City Council - workshop

are here, but we're going to start. I call this meeting to order. Before we begin, can we please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance? Madam Clerk, please call the first item. Council members, any edits to those minutes? I see none. I move to approve the minutes for the regular meeting of June 16th, 2026. Second. Motion, second. Discussion? See none. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. All those opposed, same sign. Motion passes 7-0. Madam Clerk, please call the next item.

with respect and dignity and that honor every resident and all communities. They are working to create an environment that values shared goals with increased empathy and genuine dialogue. We now come to the public agenda. The public agenda allows for up to five speakers to have five minutes each to address the council. Please bear in mind that this is not a period of dialogue with council or a question and answer period. This is your opportunity to address the city council with your concerns. I ask that you address your remarks to the city council as a body and not to any individual council member. No action will be taken relative to items on the public agenda other than referral to the city manager for information as necessary. Speakers will please speak into the microphone. Please state their name and address for the record. A time clock will display the speaker's remaining time to speak. Order and rules of decorum will be observed. We do not have any speakers currently signed up to speak today.

Would anyone in the audience like to address the council? I see none, we'll bring it back. Madam Clerk, please call the next item.

Consent agenda items one through 19.

Council members, any items to be pulled? I see none. I move to approve consent agendas, items one through 19. Second. Motion second. Discussion? See none. All those in favor say aye. Aye. All those opposed, same sign. Motion passes 7-0. Madam Clerk, please call the next item.

Board of Bids and Contracts, dated June 22nd, 2026.

Good morning, Mayor, City Council, Josh Lauber, Department of Finance. The Board of Bids and Contracts convened yesterday, June 22nd, 2026, for the following items. We have for engineering the Stormwater Sewer Number 834-2026 Stormwater Ditch Grading and Culvert Cleaning Program for RL Utility Solutions for an aggregate bid total of $166,502. For purchasing, we have the Riding Front Deck Mowers for Prairieland Partners for an aggregate bid total of $84,886.08. We have Four Wheel Drive Articulated Tree Care Handler for Senebogen LLC for an aggregate bid total of $862,493. We have the License Track Software Annual Renewal for Progressive Solutions Incorporated for an annual total of $75,324.26. We have the Avail Maintenance Agreement Change Order for Avail Technologies Incorporated requesting your authorization to extend the contract three months. That'll allow us to bring back our new RFP we have completed for you. We have the structural firefighting coats and pants change order for Delta Fire and Safety Incorporated doing business as Delta Industrial Services and Supply for an amended contract amount of $346,364.80 estimated. We have the structural firefighting boots change order for Ed M. Feld Equipment Company Incorporated doing business as Feld Fire for an amended amount of $78,834 estimated annually. We have the wild land fire PPE clothing and personnel deployment gear change order for Ed M. Feld Equipment Company Incorporated doing business as Feld Fire for an estimated annual usage of $81,708.66. And for airport, we have the upgrade of the Dwight D. Eisenhower existing terminal building paging system for Electronic Contracting Company for $1,079,817.14. This is how to do business with the city of Wichita. This is our purchasing calendar of small business resource partner events the city's hosting or participating in. And these are public opportunities out on the street opening on June 26th, July 10th, 17th, and 31st. And I'll be happy to answer your questions and recommend your approval.

Thank you, Josh. Questions for staff? Can you please go back to slide number five? Sure. Usually the city takes the lowest bid. Can you explain this one?

Yeah, fantastic question. So the four-wheel drive articulated tree care handler was a unique instance where U.S. equipment sales and rental only bid option four for the $77,575, respectively, for the other vendor with no other options. The bid document, the bid package explicitly outlined the base bid with options as selected by the department would be the determining factor. The department has funding to purchase the other options. The department requested options one, four, five, six, and seven. So it was a low bid with only one of those options, but the aggregate total in alignment with the bid package was lowest.

Thank you, Josh. And can you go back to slide number 15? Sure. These are the open bids available. Can you just, sometimes people don't know that the city is always looking for vendors, whether local, established, or new businesses. Can you talk about specifically, we have a new fire station that will be constructed in Southwest Wichita, so that's a bid that's open right now?

Correct. We have a bid open for the construction of the new fire station and all of our bids are on our public website, wichita.gov slash procurement portal. We want any vendors and all vendors that can participate. So if you send those to myself, we also have our small and emerging business enterprise program where small businesses are afforded 10 points on the evaluation criteria. So we look forward to getting as many bids as we possibly can.

I have a question. Josh, on the parking garage tear replacement and beam repair, what parking garage is that?

I believe it's the employee parking garage, but I'm going to have to let someone from Public Works speak to that. I would not know.

Paul Gunzelman, Public Works and Utilities. Yes, it is the employee parking garage, the southwest stairs.

Are you sure it's not the old town garage?

No, it is not. Sorry.

Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Josh. I see no further questions. With that, I move to approve the boards of bids and contracts dated June 22, 2026. Motion second. Discussion? Seeing none. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. All those opposed, same sign. Motion passes 7-0. Madam Clerk, please call the next item.

Council member agenda. We don't have an agenda listed today unless council has an agenda to add.

Council members, any agenda items? I see none. Madam Clerk, please call the next item. Council member appointments and comments. Council members, any appointments? I see none. Council member comments? I will just say thank you to City Manager Dennis, Chief Sullivan, and Chief Snow alongside the council this morning. We visited district number one. Jimmy's Diner had a fundraiser. It was the 10th annual Hotcakes for Hope Care in memory of Joe Davidson, and it's a benefit for Grace Med Health Clinic. So thank you all who volunteered their time. and thank you to our partners in our community that help all these nonprofits. Council Member Hoheisel.

Thank you, Mayor. Is Chief Snow in the crowd? She's not. She's not. Okay. Well, I believe it is her birthday today. So happy birthday, Chief Snow. If anybody sees her in the hallway up here at City Hall, please embarrass her since she avoided this one right here. So thank you, Chief, for all you do.

And then council member for district one and six, do you have an event to share?

Council member Shepherd and I will be at Nazca Park tomorrow for the Mexico World Cup game.

So everyone is invited to come out and have fun. We're gonna have food trucks, vendors, shout out to Park and Rec for making this happen and WPD and everyone who's involved. But we've heard overwhelmingly from constituents, both in District 1 and District 6, really all of the districts that they wanted to see it happen again. And so this is one of the ways that we can respond to our constituents immediately. And hopefully you all come out and we have a full crowd. And then also wanna give a major shout out to Vice Mayor Glasscock. If you weren't here on Saturday, you missed him dancing with the drum line from Topeka in the Juneteenth parade, which was a great sight to see. So thanks to Vice Mayor Glasscock for walking in the parade and for Council Member Hohasel for coming out to Juneteenth and all the colleagues who even though couldn't make it this year have been out in previous years to support Juneteenth as well. So really grateful for that.

Thank you, council members. With that, we cannot adjourn this meeting because we will have an executive session. So we will remain in the meeting, but we will now have city manager Marstall take over for the workshop.

Thank you, Mayor and Council. I did want to highlight, as we have on the screen there, about the bid is out for Fire Station 23. So we will be working on a groundbreaking for that station once we have things lined up. But hopefully late summer, early fall, we will do a groundbreaking for that. For our agenda item today for the workshop portion, we have four items for you. And we'll start off today with our monthly update on the Water Works Project and invite the representatives from our Public Works Department and our contractors to come forward and give a brief update on the status.

Good morning, Mayor, Wichita City Council, Mr. Manager. For the record, Don Henry, Public Works and Utilities. I'll turn the presentation over to Ron Coker, Senior Executive Representative for the Wichita Water Partners here in just a second. Wanted to make a couple of comments. First of all, significant progress has been made. since the last update by Mr. Coker and Gary Jansen, the Director of Public Works and Utilities. And that includes a few items. We have a list of open items and issues that you would expect with any large construction project. Just wanted to reassure that those items are being carefully tracked and monitored and the work associated with that so we can make sure that the plant will be teed up and ready for operations when the city takes it over. And Ron will provide a little bit more information in a moment in his presentation on the solids contact clarifiers, which have been kind of the primary focus of this last delay. And significant progress in terms of repairs to the clarifiers have been made. Solid Contact Clarifier Number 5, in particular, repairs have been completed to that. Last week, they took it through the rigors of preparations for performance testing, and I believe it was Sunday when the performance testing began on SCC Number 5. And I'm happy to report, although early in the testing process so far, results look encouraging. And then in terms of staffing and training for city staff, Our staff are on location, actively participating in work and operations through startup and performance testing, and we're gathering very valuable hands-on experience that will set us up to be in better position when we take the plant over and we're able to execute our plan and set the plant up for delivery of water into the distribution system. So with that, I'll go ahead and turn it over to Ron.

Good morning, mayor members of the council. Um, just one small correction to what Don said. It was all right, except it's sec three that, uh, that started back up. You'll remember solids contact. Clarifier five was the one that we did temporary repairs on and we ran all spring, uh, with those temporary repairs that's now under repair and will be the last sec to come to come online. So here, uh, excuse me, here's, um, okay. Page down. Arrow. Enter. OK. Oops. Enter popped up something else. Thank you. Oops. sorry about that. Here's our update. So we're down to two slides for the presentation. So we'll get shorter and shorter each time. Uh, as Don mentioned, uh, we did start sec three up and restarted the plant on June 16th. One thing that occurred before that though, was we reached a agreement on the revised, uh, performance testing and acceptance plan. Um, so you'll remember Gary mentioned it, I believe, and I may have as well last time we were here. The city wanted to run longer performance testing on these repaired clarifiers to make sure that all the repairs were satisfactory. So the testing period occurs over a minimum of 21 days and 235 days on all three water sources, so three times. If we can do that in just three PTAs, in other words, if we can get all the repairs done to get all of the clarifiers in those three PTAs, there'll just be three, assuming they all pass. If not, we have a fourth PTA scheduled at the end of the period to catch anything that wasn't tested or if there's any retesting that needs to occur. So that is all underway. I think that's going to be a good opportunity a good picture for the city of how these clarifiers perform in the plant as well. So that was finalized. We did start up on June 16th. We started testing this just this last Sunday. With respect to the final modifications, we're down to some rake arm modifications only on SEC 5. Again, that was the last one we started repairs on. We've got a little bit of draft tube and baffle installations remaining on SCC's 2 and 5. I told you last month we're trying to make sure all the coatings are done inside of those repair areas before those actual repairs are made. And coatings have continued to be a challenge with the weather. We had 13 weather... 13 days last reporting period that I told you about. This time we've had eight weather days in between these presentations. So we've ramped, from our side we've ramped up that coatings effort. We've added a second coatings contractor and then we've added three additional crews onto the site to try and keep that coatings moving as fast as the repairs and the testing are occurring. So I think we're still on track for early fall, assuming all goes well in testing. We'll know as really as we get probably in towards the middle of the summer, whether that's where in early fall that might fall as part of it, but that's our plan to date. Any questions on status? I'm gonna show you a picture or two here next. This is just SEC3. Same thing happened again, won't advance. Hit enter, and I do enter, that happens.

Okay, there we go.

So here are pictures of SEC3 before and after it went into filling and operation. So you see the, what you're looking at is the outside of the, what I would call the skirt or the mixing chamber. You remember the draft tubes on the inside. That's what turns. The mixing chamber is the next row out. This is, I'm gonna walk up to the screen real quick. I'll stop talking. in the picture on the left. So the outside of the area in the picture on the left. So you can see a lot of coding work has been done on that area as well. Other than that, I think we are pleased with the progress. Obviously we would love to move faster, but we're not going to wish away rain in Wichita, particularly in the summer months. So we'll just work around that and do the best we can to get it to you as fast as possible. Any questions for me?

Thank you, Ron, and again, the completion date so far is early fall.

Yeah, we're looking at an early fall transition to the city, and remember, the city will take over the operations of the plant, and then there's still a period of time where the city's gonna test and train on that plant before that becomes operations into the system.

This isn't the same coating used on the reflecting pool, is it?

It is not.

Thank you very much. Okay, thank you. Thank you. City Manager.

For our next topic, we have part one and part two to talk about homeless services within the community. I'm pleased to have our partners from United Way here to come forward and talk about the continuum of care and how that system is working to be a wraparound or comprehensive structure to serve homelessness. So I'll turn it over to Pete Najira from United Way. Pete.

Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting us here. I think everybody knows who I am as the CEO for the United Way of the Plains, but I'm here also as the lead agency for the Continuum of Care. We were here six months ago, I think, or it was November, where we discussed some of the same things, but we went into greater detail, so that presentation is still available. We tried to avoid some of that this time. We touched on some things. There is some new news that we wanna discuss today, and I know there's some new council members here as well. We're gonna follow a certain agenda here. If you didn't know, the Continuum of Care is a federal program. It's a community-wide initiative. It's intended to foster a coalition of the willing. There's no requirement for people to join the coalition, but if you do, there are some requirements that we need to meet. per the federal regulations, and we have a team that keeps us on track. Ultimately, the goal is to put in a holistic system that makes homelessness rare, brief, and non-recurring. It's proven to work in many communities, and we'll talk about that here today. If you didn't know, these are the requirements to have a COC in your city. There are 396 in the nation, so not everybody gets a COC. Part of that is a big commitment from the community to want to do it. Find a lead agent that is willing to do it because there are costs involved. And the United Way has been the lead agent for this continuum of care since 2012. Before that, it was various government agencies. I think the federal rules required federal government to run it or government agencies to run it. When they changed the rules, many cities moved it to a different entity that was maybe more appropriate for them. Now you'll see United Ways run this. You'll see Salvation Armies run it. you will see large homeless entities, nonprofits run it, and sometimes you'll see city or county government run it. But if you choose to run it, you have to do these things. This is manpower, this is competence, this is a burden in paperwork if you're managing a federal grant. So this is what it looks like here, and we've grown it to scale up to the size of the challenge we have in the city. We put a leader, it's Matt Lowe on top of this, but the requirement to have a planning manager to run the grant and enforce compliance and grant money out, that's Cole Schneider's as many of you know. Then we have to do coordinated entry to make sure we're putting people in the system that is prioritized by need, and that's Jen McGill. And then the backbone, all of this is backbone, but you have to have a data-driven system. The HMIS program, it's a very expensive initiative, but we can track data. And data, of course, is only as good as the information that's put in it with the coalition of the willing. So a lot of our challenge is making sure that the nonprofits and partners are using the database so that we all have a clear view of what's happening here. And so we've grown the team to meet the challenge. I've been here six years. This used to be three people. It's now 10. We've also seen the effectiveness of the coalition rise, which I'll show you in a minute. We were asked about the funding structure. This is what it looks like. And so the advisory board of the coalition grants the funds, and United Way competes with everybody else. But you can see how much of the federal grant goes to, for instance, the database. Over 300,000, we put up another 80,000 match. planning grant for coal, coordinated entry for gin. And then we added a grant. We got a separate grant from KDADS to add a special navigator to help us address urgent needs there. And we're going to show a few other things. But this is the foundation or the backbone of any COC from which then everybody can operate on. Matt.

I'm gonna take a few slides to talk a little bit about governance and how we operate as a continuum of care. We essentially have our membership. We have an advisory board and our coalition board provides oversight to the coalition and essentially holds the staff accountable for moving the mission forward. They don't have a lot of real tasks that they do, but one of the big ones that they do is every year when we have our competition, the advisory board is charged with weighing the applications that come in for funding and approving what goes out and what the ultimate application that goes before the federal government. In addition to doing that, we use our advisory board to challenge, to open doors, to break down barriers, to help us to accomplish the goal of making homelessness rare, brief, and non-recurring in our community. We do meet bi-monthly and as needed a lot of times virtually and that kind of thing as needs arise. This is what our governance, our CoC Advisory Board currently looks like. We have 10 members that are just from the community, and myself would make 11. And last year we added five more to that. We added... two members of law enforcement and three people that were elected officials because of the coalition's commitment to work with law enforcement and to work with local government such as yourself to address this cause. We know that the nonprofits, we can't do it on our own. We all must work together to solve this problem. So now we have a robust board that includes both the business community, nonprofit community, the United Way, as well as elected officials and law enforcement that hopefully together we can work to address homelessness in our community. So how does the coalition operate? This is day-to-day operations, and that mostly takes place through the membership. That takes place through all of the partners, the willing who join the coalition and help us address homelessness in our community. So as I said, the membership does the operational work. The full membership meets bimonthly and as needed. but a lot of the work takes place through what we call work groups. So it's smaller groups of coalition members that are tackling specific needs that come up in the community. Because as you can imagine, homelessness is very large and it addresses many, many different populations of people, many different types of homelessness, and so we convene work groups to tackle those things. Some of the current work groups that are currently existence as a youth work group addressing the needs of those who are 18 to 25 we have a veteran work group we have a system planning work group that deals with some some kind of larger barriers or gaps that we have in the system emergency services families membership we also have a data subcommittee that deals specifically with things related to our database and a coordinated entry subcommittee as well So who's in the coalition in homelessness? These are our current members. We have about 25. We regularly are getting and adding new partners to this. Our most recent partners that we added was Kansas Children's Service League, the International Rescue Committee. We currently are, you know, have a request to join from Hunter Health. And so it is very much, you know, as Pete shared, it is a community of the willing, you know, like we invite and we're looking to work with any partner who wants to address homelessness whether that's health care education non-profit street outreach you know all of it and because it takes you know all of that to solve homelessness in our community So a little bit about how we work, and we just kind of created this graphic to kind of show the coalition. People can enter the system at any point, which is why this particular graph is in the form of a circle. Our goal is to intervene at the prevention side of things and to keep people from ever entering homelessness in the first place. However, in the event that they do enter, sometimes we catch people when they come into shelter, sometimes we catch people on street outreach, but either way the case may be, We need the wraparound services regardless of where a person is at in the continuum, whether they are in street outreach, whether they're in shelter, whether they're in housing. People need ongoing support to stay housed. These are the wraparound services with the coalition in homelessness at the middle. Another way to look at this, and I kind of put this in more of a a linear graph. I could not fit it all on one piece of paper. This is very much a rough draft that we will make pretty as time goes on, but it shows many of the partners and kind of where they fit within each one of these slots. And I try to make it as linear as possible, keeping in mind that circular graph that this is not how it always works. People enter at different points throughout this whole graph, but we have housing-focused street outreach, night-by-night emergency shelters, program-focused shelter, then you have rapid rehousing, which is meant to be short-term rental assistance and case management support, typically for up to a year. Then you have transitional housing, and I kinda got them backwards, but you have community-wide housing navigators, permanent supportive housing, other permanent housing, and then of course all the wraparound services that fit throughout the entire thing. So I'm just trying to create a couple of different ways that you can look at that, and I'd be happy to share this more in detail with you separately. Last year, with our last grant cycle, these are the funded partners that the coalition board elected to fund. All of these are rapid rehousing and permanent supportive housing programs. Again, rapid rehousing being... Ideal for those who just need short-term support and case management. We can serve people up to a year. Permanent supportive housing being more for the complex needs of people who are typically chronically homeless, have at least one disabling condition. And then we have one hybrid program that's in there that's called a transitional rapid rehousing that incorporates both you know, aspects of transitional and permanent housing. So our total grant for this year is $3.4 million roughly. You have the match dollars, you know, out there to the side and our application is currently open and we will reshuffle the deck and see what comes of it. With that, I'm gonna hand it back over to Pete.

And we're going to talk about that funding cycle here in a minute later in the presentation because it's changing for 2026. You'll also see it was 3.5 million. We've increased it by 600,000 year on year. And that comes from a grading of the coalition and its effectiveness. So the federal government has agreed that Wichita continues to do well and honors requested increases in dollars because of our productivity. These are some of the stats of the coalition that I want to make sure we're all aware of a bit. Of the 396 coalitions in America, none are what they call a high-performing community. It's an HPC. These are very strict standards that HUD has to say you are the best of the best. If you see one of them at top is inflow and outflow, we're almost at equilibrium, a functional zero, right? How many are going in or how many are going out? That is a sign of success that coalition is working. But on the far right here,

51 average days homeless.

The national average is 176 days. So Wichita is putting people out of the shelter into housing, some sort of housing, in 51 days compared to the rest of the country. High performing communities, the goal is 20 days. No one's ever made it. We can get close, but to get to 20, you need a lot of help on the prevention side and on the exit side, which we'll address. Yes, sir.

Are these people that are looking for the services or have made contact with you, the 51 days? I know we have a lot of chronic people who are homeless out there, but so I'm just trying to get a little clarification on that 51 days. Is that?

Those are people that were housed. And so certainly if you look at the people that were still homeless, they can exceed that.

Oh, okay. So these are people that are coming and looking to you guys for services.

They either come looking or we go find them. Either way, they say yes to housing and we're able to get them into housing.

Okay, thank you.

Another thing about Wichita, we know through the system that of the people who come to the continuum for help, 80% resolve on their own. 80% resolve on their own, and so we're addressing the 20% here. I told you about the 51 days, so that's very close to top in the country. The other one right here. 82% of people we house stay in the housing within two years. High performing communities, the goal is 85. We are three percentage points from meeting the federal government's top of the top COC.

Another quick question. So you say 20 or 80% resolve it on their own? So that means just outside the program they find other avenues or family members or?

Yes. Correct. They come into shelter, short time, they leave, they go move in with family, they go into housing, they go on about their way and they don't come back.

especially a working family, Alice families, they just missed the paycheck. Uh, they just need to bounce back and get through a month, work up, get their savings back and they're back, you know, renting again. Okay.

So that's also, um, that's a different definition cause I know we're dealing with three or four different definitions of homeless. Um, so that could still be technically homeless if they're living with a family or something like that as well.

Well, and of course we want everybody to have their own house and that means building more homes.

Yeah.

Or apartments.

So that's more off the street is more what you're indicating. Yeah.

Okay. The continuum of care operates off of the definition of what we call literally homeless, meaning they're in a shelter or in a place not meant for habitation. And so, yes, these people that are exiting and they're moving in with family or friends, as long as it's a permanent tenure, like it's not defined that it's going to be a temporary nature that mom or dad or cousin says you can come, but you can only stay a week, then you gotta go, we would consider that temporary. Those would still be included in kind of our not permanently housed number, but if they've moved in and that family member says you can have the basement, that's yours and stay as long as you need until you can get back on your feet, that's considered a permanent dwelling by HUD definition.

Okay, thank you. Mike, anybody who has a recent college graduate living at home, Are they homeless? I mean, we see that a lot in the nation now.

Follow-up question then because that is something that I think gets confusing because the point in time count is much lower than this number. However, just what you said, your son or daughter who is home from college during the summer is considered homeless?

No, no, we're not tracking it.

Okay, but so USD 259, McKinney-Vento does, though. So that's why I'm very confused because that number is higher. McKinney-Vento says that there are 2,000 families that are experiencing homelessness. So if they're doubling up, meaning they're living with grandpa and grandma, that's considered homeless. Is that accurate?

According to McKinney-Vento, there's four categories of homelessness, and one of them is this McKinney-Vento, typically reserved for youth. that if a family is doubling up, it's not necessarily two adults doubling up, but if there's children involved, you know, McKinney-Vento, you know, they recognize all of those. And we wanna build a system, I wanna be clear, we wanna build a system to where all of those families have their own homes as well. However, with the, the federal grant that we have for the continuum of care it focuses very much on the literally homeless addressing those in shelters or in places not meant for habitation and focusing all of our resources on that because those are the people that are the most vulnerable and most likely to die or have something bad happen to them and i didn't mean to confuse the issue mayor i was talking more about affordability because my child is not going to be a drain on the system it's more about affordability in america some of the other programs you're talking about are income related

on the federal grant.

I have another follow-up question. When I first came to America, my family was sponsored by my grandpa. We lived with my grandpa and grandma for a long period of time. Would I be considered homeless then? Because we were children. You're telling me McKinney-Vento says that if kids are... I need a better definition. Can someone explain the McKinney-Vento definition of homeless for children?

I would probably think it's probably best if you want more of a deep dive in the McKinney-Vento to get an expert that works in the McKinney-Vento program. I'm telling you that a family that has experienced homelessness and is living with a family member or living in a hotel or motel, by McKinney-Vento's definition, they'd be considered homeless. You coming to America... if you had a home where you came from and you moved in with grandma and grandpa you never experienced the night on the street you never experienced homelessness there was never a basis to start with to identify you as being homeless report into the system become come into the hmis in your case in my son's case we're not trying to address you know my college well doubling up sometimes is considered homelessness so that's why i wanted

I FEEL LIKE COMMUNITY NEEDS TO UNDERSTAND THOSE DIFFERENT DEFINITIONS BECAUSE WE USE THE POINT IN TIME COUNT AND THAT NUMBER IS UNDER 1,000. AND THEN IN THE COMMUNITY I HEAR THIS 2,000 NUMBER AND THEY TELL ME IT'S THE MCKINNEY VENTO NUMBER. SO I NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS ACTUALLY THE NUMBER.

