Public Safety Committee - Regular Meeting

Bring the public safety committee meeting to order. Roll call, please. Committee members Coleman. Here. President Johnson. Here. Kim. Here. Naker. Here. Yang. Chair Bowie. Here. Five present, two absent being Councilmember Yang and Councilmember Johnson who are excused.

Thank you so much. Well, welcome everyone. This is our fourth Public Safety and Community Wellness Committee meeting and particularly what we're going to have on the agenda are two items today. And I just wanted to just do a quick little overview of why these items are on the agenda. You know for particularly for the Public Safety Committee meeting one of our intentions is to make sure we're reviewing our community first public safety framework and initiatives.

And one of the items on the agenda is the Returning Home St. Paul pilot that began in 2020 and in partnership with several community partners including Housing Link Ujama Place and also Minnesota Justice Research Center who will be here today presenting on the report, their comprehensive report. So there's two attachments for agenda item and we'll be hearing from our speaker from the Minnesota Justice Research Center, excuse me. And our second item for the day is on the Justice Impacted as a Protected Class. And for this agenda item, we're going to have more so like a three pronged approach particularly around reviewing this policy as an informational overview of this policy in other cities.

We're going to ask for our Deputy Director Beth Commerce from Hero to review our existing ordinance. I want to be really clear that she's going to be reviewing the definition of our current protected class chapter 183, following our other speaker Paul and Maurice from the Justice Equity Coalition from the ACLU Minnesota in a series of coalition members who are going to be providing their advocacy and education to this body particularly around this policy and how this policy has made some great headways in other cities across the country. And last but not least, we'll be hearing from our third speaker for that second item, Neil Rivers, from the New Justice Projects, particularly speaking on the barriers to housing and how the justice impact as a protected class will help to remove some of those barriers particularly around having access to housing. So without further ado, we're just going to make sure we're jumping in. I'm going to be looking for questions from colleagues.

So, we're going to start with bringing up from Minnesota Research Justice Center, we have Kathleen who's going to give a review on the returning home St. Paul. So, glad to have you here, Ms. Kathleen or Katie, excuse me.

My mom calls me Kathleen when I'm in trouble. I feel like I'm turned up here, but Katie is fine. Thank you. Do you want me to just launch into my presentation?

Absolutely.

Okay. Well, thank you so much. I'm Terri Bui, it's nice to see you all. Good afternoon. So I'm going to take a little bit of time to talk about an evaluation that we did in partnership with the city of St. Paul back in twenty twenty, twenty twenty one about a pilot program called Returning Home Saint Paul. So, I'm going to go kind of fast and really skip ahead to findings and recommendations that I think will be most relevant, but I've got extra slides if folks have questions. So just a little bit about the Minnesota Justice Research Center, the JRC. We are a small nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to transforming our criminal legal system. So we seek a criminal legal system that promotes public safety by being more equitable, accountable, and restorative in delivering justice.

We do this through research, education, and policy development. So I'm the research director at our org, and Returning Home St. Paul Evaluation is an example of some of the work that we do with government agencies and other organizations throughout our state. So talking about housing for returning citizens, just a high level overview of the issue. So research tells us that people who have spent time in prison are seven times more likely to experience homelessness than the general public.

Also, that somewhere between, for one study, somewhere between sixty to eighty eight percent of respondents in a returning home study reported living with family members upon release. So, identifying and finding supportive housing for folks when they return home is really important and really challenging. Research also shows us that there are significant restrictions, in particular for public housing and housing vouchers, but also significantly in lower resistance. And so, things combine to make housing sometimes seemingly impossible to access for those who are returning home. So, this is the issue that Returning Home Saint Paul set out to address in part.

So Returning Home Saint Paul, again, began back in 2020. It's a small pilot program, I believe housed in the Office of Financial Empowerment at that time. And there were really three big goals with Returning Home Saint Paul. The first was to increase housing access. So specifically, the program looked to house returning citizens to market rate housing beyond just public housing, both to sort of avoid some of those restrictions I mentioned, but also to really access, expand the possible places where individuals returning home might be able to find housing.

