Housing and Human Services Committee 3/27/2024

27th meeting of the Housing and Human Services Committee will now come to order.

I am Kathy Moore, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council President Nelson.

Council Member Saka.

Here.

Council Member Wu.

Present.

Vice Chair Morales.

Here.

Chair Moore.

Present.

Four present.

All right, thank you.

If there's no objection, today's proposed agenda will be adopted.

All right, hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

So I wanted to thank everyone for being here today for the March 27th meeting of the Housing and Human Services Committee.

On today's agenda, we have two items, and I'd like the record to reflect Council President Nelson has joined us.

So, as I was saying, we have two items on today's agenda, one of which is for a possible vote.

The first on the agenda, we have the appointment of Cody L. Allen to the LGBTQ Commission.

And second, we have the King County Regional Homelessness Authority here to provide an update on their work.

So, first, we will move to public comment.

We will now open the hybrid public comment period.

Public comments should relate to items on today's agenda or be within the purview of this committee.

Madam Clerk, how many speakers do we have signed up today?

Currently, we have three in-person speakers signed up and there are four remote speakers.

All right, thank you.

So each speaker will have two minutes.

We will start with in-person speakers first.

And clerk, if you could please read the public comment instructions.

The public comment period is up to 20 minutes.

Speakers will be called in the order in which they registered.

Speakers will alternate between sets of in-person and remote speakers until the public comment period has ended.

Speakers will hear a chime when 10 seconds are left of their time.

Speakers' mics will be muted if they do not end their comments within the allotted time to allow us to call on the next speaker.

The public comment period is now open, and we will begin with the first speaker on the list.

The first speaker is Dee Powers, followed by Alex Zimmerman.

Good morning, Council.

Good morning.

Good morning.

My name is Dee Powers.

I live in District 3 and I work at the housing justice nonprofit, Be Seattle.

In 2015, I was suddenly priced out of a previously affordable Pioneer Square apartment and ended up living in my vehicle for seven years, less than two miles from my last permanent address.

The reason I'm able to stand here today as a housed and employed resident of now District 3 is because during the beginning of the pandemic, I was given the luxury of not being relocated with my vehicle for an extended period of time.

I was not swept.

This gave me the luxury of connecting with service providers, such as the RV wastewater pump-out program, such as vehicle residency outreach.

They gave me the services I needed to successfully get an emergency housing voucher, lease up with minimal trauma, and move back inside.

I am pleased to be able to be here today as a housed resident to tell you this, that services rather than sweeps are what get people back indoors.

And I know you have a presentation today from KCRHA as well as possibly the Unified Care Team.

And my question is this, of the sweeps that were conducted in 2023, how many of them actually had outreach staff at them?

How many of the obstruction sweeps had outreach staff at them?

Are we offering services during the trauma of removal?

That is all I really have to ask today.

Thank you very much for your time.

Thank you very much.

Up next is Alex Zimmerman, followed by John Grant.

Thank you.

Ze heil, my dirty damn Nazi fascist.

Kunter.

Bandita and killer.

My name is Alex Zimmerman and I want to speak about housing.

And I speak about housing for many years.

In my website you can find plan what is housing can be fixed in city for everybody, most of low income or mid income, you know what it means.

And I doing this for many years, nothing happened.

But right now I want to speak of something absolutely unique, you know what it means.

And for my understanding, nobody speak about this before here.

Seattle Times published a public article not so much long ago about a dozen thousand apartments who stay empty for years.

Business is business.

Capitalism is capitalism.

Everybody wants to make a profit.

So my question right now is very simple.

When this apartment, for example, who costs $25,000 per month, rent, stays empty for years, why this?

People of Seattle, you know what this mean, who control and own this city, you know what this mean, don't have nothing from this.

When you go to bank, bank always charge you something.

When I go to my parking ticket, I pay double when I are late, little bit.

So my question right now about this, what is we need doing with this apartment who charge $25,000 per month?

We need something to have profit.

We the people control this city, so everybody who use our city for profit, possibly give us something.

It's a normal capitalism.

So I'm proposition to you, so this thousand and thousand apartment who belong to top level of...

You know what it means?

You can charge 20%.

Is this money go to city or give this to homeless right now?

Stand up, America.

Thank you very much.

The next speaker is John Brandt, and then we'll move on to remote speakers.

Thank you.

My name is John Grant.

I'm the chief strategy officer for the Low Income Housing Institute.

I'm here to testify today about our tiny house village program and our partnership with the King County Regional Homelessness Authority.

First, I really want to thank the Regional Homelessness Authority for their partnership over the years.

And we are very happy to see that in their proposed 2025 budget, an attempt to close our ongoing budget hole that was left from the last city council budget process.

This is a pretty significant hole.

It's in the millions of dollars.

This is something that the council you know, left for all of you to try to help resolve.

I'm here to testify in support of that, closing that budget hole.

We currently have 500 units of tiny houses in the city of Seattle.

We are serving folks that are chronically homeless.

When we try to resolve an encampment, this is where they go.

99% of the folks that are offered a tiny house accept them.

This is how we get chronically folks CHRONICALLY HOMELESS FOLKS INSIDE.

WE REALLY WANT TO ENCOURAGE YOU TO WORK WITH THE ORIGINAL HOMELESS AUTHORITY TO CLOSE OUR BUDGET FOR 2025 BUT ALSO 2024. WHILE THAT BUDGET PROPOSAL ADDRESSES NEXT YEAR, IT DOESN'T SOLVE OUR BUDGET HOLE THIS YEAR.

AND SO WE'D LIKE TO BE IN CONVERSATION WITH THE HOMELESS AUTHORITY AND ALSO WITH THE COUNCIL TO MAKE SURE THAT THE SUPPLEMENTAL BUDGET PROCESS, IF NEEDED, RESOLVES OUR BUDGET HOLE FOR 2024. If we don't do that, we are talking about a reduction in services, potentially closing a village.

not an option in a time where we need to have growing our capacity for emergency shelter and not reducing it.

So we look forward to having these ongoing conversations with the Regional Homelessness Authority.

As a reminder, last year the council actually passed a statement of legislative intent directing the authorities to use whatever underspend they have to make us whole for this year.

So we look forward to those conversations with you and with the authority.

Thank you very much for your time.

Thank you.

The first remote speaker is Sarah N. Can you hear me?

Yes.

Thank you.

Yeah.

My first comment is just to make it easier for virtual commenters to access.

It was really challenging.

And I'm a high tech user with multiple devices.

And it was pretty challenging to get in.

So please look at streamlining that and making it more accessible.

My comment today is for the agenda item relating to KCRHA and their important work around providing shelters.

So I have a couple questions to ask for more information from those officials.

How does the KCRHA utilize their wide network of providers and disseminate information related to weather emergencies?

Who's responsible for providing the notification for the public?

This includes disseminating info to people outside, social media, website, notifications at the location.

and communications to service providers and other agencies?

How many KCRHA employees are tasked with monitoring the weather, and how do they go about activating the extreme weather rollout?

Who makes the decision to activate a tier?

How often does the team review the weather?

How early or late are they making these decisions and disseminating this information to the public?

Where is information disseminated about transportation resources to access these spaces?

These are concerns that I have as a volunteer in working in homelessness in the community and would love more information from the KCRAH officials on that dissemination of information.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

The next speaker listed is Christina Sawatzik, who is listed as not present.

So up next is Zizi Top.

Need to push star six.

Hi, can you hear me?

Yes, we can, thank you.

Hi, my name is Susie.

I am a homeless service provider and volunteer community person working with people who live outside in unsheltered spaces.

And I would also like to ask some questions of both the city and KCRAJ about how they're conducting sweeps throughout the year.

Particularly, I would like to know what guidance or policy the city has with the Unified Care Team to be able to provide to their staff adequate training on how to best support people who are living in encampments when they are not able to access shelter, when those offers are not available.

I would also like to ask what the city's policy is on employees working outdoors in severe weather conditions, what safety measures are in place for them, and what considerations that has towards people who are living outside in those conditions.

I think we've seen demonstrably that the city doesn't have a lot of concrete policy in place and not a lot of transparency about where we can find that information.

Additionally, I would like to know how the city supports people who are offered shelter resources and getting to their spaces for their check-in time.

And I would like to know how the city guarantees that a space is available and that that person that is offered it is actually eligible for it.

I've seen too many times where somebody is offered a spot in a shelter, they have to figure out a way to get there themselves by a certain time.

They get there and that space is not actually available.

or it's a person who identifies as a man that was offered a spot at a women's shelter or something else that was not meeting their needs.

I think we all know that there are severe gaps in the way that the city handles encampment removals and sweeps and there needs to be more accountability and transparency in place for that to be addressed.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Do we have another speaker?

The next speaker is Joy R. Okay, and can we please get the closed captioning working?

Okay.

Hello, can you hear me?

Yes, we can.

Thank you.

Hello.

Hello, we can hear you.

Hi.

Yes, I would like to ask a question regarding the United Care Team.

I'm a community volunteer who participates in mutual aid support, witnessing countless sweeps of unhoused people.

In fact, there are two sweeps happening as I speak in the pouring rain, by the way, where people's belongings that they are able to salvage are soaking wet.

One that was posted less than 24 hours, displacing people sheltering in eight tents today.

One of those eight pens is in fact a person who was just swept the day before on Monday.

He was offered a spot at a tiny house village which would not be ready until the following day, possibly not until two days later.

So he was swept from where he was even though the shelter that was offered to him was not available.

This person did not have a working phone.

So communication with him would not be insured to even let him know when the spot at the tiny house is ready.

The city swept this person twice within a week.

The second time with less than 24 hours notice.

There must be a different definition of care being used by the United Care Team.

This is not care.

This is reckless, violent harm imposed by the city on people who are the most marginalized and vulnerable in our community.

An immense amount of funds being spent by the city to traumatize people even more.

sweeping them from street to street.

To me, this is simply wanting to erase people, make them invisible.

What is the policy that guides less than 24-hour notice sweeps and those that are given no notice at all?