MAYOR, MAYOR, IF I MAY, YES, ACCORDING TO MCKINNEY VENTO SERVICES, FAMILIES ARE TEMPORARILY DEFINED AS HOMELESSNESS UNDER DOUBLED UP LIVING WITH A FRIEND OR RELATIVE. staying in a motel or a hotel, living in an emergency transitional or domestic violence shelter, or living in a car, public place, abandoned building, or campground. So to your point, given your scenario, yes, if you were doubling up with your grandparents and your parents and their children were staying with them, according to McKinney-Vento, which is a federally funded program, you would be considered qualified for that program.

I mean it's all about we asked the question as always where did you sleep last night and how they answer that question is how we identify whether they're homeless or not. I mean, it sounds to me like if they're doubling up, that is a definition. I want to be clear on the McKinney-Vento. They ask that when you go to register for school, they hand you a piece of paper that they fill out. And if they say they slept with family, they slept in a hotel, then they go on the McKinney-Vento list. That is not the list that our coalition in homelessness currently is operating off of, nor do we really address that particularly. It's not a priority at this time.

One more quick question on the point in time count. That is simply people who, at that point, are on the street. So I know there's another definition that, as far as eligibility for some grants and housing grants and whatnot, you have to be homeless for a year, documented homeless. And then there's another pathway. That's not included in point in time. It's strictly on that particular night. It could have been, I got it. kicked out or evicted yesterday, but I'm technically homeless on that night.

Yes, it includes both.

Okay.

We just have on this slide right here, some of these programs specifically are housing for those people that have a year or more of that homeless that are considered chronic, but both, whether you're homeless for one night or you're homeless for two years on the night of that point time count, if you are homeless, you get counted in that number.

Appreciate that. Yeah, they changed the definitions on the point in time count for federal grants a decade ago or so.

Well, the key question is always, where did you sleep last night? And how people answer that question is how they can determine whether they're going to get included in the point in time count or not. So again, going back to McKinney-Vento, they said, I slept in a hotel last night. According to our continuum of care, that is not counted in the point in time count. If they said I slept with my brother, you're not literally homeless on the night of the point in time count, not counted.

Okay, thank you.

All great questions that illustrate the complexity of the challenge for sure. I think maybe more accurately, this data shows for those people who come in contact with the continuum of care, they do see some success rate here. To give more context about it nationally, how the COC in Kansas is operating, we're one of only 11 states that has a homeless rate lower than the other 39, as you can see here in addressing homelessness. And you can see how our neighboring states are challenged a bit more than how Kansas is working. And this is part of a... We have four COCs in the state of Kansas and how the four of them are working to address homelessness in the state.

Pete, is this data from the 2026 point in time or is this from the 2025?

I don't know that it's, is it based on the point in time count? Point in time count is just one metric for one given day, right? When you look at the whole spectrum, of the averages of all 365 days, you get a different view.

I forgot where we sourced this from. It's from 26 because not all of the COCs in the state have reported their numbers yet.

this would be based on point in time on those numbers because the 2000 number is different than 3000 number and then if we look at is it 2858 see if my eyesight's still good 2650 oh okay it was not good um and then the wichita number of reporting time count last year could you remind me what that number is Which one? 736. 736. And so that's our percent out of the, when we're looking at other counties as well, do we see most of it in Wyandotte or where, Douglas County?

Well, Topeka has about similar numbers. And then the rest of the state has the other lion's share of it. Johnson County is growing, but it's a much smaller portion. Wyandotte, I'm not 100% sure on Wyandotte's.

So going to the point in time count, I know that I've volunteered for the past couple years We don't as part of that ask them how long they've been in Cedric County, correct?

We do not ask Was there a reason we didn't collect it this year I because we're already collecting it as a as a part of our general street outreach shelter like we're getting much more data by collecting it as a part of the enrollments into the homeless service system as opposed to that one point in time and we were trying not to add questions to already you know somewhat irritated people that were bothering you know what i'm saying like we just don't want to badger them with a bunch of questions we already have a lot of questions we have to ask and so it was one of the ones that got kind of pulled out as saying it's not necessary, we're collecting it in another place, let's don't ask it.

I think for us it's necessary to figure out what percent of our homeless population is coming from Wichita or not. Would you provide that information on a subsequent slide here?

I think in another slide we have it coming up here when we talk about the point in time. But I know Council Member Glasscock, you're on the advisory board for the COC and so it can be a discussion in that board.

Oh yeah, I will bring that up, thank you.

There's other reasons having the COC has other advantages by partnering with the United Way. And we just wanted to show what we think helps contribute to the success of the COC, even though it's challenged. why it is able to do as well as it can is because some of these wraparound services, particularly around the social determinants of health, but as long as the United Way can, and it's a very unpredictable donor landscape right now under some stress, we're still committing about $2 million in these service providers to strengthen the continuum of care. Another part of what I think everybody saw that the United Way is attempting to do is help Second Light be the effective tool we all envision it to be for the continuum of care. I mean, thanks to the city government and getting it going and built, now we want to put that asset to use. And we know it, any business leader knows it's going to take some months if not years to get it going and to ramp it up. I know they have two employees now. but they're building their connections with partners. They need operating funds. I hope it's a challenge to the city just like we challenge businesses to help unlock a $1 million challenge grant available to double the money to bring Second Light into the continuum of care and see our numbers even get better in serving this population. This is a new thing that's happening this summer. We talked about what the continuum looked like before. Let's see if it works. So this right side here we're adding to the continuum in addition to the KDADS grant and the federal grant. We secured a 1.1 million grant for four years, well two years guaranteed, up to four years that is restricted to focus on family homelessness. And so that program is gonna roll out beginning July 1. Matt is leading that. We're hiring for these positions already, partnering with other agencies who focus on family homelessness, and we hope that this is going to be another tool with second light this year to strengthen the continuum of care.

I'm gonna go back to this slide here. I did want to, since we had such a nice conversation about the McKinney-Vento, this program will serve those who are doubled up and who are living in motels. When we were first talking about this grant, I thought, how wonderful would it be if we could partner with McKinney-Vento and say, give us your list, and we commit to housing as many of these as possible by the end of the school year. That's my heart with it. As he said, we're looking for a program manager to kind of help run that program, but we'll be able to report back some you know, good data here in the coming months. We hope to create a dashboard and that kind of thing to report the progress.

Now Matt, so sorry to interrupt.

No worries.

So when you talk about going to these entities and asking them for a list, this is a technical question. I'm assuming there might be some laws that prohibit that. Yes. Like I know in higher education, there's FERPA laws, right? Medical, there's HIPAA laws, right? And so help me understand why we can't go into the HMIS system and pull that information.

So McKinney-Vento does not currently enter data into the HMIS system of those who are coming into the school district. They are a part-ish of the continuum of care. This relationship is not as strong as it could be. I will just say that. We would love to have them more at the table. Again, it's a community of the willing. All we can do is throw out the invite. So many times if people... At one point we had a, one of our board members was on the McKinney Vivinto team, but they've since fallen off and we've not had a strong engagement. That being said, we do work closely with the family providers, the Family Promise of Greater Wichita, St. Anthony Family Shelter, Humankind Ministries, Children First CEO. And I've talked earlier about work groups and how the work is done at an operational level in the form of work groups. The family providers is one of those work groups, and this was really birthed out of bringing those family providers together and saying, what is the ideal experience? Ideally, we don't want any family to experience homelessness, but what does it look like in a perfect world for a family facing housing insecurity to go from first experiencing that crisis all the way to working through the crisis and being stably housed once again. And we, you know, we vision boarded all of that. And then we said, okay, where are the gaps? And one of the things we identified was what we called centralized access. We felt like families were being bounced around, having to call too many places and they were, many were falling through the cracks. So we honed in on that and said, what do we need to do to, to shore that up to, so that, um, It's kind of like a second light, if you will, but for families. It's a one-stop shop. They got one call to make. They get connected with a navigator. We try to solve the problem. If we can't solve the problem, we connect them to shelter, but they're not having to do all of the different things. And so out of that work... kind of birthed this grant, because then this grant came along, and we're like, how wonderful that we can tie in these dollars, you know, in with this family program, and we're set to launch this thing in July. We're going to do a soft launch, but ideally, any family facing housing insecurity can call 211, and 211 will ask a few questions. You know, do you have children in the home? Where did you stay last night? You know, that kind of thing. Any families who are experiencing, they're doubled up, they're living with family friends, they're in a hotel or motel, they have eviction notice in hand or no utilities, immediately get scheduled an appointment with a family housing navigator. Those staff people that you just saw appear on the screen. Family Promise is also adding some, Children First. Anyway, they will have a same day appointment and we will sit down with them and say, what is it gonna take to solve this issue for you today?

That's amazing.

If we can solve it, we're gonna solve it. If not, we'll connect them to shelter.

I appreciate that and I love the same day. Just to follow up for you about the HMIS, I want to make sure I'm understanding this correctly. Providers who are part or who are working with this population of unhoused Wichitans are not expected and or required to insert data into the HMIS system.

Many are, not all are. If you receive federal funding, you are required to. Some others are not required to but strongly encouraged to because we're only as good as our data and if an entity is not doing that, we will try to problem solve with them to get the data, but not all do, but most do, 95% do.

And I'm assuming that there are maybe some organizations who don't receive federal funds, right? So they're not required for the federal government to enter data into the HMIS, but they're receiving some level of government funds, perhaps maybe local government funds. DO WE HAVE ANY PARAMETERS, CITY MANAGER, AROUND REQUIRING THOSE ENTITIES THAT WE ARE FUNDING TO ENTER DATA INTO THE HMIS SYSTEM? WE DO. PERFECT. THANK YOU.

Yes, and the United Way has done similar. Some of those funded organizations that we fund from the United Way standpoint, we've also included that in their funding agreements that they will also include data in HMIS. So yes, there are ways that we can entice people to share that data with us. And furthermore, another value add to the community that Most Continuums of Care charge people to have access to this database. We offer it free of charge to all nonprofits, and it is essentially a free database that they can use, that they don't, that they can, we can create custom reports, that we can do all, they can collect all of the data that they need to report otherwise, you know, notes, services, the whole nine yards, so. Yes, sir, do you have a question?

is that not okay all right cool i didn't think so just to share protocol workshop is for council members to ask questions of presenters so thank you for the audience for attending you can always contact your council member with your feedback but this is a time for council to provide feedback for staff to provide policy direction for them

Thank you. So I will move on to our Shelter Connect. This is a recently launched mobile friendly website that functions very much like an app. It's meant to show in real time shelter bed availability in our community. There is a QR code there. It is a live QR code. So please, by all means, if you're not signed up for that and you're interested in that, do so. You'll see on the right hand side, this is what it looks like. This is just a screenshot of the shelters of six of them. I know it's very small, but it shows the name of the shelter, the address, how many open beds there are, how to get a hold of them, when intake hours are. It shows when it was last updated. You can see at the time that we I did this screenshot. Children first, it's red because there were no units or no beds. Crossroads had two open beds. Emporia House had 13. Family Promise had none. Humankind had one family bed, one single adult bed, and Second Light had none. This is something that is really kind of new to the space and I keep, we can scale this. Right now, for example, Second Life, this is just night by night. But I'm like, we don't have the program beds. We need the program beds in there. This is something that could be scalable to transitional programs. Think of like recovery programs like Oxford House and that kind of thing. I mean, it's something that we can really, a community tool that the coalition is offering to the community to use and to help us build so that it is a useful asset to the community.

I think that's very important to scale this so that the information is there, especially when the hot team goes out, they know what's available and what's not available.

And the hot team is one of the primary things that I had, not just hot team, but the Wichita police department, many officers already have access to this and it is meant to be so that they can look when you're thinking about your ordinances, they can go and we have a single adult and it's like, well, what do you know? there's a bed there for you at Humankind Inn, so therefore you can't stay here, you know, that kind of thing. So it has a double purpose. Obviously, the people experiencing homelessness are our primary concern, but it does help with giving resources to our officers to be able to know where to take people or to send people.

Are the available providers pretty good about keeping this updated?

Yes, they are very good, and if I identify, like myself or Haley, our HMIS administrator, if we identify people gaps, then we're reaching out and saying, Hey, I noticed it hadn't been updated lately. Where are we at?

This would be a quick question. Sorry for the chief. Uh, do we provide this a link to this, to all of our officers or just those on the hot team? So would it be helpful to have all officers have access to the information? updated from each one of the providers?

That's about a month. He just said it's updated pretty frequently. Not your experience? Okay.

Well, if you come across, I mean, it's only as we can only encourage participation as much as we have information. And so I was not aware of that. I've made one call myself and they had a certainly valid explanation as to why it wasn't updated. It's been my experience. I'm checking it regularly and I'm seeing the dates where people are updating it now.

If our officers experience that, who do they reach out to you directly as the manager of this or who would they reach out to?

Myself or Haley Button, our HMIS administrator. Either one of us, we will address it immediately. However, I will say there are some situations where often I'll point out the second light as an example. We have emergency shelter beds. It's not really very helpful because they open, this is for the 30 beds, if they open the door at four o'clock and the first 30 people come in and then they close the door, it's like, this isn't helpful for that. This is more helpful to see like where are beds that I can take someone. Like I can't take someone to Second Light right now if they can't get into four o'clock and then the beds are full by 4.15. You get what I'm saying? So it's only helpful to have beds that are available.

It's only 30 days running. Yeah, it's very new. So I think we'll work out some of the kinks. All right.

THIS IS A SIDE CONVERSATION THAT I WANT THIS TO BE A CITY MANAGER DIRECTED. I CAN ALREADY SEE THAT THIS IS A CHALLENGE BECAUSE SECOND LIGHT ONLY HAS CURRENTLY NIGHT BY NIGHT BEDS 30. THEY ALSO HAVE 100 TRANSITIONAL BEDS OR PROGRAM BEDS. PROGRAM BEDS. I would like to see and I would like to hear the council increase the capacity of these night-by-night shelter beds that are available sooner than this 4 o'clock timeframe so that, again, we can enforce a law that we have in the books right now.

I think I will pitch in there. I think the intent from the moment we did this, from the moment I came on council two and a half years ago, and when Councilman Glass redirected funding for Second Light, the intent was always to have a 24-7 availability of shelter beds. I think that is something Second Light has to come to, and we just have to find a way for them to have those shelter beds available, not at 4 o'clock, but any time during the day. So if an officer sees someone, they can take them to the shelter. So I think that's been a point of contention among some of the providers and the enforcement people, hot team and stuff, and I think that Second Light has to be able to do that.

Agreed 100%. When we allocated money originally, that was why I supported allocation of money for this facility. And then unbeknownst to me, and I think some of my colleagues on the council, we moved to from just shelter beds to program beds, and that's not a discussion we've had. And so I know that we'll have this when we have the budget conversation. I know that we'll probably have more presentations about it today, but I will not support more funding for their operations unless it's primarily towards shelter beds and that will be a requirement for further support for me.

Mr. Manager, is this a conversation that would be more appropriate during the budget presentation and not necessarily this presentation or at least following this presentation.

We will have more detailed conversation as part of the budget for some specific dollar amounts but I think it's helpful in this context to hear how Second Light fits with the overall structure of the continuum for service delivery. So I think this is and then we can get into council's goals and objectives for specific providers such as Second Light, which we'll do in our next presentation.

Well, I think it matters if the chief's saying that this information is updated real time, we're talking about that there's only 30 beds available. When this was captured, there were no available beds at Second Light. If we had the shelter beds, which was what I was promised when allocating money, We wouldn't have that problem right there, where then the chief wouldn't have places to take people as well. And so when I hear from residents, it's about the lack of shelter beds available. And then given that, we also can't enforce anti-camping ordinances when shelter beds are not available. And so I do think it's applicable to conversations.

I AGREE. I WANT TO BE RESPECTFUL TO THE PRESENTERS AND LET THEM GET THROUGH THEIR PRESENTATIONS. I SEE ON PAGE 20 THERE'S ACTUALLY AN IDEA ON WHERE POLICYMAKERS CAN HELP. I WANT TO MAKE SURE WE GET THROUGH THAT. I'M HAPPY TO REVISIT THIS CONVERSATION FOLLOWING THIS PRESENTATION, BUT I DO THINK IT'S GERMANE TO THE TOPIC.

THANK YOU. I WILL MOVE ON. I DIDN'T MEAN TO OPEN UP A Anything with that? I will say Second Light is very much, we appreciate the work they do in a united way. Step forward with their gift. I mean, we are 100% supportive of their mission and I was not in any way trying to create any kind of challenges for them. Okay, so initiatives for 2026, in addition to mentioning the DCF TANF grant in our HUD notice of funding opportunity that is currently, this is kind of our grant that we use to do a lot of the programming that we have for housing. That application is currently open. This year, HUD has expanded what we can fund. And for the last many, many years, we've only been able to fund housing programs, meaning permanent supportive housing or rapid rehousing. This year, in an effort to try to create holistic support for people coming out of homelessness and a focus on self-sufficiency, we have opened the funding up to support permanent supportive housing, rapid rehousing, transitional housing, street outreach, workforce development, substance use treatment programs, as well as mental health treatment programs, and others that kind of will help people coming out of homelessness. These are the ones that our coalition has identified as being to enable stabilizing people coming out of homelessness. We are also going to be working with our coalition board to develop a strategic plan, looking at homelessness holistically to address what our strategic goals are for the next three to five years as a coalition of providers. And we will start doing that planning process here in the next month or two.

If I may, if you could go back, what are the biggest gaps that you see currently? I know mental health treatment is obviously a big one. That's one I can't wrap my head around because we need state partners to get involved in that one. Yes. And I know substance use treatment programs. We have the opioid RFP that will be out here in a couple of weeks. What, by your guys' eyes, are the biggest gaps the biggest challenges as far as these issues go on this screen right here?

I will always say homelessness is a housing problem. We all know people who have loved ones who have mental illnesses, substance use disorders who are also living in homes. I do believe that, and I'm gonna get into slides, that a lot of what is addressed affecting homelessness has to do with affordability and housing in our community. So I'm just gonna set that out there first. But if we're looking at the housing stock as it currently stands and the work that we're doing, we're doing work in all of these areas. There is certainly gaps. The biggest gaps, workforce development, mental health treatment because it's very hard to tell someone who's living on the street to go find a job. Someone mentioned not having an address, it's kind of hard, like how do they take a shower to be able to put the work clothes on, to use the computer, how do they get to the job interview, all of those kinds of things. So having workforce programs that are specifically focused, because one nice thing about this grant is that if we fund these programs, they are dedicated to this population. So if we fund a workforce development program, they can't just serve the general, they can with their other programs, but with this funding, it would have to be for homeless individuals. If we fund a mental health treatment program, the way I'm envisioning it is it takes six weeks or however long it is to get into ComCare that we can, immediately deploy a mental health provider who can do an assessment, who can do the things that are needed to start treatment now, and then bridge over to the ComCare or to the other mental health provider in the community. So those are kind of the big ones.

Is ComCare good enough for the treatment? I know we have people out there that maybe need state hospitals or something like that.

There are certainly people that are hardest to engage and others that need something more than what the current system has to offer. And I believe, and we are working on that, kind of in this hardest to engage pilot. And we're actually in the process of trying to scale that to identify how many are we talking about specifically. But that's something more than what the coalition can offer at this time.

I appreciate that. Thank you.

Matt, so I serve on the Workforce Alliance board, and one of the things that we had in our last board meeting was a grant that was received for specifically individuals facing homelessness and workforce. So I want to make sure that things are being in alignment. I know that Workforce Alliance I don't think is one of the COC PARTNERS, BUT MAKING SURE THINGS ARE WORKING IN TANDEM SO IT IS NOT DUPLICATION. IN ADDITION, WHEN IT COMES TO STREET OUTREACH, I HAVE TWO QUESTIONS. NUMBER ONE, HOW MANY STREET OUTREACH WORKERS DO WE ACTUALLY HAVE HOLISTICALLY IN THE SYSTEM? I KNOW THAT THE CITY OF WICHITA RECEIVED A GRANT FROM QUICK TRIP TO DO STREET OUTREACH SPECIFICALLY. SO I GUESS WE HAVE TWO IN THE CITY OF WICHITA, MAYBE MORE I'LL HAVE SALLY OR WE HAVE A TOTAL OF THREE FULL-TIME, THREE FULL-TIME STREET OUTREACH WORKERS. AND I THINK THAT THIS CONVERSATION IS APPROPRIATE TO THIS ECOSYSTEM BECAUSE I UNDERSTAND THE FRUSTRATION FROM LAW ENFORCEMENT THAT WE HAVE ALL THESE RESOURCES. BY THE WAY, THIS IS UPDATED EVERY QUARTER. THANK YOU TO THE UNITED WAY OF THE PLANES. THIS IS A ONE-PAGER RESOURCE GUIDE. that shows all the resources available in our community. And it's actually not exhaustive. There are some that are maybe not on the list. But among them is shelter, clothing, food, employment and job training, children and youth, counseling, medical, alcohol and drug services, housing, debt credit, and budget counseling. So this is a great resource. This is a side note. This is a plug for United Way. Thank you for doing this. But it also shows me that there's a lot of resources here. And our officers are not case managers. And I don't expect our officers to know all these resources. However, outreach workers would probably know this list a little bit more intimately. So I think the first point of contact when it comes to an individual facing homelessness really should be a street outreach worker, not a police officer, showing them resources. But then if they don't want to engage with these resources, then law enforcement can come in. I think there's a step. And right now, I feel like everything's being thrown at the police department saying, you're the first to do all of these things. And they're not... their official duty is law enforcement. And so we have laws and they want to enforce laws, but if they're there to do street outreach, it's kind of difficult for them to do that double duty. So holistically, how many street outreach workers do we have? City of Wichita has three full-time street outreach workers.

Thank you for asking that question. Street outreach is something that is, I think, growing in our community, and I want to differentiate. There are two different kinds of street outreach in my mind. There is street outreach that goes out and hands someone a blanket. and gives them a sandwich and says, how can I pray for you? Have a nice day, stay warm and well fed, or whatever the case may be. Then we have what we call housing-focused street outreach. And our continuum of care is very much focused on the housing-focused street outreach side of things. I'm extremely grateful for the city of Wichita and the three outreach workers that you all have. I'm thankful to Quick Trip for funding that. The United Way of the Plains, as you saw in our organizational chart earlier, we also have three, we call them housing navigators, because I really wanted to focus in on you're not just doing street outreach, you're working with people for housing. Shelter is certainly one of those options. It has not traditionally, as I think our law enforcement friends have said, that has not traditionally been much of an option for our street outreach workers. Because when they go out and they're engaging people in encampments, They have too many things. They say they can't go. They got pets. They got dogs. They got partners. They got all the reasons why they can't go to shelter. And if they refuse, we can't make them go. And so we're going to work with them right there on housing. We have three street outreach workers that do housing navigation, as does the city of Wichita. ICT Street Team does some street outreach. Humankind Ministries has a street outreach worker. I'm not sure how much they're doing anymore. Those are the main ones, yeah.

Matt, I still remember on the Homelessness Task Force over two years ago, I still remember a comment you made and it stuck in my mind. You said at that time we will need a dozen a dozen housing navigators or outreach people. So I think that's, is that still a good number?

I think so. I mean, cause we've, we'll talk about, we haven't got to the point in time count specifically at the breakdowns, but if you look at on any given day, we say we have 200 unsheltered people, like what is a caseload for a, you know, a case manager, we'll say it's 20, you know, well that right there is gonna tell you you need at least 10 or 11 outreach workers. And I wanna clarify as well, because all of our outreach workers, they all have caseloads. So they're doing street outreach. We do a coordinated street outreach event every Thursday for all providers to where we can go out together. Oftentimes the places they go are the lists that they get directly from the hot team. They're saying, these are the complaints that we've got, they'll go out and do outreach in those spots. every Thursday. In addition to that, they're going out, we've divided up the county because we are the Sedgwick County's continuum of care to ensure that we have coverage over the entire county. Our staff at the United Way makes sure that we hit every corner of the county, but there's three of them. And in addition to doing that street outreach, they have a caseload of about 20 clients that are in some process of housing. They're either in a unit, needing ongoing support, or they're working with them to get into a unit. So it's a very heavy lift and something that is relatively new to this community. We added these housing navigators just a couple of years ago because we saw the need. The housing department had been saying it for years that we needed more case managers in this space. And so we leaned into it, kind of wrote some grants, got some things to get that going. and then I'm thrilled to see that the city housing department is continuing to add, to scale that, because we need to scale the work that's being done in the community. I agree, we can't rely on, as much as, as amazing as the homeless outreach team is, they do phenomenal work, and they very much do the work of case managers. There's still only three of them, too, you know, it's like, so yes, that would be a gap in our community.