The second goal of the program was really to bridge that transition from reentry to self sufficiency. So a big component of the program, as you mentioned, was partnerships with non profits or organizations that work to support people in that transition. So specifically, working with Housing Link and their Beyond Backgrounds program, and Ujama Place. So the program targeted young black males 18 to 30 in particular to support their transition to housing. And finally, the goal of this pilot program was also to identify ways to mitigate perceived risks landlords.

So one of the hypotheses that this sort of collaborative had was that landlords may be hesitant to house folks with backgrounds because they may have, take a financial loss through either unpaid rent or damages or things like that. And so the program set up what they called sort of a housing fund for landlords that they could access if they were willing to house folks in the program. So those are sort of the three prongs of the program. So I'm gonna kind of skip right to some of our findings. So we partnered with the city of Saint Paul with Ujama and Housing Link to evaluate the program.

So we came in sort of halfway through, and the goal was for us to interview all participants of the program, all the landlords of the program, and program staff as well. So the goal of Returning Home St. Paul was 20 participants. Participant recruitment was very challenging, and so each member of the sort of collaborative encountered various challenges, really connecting with and recruiting participants. And in the end, there were 12 total participants housed through the program, 10 of those housed in St.

Paul's. So the two that found housing in Minneapolis were not sort of followed through the rest of the program. So at the end of one year, six of the participants graduated, that is they were, they remained in housing for a year, and five of those six re signed their leases. So four of the participants, so 40%, nearly half, exited the program early. So two were from mutual terminations from housing and two were from evictions.

So it was a challenging process and program, and there was a lot of learning that happened with the folks who were involved. There were a total of nine landlords that ended up housing participants through this process, but the interested pool that HousingLink particular built throughout this process was about 53 landlords. So they were able to bring interested landlords into the fold who said they had an interest in housing folks with backgrounds. And at the end, 70% of participants housed in Saint Paul didn't have any additional criminal legal system involvement while enrolled, but, and of those 30% that did, there were no new felonies, so a lot of it was technical violations. So that was a big goal of the program too, supporting folks through housing and not reoffending.

Financially, the numbers, so the program had financial support for participants for application fees and for security deposits or first month rent. So that was the only sort of financial support that was offered. So several participants accessed those financial supports and the process. And then the access fund, the housing fund for landlords, should they need to access it, nobody accessed it. None of the landlords ended up coming to access any of that money.

So, know, we can sort of draw several conclusions for this, either they didn't need it, they weren't aware of it, or a combination of both. When we looked at participant experience, so we interviewed participants throughout the process. I've got a lot more data on this and we have a larger report on our website I can direct folks to. But participant experiences were particularly powerful for those individuals who identified as fathers, and those were the most successful. So being able to feel hopeful, supported, and especially increased sense of stability was really important for folks who were able to make it through the program.

And even for those who ended up terminating their leases early, they felt that while they were able to access housing and get support in doing so, they felt a sense of hopes and stability. However, as you saw by the numbers, there were continued barriers. So, you know, it pilot was program, they were experimenting with different ways to house folks, And some of the big takeaways from both partners and participants and landlords were the continued barriers to not just searching for housing, was challenging, but also securing and then maintaining housing. So folks often talk about job instability. They needed to be able to keep jobs in order to pay rent, and that was really challenging.

This was the pilot program went from December 2020 through, I think the last participant was enrolled in early twenty twenty two, so this was sort of in the heart of COVID nineteen, and so that provided a lot of challenges for housing. And then several participants and landlords named whether it applied to them or not. Some landlords thought that that the eight to ten year look back policy for folks with criminal histories couldn't be housed. Some some landlords found out that that was actually not a policy that applied to them, but they thought it might. And so that was named frequently from participants and from landlords as a barrier for housing.

