The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2025-05-23
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Session summaryEditor-reviewed
On May 23, 2025, the Portland City Council and Multnomah County Commission held a joint work session on the Homeless Response System, opening with a quarterly progress update. Staff reported the system was on track to exceed shelter/housing placement goals, that permanent supportive housing retention exceeded targets, that a persistent disparity remained for Black, African American, and African residents in shelter access, and that the percentage of adults exiting shelter to housing had declined even as more people were served overall; figures describing these trends were presented with caveats about data limitations and were, in places, stated inconsistently. Discussion following the update covered inflow/outflow dynamics, rent assistance costs, racial disparities, day center capacity, and data reliability. The County Chair and the Mayor each presented their proposed budgets and priorities for shelter, housing placement, and outreach, citing funding gaps and requests for additional state support; specific dollar figures were also stated inconsistently across the two presentations. An extended discussion followed on coordination between city and county systems, definitions of outreach versus navigation, workforce development, housing production, and behavioral health needs. Closing segments covered a shelter availability tool, a Health Share case-conferencing initiative, and outreach coordination questions. Votes, if any, occurred and outcomes are recorded in the vote ledger.
AI-drafted from the session's auto-captions, reviewed by an editor — describes the discussion only; recorded votes live in the vote ledger. Captions contain errors.
0 Okay.
1 I'll ask jillian about it too, to get a little more info. Yeah. So this is something this is a different meaning than when she's sitting at or she's sitting at. She can ask, okay, I'm just we're starting. It's starting to really, I think, oh, god. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. For your laptop. Okay. Thank you. I'm good. Yeah.
2 Good afternoon. We are just getting everybody's technology figured out, and then we will get started. We're going to take just a minute more. Okay. Thank you all for being here today. I am going to call to order a joint work session of the Portland city council and Multnomah county commission on the homeless response system. We are happy to welcome our colleagues here today from across the river. Thank you so much for joining us. We have a few things on today's agenda. We are going to get a quick quarterly update. We have these meetings quarterly to provide updates to both bodies about how our joint system is operating. We'll have a few minutes about 2020 five minutes for questions and discussion about that update afterwards. Then we will have brief presentations from the mayor and the county chair about their proposed budgets and how they put together their budgets as it relates to our homelessness response system. Then we'll have time for about a 60 minute discussion. Colleagues, you asked at our last quarterly meeting for time to talk amongst ourselves, not just ask questions of presenters. I know that with what, 17 of us, an hour is not a lot, but that is about four minutes each. So we are going to have as much of a discussion as we can in that hour. And then at the end there are a few items that at our last meeting, folks asked for more information on, and we have updates from various groups, including a few of our county colleagues on some of those items that questions were asked on. And we will close out their chair. Do you have any opening remarks you'd like to make before we turn it over to our joint staff?
3 I, I.
4 Do not just just appreciate city council once again hosting us so that we all can come together. I'm looking forward to the conversation today and all of the updates on this issue. That's so important to all of us. So thank you.
5 Thank you very much. And colleagues, I know that there is a lot of urgency around the conversations we'll have today as we all move toward finalizing our budgets, and as we get more and more reports on the state of homeless services within our community. So I hope that we'll be able to have a meaningful conversation. I would like to turn it over now to jillian schnee, who runs our homeless response system, and jillian, your team for our quarterly report.
6 Thank you. Council president. I don't know my. Report. Commissioner moyer is ill, so she will not be attending virtually. So the her portion of the last section we will not be doing today. Right. Great.
7 Council president, chair. Mayor. Councilors. Commissioners. Good afternoon. Thank you especially to city hall for hosting us today. For the record, my name is Ryan deibert. I use he him pronouns and I'm the deputy director of the homelessness response system. I'm here to share highlights from our third quarterly report under the city and county iga that establishes the homelessness response system and our work to implement the homelessness response action plan. The iga and the plan both include several key performance indicators that were agreed to by both the city and the county to accountably and transparently track our shared progress, while also pointing us to places where we may need to shift strategies or course correct. You received the full quarterly report ahead of this meeting. We also published it to our website along with our updated dashboard. So I'll share just a few highlights and a little bit of additional information to help put that into context. But let me just start with the top lines. If we could go to the next slide. So first we're on track to exceed the goals for sheltering and housing more people, but knew by name less. Data from homelessness services department suggests that even with increased effort, more people are becoming homeless every month than we are able to support to return to housing next. When we're able to get people access to the care that they need and financial assistance that they need, they remain very successfully stable, stably housed. 83% of formerly chronically homeless people served in permanent supportive housing remain housed two years after they entered, which exceeds our goal of 75%. Third, we're generally meeting our goals to equitably shelter house populations who are overrepresented in the unsheltered population by race, ethnicity and age. But we continue to see disparity among black, african American and african people, particularly related to accessing shelter. We're going to talk about the work we've done to begin addressing that disparity. And then lastly, we continue to see a decrease in the percentage of adults exiting shelter to housing. We'll talk more about some of the challenges with the measure itself. And the homeless services department has done some detailed review of factors that influence this particular metric, and what it would take to close the gap. So they'll cover that in some detail. The report itself provides a lot more detail and context than I'm going to have time to cover today. So let me just move quickly through a few of the top pieces. So if we can go to the next slide and the next. So again, first we're on track to exceed our goal to increase the number of people sheltered or housed above pre trap levels. Over the last five quarters, we've cumulatively sheltered or housed more than 14,600 people. And we're very likely to exceed our goal to shelter or house 18,568 people by the end of 2025. Next slide. When you split that out by those who were sheltered versus those who are housed, you see roughly a third of the 14,600 total were housed, and roughly two thirds were served in shelter. Next slide. And while we're sheltering our housing, more people than ever before, and we're on track to exceed the goal, we're doing that work in some of the toughest economic conditions we've seen yet. New homeless services department data from the by name list shows that in all but one of the last 15 months, more people have become homeless than have left. So inflow people newly becoming homeless or returning to homelessness from housing is outpacing outflow. In other words, folks who are housed or otherwise left services for long periods of time. Next slide. So that means, again, from the homeless services dashboard, the number of people known to be experiencing homelessness has grown over time. As you'll discuss later in the agenda. All of this comes at a time when we're seeing declining revenue across all of our local and regional funding sources to meet these growing needs, so this makes the collaborative work across systems and governments that we support through the homelessness response system even more important. Okay, so that's measure one. We're exceeding our goal to expand shelter and housing, but it's not keeping up with increased inflow during the same period. I'll skip ahead to what's labeled in our plan as the fourth measure. If you go to the next slide and the next. So this this indicator looks at making sure people who are served in permanent supportive housing remain in that housing at least two years after they move in. This is long term, deeply affordable housing with wraparound services for people with long histories of homelessness and significant disabilities. The goal is 75% retention at two years and beyond. We've consistently achieved that, and we're currently at 83% permanent supportive housing works. If you'll go to the next slide, our next measure says yes, shelter and house more people, but make sure we're doing it in a way that improves rather than worsens some of the disparities that we see in who's experiencing unsheltered homelessness across time. Next slide. So for this measure, we look at the blue bar, the percentage of those who are sheltered or housed versus the gray bar, the percent of those known to be experiencing unsheltered homelessness before a trap. The goal is for the blue bar to equal or exceed the gray bar, as in our prior quarterly report. We're meeting or exceeding this goal for all populations except for those who are black, african American, or african. We sheltered in these five quarters. We sheltered or housed nearly 3000 people who are black, african American or african, representing about 20.2% of all people who are sheltered or housed during that time. But people who are black, african American or african were about 22.8% of people known to be experiencing unsheltered homelessness before a trap. So that 2.6 percentage point gap represents a difference of roughly 380 people who would have needed to be sheltered or housed in order to meet this goal. It's been a persistent disparity that we've noted in each of our quarterly reports, and will summarize some of the engagement and action that's underway to help address that. If you'll go to the next slide again, though, as with measure one, we started separating out those outcomes by who was sheltered versus who was housed. And in doing so, it's really clear that the disparity for black, african American and african people rests significantly in entries to shelter. So you've got housing placement on the right, well above our goal. And shelter entry in the middle well below. So our steering and oversight committee for the homelessness response system has been really clear, directing us to take action to shift these outcomes. Over the last several months, we've worked closely with the homeless services department to build off of prior engagements and then to lead new conversations with a range of providers and community leaders serving black, african American and african community members. Next slide. Those engagements surfaced a range of preliminary themes and recommendations. We include full detail in a memo that we distributed to you all prior to this session, but I'll briefly summarize the recommendations. So first, to address disparate treatment and experience of black african American african community members in shelter, there needs to be increased and shared accountability from providers across all shelters in our system, including training to increase anti-racist leadership and address anti-blackness and implicit bias, and to support hiring and retention of staff that better reflect the diversity of racialized identities that their shelter guests hold. Next, black and african-american community members who've had negative experiences in shelter have noted that expanded access to motel vouchers, coupled with housing placement resources through culturally specific service providers, will lead to improved sheltering and housing outcomes. Next slide. We also heard clearly that shelter only solutions would not meet community needs, and that better community level support for people who are doubled up or couch surfing would help to address black, african American and african people who would otherwise be more likely to become unsheltered. And we note that these recommendations are preliminary, since additional engagement system planning work is needed, particularly to explore expanded, culturally specific shelter options and other community supports that better serve families and single women. The homeless services department is actively pursuing several opportunities to act on these recommendations. In collaboration with culturally specific service providers, through realignment of existing contracts, and they're going to continue to work on those interventions into the next fiscal year as well. Next slide. The last of our key performance indicators is another one that we'll spend a little more time with today. So as the city and county both came to this agreement, both entities said yes, it's important to address unsheltered homelessness, but to do that we need to both expand shelter and may need to make sure that shelter is a place where people have meaningful options to return to housing and stability. That, ultimately is what addresses people's homelessness. And it makes it it makes much more efficient use of our shelter beds. As one person returns to housing, that shelter bed is freed up for another person experiencing unsheltered homelessness to come inside. Next slide. This goal, as it's structured in the plan, looks to increase the percentage of people exiting from adult shelter to housing. That's the blue bars from a pre baseline of 26%. That's the gray dotted line to a goal of 41% of adults exiting shelter to housing. That's the red dotted line for the full period that we've reported on this measure under wrap we've seen quarter over quarter decreases in this measure such that in the 12 months that ended in March of 2025, only 19% of people exiting adult shelter were recorded as exiting the housing. I want to be candid that this measure is not perfect. It has a number of challenges, most significantly, that it's based on self-report by people leaving shelter to the case managers at the shelter who are entering the data. The data are often incomplete, and the most common answer is exiting to an unknown destination. Also, if we go to the next slide, this measure is really sensitive both to changes in the number of people exiting to housing. So the numerator and the total number of people exiting shelters the denominator. So for instance, if you look on the left and the right side of this graph in the 12 months ending in March 2025, that's the dark blue section on the far right. More people exited shelter to housing than a year ago. That's the dark blue on the far left. But because we have more shelters online now, more people exited shelter during that same time. So the percentage of those exiting shelter to housing decreased, you see. So in other words, the numerator increased but the denominator increased even more. So the percentage went down. So if we continue to expand shelter, which is one of our goals, without also increasing housing placement resources for people in shelter, this measure is going to continue to go down. It's a reminder that both jurisdictions have already agreed to try to maintain a balanced approach that both gets people off the streets, but also creates those meaningful opportunities to return to housing and stability. Our our community advisory committee and implementation committee have tracked this metric really closely, pushed into a range of questions about what might be driving the shift under the direction from Multnomah county ceo chris neal, the homeless services department has done some detailed analysis around this, and we'll share some of the highlights from their findings now, as well as takes on how to shift this trend. As I turn it over to my colleagues from the joint office to talk through what they found. Just a note that our quarterly report also tracks the recommended actions that have been brought by our oversight bodies in each of our prior quarterly reports, along with status updates on each of those next several slides summarize those, but for time, I'm not going to cover them here, so I encourage you to review the summary in your slides or the report document. So if we move over to the start of the homeless service department slides, I'll turn it to anna and doc.