How many of those sweeps did the United Care Team do in 2023?

2023, which thus far holds the record of unhoused people's deaths in King County.

You may recall a study by the Journal of the American Medical Association published April 2023 that proves and cabin suites significantly increased the number of deaths of unhoused people.

Thank you very much.

Next speaker.

Christina is still not logged on via phone or Zoom yet.

Oh, here she is.

Just one moment.

Christina, are you with us?

I hope it's my turn to speak because I see no captioning.

So I'm going to apologize because I am deaf and I rely 100% on captioning.

So I apologize to the speaker, the leader, as well as the rest of the city council.

My name is Christina Savitzky, and I am a commissioner of the Seattle Disability Commission.

And first and foremost, I'm calling about the appointment of Cody to the Seattle Commission, I'm going to get the acronyms wrong because I'm still flustered about trying to get in, but for the LGBTQ commission, I am.

Overly overly recommending Cody for the LGBTQ commission when he 1st started volunteering for the commissions before even being put forward for a point being appointed.

He jumped right into volunteering and helping out not only with the LGBTQ Commission, but with the Women's Commission as well as my commission, the Seattle Disability Commission.

He started helping us out, volunteering at our events, supporting us, supporting myself in ways that I just can't say has just been fantastic, so supportive, so compassionate, so understanding, just being there in ways I can't even just use words for.

coming out to our events, supporting us in ways that I have never seen commissioners do from other commissions in all the time I've been part of a Seattle Disability Commissioner for I think seven, eight years now I've been around.

And I just can tell you Seattle would just so benefit for Cody being an LGBTQ commissioner that I can't even give you all the words and the accolades.

to say how beneficial it be to appoint cody to this commission and i want to thank you all and appreciate the opportunity to be able to um speak to um allowing cody um being able to give the comment for cody being um put forward for this commission and thank you very much and you all have a great day now thank you thank you very much for your comments

And that was our last public speaker.

Okay, so there are no additional registered speakers.

So we'll now proceed to our items of business.

I would note members of the public are encouraged to either submit written public comment on the sign up cards available on the podium or to email the council at council at seattle.gov.

All right, we will now move on to our first item on the agenda.

Madam Clerk, will you please read the first agenda item into the record?

Agenda item one, appointment 2778, appointment of Cody L. Allen as a member to the Seattle LGBTQ Commission for a term to October 31st, 2025 for briefing, discussion, and possible vote.

All right.

So thank you.

Today we have Janet Stafford from the Office of Civil Rights joining us remotely to introduce us to Cody L. Allen.

And I'll turn it over to you, Janet, to talk about the work of the commission and to introduce the appointee.

Yes, good morning.

Thank you so much, Chair Moore.

And good morning to all the council members.

My name is Janet Stafford.

I use she and her pronouns.

And I am the commission liaison for the Seattle LGBTQ Commission with the Seattle Office for Civil Rights.

I'd like to start by sharing some of the work that the LGBTQ commission has done this last year.

Some of their event has included working specifically with the city council and the mayor's office for the annual pride flag raising event at city hall.

They have also participated in numerous pride events this year.

They have connected with the mayor's administration staff as well as meeting with prior council members.

And they really look forward to meeting many of you this year to share some of their current work plans for the next year or two.

So today we have one appointment for the LGBTQ.

I do have a statement on their behalf that was prepared the unfortunately could not be here today.

So cody Allen brings a strong background in nonprofit leadership and advocacy and being the chairperson for the city of casper's LGBT Q inclusion committee.

He has done similar work being on a commission in his home state of Wyoming and is excited to bring what he has learned and his skill sets to help the community here in Seattle.

He helps to focus on the LGBTQ youth to ensure they have a voice in policies and programs.

As Christina mentioned just earlier, Cody has been an active participant to the LGBTQ Commission as well as other commissions in OCR.

Since the summer, he has really been active and has participated in many of the events and is currently one of the main leads on the LGBTQ social media community.

We look forward to his appointment today.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you very much, Janet.

And I just wanted to say thank you to Cody for your interest and willingness to serve on this commission.

My staff previously attended the LGBTQ commission and noted that your participation was greatly valued by the commission.

So thank you for all of the work that you've been doing and the work that you're signing up to continue to do.

So, colleagues, are there any questions or comments for Janet from Office of Civil Rights before we proceed to a vote?

All right.

I'm not seeing any further...

I don't have any questions.

I just wanted to say thank you very much, Cody, for stepping up and being willing to serve.

Thank you.

Any other comments?

No, I don't care.

Yes, go ahead.

Thanks.

Good morning, Janet.

I do want to echo everybody's comments.

I think it's important to acknowledge commissioners.

These are volunteer jobs.

They contribute important ideas, policy recommendations, possible solutions to the city.

And whether it's the LGBTQ Commission, the Disability Commission, the Planning Commission, any of the other folks who are volunteering their time to provide their expertise to us.

I just wanna say thank you for your willingness to work on behalf of the city.

All right.

Thank you for that.

I think we would say there's consensus that being a volunteer on all of our committees and boards is very much a valued service by the council as well as the residents of the city of Seattle.

So thank you to all who stepped forward, and we always have plenty of vacancies.

There's more work to be done.

So, that said, I will now move that the committee recommend confirmation of appointment 2778. Is there a second?

Second.

All right.

Thank you.

It's been moved and seconded to recommend confirmation of the appointment.

Are there any final comments before we vote?

All right.

Seeing none, will the clerk please call the roll on the recommendation to confirm the appointment?

Council President Nelson?

Aye.

Council Member Saka?

Aye.

Council Member Wu?

Yes.

Vice Chair Morales?

Yes.

Chair Moore?

Yes.

Five in favor, none opposed.

Thank you.

So the motion carries and the committee recommendation to confirm the appointment.

Sorry.

We'll proceed.

To confirm the appointment, we'll be sent to the April 2nd City Council meeting.

Again, thank you, Janet and Cody, for joining us today.

Thank you again.

Thank you.

Have a good day.

You too.

And I'm just wondering if we have an update from Seattle City Channel on the closed caption.

Okay, thank you.

Will the clerk please read the second agenda item into the record?

Agenda item two, King County Regional Homeless Authority briefing for briefing and discussion.

All right, great, so thank you.

Today we have the interim CEO, Darryl Powell, and his team to walk us through their presentation.

They will walk us through the role of KCRHA relative to the city and county, their 2024 budget, their work with coordinated entry, and more, I'm sure.

So without further ado, I'll turn it over to you, Director Powell.

Thank you, Council Chair Moore and other members of the Housing and Service Committee.

My name is Darryl Powell, and I'm currently serving as the interim CFO of the King County Regional Homeless Authority.

Actually, today is my sixth week to the day that I've started, and I will tell you that I've been learning quickly because this position requires that you learn quickly.

I've come to know the many complexities steering the ship of this kind to accommodate the various needs of the constituencies, our government funders, our agency partners, the community, elected officials, philanthropic contributors, among others.

I will say, though, I do echo the mayor's position and belief that employing our regional approach to solving the crisis and homelessness is likely the best approach.

That said, I acknowledge the missteps of the authority that has been chronicled these past couple of years.

The team has and continues to learn from these experiences, which is putting us on a path forward to correction.

These past six weeks, my primary focus has been on aimed at understanding the strength of our staff and our operations, as well as our team performance.

and more importantly, the levers to ensure retention.

Today, staff will present the more detailed items of what's going on with the organization and the needs of the organization.

But before I turn the presentation over to them, I want to first share that I have been impressed with the amount of good work that's going on at KCRJ.

To some degree, I arrived as an outsider.

but I see the narrative of KCRHA in the media and the public has not reflected some of the excellent work that's going on at KCRHA.

Part of the presentation is going to touch on some of this great work.

I would say lastly, one thing that I have been able to determine is that I've already recognized the urgency of KCRH to rebid the contracts in the organization.

Since the organization has started, all the contracts have moved from the city of Seattle and the county, and they are in their same language.

Part of the last two years, we've determined that there are efficiencies that can be gleaned from rebidding the contracts, and so we are going to begin to initiate that bid process.

We believe that the rebid will provide us an opportunity to deliver on the goals we have as an agency to create a long-term institutional alignment across systems to serve the people experiencing homelessness.

We believe that our ability of our partners to serve, to deliver on the services that we ask them.

So I intend to start talking to funders, our board, our agency partners as we launch the rebid.

I will say that you should have confidence in the future of KCRIJ.

Despite that important conversation, I do want to reemphasize that I have confidence the future of KCRJ and the ability to effectively use the resources given it.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

And I'm thinking that I would turn it over to Jeff Simms.

And we also have Austin Christopherson from the Regional Homelessness Authority.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

For the record, Jeff Sims.

I use he, him pronouns.

I'm the Senior Director for Policy at KCRHA.

Thank you for having us here today.

Let me pull the slides up for you.

I can only see half my screen here.

That's kind of challenging.

There we go.

Hannah, can I get a little help with getting to go up?

There we go.

Thank you.

We have a lot to cover today.

There's a lot of material, and I'm sure we're gonna have a robust discussion, but thank you for all the members of the committee and our honorary for the day members of the committee for joining us.

We're excited to get started.

Before we do, because of that amount of content, we wanna make sure we start off with, as Darrell alluded to, Some of the areas that KCRHA already is showing excellent effectiveness with what its work is, or is, to his point, has recognized some areas of misstep and already made dramatic improvements to correct those.

Two of them are on screen right now.

The first is related to our work to respond to homelessness encampments.

As the committee discussed last week, the state of Washington, through the Department of Commerce, entrusts us to respond to encampments on state-owned property.

As you can see on the slide, 89% of the individuals we encounter at those encampments move indoors.

That's through, I'll get more into that program in a minute, but we think that's an exceptional rate.

It's better than all other peer efforts that I'm aware of, at least.

We think that's an important note and important endorsement of our model.

Also, I'll go also into our systematic functions as we go through.

One of them is our point-in-time count that has to be done annually.

KCRHA is the first community working with the University of Washington on an innovative new approach.