But at the end of the day, the biggest continued barrier, even for folks who secured housing, was being able to maintain that housing financially. So nearly all of the participants struggled to pay their rent on time. The pilot provided financial assistance for getting and securing housing, that security deposit and application fees, but not for rent throughout the course of the year, and almost everybody had trouble paying rent. Some of the learn learnings from landlords. So this this pilot really showed and, you know, we had a lot of interesting discussions among the whole collaborative that the sort of initial hypothesis that if we can offer this housing mitigation funds to bring landlords into the fold who might have been, you know, perceived a risk with housing folks with backgrounds in the past, but maybe would have tried it, actually didn't pan out.

Every single landlord who participated in this program already had a history of housing people with backgrounds. So, we didn't really bring new landlords into the fold. Instead, we were able to tap folks who said, I already would have been willing. This is nice now that I might have access to this funder support, but it wasn't sort of a changing of hearts and minds that happened with this program. A big learning for the partners were that recruitment was a real challenge, especially limiting geography.

So the program was limited to landlords and residents of Saint Paul, and they found so many folks begin the process of housing, but then identify a place to live outside of the city. And then they were not eligible for the program as a result. And so, were really transient, not surprisingly, and so, as a result, people had a hard time recruiting and keeping participants in the program to be housed in St. Paul. In addition, HousingLink had lots of interested landlords, but outside of the city of St.

Paul. So, that geographic restriction made things really challenging. And then finally, perhaps not surprisingly, the housing markets in particular at that time moved really fast. And so Ujama, Housing Link, and the city learned a lot about really deepening collaborative partnerships from city entities and community based organizations. There were a lot of learnings that are in our longer report about how to really sort of like work together and work fast when you're trying to support people who are returning home, both sort of from the city side and also from Ujama side with case management and support and housing.

So our recommendations at the end of this small pilot really align with those findings. So first, we found that it was absolutely necessary to build additional wraparound support and in particular financial rental assistance for programs. If there is going to be a housing program in order to secure housings, maintaining housing is necessary, and being able to pay rent was really challenging to people. So thinking about, if we're thinking about this sort of financial, we had conversations about if that 30, or that $3,000 risk fund could be used or shifted to support folks to stay in housing and be able to pay rent. In some ways, that does go to the landlord, right?

So there were some conversations and learnings about shifting the kinds of financial support necessary. Second, increasing the pipeline of participants for the program. So again, really trying to make sure that maybe not just partnering with one community based org, like Ujama, there was a lot of conversations about going directly to the DOC for folks on reentry and going to other community based orgs to really open up the pipeline of participants, especially if that geography is limited. Third, shifting to targeted landlord outreach. So this was a big learning from this pilot project that rather than trying to, at least at the beginning, expand the pool of landlords who will rent to folks with backgrounds, identifying those landlords who are already potentially willing or already have in the past and supporting those folks to be able to continue to do that.

We heard a lot from landlords, you know, I'm okay with it, but I don't have the resources, or I'm not connected with housing to find people who might need housing. So we strongly recommended shifting to a more targeted landlord outreach process to really maximize that pool of interested landlords. And then, as I mentioned, the sort of collaboration among organizations and government was really important, and so we recommended establishing and supporting those relationships between program partners in particular. Finally, when it came to policy changes Sure. Oops, sorry.

Just had a question from Councilman Of course.

Thank you so much, Tara. Thank you. This is a really interesting presentation. I just wanted to ask quickly on the targeted landlord outreach. I find it very interesting that there were so many more interested landlords than were and also, it was difficult for people to stay in their housing due to affordability. And I'm curious if we have any information about the affordability of the units that the landlords were offering. Were those market rate? Were they deeply affordable, affordable?

It's a really good question. For this particular project, we did not have any findings about the rent that people paid. I imagine that HousingLink has so HousingLink has a database of landlords, and so HousingLink is able to sort of like organize those units by price. So it could be it's a question we can answer, I guess is the short answer, but we didn't look at the differences in rents for folks who participated in the program. I will say that they the recruitment process for participants with Ujama Place also was coupled with, Ujama Place had like some life coaching and case management about sort of financial management, and so knowing what the rent was going to be and making sure that that rent was affordable and accessible was part of the process, but I don't have numbers.