Matt, you gave a really great explanation between two different types of street outreach workers, ones that are, I guess, immediate needs focused, and the other is the housing focused. And so if I added correctly, the housing focus, you have three at United Way, there's three at the city, There's one at ICT Street.

One, yes. And United Way recently funded them to add a housing navigator at ICT Street Team. I will also throw in that Open Door has, they've had one navigator that was working with primarily people at Open Door, but that receives a caseload from our coordinated entry system. So sometimes they're not at Open Door, sometimes they are on the street. And they've recently received funding to add a second one beginning in July. So that would take us to nine, yes, in our community.

focused on housing individuals who are facing homelessness. The other group, the immediate needs focus, are they coordinated?

They're loosely coordinated. It's very grassroots in nature. I mean, it's often church members, church groups, people that feel passionate about the unhoused in our community. They get a group together, a small group, Bible study, whatever, and they say, let's go down to the Lord's Diner and give out blankets. And so they go do that. But it's not tied to any kind of really housing resource. When we identify those groups, we engage them and we try to invite them to be a part of our continuum, and we offer to go with them or to send out navigators. So some examples would be the Lord's Diner, for example. We were sending our housing navigators once a week, and they would set up a table at the Lord's Diner, put a little sign that says, interested in housing, and then they would engage with people. We also do that at City Life Church. We've done it at the ICT Street Team events. And so our navigators will go out with these grassroots people that want to do this work and try to add the housing focus aspect to it. But in reality, we really, more than anything, want to defer people to the places where resources are, such as the Lord's Diner, such as Second Light, Open Door, and not try to go out and duplicate that service by providing it on the street.

I APPRECIATE YOU EXPLAINING THE TWO DIFFERENT GROUPS. THE HOUSING FOCUS GROUP IS MUCH MORE COORDINATED, REALLY FOCUSED ON THE INDIVIDUAL GETTING OUT OF THEIR HOMELESSNESS SITUATION INTO EITHER SHELTERING, TRANSITIONAL HOUSING, HOUSING IN GENERAL. THE IMMEDIATE NEEDS FOCUS GROUP IS NOT COORDINATED, AND THEY ARE DOING IT BY THEMSELVES, AND I GUESS I'M A LITTLE I understand where their hearts are. But is that actually helping? Because I actually got an email from someone at St. John's Episcopal Church. This is just north of Open Door. And they have done a lot of things to help individuals facing homelessness. But now they're to the point where they are asking for the city to come help them because individuals have now become very much more aggressive and threatening. And they're frustrated because they have been helping with sandwich Saturdays, shower up, and all these things, uncoordinated, by the way. And now they're asking for this assistance. But at the same time, we do have a coordinated effort going on. And if churches would help with the coordinated effort, would that be more helpful?

One hundred percent. We invite, I mean, as much as we appreciate St. John's Episcopal Church for sure, but we invite the faith community and all of these groups to come together, to come, you know, be a part of the coalition. Let's work on this together. At one point, one of the work groups was a grassroots work group where we would try to convene them all and try to direct them. And we continue to do that work. And so, yes, it is not helpful to hand someone a blanket or a sandwich. It does feed them for the day. And so I have that empathy that when you see someone who's cold, you know, on the sidewalk and you want to, and they won't go to shelter, you know, something needs to be done so that we can save their life. But as a, so I'm going to set that aside, but as a general rule, just going out and handing out sandwiches, I drove down second street the other day, coming through old town, past the bridge and look to the left. And there are people and all over, there's just clothes all over the sidewalk where somebody had just set totes of clothes. And from that same vantage point, I can see the clothes closet at open door right up here ahead. So it's like, why are we dumping clothes on the sidewalk when there's a clothes closet right there? And so that is not helpful to our community in any shape or form.

I just wanted to make a quick comment, if I may, and thank you. You're doing a wonderful job. I appreciate it. Director Stang, I remember a couple years ago, you and I were talking about this, and you mentioned that your wish, if we would do it right, is all of these very well-intentioned, empathetic groups, especially the faith community, instead of expending their resources on buying clothes or buying food to distribute or whatever it may be, if they would make a donation to Second Light or to Union Rescue Mission or to Open Door so that it will help people to get help instead of, again, just a very temporary fix. We also talk about the fact that there's approximately the same number of faith-based organizations in our community as homeless. And if every faith-based organization in our community would commit to financially supporting if you will one individual at at second light think of the impact that that could make so um everything i know about housing i've learned from director staying and i know this is the one thing that you're very adamant about is if we could be more intentional in our efforts instead of you know doing what feels good immediately thank you

Thank you, Councilwoman Tuttle. All right, we'll carry on. Our current status, this is where we get kind of into just some of the stats and things that you've asked about. 38% of Sedgwick County households are living paycheck to paycheck. This is what we call our ALICE population, asset limited, income constrained, but employed. 38%, I mean, we're talking 200,000 people in our county that are living paycheck to paycheck. 62% of this population who rent are cost burdened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on housing. So again, you're doing the math. There's still upwards of 100, 125,000 people in our community that are cost burdened living paycheck to paycheck. The number of newly homeless has grown by 147% in just six years. These are new people to our system that are falling into homelessness because they are not able to afford their housing any longer. The fastest growing population is seniors over the age of 65. That percentage doubled in the last six years. So it was 3% of our population, now it's 6%. The actual number is far higher than that. Like it went from like, two digits, like almost 80 people to like 400. Again, but because of the increase in homelessness overall, the percentage was only a double in the last six years. And so whenever we have these anecdotal things, we'll say, well, it's all because of the drugs and the mental illness. Seniors over the age of 65. So you mean to tell me that for all of these years they had these mental health concerns and now all of a sudden because they're 65 that they're so mentally ill that they can't live in their housing anymore? It tells me that there's got to be something else going on that's driving this. Individuals who experience homelessness, I won't get into these because Pete already shared those, but our system exited 1,360 people to permanent housing. Of the 3,358, that comes to 41%. Doing phenomenal work as a continuum of care, but again, that's using all of our resources, which speaks to the need. More resources are needed. We're doing what we can, but we can only do with what we got. The percentage of people housed, again, that's 82%, and then there's the stat about Sedgwick County. 82% of our people experiencing homelessness came from Sedgwick County, meaning 18% came from other places.

On that real quick, the Cedric County, is that their residents of Cedric County for a year? Is there like a time limit for that a year? Do we have any deeper data as to where the other 18% came from or part of that 82% who maybe they just recently came to Cedric County? Do we have any deeper data?

I can run the data and send it to you if you like after this presentation. Because it does, it breaks it down by county and it would break it down by you know, six months to a year, three to six months, zero to three months, that kind of thing.

And would you say that the majority from outside Cedric County are still from inside Kansas or?

Most are from still in Kansas. They're just from other counties. Okay, thank you. Yes.

The statistics we got last year were they asked the question, if you've been in Central County for 90 days or less, where did you come from? Out of county, but somewhere else in Kansas was 43.75%. Outside of the U.S. was 1.84%, and out of the state within the U.S. was 54.41%. So last year's numbers when they were here was 226.1 people. So I don't know how we calculate that, but 226 people. And then we talked about that it costs $5,000 per 90 days per person. So let's say that we had each one of those people in the system for 90 days. The cost for the Wichita taxpayer paying for people from outside of Wichita comes out to about $1,130,000. Extrapolate that throughout the entire year, and let's say that they do say here that we're looking at $4.5 million that Wichita taxpayers are paying for people outside of our community to use our services. The numbers from last, the two county of origin were Reno, shawnee county and then saline county i know reno and celine if i remember correct don't have shelter space is that correct i'm not 100 sure on what shelter space they have in either one of those counties but shawnee county i know it does have a shelter space so i thought that was interesting as number two and so i imagine those numbers are higher than last year given the point in the time count being somewhat higher this year i'd imagine those higher So going back to the question of why I think it matters and the point in time count is if we're providing a lot of resources and we've spent more than $30 million on resources and this entity, and last year it was 81% of people, I'd be interested in what this year's, if it comes in that 70% are only from Wichita and 30% are out, then we all have to have a conversation of how did that increase 10%. I don't know if that's accurate, but if it's increasing, we have to have a more holistic conversation about how do we mitigate that increase because those are the numbers that I'm worried about. If we're serving Wichita residents that are homeless and we're trying to get them the resources, that is our duty and that is the taxpayer funds that are utilizing those services. But our responsibility is not people outside of Sedgwick County. And so if we're recruiting people to come to Sedgwick County because of the resources, that would be the fundamental problem.

Yes, and this data is a 90-day look back. And so it's... Certainly, and we can add that question back to the point in time count. It's not too much of a challenge.

If we have that data in a different way, I'd just be interested of how that data's changed over the last couple years. And I don't care how we have the data as long as it's measurable and similar to how we measured it previously. Thank you. Yes, sir?

Thanks, Matt. Just to Vice Mayor Glasscock's point, he and I might disagree on a little bit of what he said there, but I do think one thing we're in agreement on is this is not just a Wichita problem and that we are taking the burden from around the state. Several other communities are not doing anything to address this issue. I think to any policymakers listening, especially on the state level, we're helping all Kansans here and even beyond Kansans supporters. But that is something that I hope they take into consideration in discussing policy and funding in the future is, for example, we have a lot of people exiting prison system down here in Wichita, one that we had talked to recently at an encampment closure. He said, essentially, I was given $100 and Boot it out. There you go. And he's actually had his parole visits down in some of our encampment areas. So, again, just something I think any policymaker, state legislator, whatnot, who's listening, this is a statewide issue, and it would be nice to have some assistance from outside of the city of Wichita to help deal with this.

I agree 100%. We're trying to engage certainly the parole. I really feel like we need higher level folks to address this issue about the prison issue for sure. When it comes to many of the homeless come from outside of county, many of the counties, particularly in the northeast, they won't serve people that are not in their county. So that further drives people to... you know, other counties that will.

How are they able to do that?

They're not from their county. I said that wrong. So Shawnee would be an example of one of those. If you're not from Shawnee County, then you can't go to the rescue mission in Shawnee County. You won't be served with a housing resource in Shawnee County. It's the same for Douglas County and other counties up in that way. I won't speak for all of them, but I know those two specifically.

So to the mayor's point, 22 individuals within a 90-day period on ours came from Shawnee County. Yeah. And... Shawnee County won't serve if we sent 22 people from Sedgwick County to Shawnee County. They would be turned away.

They would be turned away and sent back to Wichita.

Reno County, four numbers, just for everybody listening as well, was 24 within a 90-day period. Shawnee County was about 22. Saline County was 12. Riley County was on the list. Montgomery County, Clay County, Dickinson County, Greenwood County, Marion County, Stafford County, and those are just the ones on this list.

Now, are there qualifications for that? Because I know this Haven for Hope does the same thing, but that you have to have been a resident of that county Six months or more.

Yes, and I'm not sure what they are, but they are, you have to be from the county. I believe in Douglas County, you have to show something. It can be a utility bill, and it can be an old one, but you had to show that you were a resident of Douglas County at some point. Truthfully, many of the communities that you see that are making significant headways on addressing homelessness do these kinds of things because they limit the number of people that they have.

Can we get some guidance on that? That's a policy decision for us, too. So now I'm going to talk to the city manager. If other counties are saying we're only going to serve our county residents, I think it's fair to say that Sedgwick County wants to serve its Sedgwick County residents, and more specifically, this body wants to serve Wichitans. How do we craft policy so that we're not serving those who don't come from Wichita and don't come from Cedric County? Because it is a burden for residents of Wichita and Cedric County to be paying for individuals who, in their communities, they're saying, no, we don't take anyone else from outside our community. We are saying we are welcoming. I welcome anyone to our community who wants to be a contributor, but if you are going to take away resources from Wichita and Sedgwick County residents, I think that is unfair. I would like to see what type of policy Shawnee does in order to enforce that in Shawnee so that Sedgwick County will be doing the same thing or in Wichita more specifically. I can't speak for Sedgwick County. That is a commission situation, but for Wichita, I would like to see something that is specific to Wichita because it does go to the data point that you just mentioned. Those who are 65 and older have become the fastest growing population that has become homeless. Well, what the emails I get from those who are over 65 is, our taxes are really high. Therefore, you're taxing me out of my house. And so if that is the case, right now, taxes are paying for individuals who are not from our county or from our city. And I think that that's unfair to Wichitans.

I'd just like to mention the unintended consequence of that is we're just going to have the people on the streets. I mean, we can say we only want to serve Wichitans, we only want to let them into our shelter if they're a Wichitan, but if they're from Shawnee County or Reno County or Arizona, then they're just going to be on the street. It's not like we're going to send them anywhere. Now with the homeless outreach team, we will provide someone with a bus ticket if they can provide proof OR A HANDOFF IF THEY CAN PROVIDE PROOF THAT THERE WILL BE SOMEONE THERE THAT WILL HELP THEM WHEN THEY GET THERE. MY OTHER THOUGHT IS OF COURSE I WANT TO SERVE WICHITANS AND FOLKS IN OUR COMMUNITY BUT IF IT IS 17 BELOW ZERO ON A FRIDAY NIGHT WHEN SOMEONE'S LIFE MAY BE AT RISK I DON'T THINK IT IS BLACK AND WHITE. THAT BECOMES A MUCH MORE GRAY AREA.

I think there's further discussion on this and I appreciate council member Tuttle's perspective. However, hearing from our community saying that again, taxes are too high and right now taxes are paying for individuals who are not from Wichita to receive these services and other communities already have said, okay, we are also not doing that. So we're the only community that's saying, we welcome you. I think that that is a disservice to Wichitans. And I think that that discussion needs to be, OK, well, then what policies do we need to craft for enforcement of individuals to not be within? Maybe other communities just outside of Wichita want to welcome individuals who are homeless from outside of the area. I would like to get a census right now or a pulse from this council. Do we want Wichitans to pay for those who are not from Wichita? Given that we have so many needs in our community right now and last I checked, we don't want the population of 65 and older to be priced out of their houses.

I agree with you, Mayor. Going back, we're spending theoretically upwards of $4.5 million on people that don't live in our community, that those resources could go to serve Wichitans. But it comes down to we also have an anti-camping ordinance. I know we have a lot more that we're talking about in this presentation, so we'll probably get to that at some point. We do have an anti-camping ordinance. And so I think to Council Member Tuttles, obviously there is a different scenario when I think it comes to the winter months and emergency shelter. And I think that's a very different conversation. But when it comes to the average day in Kansas and how we're spending our resources universally, it should be spent on Wichitans and Wichita taxpayer dollars that are paying for that money.

Yes, might I offer a suggestion before I move on? A couple of things, these are just ideas for consideration. You can serve people from outside of Sedgwick County, but you don't have to give them a voucher. You know, we don't have to allocate, you know, COC resources. We don't have to give them a program, you know, transitional type bit. Yes, when it is freezing cold, and we're talking about life-saving, it's come one, come all, we want to save lives. And when you're talking about these designated, if you will, resources that are for Sedgwick County. Federal government says, how many people do you have in Sedgwick County? Here's your pot of resources, right? The rest of the state also has a pot of resources to serve people in those counties as well. Just something to think about. I know we need to move on. One last comment.

One last comment. And just circling back on this, I think one discussion has to be had with communities who we are serving their populations. Just putting this out there from my perspective, I want to help whoever needs help. And if we start segregating it like that, where does it stop? Does it stop with children? Does it stop with seniors who are within our borders in our county right now? And we're going to say you don't get services because you are from somewhere that does not have options? I think that's one of the issues there is a lot of the communities we're looking at, they themselves are not doing anything to address this issue. So they are coming to places where there are options. We need to be the model. We need to step up and be the ones that other people are emulating to try and address this issue. If every community did what we're trying to do, we would be a lot further along in addressing homelessness than we are right now.

I mean, to Council Member's point, where does it stop? at some point, if you have that argument, why wouldn't people from California send busloads of people to Wichita? Like, what would be the prohibition on anybody continuing to send resources here? There is only so much capacity that we have to be able to manage that.

I don't know that we've seen any of that happening, and that can be a discussion that we have if busloads of people are being dropped off in California.

Well, anecdotally, we've heard that people are being dropped off in California.

Most of what I've heard, anecdotally, has been surrounding communities, some of our outlying towns. sending people here that's mostly what i've heard as far as people being busted it's not large groups being busted it's one or two people and i'm not going to name any communities because i think we've all been part of some of these conversations but nearby communities who we don't want them within our town so let's bring them to sedgwick county to wichita and again that's a that's a i know that some of our staff here have engaged with those communities about that And that's a separate issue that we do need to address because, again, and I think we're all in agreement here, we need people to be putting their skin in the game to help address this issue who are not.

Well, we've had these conversations often before Dennis came here as well or City Manager Marstall came here as well. and I think that is a legitimate question of how we reached out to these communities. I've never gotten any feedback that we've reached out to Reno, Shawnee, or Saline County, but we've mentioned it from this bench multiple times, but I don't think we've actually ever reached out, or at least I haven't been informed if city staff reached out. I'm happy to reach out, but I don't think that's my place. I think that's probably the manager's place or whoever's place to be able to reach out, but I don't know if we've actually had those conversations aside from just talking from this bench on it.

Okay, well, we'll carry on with the point in time count. You'll see the stats. On the night of the point-in-time count, January 29th, we recruited over 120 volunteers, trained them, and sent them out into the community to count people who are actually living on the streets or in places not meant for habitation. We use our database to collect data for those who are staying in shelters. And on the night of the count, there were 637 sheltered people and 222 unsheltered people. That is an increase from last year. Note here is this annual housing inventory count. At the same time we're counting people, we're also counting beds in our system to see how many of those are in usage on the night of that count. On that night, 95% of all available beds were utilized on the night of the point in time count.

Matt, question for you. Can you give me the specific for 2025, how many people on the point in time day were at Second Light and how many were at Second Light on the point in time count day in 2026?

I can send it to you. I don't have the actual number.

On the day of point in time, how many individuals were at Second Light in 2025 and 2026?

And I see someone from Second Light. I think it was capacity. It was cold night.

I think it was even over capacity. So that's why I want to know the exact number. Actually, I would like it for 24, 25, and 26 on the actual day of the point in time.

And I can send that to you afterwards?

Perfect.

All right, yeah, very good, because you'll see that the sheltered number, I mean, it did, we almost had 100 person increase in sheltered, which is a positive thing, and I will also caveat the 95%. That figures in that if Second Light or the Rescue Mission or somebody says, we have 100 beds and they have 200, well, then they're getting, obviously, that's 200%. That means that some programs are also underutilizing beds, most likely, you know, like families or kids or domestic violence or something like that. But I don't have any of that data right here in front of me.

Do you have a question? Yeah, and this is on the next slide as well. The capacity for beds for family, people with disabilities and domestic violence, would you say they are regularly full? They regularly have openings? What's usually the status with those?

Families and domestic violence are notoriously full. Hence a lot of the work that we're doing with the family work group to try to keep people out of shelters, try to ease some of the burden on the shelter so that people that truly need to go to shelter can go to shelter and we can keep people in their homes, those who could stay in their homes. But these are almost always full. I think Crossroads will have some openings and Emporia House will have some openings.

I can tell you Guadalupe Clinic, we run this all the time and there is never, ever a bed available. for shelter, for domestic violence, or families.

That's what I hear. I appreciate that.

To close out the presentation, we're going to talk about emerging challenges and what we're talking to policymakers about. The ALICE data is being sponsored by the United Ways. There are 20 in the state of Kansas. They're all talking to their council members just like we are today. The program is also supported by the Kansas Health Foundation, Kansas Blue Cross Blue Shield, spreading this throughout our state. We view it as a policy challenge. You have seen the ALICE data. It was released two weeks ago. This is the threshold on eight essential costs to survive in Sedgwick County. The median pay is $70,000, so we already know families are choosing between rent and food. So the point here is that if there's any policy challenges the council can undertake to reduce any of those thresholds, where it's housing and childcare. I mean, there are a lot of nonprofits working. How do you lower those costs through policy to ensure they can make their budget work? Because we've got to find 6,000 in their budget. Just like the city council has to work with their budget, and you're seeing increasing costs, because you're feeling this chart right here where these essentials are outpacing the overall inflation i mean this is a national phenomenon it's affecting us here in kansas so you can see where we are the thing about this is this is two years old when inflation was 2.9 percent today it's 4.2 So we project as the data rolls forward next year and the year after that the cost of living is going to be even higher than inflation where wages are tied to inflation. This is why wages don't keep up with the cost of housing. And so this is what it looks like then on the housing system. All of you here probably have bought a home. You had to get a mortgage. You went through credit checks. You can't get a mortgage if your income to debt ratio is 33%, 36%. And yet we're having people pay 50% of their wages on housing. I just Googled available homes in Wichita last night. It's about $1,000, $1,500. The average pay or cost is about $285,000 a home. That means if you're going to get a mortgage, if you have the down payment, you're talking about $2,000 plus in mortgage interest, taxes, insurance. So they can't even get into the home. Rental apartments, same thing. I just Googled it. It's about 1,000 vacancies of two-bedroom apartments. also above the threshold, but there are things that cities can do. It's challenging, and they're all ideas I think you probably know of already. This is just one more backup to what we're seeing in the community. We operate 211, the five top reasons people call. You know, it's no surprise to us about utility rent, housing. We're trying to keep them in their home before they become evicted. And so these are some of the things policymakers are undertaking. And we're going to show two examples here as we represent. Dennis called us. We started putting this deck together last week. And two news articles came up to illustrate some of these points here. But anything that can be done to scale up affordable housing. We are short housing in Wichita. It has never recovered since the recession of 2008. I think you all may have seen last year the Kansas Leadership Center's wonderful article about why we have the housing development issue we have here in Wichita. Same with zoning laws to promote different types of housing in our community. Funding mediation services, I know this is a strain on the budget, but it's cheaper to keep them in the house before they get evicted. The last point is an important one, not to be glossed over. It sounds simple, but it's important about how do we foster collaboration? I know we're all working towards that here, and there's a balance between compliance and support, because the work of all the nonprofits that are doing this in the city office It's really, it's gut-wrenching, as you know. There's a burnout rate, and we don't pay them enough to do this 24-7, seven days a week. Yet they are running a continuum that is considered high-performing by HUD standards. We can always do better, but where can policymakers help those in the trenches that are housing person by person or help law enforcement? How do we create more housing? How do we foster the morale and inspiration of the workforce that is in the trenches doing it? And so the two examples, this just showed up in the press. I quoted it down there at the bottom. I think it was Thursday. This happens to be Goddard. And so they built an apartment complex with 60 apartments Only 20 will float with the market rate. 40 are gonna be restricted. And look at the dollar amounts. 870 for two bedrooms. And I just showed you the ALICE threshold was 1200 bucks. and they're gonna offer two bedroom apartment for $400. So that development helped those Alice families get $400 back. Now it's 40 more if we just use that we have 800. I mean, if we took the point in time count and said everybody is, there's no mental health, there's no drug addiction and they have jobs, Where would we actually put them with the wages that they earn? And so we thought this was a wonderful example of how one of our suburbs has done it. I know we have discussions about infill here. Same city, same day, this next article comes up. I'm going to see if I can show it, because it's a video. And it's Tyler York. I think many of you know him, Wichita Association Business Association. And they're building a development. And listen to what he says.

Are looking to make new regulations for duplexes in their cities, but builders in the area say some of these regulations will hurt the market if passed, making housing even more unaffordable. Kale Chapman spoke with the Wichita Area Builders Association as they're working with the city of Goddard on their regulations.

are the most competitive market right now for renters. The city of Goddard looking to further regulate duplex developments within city limits. The large package of proposed regulations includes capping the number of duplexes allowed to be built at 40% of a development. requiring developments to build a public park, requiring that a lot have two trees before being issued a certificate of occupancy, and making developers design at minimum six different styles of units so every house does not look the same. Wichita Area Builders Association President and CEO Tyler York has been speaking with the City of Goddard about builders' concerns on how this may impact the market and affordability.

Right now, a two-family home, a duplex, is about the only affordable option that's on the market for a good segment of our population.

York says changes like requiring developments to build a park or mandating multiple unit styles will increase costs for builders and eventually residents.

That will increase costs. The reason why so many duplex communities right now look the same... is because with repetition comes efficiency, and with efficiency comes cost savings. I understand the desire for wanting to have parks. However, there is a cost to that, and it is a long-term cost. There's maintenance costs that will be shouldered by the people living within these communities.

York says he would not advise putting a cap on how many duplexes can be built with how badly the area needs housing.