8 Good afternoon everyone. My name is anna plumb. I'm the deputy director for the homeless services department and I'm joined by my colleague, doc ramblings. We have about five minutes because we know you want time to discuss, to talk about some work doc has done to understand exits from shelter to permanent housing. We're going to go quickly, but we will follow up with more detailed information for you as well. Next slide please. So Ryan went over the data, the most recent data we have on exits from shelter to permanent housing. This information was presented to the implementation committee in early may. And that committee, along with chris neal, directed us to perform a rapid assessment of what's going on with exits from shelter to permanent housing. Looking at the major questions that you see here on the slide next slide, you can go to slide four, please. We just saw this data. So I'm skipping past it to the next slide. So Ryan also elevated that as doc did his analysis he found some challenges with the measure itself. I'm highlighting these because I know we're having conversations about kpis across the system. And as we think about what we want to measure, we want to make sure that what we're measuring is an accurate representation of our goals. So we're just highlighting some a little bit of a few issues with the measure. Ryan kind of hit on the major ones. It is also self-reported. And so there's some other things we might could do to improve that particular piece of information. I'm not going to speak more on that, but we will follow up with more information. And now I'm going to pass it to doc to tell you what he found.
9 Good afternoon. So despite any concerns that you have around the measure, we can confirm that exits from shelter to permanent housing have declined over the past 9 to 12 months. At the system level, we can see that fewer people total are exiting from shelter to housing, even though we have more beds. And an initial analysis of exits by shelter type indicated a more significant decline, specifically among congregate and alternative shelter types. Next slide please. So we heard from our shelter providers as well as our program team who monitors the performance of individual shelter programs. And we've learned we know that the primary issues impacting shelter program's ability to place people into permanent housing include a lack of housing placement options under resource shelters, reduced placement funding and challenges with using rapid rehousing and shelters, as well as some additional participant barriers. Next slide. So a lack of affordable housing continues to be one of the most significant barriers for our providers. Without subsidies, there's very few housing options for people or households that are below 30% of the median income. So as a result, our providers are supporting households for longer periods of time, which results in fewer households getting served. Overall, the relocation of rapid rehousing households may also be limiting the availability of new rapid rehousing placements. Some households who are being supported by rapid rehousing have to change units multiple times for a variety of reasons. Next slide. We also know that not all providers and programs have the same level of case management, placement, funding, and other housing related resources. Existing shelters need to be supported with appropriate funding in order to become more efficient at exiting people to permanent housing with the beds and units that they have. Case management and rental assistance are the two most vital supports needed in order to increase the flow out of shelter and permanent housing. We also know that limited client assistance funds have required some providers to take a targeted approach, where currently services are only available to a select portion of shelter guests. Next slide. Our program team also identified challenges created by limited clients client assistance funds, and this began as early as 2023 when COVID assistance began to wind down. The trend continued into 2024 as the demand for rental assistance increased, increased among our providers, and the second half of 2024 actually showed an improvement in placement out of shelter. But it became harder to move people into housing as vouchers from programs like Oregon all in and housing Multnomah now have dwindled. So now the amount of money being spent per household to prevent eviction is higher than it ever has been, which results in even fewer households being served with the limited resources. We know some shelter providers have already depleted all of their client client assistance funds already for this fiscal year, and I apologize for the typo on that slide. Next slide please. And so in shelters, rapid rehousing is the primary housing placement resource that is used. It's a very useful intervention. It allows for a person centered approach. But this only works well for a relatively small subset of the population. It's a short term time limited subsidy, and many people need longer term or even permanent subsidies. So the people who it might be the best fit for don't always get prioritized in shelter because there are other participants with higher or more immediate needs. We also know the current budgeted amount of rapid rehousing rental assistance is not enough to get and keep people housed. Some landlords might be less willing to rent to participants without a full year's worth of subsidy, and many households are facing eviction and or returning to homelessness when their rapid rehousing rental assistance runs out. Next slide. Last of all, there's also additional participant level barriers that continue to provide challenges in housing folks out of shelter. The chronically homeless population, which includes older adults and individuals with higher acuity, continues to create additional challenges as individuals from this population often require a higher level of support than shelter and rapid rehousing programs are designed to provide, and then other barriers include the added cost of treating mental health and substance use disorders in shelters, especially ones that are not designed for those types of treatment, a larger than usual property debt or back rent among participants, and then noticed reduced landlord willingness to negotiate those debts. And we also have seen some increased length of stay at some shelter programs, and a continued lack of engagement by some shelter participants.
10 And okay, next slide. Thank you doc. We did also look at I say by we I mean doc also looked at our spending by provider. This is something we do on the program side regularly. But we also asked to do another review to make sure that we are spending the funding that we do have allocated for placement out of shelter. There is a public dashboard on the county central budget office website. That dashboard lags behind our own internal tracking, and we do feel like we're pretty much on track to spend the money that we have allocated so far. One thing to look about when you're looking at spending is all of our contracts are on a reimbursement mechanism, so the organization will go spend the money, invoice us, and then we pay. So that invoicing and that spending can lag behind what's actually happening by up to a few months. It is true that some new funding that was budgeted this fiscal year has been slower to get out the door than we would have liked. There are two reasons for that. Number one, after that funding was put in the budget, we noticed we had a significant budget gap this year, so we paused to make sure we wouldn't put money out the door. That wasn't going to be sustainable into the future. Once that happened, once we realized we'd be able to support that moving forward, we did run into some procurement and some contracting things. This was new funding for new providers, and that takes a little bit longer to get out the door. So that has been slower than we would like, but we are working on it and it's moving forward. And then I do want to note that there is a program offer that is placement out of shelter into housing, but there are also some shelters that have that funding in their operating budgets, which is another parts of our budget. So looking at that one sort of area of funding is not the only place that we support folks moving from shelter into housing. Next slide please. And then I did want to put on the exits from shelter into context from April 2024 to this March, almost 4000 people were placed into housing across all of our programs. About 20% of those were folks coming from adult shelter. We mentioned that, you know, the self-reporting. I am exiting shelter into housing. That is a self-reported measure that we use. But we were able to look at those folks and see how many of them had a matching entry into a housing program in our data, and about 66% of them did. So that shows that folks are moving from shelters into housing via our programs. Some folks are moving into shelter via other options as well. Finally, next slide. We looked at what would it take to get to that 41% if we did not make any additional units? So if the denominator stayed the same, we would have required 1400 more people exiting from our shelters into permanent housing to get to that 41%. That was the original goal, and that's more than what we did in the last year overall. To look at what that would cost, we looked at what we're budgeting for rapid rehousing right now, and there's some big assumptions here, right? So we're assuming it's all rapid rehousing. And our most recent solicitation went up from the 9500 that got quoted to 13,000 a placement. We still think that's probably too low to be sustainable, but that's what we're able to budget in this moment at the cost of 13,000, a household for 1400 placements, that's about $18 million. If you if you factor in a higher cost per household, or the fact that some of those households would likely use permanent supportive housing, which is more expensive, that cost is going to go up. So that gives you a range of what it might cost to do all those additional placements. Okay. That was our very fast presentation and we will follow up with more detail.
11 Thank you all. I appreciate the speed. So we have time for some conversation colleagues. We have about 20 or 25 minutes to get any questions about the presentation answered. And we'll have time for more discussion later in our time together. So I would ask that if you have councilor Colleagues, we can't really use the hand-raising system because we don't have our county colleagues online there, I believe. But if you have a question for our staff who presented. Why don't we go around the dais just so everybody has a chance? We'll start over in district one. And if you don't have a question, feel free to pass. Let's keep it to one question each so that we have time to get to. District. District four. District one for the county. Mr. Mayor, do you have any questions before we go to our district one county. City colleagues.
12 Slide 36. It states that at least 20% of placements coming from adult shelter. Where are the other 80% coming from that are going into.
13 Into housing.
14 Permanent housing. Yeah.
15 So we have lots of other housing programs. We have outreach workers who are out in the field meeting folks and building that relationship and housing them directly from the street. That's one major example. We have lots of different housing programs. Some of them are shelter focused, some of them are not. We also have in-reach programs where folks are meeting people, and that may or may not be documented as an exit from a shelter. So that's one of the challenges with the measure, is that you they have to sort of tell the shelter that they're going into housing as they exit number one, and there are lots of other work and support. Someone might be staying in a shelter but get housed via outreach relationship that they have. So we have many housing programs that are not shelter focused.
16 Thank you.
17 Councilor Avalos.
18 Thank you so much. I think my general question is I'm curious how we are. Let me back up. People of color in particular, and as we are seeing in the data, are overly represented in our homeless population. But I'm not seeing an equal, in my opinion, effort to really advance some of the more culturally responsive work. I'm not seeing where our partnerships are possibly growing with partners that could speak to the needs of communities of color. So I'm curious how that's showing up in this report and in your work.
19 Sure. I can take it. That's a great point. And we actually do have a lot. We are doing a lot of work there. Both hts and hsd work together on the engagement that you received a memo about that gave us some recommendations of how we might pivot our services to be more culturally responsive, and we're actually in the process of talking through some very real time ways. We might change up some some more established services to make them more culturally responsive in partnership with our culturally specific providers.
20 My comment would just be, I'd like to see those partnerships grow. I'd like to see more culturally responsive groups be represented in our providers. Thank you.
21 Councilor Dunphy.
22 Thank you. Could you please define for me a little bit more what exit shelter means when we're talking about this? Does this mean somebody who is done for the night and doesn't come back the next day? Or is that somebody who has stayed their whole amount of limitation? Or I guess, how are we defining exit shelter?
23 That's a good question. And it's one of the reasons it's kind of hard to compare across a specific provider to the system wide total. When we're looking at system wide totals, we are looking at, okay, so this person had a series of exits over time. We're going to where's the most recent one that is the most the one that we know is sort of effective. So someone might have gone in and out of shelter and then they exit to housing. That would be the one that we would highlight. When you're looking at a specific provider, it can vary. If it's a nightly shelter, they're looking at it every night. There are other shelters that have a longer term stay. And so if that person exits from that longer term stay, that's where that's going to be.
24 Just just to clarify, though, for the purposes of the data we're looking at here, when somebody exits to housing, that's a one time event. But exiting shelter could be an every night event. Like ostensibly if somebody is staying for a year in shelter overnight, they have 365 exits of shelter. Is that and that sort of shows in this data.
25 But those would be if it were that person that exited 365 times, there would be that in our data that would represent one person. So it wouldn't it wouldn't be 365 exits as part of the numerator. It would be that one person exiting.
26 But are we able to say if like if someone exited shelter and then went to a different shelter right now, can we say that that person is still in that a category, not the b category? Yep. Okay. Thank you.