It's a good question, though. Thank you. Other questions? Thank you. So just the last recommendations, again, one of the things that we heard from participants in particular, but also from landlords, was if we can eliminate existing barriers. So two of the barriers that folks mentioned quite regularly were that there were a handful of harder house offenses. So, offenses for which folks would be automatically denied housing. And so being able to look into those offenses and remove that automatic denial barrier so that landlords could then house folks. And then secondly, again, this eight to ten year look back periods. Now, these policy changes, you know, these recommendations are three years old now.

So at the time, this was something that the city was looking into shifting, and so that's where these policy recommendations come from. So I think oh, so the last slide. So again, part of our small pilot, know, evaluation of this program was really about participant experiences and trying to learn from those. So I just end with a quote from one participant who said that the overarching story of this returning home St. Paul, this small program was of hope and inspiration.

So really identifying for a small group of folks who were able to connect with these supports, there was an extra reason to know you're doing the right thing and to keep doing the right thing. It changed my life's perspective. So we know both from the research and experience that access to housing for those who can secure and maintain it can be really life changing. And we saw that happen with the program for folks who were housed. Okay. So, I kind of sped through slides, I'm happy to take questions or talk more about

We're coming in. Thank you. Just one additional question. Is there is the study entirely complete, or is there any long term work with the participants or any tracking being done? Yeah.

No, it's entirely to my so certainly from our sort of as an evaluation partner, you know, we wrapped up two years ago or so, I think, in mid twenty twenty two. So but I'm and and then I know that, like, you know, staff has shift. In fact, some of the some of the staff who were at Ujama when we did this program are now working at the city of the city in the Office of Neighborhood Safety, so it's been fun to sort of watch folks' trajectories. So, I don't think so. I won't say for certain that there's no long term follow-up, but that was not part of the original project.

Thank you so much. And then also, to your question, Councilmember Coleman, this was a partnership between the City of St. Paul Office of Financial Empowerment really ran this program. The director and the program manager or coordinator for it is no longer work for the City of St. Paul, but they're still strong partners, they're still strong advocates.

So, the reason why I brought this back is for us to explore if we want to continue this pilot. Like was given before in the presentation, it was just about 12 participants. So council can you know re explore if we want to continue this and talk with our department heads particularly Office of Financial Empowerment or another department that has interest with continuing this on. But I don't have any questions. I do want to just say I appreciate clarifying these recommendations.

I know for someone who live in Ward 1 and have quite a few of communities who are just as impacted. This program was transformational. This program was life changing and allowed for people to have access to housing in ways that we don't normally see from the city or even from the county or the state. So I'm happy to get a refresher on this and also have the conversations particularly around how our resources and our existing programs whether it's the rental assistance can also be applied to these to our communities you know that's impacted. But thank you, with further ado we're going We to have a really tight schedule here.

We're going to be working some miracles with the time, I'm going to bring up our Deputy Director Beth Commerce to speak to the Chapter 183.

Good afternoon, Thank you. Name is Beth Commerce. I'm the Deputy Director in the Department of Human Rights and Equal Economic Opportunity. It's a bit of a mouthful. We go by our acronym, H R E E O, otherwise referred to as HERO. You did invite me to speak invite us to speak about our Human Rights Ordinance, so I will do that. I always take a minute to level set and talk about the Department as a whole. On the screen, you can see our mission statement. We do have human rights investigators. We have our accessibility coordinator for the Americans with Disabilities Act and language access.

Complaints of police misconduct is coordinated through our department. We have an excellent small business certification program for all of those small business owners. It's referred to as the CERT program. Procurement, everything the city buys and sells runs through our team of buyers. Labor standards investigations, minimum wage, wage theft, earn sick and safe time, and I went ahead and added prevailing wage to that instead of putting it as a separate item.

So we're a really unique department. We do a lot of different things. I don't think I need to show all of you this, but we our ordinances apply for the in the jurisdiction of the city. Now, chapter one eighty three is the human rights law, the city's human rights ordinance. And you can see on the screen that we can investigate allegations of discrimination in the following areas, education, employment, housing, which is also known as real property public accommodations, so if you were going to Starbucks and buying a latte, for example, that would be that kind of scenario public services credit, business, and reprisal, also known as retaliation.