For every one new unit that goes on the market, there are nine renters competing for that unit. The bottom line is that the Wichita metro area needs between 20 and 50,000 new housing units of all kinds. These two family homes provide an affordable unit that has such high demand right now in our local area. In Goddard, Cale Chapman, 12 News.

He dropped a lot of interesting facts there. I know it's a challenge for every governing body. As a citizen, I'm grateful for all of you that have run for office and that you're tackling these very difficult challenges. I can see there could be an interview saying the exact opposite of what he was saying on why they want a park and why they want different styles, but we're 20,000 units short. It doesn't matter how good the continuum of care gets and how much federal dollars we get if we don't have a place to put people that they can afford to live. We keep putting resources into a system that's treating only the symptom and not attacking the root cause and policy makers have one of the only platforms for the community to find a way, and it's a long-term way, to get through this. I believe we're making decisions today that are gonna produce a healthy community five to 10 years down the road, and so I'm grateful for the discussion that you're having. I know these aren't easy, But somehow every community in America is wrestling with the same challenge. How do we get 10 to 20,000 units at an affordable rate? So thank you for giving us this opportunity.

If I may, Mayor? Thank you, Pete, and thank you, Mr. Lowe, for all the work you're doing in the community and for this presentation today. I have a question for the city manager. Recently in the state legislature, they did pass new laws regarding zoning, building, whatnot, applications. Some of it I like, some of it I don't, but it is state law now. What are the next steps with that regarding our zoning department? Is that additional ordinance? Does that need to come into existence here?

Yeah, there is. Thank you, council member. There are some things that, like we just did with some of the state legislation last week related to felonies, misdemeanors, and things where we have to match up the local code with the state law. So yes, they are going through right now and seeing if we need to sync up our local laws. So we're still doing that evaluation from MAPCD, and we'll be back in touch.

All right, thank you. I just want to say thank you to Matt and Pete for going first, specifically, because most of our questions hopefully got out of our system early and not later. So thank you for being bold and going in first.

I do have a question for you all. Particularly, can you help me understand how the members of the Housing Continuum of Care are selected? It was earlier on in the conversation. I reserved my thoughts. It was on page seven, the governance of the continuum of care. Page seven. Yes.

I'm going to get the slide deck. I don't want to go through.

No worries. Interesting.

What was the question again? I'm sorry. Thank you.

How are these members selected?

For the board?

Yes. Specifically the governance of the continuum of care.

We look at a lot of different factors. We look at people that have a passion for the cause that can that are in places of influence to help us affect the cause in a positive way. Historically it's been a lot of providers. Over the last couple of years we have intentionally tried to invite more people with more influence to be able to help us because we have a lot of big problems or big issues that are affecting homelessness and we need people that can help us find solutions to those problems. And so that's a lot of how we do it. Like I said, we have, there are 16 people currently on our board We select, we intentionally have seats for people with lived experience of homelessness, and then we've created seats for elected officials as well as law enforcement, and the other just come from the general community.

There's some requirements, I think, recommendations from the HUD for those positions he's talking about, and then we have a nominating process looking for passionate community advocates to fill the remaining seats.

So I know HUD, whenever you're receiving funding for things like this, they often require someone with lived experience. Did they change the definition on that? I know that there was some conversation about the years in which it defined as experiencing homelessness.

Yes, they do. The person with lived experience, they do want it to be in the last few years. I don't remember if it's three exactly, right off the top of my head, but it's not meant that someone that was 10, 20 years ago. Certainly, that experience is still valid, but it's meant to be more of a recent experience of homelessness. At one point, we had a person with lived experience of domestic violence, a person with lived experience of youth homelessness, and we would try to expand that. We currently have two that meet the definition of the the more tighter and more that expand the broader definition of people with lived experience from longer ago.

Is there an opportunity to add more? Because I know that we talked about the McKinney-Vento program. I'm wondering if that perspective, and maybe perhaps you've already have invited them to the table. I don't know. But I'm also thinking about our housing department. that I don't see represented here. When we're talking about the ecosystem, which is what I've shared during the agenda review, that it seems that we are not all on the same page in the direction that we are going as a unit. And that's concerning to me when we talk about having a unified approach to addressing this challenge. And I think having everybody who is, we know that we receive federal funding and we know what our housing department does from the city standpoint. See the state represented there as well as well as vice mayor Glasscock from the local municipality WPD Is there an opportunity to maybe look at where those gaps exist and add in those? Add into maybe one or two more people who can help fill some of those critical gaps

I think we can. We look at that every year. We've turned over that governance dramatically from five years ago. So it is more inclusive, but we always have room to grow. It's already at 19 members, and so we're trying to keep it manageable. The city is also a member of the coalition already. Sally used to chair it as well and has run through her terms.

I WOULD REALLY LIKE TO SEE OUR HOUSING DEPARTMENT REPRESENTED ON THERE. AND I THINK VICE MAYOR GLASCOCK IS GREAT. I THINK THOUGH THAT HE'S NOT IN HOUSING, RIGHT? I'M NOT IN HOUSING. NONE OF US HERE ARE THE EXPERTS IN THAT DAY-TO-DAY WORK. I JUST THINK WE HAVE GOT TO HAVE SOMEONE FROM THE CITY WHO WORKS IN OUR HOUSING DEPARTMENT IN THAT SPACE HELPING SHARE immediately what we are doing and how it fits into the larger plan that you all are working on. And then I had a question in regards to page 37 and You'll have to forgive me because I may be asking questions out of ignorance, but I just want to understand better. So the 51 days average of homelessness, explain that to me one more time. Is that the days you're turning it around, turning someone around from being homeless into transitional housing or housing in general?

It would be from the time that they're identified to the time they move into a housing unit. That can be everything from moving into a permanent house that is their own, but that does include people that moved in with family or friends that's a permanent tenure. But it does not include those who are still currently actively homeless, those who exited to places not meant for habitation, other shelters, or temporary environments. So that being said, things that can drive that number up or down, when we have things like, you know, the Union Rescue Mission, Second Lights, Emergency Shelter. Someone could come in for one night, leave, and go back home. Like maybe they just got kicked out for a couple days and they go back home. You know what I'm saying? It drives the number way down as well as some take longer. That's why it's this average.

So are we defining – so this goes back to the mayor's point, and I would – really appreciate this because now i have clarity on like the housing continuum of care you all are the ones building this ecosystem and perhaps i should have known that sooner but i'm okay i'm late to the party so now i know um but this goes back to making sure that we are all functioning on the same definition of homelessness because this says 51 days there are some providers who are saying they can flip from 90 to 180 days

Is that a specific program, like transitional living type programs?

So I've thought that Second Light is saying that once you enter into the shelter, it roughly takes around 90 to 180 days to move someone from shelter to housing, be it transitional housing. And I'm assuming even longer when we talk about permanent housing. So in my mind, and I could be completely wrong, someone is homeless. We get them housed. Shelter is the first place, right? Mm-hmm. We work with them, case manage them. The goal is to eventually move them from shelter to transitional housing. We then continue to case manage with them because we don't want to move people from shelter into permanent housing immediately because not everyone is ready to do that. And that, in my mind, is setting them up for failure. So from transitional housing then into permanent housing is even longer from the 90 to 180 days.

I would come back to this slide that had the continuum as a circular graph. because we can move people directly from unsheltered homelessness right into a home, and that ends it immediately. There are some people that an emergency shelter is supposed to be 30 days or less. As I know it under the way that we have things listed second light, is an emergency shelter you have night by night emergency shelter and then you have program but it's still considered an emergency shelter by HUD's definition and they don't have a transitional housing program but you can move someone from directly from shelter into housing transitional was something that HUD you know kind of defunded some years back because of the length of time because we are keeping people homeless that entire time that they are in a unit and many times we can resolve that while they're in a home it costs way more to have somebody in a transitional housing unit you having to pay for staff you're having to pay for all the utilities the food all of those things and if they're stable enough to be able to be successful

So these are the conversations that I think should be happening because I would argue, though, that moving someone into permanent housing before they're ready is also going to cost the taxpayer more because of the recidivism.

Potentially, that's where we don't look at. We're awfully talking, obviously talking about system wide issues. But when it comes down to that navigator and that program level. we should be assessing people based off of their current level of need and their current level of ability. And so some are gonna need more intensive services to be able to stabilize before they're ready to be in a home.

Eight to 10 are staying in the house, right, for two years, 82% success rate. from shelter to home when we when we get them into a home and we stay with them to make sure that they are qualified everybody has different needs one more other thing i think this is 2025 data so second light may not be reflected yet in this information so um they're still ramping up

We're housing many people directly from the streets. We've housed 62 from unsheltered environments just this year alone. And so some of those are falling back into homelessness. Many of them are staying in housing with case management support and are doing just fine. And yes, there is some recidivism. There's always going to be some recidivism. But we come back to them. If they fall back into homelessness, we're going to come back. We're going to try again. We'll probably put more supportive parameters around that person or that household. But as a general rule, just like with all things, we want to go with the least restrictive means necessary. And we should not assume that everyone experiencing homelessness has to follow the same path. You know, that's a very linear path, which is one reason I prefer the circular because you can enter at any time. and some we may encounter on the street today, and they're building just fine in housing. In fact, if you go down to some of our larger encampments down south, many of them have built structures that are like homes, and they are maintaining it and have for a long time. And so, you know, like, I think it's a misnomer to assume that everyone needs to have to go through all of these, to transition on, have to stay there for 18 months. We should be launching people as soon as they're ready.

I agree. And I don't think it's a one size fits all by any means. I guess my direct question is, then how are you indicating who needs that longer term case management support before they move into permanent houses versus those who maybe need to take some different steps in a pathway? And maybe this isn't something we hammer out today, but I guess that's what I'm missing. I don't understand the clear indication of how we are getting people the help that they need. I think moving someone off of the streets and sticking them in a shelter is not success. That is not success. And I say this as someone with lived experience who has experienced homelessness. My biological mother became a single mom after being a stay-at-home wife, did not have a job. And so what she needed was life skills. She needed workforce readiness skills. And that takes time. Sure. She also had three children who also experienced some things in their own life that also needed some case management support. So I guess what I'm saying is I agree with you, and I'm not hearing that. I'm not hearing that we have that built in.

So, and... My apologies for not sharing more of that information. It takes a little bit of a deeper dive into how our system works. We operate, I think Pete mentioned, we have the three different legs of our HUD grant, one being the grant management system compliance, one being the database, and the other being the coordinated entry system. Within that coordinated entry system, every time we encounter someone experiencing homelessness, we do assessments, and based off of some of the things that we learned through that assessment, it determines It's not a perfect situation because it's just an assessment. It determines kind of level of need. It gives us some direction as to how we should go. But with all of our programs, it is never meant to just place someone in housing and say, great job, here's your keys, and see you later. Because we should be assessing them while we're placing them in housing and continuing to assess them while they're in housing and connecting them to all the wraparound supports that they need. The only differentiation is where the person is staying while they're being supported. If you're staying in an emergency shelter, we want shelters that are providing all of those life skills and all of those connections to those wraparound resources. If it's a transitional housing or if it's a permanent housing, the level of case management may look a little different based off of the location, but it should still always be that same level of intensity when it comes to providing what the family or the household needs to be able to stabilize and thrive as a citizen in our community.

Thank you.

That's what those housing navigators do, Joseph. And then you saw the additional $2 million in wraparound services that we put in, all to shore them up, like you said. And the mayor talked about Workforce Alliance. We do finance, education, and health as well. So...

Can I have a follow-up question so that there's more clarity on the verbiage, transitional housing? So I'm looking at, for those that have the handouts, slide number 35, page 9. So when you were sharing that, you mentioned from shelter to rapid rehousing, then transitional housing. I know that not everyone goes through that same continuum, but it really, if you found someone who was, let's say, within the city core in an encampment, the first option would be, hey, here in Wichita, we don't allow encampments blocking sidewalks. There's space for you at, there are two shelters in our community. THAT ARE NOT SPECIALIZED FOR A SPECIFIC POPULATION. THAT WOULD BE UNION RESCUE MISSION FOR MEN AND THEN SECOND LIGHT MEN AND WOMEN. THE OTHERS ARE SHELTERS FOR You have women and families, families, veterans, 18 to 24-year-olds, families, families, domestic violence, domestic violence, and a day shelter. So shelter would be the first opportunity for an individual to connect to some sort of... sleeping option other than the streets.

Depending on who you are, right?

Depending on who you are, which one of those population that you fit within. Yes, all of our street outreach, that's the first thing we're offering, a shelter and meeting those basic needs. What we're finding is, I'm sure you're all aware as you talk about the camping, is that many either will refuse to go to shelter or if they do go to shelter, they're not successful in shelter and they get kicked right back out to the street. And so what do we do with, I mean, for our outreach, we can't just keep going and saying you need to go to shelter if they've been kicked out of said shelter that we're telling them to go to. And so while we are offering that as a first line of support, if they say no, then we're gonna move into more of that housing conversation because that's ultimately where we're trying to get in the first place.

So then if they refuse sheltering or were kicked out of sheltering due to behaviors, therefore then you would re-meet them out in the streets and you would offer rapid rehousing.

depending on their situation, because they may not be, to support Councilman Shepherd's point, they may not be appropriate for rapid rehousing, because that's gonna be short-term in nature, and it's gonna be some supportive services like rental supports and case management, but it's meant to end. It's meant for more people that just need a little bit of time, like six months, nine months, and then they'll be on their own. Many of the people that we're seeing in encampments need something more extensive, which is what we call permanent supportive housing. Many times you have to have, well it's not many times, by HUD mandate you have to have that chronic status, meaning you've been homeless for a year or more, and you have to have disabling conditions. Now, I'm getting real into the weeds on this. And that's kind of where we go, because there's no end to the subsidy. You provide it as long as the person needs it. We're always still working towards self-sufficiency. And there are many times where we've stabilized people and they've lived in the same unit for two, three, five years, and we can pull out the supports and let them go on their own. But in the absence of those, we're going to offer what we have, which is going to be shelter. Or if we have a rapid rehousing, we're going to try to work the rapid rehousing route. and sometimes we're successful and sometimes we're not.

Matt, I appreciate that you're going into the weeds. And I thank you for that. And I know it's complicated and complex, but it's necessary for us to talk about the complexities out loud because I think so often, We paint the picture as if this is a simple solution, and it is not. And again, this is no slight on any of my colleagues. We all do the best that we can with the information that we have. But this is what was my concern with the encampment ordinance specifically and the strain that I have constantly said that I believe that it was going to put on WPD. And I believe it has put a strain on them. Because they go out, they engage, and they work with the individuals. I've seen it myself, and they establish relationship and trust. They're about a month and a half, two months in, and the person finally says, I want housing. And by the time that person says they want housing, no beds available. So then the cycle starts all over again, right? And then we also think... of a specific profile of an unhoused person, like they're all on drugs or they're all struggling with mental health. And sure, there are some people like, there's some functioning folks who are in that situation, but that's not the profile of every individual. There are some folks who got into a bad marriage or divorced and starting over again. There's some folks who are fleeing an unhealthy relationship. There are some folks who, unfortunately, their families have left them or they're aging out of the foster care system. And this is why we have to talk about the complexities and the profiles of the people that exist in this system. And when we do that, we're able to lead with not just compassion. This isn't a compassionate issue. It's a pragmatic issue. And that's why I've asked you to explain the nuance of how do you decide who goes where? Because not everybody needs to go to Second Light. Some folks are going to need some additional help and guidance and case management wraparound supports. And there is a price tag to that. And it is our responsibility to own that and to make sure we meet that price tag.

Great. Thank you. And I'm always happy to go deep dive. I just know it can get really weedy and sometimes people will glaze over and they're like, yeah, you lost me.

This is a very engaged council. We like depth in these conversations.

Yes, you are. Thank you all.

So then I'm going to now move from sheltering to rapid rehousing. Then let's talk about transitional housing because this is the area where I think Second Light is kind of dabbling in but not fully. So to me, transitional housing, the model, and it's one of the examples, is Union Rescue Mission. Union Rescue Mission has a one-month program, a three-month program, and a one-year program. Correct. and they would still be considered homeless then right like if you're in transitional housing you're still considered even though you know that you've you have a permanent bed as long as you're part of the program so at union rescue mission you can engage in a program for three months that brings you that supportive uh services that council member shepherd was talking about so Second Light has these what are called program beds. And it kind of mirrors a little bit of what Union Rescue Mission is doing. However, there's not like a structure for program beds. Can you explain the differences for me?

And so, yes, you're 100% correct. I mean, Union Rescue Mission has kind of all levels. You know, they have the night-by-night shelter. Then they have their C2C program that's more that 30-day. You know, we still consider it an emergency shelter, even though, you know, you have to get accepted into it. then they have their solid ground, their eagle's wings, and then of course there's the DOC program, which is really separate. And they're the ones that kind of came forward with the solid ground, eagle's wings, and said, this is a transitional program. It's gonna be six months to 18 months, and this is what our program's gonna look like. And Second Light certainly has the option of doing that. Transitional housing is meant to be for higher, I should say, I don't know, barrier entry, if you will, like they're typically people that can live in a group environment that are going to go get jobs, that are going to follow the rules, that are gonna do those kinds of things. And so Second Light certainly could do that should they want to, but as it is right now, they're considered an emergency shelter.

So help me understand this spectrum of individuals. What I'm hearing from you, and please correct me if I'm wrong, There are those who we're calling the hardest to engage. They need help, but don't know they need help. Maybe mental capability to voice those needs are very hardest to serve. Then we have those that want help, but they may need help either at a shelter or at an encampment. Then we have those who don't want help. Can you please share with me, because we hear from community, if they don't want help and they wanna not abide by rules set forth by society, tell me about this population that doesn't want help. Is that actually accurate?

I find those to be probably the more challenging of any of them, because even the hardest to engage, you can come up with solutions for. I don't believe that people don't ever like truly don't want help. I think it's the right kind of engagement and showing and having the right kind of navigators and people that are working with them that are well trained, that are not judgmental, if you will, but that are going out, that are very compassionate and that are walking alongside. And sometimes that takes a little while to build trust. And so it's very much that example that somebody was using about like working with somebody in an encampment for a month or two, and then you get them to yes, and then they get moved on. It takes a while to get people to yes, but we're finding that more and more as we're leaning into this encampment work, which I know you'll hear probably more for from your housing department, that we're getting more and more people saying yes. Because when we go into a place like Chapin Park that has 75 people identified, and at first everybody's a no. Like they don't trust you, they don't like you, they don't want you there. Like why are you here? We've been down here for all this time, existing on our own. If you really cared, you would have been here before, right? Well, we are here now. We're here, we're here to serve you. And when we come back day after day and we continue to serve and we continue to show up with a smile and with unconditional love and we get somebody to say yes and people see us moving that somebody out of the encampment, then people start saying like, huh. Maybe there is something to this. Maybe if we can house them, maybe I can get housing too. And so it really, in a lot of ways, this work is about reinstilling hope into people that have lost hope. And so with everyone that we're able to connect with and with everyone that we're able to place into housing and people see that, more people want to say yes and more people want to believe that they can have housing themselves again. And so that, to me, is the difference. It is all about walking alongside people. It is about creating a system and having the right kind of navigators, the right kind of people who are going along and who believe in the inherent value and worth of human beings and that believe that these people that are living in these terrible situations have value and that they can have fruitful and healthy lives and sometimes you know we'll have over the course of years we work with many many people that we've placed in housing and eventually you know we get news that they passed away and while it's so sad that we've lost them that they passed away it's also an inner celebration that when they passed away they were in a home they had a roof over their head and they had food in their refrigerator and they had dignity that they were able to pass from this life into the next with dignity and that is what I believe that is what are the mission of our coalition in homelessness and what I believe that should be the mission of all of us in this community so that answer your question I'm sorry I might have got on a little thank you

what an asset Matt Lowe is to our community. I'd say any organization is only as good as the people we have. The United Way is lucky to have someone of Matt's competence and passion and dedication who has committed his life to this career. I think he is a gem for our city. and that he is advising what we're doing here. I learned something new every time I sit down with Matt, and I've been sitting down with him weekly for five years now. I wanted to end by letting you all know we're moving to two other meetings. but we're announcing an internal promotion for Matt Lowe because of his success in leading our team, in developing a coalition of the willing, his ability to inspire and motivate folks, towards some very difficult challenges. I think Wichita is fortunate to have people of his talent, and we're happy to announce that he'll be a new associate vice president at the United Way of the Plains, leading our homeless efforts so that Wichita achieves functional zero. So congratulations, Matt.

I'll just say, I don't do it for the promotions. I do it for the love of people. But I do appreciate it. Thank you.

And now, Mayor, we've got part two of a homeless ecosystem conversation. We'll have Steve come forward from our Housing Services Department.

Good morning, Mayor, Council. I am actually going to, I actually had built the United Way somewhat into our presentation. This is our agenda for the day. I'm gonna go over a couple of things and then I'm gonna pivot over to Captain Moses from WPD by slide like two or three, so. I wanted to also point out some highlights. This is a new dashboard that you may or may not have seen, depending on how much time you've spent with Sally. It's a little hard to see, so I'm going to give some highlights because there's a lot of data on it. The highlights are that in April 2026 alone, the housing department paid rental assistance for 553 households who came from homelessness. Those programs include our Home Tenant-Based Rental Assistance Rapid Rehousing Program, our ESG Rapid Rehousing Program, Housing First, and four different Section 8 increments, including EHV, HHP, VASH, and FYI, which is the Foster to Youth Independence Program. also in april over to the right you will see if you can't see that we documented 384 interactions in hmis for those who we have housed those are encampment visits and those are for visits that we used that we did for people to acquire housing maintain housing move into housing prepare for housing all of the steps I'll come back a little bit later to talk about those steps for housing. But on this slide, I'm going to pivot over to Captain Moses from WPD.

As Steve said, I'm Captain Moses from the Wichita Police Department. We're focusing here on city response to reports of unhoused individuals and specifically the Wichita Police Department's enforcement of the laws related to unlawful camping. I almost think we did this a little bit backwards. United Way kind of focus in the continuum kind of focuses on the long term strategies, whereas here we're talking about your first initial contact with the system and what that looks like. The easiest way to sum this up, and I think we've already gotten there, is if you call 911, if you submit a report through C-Click Fix, or if you call the HOT Team or send them an email, the response to homelessness from the city, generally, the first response is going to be a Wichita police officer. I'll leave that to all of you, the policymakers, to decide if that is the most appropriate response. But to follow on the conversation that Councilmember Shepherd was having, along with all of you, about the nuanced nature of the homeless services system, we are not the experts in that. We do have some people allocated the Homeless Outreach Team, which I would add to the Mayor's count of outreach workers, four from the Homeless Outreach Team. That is the focus of the work that they do. We are not experts in the housing services or the system. And generally, our response is going to be one of two things. We're going to take you to a shelter, whether that is where you should be or not, because that's the only resource we have available to us. Or we're going to enforce the law and write you a citation, take you to jail, or tell you to move on, and then have your camp cleaned up. Councilmember Hohaisel.

Thank you, sir. Now, these initial points of contact through WPD, is that like 90% HOT? What would you say?

Most of it does go through the homeless outreach team, yes. However, there is, with the change in ordinance last year and the way we function, the HOT team cannot manage every request or complaint that comes in related to unlawful camping. And just to touch on that, I looked at our calls for service across the city for the police department. They were up 8% in 2025 and so far in 2026. They're up 3% compared to 2025 year to date and up 3% over the two year average. And the biggest driver of that increase in calls for service is non-criminal calls for service. Looking at miscellaneous reports, suspicious characters, generally things that would fall into this category. a call of I see someone camping on the street, I see an unhoused person on the street. Some of those may turn into disturbances and others, but there is a strong likelihood that an unhoused individual's first contact with the police department is going to be just a general police response because the homeless outreach team has a list that they work on and they follow up on complaints as they come in.

So perfect example of that this past week, it was Wednesday. I'm going on my nightly walk. I'm religious about getting 10,000 steps a day. So I was walking along the river. It was about nine o'clock. I originally had called the non-emergency number at city hall. There was somebody that was bathing in one of the fountains along the river, then found out he was nude and started yelling at the person. he was with, and so at that point, I think it turned into more of a domestic situation. So I called, officer responded, should the initial point of entry always be, so I called city hall line, because it was a non-emergency situation at that point. They instructed me to call 911 regarding it. And so who am I to call at eight o'clock, I'm on my walk in the evening and I'm seeing something that could lead up to a disturbance, which it did lead up to a disturbance. And then I sat there until the officers arrived What is the process that I should do in the future? Is it calling on emergency number or who?

We don't have an after-hours non-emergency number for the police department. If you need a police officer for any reason after hours, the call is to 911. That is the only way to generate a police response after hours. Now, in that situation, you witnessed, if someone was nude in public, you were witnessing a crime.

I found that out after I called. Then I realized, I was like, okay, I probably made the right decision on calling.