Point-in-time counts across the country are known to be undercounts.

They're often seen as flawed data.

We're innovating new ways to improve on that, to find ways to have better infiltration and have better understanding of what the experience of homelessness is on any given night.

We're thankful for the partnership with University of Washington.

I also want to flag that in partnership with the public housing authorities in our area, Seattle and King County was one of the best cities in the country in terms of implementing a program called Emergency Housing Vouchers.

At a time when many of our pure cities had only succeeded in getting people moved into 10 or 15 or 20 percent of their units, we were at the 70 and 80 percent mark.

We actually did so well, we qualified for additional vouchers to receive from federal resources.

And also, and this goes to some of the turnaround comments, it was well publicized last year that we had some challenges with getting our contracts out.

We're pleased to report that this year 100 percent of our 2024 contracts that were carried forward were done so on time and ready for invoicing from our partners.

I think those are really important accomplishments that we want to make sure that we're getting a little bit more microphone on because they often go underreported in other places.

So with that, let's turn to who we are.

I think many of you are already familiar with KCRHA's theory of change and our overall approach.

We're focused on data and proven practices, centering the voices of people who are most affected by our services.

I think many of you also will recall a lengthy period of engagement before KCRHA was developed.

It was a deep community engagement process that came up with 10 recommendations that the city and the county should look at to improve homelessness services in our county.

One of those, you'll see the second one on the screen, was to create KCRHA.

The other four, as you'll see, that's why I only put up four of the ten, were things that you couldn't really accomplish effectively without having KCRHA.

So we wanted to highlight that as our purpose and our reason for being here and talking to you today.

This next slide is really meaty, so I know we'll spend a lot of time on it.

This looks at the three columns and what different entities, the city, the county, and KCRHA do.

Green check is obviously a yes.

A red X is a no.

A yellow or an arrow is it's complicated.

So let's focus on the KCRHA column.

I want to run through that one primarily and focus on what it is that we do.

First, you'll see there's a group of green checks pretty early on around shelter and diversion.

Those are program, and also, some of them that aren't listed on this slide, they're day centers and safe lots.

Those are program areas that we operate.

So shelters, I think we're all pretty familiar with what those are, so I won't go into that.

Day centers, similarly.

Diversion is short-term, flexible financial assistance.

So if a household that's experiencing homelessness right now, it gets them out of homelessness.

This is actually an approach that was pioneered in Western Washington.

We also have several contracts for rapid rehousing.

That's a little bit different in that it is a longer-term subsidy paired with supportive services, so a household becomes housed and they stay housed when they're done, usually within two years.

Those are some of our primary programmatic functions.

I'll go into some more later as we go through that.

We also have some permanent supportive housing contracts, but I wanna note down at the bottom, we are not the entity that is building housing.

That is Seattle's Office of Housing and the County's Department of Community and Human Services.

That was an intentional design that we are not doing the capital development of those.

Sometimes we are receiving the contracts for operations if it's tapping into federal funds.

Also, if you go down on that same column, you'll see four green checks in a row.

That kind of gives you an idea of some of the systematic functions we hold.

We are the coordinated care for the region.

It's a HUD required entity to collaborate in how we do homeless services.

We manage the, to your point, Madam Chair, the coordinated entry system.

I'm gonna dive into that a little bit more later.

We manage the homeless management information system, so the data around homelessness.

And then also, as I mentioned, we are the right-of-way initiative.

Not on this slide is also that we are the housing or the agency where the ombuds office resides.

I'll be going into the systematic functions a little bit later because usually those are things people are less familiar with.

There's a couple of things that I want to point out at the very top.

You see that they're being recaptured by the city of Seattle.

That's homelessness outreach and homelessness prevention.

We'll go into both of those in a little bit, but those contracts for prevention either later this year or outreach next year are going to be, KCRA will not be receiving the funding from Seattle to continue those functions.

They're going to stay with the city.

And many of you I've had a chance to meet with individually before, and I'm sure you'll all remember me pointing out there's a bunch of red Red X is in the middle, and I think those are important.

We're not the behavioral health system.

We do not receive the funding to be the behavioral health system that's a county-held function.

We also are not the primary entity for criminal activity or public safety, and we are not the public health entity.

Obviously, there's tremendous overlap in the populations we serve in all of those issues.

We can't ignore that.

But we need to remember that we are only one of many different service systems that are operating around that.

That was a lot.

I've already said a fair amount.

Is now a good time to stop for questions or do you want me to keep going?

I think we'll just keep going.

Okay.

And then people can ask their questions at the end.

And I also just wanted to note for the record that Council Member Rivera has joined us.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

So we'll go to our next slide.

I wanted to give a sense of our budget overall.

What we'll jump out to, I imagine, is that shelter is about one third of our overall program area.

If you look at permanent supportive housing and rapid rehousing, that's also about a third of what we do.

And then there's a lot of smaller areas.

One thing I think that is an important takeaway from this slide, it's often missed by the public, though I know that you all are well-versed in this, is that all of our funding is dedicated to existing services.

So to increase, you know, to do like an increase in shelter with the resources we have now means we have to take away from something else.

It is a zero-sum game because we are only able to provide what we have been given funding for, and frequently the money that we're given is very prescriptive in terms of what it needs to be used on.

Also, I'll flag that our overhead rate or our admin is only 6.5%.

I know many of you have familiarity either with business enterprises or nonprofits, and you'll immediately be like, 6%, that's absurd.

It's an unsustainable amount, so I'll be talking about some of that in a little bit.

And then next, I wanted to talk about where the source of that funding comes from.

You can see that the City of Seattle is definitely our largest supporter of, or funder, providing a little bit less than half of our overall funding.

And then you can see the other places that our funding is coming from.

Before I go into system functions, I wanted to, go ahead, Council President.

Also, I think my, I wonder if my slide might not have popped up for you.

Go ahead.

Is it okay?

Before we go into system functions, which, like I said, I would spend a little bit more time on to just kind of give an introduction to what they are, we wanted to run through what's going on with homelessness outreach, just making sure we corrected the record in one sense.

As the city has pointed to communication from last March, indicating the KCRAHA had said it didn't have the capacity to be able to operate a homelessness outreach.

And we just wanted to make sure that it was clear that that communication was about a different set of funding that actually would have been new funding to come to us for a new purpose.

As you can see on the slide here, we actually, in January of 2022, took control of prevention and outreach contracts.

We've administered for more than two years those funds.

And as you can see that also we, over the course of that, have even re-competed those in collaboration with the City of Seattle to make sure that we were having new contracts that were more effective.

Actually, I can report that the first six months of those new contracts already resulted in some improvements.

We saw a 40% improvement in exit rates to permanent housing.

That was driven mostly by the reduction of bad exits, where we either lost track of someone or they weren't connected with permanent housing.

We think that's a notable improvement.

It also reflects the design that we came up in collaboration with the city that was around to having geographic deployments.

It's easier if you're assigned an area to make sure you're keeping track of everyone in that area.

So we wanted to make sure that that was clear, that we were, that the previous communication was on something that was a separate pot of funding that would have been new for us for new roles.

So now let's go into, I was calling them system functions.

This first one's a little bit, it's kind of system.

It's kind of just a programmatic function.

As was covered for the committee at its last meeting, you're aware that the state contracts with us to respond to encampments that are on state-owned property.

We call it the right-of-way initiative, or it's now been redubbed the encampment response program.

We have three primary functions.

underlying beliefs or approaches in what we're doing with that.

The first is we lead with housing.

You can see that we had an initial award of $49 million.

$16 million of that is ongoing.

All of that is essentially supporting the housing placements that we will be putting people into.

Also, of that 49 million, the reason it's so large up front is because it also supported the purchase of a building, again, for permanent housing.

And that's based on what we know as best practices, housing first and other approaches.

That is what we know people will accept.

That's what we know is the people that are experiencing homelessness are saying they want housing.

The second fundamental tenet of our approach is around outreach.

We make sure that we have two outreach teams.

We make sure that they have sufficient time to engage with the individuals in the encampment.

That's why we have an 89% rate of acceptance because they really work with them to first develop that by name list, to really understand what it is they would accept.

They work with people like, hey, here's the units that are available right now.

Here's a photo.

This is why this would work for you and talk to them about that.

And then after that outreach work is done, we have a housing plan in place for everyone that's there.

And obviously, not everyone accepts.

That's why it's not 100% on this slide, but a lot of people do.

And it's in place before the teams show up to clean up the site.

We actually have a resolution that's going on.

It's Wednesday.

It's happening on Friday.

And the encampment residents where we were activated at knew that a posting was occurring yesterday because we had talked to them about it.

It was posted yesterday.

Crews are going to arrive on Friday.

No one's going to be there.

It's going to be trash and other things that are left behind.

So that's our approach with the Right-of-Way Initiative.

I'm going to stop you there apparently.

Council President has a question.

I have a question about this because this is probably one of the areas that I hear most about from constituents because if they're driving down I-5 or elsewhere around town, they do see encampments along right-of-ways that Seattle does not control.

And so it's very frustrating for them to hear.

It's not our responsibility, and the pointing of fingers between the city and the state over this issue is just frustrating for people.

So can you tell me, I would like to know, or can you please explain who gets the, who does this work?

So who of the providers, I believe it's the PDA, correct me if I'm wrong, talk about the housing that was just acquired.

Just could you go into a little bit more detail about how this works so that so that the public can understand.

Yeah, absolutely.

So it starts off with a collaboration where the Department of Commerce, WSDOT, and also on that call, the City of Seattle joins.

We're taking information from the City of Seattle as well as from WSDOT, very similar to what you heard two weeks ago from the UCT.

Where are fires happening?

Where are you having public response issues?

Things like that.

We combine that with two outreach agencies.

You're exactly right, Council President.

One of them is PDA.

The other is the REACH program, part of Evergreen Treatment Services.

That's our two field teams that are out there doing outreach.

They go and do assessments of sites because we add not only the...

EXTERNAL REPORTING INFORMATION, BUT ALSO INFORMATION ABOUT WHO'S AT THE SITE.