There is a one year statute of limitations period to file a charge of discrimination from the alleged incident that someone believes discrimination may have occurred. And the next slide shows you our existing protected classes. I'm not going to bore you and read them out loud for you because there are many. But just so you know, all of our protected classes are on the screen. It's Chapter 183. I did bring copies of our handout. Our manager actually put this together. It's pretty terrific. It's in several languages, so I'll leave that here and then swing back later and grab what's left over. Okay?

And our contact information. Do you have any questions?

Any questions at all? Great.

Thank you for

that review It's of really important that we level set on what our existing policy is and, you know, as council members, know we can always follow-up with that ordinance and look do a deeper dive into that in another setting. But thank you so much

Director

Comments Commerce for your resources and also your education. We're going to transition to our coalition partners here, Paul Sullivan as well as Maurice Ward to speak particularly around the justice impacted status as a protected class around their their work in Minneapolis and across the nation. Without further ado, just going to hand it off to you both.

Thank you so much council members for hearing us today. As council member Bowie said, my name is Paul Sullivan. I'm an organizer with

the ACLU of Minnesota. Mauricio Ward, founder of Jive. And

we're here today representing the Justice Equity Coalition, which is a coalition that came together to try to promote justice impacted status as a protected class, first in the city of Minneapolis and now in Saint Paul and starting in a few other cities across the state. This is sort of the core committee of us. I believe we're all present. It also includes other organizations along with the ACLU and JIVE. We also have Nell Rivers with the New Justice Project and Daniel Matthias with Minnesota Freedom Fund. And Maurice is gonna give a little bit of background on what got us to where we are today.

What happened the reason why we're here right now is that as I came home from doing eight and a half, nine years, I realized that the I faced obstacles that were collateral consequences. Didn't have the terminology for it initially. Just knew there was discrimination that was everybody knew existed, but nobody was doing anything about. So I went through just dealing with it like most of us do, you know, just trying to maintain, trying to find a job, trying to find employment, trying to maintain it. But I I listened to all the noise around me about how individuals are going back and how resid residences were so high, but they were they were not talking about the real reasons why and the real reasons why we face so many other obstacles that keeps keep us from achieving, you know, our full potential.

I don't I think one of my most surreal moments was being in my house and feeling like I could not be the father or provider because of my criminal background, and it was embarrassing. So with that being said, with right to the vote was established, we formed JIVE, is an acronym for Justice Impacted Individuals Voting Effectively. We took we formed then we formed the Justice Equity Coalition. We were fortunate to find champions in Minneapolis who have passed that amendment to their bill of rights, but we also have a national coalition with bar business out of Atlanta. And we've been pushing to make justice impacted individuals a protective class because we know identity is power.

So, the core values are all individuals have the right to be forgiven, makes sense, All individuals have the right to live free from sanctions and excess. The prevalence of de facto sanctions imposed by society upon just as effective individuals necessitates the creations of laws to protect these individuals from societal sanctions without due process. And that's just common sense.

Yep. So our first step to this was linking up with some members of the Minneapolis City Council. We were fortunate enough to cooperate with the office of Council Member Robin Wansley and the Council Member Jason Chavez. And our timing was also incredibly fortunate because they were already working on an amendment to the protected class ordinances, and we were able to bundle justice impacted status together with new protections for housing status and for height and weight. So it took about a year altogether to get the language figured out, to go through the proper processes, and then ultimately the language that they ended up on, which I thought would be worth including for reference here, is how they define justice impacted status as the state of having a criminal record or history including arrest, charge, conviction, period of incarceration, or past or current probationary status.

Now, how that has rolled out in the approval and implementation process, it passed unanimously. We had a hearing very similar to this one, and then a second one where we were able to actually, we went into overflow room for the city council chambers with supporters. And what it does is that, you know, like all of the protected classes, there are various areas that it protects. Specifically on this list, the areas that justice impacted status now is protected in are education, employment, professional organizations, property rights, and public accommodations. So not the entire list, but it is certainly a strong start and it certainly goes a long way to start addressing some of these issues.