So the appropriate call is to 911, especially if there is a disturbance. We have told people that the appropriate avenues for submitting a complaint of unlawful camping is through C-Click Fix and through 911, or to contact the Homeless Outreach Team.

But I do C-Click Fix at 8 p.m. That goes to the Homeless Outreach Team. but they're not working in APM.

No, no, they'll follow up on it the next day. Yeah.

Okay.

Uh, but again, all of those generate a police response, which is, um, I've had this conversation with many people. The, the only, the role of the police department is to be a law enforcement mechanism of the government, right? That is why police departments were created. So when you look at what we are able to do, when we go out and we respond to a report of an unhoused individual camping, we have two options. We have the ability to either take them to shelter if there is shelter space available or write them a citation or arrest them for committing a crime. And I think that's part of the larger conversation of is that the most appropriate response for the first response or are we missing something in between that first report and then the police becoming engaged in in the situation. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I mean, to the mayor's point previously of how do you get a housing individual out there immediately, which is hard at 8 p.m. at night, but so if there's a line to get somebody out there at 8 p.m. at night and then if the situation escalated like it did in my circumstance, then obviously the police should show up. But the first person should have been probably a housing staff at 8 a.m., but they're not going to be there at 8 p.m. So that was, I think, to the mayor's point of how do we have that as the initial point of contact. And then to the chief's point earlier about, and hopefully we figure out how we can get the system updated, but if there's not shelter beds available, then you are stuck. There's nothing you can do.

And I'll touch on that in the next few slides, but the other, the only other thing we wanted to call out here is each city department follows their own established policies and SOPs so generally when it comes to report of an unhoused individual there's going to be three maybe four departments maybe five involved in that response depending on where it is and what it actually involves and that's part of what makes this so complicated if it's on public property we have to contact parks to come clean it up if it's on private property then we engage mabcd At some point in that process, the housing department is going to become involved. And depending on where it is, we may engage public works as well. To touch on what you were talking about, general police response versus homeless outreach team, the homeless outreach team does have access to information that our officers on the street do not. Homeless outreach team are the only officers that have access to the HMIS system. I can't speak to why that is. It's not a system that we manage, but the Homeless Outreach Team are the only people that have access to the data in that system. Our general police officers do not. So if a general police response occurs, they're gonna go out and they're gonna document their enforcement effort through a case in our records management system. We actually created a case classification to document unlawful camping when the ordinance changed last year, and I have some data on that that I'll share. They provide information brochures to unhoused individuals. They post the camp for cleanup when necessary, which then requires an email to the parks department to have them come out, add that to their list, and clean the camp when it's appropriate. Again, they don't have access to HMIS. The homeless outreach team response is very similar. They do conduct street outreach. definitely more than a general police response. They monitor C-Click fix, records management system, and then they have a separate phone number and email address to receive complaints. They track their data for contacts in a different way specific to them. Basically they track it in an Excel spreadsheet when they're going out and make contacts. They also make a police report in the records management system when they do an enforcement action. They do have access to HMIS and they collaborate more closely with the housing department to connect those people to the nuanced services that are appropriate for that individual.

Captain, real quick, would you say that I guess let me figure out a way to phrase this. What percent of the time that it's not hot would it be a community police officer who has the first contact with an individual who is in camping?

I can't tell you that. If someone calls 911, the officer that's available is going to go. Generally, if we receive complaints from like an elected official or someone who contacts the bureau commander directly, that will be, we try to route those to the community policing teams because as I went over, our calls for service continue to go up and we want our patrol officers to be able to focus on those high priority calls for service that are a danger to life. I'm sure you've all heard, I hear it all the time, I had to wait X number of hours for a police officer to come work my car accident or respond to my burglary. And that's because they're engaged in other activities like this which are extremely time consuming. I myself have gone out and posted camps for cleanup. I myself have engaged with unhoused individuals. and attempted to get them to take shelter. But again, I'm not an expert in what nuanced resources are available, so the only thing I can offer is I'll give you a ride to Second Light. And while I don't mind the way that I'm dressed in the car that I drive, we know there are people in our community, especially in the unhoused community, like Matt was talking about, it's about trust. And I don't know what their experience with the police department has been in the past, but we know that we are not always the most welcoming offer of transportation to a shelter. Sorry, I kind of went off topic from your question, but they go to community policing, hot team, and just a general police response, and I don't have a breakdown of who they actually go to.

Okay, I appreciate that. Thank you.

Captain, why don't they have access to HMIS? Is there a reason behind that? Is it a law or a violation of privacy that we're concerned about? Is it a cost issue?

There's many, many things. Each person has access. Sorry.

I'm sorry.

There are a couple of reasons why every law enforcement officer does not have access to HMIS. One is because it is protected information, and that's probably the bigger reason. Actually, probably the bigger reason is the cost. As I mentioned earlier, this is a service that a database that we provide, and every user in the database costs a monthly fee. And so since the grant and the United Way is paying for that, we kind of limit it to only people that kind of have a need to be in there that are inputting data, who are looking, you know, and that kind of thing. We don't want people just in there just looking, like we want them actually contributing to the system.

Quick question. That's a follow-up. Would it be, maybe it's an Aaron question, would it be beneficial maybe for Spider to have it? I mean, or maybe the Bureau commander that day or that shift? I mean, to reduce the cost so that not every officer has HMIS access, but maybe the supervisor. Would that be beneficial?

We're certainly open to the conversation about expanding access to HMIS. We do think it has benefit to us as we're responding, especially after hours. You have to remember the homeless outreach team only works during the day. And that's because that's when the resource providers are available. But our officers who work the middle of the night have very limited access to information and resources. So knowing who someone, if they run into someone on the street, knowing who someone has been in contact with would be helpful. So that we can know, oh, they've already worked with humankind, maybe we can connect them with someone from humankind and not restart this all over again. But I think Jan has something to add.

Jan Jarman from the Law Department. When we wrote a policy on the use of HMIS and we wanted to keep it very narrow, HMIS should not be used as a law enforcement tool. In fact, it's illegal to do that. So you don't want to give it to all law enforcement because they just don't know. You have this new tool and you can train, but if you're not there for the training that day and you might not know, you're not supposed to use it to investigate your crime. So we kept it very... narrow to only the hot team to protect the integrity of HMIS.

Thank you for that context. And I think that makes sense. But what doesn't make sense to me now is why WPD is the first line of defense on these calls then. If we're not going to provide them, and this is not a you question, it's just a comment, right? It's we're sending them out there without the tools to be able to effectively serve the population. I mean, why are we just now having this conversation?

Maybe a follow-up question to that is a good one, which is ICT care teams, are they 24-7? No, right? But they do have some night times.

The mental health response teams? They are close to 24-7. We have one team that's currently open, but we have certainly expanded the ICT teams beyond what we used to have. They are not operating 24-7. but they are over capacity for what they respond to now. We actually keep track of calls that they can't respond to through a pager system so that we can show through data. We don't have enough ICT teams the way it is now. So to add an additional response like this to their plate would not be something that we would be supportive of.

I'm interested in a conversation post this workshop of why are we sending WPD out as the first line of defense if they don't have the tools to, I mean, are we wanting them to just, what are we expecting them to do, I guess?

I'm looking for some context. They're a law enforcement agency, a department that is supposed to enforce our laws. I think that's what their role should be. They're not a mental health worker. You're not a social worker. Those are not, while you may have a specific unit that does that, that is not your main role. Your role is when you call 911 in a situation where someone is naked in a fountain, THAT IS AGAINST THE LAW. THEREFORE, THEIR ROLES SHOULD BE ENFORCED ON THE BOOK, WHICH IS YOU CAN'T DO THAT, I CAN'T DO THAT, YOU CAN'T DO THAT, THEY CAN'T DO THAT.

IS HOMELESSNESS A CRIME?

BATHING IN A FOUNTAIN, YOU ARE.

THAT IS THE ADDITIONAL CONTEXT. YOU MENTIONED SOMEONE WAS NAKED. IS BEING HOMELESS A CRIME? WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH THE ENCAMPMENT ORDINANCE IF SOMEONE IS IN ENCAMPMENT WPD shows up and then what? Because we keep adding additional context that yes, someone being naked in public is a crime, absolutely. Law and order should enforce law and order. What do you do when someone is in an encampment and you don't have access to the tools and resources to see who in this institution has even touched that person to get them the help that they need? It's kind of like a CRM. I think of it like a CRM. We should have a basic customer relations management system that showcases, which I'm assuming is HMIS, who this person has talked to, what services that they've received in the past, so that way you all are able to guide them to the right place, if there is a place.

I think that comes into a few slides that I have. So happy to continue that conversation. I'll let you finish. Because I do speak to the ordinance and some barriers that we see with the ordinance and what our specific role in the process is and should be. So we do collaborate with the housing department for coordinated outreach when we can. Again, they have three full-time outreach workers that also have case management responsibilities. So oftentimes I will receive a complaint of unlawful camping from whatever source, via the chief or someone else. And my response is generally that I forward that complaint to our hot team and Steve so that they can coordinate outreach when they go out to that camp. Obviously it was only three people. The opportunity to do that is limited. I'll let Steve touch on that. That's not our operation. We do believe that multiple points of entry to this system create challenges for effective coordinated outreach. We know that Steve gets complaints about unlawful camping that we don't. We know that we get complaints about unlawful camping that Steve and Sally don't. We know sometimes Reggie gets complaints of unlawful camping in parks that we don't. And when we don't all get the information at the same time, it creates this mess of a situation that we then have to unravel and figure out, okay, who's been out there, when, and what's the appropriate next step. So the absence of a centralized reporting and response management system definitely hampers practical coordination to these issues. Just like we have restricted access to HMIS, housing has restricted access and visibility into SeeClickFix. I don't know that they want access to SeeClickFix because unlawful camping isn't the only thing that's in there. Reporting potholes is in there. Reporting abandoned vehicles is in there. Things far beyond the scope of what housing needs to be aware of. But that is a barrier because they can't see what our homeless outreach team sees through SeeClickFix as far as what's being reported. We've also heard feedback from community that something with See, Click, Fix that is frustrating is that once that report is submitted for an unlawful camp, they get an almost immediate response saying, your report has been closed. But they don't see that the camp has been addressed. However, it's been added to the homeless outreach team's list to go out and follow up on. And then after the homeless outreach team or an officer follows up on it, We send an email to the Parks Department, which then initiates a separate system to track the cleanup of that camp, which I'm sure Reggie will talk about later. And then obviously shelter bed availability information may lack accuracy and just shelter bed availability and shelter admission policies that vary across the system is a huge challenge for us. We are not experts in the housing system or the shelter network. I have myself been out on calls at two in the morning as a police officer in the freezing cold, dialing Googling numbers for for for homeless shelters and calling them and saying, do you have a bed available for a person who is this age, this gender and this situation? And that's the situation that our officers find themselves in routinely. That is a lengthy response. It takes time to figure that out. Sometimes you will take someone to Union Rescue Mission and find out later that they've been trespassed. And then we get called back out to Union Rescue Mission and we have to figure out, OK, now where does this person go? Same thing happens at Second Light. But all of these shelters have different policies that we aren't experts on. And again, after hours support for our police officers in this area specifically is definitely limited. That's why the Homeless Outreach Team works during the day. Barriers for the ordinance. Again, when we go out, our role is to enforce the law. When you look at the ordinance as it was approved in January of 2025, I believe, all of the subsection of the ordinance include the language I have below, but we do want to call out that enforcement does not necessarily require writing a ticket or taking someone to jail. And I think that's contemplated in the language of the ordinance. So each section includes the language an individual may be cited for violating this section if they refuse to leave and or remove personal property within the timeframe specified in the notice. or if they have previously been notified that camping on such public property or public right-of-way is prohibited. So the ordinance requires that we give the person the opportunity to pack up their things and leave within the time that's posted. The ordinance also requires that a person may not be cited with the violation of this section if they are deemed homeless and there are no appropriate shelter beds available for such individual. Because of the complexity of the network of shelters in our community, what we have told our officers is, your phone call is the second light. And you will ask, do you have shelter space available? If the answer is no, you will not write a ticket. And I think there are concerns when you look at that website from United Way, while it is extremely helpful, there is absolutely the potential that we will disproportionately impact women by enforcing the camping ordinance. If you look at just that website and Union Rescue Mission has 60 beds available, only a man can go there. If that's the only bed available, then how does that work when you contemplate the language in the ordinance? So that is something that our officers have to deal with when they're out there in these situations making the tough decision of how are we going to enforce the ordinance in this specific situation. Since the emergency winter shelter closed at second light, the beds, the emergency beds are available after 4 p.m. I believe it's 30 is what Matt said earlier. Um, and from our experience and what we've communicated with the homeless outreach team, generally those beds are spoken for before four o'clock, uh, which means during the day there's no shelter beds available. So at second light. So if we go out to enforce the camping ordinance, we cannot write a ticket or make an arrest because there are no beds available. And then after hours, generally those beds are taken. There's six beds that are reserved out of that 34. hospitals and those beds fill extremely quickly as well. So post-emergency winter shelter, enforcement of this is extremely limited from a citation perspective because of limited shelter space. Councilmember Hoheisel.

Thank you, Captain. So also, there are other laws and ordinances that apply to here as well. For example, if there's open drug use, public nudity or whatnot, you can still effectively deal with a lot of the campsites where there are health hazards and public health hazards, safety hazards as well. Is that correct?

Certainly there are other crimes that people could be cited for outside of unlawful camping. If they are violating the law, then yes, there are other crimes that they could be cited for.

How often do we cite people for those crimes?

for crimes other than unlawful camping. I mean, that's what we do every day. I don't have the number of...

Okay, but specifically in certain locations. So I'm thinking of 3rd and Topeka. I walk out church every Sunday. I actively see drug deals happening.

So I can give you that data. So far in 2026, we've made 35 arrests in the second and Topeka area at specific locations. That's up 338% compared to this time last year.

Thank you. That's great data. Exactly what I was asking for.

So captain, and maybe this is a question for legal. You go to an encampment, you post it. I've seen them. IT DOESN'T SAY WHERE THEY ARE TO LEAVE OR GO. SO I WANT TO KICK IT ON ST. FRANCIS STREET. YOU COME AND KICK ME OUT AND GIVE ME MY NOTICE AND I MOVE OVER TO SECOND AND TOPEKA. ARE YOU REQUIRED TO POST ANOTHER 48-HOUR NOTICE THERE?

YES.

THANK YOU.

AS PROVISIONS OF THE ANTI-CAMPING ORDINANCE, WE ALSO HAVE IMMEDIATE CLEANUP. CAN WE TALK ABOUT WHERE THE SPACES FOR IMMEDIATE CLEANUP ARE?

Yeah, so we have Tier 1 and Tier 2. Tier 1 is considered immediate cleanup. I don't like that word because it is not immediate. I think it gives the wrong impression to community. What it means is we can immediately notify the parks and rec that their cleanup crew can come clean up the camp when they get there, right, when they are done with the camps that they already have to clean. Sometimes that's right away. Sometimes it's not.

What are the areas that require immediate cleanup and how many times have we issued that?

Generally, the cleanups we're doing are in the immediate cleanup areas.

Yeah, so we don't necessarily need to be posting a 40 hour notice. Those should be immediate cleanups.

Correct. So they're posted for cleanup and we send the information to Parks and Recreation via email. And then when they get to that point, they will come out and they will clean it up. It is immediate in the sense that we're not posting a 48-hour notice, but it is not immediate in the sense that someone is with us right then and there like they do in other communities to actually clean up the camp.

One thing that we also don't have is we still have to go out there and post a notice. We don't have notifications anywhere on the street that say no encampments along this area as well. If it's already immediate cleanup, it's a violation of municipal ordinance. It kind of goes into the backend parking conversation where we don't have areas that maybe have said no backing parking prohibited here. There are certain areas that we've designated specifically around schools, around floodways, around other areas that camping is not permissible at any time. But to my knowledge, we don't have any notices of that anywhere. Am I wrong? Or do we have some areas that have notices somewhere?

We don't that I know of, but we have discussed and they are working on some signs to put up on 2nd and Topeka in that area. My only concern about that is, does it then leave the impression when you don't have a signed area that those aren't areas like that? But it is such a, it is, there's so much camping down there that we thought some signs might help. So the last meeting we had, those were being created.

And encumbrance are illegal in general, right? Like encampments are illegal in general, correct?

Being homeless is not illegal, but public camping is.

Thank you.

I might also add, while we're on the topic of 2nd and Topeka, our homeless outreach team and our patrol south community policing are in that area at least two to three times a week, cleaning up the area, moving people along, cleaning up, sending encampments to the park and recreation staff to go clean, and then people come back. And all that others speculate on why they come back, but they do. And then we are back out there, moving people along, cleaning up camps, trying to connect people with services. But again, it's a very nuanced system that police officers generally are not experts in. Councilman Shepherd, sorry.

No, no worries. And maybe Park can speak to this. You mentioned the 48-hour notice and then Vice Mayor Glasscock referenced the municipal code of immediate cleanup. Very aware of that as well. But I'm assuming that the reason why it may take longer than immediate, like right then and there, is because the capacity and staff that are available in Park and Recreation to do that. And I'd be curious, Reggie, what are we foregoing as a result of prioritizing this? Where are you taking staff from to focus in on the encampment cleanups?

So we have a team of four people that's their primary responsibility to address the encampment cleanups. And we have it on our dashboard that's on our main web page now that shows when something is reported and the timeframe that it takes to actually have that encampment removed. And you can see the timeframe and the cost that goes along with that. So that will give you an idea of whether it may be an immediate account removal or if it's an area that has been posted as a 48-hour notice. And we'll talk a little bit about that in the presentation as well on what our current timeframe is on addressing those.

I'd be curious, too, when that time comes, Are they new hires? Where did you pull these staff from to focus in on this?

So when they transitioned over to us doing it in-house with Parks and Rec, we moved some positions from our forestry team over to the encampment crew to be able to address what we needed from there. And that's where that process started once the ordinance was in place starting in January of 25. Thank you.

Just one thought about cleanup and why tier one cleanups are so difficult. Even when we do a tier one, we'll still put a notice because it's best for everybody if they can keep their stuff. And then it'll go to Parks. By the time Parks gets there, the encampment might have moved across the street, which is still illegal because you can't move anywhere within the line of sight. But the problem is Parks doesn't know who it was that moved across the street. And they haven't been given an order for across the street. The other problem is when you arrive to clean up a Tier 1 or even a Tier 2, and people gather all their stuff as you're coming. They see you coming. They put all their stuff in a bag or in a cart. We can't take their personal items from them. So now we're left, cleanup isn't as easy as you think. You don't just get to go out and sweep everything away because you're allowed to have a shopping cart with you. You're allowed to have a suitcase with you. So we don't take things out of their hands, but you're left with the same problem tomorrow because then they move next door and they've erected the same encampment and then you start over again.

Just a thought.

To add to that, too, we've actually seen that people are now... knowledgeable of when we are out and will intentionally not have a camp set up with sleeping things. They will pack those things away and then wait for the evening to then unpack them and set up a camp, which also provides us some operational challenges. That specifically happened right behind Second Light just last week.

If we're doing a cleanup and we see drug paraphernalia in people's possession, is that warrant that there's a violation of the law committed or do you actually have to see them use it?

No, so we would absolutely have to prove that an individual person possessed that paraphernalia in order for a prosecutor to take that charge. And I'll let Reggie speak to this more, but my personal experience when I went out and posted to camps is people will abandon their property once it's posted and just move on. And so generally, Reggie's people are not actually interacting with individuals. They're interacting with abandoned property.

OK, thank you.

like the camp I had that I personally posted. There was no one around when I found it. I posted it. It was an unknown suspect that was violating the ordinance and I never knew who whose property that was.

I have a follow-up question. It's back to the signage. I know that Citi is working on signage in the most frequent locations, one being 2nd and Topeka, but I'm looking at an email from District 6. This gentleman has been frustrated that He can't utilize the Arkansas River with his family because he keeps seeing all these encampments. And I know that I always copy Councilmember Ballard because we want people to utilize public assets. And we tell people to submit the complaint via the City of Wichita Report and Issue app or call 911. Are there frequent locations that can maybe Park share? What are these frequent locations where we keep getting repeat? Obviously, Second and Topeka being one of them, but can you share with actual data where these frequent are?

So we don't track actual data on each location itself, but we do map for the sites that we actually clean up. So one of the things that we're doing right now is looking at producing signage that we can place on site for those areas that we're seeing frequent encampments. So we're going to incorporate that into our cleanup crew process that once they remove those sites and once it's deemed an area that's been one that's been infrequent, We'll leave signage behind that was there to say that this is not an area that is illegal for camping. So we're working on the language on that to have approved and then getting the cost because it will be a budget impact to see how we incorporate it into our process moving forward.

But Reggie, that goes back to Attorney Jarman's point of there are no legal spaces where folks can, I would just caution us of the unintended consequences of posting signage that showcases that an area is an illegal space to camp when it is illegal. Not to be homeless, did I hear that correct? But to camp. There are no spaces where someone can do that. I mean, we're not Colorado Springs. We don't have a legal ordinance that makes it legal to camp within a particular radius. We don't have that law here. So my fear in doing that is setting you up and your department up and WPD up for failure. I would just caution us and... I don't think that that would be a wise directive.

And I think that's why it's important that the languages, what we put on those signage is going to be important as well. Before we implement anything, that's something that we're going to review and make sure that it reflects what the current ordinance is and then we're able to implement it to show that people in the areas where they're camping, that is an area that they should be.

Along those lines, what counts as an encampment? I know that's one of the things that some residents have been struggling with. For example, Lincoln Park, we have a gentleman who has all of his possessions. He sleeps on a bench near the park, but it's not officially camping because he does not have a tent set up. So is simply sleeping on the streets violating our camping ordinance?

That actually is a violation. You don't have to set up a tent to be in camping. It's laying down, preparing and sleep day or night, having a camping paraphernalia, which would be a pillow or a blanket. It's pretty broad definition.

So can't you sleep in the park? You're out there reading a book and falling asleep. That could technically be against our ordinance as well.

The way the ordinance is written is you, if you fall asleep reading a book, it's not to stay there. The wording is to use that as your, it's not to use it as your home, but there is wording that distinguishes between somebody temporary falling asleep, anybody, even a person without a home, falling asleep on the steps of Century 2 for a couple minutes is not illegal. But laying all your stuff out and using that as your bedding is illegal.

OK. And then we come out and we clean that up. And then they can be back the next day and doing the exact same thing.

Right. Because that fellow is probably a situation where a cleanup wouldn't help in that situation because he can just take his suitcase and leave. So an encampment cleanup there isn't effective.

So it would be moving them on down the line or? Moving them on. OK. Thank you.

So if you had an area like 2nd and Topeka where you wanted people, especially where you had certain focused areas you didn't want people to be, the one thing that holds us back from saying, look, you really can't camp anywhere, but you especially can't be here right now. The thing that holds us back is the fact that there has to be shelter available because we have nothing to back it up. The police can say, we wish you'd leave, and they can say, no way. And the police, if there's no shelter available, the police can really do nothing about it unless they're on private property where we can trespass them from that. But on public property, there's nothing you can do.

Well, that seems to be in every single question and presentation so far today is shelter available. And when we talk about there's only 30 beds available right now for emergency shelter, that is the root of the problem currently is that there's not enough shelter beds available. So thank you for bringing that to our attention in this presentation, just like the last presentation too.

We just wanted to show the documentation of enforcement actions. So we've had 338 enforcement actions that were documented in our records management system from April 2025 to December of 2025. The ordinance was passed in January, but we didn't create this case classification and get our policy kind of finished until April. So far this year we've had 313 enforcement actions. This means an officer went out and warned someone you cannot camp, you've got to move along. If they didn't take their stuff with them then the camp was posted or if they weren't there when we encountered the camp, the camp was posted and sent to parks. So that's a total of 651 enforcement actions that the police have taken since April of 2025. Again, we want to make sure everybody understands not all interactions between police and unhoused residents relate to unlawful camping. We run into unhoused residents all the time on all different types of matters, many times as victims of crime, sometimes as suspects of crime, and those don't all interact around unlawful camping. Sometimes we get questions of, can you tell us how many reports you have where you've interacted with unhoused individuals? We do have a button in our RMS where you can mark that someone is homeless. But that's not a great picture of actual enforcement action related to unlawful camping. So I just wanted to call that out. We do have 4,838 documented HOT interactions, Homeless Outreach Team interactions, in 2025. So those are individual interactions. Those may be interactions with one person multiple times, but 4,838 interactions from those four officers.

Captain Moses, quick question as a follow-up to the 35 arrests at 2nd and Topeka. Since the law went into effect, or the updated law went into effect in January of 2025, but data was not being collected until April 2025 to December 2025, 338 enforcement actions. How many were arrests?