SO THINGS LIKE, ARE THERE PEOPLE, ARE THERE ELDER SENIORS THAT HAVE ESPECIAL VULNERABILITIES, YOUNG PEOPLE, WHAT IS THE COHESIVENESS OF THE ENCAMPMENT, WHAT ARE OTHER SAFETY AND HEALTH FACTORS WITHIN THE ENCAMPMENT, THINGS LIKE THAT.

THAT'S ALL, IT'S NOT TOO DISSIMILAR FROM WHAT THE UCT DOES, JUST WE HAVE A FIELD TEAM THAT'S ALSO ADDING A FEW PIECES.

AND THEN FROM THAT, WE COME UP WITH OUR PRIORITY LIST AS WELL, JUST LIKE THE UCT DOES, AND THAT'S THE LIST THAT WE WORK DOWN.

Then we have, so REACH and PDA will be engaging in advance.

For example, the encampment that's being resolved today, they were already set with certain, the housing plans were set in place, so they already started working at the next location that they're going to be at, building those connections, making the by name lists, stuff like that that's already happening for our next site while we wait on the current one to get resolved.

How long will that take that you just described, building the connections and building the list?

How that goes about?

No, I mean, do you have an idea?

How long does that usually take?

It varies.

Frankly, our bigger holdup for the first half of the first year of the initiative was waiting on our permanent housing to be ready.

That was more substantial of an issue than it was the timeline that we had to build trust with people.

I would say we were probably seeing four to six weeks at that point, like early initiative.

This latest one, I would say it's probably been three weeks.

I didn't think of that before I came here.

About three weeks that we've probably been on site, something like that.

I can get back to you and give you the exact numbers.

But they show up, they do a by name list, and then, like I said, they're working with individuals, identifying unique needs.

You might have an individual that's undocumented.

There might be someone who's a sex offender.

We've had that in the past.

We've had individuals that can't be placed in certain places because of safety issues.

So we have to work through some of that and make sure we have all the right connections in place.

And then we move forward.

Sometimes we have to wait for the crews.

Like in this case, Seattle already was resolving a different location.

So we had to wait for the crew to be available on Friday, not today.

But things like that kind of go into it.

You asked about the other providers too.

We have Lifelong, Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle, Lehigh, am I forgetting?

I'm forgetting one.

We're soon to be contracting with Uplift Northwest.

We also privately work with a good number of private landlords that we contract either with, we've had some whole buildings that have been offered to us to lease, or also we have like, you know, scouting site.

It's not like onesies, twosies, it's usually like fours and fives.

Apartments in various buildings around the area as well.

I think that covered all your questions, but maybe not.

Basically, KCRHA decides what sites are important for resolution.

Then you tell the state and then you basically say, okay, we're getting our contractors to do the trust building and all that stuff that's going to take about three weeks because we already have the housing or some of the permanent supportive housing.

Then did they just go down your list?

Yeah, I mean, Washington gives us a list of 15 that's like, here's the ones that are the most challenging for the same metrics that the UCT is looking at.

Fires, violent crime in the area, things like that.

And then we send our outreach teams to do that additional engagement to understand the complexities within the site itself.

Also, we've had times that we've found that something's been brought up, maybe because of political rumblings or the amount of trash or traffic on the area, and we aren't finding people staying there.

So you might have a tremendous amount of daytime presence, but overnight, we're not having people actually living on site.

That's happened a couple of times as well.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Council Member Wu.

Just want a quick clarification on slide 10. It says 89% accepted housing.

Is it shelter you mean or housing?

I mean, by permanent housing, can you make that distinction?

Is there a difference when you say housing, does that include shelter?

Because from what I've seen when I've been at encampment resolutions, it's crying gate shelters most of the time versus permanent housing.

And sometimes tiny houses is not considered permanent housing.

Absolutely.

That's a great question.

And thanks for inviting me to clarify that.

It's important.

The state terms what we have as our non-congregate hotel as emergency housing.

That's how they phrase it.

So that's why I'm using housing there.

I think that we're more used to calling the hotel a shelter, a hotel shelter program.

That's about 80 beds.

It turns over a fair amount.

And then we have hundreds of housing units that either are online or in the pipeline that are truly the most of them are apartments, either small efficiencies or studios, something like that.

Then also, as I mentioned, there's one building that we were able to acquire a building to put people into.

So I truly mean housing by that number.

So when I say 89%, that's all individuals that moved inside from an encampment.

So we put together a by name list of who was sleeping and residing on site.

That would be the 100%.

89% of them have moved indoors.

I'll save the rest of my questions for later.

Thank you.

Sure.

Any other, Council Member Rivera?

Yes, thank you, Council Member Moore.

Just a point of clarification.

So the contract you have with the state, is it to move people into permanent supportive housing, or is it to just move folks in general, and then you do a combination of the permanent supportive housing and the emergency housing?

And what happens to the 11% that don't accept housing?

Do you just They stay at the encampment or what happens?

Yeah, great questions there.

So the way that the initiative was launched is that Commerce put out a NOFA inviting five counties, we were one of the five, to develop a proposal on how we would respond to encampments.

The legislative language did say that there needed to be a preference for permanent housing, which is why we structured ours in that direction.

Also, we know what works.

Housing first is a good approach that will address needs.

People will move indoors for housing.

And so that's what we've leaned into there and what we're using our funding for.

Transparently, there's other counties in the state that they mostly did shelter, to your point, Councilmember Wu, and they are struggling right now to get people out of those units because they don't have a place to put them in their system.

We know where our bottlenecks are, and so we purposely approach this with a way of how do we solve our known bottlenecks.

So we came up with the approach of saying this is what we're primarily going to do and that we invest less money in our temporary placements and less money in our field team.

Almost all of our long-term funding is going towards that housing.

Does that cover your first question before I go to the other one?

It does, but a further point of clarification, I thought the mission or how...

KCRE Chair is responsible for emergency response to the homelessness crisis, correct?

Certainly, that's definitely a domain.

When it was created.

Yeah.

As I noted earlier, we do hold a lot of housing contracts too.

So if we're thinking only emergency shelter, that would probably be inaccurate.

We have rapid rehousing, diversion, permanent supportive housing.

We've held prevention before.

Those are all housing approaches as well that are under our purview.

Since we're talking about Housing First, I do have to note as a representative of Seattle and the largest funder, one of the two funders right now, besides the state, When you say housing first is the good model, we do have to recognize that there is somebody's responsibility to make sure that it's not just housing only, that there are other services, and to help people get their lives back together.

And it's up to all of us to make sure that those services are being provided, and I've been disappointed to find that that is lacking.

Yeah, thank you for that point, Council President.

You're exactly right.

We can't just give someone a key and forget about them.

And we appreciate your advocacy in the behavioral health space to advance those investments and give us more.

Appreciate that.

And that actually goes to, I'm sorry, go ahead.

I was gonna say that actually goes a little bit to your other question, which was what happens to the other percent?

And also, am I only talking about permanent supportive housing?

In this case, almost 100% will end up in some kind in what we are calling scattered site permanent supportive housing.

The agencies that we have contracted with are providing behavioral health services on-site or coming on-site through a partnership for the most part.

Exactly to your point, Council President, we can't just leave them.

We're mostly talking about people that are chronically homeless.

They've had extended durations of experiencing homelessness, experienced tremendous numbers of traumas, and just putting them in housing and just leaving them would not succeed.

So we actually are master leasing apartments and then there is routine and regular engagement from that agency as their case manager and their behavioral health support.

So a lot of times people think about PSH as like it's only a building that we built and it's only as that.

We made a trade off.

In order to do things faster, we're master leasing apartments rather than building them.

That costs more.

In the long term it's going to cost more money, but it allowed us to move quicker.

And then to your last question, Councilmember, the 11% actually did have a housing plan or housing option offered to them.

They turned it down or some of them, they turned it down.

That actually was, there was some of our early locations where that primarily happened.

We've had better rates of success lately, almost 100%.

But that's what went on is that those individuals ultimately said, no, I don't like the option that you're offering to me or it doesn't meet my needs.

There were...

A couple that we don't include in these numbers that they were offsite, they had been gone for multiple weeks, so we did not include them on this number.

So to my question, though, Jeff, the 11% that say no, where do they go?

They just stay in the encampment?

No, they're not staying on site.

They know that they're not allowed to.

They were probably displaced to somewhere.

Despite our best efforts, we actually have had some occasions where that resolution occurs.

We still stay in contact with those individuals, and some people have moved indoors afterwards into the placement that we've offered, but obviously not 100%.

And then again, I just, when you say it's inaccurate on the emergency sheltering versus a permanent supportive housing, and I fully support permanent supportive housing, but I know we don't have enough of it.

Again, my understanding was when KC RHA was created, it was to deal with the emergency response, not the permanent supportive housing.

So there seems to be a confusion around what the mission really is.

It almost sounds like it has changed.

in the time that it has been created.

So I'd love to hear more about that transition at some point after perhaps you finish your presentation.

I think that it's important to know that, I mean, think about the money we're getting from the state.

Like I said, that's all in the housing space.

We've continued to do well in getting more funding for rapid rehousing, things like that.

So the share of our budget is growing.

And I mean, Seattle started off 70% of our funding.

So now it's 47 or 40, something like that.

So we've grown in that housing space because we've done well in getting federal dollars and state dollars in those spaces.

But in terms of the actual mission, there hasn't been any evolution there.

The change that we're gonna talk about where prevention and outreach are being recaptured by Seattle, that's the first change in program areas that we've been given.

There hasn't been an evolution.

All the contracts that I'm talking about were contracts we started with on day one.

So yeah, if I could ask for some clarification around the permanent supportive housing.

So my understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that the money that you're receiving for permanent supportive housing is coming from the state and the federal government?

Is that correct?

That'd be the best characterization.

I could be wrong.

I don't know.

I've got some team here that could clarify a few for me.

But let's think in broad brushstrokes, that's probably correct.

Okay, so you're not necessarily getting Seattle money for permanent supported housing or levy money?