We've been in continued meetings with the city of Minneapolis about what implementation will look like. The new protected classes went into effect August 1, and the city has been working their investigations in human rights department has been working on doing a lot of outreach. We actually just yesterday sat in on a know your rights presentation by that office that gave us some really amazing scenarios to people that people could walk through to kind of elucidate where do these lines lie for, like, what counts as an infringement on this neutral protected class or not. And yeah, really it's the I didn't want to come up here and bore you all with, you know, all of the minutiae of the exact, you know, how the process works, but essentially the idea, especially for areas like employment and for housing is that it shifts the burden from the person who's applying to the person who is hiring or giving somebody housing. So instead of saying, oh, you have a record, you you know, you have some sort of criminal history, we're just not gonna hire you or we're gonna have some sort of adverse decision when it comes to housing simply based off of that.

Instead, now there's a nexus of various factors that employers have to consider, that landlords have to consider to say, why is it relevant that you have this status? It's not just that you have this status. And of course this is exempted by state law, by federal law. There are certain positions that this doesn't apply to, like jobs that work with children, like law enforcement, but in general the idea is that it makes it so that you no longer have to just say, oh, you have a felony, can't give you this job, can't give you this apartment. It shifts that burden, if that makes makes sense.

Yeah, Maurice is going talk a little bit about the national context of what we're doing.

So once we formalized this and started working, we reached out to a national coalition, And I actually have a meeting with them this afternoon. You can see the different areas or the different places who have passed, Atlanta, Georgia Gainesville, Florida Minneapolis being one. Also, just recently, New Orleans just passed the Fair Chance Act. It's very comprehensive. Augusta is looking at passing something.

Baltimore is looking at the state of Illinois is doing some very comprehensive things. What we're trying to do is make justice impacted individuals a protective status and let individuals understand that we are a vulnerable class of individuals that need protection, and we've been working as a coalition to make that happen.

And I feel like it's worth noting, you know, things are moving incredibly fast nationally with this. Fact that, you know, I wasn't even able to get, you know, New Orleans changed from black to red because, you know, we just found out about that, you know, yesterday is I think speaks to the the salience to this moment. Now, lastly, I mean, I'm not going dwell too much on this, but why is this necessary?

Before you go into that point, we just have a question or a comment from Councilmember Jones.

Please. I was looking at the map you just shared. Are there any cities on the West Coast where this is in process? Or are there any different state laws there or something? Or is there a reason why?

Not to our knowledge. Okay. I can't necessarily speak to why geography has rolled out the way that it has. Okay. But this is, you know, from the coalition that we've worked with, these are the cities that have, you know, initiated processes to have ordinances like that. Really, yeah, I'm not entirely sure why the West Coast Okay. Thank you

so To clarify also is that the network that we're in, we aren't in communication. We don't know if there's actually something going on currently. We're it's not that we're a smaller network, it's just that we tend to communicate and build grassroots through grassroots, right? I found out about bar business because they had passed some legislation, and I was able to talk to the council member who authored that or was the champion of that, and that connected me to Illinois, to Baltimore, to all the other areas. So it's just we don't know what the process is currently in that area.

We just know what's going on right now in our little network.

Thank you.

Yes. I won't belabor this point too much since we've already had fantastic speakers from MNJRC talk about why is this necessary. But in short, it's just as impacted individuals are an incredibly vulnerable population in our society today. Sixty five percent of them are unemployed at the four year mark and it is often due to barriers like this. You know, we also see, you know, incredibly high rates of homelessness, like once again, in part due to the fact that, you know, it's legal for landlords to be able discriminate based on simply having a record.