27 Counselor Smith.
28 Thank you, madam president. Thank you for the presentation I appreciate it. I noticed in the I can't remember the slide where africans and african Americans were sheltered. There was 20% and 24%. Is there where a way for you to tell me in individual people how many that 20 and 24% represents?
29 Yes, definitely. I'm not going to try to do the math right right here. But I can get you those those specific figures.
30 Yeah, I'm very simple. I asked the same question every time. Thank you.
31 No, no questions at this time. Thank you.
32 No questions.
33 Okay.
34 Counselor. Canal.
35 Thanks. Yeah. You mentioned that inflow was limited to like, the definition was the people who are becoming homeless in the metro area for the first time in the documentation. So that that distinguishes from people who might be moving here who are already houseless. Right. And so I wanted to ask if you could speak to some of the reasons for that, and in particular, if you could comment on slide 34, reduced landlord willingness to negotiate. And if there is a pattern of different behavior you've been noticing in landlords over the course of the life of this agreement, in a general sense.
36 So that was based on our docs, sort of interviews and analysis of reviews with sorry providers and program managers. We can follow up with more detail. I don't know, off the top of my head, but we can definitely follow up with that.
37 Okay, could you confirm that my understanding of your definition of inflow is correct or not?
38 So the inflow is the inflow would be inflow into our data system, which is the Multnomah county data system. And so when somebody is new to our system, we define it in three different ways. But the major one is we have not seen them in the data system before. We don't necessarily know if they are new to the region or newly homeless or both. So it could be someone who's lived here their whole life and became homeless. It could be someone who's lived here for their whole life, has been homeless for a year, and is just now accessing our system. Or it could be someone who moved here homeless. We wouldn't necessarily know all of that from our inflow data.
39 Thank you.
40 Councilor Ryan.
41 Yes, thank you, madam president. First of all, I want to say not that the data is pleasing, but we have it. So thank you for the inflow and outflow data. I think I needed to start with that since I've been asking for it for a while. Also is the question I have after that is after the comment is criteria for exits from housing or from shelter into housing? Is there a criteria that we look at when someone's exiting a shelter to meet our requirement, if you will, to be put into permanent housing? I know when we were visioning on the safe rest villages, it was always about helping them build their agency so we could see that they would have a better result when they're in permanent housing, hooked into behavioral health services, for example, job workforce, to have those type of criteria that we're waiting.
42 Are you asking about data entry criteria or criteria of like how many exits folks are.
43 Asking about criteria that we would of course, measure. But we looked at data that said that if someone was in behavioral health services and they were active in it, and if they were active in the workforce, the likelihood of them being housed three years later would go way up. So that's the through line I'm looking for.
44 So.
45 Oh, clarifying question, counselor Ryan, are you asking if during an exit interview from a shelter, how deep does that interview go when it comes to the services?
46 No, I would I would think that the people overseeing the shelter would have a case management on everyone there, and they would know those in that village, for example, that are actively pursuing behavioral health work, are actively engaged in a job. And those two factors would indicate they would be probably more successful in permanent housing for a three year period.
47 So the way I would answer that is, yes, the shelters that have that case management resource or have an in-reach resource are doing that kind of work. Work with folks to say, hey, you feel like it's probably like, let's start looking for housing for you, right? They are doing that. Our contracts with shelters do also have goals around how many folks will exit from that shelter to housing. We do not currently have sort of the kind of indicator that I think you're talking about, but that's handled on the case manager level, and that's what the providers are tracking as a part of their work.
48 And I hope that we continue to pursue that, because that would give us metrics that would help us understand the roi on our investments. Okay, I'll stop there. Thanks.
49 Commissioner singleton.
50 Thank you. Thank you all for the presentation. I actually have a question for skyler. Could you talk a little bit about some of what we heard from you and your colleagues around the need for about exits from shelter, from the city perspective?
51 Yeah, absolutely. Thanks. Commissioner. Skyler, director, Portland solutions for city of Portland. Good to see you all. So I think anna touched on a little bit of this year's kind of conundrum, but I think we've been in an effort for the last few years to integrate our different systems. We've been adding a lot of shelter and some of the previous kind of programs that have been in place for a long time at the county for housing placement did not apply to the providers or the programs necessarily, that we were managing at the city or in partnership with the county. So I think we've been trying to figure out what that means to get as many people from shelter into housing as possible. A few of those programs were the housing Multnomah now program, the Oregon all in that was mentioned. So state and county funded kind of one time programs to really boost those numbers and get folks into housing. One of the challenges, I will say, from a programmatic point of view, is the lack of consistency of those programs and then an integration of all the service providers into a consistent system of care. For example, I think the money that was allocated last summer, like anna mentioned, we've been a little frustrated with how long that has taken to come to fruition this year. And I think a lot of the numbers do speak to that. We're really excited to partner in the next couple of months to get as many people housed as possible with that money that's coming in to our kind of city providers. So I hope that helps.
52 Yes. Thank you.
53 Councilor Koyama Lane.
54 Thank you so much. Thank you so much for being here. This is great. I'm wondering if someone can share with us what homelessness response looks like within Multnomah county, but outside the city of Portland, I know Portland is about 75% of the population of the county, but for example, what is the response look like in, say, Gresham or other cities that are within Multnomah county, but not Portland?
55 I can take that and people can add so Gresham Multnomah county funds Gresham to have their own homelessness response team. So we send the city of Gresham next year. It's about $1 million, which they use for their own housing team. They have staff and rent assistance dollars in the three east county cities. We have some funding set aside for a specific outreach team that is sort of geared towards serving those three cities. That is relatively new and it's ramping up now. So those are the three. Those are the two major ways that we serve those those jurisdictions.
56 Councilor Morillo.
57 Thank you, madam president. Thank you so much for this presentation. This was really helpful. And it's just good to get this data. I wanted to ask if we wanted to access aggregate data on our unhoused population. Is that publicly available and if so, where do we find it? So for example, if a constituent reaches out to our office to inquire about where most of our unhoused population comes from, where do we find and access that information?
58 We have a really fancy public dashboard that you can access that has the totals by month. We don't release the like by name data, of course, but if you have other questions, we'd be happy to work with you to get those answered. But a lot of the data is available on our public dashboard.
59 Awesome. Thank you.
60 Councilor Novick.
61 Questions.
62 Commissioner edwards.
63 So this is a general question for anybody who would like to answer it. Now that we have the dashboard and the name data, now that it's available, and we can see that we're not making net progress on reducing the number of homeless, is now the time to reconsider our homeless response action plan goals and the community sheltering plan goals so that we have goals and strategies that get us to a changing the trend line of reducing the net number of homeless.
64 In a word, yes. And we've started that. We've been thinking about it for a while now that we have a year under our belt and we've started our just very initial engagement earlier this week. But yes, we are going to reorganize the plan and revisit all the action items and make the work easier to follow, quite frankly, for everyone. We are also going to refine our existing key performance indicators and add some new ones. The refinement of measure three is a really good example. And then third, we're also going to revisit the community sheltering strategy. The budget requires it or fiscal outlook requires that we revisit it and also our data and our outcomes. Now that we have better data to do that analysis, it will absolutely be revisited. And so once we get through this budget cycle, the pieces around the kpis and the sheltering strategy will start in earnest so that we have that information for you before you start your fiscal year 27 budget process officially with the December forecast. So let's call it a December 1st deadline.
65 Just as a follow up. Right ahead, since the commission and the previous council approved the homeless response action plan and the iga, I'm assuming it would the reworked plan would come back to the council and the commission.
66 I don't see why not. There's a legal piece to that question that I'm going to get clarification for, but I don't see why not. Yeah.
67 For asking the question. That's a question that a few of us have wondered about as well. Councilor Clark.
68 Thank you, madam chair. I guess I just want to make a comment and maybe it's building off of commissioner Edwards, but I think I'm having an existential moment that just the astounding amount of money that's being spent here, and with the trend line going down and I'm, I guess I'm just really struggling with that, you know, the cost per homeless person. And, and I'm really interested in reworking the goals and seeing how we can be more effective because it's astounding. And I don't think that in the long run, we're going to be able to afford this. It means that we're going to start eating other programs. And that's really bothering me. I'm just had to express that existential moment, and I'm hoping that we're going to talk later in the agenda about the providers, the number of providers and the outreach and how it's coordinated. So thank you.
69 Councilor Green.
70 Thank you, madam president, and thank you for coming today. I do have a question and I don't I was asked a question this morning at a community coffee from a constituent, and I didn't know how to answer the question. So I'll ask you guys and hopefully you can point me in the right direction. This person lives in the pearl district in one of these buildings that I think bridge housing manages, which I believe is a section 42 property. And as the slide that was showing the shortage of affordable housing for the exits, the question was posed to me was, well, we've got a number of vacant units in that building by their anecdotes, and you've also got some residents who earning 100% of the area median income, living in some of those properties. And that's sort of creating a shortage of that 60% and below. So I'm just wondering, is part of your purview, looking at those properties as part of the broader strategy? And how do we how do we ensure that we've got the right data and we're tracking on whether those whether we're losing a stock of affordable housing, I guess is my question. Thanks.
71 Type of building.
72 Yeah.
73 Either way.
74 Well I'm sorry clarifying question is this a is this a 0 to 60 affordable housing building development okay okay. Did you want I.
75 Yeah I think we also have danny oliveras here. I would say what's actually really interesting. Councilor we had a meeting yesterday about this. I think it's going to be a collaborative approach with the Portland housing bureau. We've had a few meetings with jillian just on what the mayor's called a housing strike team. I think he'll speak to it a little bit later, actually, but we're seeing a deep need across the city, in the county. I've spoken to it a couple times at different meetings, but we're hearing from a lot of affordable housing providers something very similar, and we're trying to address it from a holistic approach. So I think we're hearing livability challenges. We're hearing income challenges, folks just who cannot afford even those units. And so I think trying to solve for all those issues as well as some wraparound services, retention services, mental health services that are really desperately needed, and we just don't have sufficient resources to be able to wrap folks around with everything they need. So we need to problem solve. We need to figure out some creative approach, and we need to try to get people into those units as fast as possible.
76 Thank you. Skye, I appreciate this. Housing strike force. Task force. I think the thing that I and I don't know about the veracity of this claim, so I'm just airing this here. But what was most alarming was that there was actually some vacancies in some of these properties. At the same time, people are we don't have a way to place them. So I look for that conversation and then if we have a chance to discuss, I would really like to link this conversation back to the social housing resolution that we passed earlier this year. And think about a regional or collaborative approach, because this is a regional problem. Thanks.
77 Councilor Zimmerman.
78 Thanks. I think my question is similarly related to councilors Clark and Green. I've heard directly from a person, a cdc executive director, that they had 100 vacant units. And so, of course, that is concerning. And it was impressed upon me that that is likely a common story amongst many of them. It gets to my I'm trying to understand. I feel like I've always understood the emergency rent assistance, family and individual. They hit a turbulent moment and we want to do everything we can to avoid eviction. Right? Because of there's just not enough money in the checking account. I think every good American understands that. I'm I'm struggling with how we've increased our rent assistance dollars in the community over the last ten years. I'm curious if we are just increasing the amount to cover a similar amount of people, because rent has just gotten more expensive, so we have to put more dollars there to cover the same. I'm just going to use the word the same 100 people that cost more. Or are we now expanding to include larger and larger percentages of the population whose rent is now just paid or partially paid by government, and how much rent on average, when we use the term exit a shelter or is placed in housing about how much on average of a person's rent do we pay if they're leaving one of our programs or going into housing? I'm trying to get an understanding for that.
