

That's great to hear. And I'm also happy to hear that other places, the sites number are also building affordable housing. That's also a good thing.

They're building on there also. I think there is a real desire to do it. You see it in all the mountain communities. You see it in the suburbs. See it across the front range.

And then my second question, I'm curious if this is anywhere in the goals. I know there's it doesn't seem like it is, but one of the things that has been concerning to me is the overdose deaths. Is that fit in here somewhere?

It it does. It is not a directly measured part of these goals, but it is part of our public health priorities. That's true also for suicides as well as for overdoses because those are, as we've seen, our homicide rate drop significantly, we are now losing more people in the city to suicide and overdose than we are to violent crime. And so our public health team is tracking that. We still find that the most effective strategy to prevent folks from overdoses is to have them indoors in a place where they have access to treatment and services. And so we still see the highest percentage of folks overdosing are those that are still living on the streets. And so that's a big part of the strategy is to bring them indoors and get them services, but that is an ongoing area of focus.

Great. I'd love to have one of those briefings here. Actually, that'd great. Thank you. That's all I have.

Would you councilman, would you like to focus on the overdose question specifically? That would

be great.

Overdose and suicide. K. Great. We'll have a public health team come. That'd be great. Yes. Ken Storis.

Thank you. On the unsheltered homelessness, can someone from your team send me the twenty twenty three point in time? It's not the dashboard's not on MDHI's side anymore for that year just so I can see. Sure. One of the one of the data points that came out just in a news report from that one was families unsheltered. Do we have a number for families unsheltered from point in time this year?

We do have it. I don't know if it's a top of my but we do have it. I can get it to you absolutely. I'm happy to get you the twenty twenty three one. I know the overall number, I think, was fourteen thirty one in '23, but what this specific family count is, we can get to you that as well.

Okay. Super. And then as it relates to homicides, apart from maybe the standard DPD response when homicides occur, is there anything that your teams are doing that includes, like, a a DHS, a children's affairs, an OSC OSCI response to each circumstance to kind of evaluate? Is there something else that other needs that needed to be met or things that that family needed that could be addressed in that in that crisis?

There is actually. Doctor. Ben Sanders and his team at OSCI have our office neighborhood safety does immediate response and outreach to each of those families usually with what we would call violence interrupters or their their their program support to say what's going on with your family? Are there services we can provide? It is often a goal to prevent retaliation. Right? If your family was a victim violence, how do we make sure you don't now go seek revenge on another family that they see as being involved? And so those partners are working very actively and aggressively. And if there is any need for housing or social services support, then Ben's team connects them through any other city resource. So that is one that we're quite actively involved in.

Okay. Thank you. Thanks.

Yes. Council president Pro Tem.

Thank you, mister mayor. So I have one around similar to council member Torres' for the all in mile high. The tracking again is everyone, and I think there's that nuance between, like, chronically homeless and families and maybe putting some milestones to addressing those. I know different resources go in. Yeah. But that's also, you know, how are we tracking our families? Because it although it's going down in one area, it's rising in another.

Yeah. Yvette, we can certainly, again, disaggregate for you the impact on on families and how they're progressing. I don't know if we have a separate indicator for chronically homeless as a category, but we do certainly for families, and we could could get that data to you for sure.

Awesome. And then I had another question around child friendly. One of the I'm just looking here. Hold on. I think it's helpful. I'm looking at the PowerPoint for the child friendly, but it's engaging with the one on one conversations with providers to validate their experience. Is that tracked through Office of Children's Affairs, or how exactly are we tracking?

It is Jess Ridgeway, who's our executive director for the Office of Children's affairs, is leading these conversations with providers all around the city, people from her team at children's affairs and and her directly. And that's helping them figure out what are the biggest challenges, what would you need to be able to offer more slots, is it workforce, is it facilities, is it permitting, and then what do we see as what's working in other places that we could help build up. So that that's exactly what she's doing right now. Okay. And if there are folks you wanna suggest for us to reach out to or include, she'd love to talk to them.