There were some contracts that used to flow through Seattle, continuum of care contracts, they're federal dollars, that would have, that are now passed to us.

At least some of those were like rapid rehousing and contracts.

I'd have to get back to you on this.

I'm worried that I'm gonna give you the wrong information here.

So let me get back, look back at what we received from Seattle that were housing contracts and that are currently PSH contracts or housing with services contracts, things like that.

We can follow up.

Okay.

So the permanent supportive housing, you're contracting to provide services or you're contracting with the individuals who own the permanent supportive housing?

Um...

I'm not sure how to differentiate those two.

What's a good example?

The Downtown Emergency Services Center, DESC, they operate PSH.

Some of their funding comes from federal streams, federal continuum of care streams that will pass through us and therefore support their operation of a permanent supportive housing facility.

Okay.

Walk us through a permanent supportive housing.

This is very confusing.

It is in our community because of it being a high-cost rental market.

Permanent supportive housing has primarily been the construction or acquisition of a building that serves everyone in that building is receiving housing supports.

They're probably not paying much rent.

Many locations are operating where there might be some amount of client share if you get some kind of public benefit or something.

You might have some rent you're paying, but for the most part, your rent's covered.

And then that is associated with support services that address your needs.

Research tells us that permanent supportive housing is the best match for people that experience chronic homelessness.

They have to have both an extended period of experiencing homelessness, either at least a year or three episodes over 18 months or three years.

18 months?

Let's just say a certain amount of time.

And so that's one qualifying factor to be chronically homeless.

The other is that you need to have a disabling condition.

That can be a serious substance use disorder or a serious mental illness.

You have to have both of those to be considered chronically homeless.

And that is who we are seeking to match into permanent supportive housing units.

Okay.

So you're like with an encampment.

If you clear an encampment, then you are working to get people either into a tiny house village or into a permanent supportive housing facility.

We actually don't utilize tiny house villages almost ever because those, the vast, vast majority of the tiny home villages and micro modular units in the city are actually reserved for the unified care team.

We have been given access, there's times that we do, some of our locations have been both state owned and city owned property.

that it's an encampment covering both.

And so we work together on that.

So we've been able to access some tiny homes in those circumstances.

The vast majority of our work has not utilized tiny home villages.

It's only been placing temporarily in the hotel shelter that we are paying for or placing people or moving people out of the hotel shelter and into permanent housing.

And the people who are operating the permanent supportive housing are like the downtown emergency service center and you're contracting with them to operate the permanent supportive housing?

Yeah, the intention of what you're saying there is correct.

DESC is not actually one of the right-of-way agencies.

It's Lifelong and Urban League and Lehigh and Uplift, but you've got the gist of it.

Okay, so those entities you're paying to operate the facility, and are you also paying them to provide case management and other types of services in the facility?

Yes, exactly.

Okay, but you are not paying to build facilities?

Correct.

We received, that's why the $49 million, we received enough money to acquire a building.

We didn't acquire it.

In this case, Lehigh acquired it.

And so that will be a facility that they own and they have a contract with us to pay for the operation of it, the maintenance of it, services, insurance, the case managers, all of that stuff in the building.

The other units have all been apartments that we've leased.

Either...

a landlord has said, you can have my whole building, or a landlord has said, you can have four units in this building, five units in this building.

Okay.

And then you said you're not using tiny house villages because that's reserved for Unified Care Team, but I've also heard from Unified Care Team that they're not able to access some of the DESC permanent supportive housing.

So is your permanent supportive housing available to the providers who are working in the City of Seattle?

I think there's a little conflating of entities there.

Again, DESC is not one of our contractors.

They are one of the largest operators of PSH in the county though.

Plymouth does a large number as well, so there's a good number.

When I get to coordinated entry, we can talk about that a little bit.

Because I think that'll be helpful for actually the domain of your question, where you're thinking either the unified care team or just an outreach team on the street, something like that, being able to access those units.

Why is that so difficult?

I can say that if you look at last month, for example, I'll go into, let me just go to coordination now.

On Coordinated Entry, there is a daily process where every single day there is both a virtual, like you can join a 30-minute meeting or over a two-hour window, you can just nominate over email.

Everyone that is part of the Coordinated Entry space, let's say we're talking single adults, they receive every day the number of units that are available, what they are, a description of them, things like that.

then they can nominate an individual that they are working with as the housing case manager for that unit.

That's how coordinated entry works.

It exists because we don't have enough housing.

We have more demand for the housing units than what we actually have.

So similar to, to use a metaphor that I think you all are very well versed in, definitely more than me, think about the land use code.

There's purposeful steps in building a building that slow it down, but we do that because it achieves a higher purpose, right?

It either ensures public input or environmental design, things like that.

It slows things down to achieve that systematic purpose.

Coordinated entry works the same way.

In order to make sure we can serve and target populations that are highest priority for us as a system, we have to have a coordinated entry system.

Last month, I can say, I anticipated that there might be some questions around demand, things like that.

So I just asked for the numbers for last month.

I don't remember how many units were nominated for or made available, but for every unit that was made available, we had an average of 34 people nominated for it.

So that's a little bit more than 30 times the demand for what we had.

Hopefully that's kind of like in a roundabout way, I think answered your questions there.

Do you want to follow up in any way?

Are there any questions?

Yeah.

Do you work with SHA to get any access to any of those units, Seattle Housing Authority?

And also, when you talk about the demand, I believe part of the problem is the demand is because people aren't...

aren't moving on from permanent supportive housing, perhaps because they don't have the supports to be able to do so.

And Urban League and Uplift Northwest, I completely support those organizations, but they're not tasked with the behavioral health side of things.

So are you saying that you, once people are in a unit, whether it be in a single apartment someplace or a larger standalone housing project, are you making sure that the providers that you're contracting with are actually performing the case management and getting people into treatment.

I mean, you're looking at those contracts that closely and making sure that that's happening.

Yeah, and actually you brought up a nuance there, like pointing out Uplift Northwest, for example.

The range, and this goes to your point earlier, that you can think of it as all permanent supportive housing in a scattered site way, but there's still some variation within that.

So lifelong is a behavioral, they're very used to dealing with high behavioral health and physical health needs.

Urban League, for example, they actually have been partnering.

They have a contract, a subcontract, let's say.

They've had on-site nursing care and on-site behavioral health care that has come in because they don't do those services.

Right.

But they've been doing, that's what's been the components in their building to make sure that individuals are supported in what their actual needs are.

And then Uplift Northwest, we actually had a fair number of individuals that they are working towards self-sufficiency.

Right.

I do know that part.

Yeah.

So even though those individuals probably, I don't know the particulars of their circumstances, many of them probably...

qualified as chronically homeless based off of what we were looking at.

But we saw that they also, there was a good propensity and good likelihood and they were actually already engaged with the interest in employment and job readiness services, things like that.

So that's why we're going to pair them with that kind of a service.

So we are seeking to meet the range of needs to your point that individual and households that there is a possibility for eventual self-sufficiency?

Definitely.

We want to support that.

That's person-centered.

But many of the individuals we're talking about have, again, they're coming to us with a disabling condition and that it's unlikely, especially in a high-cost housing market, that they're going to move out of our permanent supportive housing and be self-sufficient.

I think across the country, I've heard varying numbers, but I think that you might expect maybe 10% of the population that goes into PSH might move on to a ratcheted down supportive service environment, not living on their own in the middle of nowhere.

They probably would still need some level of support, but not that heightened level of support that PSH offers.

But the vast majority of individuals, you're not even across the country, you wouldn't expect them to move on and be just self-sufficient in a unit.

So, yeah, can you talk about some of the challenges of coordinated entry?

I mean, obviously, you noted the challenge that there's more need than there is availability to meet the need.

But I've heard from providers that it's a very opaque and difficult process to navigate.

Could you maybe expand on that a little bit?

I'd be happy to, actually.

So because it's true, you're not wrong.

Across the country, coordinated entry is required by the federal government.

We have to do it.

But across the country, it's widely critiqued as being slower, inefficient, frustrating.

that's not unique to us, that's across the country.

Last year, KCRAHA actually made substantial changes to our coordinated entry system.

The feedback we've gotten so far has been that it's been a dramatic improvement.

And we don't have the data to tell you that yet.

I was trying to get that before we came here today.

Hopefully, we'll be able to bring that to you soon.

And I can go in, it's probably a little bit more detailed than we have time for today about like the particular changes we made there to make it more effective for our housing providers to get people placed into it.

But you can see on the slide here, overall with coordinated entry, There's a range of places that you can be nominated to.

It can be shelters.

Many of our shelters are enhanced shelters, certainly.

You have a case manager that's linked with the household and doing the work to make sure that they've got their documents, you know where they are a good match for, things like that.

that provider agencies doesn't say homeless provider agencies.

Other agencies can also nominate people in coordinated entry.

So outreach agencies do that, of course, but also you can have other entities that might be a health services agency, maybe like you might have for, I know that I've been on meetings with some of the jail health services team, trying to understand how they could participate in this.

So there's pathways that other entities can also bring clients and nominate them.

And then we also have RAPS, stands for Regional Access Points.

Those are, I mean to really simplify it, it's kind of like a walk-in shop that you can come to if you're just experiencing homelessness, you're not in service engaged and you wanna go there and be connected with somebody that can help you get nominated.

So those are the various ways that you can be nominated.

The changes that we've made ideally make it easier for those entities, whoever they might be, that are bringing clients to make sure that they're bringing clients that are ready, that are a good match for programs, and also that we're just overall moving at a faster rate.

So hopefully we'll have some good data for you on that soon.

But we have made some substantial changes, and the anecdote I like to give is that the first too few times I joined some coordinated entry meetings, everybody showed up to complain.

I mean, everybody.

And the last two that I participated in, we did not have that level of engagement and we actually got positive comments.

So it went from like really bad to a few positive.

That's probably indicative of something that's good, but we're working on having the ability to actually quantify that in the way that an evidence-based system should.

Okay, thank you.

I think Council Member Wu had a question.

Oh, okay.

Beg your pardon.