79 So the percentage will differ depending on the person's situation. But our programs have sort of a reasonable rent threshold. So there are like the level of rent that is that a program is able to pay is defined by a threshold within the program. And we can I can follow up with more detail on that.
80 Okay. Yeah.
81 I think sorry, counselor, to interrupt you, but yes, the need has only grown up, gone up in terms of the rent because rents have gone up and also the retention services in particular. And we are learning. I think anna will correct me here, but it's really a year minimum of retention support that these individuals need to be successful at a bare minimum. I think in we've talked about this in the housing strike team. Wouldn't it be great to test out less than that? But I think we have enough data to know a year is the minimum mark.
82 So along that, can I ask just a clarifying question, is a person who gets that kind of support? And that makes a lot of sense in my head for some people who we've all experienced very sick dealing with, with very serious situations of addiction, working through quote unquote, like some significant problems, is that just what we're talking about, or are we talking about other folks who are in lines of work that is never going to yes, to raise enough funds to live comfortably in this community. And I think those get pulled together in ways that can be difficult. You're saying both. Yeah. Okay.
83 Shelter providers will even tell you that ssd and ssi used to be fine for an apartment here, no more. So we have older individuals stuck in shelter because of that. Because of that, it just doesn't go far enough.
84 Can I if I can jump in? Counselor Zimmerman I think my name is Dan field. I'm the director of homeless services department. I think you're asking a really essential and foundational question. What's the purpose of rent assistance? There was some good reporting in the Oregonian recently. We've seen data from econorthwest that talk about the inability of people who are working, who may be on disability to sustain themselves independently. So is the purpose of our work together to give them permanent rent support for the rest of their lives until something else changes? Or is it to provide a year bridge and then they're back to their own devices, in which case they may go back onto the homeless carousel? And I think as a community, we have to answer that, because that going back to councilor Clark, that speaks to the depth of resources that we have and whether or not we'd be able to bring those resources to house everybody who falls into that category. It's not just a temporary blip, it's a permanent situation or semi-permanent situation.
85 I also think it speaks to the challenges of the info that Ryan highlighted. We have more people becoming homeless every day, and a lot of those folks, it's due their income is just not high enough to pay for their rent. And how, you know, that's a that is a problem that is larger than the people in this room. And so how do we work together on that larger problem while also doing what we're tasked to do?
86 Thank you.
87 Councilor chair, do you have a question?
88 Yes. Thank you, council president. So I appreciate all this. I just want to touch on the fact that on multiple slides you talked about and it was mentioned that, you know, the current rates that we have to pay for some of these things to build on some of these questions is just not sufficient. So I'm going to, you know, this is something that I've raised before, but I'm just going to continue to press on, you know, in order for us to make the best decisions we have to do about our budgets and about what we want to see, we really need to know what is what is sufficient, what is adequate to successfully move people from the street or from shelter into housing, and what does that look like? So I'm just going to continue to press, like having that based on the different situations that might person might be coming in, what resources, what type of shelter they're coming from. All of that is going to be really key. So that's that's what I'm looking to see as we move into this next year and this next part of work that you were talking about, jillian, about the 2.0, you know, is really understanding that. So as we're building out our system, we understand what what does that resourcing that system look like.
89 I saw a place in the slides where we identified a problem and a solution, but we didn't talk about whether we're funding that solution. When you talked about homelessness within african, african American and black communities, you identified that one of the things that was needed was more opportunities to stay, not in shelters, but in hotels. And I wasn't sure if that meant hotels where the county purchases a hotel to use as a shelter, or if that meant vouchers for other types of hotels. But I'm wondering if we are increasing the dollars available for that type of work, even in this difficult budget, because we've identified a gap in the system and a solution, or if we are continuing to allow that to be a gap in the system.
90 We're phoning a friend.
91 Fantastic.
92 Hi, my name is emily nelson. For the record, I use she and her pronouns. I'm the equity manager at the homeless services department. I appreciate this question. We showed some slides about the engagement that was done around this exact issue, and trying to get some recommendations from our culturally specific providers and community members. We also are currently in receipt of two very well timed proposals from two of our culturally specific providers who serve those communities to repurpose some of their dollars that were going towards shelter that wasn't as culturally responsive towards motel vouchers, which are the more culturally responsive recommendation from those engagements.
93 So we are addressing this gap and trying to solve this problem in the next budget.
94 Absolutely, yes.
95 Thank you.
96 Colleagues, I'd like to.
97 Turn turn us over now to the chair and the mayor to just spend a few minutes each talking about how they set their budget as it relates to homeless services, and then we'll have time for conversation about those budgets, about our priorities, about places where we are doing complementary work, places where perhaps there are gaps still in the system. So, chair peterson, would you like to start us off with this next section?
98 Yes. Thank you. So if we can bring up the slides. All right. Great. Thank you. And just go to the next slide. And what I'm going to do is just go as briefly as possible through these. We had three hours on homeless services department last week. I know you guys have gone through budget lots and lots of budget meetings. So just going through the highlights of this. So this slide really talks about the guiding principles that I used in the homeless services department. Used as I was creating my budget, really making sure that the core services and the overall system for our homeless services were maintained even in a time of limited, constrained resources. So looking at shelter, housing and core services, no one lose would lose their housing due to a cut in our budget and making sure that we are meeting the goals of the community sheltering strategy and housing placement being essential to ending people's homeless permanently. So those are the things that we looked at, which for me relates into keeping people housed, sustaining the shelter beds that we have developed and continuing to invest in moving people into housing. In addition to this guidance to our homeless services department, I asked all of the county departments to lay out how their funding and programs support the homeless response action plan. Can we go to the next slide? So you heard in some depth today in our last presentation about the current performance relative to these goals across the city, across the county and our broad set of partners. As I created my budget and looked at our ability to continue to make progress in partnership with the city and across all the departments on these measures. But I will say that we know that we need to, that the need continues to increase. We saw those data. We have to continue to work with our colleagues at the city and across our health, housing and employment sectors to expand our goals to meet the needs. As you look at where my budget invests to address these goals, you'll see that while the homeless service department is a critical partner in achieving these goals, they are not alone and they can't be alone in this. In. In addition to health share of Oregon and the city of Portland, other county departments work closely with our homeless response system to provide a one county approach to supporting people in very vulnerable situations. I appreciate the honesty that the homeless response system staff provides with the reports that we receive, so we really can track how we're doing. I also really appreciate their extraordinary work with our partners to implement the goals and the outcomes, and the standards and expectations we're setting with them. Can we go to the next slide, please? So this is the overall investment that we're seeing in the main sources of funding for our homeless services response. In total there's $354 million going to reducing homelessness through shelter, housing and services. That includes specialized services that are offered through the health department, the department of community justice, the department of county human services. As examples. It also includes growing a shelter system that we are working with the city of Portland to expand to 362 publicly funded beds every night, and an overall system that prevents people from falling into homelessness and moves hundreds of more each month into their own homes. This includes helping more than 2600 additional people move out of housing. Excuse me? Move out of homelessness into housing and helping nearly 6000 households remain in housing. Avoid becoming homeless and offering just shy of 10,000 people access to a shelter bed. Can we go to the next slide, please? Actually let's see. Yes. So? So. Sorry. Go back. One more slide. Thank you. Yeah. So this is where you can see how different divisions are funded in my fy 26 proposed budgets. The primary shelter the primary divisions are housing placement and retention. So this includes some outreach and inreach to shelters to place people into housing. Some of some of those work that we're talking about, how do we have more positive outflows and exits from shelter? Safety on and off the streets is primary shelters, and it also includes outreach to ensure folks who are outside have their basic needs met. And then supportive. Housing is deeply affordable housing, with adequate service packages to house those who have been homeless, often for long periods of times, and have complex needs that need to be met. You can also see the results of these investments. All of these are important and significant to reducing homelessness in our community. For housing, it isn't just enough to provide placement services. People need the support to sustain their housing so they can improve their health and increase their incomes. To go from surviving to thriving. I also want to highlight that in addition to making sure no one became homeless due to budget cuts, we were able to maintain funding for seven day centers. That's nine centers total. Can we go to the next slide? This is much of the $30 million from the supportive housing services measure, dollars that currently proposed to other departments. One advantage we have of working with other departments is that a diversity of focused populations will be served. Those who have behavioral health needs, families, youth, those with intellectual and developmental disabilities, seniors, survivors of domestic violence and sex trafficking. It's important to note, as well, that housing also includes supportive services and that outreach and some day services also connect people into housing. So there's not always the cleanest lines because some of this work is definitely overlapping. Can we go to the next slide. So working on the homeless service department's budget and using our supportive housing service resources to other departments in a year was very difficult for both hsd as well as my office. Since the announcement of the gap that we had. We made sure that focus on I made sure that we were that I was really prioritizing homeless services in the budget that I was building. So focusing on on building a budget that allocates general fund dollars to fill some of the gap. I moved 16 million, 16.7 million in general fund dollars from other departments throughout the county because homeless shelters, services and housing are priority for me, we know it's a priority for our community. Even so, that that still leaves a $32.3 million gap. This is much better than the 25% gap. Nonetheless, we don't have enough resources right now to meet the needs in our current budget. Meaning, you know, we just don't have the resources that sustains the level of programs and services we currently have in action. So as we look for the future, some of the funding that we're using in adding back is one time only. And if we can't replace that with ongoing revenue, we are going to face additional cuts in fy 27. So I want to make sure that that's noted as we think about the investments we're making this year and what that means as we look at our our outgoing years. But this provides some of those, some of those funds that were added back using the general fund dollars in the county. Can you go ahead and go to the next slide, please? So we've also been working really closely with the city of Portland, the governor's office and state legislative leaders to advocate for increased state funding to more closely align with the prevalence of people experiencing homelessness. We have a joint city and county supplemental funding request of $25 million that is supported by the governor, to address some of the local funding gaps that we have. That funding will help the county not lose ground on the crisis. The state's most recent revenue forecast that the legislature will use to set the 2527 biennial budget was down from the December forecast, which means the legislature is going to have limited resources to invest, just like all of us. I'm continuing to make a strong case for an investment in our homeless services. I know the mayor is as well, because we all know that if the state is going to make progress on oregon's homelessness crisis, they have to make a strong investment in Portland and Multnomah county. If we go to the next slide, this just goes into some of the details of, at least on the county side of the ask to the legislature where we would plug in those dollars. So that's in the column of the governor's as. My last slide is the next slide. Thank you. So I wanted to end on this graph because this is from metro government's own auditor. That shows how inequitable the funding across the region is, based on the number of people experiencing chronic homelessness. We should continue to work in partnership with metro and our other counties to participate in in regional approaches. That's clear. However, it's also clear that we are not getting the resources we need from the measure to dramatically reduce homelessness in our community. If Multnomah county isn't able to solve homelessness at the city of Portland isn't able to solve homelessness, then the region fails on this issue. The entire state fails on this issue. It is not just a question of fairness. It's imperative that we receive the resources that we know we need to make an impact on a complex problem that our community wants to see changed. So, councilor Clark, the question that you had about resources is very important. One, and this slide provides some perspective on the proportion of funding that we receive compared to our neighbors and the sheer number of people that we are trying to serve. So that concludes my slides. After we hear from the mayor on his proposed budget. I'm looking forward to hearing from all of you on the shared plan that we need to build together to decrease the number of people experiencing homelessness in Portland and Multnomah county and making homelessness rare, brief, and non-recurring. This is a conversation that we need to delve into very soon, like right after we pass our budgets so that we can start that hep 2.0 conversation, the community sheltering strategy revisions work that jillian spoke about earlier, and that we can go into our next year's budget process with agreement on our plans, our priorities, and next steps as we face continued constraints in the resources we have to address this issue and the work that is needed in areas like housing production and behavioral health supports and other supports that have a huge bearing on this issue that might be outside of our, you know, our county budget itself. So thank you so much.