Okay. I'll I'll reach out to her, but I think that that's just critically important right now, especially since, you know, we have a lot of providers that have gone away that are no longer in, you know, providing services, and we just see this rising need for young people. And I think you mentioned it just briefly in your comment, but there's there's that gap of time for, like, those middle school you know, elementary, middle school, and high school. So I think that we're missing it's not the missing middle, but it's kind of like just an overseen age group that often I think needs sometimes the most engagement.

And then in terms of the middle school years? Mhmm. Yeah. That is where our real focus on our out of school programming is is focused on middle school. So that's a lot the work opportunities are really high school focused, but the out of school programming for summers and after school and weekends is targeted specifically at middle school through the MySpark program and others that you know. So that's been the real focus there.

And then somewhere in the link between childcare and workforce development. So it's like I don't see Ditto kind of represented as far as, like, making that connection because childcare is such a workforce support. And in our conversations and what I hear from from folks in my community is, you know, we wanna work. We don't have childcare and trying to balance those two things. So I think there might be value to be able to link some of some of that data.

This I'm glad that you asked that because this team is actually a joint partnership, the child friendly goal, of the children's affairs team and the economic development team. So they are both working collaboratively particularly on the youth work programs they run together, but even the child care solutions, they our economic development team very much sees that as a solution necessary to help business grow and people get good jobs is the availability of child care.

And then just one last thought or comment around the increase in gun violence. I know that, you know, from the chart that you showed, are you looking across the city where that gun violence is occurring?

We are. And there are two things that are noteworthy. One is that so far none of that gun violence in April has taken place in any of our PNI locations. And so what we see is the places where we have heightened collaborative community driven strategies that include a comprehensive approach to public safety, it's really working. There is more work for us to do in in other places, and I think there are some different dynamics driving some of those. But we are tracking that carefully and and driving stepped up interventions both in terms of community resources and in terms of patrols and

police presence? I think so in Southeast Denver, we've there have been a lot of incidences that have added to that number. I'm not quite sure how homicides are tracked if it's, you know, if it's the outcome or if it happens on location or if it happens later at the hospital or something like that. That's a nuance of how that data is.

It is the place of the incident. So if someone is shot at a certain location and eventually doesn't survive, they're injured in the hospital, that's always attributed to the location where the incident happened. Okay.

I didn't know if it was just the homicide that occurred or in that place, but that's helpful. There has just been an increase over the last over the last month. And, again, different incidences, different, you know, not all concentrated in the same neighborhood, but it's definitely occurred more frequently than we've had in the past, especially in this last month.

So

Yeah. This has been the hardest month we've had so far in in three years from our data.

And they've all include they've, I think, half of them have there's been four to have been involved. Yeah. So I think we're just still trying to figure out, like, what's happening in separate incidents incidences and so forth. So I appreciate the moment of going back and trying to figure out and looking in paths of what is happening or how those families can get better support in

the future. Thank you. You. Councilman Gonzalez with yours.

Thank you, mister mayor. A couple of things I just wanted to when you mentioned, first, doctor Sanders, you talking about the office of the. Correct. That he's doing the Yes. We learned, I think, that

There's there's two teams there. Some of that are on the OSCI team and some that are on the neighborhood safety team, but it's a collaboration of both.

Well, I think we had learned recently well, we were we were recently talking about the fact that we lost a lot of dollars from the federal government for violence interruption, and so there's some work that needs to be done to, like, bring that back up to par. Are you in that conversation at all?

I have talked to them about that. I think we've had the same team doing the work pretty successfully for the last two years, I think, with good results. I think this was a real aberration this past month, and so I think there's always more we can do with more resources. But in their conversations with me, that has not been their direct concern in the last month.

We work with additional community organizations that are embedded in the community and are very familiar with a lot of the members in different neighborhoods and have been the ones to usually respond. And so I think we just need to take a look at that because I think it's important as we're having these conversations around the uptick in violence, gun violence specifically, and and looking at, you know, do we have all of the proper resources funding in place to make sure that we're still providing those programming and resources at the same level? The other side of that I was going to ask was about sorry. I just had my notes. I was taking notes.