Go ahead.

No worries.

Thank you so much.

I just want to ask a follow-up question to the folks that don't accept housing.

I'm wondering when the outreach team goes out and they create the list of folks that need housing, and then I imagine, I guess describe what happens.

I imagine they go back, they try to figure out what housing is available.

I guess what I'm getting at, what happens to people who show up after the outreach team has done the outreach and created the list of folks that actually need housing?

I imagine people keep coming.

Yeah, actually, that's a great question because obviously there is some dynamics around every encampment location.

So we're there for at least a couple weeks.

It's not just one day.

Like, could people actually have variants?

Like, two sites ago, I remember we had one individual that was at the hospital for a several days and we hadn't seen them.

We're like, where did they go?

And then they came back.

So we're there for a couple weeks to make sure that we've captured who lives on site.

So that's the first thing.

And then there, of course, are going to be individuals.

Once we are, when we're active at a site, we have outreach teams there every morning.

Like, I joke that, like, One of our agencies always showing up with coffee and donuts every single morning and like, good morning, how are you?

Why don't you come out of your tent so I can meet you?

If there's someone that new that arrives on site and it's already after we've established like who is living here and we've closed that list, we tell them that.

We say like, you know, this is a site that will be under resolution soon.

You are not going to be able to stay here for very long because shortly we're going to be like clearing off this entire location.

We'd encourage you to go somewhere else because you're not going to be able to stay here, but we're not forcing you to leave at this time either.

Some individuals say, okay, thanks for the heads up, and they don't set up and at the location in the first place.

Others have set up and then when it comes time and we tell people, hey, we're going to go ahead and post now, they move on.

So you don't add those individuals to the list post facto, you just tell them that you're going to close the encampment and they should go.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I should have, yeah.

No, you're, sorry, I left out a key piece.

We also have some shelter beds, some true like congregate shelter beds that we operate and are contracting for.

and also just generally are aware of not set aside for the UCT, but if there's other vacancies across the 5,000 shelter beds in the system, we would work with them to find that.

Generally speaking, we have more people that are like, okay, I'm not gonna set up here in the first place, I think is probably the primary thing, but we do offer something.

We would never leave someone without any option, just the chance to move along.

Do you track those folks as well?

The people that did not accept anything?

Yes, and the ones that showed up after you created your initial list.

Yeah, so we have a unique identifier.

I know 100% of the people that we've actually put on our by name list and moved indoors.

For individuals that did not engage with us, we aren't able to do that because they might not have actually, like we've got the by name list of who lives there.

That's why it's not 100% on that list.

It's not only the people that moved indoors.

But for individuals that might have shown up and said, been told, hey, we're resolving, we've already closed this site, you know, like you're not going to be able to move here.

We don't have that information because, you know, it's a conversation that was too rapid for us to be able to capture someone's information in that sense.

You know, they came by, started it, and then moved on.

And this just gets back to my original point about how do we help folks that, show up at the last minute.

We have an emergency situation as well.

It doesn't sound like you're actually able to help those folks get into some kind of sheltering.

We are offering them shelter, actually, if they wanted.

This was surprising for me, at least.

We actually don't have tremendous amounts of people showing up.

You would think that, like, word would get out and we would have droves of people arriving.

That's just not actually what happens.

Like, for the most part, we're resolving our encampment that, not the one that's underway right now, but the last one, I think, out of 30 people, there was also two other people that showed, individuals that showed up after the 30 households that we're talking about that had been on the by name list.

And then just one last question, point of clarification.

You said the state and federal funds are used for permanent supportive housing.

What's the city of Seattle funding mostly used for?

Well, KCRHA.

That's a big part of it.

I think that what you're asking about is the unified care team.

Is that correct?

No, I'm asking where the Seattle funds that go to KCRHA, what is that used for?

When you say KCRHA, do you mean admin or do you mean...

I mean, mostly, the vast majority of the funding that we receive, 94%, 95% of it, is going out in the form of contracts to provider agencies.

And so that's how it's being used.

What we can do is follow up.

It's actually pretty readily available.

We know it was, we've actually recently presented it to our boards.

the money that is coming from Seattle, which program area it supports.

So we can follow up with that information for you.

You can see like, you know, X amount of dollars support shelter, X amount support rapid rehousing.

I just don't know that off the top of my head.

We can follow up.

That would be great.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Council Member Wu.

Thank you.

So I actually go into encampments and I try to connect people to resources.

I've been there for encampment resolutions.

I've seen the evolution of KCRHA and a lot of the rough patches that has been overcome.

But to Council Member Rivera's point, I think some areas of improvement is that KCRHA contractors, outreach workers come out during the day, But I feel like encampments populations change because some people during the day will go to services or maybe they have a job, they come back at night and only around night when there are no social workers or outreach workers.

And so those people get missed during encampment resolutions and they don't realize it's happening until they show up on resolution day and their things are gone.

So I think if there are any, Points of improvement, we'll love to see outreach workers at all hours a day, all parts of the weekend, because some people may live there, but they're not there during the day when outreach workers are.

Another thing is, when there are encampment resolutions, I've seen times where people hear that a resolution is happening and they show up looking for shelter.

And it's quite...

I was quite surprised.

And so I don't know if there's any way or a policy we could help people searching for shelter and showing up the day of, or if that's another data gathering point of where people are coming from searching.

Another thing I wanted to ask is all of these stats and all this data is from 2024, but I'm really interested to hear what are some of the lessons learned, mistakes made, and how we're changing that for the future.

It'd be great to have seen earlier stats and see how they compare.

Also, I would have loved to seen a contractor list because I know you do contract with a lot of organizations, agencies, would love to see what results they're producing and helping to reach our goal.

But I know that's a lot to ask for and that's a big question of mistakes learned and what we're doing differently for the future.

But I also wanna know like, how do you see KCRHA?

What's the vision going forward with mistakes learned?

How are we going to do better?

And I feel like we do need KCRHA, but what does that look like?

Because what we're doing, is it working?

I would add I would answer that question by the vision has not changed.

We have some missteps in execution, but the reason why the Regional Homelessness Authority was started in the interlocal agreement and the belief that a regional approach to solving some of these, we still read that document and that's a guiding document for us.

What you're talking about is execution mistakes.

You're not talking about institutional policies or you're not talking about programmatic policies.

missteps or you are talking about programmatic missteps.

So the vision is the current vision.

How we're going to execute on it, I think that's the real question.

And so we do have programming and like I said, results that we are showing that because of the noise, it doesn't get out.

but the system has improved.

There are things that we are doing now that the City of Seattle did not do when they held the contracts.

Because of the combined effort of having King County's contracts, having Continuous Care contracts, we have a level of scale that we'll be able to do things at a lot more efficient level.

I don't want to get past that we operate on a 5%, 6% overhead rate.

And so in terms of what are we doing, we don't hear anyone else saying that they operate what we're doing at that level.

I think you're hearing some urgency about what is the vision, what is the plan, how are we going to overcome some missteps because the ILA does expire this year or it will continue We're up against a timeline, and so we are asking these hard questions because we are trying to ensure the health of the organization.

And I would just say, let's be candid.

We're asking these tough questions in a period of $230 million budget deficit.

We're asking these tough questions and us giving exercises of budget cuts.

We're asking these tough questions in the spirit of clawing back resources that are the homeless that the KCRA just had.

So I appreciate the questions, but I want to know the context and what the questions are being asked.

And let's mirror the timeframe of the ILA expiring along with the current situation we find ourselves in.

And then we can modulate what we think we can achieve given all of those variables.

Yeah.

That's why I was providing that context.

Well, I think it's fair though to ask the question, you know, we hear the comments that we are all committed to a regional model, and we are all committed theoretically to a regional model, but we are looking at, and I think Danny Westneat raised this issue in an editorial, that the other jurisdictions are not really coming forward.

They're not coming forward with contributions.

They're not coming forward with land.

There's really a lack of cooperation.

Seattle is the primary funder of the RHA.

Even King County provides a small percentage of money, and they held back a significant percentage of their budget so that they could directly contract with providers, and we turned it all over.

And yet, it doesn't, I mean, You can only be regional if you've got regional cooperation.

So how do we address those concerns that we are seeing from other jurisdictions that are not joining us?

And they may have legitimate reasons, but how do you overcome, KCRHA, overcome that reluctance to participate in a regional approach?

Well, I would say that's an open question.

I would say that's an open question.

I mean, that's a big question.

And for me to answer it, I don't really have that answer.

We have reached out.

We've gone to Auburn and talked to the Auburn mayor and their staff, trying to understand what is their hesitation.

And I won't get into the details of the conversation, but we are reaching out.

We're going over to Bellevue and talking with the mayor there.

So we are having outreach efforts.

Like I said, as an outsider, prior to me coming to see what some of the good work, I would have just intuitively said, why would I invest in it?

If you hear what you're seeing in the paper, what you're hearing from the community.

So I think when you say, how do you overcome it?

I think some of it is us telling some truth telling.

There's a lot of good that is happening right now that gets lost in the noise.

And so part of our responsibility is raise the level of the truth telling.

One of the other things, how do you overcome it?

If you notice, I mentioned talking about the rebid.

We have some efficiencies that are baked into the system.

that need to be revisited.

Given that we are still operating as if the contracts had been in the city, the opportunity to re-bid, to engage the partners to say if we had our druthers, we'd rather do it this way.

Be able to begin to start talking about operating metrics like you will get contracts based on performance of exit to permanent housing.

These are all things that weren't baked into contracts that we know that will help improve the system.

So those are part of how they overcome.

But I would say that it is a big ship.

It's not a boat that you can just turn.

It is a very large ship you're asking us to turn in some very turbulent waters.

Absolutely.

But we've also lost, to some extent, the confidence of the private philanthropies with the partnership for Xero, I think it was.

So we also need to be making sure that they are brought back on and into this conversation.

So I think there's a lot of conversations that we need to have about We are at a juncture.

We are looking at this being up for renewal at the end of the year.

And I think we all want it to work.