99 Thank you. Chair.
100 Mr. Mayor, do you have a presentation for us as well.
101 Madam president? Madam chair, commission. Council colleagues, thank you very much for this opportunity. We talked about budgets and how we framed it. And for this past four months, what I would frame in all of our budget discussions was a clear vision, and we would throw most decisions against these key words community, health and safety. And if it didn't meet that measure, it was unfortunately on our cut list. If it met the measure, it was something we would advance. And we really framed all of our decisions based on that. I've had the great pleasure and honor to present my plan to not only our city council that has gathered here today, but also our county commissioners. In addition to Oregon metro and also our state legislature. Regarding budgets on your desk, the budgets that we have for the particular areas that we had to fund to continue our existing system and grow it. So I don't want to labor that certainly ready to ask questions if you have those. What I want to do is provide an update on where we're at as our city goes next slide. Here's the number of people our shelter system is serving per year right now. We have not grown it since 2017. Next slide. Thank you. Meanwhile, we've seen a 330% rise in unsheltered homelessness since 2017. Next slide. This graph is to note that we have not met this moment. This is a shelter capacity issue, but this is also an engagement issue. We're not getting people through the system and to their families treatment or permanent housing. When this began in 2017, our jurisdictional partnership and our funding and spend was about 440 million. Today in fiscal 25, portland's funding combined with counties funding is $400 million, ten x, and all we've seen is additional suffering and dying on our streets. Next slide. More than that in Portland, I'm happy to say that we've made progress on homicides. To half of what it was in this last 12 months. Compliments to our unarmed and armed armed responses and our community writ large. Unfortunately, this reduction has not been felt amongst our unsheltered, the homeless, especially the unsheltered, represent nearly half of our gun violence victims. It's the only category that has not fallen so far as homicides. When people are left in insecure, vulnerable situations, this is the result. Next slide. Unsheltered homelessness is a crisis that requires action. I'm standing up safe and comfortable. Overnight shelters and day spaces. It sets the stage for engagement, for reunification, treatment, healing and housing. We have an incident command meeting that we meet once a week, and we set up our own core values for it, and we place every decision upon that core value. It is quality, it is safety, it is sustainability. And the fourth and most important is action. We don't talk about what we're going to do in three years or five years. It's what we're going to do in a week, in three weeks, and in four weeks. We also must increase housing with initiatives like sdc waivers, which you and your colleagues will be discussing shortly. We have a housing strike team that we've set up, and again, it's another incident command meeting once a week where we have stakeholders that are focused on addressing bottlenecks, delays and gaps immediately, and we focus on blocking and tackling to let the service providers do what they do best. And that's house our vulnerable. And then in addition, we're working with a permitting strike team again to overall focus on creating additional resources onto the street. Next slide. Our goal and I've talked to all of you and you've read it over and you've heard me say it again and again and again. Our job is to intervene, to reduce the suffering on our street and engage those that are on the street to help out for a better tomorrow. Yes, we're focusing on sheltering. I do want to compliment our commissioner Colleagues. Last week, the announcement of reducing tent and tarp distribution is a very meaningful change, and I'm very grateful to each and every one of you for that commitment to our community. Sheltering is replacing the missing link. It's not part of the. Health and human services goals that the county has to focus on. Those are the pillars that we rely on our county partners to do. But portland's focus and pillars are public safety, our infrastructure. And right away, that missing link is a public safety focused item. So we don't have people that are going to die tonight. We're going to continue to work and help those that are most acute into life saving shelter and to housing. We're building relationships. Oregon metro has been a great partner. The state legislature is a great partner. The governor is with us, the chair. The commissioners are all with us. And that's how we're going to really address this. But we're going to address it immediately. And we're creating new housing options and level. What came out of a housing or a multifamily workgroup and task force, and then bandied about at our housing strike team was sdc waivers with the governor's support. With your support, we acted fast and we made an announcement. It's a 5000 new homes challenge. However, we have to do it within three years. It has to be over. In three years. We have been noted. The negative today we actually have apartments getting ready to go, but they're waiting for pass the ordinance to pass. That's a consequence we didn't expect. It's also a challenge that I provide to our councilors that they're ready to go. And the bottleneck is there. I've been meeting with commissioner Singleton. It's been my Tuesday night beer every two weeks, and we find out other housing options. There are 800 adult foster care beds that are open now. And she and I have been challenging our teams. Why? To your point, councilor Green. Why? And so let's find the bottleneck, use our political clout and let those individuals open and get those beds filled. Right now, it's not a shelter strategy. It's a continuum strategy that we have to be focused on. And we are. Next slide. And I really want to stress this. And I've said it often. And to all of you I might be pushing hard. I believe it's time we shake things up. But I'm willing to work with. And I have been working with every single one of you on the county side, on the city side, that we must do this work together, and we must do it at this dais that includes all of the stakeholders I mentioned. There are 223 days left until December 1st, and I mentioned this at our homeless response meeting every time until December 31st. And that's the date that county has promised to deliver 1000 new shelter beds, which they are on the way to deliver. There are 193 days left until December 1st. That is the date I mentioned in all of my leadership meetings in our incident command meeting. Sky says it for me now. It is a date that's circled is a date that we cannot fail our community, and we're going to add 1500 beds or to the level that we need to care for our citizens, because we don't want to go through another winter with suffering and dying and hypothermia. On the front page of our papers, we must act together and we must do this immediately. And I'll end this with you. In our incident command meetings, we'll invite practiced experts from around the world. In three weeks ago, we were fortunate to have mayor landrieu from new orleans, the former mayor, who was most recently president biden's chief white house advisor. And we talked to him about there's 193 days. And he said, absolutely, you must set unrealistic, unrealistic, unrealistic expectations for your team or you'll never get out of the gate. But then he went on to say, but then you must be relentless in pursuit of that. Mayor landrieu after katrina and seven years later had 8000 people living unsheltered in new orleans. And two years later, after he challenged his homeless service providers and his city, he had 1000. I want to challenge each and every one of you. We can. We must we will. Thank you.
102 Thank you, mr. Mayor.
103 So, colleagues, we have just over an hour to have some discussion. And we've heard from the chair and the mayor what some of their visions were as they put together their budgets. We've all seen both of those budgets. And we heard from some of our colleagues during our earlier questions, concerns about whether we have the right vision and the same vision and the right investments to reach that vision. So we had requests last time to not just go around the dais, but to engage in actual discussion. And 17 peopl, a little over an hour, it's about four minutes each. It's not a lot of time to discuss, but I'd like to give it a try and give us an opportunity to talk about these investments and the framing that we all want to see, the goals that we all want to meet and how we get there, either through the final budgets that are passed this year or our work as we move forward and see an updated plan from the system through the wrap that we will all, it sounds like, have an opportunity to take a look at later this year, I'd ask my chair of homelessness and housing to kick us off with any thoughts you'd like to say? I didn't warn her about this, I apologize, and because we don't have the hand raise function for everybody. If you'd like to make a comment, raise your hand. I'll nod once I see your hand up, and we'll just try to do this as gracefully as we can with a lot of people up here.
104 Thank you. You didn't warn me, but I stay ready.
105 So thanks. I thought.
106 You might be ready.
107 With thoughts.
108 Thank you. I guess what I'll just say is, at the last time we had this joint meeting I talked about, I introduced the concept of what I have been spearheading with my committee on uniting the city strategy and just making sure that we are talking as policymakers about where we're headed and what we want to see in the way that the city shows up in partnership. So those discussions have continued to move. In my committee meeting this coming Tuesday, we're going to be introducing the resolution, the one housing plan resolution, to actually set the framing of the work. I've been really grateful to work with many, many leaders across the city who are, again, understanding the call for alignment, especially in this new form of government. And yeah, and of course, being a partner with the mayor's side of house and the council side of house. So I'm hoping that by completing that process, we will be able to show up in these meetings in a way that has some more information, some more data, some more north star, and overall just can really get our house in order so that we can be a better partner. So that's my intention. That's what I'm trying to lead as a committee. I'm really grateful to my committee members who are working in lots of different ways to bring things to the table. So that's what we're focused on and we appreciate your partnership. Thank you.
109 Thank you. Councilor, would either of either the councilor or the commissioner who sit on the steering and oversight committee like to jump in? Councilor Zimmerman, do you want to go right ahead?
110 Thanks. I mean, I think one of the big questions that sits on a lot of our minds is how intact an iga is. And this joint work, given this movement over the last few years, where the city continues to pay for more shelters, more outreach workers, more and more of the things that we're being paid for pre 2015. And I, I have been supportive of that because I've believed in those types of shelters. And, and I think I'm on the record 9 or 10,000 times saying I'll support the mayor in this, in this new approach, as long as the test sites in the svs are, are funded. But I think that's a big part of this conversation. And what I hope is, you know, I the reason I am supporting councilor Greens social housing study is because I want the city to be very good at the infrastructure development, to get more units up wherever and however and as quickly as possible. And I'm, I'm just kind of I'm curious where other folks are at with this. As we start to muddle the two lanes of responsibility more and more and is it time to do a revisit so that we can have clarity? Because that's that's where I'm trying to understand the role that housing and homelessness committee I sit on the role of the soc, and then ultimately the city's role giving these changing parameters and 17, frankly, 17 new faces, except for a couple of you.
111 Commissioner, you also sit on the soc. Would you like to jump in here? And then maybe we can hear from a few others?
112 Absolutely. Thank you. I think, gosh, as somebody in the room who actually worked at the Portland housing bureau, when we were putting together the joint office of homeless services, I would just like to offer that there is a lot of history of the city's role in in supporting adult shelter and outreach. All of my contracts before the joint office were with the city of Portland. And so I do think there's a long history there that, yes, we need to redefine what those roles are because we have changed that structure of the at the government level itself. I just want to say, I think it's a bit genuinely generous to call any of this a system. We really created shelter and outreach as a patchwork and piecemeal, depending on different political whims or funding availability, or how HUD decided they wanted to fund different things in the community. And so that's part of why I called for two work sessions, that I'll have a couple minutes to talk about later. And you and I councilor Talked about it a little bit at the last, last soc is we actually need to create some intentional time and work plan that in the next six months, decide what are our different roles, what are the responsibilities. We don't even call all the work the same. You all use the term outreach for things that we call navigation or inreach or something else. And so even just definition clarity doesn't exist around the types of services. And I wish we could have done it for this budget, but I just don't think it's been enough time. And I know that you all just saw for the first time the data around cost and outcomes that we received as part of those assessments and work plan or work sessions. So I think there's more work to be done. I don't think we should just sit and rest on this is the existing iga. I think it's a lot of conversation that we need to have. But again, I want to do it with intentionality and purpose and data and do it with a decision making timeline so it doesn't just linger forever. I feel like I'm going on long, so I'm going to just kind of pivot back and ask, mayor, I did have one question, and when we met on Tuesday, you said, you know, I'm going to ask you something or push back on something, and I am. Can you tell me about the data that you shared about the shelter? Are you talking about number of people served in shelter? I'm not clear on where that data is coming from.