Two.

Thank you.

We've cited or arrested two people for unlawful camping.

And how many were placed into shelter or housing?

Directly from the police department, I could not tell you. I have no way to tell you the number of people our officers transport to shelter, but I know it's significant. We can look at winter weather. We are the only resource in our city that is out when it is harshly, bitterly cold. Every year, we authorize overtime for our officers to go out and make contact with unhoused residents on the street and say it is bitterly cold. Let me take you to shelter.

So over time that police are contributing to may result in the need to address our unhoused neighbors. Say that again. Do you have to issue over time for folks to go out and address any issues related to our unhoused neighbors?

So we allow officers on duty to do that. We encourage officers on duty to do that. But we know, based on our call for service numbers and our authorized staffing levels and the amount of ground that we cover, we have 166 square miles in this city that our officers cover. And their main priority is 911 calls for service. So when time allows, we encourage them to contact unhoused residents that they see and encourage them to go to shelter. But we know that's not enough. So we authorize overtime when these weather incidents occur for additional officers, including the homeless outreach team, to come in on their time off and do that work as well. Thank you.

Captain Moses, I don't know if you already said this and if you did, I apologize. Do you know how many encampments you all cleaned up in 2025 and so far in 2026?

Reggie has that information later on in the presentation.

Okay, great.

Thanks. But what we can say is we've made 651 enforcement actions, which includes like the camp that I dealt with. I went out, I made a police report, I posted the camp, I emailed Parks and had them come out and clean it up.

Captain Moses, sorry. I'm going to go back to the two that you cited or arrested, the police department. Can you share what those two were, the premise behind it? It was not because they just had an encampment. Tell me, can you share, since there were only two out of 338 enforcement actions, only two resulted in a citation or arrest?

Generally we look at that as an option of last resort and I believe both of those were actually written by the homeless outreach team after they had engaged with people significantly and attempted to get them into shelter and the person just refused to move or refuse shelter and there was shelter available.

And then while we're on the topic of HOT, the HOT team began in 2013. How many bus rides have been provided to individuals to go back to their families and cities outside of Wichita?

That number is 1,095.

Captain Moses, can you walk us through the process of how we determine, because I mean, just earlier today, we were having consternation about folks sending unhoused neighbors here. How do we ensure that there are family members where we are sending them? I want people to be a good neighbor and a good partner to the city of Wichita, but the city of Wichita also needs to be a good neighbor to those other surrounding communities as well, or wherever we're sending folks who say that they have family in other communities too. So what's the process to ensure that they are going to have safety and security where we're sending them.

It's thorough. This is all, I just want to call out, this is all funded by donations. This is not funded through budget allocation from the city. It's donations to the homeless outreach team. And we actually make contact with whoever it is in whatever state, city, wherever, that is going to take responsibility for this person and have a place for them to stay when they get there. If we cannot do that we will not send someone somewhere else on one of these bus tickets. That's the end of my presentation. I'll hand it back over to Steve, and I'll stay around for questions.

Actually, sorry, Captain Moses. I asked you this via email, so I'm going to finish asking the questions since you're prepared to answer them. Panhandling was not addressed here.

It will be at the end of the presentation. It's in one of the policy discussion line items is panhandling, but happy to answer any question you have now.

Okay, I'll wait for the panhandling question. The last one is, can you please share the ERT model from Edmonton, Canada?

Yeah, happy to do that. So Edmonton, Canada is an agency that's involved in Major Cities Chiefs Association, which we also are. It's the largest police departments from across the United States and Canada that meet twice a year. The chiefs meet a third time by themselves. And Edmonton had a huge unlawful camping issue across their city, large-scale encampments where they had people who were dying in those encampments, people who were freezing to death in Canada, and people who were burning to death trying to keep themselves warm. And so Edmonton created the ERT, the Encampment Response Team model, which is a truly collaborative effort between police and service providers and then their park peace officers as well, who go out together to address encampments. We've seen some videos and learned from Edmonton that they will actually take like a white small city bus out to an encampment that is gonna be closed and the service providers will go out and make contact with individuals in those encampments. We'll tell them this encampment is being closed. Your options are to come with us on this bus, pack up your stuff and leave or you're gonna be arrested or cited for unlawful camping. And they actually get significant cooperation because it's not, the police that go out and make that initial contact it's the service provider and what they do is they load them up on that bus and they will actually start the process on the bus and start working on getting an id figuring out what section of this nuanced system they fit in and then they drive them to the navigation center essentially their version of second light and continue that process there while then the police and parks are involved in cleaning up the actual camp I just wanna call out funding in Canada is very different. In Edmonton, it's not a municipality funded project. The state, the province actually has allocated a lot of funds to this project to make it successful. So that's the quick and dirty on ERT. Happy to get more information for any council member that would like it. Again, Deputy Chief Duff actually was a member of the PELI program and worked with the Edmonton Police Department through that program and went up and spent some time up there with them through that program.

Do you have any contacts with the state that you can push to help get some funding down here for us as well?

I think that would fall under the policy discussion at the end of this presentation. Better suited for the elected officials in the room.

And Captain Moses, thank you very much for your part of the presentation. I know that the fire department will not be presenting regarding homelessness. However, I meet with the chief monthly and she gives me this update. I WANTED TO SHARE THIS WITH MY COLLEAGUES BECAUSE YOU JUST MENTIONED IN EDMONTON, CANADA, INDIVIDUALS WHO MAY HAVE DIED DUE TO TRYING TO KEEP WARM BUT CAUSING A FIRE OR DYING BECAUSE IT IS SO COLD. THESE ARE THE LATEST NUMBERS FOR 2025. THESE ARE INCIDENTS INVOLVING VACANT STRUCTURES IN ADDITION TO THE NUMBER OF ALARMS THAT HAVE BEEN ACTIVATED AT SECOND LIGHT AND ALSO THE NUMBER OF INCIDENTS REGARDING HOMELESSNESS AND FIRES IN OUR COMMUNITY. SO WHILE LAW ENFORCEMENT IS ONE OF THE FIRST RESPONDING AGENCIES THAT IS INVOLVED WITH HOMELESSNESS, SO IS FIRE. AND SO I JUST WANTED TO MAKE SURE THAT THAT WAS ALSO PRESENTED DURING THIS PORTION TO MY COLLEAGUES.

MAYOR, CAN YOU EXPLAIN, I SEE DISTRICTS ONE, THREE, AND SIX ARE OUTLINED. CAN YOU, BECAUSE I HAVEN'T HAD TIME TO SEE THIS. HIGH-LEVEL OVERVIEW OF WHAT THIS MEANS?

THESE ARE THE VACANT PROPERTIES THAT HAVE HAD MULTIPLE FIRE ALARMS. FOR INSTANCE, THE VERY FIRST ONE HAS HAD 15 FIRE ALARMS, AND THAT'S IN DISTRICT 3. SO THIS IS JUST FOR 2026 SO FAR. THE ONE BEHIND IS ALSO 2026. THIS IS THE NUMBER OF INCIDENTS INVOLVING HOMELESSNESS THAT FIRE HAS HAD TO RESPOND TO. 254 INVOLVEMENTS AT 1025 NORTH MAINE. THE FOLLOWING ONE WOULD BE 80 AT 2800 NORTH HILLSIDE. AND THEN THE LAST PAGE THAT YOU SEE IS THE NUMBER OF ALARMS AT SECOND LIGHT SINCE MARCH 31ST OF 2025. AND THAT'S 850 ALARM CALLS.

I'd just like to add a little bit to this conversation here, because this is an issue I've been grappling with in my district, and you see the numbers here. Until we actually get some changes on, again, the state level as to how we deal with property rights and vacant homes and being able to actually cycle through and get those off of the market, we really have limited resources in how we address this. We can go out and we can board up houses and try and keep people out of them the best we can. But I just want to point out again that this is part of a larger conversation that we need to have. with our state legislators, state representatives as to how we can solve particularly this process of abandoned structures. Several other states, I know some people have been to Detroit, and seeing the housing stock that they have there. And with state and local rules, they've actually been able to repurpose a lot of those homes and get them to the hands of people who need affordable housing. So just a little bit of nuance whenever we're talking about structure fires, vacant houses fires. We all, I mean, down south, it's fire season. I think 70% of those calls come in south of Kellogg. So it's a difficult issue we're facing. But again, that's... CONVERSATIONS THAT WE NEED TO HAVE WITH OUR STATE REPRESENTATIVES AND SENATORS IN ORDER TO MAKE SOME HEADWAY AS FAR AS THE ABANDONED HOUSES THAT WE HAVE IN OUR DISTRICTS.

WELL, IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT BEHIND THE HOMES IN YOUR DISTRICT, TOO, A LOT OF THOSE HOMES WERE NOT MEANT TO BE PERMANENT STRUCTURES AND THE GOVERNMENT FAILED YOUR DISTRICT by not keeping their word. And so if we're gonna talk about the data about why these structured housing fires are occurring, I would hope the chief is also supplying context behind why that is and that we as a city council are committed to making sure that we're investing in those areas where we see disproportionate SITUATIONS LIKE THIS OCCURRING, AND THEN ALSO WHERE WE SEE MEDICAL CALLS WHERE FIRE HAS TO RESPOND IN OUR DISTRICT, IN MY DISTRICT ALONE. THAT'S THE NUMBER ONE REASON WHY FIRE IS COMING OUT, AND I'VE BEEN WORKING WITH FIRE ABOUT MAKING SURE THAT WE'RE ADDRESSING THE SOCIAL DETERMINANTS OF HEALTH, ALSO MAKING SURE THAT HEALTH LITERACY IS A FACTOR. AGAIN, I TALK ABOUT RED LINING A LOT, BUT THAT ALSO CONTRIBUTES TO A LOT OF WHY WE SEE WHAT'S HAPPENING, AND IT'S NO SURPRISE THAT IT'S HAPPENING IN DISTRICTS, AS YOU OUTLINED, MAYOR, DISTRICTS ONE, THREE, AND SIX. know we like to outline where the most property taxes come from in this city it's also no secret that the lease are probably coming from those areas as well so there's a correlating theme so again as we present this data i would like to make sure that we're having full picture in full context behind the situations and lived experiences that people in these neighborhoods are going through or else it's a mute point to me AND, FURTHERMORE, WE DID TAKE A STEP TODAY. THIS WAS IN CONSENT AGENDA PACKET. I WAS GOING TO PULL IT BECAUSE I HAD SOME QUESTIONS AND JUST WANTED TO DRAW ATTENTION TO IT, BUT WE ARE TAKING STEPS TO MAKE SURE THAT WE'RE ADDRESSING THE SITUATION OF VACANT HOMES AND MAKING SURE THAT WE'RE GIVING MORE POWER TO THE CITY TO BE ABLE TO ADDRESS NUISANCE ABATEMENTS BY CHARGING THE PROPERTY OWNERS FOR NOT TAKING CARE OF THEIR PROPERTY.

There's no more questions for me. I'll hand it back over to Steve for a little bit and hang out in the audience.

I have good news. As you recall about this time last year, we were having some more conversations. What do we do about our encampments? And so I'm going to level set here and talk about something wonderful that's happening. It's not perfect. It's a process. And at the end of the day, we've got some really wonderful collaboration happening between our departments in order to solve a problem. But I want a level set that probably everybody in the room knows I'm talking about a specific location. I'd like not to call that out. People much smarter than me have told us that we want to work one encampment at a time and not necessarily publicly identify where we are working for the purposes of protecting those people and what might happen. Again, those people are much smarter than me. So understanding that I didn't know everything about how are we closing encampments, I reached out to Houston, right? The lady who led the reduction of homelessness, unsheltered homelessness in Houston, Mandy Chapman Semple, she graciously came to give us this presentation. It was last July, July 2025, and she walked us through the steps. The good news is we are implementing many, if not all of these steps. in one particular encampment, and as the slides progress, you will see how this is progressing. It's a direct-to-housing approach through coordinated support systems. We have some proven impact metrics from other communities that we're working on implementing, and it includes a sustainable post-closure support system. The approach is housing focused, trauma informed, coordinated amongst multi-departments, multi-agencies. It's an evidence-based transformation, as I will get into in a little bit, and ultimately provides for the goal of safe transitions for individuals. We have local alignment and partnerships across department. We have case conferencing that happens daily internally and weekly externally. That includes the hot team. We are working through every client we are encountering in a team approach on a case conferencing team's call. There is no wrong door policy for these individuals. There is a budget considerations for this. We have included rental support, rapid rehousing funds. We're using some of our internal supports. Certainly, we're using the Quick Trip. money in order to provide the resources for this, and this includes staffing and contingency plans, and of course we have a lot of departmental budget line items that we have been aligning to this.

What's the recent funding from the federal government look like? I know there were some consternations about some cuts coming down the line, and I think there have been some in some areas.

Sally will be able to speak to the ones that are regarding the public housing authority ones, because she does have that story for you. But interestingly, the COC slide that was presented earlier in the United Way PROVIDES THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF STREET OUTREACH. AND YOU WILL BE SEEING A PRESENTATION FROM ME IN THE NEXT PROBABLY THREE WEEKS AS I WILL BE APPLYING TO INSTITUTIONALIZE THIS PROCESS THROUGH THE COC GRANT MOVING FORWARD. THE 12 PEOPLE THAT THEY TALKED ABOUT, IT MIGHT HAVE TO COME FROM THE CITY OF WICHITA'S TEAM TO DO THIS MODEL, TO CLOSE ENCAMPMENTS BY HOUSING PEOPLE. THAT'S MY GOAL. THANK YOU. Okay. other communities have had results houston is not on this slide but they had a 60 reduction in unsheltered homelessness new orleans cut unsheltered homelessness by 24 percent dallas reduced homelessness by 25 to 28 and these communities are subcontracted with clutch consulting to institutionalize this model through the consulting of mandy chapman sample we don't have a current consultation project with her i just like to hear what they have to say and then i run with it so there's obviously an opportunity to continue to work with her we are regularly communicating with the residents of the camp that we are working with we are regularly communicating with them through the hot team through our daily work with them we are out there every day and we are building trust interestingly the hot team has amazing trust with some of the people in our encampments and we use that trust and build from that rapport in finding housing plans for the people in the encampments This is a multi-phase approach, and I'll be able to specifically identify where we are at. Phase A is pre-work and unit pipeline. Phase B is a resource fair that we built out. Phase C is a resource fair activation, camp closure window, and then post-camp stabilization. We actually have specific dates on this. These dates will be formalized in the upcoming weeks as our internal departments come together and build out that strategic plan. We are coordinating daily among outreach teams. We are assessing clients needs. We are identifying units in the community and landlords who will rent to individuals coming from homelessness. And we are actively aligning our resources with park and rec and with a police department and all of our resources in order to coordinate these efforts. We had a resource fair that included actually i've got numbers about the resource fair we did track data and this is the results this was on may 27th we had 18 community partners we engaged with 45 to 50 residents 30 residents advanced along their housing pathways we had council engagement and even other community partners showed up that wanted to find out how they can better assist moving forward We are now in the closure window, actually. We're post-resource fair. Our outreach workers are reaching out and facilitating housing move-ins. We are moving people to shelter in hotels. There was a veteran recently that moved into a SSVF-funded hotel. We are actively looking at site remediation, and when Reggie comes up, he'll talk more about that. And then we do have a closure maintenance strategy, and that is also in Reggie's presentation. We're looking at developing key performance indicators. We're tracking move-ins, retention, pet accommodations and satisfaction. The data is aggregated and anonymized and you will all be seeing a dashboard here coming up. These are the steps to housing. I know everybody says that it's complicated. At the end of the day, however, there's parts of it that just simply are not complicated. What's not complicated is that everybody needs to follow these steps. There's going to be, they're going to shoot off of this path here and there, but some of this stuff, and as I'll talk about them, don't need to happen two or three or four times every time somebody restarts. For instance, we need to assess their needs, get them into the HMIS system, we need a photo ID, we need a Social Security verification, we need an income verification, and then they need to fill out the housing application. Interestingly, if our community providers all uploaded the ID and the verification of Social Security and then income verification, the next street outreach worker who comes across them won't have to do those steps again. That's what the beauty of a homeless management information system is, is that common point of contact. If everybody is documenting everything that they're doing, then the next person just simply keep the ball rolling. We've got all of these steps lined up on a spreadsheet. it's a wonderful system and we did get a new system, but it still has its challenges in tracking this. It's really built to track HUD data, but in terms of housing data, it's a little more challenged. So frankly, I just put this in a spreadsheet and we're just tracking these steps for every one of those clients moving forward. If we got stuck at income verification, then somebody else can work on the other things, if that makes sense. These are all of the steps that they all need to take along the housing path. Here's our current dashboard. So we have met 75 clients in this large rural encampment. Seven of them have been housed since May 27th. seven of them have disappeared on us. So that accounts for 14. And three of them have flat out refused to be housed. Now the three who've refused to be housed are probably going to move to a different encampment once this one gets closed. The beauty of this is they're watching everybody else get housed and we will continually revisit this. Matt spoke to this. Some of the people in the particular encampment that I'm talking about have been there for seven to 10 years. they have given up hope but when we start to reintroduce hope into the matrix then the yes is more likely to come the next time we ask doesn't mean we stop asking but the next time they'll have seen the results of other people potentially moving on so we are tracking everybody along the steps down that bottom So we are keeping a series of dashboards, we're doing pivot tables, we're doing dashboards, we're tracking this on a weekly basis in the group, and we're gonna be reporting this out to the city manager's office so that you all can see what we're doing. It's de-identified so that you won't see necessarily where we're working, although you could probably guess, and you can see where we're at along the path. There are some systemic opportunities. Some are here, some have actually come up. I've been working with a criminal justice system, for instance. The gentleman that Councilman Hohaisel spoke about completed his parole in the encampment itself by the parole officer coming out and meeting with him. I have spoken to somebody at Kansas Department of Corrections about that, and the response was they cannot compel somebody to be housed. I understand the nuance of that. So I've been really working with, I've been trying to embed with KDOC, but more importantly, I've been talking to our municipal court, right? How many unhoused people are we currently working with? And do those probation officers understand the process to becoming housed? I've got a meeting with them this week to talk about it. and I sat in the back of the courtroom when somebody was being sentenced who was unhoused, the judge knew it, called me in. We're building these partnerships to try and find the path to housing for everybody no matter what door they find themselves in. I used to work in the criminal justice system. I worked prisoner reentry for decades in Northern Nevada. I know that the criminal justice system contributes to inflow into homelessness. If we don't shut that valve, we're gonna just keep having the same problems over and over again. This has to be multi-pronged approach. I'm trying to work on as many prongs as I can. Do you know how many pets are in some of these large rural encampments? There are a lot of dogs. And do you know that along the way, our animal shelter director had never been looped in? She has now, and all of the animal rights advocacy groups have been looped in now. These are the things, these are the gaps that we are attempting to fill when we see them, if that makes sense. I am also finding pathways through disability resource organizations that aren't on that list that you guys C, and now we have disability organizations coming out. At the end of the day, what we acknowledge about self-sufficiency with people coming from homelessness, it's not simple to say that everybody needs to get a job. It's not that simple. However, everybody needs an income path. I don't think it's fair to put somebody in a 100% rental assistance program and then expect that they're gonna go donate plasma in order to get groceries. If they have a disabling condition, they need to work down a disabling condition pathway and get disability income. Otherwise, we need to find a different resource for them. The nuance of getting somebody reconnected to the workforce who's been homeless for eight to 10 years, that's a long road, but we need income along the way in order to develop that self-sufficiency. Connections to organization that secure those income pathways and then and I put it as kindly as I can in that the well-intentioned Samaritan groups that previously came up the sandwiches the clothing all of that. They are very active in our encampments. They are I would say not helpful but actually in some ways i worry about how dangerous it is for them to do the work that they are doing if we can give a widget of trauma to every day somebody is unhoused and giving them a sandwich one day keeps them unhoused one longer day are we adding to the drama This is part of my concern about the sub-parenting groups. And I don't want to say anything bad about their hearts. I think they think they're doing the right thing. They just need to be told that we would rather they house somebody as a solution to their homelessness rather than feed somebody as a solution to their homelessness. Post-closure stabilization. I've not kept up with my slides here. To tell me when to pivot over to Park and Rec. after we move people at the end of the closure period we are going to continue to check in with them our goal is to connect them to the case management services in the community that they need to continue to support these things that they have going on Those are with DECA, with SAC, Substance Abuse Center of Kansas. They are with ComCare. I've gotten a lot of wonderful communications with ComCare lately and connecting them to the ongoing mental health support that they need in order to maintain that housing. And we also have built into our homeless prevention program resources to help people who have been housed in the last 24 months from homelessness who might have hit a bump in the road and we'd be able to reach out and continue to help them to make sure they don't return to homelessness to turn off that spigot of inflow too.

Yes, sir. Real quick, Steve, is there a target for these catching encampment closures as far as people engaging? Is it like 50, 60% that we want to try and get houses that kind of the national average? I'm just curious if there's like a just a target point as far as a percentage of people that do eventually get housed through the catch model.

Good question. You're making me think hard. We piloted this at 235 and Broadway, and we met 12 people. We housed six. and five of them are still housed. And that happened in September. I will have to go back to research about the success rate, but so far those KPIs are the camp was closed. So I haven't dug in deeper to say, where did they go? And I'm also developing a little bit of a lane here in our data to make sure that I capture that if I started with 75 and I housed 50, where did the other 25 go? Easy for me now to say they chose not to be housed, but I want to track them to see if they went to the next encampment and then track them to see if they went to the next encampment. And how many interactions did it take to get to the center of their housing plan?

I appreciate that. I'll be looking out for that one.

Okay. Okay. Now I'm going to pivot it over to park and rec department to talk about the environmental processes that go with closing a large scale rural encampments. Reggie.

So the next phase of this is as they transition and they get services that are available for the individuals that are there that are unhoused, is that the Parks and Rec team comes in and does some of the after cleanup and environmental cleanup areas there for it. So that involves cleaning debris, managing hazards, dealing with bio-waste that's there on site, and restoring the space to protect their environment. There are safety improvements that we'll work on with trimming and vegetation, enhancing the site, improve safety and deter re-encampments. So that is an ongoing process that we'll work through with our forestry team as we are removing those individuals who are there that won't be housed in that area any longer. So we also have health monitoring. So we do performance sweeps in the air and the soil test for safety and community health. We also have ongoing support that we're looking at for new camps, connect people to housing resources. We're working with the housing department as well as the HOT Team. Then once we get to that point, we're looking at what are the actual numbers that we're looking at as we are doing the cleanups. So once the encampments are cleared and the inhabitants or Parks and Rec team deploys, the cleanup function was transitioned to Parks and Rec in 2025 in-house. And as a result of that, the number of encampments removed doubled in 2025. So you can see us four back as 2022 with the numbers 129 and went to 289 to 225 and 24. And in 2025, we have 459 encampments that we actually cleared last year. And twice as many accountments were cleared for slightly less cost in outsourcing. The cleanup time was significantly reduced from 14 to 21 days when we were working with the external vendor to the average of three and a half days. So it shows here what those costs that was associated with that. And even with us moving internally, we doubled the number of accountments, but we were able to do it for less than what we were paying external for a vendor to provide the service.

reggie i just want to say that's a huge success story what also i think is a success from this as well is that when i did a ride along with one of the contracting cleanup crews they didn't have proper ppe and i know that we're providing that and so we're able to do it also more safely for those that are doing cleanup so i think this is a really good success story over the last year so thank you for your work on this

Thanks, and I know that's one thing that Gary and his team puts an emphasis on, making sure that our team is protected and getting them the equipment that they can do to do the job as safely as they can.

Another maybe just quick question. I know that you're doing a lot more with less resources and you have a lower turnaround time as well. Are there still further resources needed to be able to meet the demand or are you pretty capped out at just turnaround 3.5 time or 3.5 days and or could you have more resources to be able to do more cleanups? Is there a waiting list?