In our collation we talk about a lot of these things as sort of like second hidden sentence. You know, there's the sentence that's handed down to you by a court of law that is, you know, through a jury of your peers. And then there's this one that is, you know, ad hoc, haphazard, applied by society. And the end result is that people really are not able to reliably get the housing or the jobs that they need, which severely, severely limits things like reintegration and severely worsens recidivism. It really kind of turns into a tragedy of the commons situation because, yes, we want these people to reintegrate, but for some reason people don't want to give them the jobs or housing that they need to do that.

Now, lastly, and I think for the sake of time we said that you already gave a little bit of your testimony, We're gonna have, Alessandra Elleray, who is a justice impacted individual from, The Twin Cities, testify on her experiences, in this area. So I think the team's link is we good? Perfect. Alright.

Hi, everyone. Thanks for having me. My name is Alessandra. I live in the Twin Cities. So I will just start off with talking about, like, how earlier this year, I was turned down by an apartment after I was told based on my record that I was not able that that I was going to be able to have the apartment. They said, oh, we should be able to get through that. Everything's fine. And I then was turned down. Three years ago before I got into this apartment, I was homeless, and I was seeking housing. I had a job at eighteen hundred detox.

I was turned down for housing based on this this certain crime being pending. I also used to work for DHS jobs where I was a CPRS through working working with individuals who who were in recovery. I was a supervisor at a group home for years and also at 18 100 detox. So the barriers that have inhibited me from being the best I can be is housing that is offered only in high crime ridden areas, which also reduces the chance for for for recovery and restoration and reducing recidivism. The crime that I committed was an act of self defense, and it's made my life a lot harder to navigate.

It has impacted me through jobs, through, you know, speaking with people, you know, about this experience. It's a very it's a it's a cloud that lingers over my head. So with having justice impacted people as a protective class, this opens up the opportunity to seek, you know, career different careers. This opens up the opportunity to to receive housing that accommodates, like, what I what I believe I deserve. It it opens up unlimited opportunities to be able to serve the people that I care about, and thank you.

All right. Thank you once again, Alessandra. And I think then that is all for our presentation. If there are any questions, we welcome them now.

I do have a quick question, and I'm looking for my other colleagues. I have some questions. Particularly, you're talking about the Minneapolis had their own definition of justice impact its status. Is that just like a universal universal definition that other cities have adopted or has there been no difference in how cities define justice impact the communities?

My understanding is that every city, you know, when you're writing the laws, it's not going to be a cut and paste exactly every single time. But my understanding is that they did look at, for example, Atlanta's ordinance very heavily when they were crafting the definition for justice impacted individuals in Minneapolis. So while it's, you know, it's gonna be different around the edges every single time, the the gist of it is generally pretty close to what we see in Minneapolis.

Thank you. Councilor McCormick?

Thank you. I just wanna say, I do have a question, but first, I just wanna say a huge thanks to chair Bui for starting this conversation today. I'm really grateful that we're having it. And to mister Sullivan and mister Ward, thanks so much for being here. I really you know, so much of this feels so so important, but I really am sitting with sort of the second sentence framing and the notion that we have a system like it or not.

We have a system that we have delegated the authority to to issue punishments for people's actions. And then this notion that we as individuals or members of our society have the right to arbitrarily make up our own additional punishments feels feels completely backwards. And I'm I'm just very glad that we're having this conversation. To get to my question, and it's just along similar lines. You mentioned mister Sullivan that there were some places where the Minneapolis ordinance maybe didn't do everything that you all had hoped for. I'm just curious if there were sort of things that you all were fighting for that you would have liked to see look different in that.

Sorry. Can you repeat?

Yeah. Thought you mentioned when we were on slide five that there were a couple of protected areas that maybe you all had wanted covered that weren't covered by the Minneapolis ordinance or any other changes that you all had hoped to see there, but maybe I misunderstood.

Can I please, yeah? I just think because the state is a preemptive state, the problem is not with the city as much as with it's with us going to the state and getting some of the the barriers that the state has established removed. Although we the Minneapolis ordinance was comprehensive, there's still barriers that Minnesota Department of Health can can know, even even the second look or other there's other carve outs they have that they use, but because of the state statute, has these lifetime bars on specifically the healthcare industry, where individuals want to work and have no clients that are even close to that and they can't get into it. They have a second, what is it, a second chance or a second look or Second chance. It's where the employer can actually pull you aside and give you, say I want this employee because of the background, because I know they have the experience.