Oh, on the child friendly slide, do can you tell us what funds are being utilized to to address these goals? Do you know what funds are tied?

I do. So some of these on the right hand side, particularly the work programming and the after school programming, some of these are Broncos funds dollars. So so subsequent to the amendment that the council held bring on those dollars, that's a significant part of what's funding the out of school programming. I think most of it. And then the work opportunities is, I think, still through an economic development in DITO fund. But the out of school programming is certainly Broncos fund dollars.

Okay. Great.

Thank you. You bet.

And then councilwoman Torres, you asked about the point in time when it comes to family homelessness. I don't have the exact numbers, but I do have some information based on the meetings that I've been having on this. So what I have here is it it says, well, unsheltered family homelessness decreased by 83% in the 2025 point in point in time count. Family homelessness has increased by a 150% between 2022 and 2025, and that it's expected to continue to see a similar trend of of increase in overall homelessness among families. The family shelter waitlist has increased nearly 200% in the past two years and is currently over 350 households.

So I think it's it's sometimes harder, I think, to get that point in time count because family households is obviously more than one person. But that's just some, I guess, information information that I had received from partners and and city partners as well. So just for food for thought.

And and just for folks listening at home, I think there's a significant difference between what we would call unsheltered homelessness homelessness for families and sheltered homelessness. When you think of often folks, when think of homelessness, think of someone that's living outdoors on the street. The number of families with kids living outdoors on the street any given night is near zero in Denver. The numbers that we're talking about are folks that are experiencing shelter homelessness, means maybe you are in a shelter, you are on someone's couch, you may be in a vehicle, you may be in a congregate shelter. Those are all things where we think there is an urgent need for action, but it is a different risk than folks that are sleeping on the streets, which is for that, that family number is near zero.

So I I will say that there's still unsheltered homelessness. Like, I don't believe that that is zero. I mean, we have reports all the time, and we've seen it with our own eyes. And so I just I don't wanna give I just don't wanna there's lots of, I guess, interpretations, but even based on the information I have here, it does specifically say unsheltered homelessness.

Yeah. And we usually whenever we again, we work with the activists on this and advocates. Whenever we get a a report whenever we get a report I have not known of a night in the last year where I've gotten a report that we have a child sleeping on the street. We were not able to get that person into a shelter or bed that night. So when that happens, usually, they notify us and we move them immediately. And so I think that's plenty of work to do. I do want folks to know that there it is not true that there is a widespread practice of children sleeping on sidewalks in the city of County, Denver. That is not the case.

Well, along the same lines with the all in mile high slide

could we

go to that slide, Becky? Thank you. On that slide so I'd asked this question in my one on one briefing, and I just thought it was it because the goal on the right hand side, the address of homeless reports within one business day, I'd ask for a little more detail about what does that mean and what does that involve. It seems very vague because just because you're addressing the reports doesn't mean that something has been necessarily resolved. Under the progress piece where it says sixty seven percent cases closed within forty eight hours, I also asked what does that mean?

Because coming from being a social worker, like, casing closing a case doesn't always mean success. And so it it's I think that is important to know is, like, what is the actual outcome of those closed cases? Is it that somebody is then being asked to move from the location that they're at? Is it that we're connecting them to rapid rehousing? Like, what are some of the things that are happening for the closed case? And it's okay if we don't have the information today, but I just thought it would be helpful for us to have a better understanding of that goal in particular and then what the outcomes are saying about that.

It's great question, and I've asked the same thing. And the short answer is yes. We will have that specifically for you in q two. Right now, we've just started training all the teams on gathering this data. And what we're asking is exactly what you asked, which is what services were offered, what services were accepted, what was the end outcome of that. And that could be, you know, shelter services, housing services, mental health services, benefit enrollment. And so we have started tracking that data and we should have it much more clean for you to see by q two. Great great question. Thanks, man. Nelson Watson.