It depends on the demand. A lot of the time what we're contingent upon is just the time frame that HOT can actually get in and tag those locations and be able to respond from there. Our resources are only available Monday through Friday to 7 to 4. So if something happens on weekends or after hours, We're restricted being able to address those once the next business day starts. So it just depends on what the policy is and how we address it and on what additional resources we may need to be able to respond.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you, Reggie. severe weather, contingency plan, shelter hydration stations, best practices for focusing on health. We are managing some risk stuff, watching the data, making sure that our staff have PPE when they go out there as well. So with that, we're putting some of this stuff back on you guys. I'm happy to answer any questions about what I'm doing. At the end of the day, I think what you heard earlier, I will say a couple of things. Street outreach, for instance, if you look back at the back data, we had robust street outreach that ended around 2014, 2015. We're just now sort of adding it back to our homeless response system. It's been only happening in the pockets related to 18 to 24 year olds with runaway and homeless youth programs, the VA, the United Way is working on street outreach more from a community wide aspect. We're doing the deep dive in these specific locations because we're filling a gap. We've had to find the funding to do that elsewhere because really, coordinated funding for street outreach went away a few years ago, or it got greatly reduced. So we had robust street outreach until about 2014, 2015, and then the data sort of drops off and there's very little of it in our system performance measures across our community that's in HMIS. It's only just now picking up with the work that we're doing. So if you look at this 10 to 12 year gap in coordinated street outreach, it's not at all surprising to me that some of the people we're meeting have been in a certain location that we all know about for eight to 10 years. Not surprising to me at all and that they had given up hope. People just aren't engaging with them. Well, we're changing that. And we, I, love that HUD has recognized this and is allowing the CoC funds to fund this moving forward. It feels as challenging as the HUD rework has been to a lot of our community members across the nation, it also feels like a ginormous opportunity for us to fill a very specific gap that happens to exist here. here in a way that can institutionalize doing it in best practice working with law enforcement working with park and rec working with the individual providers across our community so these are i don't know exactly what the question is who should own and manage the outreach process or who should own and manage the homeless response system are the right people involved at the right times Did you guys wanna have a conversation about unlawful camping ordinance, lawyering, and panhandling? I will say about panhandling, I think, I don't know if you have any data, I don't know if the WTP, he does have some data regarding panhandling. I think it's implied, and I think most of our community believes that all panhandlers are homeless, and I don't think that's true. And I think at the end of the day, some people make money that way, and they aren't all homeless. It's not to say that it doesn't exist, but we can't always trust the sign on the cardboard. So maybe that's part of your conversation here as well, if you're really wanting to dig into the visibility of homelessness.

I definitely do. I get a lot of comments regarding panhandling. And so I know that this takes a different turn from this conversation. But I had these questions asked to Captain Moses. Number one, is it illegal to give money to a panhandler?

I don't think you're going to like my answer. Maybe. Could be. Kind of what Jan and I spoke about in council last week is we as an entity between the law department and the police department have sort of tried to direct council to take a step back from simply the term panhandling and look more at the behavior that is actually occurring because individual behavior or behaviors or what we can make illegal. So there is a city ordinance that addresses this issue. It's 1144-100. Entering or staying upon designated roadway or impeding the flow of traffic is prohibited. Subsection F specifically states no driver or operator of a motor vehicle shall park, stop, or leave standing a vehicle on a designated roadway or suddenly decrease the speed of such vehicle or deviate from a traffic lane for the purpose of responding to persons violating the other subsections of that ordinance. So if you stop in traffic to give someone something, who has entered the roadway and that impedes the flow of traffic, then yes, that is illegal. If you are stopped at a red light and traffic is not moving, the way I read this ordinance, you're not impeding traffic. The impediment of the traffic is what is illegal. Correct me if I'm wrong. Sometimes Jan and I don't always agree.

The intent was that it is illegal to pass something to a person outside your window. That ordinance can be tightened up and in fact Sharon's been working on it. The penalty section is messy and we need to fix that. It's debatable whether it's written in a way right now that it can be if you're stopped. But the intent is you cannot pass something to someone. Is it something that PD really wants enforced? Probably not. My mom used to make these little baggies with a granola bar and a $5 bill. And I said, mom, please don't. It was in Springfield. It wasn't illegal there. And it's not helping anybody to do that. But our intent is that there should be an ordinance where you cannot hand something. Our problem is it's also illegal to receive from the street. But you have to kind of imagine the curb as a plane. You cannot break the plane and put your hand into the plane to take something. We had a fellow who used to have a net, and he would, because he knew that you're not allowed to take anything with your hand, so he would have a big net that he would stick out in the street to take things. That's also illegal because you're breaking the plane. There's been a, there's a 10th Circuit, we're the 10th Circuit. There was a case out of Oklahoma City that we actually based our entire ordinance on that was struck down and said the ordinance was unconstitutional, that you, have to allow people to stand on the median, because our ordinance used to say you can't stand on the median, because it's not safe. It's a traffic safety issue. But the court struck it down, so we had to take that out of our ordinance. And that's how our ordinance got a little Frankensteined. We were trying to fix things, and that's how the penalty ended up getting a little bit messed up. But to answer your question, I think that you cannot hand things to people in the street. But I understand Captain Moses's argument that it could be tightened up a little bit.

A follow-up question to that then, because this is a regular occurrence, back to the median situation. You're not on the street, you're in the middle of the road on top of a median. An individual with a sign, very frequently, Can you cite that individual or no? It is not illegal unless there's actual, an officer has to witness. Is that accurate? You can't even, so if a regular passerby who's in another vehicle captures this on video, that is not admissible.

It would be admissible, but it's not illegal necessarily. I think there's a difference between a raised median and just you're in the street and there's some yellow lines. But my supervisor may not agree with me necessarily on that. It's a debatable issue. But I think if you're in the street, we have an ordinance. If you go further down, there's more ordinance that says you cannot be in the street. But if you're up on a median, that is not part of the ordinance. So if we had a citizen who said, I saw somebody in the median holding a sign, that's not illegal. You can hold any sign you want. That's First Amendment. You can be in the median now thanks to the Tenth Circuit. They think that's okay. Now, if a citizen saw a hand-to-hand... you know, a handoff, that's hard to prosecute because we would have to, first of all, we don't just prosecute based on what one citizen says. If they have a video, maybe we would. That would be evidence that we would use, and the police could do that. We'd have to have them sign the complaint. They would have to be a witness. They would have to go to court. But it is a misdemeanor, sort of, because it's written wonky in the ordinance. But it is meant to be a misdemeanor to accept things, to handle. It's a misdemeanor. So we could charge a misdemeanor based on what a citizen saw. It is just a dangerous business to get in. because it is not safe also for citizens to take videos from their cars as they're driving around and trying to capture bad behavior. And I would just tell citizens, we know. We see enough bad behavior ourselves that we usually are pretty good at finding it. Also, the police will set off intersections and watch for transactions. That's what they're trained to do, that they have to see it, and then they can charge it without even getting a citizen involved in it.

One part of this was not just to monitor, let's say, the traditional panhandling, but also firefighters with boots collecting money and football teams trying to collect money in the median, too, because you had kids running in the middle of the streets and asking for money to support their charity team and just the safety aspect of that. So it's not just for panhandling aspect. It was also for safety. I was primarily that's actually probably how I would have seen it rather than just the First Amendment right to hold up a sign.

Absolutely. It's not really a panhandling ordinance, and that's how I've trained it. It is a traffic safety ordinance.

That's right.

And we do enforce against football teams and basketball teams and people collecting for funerals, and people should not be in the street. We have enough problems as it is in the street.

I know at a couple intersections, and I don't see anybody from comms here, I think they're on their way up to Topeka, but for communications, I know at a few intersections, we have signs that talk about the ordinance and tell people resources. I know we were supposed to get more signs, but we had to get a sign study, traffic study to figure out where to put the signs to make sure it didn't block. traffic so i don't know if the signs are actually up yet but we did have signs letting people know resources so for the five people watching online uh there are resources that we try to identify and that gives people the ability to donate online as well

A quick question on that. Is there a permit process for people who want to stay not in the medians, but just on the side of the road, the football teams? No, there is not.

And I'm going to chime in. Yeah, I'm not overruling Jan, but I am going to chime in. There is not a permit process. There used to be a permit process, but then you run into the First Amendment kind of issue that the fire guys are okay, the baseball teams are okay, but other people are not okay. So we used to have that permit process and it went away a long time ago. And I just wanted to chime in on the reason why we have to apply it to everybody is because otherwise you are regulating the content of the message. and signs and when you start regulating speech, you're going to be declared unconstitutional. You just are. So that's why we're not talking about I'm asking you for money. I am transferring something to you and you are giving me something back. So it's the action, and Jan is correct, I'll give her some kudos, that it is related to the traffic issues that are caused by that transfer of money.

I'm glad to see the love being shared in our legal department here.

There are alternatives for people who are fundraising. Those football teams actually switched to putting QR codes on their signs, which is also dangerous, by the way, because cars can... But Dillon's let the people... You can go in and make your payment in the Dillon's parking lot right behind where they're standing. It is legal to stand on the sidewalk with a sign. So there are other ways to do it.

I appreciate that.

Sorry that it there was one remaining question. I forgot to ask you it. I asked this via email so How many night-by-night shelter beds would be appropriate to have its second light in order to enforce our illegal?

camping ordinance Yeah, so I asked the homeless outreach team that question based on what they're seeing on the street and the best answer I can give you is From what we see, having essentially the emergency winter shelter functioning all the time would be the best option. So if you want to put a number on it, 100. But from our perspective, having an emergency shelter that people can access all the time is what we need. Not after 4 PM, and not 30 beds, and not six beds designated for the police. an emergency low or no barrier shelter that everyone can access is what we would need to enforce the ordinance.

Now, I'm sorry, captain. Um, now if we come up across an encampment and there's open shelter beds at second light, but let's say there's children or people fleeing domestic violence or women where those beds are not available, what would the ordinance say about that, for example?

I'll let Jan answer that one.

because there would be technically open beds, but not for the designated clientele.

I can tell you probably what the policy decision on the police department's behalf would be, but if you're asking specifically what the ordinance states, I would let Jay answer that.

The ordinance just states bed space, but I love PD's policy decision that Second light is the model because we don't want to enforce against one group of people and not the other. So second light's great because it takes men and women. We don't have to decide, well, there are beds for women and not for men. We did get into that problem in the past where a one woman, when there was no space for women, one woman would stay in a large encampment of men and it somehow protected the entire encampment. from cleanup and second light is easier to track, frankly.

Well, specifically the children though, because we have had a couple of cases of encampments with children there and some difficulty in getting them homed as well. So if you came across one and there was a 15 year old there or something like that, or a family with children, and we've indicated that most often more often than not, that there's no space at those shelters. What would our ordinance say about that in particular?

So I think the ordinance is clear. It simply just says a shelter bed has to be available. I think you're getting more into the policy decision of the police department on how we enforce that ordinance. It's nuanced, obviously, and it's hypothetical, but I'm going to touch on a couple different things. You said if you come into an encampment with a 15-year-old, there are resources available for us. There are ways that we can manage that, which would be if you're a 15-year-old out on the street by yourself, that is not safe. You are a child in need of care. We would take you to the children's home, and we would initiate that process, right? You are not where you are supposed to be. and we need to get you somewhere that is safe so that the different mechanisms of government can initiate to make sure you get back to where you're supposed to be if that's safe or somewhere else. Now, if we run into an encampment with small children and guardians who are with those small children, our officers would have to contemplate a few things. Is that a danger for the children? Yes. Because that's a danger for the children, is it more appropriate to separate those children for the time being and also initiate the child in need of care process by putting them in the custody of the children's home? Probably. We obviously don't want to separate families, but we have an obligation. Adults can make decisions for themselves, and there are resources available for those adults, like shelters. space shelter space for children is more difficult and we would obviously attempt to access that space for families and children but if we couldn't at the end of the day the police department has an obligation to make sure that those children are safe and we're not going to leave them on the street

And right now I'm on the portal, which is very helpful, the United Way portal. There are currently family rooms available at Humankind Inn and then also St. Anthony Family Shelter. I know that's not all the time, but currently with the app developed, there are family rooms available at both those locations.

It would be ideal if the front desk at Second Light became the one-stop shop and our emergency shelter system were coordinated. And that person at the front desk a second light would know what beds were available and could hot phone special spaces at St. Anthony's Family Shelter so that the families wouldn't get separated. That would be the ideal situation and other communities have done that. i feel like we're probably farther away from that since we're just now building the infrastructure for emergency shelter but that would be the ideal that there would be one place for the police department to call to keep the family together to stay them to get them connected to that family room at the end and we would agree with that the simpler we can make this for our officers on the street

the better it is for them, and honestly, the better it is for the citizen. Because we're not standing out there trying to figure out where the heck are you going to go. If we can call one phone number and say, I have an adult male, an adult female, and a five-year-old male that are a family, and I need a place for them to go, and Second Light can tell us, great, take them here. That is the best option for us.

Which would be a really good follow-up question. I wish that United Way was still here because this very app that we're talking about is the COC, the Coalition to End Homelessness. And so if that app is the most up-to-date information, if maybe there's a United Way individual embedded inside Second Light where there's a phone number, 316- phone number and that's the phone number that officers would then call. It's basically the clearing house. And so we have all the resources. I feel like we're not that far away if all these shelter beds are available. They're on that app. They now are updating constantly. It's only been around for a month, so I know that there's lots of work to be done. To me, there seems to be a reason why we should have even that open conversation of having a United Way person inside Second Light answering that call for officers instead of officers having to call each of these numbers to find out how many beds are available or even opening up the app. They should just call that 316 number and just say, I have a family with these criteria. Where can I send them to? Or where can I take them to?

I think the United Way would tell you that's their 211, and I think you have a great idea, and you may need to ask the United Way to be present at Second Life.

I think the other question that's the beautiful part of this as well, and we'll be talking about this in the budget conversation too, is if we're going to allocate money, we can make our funds contingent on these requirements. If this is what the police department or housing department is saying, our two entities that are experts on this, and they're saying this is what must be done, if there's going to be any city funds expended on this, there should be also requirements and clawbacks to those funds for any entity, especially a nonprofit receiving those funds. And so I would be interested when the manager has a conversation, we have the budget conversation, If these are our experts saying that this is how this can be successful, this is how we can make sure that we're enforcing our anti-camping ordinance and also getting people helping resources into housing, then any funding requests that we are even going to be talking about should be contingent on those needs.

I think to be fair, we need to make sure that second light is the boots on the ground once we get them to second light. They definitely need to be at the table, too. I mean, I would be in favor of trying to add more shelter beds. I think we will never have enough. I hope someday we do. I just want to make sure that we have all of the people at the table and we don't have expectations for Second Light that we're either not willing to give them more resources for or kind of change the game in the middle when they're the ones that will be, you know, I APPRECIATE ALL OF THE COMMENTS. I KNOW YOU GUYS ARE ALL THE EXPERTS IN YOUR FIELD. WE HAVE A DIFFERENT TAKE ON IT. OURS IS MORE EMOTIONAL OR BECAUSE WE GET THE COMPLAINTS FROM OUR CONSTITUENTS. I KNOW THIS IS VERY COMPLICATED AND MULTIFACETED. I REALLY APPRECIATE THE OPEN CONVERSATION. I SAW DAN PROBABLY LEFT. No, Dan? Yeah, sorry. Anyway, those are just my thoughts.

And just circling back to my earlier comment, I think that's something that we do need to give grace to, especially WPD, is the enforcement. Giving you guys the ability to judge some things like domestic violence. There's not people in the shelter right then. So I do just want to make sure that... From my perspective, anyway, that's of note that there is some discretion given to WPD and our housing department. I appreciate this catch model. One of the issues we've had with encampment cleanups is they come in, they clear them, people do not disappear. This isn't Pac-Man. They move somewhere else. And we were compelled by the state earlier this year to do a lot of cleanups along the river because of some issues with the floodplains. And we had made a lot of progress in some areas of my district. I know Lincoln Park, 47th and Broadway. And over the last two months since we did those cleanups, they have been They've been howling because of the number of people that have come up into those places. So whenever we are in encampments, trying to take them down, doing it responsibly, trying to get people directly into housing as opposed to coming in. Three-day cleanups, it sounds great, but a lot of times it just displaces people. And one of my desires is to make sure to keep our neighborhoods safe. So along South Broadway, for example, we have a lot of vacant properties, a lot of vacant lots. Again, Lincoln Park there. I'd like to look into some things as far as protecting the neighborhoods, but we just need to keep that in mind when we do these encampment cleanups. It's not... addressing the issue unless we go fully through with the catch model or a similar model and are actually having success in getting people off the street into the spaces that they need to be. So kudos to you on that. Just something as we make policy further down the line just to keep in mind. Again, my district's the one who has to hear it whenever we do major encampment cleanups. And again, they go somewhere. They don't disappear. And yeah, so just want to put that on everybody's radar as well.

the individuals downtown and along the river who are by themselves, they are encampments. And we've talked internally about what is it like to go house them directly. We've been challenged with that because they, move they do move around and it's not just because of the camping ordinance that they move around they move for a various number of reasons and we might have one contact with them we might know where they are at that one moment we really need our community to use a feature that is in our new hmas system that i turned on on december of 2024 and that is the geolocation. So anytime anybody, and hopefully the HOT Team will start using this more consistently as well, when we engage with somebody, we can geolocate them and know where they're at. We can start to map where they're going and where they've been and where they went next. So that is a feature that we're trying to lean into as well, but it makes the housing people directly out of those downtown locations more challenging because they move around so frequently.

And on that note as well, dealing with some of the encampments in neighborhood parks where there are playgrounds and whatnot, that is something because oftentimes there's paraphernalia and whatnot out there as well, and it can be unsafe. So I would be interested in seeing what we can do to make sure that our parks and neighborhoods are a little safer when it comes to some of these encampments. Some of the parks... Again, discretion and whatnot, but a lot of the parks where there are children there, everyday neighborhood parks playing, seeing what we can do to address those issues.

Thank you. So Mayor and Council, as we conclude this, I do want to thank also, we do have a project management team within the city that's been helping think this through, particularly about the encampment. And as I think it was highlighted, we are being methodical. We do have a process. We are trying to do a lead time and engagement. So I'm pleased with the work of all the departments you've heard from today, giving this the opportunity thought and deliberation it needs. As we started out though, I wanted to highlight the two limitations that were identified related to the existing ordinance was one, given the fact that shelter beds, you don't know the status on a shelter bed until basically four o'clock. then even after that you don't know if there are many shelter beds so i don't know there's any appetite for wanting to look at the ordinance again but then also you saw the limitation about giving them the opportunity to pack up their stuff and move and so those are the parameters that we'll make sure we're crystal clear on that the police are working with and so that will continue unless i hear anything else from council members so otherwise

So I'm in favor of having the conversation with Second Light about increasing bed capacity for night-by-night sheltering. Basically having what emergency winter sheltering was probably at a reduced rate because what we heard was HOT thinks approximately 100 night-by-night beds would be very helpful in this period. Then PD can enforce their laws, our laws that we passed. In addition, I think part of that conversation regarding the ordinance and shelter bed availability, I still feel like PD doesn't have a specific place other than this app to see how many beds are available. If we can bring back to the table United Way to have this conversation, can you be the go-to phone call if you're housed at Second Light? I don't know what capacity Second Light has other than, you know, they have the space, but they need a person that would answer the call and say, we have so many beds available. So I don't know where in policy that would be, but getting United Way's COC, Coalition to End Homelessness, back at the table regarding that.

One of the things the police department always recommended through Captain Rick Straw because the MAC and now Second Light opened in his bureau is they have transportation capabilities. The other option would be that if we had somebody that wants shelter, that we just take them to the MAC. And somebody at the MAC then interviews them and determines what's the appropriate place, and they transport them to that appropriate place. That just is one other option I'm putting on the table. But we know that many people in the unhoused community are not always comfortable getting in a police vehicle. So one of the things that I would ask you to look down the line is that we also have the ability to call second late to come out and pick someone up who just is not comfortable getting in a police vehicle. And I think we know that a lot of people in the unhoused community have been traumatized and someone that is in a uniform and armed. And we see that when we do the emergency show winter shelter, uh, pick up that often we have people that just say, I'm not getting in that police vehicle. We just don't have another option. So that's just the thought.

I agree with Chief. I think that's a great idea. That's always been my thought process is the same. So I think the MAC was always, or Second Light now, has always been the place where we could take people and they could disperse them to the correct shelters. So I think that's a wonderful idea and we should explore that.

So both of the last two suggestions are for a front desk person at Second Light and for possible transportation to Second Light. I mean, they only have two employees right now that are, you know, just like everybody else, doing five people's jobs. Are you implying that you would like to maybe to hire another person through Second Light? It is hard to see what United Way would do if they are not here to participate in this part of the conversation. I am just curious, are you looking for another nonprofit to do this work and absorb it or are you wanting to ask Second Light if they could hire somebody to provide these services as well? This is to all my colleagues.

I will answer that. I think that the purpose of setting up a separate nonprofit and not having another nonprofit run the shelter was so that nonprofit could develop those capabilities. So they could get funding, however that is, state, county, city donations, and set those services up. That nonprofit could be the... the distributor or map can map things out for people and could get them to the resources that they need. So I think that's a responsibility, a duty of Second Light. And I realize they don't have the money that they need, but I think this part that they need to figure that out and we need to figure that out.

And jumping in this conversation here, part of the conversation we're having about allowing funding, And some members on council want to make it directly simply for a bed space, which I can appreciate. But I want to increase bed space from a humanitarian standpoint is what I want. Also, the concerns might be that a program like what Councilmember Johnston is talking about could be funded in part with any funding that we give them. So that might speak to allowing for some flexibility in the funding request that we have coming up that we will be discussing later on today. If we actually allow a little more flexibility instead of saying it's 100% for bed space. So that might be part of the conversation that we have here in five or six hours when we get to it. I know, right?

I agree with you. It needs to be both. It can't be just shelter. It can't be just program beds. It's got to be both. So I know there's lack of funding, but that needs to get figured out. And it needs to be both.

May I ask a question that may be out of ignorance? So I apologize in advance. What is the city's relationship to Second Light? Are we the parent organization of Second Light?

They are a separate 501 ?

It feels like we're making a lot of decisions about Second Light. So I'm trying to figure out.

We funded them for a couple of years now. We've invested $18 million in their facility. So I think that's why we have a sense of ownership with Second Light and some expectations for Second Light. Right. So we wanted their independence so they could do some of these things.

I just heard though that the continuum of care is responsible for building out the ecosystem. So back to the question that Steve asked in the slide was who owns what responsibility?

Continuum of care and Second Light should be and I think are trying to work together.

SO I DON'T THINK WE SHOULD MAKE ANY DECISIONS WITHOUT HAVING A CONVERSATION WITH SECOND LIGHT FIRST.

I WOULD ALSO SAY SECOND LIGHT WANTS CITY RESOURCES AND THEY HAVE TO COMPLY WITH CITY REQUIREMENTS AS WELL. THEY CAN BE A SELF-SUFFICIENT NONPROFIT AND GET ZERO DOLLARS FROM THE CITY.

IF THAT'S YOUR WILL, BUT AS YOU ALWAYS SAY, YOU HAVE TO COUNT TO FOUR, IF THAT'S YOUR WILL,

Yeah, I think they should. I've been very clear today on the bench is if we're giving money to Second Light, they should be able to hit parameters and requirements that we're providing. There should be strings attached with city dollars. And if they don't want to have strings attached, cool. Then you don't have to get city dollars and taxpayer dollars.

So context matters. And I will often say, like I tell many people who criticize us, it's easy when you're not in the driver's seat. And I don't disagree with you. We've had this conversation. I'm not in the day to day. And I think there's some nuance and some context that we may be missing, that we may benefit from by having a conversation on how we get there and what it looks like.

I think this is the beginning of that conversation.

I don't think so. I think we are putting the cart before the horse by trying to make a decision on what we're doing today.

There's a lot of disagreement between providers on what should happen, too. They don't all agree. So we have to choose a direction and go with it. And then if it's wrong, we can pivot and correct it.

TODD BANDUCCI- But I think that's how we got here, respectfully.

TODD BANDUCCI- No, I don't think so.

I don't agree with that. I would also go back to the transit question, though, that the chief brought up. Our paratransit offers persons with physical, cognitive, visual disabilities to partake in paratransit. There probably is a maybe significant portion of our unhoused population that would fit under those requirements. Do we ever use the paratransit resources that are already funded by municipal tax dollars to be able to do this? Because they're 5.30 to 7.30 PM Monday through Friday, which is usually longer than what our enforcement is. And they also operate on Saturdays from 530 to 630. So I don't know if we're using that. And obviously, maybe not all people qualify of our own house population. But there's going to be a portion of that that should qualify for paratransit services and already funded by municipal dollars. So when we're talking about ideas about transportation, That would be, I think, makes sense as a city use when it comes to transportation.

Well, and there's some communities that the fire department transfers people. It's not the police department. People are more likely to get into a fire truck and go somewhere than they are a police car. So there's other options, or like a van, a white van could be a possibility too.