But we have to be honest about where it didn't work and how we're going to make it work going forward.

And conversations about, for a long time, tiny house villages were not viewed as something that was viable.

And yet, tiny house villages are a critical piece to resolving what we're seeing on the streets.

And even now I'm hearing that you're not really working with tiny house villages because that's all UCT.

Well, maybe we should be expanding the contracts that we have with tiny house villages.

It's not necessarily a plug for them, Lehigh per se, but just like...

the public, we don't see, when we look at what's happening on the street, we don't see any improvement.

We only see things getting worse, aside from, I think, the right-of-way, where that's very obvious, and yet we don't know where those people are going, and it's important for that message to be communicated.

Yet we're actually getting those individuals into permanent supportive housing, but Anyway, I've said my piece.

Council Member Moore, if I may, I just want to add to what you're saying and also say that this presentation has really focused a lot on the state and the right-of-way.

And I'm not clear.

We are making investments in UCT separate from the KCRHA.

And I'm not understanding is it that, and this is why I asked my earlier question about the city's investment in KCRHA and where that is going, because I know that we also are funding UCT to do emergency response as well.

And I am not clear how those two are working together and what kind of return on investment are we getting?

between those two pieces.

And I think I would have liked to have seen more on the Seattle side of things with this presentation.

The right away encampments are really critical and I'm glad that you're working with the state and clearing those.

You know, I'm glad that you are getting folks into permanent supportive housing.

But to council member Moore's comments, we're not seeing in Seattle the measurable really results.

Folks are on the street and we are very concerned, all of us up here, about getting folks indoors.

whether that is permanent supportive housing or emergency sheltering and coupled with services.

We all care about that and we are just not seeing those measurable results.

And I want to hear more about the Seattle investment because we're all here representing constituents in Seattle.

A regional approach does make a lot of sense and I care very much about it being a regional approach.

But as it has been set up here, a regional approach then means our regional partners need to be fully invested like we are.

And then for the purposes of a presentation and for transparency to the public, When you all come here, it's our expectation that you're going to talk about Seattle and how all this is impacting Seattle and where the Seattle funding is going, because that's what the constituents here want to know about.

Thank you.

I think I'll let you finish your presentation.

And then we can do questions if there's more.

Sorry, while I'm pulling it up, I do want to make sure one item is clear.

My understanding of our interlocal agreement is that at the end of this year, Seattle or King County could unilaterally withdraw from it, but that absent an intention to withdraw, it just continues forward automatically each year.

Now, obviously, there's conversations to possibly change our governance structures.

That's been an area of a lot of conversation, but my understanding is the ILA doesn't disappear on December 31st absent action, so we Just making sure that that's a clear point, especially for the public.

I think all of us, we've talked about that before.

Yes, it will automatically renew unless one of the jurisdictions or both jurisdictions make a decision to change it or to withdraw.

So yeah, that is a point of decision.

Do we know why that's happening?

I think we left off on point and time count.

Yeah, that would be our next one.

And to your point, Council Member Rivera, I definitely can follow up.

I'm sorry, is it not sharing it?

And I apologize for the feedback.

It tells me that my screen is sharing, but it doesn't seem like any of you see it.

Is that correct?

We see the point in time count.

We do see it.

Oh, there we go.

We were at point in time count.

To your point, Council Member Rivera, we will follow up on what money that's given to Seattle operates in Seattle.

Sorry for the, in terms of the discourse that we ended up focusing on some areas that weren't of interest, but we can provide a lot of that information and delve into that more, so.

Well, it's all of interest, but we also are responsible to Seattle taxpayers, so we want to make sure we're very clear on that.

And because you did bring UCT up, there is a lack of transparency on what then parts are you handling versus UCT, because my understanding is UCT is very much an emergency response, but it was my understanding when you all created that that you weren't going to handle the emergency response, because there are a lot of partners handling permanent supportive housing, that all flows through the providers anyway, many of the providers.

You don't actually create units, so I understand that.

And so I just think there needs to be this lack of, or I mean lack, excuse me, there needs to be transparency and the Seattle funding, as I said earlier.

So thank you for providing any information post this presentation on those pieces.

Yeah, absolutely.

Most of that would be a question for the UCT.

I know they were here before.

There might be some follow-ups.

I do want to flag, though, that in the same way that WSDOT has cleanup crews and crews that come up and pick up, we don't control those.

WSDOT still controls those, and they've asked us to do the advance work.

but to make sure that people are gone before they arrive.

So in many ways, the UCT is very interdepartmental.

And I know that at the creation of KCRHA, you know, if the SPU is doing pump outs and cleanup and parks is doing pickup and that's got, you know, like there's numerous contracts there that wouldn't be something that you would pass to us as part of that.

So, you know, there's a lot of components that are part of the UCT that, you know, were not passed to us because it wouldn't make sense.

Like we wouldn't own the public utilities.

That wouldn't be logical.

but there's other pieces too where there's overlap, but I know that they talked a lot about that already for you.

I'll try to pick up quickly.

Are we okay on time?

I wanted to just clarify.

My understanding, Councilmember, is that the outreach portion of emergency shelter is Seattle's responsibility, and that is part of the body of work that we took back into the city.

So you have to break up the outreach part and the actual physical shelter part.

Anyway, that's how it's been explained to me.

And my understanding is that we took back the outreach part because it wasn't working effectively.

Uh, we were not getting the support that we needed in doing the outreach.

Um, and so that's why we made the decision to bring it back.

The same with the prevention.

So yes, and that is all true.

And we also continue funding KCRHA.

So I just want to make sure I'm clear, um, where that funding, what that, what that is going to fund.

Let me run through the last couple of things and we'll turn it over for more questions.

How much time are we over?

How am I doing here?

We're way over.

Okay.

Well, I already mentioned the point-in-time count previously.

The primary model, I won't spend too much time on this here, it is a model that we're pursuing that utilizes respondent-driven sampling has, through some mathematical and modeling work that UW is doing with us, takes a known number and uses that to extrapolate our respondent-driven sampling to develop better estimates.

So you can see this year when we did that, we had 1350 surveys across 17 hubs across King County.

The results of that aren't available yet, but it is an innovative new strategy.

HUD gave us a waiver because they're excited about the idea of us doing this kind of work.

Could you give us the difference between the model that was in that last year?

How would, what was the number with this model compared to the previous year or whenever the previous count with the other one?

Because I, my understanding is it went from like 12,000 or something like that to something 45 or 40,000?

It's a big jump, so I want to make sure.

The 45 numbers were the annual usage, like the annual service data.

There was work by DCHS and Public Health and HSD to compare all of their data sets and get a sense.

So that's where some of those numbers come from.

It's pretty confusing to cover here, so let me back up with all of those and the trends there.

I think it's best to have that on paper so you can see the numbers.

Thanks.

So let me just write that in.

That was the point in time count.

The agreement establishing us required that we develop an ombuds office that is to ensure that our system is providing equitable access that's client-centered and quality services.

You can see the bullets here, the various things that our ombuds office does.

It was still being stood up and staffed in 2022, but you can see already how in 2023 then they dramatically increased their work and continue to do that.

And that can range from actually inquiring and investigating a circumstance where something that was inappropriate occurred and looking into that to make sure the corrections are done, or it frequently is just making sure the individuals that are experiencing homelessness are getting connected with the information and the resources that they need.

And then I was gonna finish with reminding, this kind of goes to your point, Council President, the modeling that the state has done says that we should be expecting to serve, that there's approximately 53,000 people in King County that are experiencing homelessness over the course of a year, not on any given day, but over the course of a year.

And then just the reminder of the dynamics that we're operating in, the service capacities that we do have, things like that.

So those are the slides, but I know, Dara, you were gonna finish up with some further points too.

Do we have further questions?

Council Member Saka.

Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair.

And thank you, CEO Powell and Jeff, for sharing this presentation.

Thank you, colleagues, for the enriching, lively discussion and questions and comments.

I was feverishly jotting down a number of notes and questions of my own.

I had about 10 of them listed.

And then now, thanks to you all, I've been reduced to one or two.

So really, really appreciate the thoughtful engagement.

I think what you all are hearing is a sense of optimism and frustration.

People want to see better results.

People want to see better outcomes.

Whatever money and investment is being spent, in this case, on behalf of the City of Seattle taxpayers, people just want to see better accountability for outcomes and better results.

And absolutely, there's been some missteps along this journey.

Everyone and every organization makes mistakes along the way, but it is really important that we learn from our missteps and strive to be better and strive to do better for our unhoused neighbors and strive to do better for everyone in the city of Seattle, especially the taxpayers.

And so I also wanna take this opportunity to applaud you all on something good that I seen in your presentation today.

100% of contracts in 2024 were delivered on time.

Great, great, great, great, great.

I know we've had, that's been a particular challenge, you know, last few years.

So kudos to making significant strides and progress in that important area.

Strategy and plans, effective strategy and planning is important.

Can't forget about effective implementation and operalization of that strategy as well.

And that's where contracting comes into play.

That's where the rubber meets the road.

So, So kudos to you all for that.

I think in terms of our contracting, I do think there is a better opportunity to streamline and enhance our contracting with our service providers to help drive more efficient and more effective delivery of services to help us ultimately achieve better outcomes for our results.

As part of that, I think we do need to bake in clear, specific, attainable performance metrics and measures and goals in our various contracts with our service providers.

In order for us to fully wrap our heads around what's going on and understand and be able to track and monitor trends and make predictions on what we can do to better improve things, we need to have better data collection.

we need to look for opportunities to improve the, the types and scopes of data that we collect, uh, and, and, uh, Yeah, I'll leave that one there.

But I think there's a particular opportunity to continue our work on streamlining the contracting process, including, again, by making sure we have some clear, specific metrics baked into every contract.

The second thing I want to kind of highlight and emphasize is a point that Chair Moore mentioned about our regional approach.

I think it did make a lot of sense initially when the KCRHA was being stood up that Seattle provided a significant portion of the initial investment.

Think of that as coming from the business community, I think of that as seed funding, if you will.

Made a lot of sense for Seattle to heavily invest.