113 You bet. Ryan sent that over. I think it was last week. It was regarding the shelter. The individuals served.
114 I think that was put together, commissioner, by the mayor and Portland solutions team. It's from the national alliance's kind of federal dashboard. Basically, we were trying to get back data back to 2017. So in order to show that so yes, individuals served, I believe.
115 I would ask that we maybe get together with the data that we have because that feels the data looks off to me again, being somebody who was in the system when we had two shelters for women and maybe three for men, I'm hard pressed to believe we were serving the same amount as we are now, with the number of shelter beds we have, so I would love to update that data and get that out to everybody.
116 And commissioner, do you mind if I interject for a second? I just want to say I put that offer on the table officially, that hst is going to look at that because and I and I don't want any of you running with those slides to be totally blunt, because they mixed data from different methodologies and the depending on the data set that national data is pit and hic data. And then the by name list is our by name list data completely different. And it is long been recognized that pit has been an undercount layer on the fact that pit is a one day count, and the by name list is a monthly count, and it's displayed as fiscal years. So just please don't run with that data. And while I'm on this train, I just want to say that, mayor, the 800 adult foster care beds that you referenced, it's I want everybody to know that that is a statewide number of those. It's 218 here in Multnomah county, and I'm still waiting for a precise number, but most of those are are private private beds. They're not medicaid beds. They are not for the people that we serve. Those are for people who have resources, who need that type of care. And then they can go and get that care at one of those facilities. So I'm getting that 218 broken down and I just don't have it. But that's what that that's the full picture of that data point.
117 Thank you jillian. It would probably be good once you do have that full data point to make sure everybody here has it so that we're using the right numbers as we're hearing from constituents about this.
118 Thank you. Appreciate that.
119 Councilor Green you put your hand up there a moment ago. Would you like to jump in.
120 Thank you, madam president. I would love to. And I am starting a timer so I don't go over four minutes. I'm going to share an image that my economist provided in advance of this, this meeting. And it's based upon the data that was in the briefing package on the homeless. The homeless counts in our, you know, in our community, along with an index called the case-shiller index, which is an index of home prices. And I share this because the blue line is a leading indicator of the orange line. And what's very clear is that when the cost of housing increases and the rate of change of that increases, we see an increase in the rate of homelessness. And so, you know, last time I we had this conversation, I had talked about our lack of efficiency in how we use these dollars. And I think I missed an opportunity to center something that commissioner Singleton just just pointed out, which is that we don't have a system, is that we have a regional problem and we're not taking a regional approach. Mayor, you talked about this. And so the social housing study is going to be very important because it's going to give us a plan and an opportunity to come together as a region across our jurisdictions to say, we've got this tremendous volume of dollars that flows through our community. And so we can either spend all of it on the back end of dealing with this crisis on the back end, or we can spend some of it on the front end to fully fund permanent affordable housing so we can stop the inflow, because unless unless we stop the inflow, we're going to pay an ever increasingly higher cost on the outflow side. And I don't I don't want to continue funding overnight shelters. I admire your spirit, mayor, but but that can never be a long term solution. That's not your intention. We have to enable that to end. And we can only make it end if we do. Some of what you talked about, all of the above, councilor Zimmerman, which is we got to make it really easy, much easier to build in this city. That's the supply side. That's why I support the sdc waiver. We need things like we need to look at our design review. That is that is that is stepping in front of our objectives. The reason why these prices went up so much is because it is really hard to get a permit through this city because of the many layers of steps. And we need to look at things like single stair reform. We need to look at all this kind of new and emerging code and zoning change work that we can do to make it easier to build in this, this county, this region, so we can do the market rate stuff at the same time that we preserve our affordable housing, at the same time that we're building this middle income social housing stuff. So I just encourage us, as we think about when we renew our commitments, or we ask voters again to open up their wallets. Like I said last time, that we've got this integrated plan across our metro county and city, our portlanders deserve it. So that's actually only two minutes and 45 seconds. And that's not really a question, colleagues. It's just me sharing what I know and making a plea. Thank you.
121 I'm sure the time will get used by somebody else or by you later in the discussion. Councilor councilor Koyama Lane.
122 Yeah, again, I appreciate the collaboration. I believe this is what the community expects of us to work together, regardless of jurisdiction, to really find solutions and take action. And the work of sheltering is everyone is very critical. And to kind of add on, I want to underline that it is a late stage intervention. It's not prevention or elimination of homelessness. So while we can acknowledge the work we're doing to keep moving, shelter forward, and to be clear, I am supportive of the mayor's commitment. I want to underline that we really also need to acknowledge that to actually end homelessness, we have to constantly be working to understand the true nature and causes of homelessness. So I, I do love looking at data. I am very into data, and I invite us to come up above it a little bit to be thinking about how homelessness is a function of poverty and economic injustice. And we see that in, in these in the data that we're looking at, we see the racial disparities in our data. People of color are disproportionately represented in those living on a low income, and that is connected to being at a higher risk of experiencing homelessness. So I look forward to hearing more about how we can move together in the direction of taking all we're learning from our current investments, data, plan actions, and bringing that together with an approach that responds to also the true natures of homelessness. And I'm interested in what that looks like to bring us together in being strategic and coming up with an action plan and approach that makes sure it includes both of those parts.
123 Thank you, councilor. Councilor Ryan.
124 Thank you, madam president. I've asked this question before, so you won't be that surprised. I'm not seeing any data in the in here on the overlay, the crosswalk about behavioral health, addictions and mental health. Why?
125 Are you asking a question about the data we're able to display in our dashboard?
126 Yeah, I mean, at the county, you have public health, you have behavioral health, mental health services. And I just am always confused on when we have a meeting like this, why we're not looking at the crosswalk of that. You can't attend a community forum or any gathering where they don't ask that question.
127 No, it's a good question that we don't currently have information on behavioral health need or other sort of physical or behavioral health diagnoses on our dashboard. The demographics we have are age, race, and gender. We do our system, and it's all built on our hmis system. And we do have some information on folks needs and their service entries, but we're not systematically collecting that kind of information. And some of that information is very highly protected. So whether and how you display that is a little bit more complicated. But I hear what you're saying, that we do need to find a way to get a handle on that so we can understand the need and start to address it.
128 Yeah. This is behavior change work and it's hard. And you're not going to see the net gains until we get to the bottom of that. So that's that's a big factor and everyone knows it. You can't walk around town have a conversation on this topic without it coming up. And someone telling a really deep story about their own experience and their families, etc.
129 And you'll hear later about some work we're doing in the case conferencing space.
130 I look forward to that.
131 Right up your alley.
132 All right. So stay tuned.
133 Adam peterson I think he's joining online. Maybe he's here in the room. He will be ready for your question.
134 All right.
135 Thank you.
136 Councilor Clark.
137 Thank you, madam chair. Much appreciation to the mayor and to the chair, county chair, and also to commissioner Singleton's comments. I really appreciate what you said about the patchwork. I can see that. I feel that, and I hope that when it comes time to take some steps forward, that you're also going to be looking at consolidation kinds of issues. You mentioned the definitions of navigator and outreach worker, and I'm just wondering if there might be some opportunities in the larger infrastructure that we have to consolidate, consolidate, maybe even some of the providers to reduce our overhead in administering these programs and making sure that we're using the same definitions across all the providers as well. And I really appreciate your comment about the regional equity. I totally get that. I also want to say that I support the social housing concept with great enthusiasm. I started my career. You're probably tired of me saying this in affordable housing, when there really was a federal housing program that provided public housing, and we're now 45 years behind in not not building that and not building housing that is outside the market, that stays outside the market, that stays affordable over time. And that's what I'm hoping when we have the social housing study that we can begin to really work on that. I also want to see us bring back the sros. I know I'm getting off the topic of homelessness exactly, but we need to restore the single room occupancy hotels that we used to have in abundance across this country and in Portland. We really need to bring that back. But I hope that when you when you go back to the drawing board on outcomes that you do look at some consolidation. Thank you.
138 Councilor I think that was the theme from last meeting as well. I'm glad to have someone bring that back up, councilor Smith.
139 Thank you, madam president, and thank you, commissioner Singleton. I do wholeheartedly agree with your plan for us to go forward and to have a consolidation of terms and what we're going to go forward with, with the iga, that is so important. I was listening to part of the presentation, and I too do support the mayor's homeless shelter idea. And as I listen to you, I know with the mayor's plan that it's just an overnight shelter. Could we have the folks who. And this is going back to what you're talking about, commissioner, could the folks that go to this new shelter that the mayor created, can they have preference to one of your ten day centers so they have a place to go during the day? Or how are those folks? How are people referred to those day centers? Because it would be great if the folks that are participating in this system, that they're allowed to participate in the county system, that gives them some sort of preference. That would be a really good idea. And Dan, you look like you want to answer that question.
140 You know, I'm.
141 Following along and nodding. We did an expansion of day services funding at the county a couple years ago, with some one time only funding. We're working really hard to maintain that, in part to support the mayor's plan. My understanding is that most of those data centers work on a drop in basis. They're not sort of scheduled, like with the shelter, but we're clearly trying to maintain that infrastructure in our community right now. And even though that funding is dropping in the county budget, we're working hard to keep the number of day centers open and keep them at least funded at a level that allows them to continue serving folks.
142 But the report said that you all have ten day centers, so is that not in your budget anymore?
143 There are nine in the budget, and some of them are for geared towards adults. And then there are two that are for other systems.
144 So I guess I'm asking chair vega peterson, can we have some sort of preference for the new folks who will be going to the mayor's shelter system that that they can be streamlined into your day centers so that they have a place to go during the day.
145 So they're all drop in first come, first serve. Sorry.
146 I hear what you're saying. I heard you, I heard you, but I'm asking a different question. I'm asking, can they have can we change or add a little bit of streamlining of services? Because it right now we're county and city, and I think we need to do a better job of working together because we're serving the same homeless population. And if there is a way that we can streamline into your programs, we don't have any resources for day centers. So you all do. And I'm just trying to figure out how we can work together where those folks are not just walking around during the day, that they have a place to go.
147 I believe. Councilor. The chair is has her finger on the microphone to weigh in on this, maybe with the less technical but more political answer about whether that's possible.
148 I don't.
149 You guys don't have to answer the political stuff. No, I mean, I appreciate the question. And I almost say, commissioner Smith, counselor Smith, you know, I think that what I hear from day centers is that they have they have so much demand that they're not able to serve, even, you know, with the people existing homelessness, I don't know that we're necessarily, you know, swapping out somebody who might be using a day shelter, who today is sleeping outside unsheltered versus, you know, in a few months they may be in an overnight shelter. So I think that that is, you know, and I and I regardless of whether they know, I mean, I would say like that is also a question that we have for providers to, you know, to figure out what is going to work best. It's displacing somebody who might be coming from an overnight only bed with somebody who is in a different shelter situation. You may not be the best answer, but I do think that we have to, you know, one of your the point that I agree on is like, it doesn't it doesn't serve any of us well. It doesn't serve our community well to have two independently operating systems. And I think that there was a time and before I came in as chair, like there was a lot of work that had been done by the city of Portland to build up a system because they weren't getting what they needed from our shared system. We now have a mayor who came in with a very, you know, with a very strong plan of what he wanted to see, but but what I would like us all to commit to in this next year is to develop that shared plan and what that looks like because of the limited resources. And I think that's going to take hard decisions from all of us. Frankly, I think we have to everybody has to let go of some of the maybe like their favorite type of shelter or their favorite provider, and really look at what's the best answer for the entire system, including the resources that we have.