I would throw out the option of neither police or fire giving people rides. One of the ways that the vision for Second Light has always been bring all these community partners. And one of the beautiful things about our faith-based community is some of our faith-based organizations have vans. And they've been wanting to be part of this conversation. Where do they fit into the ecosystem if they're not going to be making the sandwiches? Because again, Lord's Diner provides a large majority of the meals at Second Light. Maybe that could be the opportunity of they could be the A church or multiple churches can take turns being the on-call service using their van to transport people to these locations. I mean, I think that we need to think beyond just government providing services, but what are other partners that can provide said services? So to me, to answer the question that Chief has posed, I get what you're saying, Chief, because I know that police department has gone out every single time we've had the extremely cold weather that's about to come to our community your officers have gone out there asking people would you like a ride to second light or would you like a ride to the shelter and a large majority of people will turn you down And so if there was a church van that said, hey, would you like a ride to the shelter? Maybe they'll be more apt to say yes. But again, that requires coordination. So I guess to answer even Council Member Ballard's question about increasing staff at Second Light, what I would see as increasing staff at Second Light would be a volunteer coordinator, someone that organizes all these faith-based organizations, these other nonprofits, these great, what was identified in a specific slide, the name of them, the Encampment Samaritans. Maybe they can all be part of that ecosystem if there was a volunteer coordinator. So maybe it is an increasing of capacity of staff at Second Light, but really to coordinate all these different nonprofits and faith-based organizations. So we hear you on the transportation. Thank you, Chief.

If I may, I think what Council Member Shepherd, correct me if I'm wrong, is speaking about here is actually getting the input from Second Life, the people who have the boots on the ground, as to what possibilities might happen. Again, we can make shelter beds a main part of this, but... hearing actually what ideas they have. The original intent of the shelter for a few of us, this goes back five years, was to create this funnel that would address people's underlying issues. That was the original intent of setting this shelter up the way it is. getting the input from Second Light and some of the other people. Again, it's the city's money. We put the strings on it. We can require some certain outcomes. And to that point, I would maybe ask Sally if she would like to talk about outcome-based funding. But again, bringing our partners in and just hearing the overall plans. We can say this much money is what we are thinking about what would you do with it? That's kind of more the- Again, correct me if I'm wrong.

No, I just, I mean, the analogy continues to be made that the city made a large investment and I agree we did. And I just, I don't have $5 million to make any investment right now. However, I think of it like when I'm making an investment in a nonprofit organization because I believe in their mission and I see the need, there is an expectation to invest with this idea that they're going to continue to deliver, right? But I'm not going to be able to regulate the decisions that they make. That's why organizations hire an executive director, president, CEO to run the day-to-day. That is why good nonprofits have strong boards, which I know we have two council members who are on that board, and that is who they take their governance from. This expectation that we invest so much money gives us the ability to dictate how they run their day to day. If that was the expectation, where were the parameters when we made the initial investment? And that's what I meant by saying, maybe there's some learning moments that we can learn from. And I think that's how we ended up here, where the parameters in my experience, and I've asked about this, they were not there when we made that initial investment. We wrote a check and we said, go do great work and we believe in you and we're here to support you to the best of our ability. And now we're here and we're saying, no, no, no, no, no. Let's change the framework. No, no, no, no, no. That doesn't work. No, no, no, no, no. What happened to what you initially said about all the partners coming together? And now we're sitting here saying, no, WPD, you're not the best people to be out and enforcing the encampment. But I've been hearing that for months from them. Like, I guess, why are we... Having been- We're here now and I'm ready to engage on the solution. That's what I'll say.

I would just say having been in the room when these conversations had taken place and been on the council bench when these conversations taken place, the requirement and the conversation that I had in the reallocating money from South Lakes in my district to be able to move it to Second Light was that it would be shelter beds.

So why is it not shelter? That was a requirement.

There was a board decision from Second Light at some point to transition from shelter beds to the um program beds and that was not the intention of council and i voted for that i've said that from the bench the intention of me allocating money from shelter beds was to make sure that we can enforce our anti-camping ordinance that was my intention i said that on the record from the bench that's i think the will of the council when we voted for that maybe not the majority but i think Talking to the mayor, talking to Councilman Johnston, I think right here, that was our intention. I'm not speaking for any of my other colleagues. But that was the intentions of their shelter beds. That was the conversation with the bench. And somewhere along the way, that changed from a unilateral decision from the second board, which at that time, maybe we should have put stipulations from the funding requirement from day one. But I think that was the understanding of council voting on that. And that was the understanding of what was said from the bench in public forum to be able to allocate money.

I would like to add just a little bit, too, if I could. When I first got on council, I just happened to already be on the Homeless Task Force with Councilmember Ballard. Then when I came on council, I remained on it. They changed my title a little bit. But during that, they wanted a comprehensive plan, like Councilmember Hoheisel said, to get people out of homelessness. But the expectation was to have, because back then, humankind only operated from Thanksgiving to the end of March. That was it. After that, there was no place for people to shelter. And the expectation was to maintain shelter beds 365 days a year, 24-7. Now, I don't know where that changed with Second Light, but that was the expectation, and some providers are not happy that that has changed. I won't name any names, because that's confidential. But it has not changed. So I think there's a lot of history here of expectations, and they've kind of moved. The target's kind of moved a little bit, or a lot. And I think we need to just recenter that. And also, I'll address your very good analogy about nonprofits. You give money to a nonprofit, you're not going to tell the executive director or the CEO how to use it. However, if they don't meet your expectations and outcomes, then I'm not going to give you any money anymore. And I think that's where the city's at now, with this independent nonprofit of Second Life.

We're all right up here. The intention when we first allocated the money, and Maggie remembers, I think maybe she's the only one who, when we did the initial investment, was based on the Haven for Hope. And that includes program bids. That includes 24-7 open shelter services as well. That was the hope. You know, we are where we are with it. And we do want to include everything. But that's the thing is include everything, not just make it just open beds, not make it just program beds as well. So I agree. And that's, again, where we are with this discussion moving forward. And again, I'm sorry, Sally. kind of got off but i do think because you you had talked about um outcome-based funding and kind of the model that that is i think denver denver yeah um excuse me good afternoon council member sally staying with the housing department for the record

I think we are at a unique opportunity to re-look at if there is a funding agreement, potentially changing that funding agreement to an outcomes-based funding agreement. Funding for winter shelter in the past generally came from federal funds, which came with really significant strings under 2 Part 200 on only being able to reimburse for documented expenses. When you don't have that restriction and you can design your funding agreement to really be based on the outcome you are trying to get, whether that's the number of bed nights. This discussion about just night-by-night shelter versus entry enrollment, there is a place for both. There absolutely is a place for both. But I've been involved in this from the get-go. there is room for 170 beds plus all the mats in the gym. So structuring that contract so that they maximize the number of beds, and not just the number of beds, but the number of activities that fit in the alignment of the housing focus, right? How far along the path have they had their assessment? You saw all of those steps. So actually being able to reimburse based on those type of results is something where taking a look at where I'm actually meeting with the city of Denver on Monday next week because this is something that they've implemented and are having great success and so we kind of want to learn from that model but I think it's that we have that opportunity at this moment and I think their last funding agreement was just devised kind of copying what was required under the ESG funds in the past and it didn't necessarily need to be but we have an opportunity to change that maybe going forward.

If there are no more on this topic, we're going to take a different topic for you, and then we'll come back to budget and have some more conversation. But we have a concept called the open air ICT permits. So Paul Gunzelman from our Public Works Department will give you an overview of this and then a decision point. Mr. Gunzelman?

Yes. Thank you, Mr. Manager. Paul Gunzelman, Public Works and Utilities, for the record. I think I can get through this pretty quick. Open air ICT permits, we've had those in place since- Paul, I'm so sorry to interrupt.

Sorry. I'm over here. Sorry to interrupt you. Can we take a five-minute break? My brain is just small.

I'm so sorry, Paul. We even have some refreshments for you, I believe, back there.

Let's just take a break until 1.35. 1.35, we will return. Paul, you can take it over. Okay, thank you.

I'll go ahead and get started here. So on August 11, 2020, the City Council approved a temporary use of right-of-way permit called the Open Air ICT Permit. which was a more streamlined process than the standard sidewalk cafe permitting process that we had in place since I think 2001. And this open air ICT permit was to assist businesses in addressing the need to social distance during the COVID-19 pandemic. This allowed businesses to use the right of way, including the sidewalk grass and area parking in front of businesses to allow patrons to get more separation in accordance with the distancing requirements. There were no fees for the temporary open air ICT permits and the fees for the legacy sidewalk permits were temporarily paused at the same time. The temporary open air ICT permits and the positive fees for the legacy sidewalk permits were set to expire August 1st of 2021. And on June 1st, 2021, the city council extended the temporary permits and associated waiver fees until August 1st, 2026. The typical applications for the open air ICTs have been for restaurants serving food and beverages to patrons at tables and chairs. Alcohol sales require proper licensure and fencing to delineate the space. Other applications have included the display of merchandise and with like the sidewalk cafe permits, clear space had to be maintained for safe pedestrian movement through the area to meet ADA guidelines. So as the businesses submitted applications, they were to submit a site plan. We would review that site plan to make sure it had the required ADA spaces, count the number of chairs, et cetera.

Have we had any complaints or issues arise from the disabled community? Not to my knowledge, no. Okay, thank you.

Show a few examples of the open air ICT, the Old Mill Tasty Shop. They're at 604 East Douglas. They actually have seating out in the parking area, so they took up one or two parking spaces to do that.

Is that in the paid parking territory?

It is within the paid parking area, yes.

Do they pay anything extra for those parking spots?

They have not yet.

No, not at this time.

Yeah, I don't know. Now that the weather's getting nicer during summer, I don't know. When I drive by,

I actually reached out to industry at Old Town, which is right next to Greater Grounds Coffee. And they showed me pictures of people utilizing it, including this past weekend. And so I would like, I think this conversation, because there's only two of them, right? The one in front of industry slash Greater Grounds, and then the one in front of Old Mill Tasty. Are they the only two that are taking up parking spaces?

I think so.

Me either. I think so. It would be helpful if you could contact both of those businesses, Old Mill and Industry, to find out the usage of this structure.

Well, and I think I'll have some information here in a little bit later slide, but yeah, we can have that more discussion, so yeah. The other one is that Archer's Merchant there at Douglas and Clifton. They have some picnic tables in the right of way. And this is along Clifton. They have an open air ICT for that.

And that right of way that you're showing right there, they have to mow that, right?

Correct, yes. Yes, they do.

So it's not blocking a sidewalk. It is actually on the grass right of way, correct?

It's between the sidewalk and the back of curb, yes. It's in the grass right of way, yes. An example of a sidewalk cafe that we've had on record shows the fence around that, the tables, and it does show that we do make sure that we do have the required pedestrian access per ADA requirements. Challenges of leaving the open air ICT in place, the absence of fees for the use of public right-of-way creates potential safety risk for the public. Applicants are less likely to comply with the requirements such as updated insurance, change of owner information, layout requirements, et cetera.

What are the safety risks for the public?

Not maintaining the clear space for ADA would be one of them. If they start spreading the tables and chairs out, that would be one. Not possibly having the required fencing if they have the alcohol.

This has been going on for six years.

This has been going on for six years.

Have we had any cop called about it, any fire report, any safety issue reported in the six years it's been there?

I would say that's very, very low risk. Right, right, right. Nothing's happened. Okay. But we would still want to make sure they're up to date with their plans, et cetera, so. All users of the public right-of-way, all other users of the public right-of-way are charged a fee for recovering staff costs and triggering the annual liability insurance updates. This has been a consistent policy for the user right-of-way and is necessary to protect the public safety and effectively recover costs.

sorry to ask all these questions but um what are the staff costs to this like can you list out is it just checking out an application verifying that they actually have fencing and the proper uh insurance that would be part of it so engineering staff um mabcd staff um

I think fire also look at all these applications to make sure that they have the required egress from the cafes themselves if it's fenced. The sidewalk cafe ordinance or policy also had, you know, depended on, additional seating they're going to put out there they need to make sure they still meet all the other codes within the building code itself number of fixtures in the restrooms etc make sure they're still meeting all the parking codes etc for the additional seating as well so there is that cost that's you know up front with the permit before the permits issued and then again to send staff out to make sure that it's all still within as it should be when they applied for the permit i'm going to show some pictures of other examples of uses of right-of-way that we do charge fees for the picture on the left hand side is a sign overhanging the right-of-way we have light poles in the right-of-way bollards in the upper right picture bollards that have been installed in the right-of-way and planters as well

Sorry, Paul. Yeah, going back to that. Did the Orpheum pay for the bollards there? They did.

Yes, they did. Yep.

And so then they, because it's on the public right-of-way, do they have to get a special fee? Can you explain that process?

So they do, yeah. So they installed those. They got the permit for those to be installed. And we have a fee schedule in Chapter 10 that... has fees for various items, canopies over right-of-way, bollards, light poles, et cetera. So they would be charged that annual permit fee for those encroachments within the right-of-way. Is that normal?

Like other places do that?

I think it's so bizarre. Yes.

But think about it, when you would talk about the right-of-way, and right-of-way is a lot of different areas and how you think about it, but it is stuff that generally we maintain. We particularly talk about the roadway, but when you get into sidewalks and pedestrian access and other things, yeah, it's very common about maintaining our right-of-way.

I think some of these were along, this is, I think, the Fidelity Parking Garage. Typically, yes. Typically, those, I think, were put in with a project. I know they maintain those themselves down there, so I'm not sure that they have, but that was part of the Douglas Streetscape project. You can see the raised planters there in front of Fidelity. I think that's, yeah, Fidelity Bank there, parking structure above it. We would have a permit on file on those now, just so we know that they're out there, et cetera. But we've kind of gone back and forth. They're beautifying the right of way, so do we charge them the annual fee or not? But we do like to have permits on file for those.

JV and I talked about this a couple, maybe like a month ago, and he had a line, sorry, I'm gonna steal your line, but it was that we should be paying people to do this. We shouldn't be charging people, we should be paying people for the activation. of these sites and like putting investment in this instead of like charging it. And so I'm gonna take that philosophy through all of this is that we should be encouraging this as much as we possibly can.

Especially cause you know, we would put street scapings out there anyway, trees, et cetera. So yeah, if they put it out there, maintain it.

Is there a criteria, I guess, for this? Because I see the bollards as a safety thing. It's helpful. I think that those are improvements to the public right-of-way rather than it's a benefit only to that organization. The bollards are actually a benefit to all. As you're walking, you don't want a car to jump that curb and hit you. I guess, is there a criteria if you're improving for the benefit of all, why should they be paying?

I think these were most likely installed to protect the building itself. They probably had a vehicle or two that crashed into the front of the building, so they put those in there to protect the building itself. Interest Bank Arena did something similar. They put bollards all around there to protect, I think, yeah, except, you know, it does protect the pedestrians. I agree with that. We do have some bollards in Old Town. They're at Second Street mostly. You know where we did the curb extensions to shorten pedestrian area we did put bollards in in the right away as part of that city project to to your point mayor, yes, so, but I think these were specifically installed to protect the building itself not necessary pedestrians.

But I would think about, as you think about right-of-way, about uniformity of what the city can control. So for instance, when we're doing road projects, and we tell people they can't put their irrigation system in the right-of-way, because if we come along to a road project, it is kind of at your own risk. But if we wanted to do a whole streetscape plan, and you think about where is a future development, particularly in downtown, if we want to do a whole new streetscape project on 2nd Street, And yet we've allowed different owners to put bollards and different things in there and we want to come along and have a unified streetscape. Then we run crosswise with folks who say I've invested $25,000 in bollards and now you're telling me you want to tear it up because you want five blocks of a uniform streetscape. And so this is why you preserve your right of way so that you can have that flexibility for how the city wants to use the right of way.

But didn't we just say that we're charging them for this too and charging a maintenance fee?

For the program.

Right. Would they pay for what, I'm sorry, council or vice mayor, which for the bollards or for the. Both, both. For the.

They paid for the bollards, but they're also paying to use the right of way.

They are paying a use of right of way permit to have those bollards in the right of way.

I mean, I think there's a way to just say to your point by right, the city still has, you know, put this at your own risk. as part of the agreement.

And that is within the language of the use of right-of-way permit, yes. And if we have to go in there to do anything, yes, we would remove them. Yeah, we charge, looks like the fee schedule for bollards are $5 each annually. So, yeah.

And in some jurisdictions, we'll check here. Some jurisdictions, they do run utilities under sidewalks and in the curb and gutter. And so part of that's part of the right-of-way and franchise fees and other things. And I'm not so sure how prevalent that is here, though.

Okay. Another question, too. JB just counted. There's six ballers there, unless I'm counting wrong. There's probably more behind. So five bucks. Three bucks. That'll be $5 each. So $30 a year. So we're making $30 a year. Our staff time of just sending out a notice to pay a bill, I mean, we're probably losing on that if we're sending out there. Are these on the online licensing and permitting? I know that through finance, we're getting things. Mark's shaking his head no. Okay, to be determined for the, okay. So this is not online yet. But yeah, we're gonna lose money. If we're only making 30 bucks on that a year, we're gonna be losing money in staff time just trying to comply in a bureaucratic way.

Total estimated annual cost recovery for the 28 open air ICT sites that we have now plus the 25 sidewalk cafes that we had in place prior to the open air ICT that we suspended the annual fees on. We're anticipating $33,000 a year for cost recovery for those. Staff is recommending to allow the temporary open air ICT permits to expire as previously approved by city council. notify the existing open air ICT permit holders to convert their permits to sidewalk cafe permits. We would waive the administrative costs, but annual fees would commence January 1st of 2027. That will give us time to, sorry, Mayor, I'll bring this up. So the two lists that I put on your, there in front of you. One is the sidewalk cafe permits that we had on file. The other is the open air ICT permits. And if you look at the annual fees, some of those, let me back up. So in 2001, city council approved the sidewalk cafe policy. I think that's what it was called. And that established the $36 per chair. Now, they modified the Sidewalk Cafe application requirements in 2012. And part of that modification was the Sidewalk Cafe original permit was pretty stringent on furniture, fencing, umbrellas, et cetera. They would not allow any advertising on the umbrellas. pick your favorite beer, soda product, whatever, they would not allow any of that advertising. 2012, well, that's the way it was originally. In 2012, they amended that to allow advertising on umbrellas. They also put a maximum of advertising maximum fee of $360. So if you had still $36 per chair, if you had 10 chairs, it's $360. If you had 14 chairs, it would only charge you $360 instead of $36 per chair. That was amended in 2012. So we would. I quickly went upstairs to print these out during your lunch break and my staff person, well, my staff person that was overseeing, he went home earlier sick today. So we will, I committed to the mayor that we will make sure that we have this list updated with the current, all of them that we have, open air ICT as well as the sidewalk permits. We have, staff has received a few open air ICT permit applications here recently. We have approved those, but we have also told those applicants that the fees would likely go back into place um after august 1st of 2026. so what what's the difference just between open air ict and sidewalk open air ict is just we allowed that in covid that was a temporary yes so so we would that would basically there's language in the ordinance that after april or august 1st 2026 it Okay.

Paul, I love you. You do a great job. This is crazy. And we should, my opinion, get rid of open air ICT. That's fine. Make everything sidewalk cafe permits with no annual fees as long as they're submitting their documents and their plans to us. I think we should be encouraging this as much as possible. I think this is just a hampering to small businesses. My favorite places in town, and I would say probably everybody in this room's favorite places in town, all partake in this, the open air ICT or the sidewalk cafe, and we should be encouraging this as much as possible. So that's my opinion.

Second.

Third.

I agree with that. My wife and I love to eat outside. That's why we like to go to other cities, so we can eat outside. And when we have the opportunity, the 10 days a year, can you do it in Wichita? We'd love to do it here.

We were just wanting to do cost recovery. There's other things that the alcohol, when we were first going into this, we thought to serve alcohol, it had to be connected to the building. and not out in the parking areas, but that's not our purview. That's probably alcohol, firearms, tobacco, you know, their licensure requirements. So, but yeah, this was...

I know the sort of alcohol you have to have, it has to be fenced.

Right, correct.

Per state.

But can you leave the building, cross the sidewalk into a fenced area?

Yeah, I don't know.

That's, yeah. and i don't know that the common consumption area too i don't know how that all fits as well but but yeah so ideally yep we were cost recovery for for the sidewalk permits i just want to echo what vice mayor glasscock said i think our attempt to

recommend that we consolidate this and and remove some of the red tape is is to ensure that we're supporting our small businesses and encouraging them to activate and and make the quality of life in wichita more enjoyable at little to no cost so i appreciate the vice mayor for bringing this forward so just next steps for the manager because i think at least counted for now are we just not going to send out notices in august because that's the last thing i want to happen is people still get notices and then

Well, based upon, I don't know if it sunsets if we have to take any legislative action at a council meeting to actually formalize it as terminated program. And so let's make sure I got that. So we'll bring it forward. But anyway, the communication, we would still send a communication saying the program's ended. However, we formally do that in terms of charging. But to make sure I'm correct, we're still going to say we have a site. Are we going to ask anyone to submit information still?

about insurance i mean i think until we have those components we're just not charging is what we're saying yeah is that what i'm hearing okay and i think there could i think there still be could be some level i mean i think there's probably could be a conversation of the at the far right it has the admin fee just like we charge for other fees for the processing side i just think the per chair is the part that and annual fee you would yeah the annual no entry the admin fee doesn't bother me because it will take staff time you have licensing for fireworks you have licensing for tons of other stuff so just see it as like a licensing fee not a per chair fee I don't know so I concur yeah like a one-time fee when you apply for your license or whatever and you can maybe a sidewalk permit license would it be annual yeah yeah I think yeah I think it should be I think it's like any just like all of our other fee systems just be one time

Okay, so that's what you're comfortable with. We will bring you that proposal forward that outlines that with still a little bit of fee and we can do it in the same motion.

Yeah, excuse me. The Open air ICT automatically sunsets August 1st. So you would not have to take any legislative action regarding those. They're just going to expire and the ordinance will still be there, but there won't be any permits issued. If you're going to tweak the sidewalk cafe as far as the fees, I would go ahead and either repeal the open air ICT or at least add some language that we're done issuing those and we're not gonna issue anymore. Um, if you're gonna go clean them up, you might as well clean them up. But just by the languages in the ordinance for the open air ICT, it would just expire.

So they could just transition to the sidewalk cafe, pay a fee just like they do for any other licensing fee and call it a day.

Yep. And if I heard you're comfortable with an annual on that. We'll bring that forward as a legislative action. We can do that within July. So we'll bring that to you, Mayor, in July. And then if there's nothing else, we'll move on to the last agenda item, which is the budget workshop and presentation with our Director of Finance, Mark Manning. MARK MANNING Yep, you need to pay for that one.

At least that was quick.

let the record reflect that that was a 7-0 vote six oh i'm becky becky and spirit becky and spirit no no no voting at a workshop if we go longer becky can make it back for our meeting

Well, council member, I can stretch it out as long as you want. You just tell me when she's going to be back. No, actually, a lot of stuff I'm going to talk about this morning is rather redundant. This, I think, is our fourth workshop, so I'll try to go through a lot of it relatively quickly. Purpose today is to provide you kind of like a final financial update. Some stuff keeps moving around. And also to provide you with a model in which the manager could present a balanced budget, including some of the things that departments have asked for. Now, this looks meaty. I'll try to go through this quickly. We'll talk about the general fund outlook. We'll talk about the proposed budget, all the funding requests, some of which staff is recommending. Then we need to move to property taxes real quick and talk about a few issues there. We'll talk briefly about the stabilization reserve. We'll talk about cost recovery, which we just heard Paul kind of get into a little bit. Then we need to move to the CIP and finally just a slide or two on calendar. So I'll try to go through it quickly. This is where we were last time we met, which was May 26th, I think. Again, the premise is we thought we were in pretty good shape in 26 and 27. We had challenges in 28. That fundamental premise is unchanged. Our challenge is we expect interest earnings and assessed valuation growth, which is essentially driving our revenues through 2027. We expect both of those to tail off by 28. We've thought that for a long, long time, but that's the reason that you see a scenario in which we think we're probably okay for a couple years and then we could have challenges. Now, if we're wrong on both of those and interest earnings stay high and assessed valuation continues to grow, then you can tell me I'm wrong in a couple years, but this has been our premise for quite some time. We continue to look at things, the things that we've recommended adjustment. We looked at our sales tax base. I think I reported to you in the first quarter that had grown 5%. We feel pretty comfortable. We're a little bit underestimated, so we increased sales tax. We took one more look at interest earnings. I won't go into detail there, but we think we can squeeze a little bit more out in 27. And then finally, we got our assessed valuation growth estimate from the county. I told you previously that they provide that by June 15th, which they did. It was slightly better than what we thought, so we're gonna pick up a little bit there. This is what that looks like. About a half a million dollars in the current year, about 2.6 in 27. Again, most of that's driven by interest earnings. And then another million or so in 28. So that's pretty much our last revision to the revenues unless something hugely material changes between now and July.