First, colleagues and mayor, I apologize for running late. I had a a quick little community dialogue this morning on specifically on on safety. And so when we go back to the safety slide, was at the the House of Hare in Park Hill and speaking with neighbors on what their perceptions are as to what's occurring. And one of the gentlemen that were there was familiar with the person that was shot in Montbello recently. I'm not sure if it's exactly Montbello or not.

I don't have the specific details. I don't receive those briefings if it's not specific within my district, but it's around the Montbello area. And one of the the the questions he had that he elevated was the importance for us to be looking at what are we doing for youth as schools are now closing. I mean, kids are gonna be out of classes coming up. And he said that his son is familiar with the person that was harmed and that there may have been additional harms because someone who was there purportedly committed suicide based on what they saw.

So the the downstream impact of the violence, obviously, will not. And for folks watching and folks, you're we're never gonna be able to capture that information within these data points. But my curiosity for the administration and your thoughts on having that coordinated approach, what are your thoughts as to the steps we should be taking? And I'm sure you said this, and I apologize for missing kind of the coordinated steps that the administration has taken to make sure that we obviously have police response to the activity, making sure that we are connected, but also for support for youth for school activities, events. Would love to hear a little bit more and once again didn't wanna be redundant, but No.

I appreciate it.

Just wanted to

ask. Thank you for the question. Good to see you. I think you're right that it's a couple of components. One is certainly prevention. What are we doing to give young people positive pro social things to do after school and in the summertime? And that is the major focus of our child friendly goal is if you are folks you talk to in Park Hill or anywhere around the city, we wanna put all of our high school kids to work this summer. And actually, the city is gonna pay them a bonus of $250 for getting a job and keeping a job. And so we'll both help connect them to jobs. We'll pay them a bonus.

We have employers who are excited to bring them in, and so we think that's a really important opportunity for youth in the summertime. We're we have specific programs focused on kids coming from the highest risk environments who might need more support or more opportunity. Some of those jobs we subsidize entirely. We actually pay the full salary for young people if they might have a harder time getting hired for various reasons. So we have a whole range of options.

We'd encourage you to reach out and do that. And then we also really focus on after school and summer programming for younger kids. If you're a middle school student but you're 13 and want something to do in the summer, we're focused on activities like summer camps at the science museum or the zoo or athletic programs or artistic programs that you can do. So we are funding those more aggressively this year to get more kids into those. And then in terms of we talked a little bit about the team of violence interrupters we have that whenever there is an incident that happens, what often can happen is one incident leads to two or three or four incidents after that.

Because if there's someone who shoots someone else, there's a push for vengeance or payback or retribution, and you can get a real cycle of violence that starts. And so a lot of what our team does at the office of neighborhood safety is preventatively working with families and individuals who've been at risk of either being victims or perpetrators before to prevent them from being at risk again. And then once there has been an incident, working with them and their families to help stabilize them, support them, get them services they need so they're not pulled into a deeper cycle of violence. And we have seen a couple of these incidents where we've had one incident that then leads to a second. The suicide you mentioned was the tragic second step of that.

And so and we see a number of these instances that are around otherwise illicit activity we're trying to stop, whether it's, you know, illegal gun sales or illegal drug sales that are deals that go bad and end up with violence. And so we think some of the broader work on crime prevention in those categories also help avoid violence.

Thank you so much, sir. Just one quick point. This Saturday, we're having a discussion at Clinton Early Learning from ten to twelve. I wanna thank Esther and her team for really coordinating with doctor Sanders and his team and really all of the departments within the city that provide support for youth, and that will be a part of this coordinated effort. And so I appreciate the work from DOS, OSCI, and all of the other groups, OCA, and others that will be present on this Saturday at Clean Earth Learning.

We'd love to be able to share more of this information from the administration, and and hopefully more folks from the administration will be able to participate. President Coleman is gonna be there from senate, so we're gonna have folks from the state and local here to speak to communities about making sure we're keeping families safe.

Great. Happy to help and make sure we have folks and resources there.

Alright. Thanks, sir. Thank you, madam president.

Any other questions? Alright. Well, wonderful. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you members of the public to joining. With that, we are adjourned, and happy Tuesday.