We also have a lot of know-how and capability already built up relative to other jurisdictions.

And I think it did make a lot of sense that Seattle, again, significantly invest relative to other jurisdictions.

But if this is truly going to be a regional approach, The success of KCRHA and our broader regional approach hinges on our neighboring jurisdictions and partner cities and agencies stepping up and paying more of their fair share.

Because I view this challenge as a shared responsibility that we all have, all cities have across this region.

to step up and contribute financially, and that was an excellent article by Danny Westy a few weeks back, and also contributing, citing, and having the political will and courage to invest heavily in both of those.

This can't be solely a shared burden that the city of Seattle and its taxpayers bear the brunt of.

We need our regional partners across various cities across this region to step up because it's gonna take all of us.

So as Seattle's investment financially, over time I would expect Seattle's investment to gradually draw down while every other city around over time, again, gradually ramps up their own individual investment.

And I'm looking forward to working with you all, with my colleagues here, with the mayor's office and our partners in these various agencies to help achieve exactly that.

And one thing that, so thank you again for this rather insightful presentation.

One thing that wasn't really covered, if anything, kind of a cursory mention that in my view is really a non-trivial challenge to helping streamline and improve how we operate and what we deliver and what we achieve and the results we see is the somewhat confusing and clunky governance structure of the KCRHA.

As I understand it, and I think you alluded to it during a portion of this, Jeff, you said the committees or the boards of the KCRHA, and when you reference plural, not singular, I think therein lies the problem.

It seems to be, as I understand it, there's three boards with oversight authority over KCRHA.

In my mind, that's too, too many.

And I wasn't involved in, you know, I'm not a architect of the original founding.

And I think in many cases, I can see how in many material respects, it made a ton of sense at the time when it was during its inception and founding to have these three boards.

And I'm not here to tear down or like, you know, break apart any of the prior great work.

that went on to conceiving this thing.

I'm here to help improve and make better.

That governance structure of three boards might have made a ton of sense during its inception years ago, but For the next iteration, for the evolution of the KCRHA, I do think there is a ripe, immediate, urgent opportunity to help simplify and streamline.

That reduces overhead and costs, transactional costs and time on you all by reporting, like, wait, who do we got today?

What meeting and prep materials do we gotta?

And also, it helps simplify and streamline decision-making So much opportunity there.

And so, but for the members of the public, can you clarify a little bit and talk a little bit more about this unique governance structure that KCRHA has in place?

Certainly.

So you're right, we have three boards.

Plural, right?

Plural, yeah, three.

You're right.

I'll do them in the degree that they report to each other.

So one of them, which is required by the federal government, is our Continuum of Care Board.

The ILA redubs that, the Advisory Committee, to the Implementation Board.

So it has a couple different names, but it's all the same thing.

representational requirements for that that are laid out and it must be representative of our continuum.

One of the primary, if not the primary function of that group is as every year or soon to be every other year, because they're changing the federal rules so we don't have to do it every year, as the application that we as a community send in for federal resources, they approve that and go through the process of this is what's in and what's out of it.

That's one of the primary jobs of that group.

Next on the list would be the Implementation Board, which again, our founding document treats the COC Board as a committee of the Implementation Board.

The vision for the Implementation Board was non-elected experts in homelessness that are able to connect with a lot of different other service systems, things like housing, healthcare, criminal justice system, and there's actually, We have to have a pretty complex matrix to be able to meet and figure out how do these 13 members fulfill all those requirements.

That's the next board.

That's the primary one.

It's actually a lot of our operational oversight comes from that board.

And then meeting less frequently is the board that includes all of the elected officials related to KCRHA.

That's called our governing committee.

The governing committee has two council members, Council President Nelson and Council Member Moore, as well as the mayor.

And then on the King County side, there's also two council members, Executive Constantine.

There's three people from the Sound Cities Association.

It happens to be their elected officials.

They figure out who they want to represent the sound cities or suburban communities.

And then there's three individuals who represent people with lived experience.

So that's the governing committee.

So those are your three different structures that we have.

and to some degree, the interrelationship between them.

Thank you.

Councilmember Nielsen, I'll get back to Councilmember Nguyen.

Thank you.

This has to do with the issue that you brought up of governing because yes, Council Member Moore and I and the Mayor are the Seattle contingent on the governing committee.

And what you just mentioned is not only are there three boards, but it's the non-elected experts in homelessness, that's called the implementation board, that's making the budget.

These are non-elected people who are not accountable for their constituents for the use of resources that are making the budget.

Then the governing committee is expected to basically essentially rubber stamp it so that the providers, very important, can get paid.

And so that really does need to be cleaned up, and that'll be quite a process, and that can only take place in the interlocal agreement.

But I just want to say, nobody is going to get on a microphone on TV and say that they do not agree that a regional approach is the best approach, and I do too.

So we all agree with that because homelessness has no boundaries, right?

But when we talk about, but the other cities have to step up.

Well, not to speak for them, I would imagine that they've been watching the rollout of the organization that was built on great intentions and with a solid mission, they're looking at it and saying, I don't know, we already are...

lack resources.

And so they need to have the confidence that they should allocate some of their resources to the regional response.

And so it's a chicken and the egg thing.

And, uh, CEO Powell, you started your, um, your talk about that you have confidence in, in what I think that my colleagues, our constituents are wanting is also confidence because we're all in this together.

And so we're going to be asking some pretty hard questions because it matters so much.

And, um, There's not enough time for a lot of those questions.

But I just want to say you're both in a difficult position because it's a big problem.

I mean, homelessness is complex.

And when we talk about the rebid, that's another big, huge thing that's coming up.

That's no mere procedural matter.

That is primarily policy.

We want to make sure that the contracts are being rebid to...

there's a plan, you know, to organizations that will fulfill the mandate or the plan.

And so that's coming up and looking forward to those conversations as well.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Council Member Wu.

Thank you.

Yes, exactly what Council President Nelson said.

I know you've done a lot of great work.

Thank you for that.

You are in a very tough spot, but we all want you to succeed.

So I think I'm going to schedule some time with you.

I have a lot of questions and would love to dig into the weeds with you and looking at building that confidence and that trust moving forward with the shared vision and mission that we all agree with.

And so, um, thank you for your work.

I know there's a lot of work that needs to be done.

Um, and you know, we all want to engage and ensure your success.

Thank you.

Council member Rivera.

Yes, I agree with all the council members up here.

I do want to say to council member Nelson's point about constituents want to have the confidence as do we.

They also want to see the results.

And ultimately, you know, seeing the results is what is going to give folks confidence.

And toward that point, and you know, to underscore the point I made earlier, you know, you have a $241 million budget.

I was able to find out Seattle is about $109 million of that.

and about 10% will come back for the outreach and prevention.

So that's a lot of dollars.

And so this is why I'm asking the questions about Seattle's investment and why the investments regionally to Council Member Saka's point, are really important.

We all are invested in your success because that will mean our success and the city's success.

We are asking tough questions because ultimately, we do want to see the approach succeed.

We all are aligned in the mission and the values.

I wanted to say that.

My last point I want to say because we talked a lot about permanent supportive housing, I've said it before and I'll say it in this context is that we all want to see and it would be great for everyone to have their first choice.

But we want folks getting off the streets and into housing of some type and into services.

And so the idea that someone will stay on the streets because we don't have their first choice.

gives me a lot of angst because at the end of the day, we know having people housed is what we need to be doing.

It's what's in folks' best interest, and I always lead with there are a lot of women and youth that are really getting taken advantage of in these encampments, and I always have that at the forefront of my mind when I am having these conversations and when I'm always pushing forward.

to get people off the streets.

And so I am very clear that we really need to look at the approach that we're taking now with the permanent supportive housing and know that while we want to do that for everyone, we can't.

And so we need to really have this, uh, uh, emergency approach for temporary housing, including tiny homes as council member Moore said, um, because it is in all of our collective best interest to get people off of the streets.

Thank you.

OK, well, thank you very much.

I don't believe there are any further questions.

So yeah, just to conclude, I do want to say that I very much appreciate all the work that all of you have done, everyone that's affiliated with the Regional Homelessness Authority.

It's not an easy job.

We tasked you with a huge responsibility.

And every entity is going to have growing pains and points of learning and I think at this point it's a great juncture for us to have that honest reevaluation about what didn't work and what can work going forward.

I certainly think reevaluating the governance structure is an important part of that conversation because I think to some extent, while as Council Member Osaka mentioned, it might have worked in the beginning, I don't think it's continuing to serve the entity or all of those that it serves well.

So that is worth revisiting.

As well as reaching out to our regional partners and asking them, having those honest and tough conversations about what are their reluctance?

What are the reasons for their reluctance?

How can we help address that?

How can we really come together as a region?

And also not getting caught up in sort of ideological positions about whether one type of shelter is better than another type of shelter.

The point is to get people in a humane condition and ultimately to get people housed and to maintain that housing in a way that's dignified.

But we also need to be willing to utilize all options to pursue that ultimate route and not get locked into a particular ideological position.

And my sense is that we've moved away from that, that there's more willingness to be flexible and undertake considerations of the variety and diversity of options.

But we also need to be sure that we're expanding that diversity of options.

One of my pet issues is the severe weather shelter response and we didn't even get a chance to address that, but that's something I will be discussing with you further as we absolutely need to improve our severe weather response and hopefully looking at seasonal shelters.

And also, I appreciate the changes that you've made to the coordinated entry, but I think there's still discussions to be had about how to make that better.

We only have one point of access for people.

and that's problematic.

So anyway, that's all by way of saying I appreciate you being here today to take our tough questioning.

I appreciate that everybody who's doing this job is doing it from a place of good faith and a place of commitment, and that we're all here learning together how to address something that's very, very complex.

So again, thank you for your presence, your presentation, and the work that you do.

Thank you.

Okay, so that said, I think that concludes the March 27th meeting of the Housing and Human Services Committee.

The next meeting is scheduled for April 10th, 2024. The time is 1126, and we are adjourned.

Thank you, everyone.