150 Oh, madam chair, you done got into some stuff right there, which you said, I'm not going to touch it. The last question, one of the things that I don't hear a lot of, and I think we I'd like to see an increase and I would like to be in those conversations as well. I'd like to see an increase in workforce development. I'm the chair of the labor and workforce development committee at the city, and I think what you said earlier, what stuck out to me was that people just can't afford to pay for housing, and they're not making the kind of money that they need to be able to pay. And so I would like to put some more resources on the city and county level that would support workforce development, particularly for apprenticeship programs, because those are living wage jobs. Those jobs are doing. We have 132 infrastructure projects in the Portland region, and if we could do more to help people get into those jobs that are in the homeless system that we can refer them to, because right now we're down on the number of apprenticeships for a lot of the programs, and so we need to be working together on that piece if possible. Thank you.
151 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Zimmerman, you wanted to jump back in with some additional comments. Yeah, thanks.
152 The first one, just a quick one, I guess. I would love to hear from all the colleagues on here, county and city, and what you envision and what you could use from those of us who sit on the soq, the steering oversight committee sitting from my chair, I've found the experience less than productive and less than desirable. And so I want that time to be used. Well, I think we fought hard to get that in, but I'm also not exactly sure what colleagues want us to brought back into our own chambers and separately, but also how to use that meeting, because I think we probably owe it to the staff to give some direction. Like, what do we want out of that? That's my first one. But I going back to the slide that councilor Green put up and I'm so happy he did the housing price graph, if you remember, and how it is the leading leading edge of then our our homelessness graph as well. And then councilor Ryan asked a related question about behavioral health and mental illness. I just want to put it right on there. I think that this this body has got to have a shared legislative agenda in Salem with respect to. And I'll just remind folks, I've spent ten years at Multnomah county. I have at least a half an idea of what I'm talking about here, but I think last year the Oregon state hospital served all about three people who were not part of the judicial system. That means there is no access outside of just the community based mental health care. There is no access for the most important, the most critical. There is no state hospital in Oregon, and we've got to have a north region campus. And frankly, if the governor agreed to have the state run it, I think we should build it for him because it is the most important thing I can think of to get ahead of this issue of, are we talking about poverty? Are we talking about people who are impoverished with mental illness, who are then suffering on the streets? And I think that if we could have a shared collective agenda in government relations and who we talk to in Salem every single session until the damn thing is built and running, I think we could change the trajectory. And then the graph that Mitch showed is something we can tackle even more effectively with our housing production, because what we've heard is you can build houses, but you cannot put sick people that sick of people in all houses. Right? We've got this, this, this thing. We've got to be able to talk about the mental illness. And I will say I recognize it's privileged information. And I think that's important. I would never want to violate any person's medical history. But I just want to point out one thing. If you are if you hold an Oregon driver's license and it says you're a resident of Multnomah county and you are in some other community in the united states, and if you were to test positive for hiv, that county health department will call our county health department to tell them about it. They'll keep it private. They'll reach out to you. We have at one time in our community's history, in our in our society's history, said that there are some things that we're going to work our off to make sure it's private, but it is so important that we do have collective knowledge around it. And I think actually we do need to add this aspect to our data collection, because it is such a large percentage of our people who, when we encounter this on the streets, we're talking about mental health, illness, behavioral health, and our society is more sick in that realm than I think we've ever been, and we've got to be able to talk about it reasonably. And leaving somebody on the street is not a civil liberty. It's a civil punishment. It's just dangerous as hell. So that's I just wanted to bring that up.
153 Thank you, councilor. And I think there are some conversations in Salem that don't get at the space for people aspect, but that get at some of the aspects around when and how folks are left to attempt to care for themselves and end up on the street. That we should certainly have more conversations about. Councilor is there anybody who hasn't spoken yet who wants to jump in on the question that councilor Zimmerman asked us there? Or, okay, commissioner, why don't we have you jump in?
154 Sorry, it wasn't in response to commissioner.
155 That's okay. I know you're helping on a lot of this work at the county also, so let's make sure we have your voice in the conversation.
156 So the two combined budgets are about $420 million. I think it might be wishful thinking to think the state's going to come in with a lot more money, or that we're in the short term. There's going to be additional resources. And I'm concerned about the suggestion that the work to reset our goals might not happen until the budget year after next. I think it needs to happen sooner because our community expects it, and I would hope that. We jointly come up with a framework and a timeline that we would come back with a reset to the homelessness response action plan that's connected to housing production goals, so that we have the whole pipeline. I've always said that, you know, if the county were to knock it out of the park to getting people into shelter and then exiting people into housing, and we were doing our job and we were hitting the percentage numbers we wanted to hit, we'd still have an issue with not enough places to put people. So we really need an integrated strategy. And again, I'm concerned that we continue on with like we're doing the best we can. Commissioner singleton's point that if we don't have a system, we let's get one and create a timeline. And I don't know the best way to do it. It may be like tasking the two presiding officers with coming up with a timeline and a framework to move this forward. But again, connecting the homelessness response action plan to housing production, but sooner rather than later, because I don't think we can continue to spend the hundreds of millions of dollars and say that we're still underwater and we're not making progress.
157 Thank you. Commissioner, I think your chair wants to jump in with a response to that.
158 Yeah, I just wanted to. So I wanted to be clear. We're talking about starting this conversation after we pass this year's budget. So. And I didn't want I don't gillian, I didn't know if you wanted to talk a little bit about your plan for that work.
159 I guess I'm just going to can I just say starting a conversation is very different from we're going to create a timeline and actually delivering on it, because I've been part of a conversation now for two years, and the whole tortured conversation around the iga and the wrap. And like I say, we kept pushing for the data on the inflows and outflows to see whether we're making progress. And now we have it and we see that we're not making progress. So I think we should accept start it, but have a point in time that we're also going to have something measurable, something that we can all discuss and agree on and coordinate our resources behind. Yeah, totally.
160 Totally agree I yeah.
161 So let me provide to address your question. And let me just start with I'm going to share with you all very soon. Just a visual that we have come up with that shows how we're going to reorganize the plan in alignment with how we talk about the data. So you're going to see, for example, you're going to see the action items reorganized into a category of inflow. Because we are now talking about inflow. So I need to be able to quickly say, here are the action items we are tackling that deal with inflow. And then here's the associated metric. So we need to keep we need to create that alignment using the plan across all those three categories I'm going to show you an image and it I welcome your directional feedback. I really do think it makes it easier to understand for all involved. And then it in that chart you will see where the gaps are in our kpis for example. So we need to refine our current ones and build out our build out new ones. But taking a step back. So we've started that early engagement process right now to just get directional feedback. I'm going to get a lot of feedback and sort of stage two on specific action items that the ones that are in the plan right now that are not done, are they still valid? Do they need to be refined or what are new ones to add under the new categories? Parallel to that, after we're done with this budget process, we are going to bring a group of folks together that I have not defined yet to revisit the community sheltering strategy, and that conversation is going to be grounded in data and outcomes. We are going to come together and figure out what is the shelter, what what is the most effective shelter system that we can have based on what we know today? Once we make that decision, we've got to lay over, overlay the financial reality, okay. So we'll figure out what does that most perfect system cost. What do we think is available now before we get the December forecast as best we can project. And then what is our financial partnership with that pot of money which gets to the iga. So that conversation is going to start in earnest in July. And I put a deadline on myself earlier December 1st. We really do have to have that work done by December 1st. Then you all get your financial forecast mid December, and then you're ready to go to make decisions for fiscal year 27 budget process in which starts in January.
162 Thank you. Commissioner.
163 You asked about a timeline and you looked to the presiding officers. And I just want to respond to that and say, I can't give you a timeline or a commitment to one today. But in answer to my colleague, counselor zimmerman's question about the soc, and I don't sit on the soc, I asked one of our counselors to sit there, but what I would like to see out of the soc is movement toward joint goals, movement toward direction to have a single system, perhaps funded in different ways, perhaps overseen in different ways, but with more than just common outcomes, with common approaches, with common values, with alignment across the funding that comes from our two bodies. And I would like to see that happen in time for that to be reflected in the budgets that are developed for the 2627 fiscal year. And I think that gets to what you're asking for, which is what is the timeline to make sure that we are moving toward one system. And it's my expectation that we all can stand committed to the work that we want to do and actually get to that place where we can do it effectively together by next budget year. Not the one after that. And I know with new majorities on both of our bodies and a lot of different ideas and a lot of new data sets coming in, there's no way we could do that for this year. But I don't think that there's any excuse for us to not be moving in that direction by next year.
164 So I guess I'm I'm also concerned that it's not connected to increasing the supply of housing. So because that's more in the city's purview, I'm really interested in, again, we can be starting exit trying to exit people, but there's nowhere for them to go. Then we're going to be stuck again. So again, if we're going to have one system between the city, the county, understanding what that those goals are and what we can, what we're able to predict, if we're going to be able to exit people out.
165 I think the reality is that if most of the shelter beds are under county jurisdiction, the city needs to be clear about what our goals are there. And if most of the housing production is under city jurisdiction. We need to hear from you about what the quantity of housing production is that we need to be looking at to be successful, of moving people out of shelter.
166 Council president.
167 Mr. Mayor, please.
168 May I.
169 Council president thank you. Commissioner edwards, I appreciate it. And I do want to compliment the jillian and anna and the team and Ryan. We have data coming at the soc and it's great data. And we're talking about contracts merging our contracts for our sheltering. What will work what won't, won't work. We now have stay limit information, which is great data that was just provided. We're moving there. It's I mean we've been in the job for four months, but we're really seeing good data coming out of that and there and we're all talking about changing our systems in real time now. So we're not we're not waiting for edwards. Commissioner edwards and commissioners and colleagues, we're moving forward fast, and we're having some really good, difficult conversations with good information. So I want you to know we're not waiting for December. We don't have the patience or the time to do it. And so I just invite you to keep talking amongst one another. And I want to compliment the team that's at this dais right now. We're having hard conversations, but that's what the city and the county are expecting from us. And it's yielding results. Even on the agenda item that jillian has been bringing forward. And I'm very appreciative of these very difficult conversations.
170 Councilors, commissioners, I want to note that everybody I have written down right now has already spoken once. So if you haven't spoken and want to jump in, please make sure you catch my eye, commissioner Singleton.