The state supersedes that. So that's not even a carve out. So we need to make justice impacted individuals a protective class, because we're getting into a lot of areas that individuals are qualified to work in, but they can't because DHS or background study comes back that prohibits them from working.

Got it. Thank you. Well,

I think a lot that was said today is deeply resonating with me, you know, before I was on the council. I've met many of you all and been in relationship with many of you all. I'm organizing on Restore the Vote and how this is very similar to re enfranchising a community that has been you know deemed to a second class citizenship and making sure that we are having a community that can exercise all of their rights and voting rights is just one aspect of someone's life that we want to make sure that people have access to housing, to employment and like what you mentioned Mr. Ward, dignity, right? Dignity in their communities and their families.

So, you know, I'm committed to this. I think this is a really great presentation overview for us to explore, you know, what action that the council wants to take. But you also, I encourage you all connect with council members, have these conversations out in community and to build that coalition. But thank you so much for your time. And we're going to transition real shortly here.

We have our last speaker, Nell Rivers and I asked Nell Rivers particularly that I know a lot has been said particularly around the advocacy on this that if you can help all of us be done by 01:55. So that gives you about like four minutes and my apologies for you know I know this this conversation or your presentation could be an entire you know seminar but we just want to make sure we had a chance to hear from you today.

Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you council members. I'll make this really quick. It only supports the previous presentations anyway, so.

Thanks, Beth. I wish we can voice activate the Change slides.

Oh, I don't see my presentation here.

Do the not this one. We have is it we have a one pager, but we don't see a presentation.

Yeah. This the presentation, I guess, isn't

yeah. It isn't here.

Okay. Our apologies. I I think we have the Poly's looking into it right now. But what we have received particularly was this one pager. We wanted to give us a quick second to look through it.

Okay.

Were you it must be that one right there. Yeah. No, this is different from it. Okay. I think there might be some technical difficulties, particularly around getting what we have is a one pager, but Polly can bring it over there and confirm with you if that's your Just want to make sure. I know we're running up to time.

Maybe she can just summarize.

Yeah. I think we're gonna do this one. Because she just had one slide.

Okay,

so we're we'll just move forward with if you can just give the overview, because what we have received, at least what we have attached on the agenda is just the one pager.

Sure.

But we can also we we can talk offline particularly around what are other ways to reengage the council members on this information. Our apologies for the technical difficulties. Is really important to make sure that we have all the accurate information posted online. So, we'll make sure to get that posted after this committee meeting.

Yeah, of course.

So, I can kind of walk through the Fair Chance Housing Act. So, it's comprised of new justice projects, so that's who I'm representing today. I'm the campaign impact and learning coordinator. Vera Institute, which is a justice and research policy tank, they're national. And then UWAAF, is United Until We Are All Free.

So that's three organizations that are supporting the Fair Chance Housing Act. So basically, it's as we heard earlier in the presentations, there is a need for housing protections for justice impacted folks. So the hope with this fair chance amendment or housing act is to address the discrimination that many of them face. It would put the burden on the landlord instead instead of of on on the the adjusted impacted individual on proving why they can't rent at that location or can't have that housing. So, that's like kind of the gist of it.

Any questions at all do we have today? And Polly, thank you so much for being a rock star and trying to make it work. Welcome to City Process everyone. But we are we had heard a lot and I really appreciate the the breadth of this conversation and all the different aspects that residents you know are faced with some barriers and you know we have a lot for us to explore around you know solving those barriers and addressing who should you know receive those protections and how our protections can actually be more expansive to the needs and some of the issues that we have heard today. So without further ado, we're going to join this meeting.

I welcome you all to the next committee meeting next month. I know that's gonna fall around Thanksgiving week so that one has been cancelled due to be on Thanksgiving. So without further ado, we are going to adjourn this meeting.