171 Thank you. I'm going to go back a little bit and just appreciate councilor Smith some of what you were raising. And I think that's something I posed at the county a couple of times when we're talking about sobering and deflection center, for example, is we should be prioritizing clean and sober shelter beds for folks who are exiting that so that they're not just then going back to the street. And I think those prioritization conversations are ours to have. When I was a provider, I felt like electeds were often asking me as the provider to prioritize, and I don't think that's fair. I think that's our job to make those tough decisions and prioritize resources. I also am very hopeful that I just want to share with everybody. Commissioner jones, dixon and I have convened a workforce table to explicitly look at how do we connect our anti-poverty work to living wage jobs. We have families who are regularly meeting over and over again crisis eviction prevention assistance, but we are never changing their income level. And so we are working with the trades and manufacturing to look at those opportunities explicitly around some of the transportation infrastructure projects we know are coming. And I would be honored if we're able to get your schedule aligned so you can attend those with us. I would love your expertise there. I also wanted to just add councilor Zimmerman. I think one of the things that doesn't often get talked about is our mental health system has state hospital or dsh, and it's missing all the other options in between. And we know that folks may not need state hospital level care, but they are not successful in permanent supportive housing. And we've got to figure that out. And it is not our responsibility to pay for. So it goes to that. We need a state. Ask around that. And I think we need to get really explicit about it. And then the last thing I wanted to share is just there's a lot of different amendments that I know will happen in both of our budget processes, but it did feel important to share that I have introduced an amendment, particularly around permanent supportive housing. We had a program that was an RFP that went out that was going to be awarded. And because of budget deficit in this fiscal year, it was paused. I've introduced an amendment to move some ongoing dollars so that we can actually follow through on that commitment. And that's about 200 permanent supportive housing units for adults, family and youth that I think are really critical for us to pay attention to. Yes, we need shelter, but we also can't slide back on our commitment to permanent supportive housing for folks. Thank you.
172 Thanks, commissioner. Councilor Green.
173 Thank you, madam president. I just wanted to respond to the question that councilor Zimmerman posed from the soc. I would love to hear if the committee is asking the question of what plans do we already have on the shelf across all of our jurisdictions that give guidance on how to accelerate housing production that are not already in practice and why, and just have that kind of be a recurring theme, almost like a stand up. If that's something you're already doing, then I find ignorance on that. But that's that's that kind of communication. Back to council would allow us to say, okay, we know what to prioritize. Let's, let's, let's clear that let's pass an ordinance to enable that. Right. And I think that's very enabling to the housing and homelessness committee's work. And also the other question I would like the soc to be be asking is how is that also working in conjunction with this mayor's strike team? Because we don't want these things to be moving at odds. We want everything to be rowing in the same direction. I don't want another planning conversation to come out of the soc. I really envision this to be like sort of a an agile stand up. This is our scrum board. What are we doing? How are we moving forward, making progress on joint movement goals. So that's what I would love to get reports back on. Thanks.
174 Councilor Avalos.
175 Thank you. As I'm listening to all of you describe what you're looking for, I guess I want to just thread the needle and say that that is exactly what my committee is doing. That is exactly what the unified housing strategy, which I will say my chief of staff keeps reminding me that we changed the name unified housing strategy is the new name. Because you know, what I'm hearing everybody say, right, is that we need coordination. We need analysis of the work that we have done. We need to not recreate the wheel. We need to strengthen our partnerships by bringing clarity to the discussion and ensuring that, again, we are all in the same team and we're all working towards the same north star. So I raise it again because, you know, I just want to, I guess, reassure people that that is exactly what we are doing. Everything that I've heard as an ask is exactly what that strategy is all about. So I welcome your partnership. And I know I've been talking with commissioner Singleton about the ways that I can bring in the hra committee with the county. We've talked about maybe doing some joint soc and hra committee to make sure we're staying on the same page, but I guess I just wanted to make sure people knew that was happening, because I'm hearing a lot of requests of, can we look at plans and assess that? Yep. Can we, you know, have a north star? Yep. That's exactly what this strategy is about. This resolution is coming next Tuesday. And so I hope people stay plugged in. And I also hope that you look to our committee. I think that's the other thing I'll just flag right. Like that is the point of the committees. In my opinion, that is the role of our policy making as a new council. And so I would encourage these kinds of questions and asks about collaboration and unified strategy to come through that committee, because that is where we're intending to do the work. And we're starting with our unified housing strategy next week. Thanks.
176 Thanks, councilor.
177 Councilor Smith.
178 Thank you, madam president. I just want to go back to the question about the day centers. I I'm still not clear. How do you get referred to the day centers chair?
179 Would you like to answer that?
180 So most day centers are are drop, drop in like people can walk in and they can use a day center that's there, you know, that they want to do if you've if you've visited any they can you know they're open for folks to go to. I think what I'm interested in is hearing from the mayor because the, the when I, when he presented his proposal on overnight shelters for me, day centers were built in as part of that. So I would love to hear from him what his plans are for day centers.
181 I'm going to let him ask his own question, but I'm still. I want to find out about capacity first from you at the day centers.
182 So question.
183 About county capacity at day centers. And then we can also talk about the mayor's proposed and what additional capacity there would be there.
184 Chair, would you like me.
185 To chair? Would you like either your staff or commissioner Singleton is asking to weigh in as well.
186 We have.
187 Staff and then commissioner Singleton wants to add go for it.
188 Go right ahead.
189 Jillian, I.
190 Was just going to say that we'll get back to you on the data. I see you're asking about by day center. What is each of those day center's capacity? I don't know, off the top of my head, but it is first come, first walk in the door.
191 But I won't refer anyone if you if your capacity is only ten. Right. So, I mean, there should be somebody in this room who knows what the capacity of our day centers are.
192 I, I will get back to you with the complete data. But for example, one is 150, I remember off the top of my head. So it's we're talking larger numbers.
193 Okay.
194 Right. Okay. That's what I was trying to get a sense for. Are these huge day centers or opportunities. Because I think it's mayor that one of the things that we should do, and my concern is that the folks that are going to be in our city system, that they'll just be walking around. So I want to see if we can have a list so we can tell them where they can go during the day if they don't have another place to go.
195 Mayor, do you mind if I jump in? Okay. Sorry, councilor. So I think just so you are aware, we are actually sharing the available resources in the vicinity of all of our shelters. Basically all the overnight shelters. Folks will have a map and they'll know exactly what resources are in kind of walking distance, basically from that shelter site. So we partner with different folks at the county, and we're trying to connect folks to those resources. We're also increasing day center capacity and trying to add day centers to the continuum of care, because we know we need more. I think a lot of day centers are at max capacity. Day to day is kind of what we're hearing. So I think we want to make sure we're also increasing that capacity.
196 Okay. So you're saying we're going to increase our own capacity for the folks who come through our city services. And I think that that was a little bit of what I heard from commissioner Julia edwards is that we have to figure out how do we streamline all of our services together, because I'd much rather be spending our $120 million on housing production. And if we're going to create something, I mean, that's what we do. That's our book of business is infrastructure. We build housing. And so it's turning out that we're spending more of our resources on homelessness shelters. And that's and we have to do that because, you know, we're getting pressure from the community, from the business community, from from our friends and our neighbors about the unsheltered housing. That's that's on our on our streets. I mean, we were at 5000 for so long, and now we're up to, what, 7200? So it's like we do need to have the conversation. I just want to leave the last comment about December. I agree with you, mayor. We cannot wait until December to have a conversation because all of us have five year forecasts. We have five year forecasts. And we can do some of this conversation with those numbers that we have right now. Thank you.
197 Thank you, councilor, mr. Mayor or commissioner Singleton, did either of you still want to respond to that or have staff taken care of it? Okay, I'm seeing no's from both of you. Councilor Novick did you want to jump in?
198 Actually, I was going to jump in. Is it is my understanding that commissioner Singleton is going to do like a report out on certain work sessions? I was planning to jump in then.
199 Councilor Ryan, did you want to jump back in or did I catch that head nod wrong?
200 No you didn't. Thank you, madam president. It's following up on the conversation you're having with councilor Smith. And that is, we were in a town hall. Was it? It was a gathering of storefront owners who were quite salty for all the right reasons. In saint john's. That's a compliment when you're from saint john's and they. Okay, we're opening up a day, a day center. There's going to be more overnight shelters. What's the plan? What's the plan? What's the how do the dots connect? How do we know that there won't be more people harming themselves and others on the streets? And they had some really graphic details of what they've been experiencing over the last five years. And so they they want to welcome this, but right now they have a lot of anxiety about it. And I'm not hearing what that plan looks like that connects the dots between the two. So that livability actually improves in that neighborhood, as opposed to it going down after it opens. Who has that plan?
201 Commissioner chair, would you like to have somebody from your staff answer that? Or is there somebody who's not up here but works with the day centers who should answer that? What's the best way for our councilors to understand?
202 I can speak to it. Sure, sure. Go ahead.
203 So that day center will be run by a provider that is an experienced shelter and day center provider. They have a lot of experience in making sure that the experience in the day center and outside of the day center is supportive to both the people accessing the day center and the neighborhood, so they develop plans for how that's going to work. There's behavioral expectations. There's ways that they expect people to behave in and out of those day centers.
204 And I can speak to the overnight shelter. So we will part of our increase in outreach capacity that the mayor's proposed is focused on exactly what you're talking about, commissioner Ryan or councilor Ryan. So having outreach workers who are able to connect people to different services, transport people to different services, know what the available day center services or other resources are in the vicinity. So making that connection point, especially in the morning when overnight shelters are letting out, is really a big part of that work.
205 So this minor system within the bigger system that we're building, you're working this out right now, correct? Correct. And is Portland street response going to be a part of that network service.
206 Yes. So we've been in communication with them. Again. They aren't as proactive in that way normally mostly responding to calls. But we do have connection points with them. And because of their potential expanding capacity, they're really looking at partnering with us on.
207 The practice where they can actually transport folks now.
208 And that's very.
209 Seemed to be the key reason for that.
210 That's really helpful. Yeah.
211 I think what we need as constituents need to hear what that plan is. There's a lot of anxiety right now.
212 Absolutely.
213 Thanks.
214 Councilor Kanal did you want to jump in?
215 Thank you. Yes, I was kind of letting this conversation play out. Mine was a little bit different. But I do want to reiterate the original purpose of Portland street response, which is for people in behavioral health crisis. And I'm always concerned without having detail. And I know we just don't have time to get into it, but I'd love to make sure we get that detail. Broadly, though, mr. Mayor, you've been relentless. Indeed. I really appreciate the earnestness you bring to this. It shows I know this is real for you and that you care deeply on both the policy and budget side. We have push and pull on these issues, and I think we need to discuss a lot of the details. Big picture. I'm supportive. But of course there's going to be these little things that that come up. So I've seen some things that are surprising for me. While we're investing in removal of derelict rvs, there's a group of people who live in non derelict rvs. They're going to get knocked onto the street on September 30th when the sunderland site closes. I'm disappointed by that. I'm trying to understand the home sharing pilot. And this also relates to slide 15 with the whole thing about couch surfing. I'm profoundly skeptical about this idea, and I'm also very supportive of some parts of the mayor's plan. I am strongly in favor of hiring ten new outreach workers and or navigators, and keeping this process separate from policing because everyone, including police, would prefer this not to be their responsibility. I'd also like to note the accountability question here for providers around the vacancy rates that was discussed, and also if we should be contracting with people who who pay their ceos 500 k a year or something like that. You know, overhead for rank and file staff is a given and not a negative thing at all. I'm talking about outrageous levels of leadership pay, but for me, I want to spend most of my time focusing on prevention because and placement into permanent housing, because foundationally, the reason someone is homeless is because they can't afford a home. And the way out of homelessness is getting someone into the right housing. That seems fairly obvious, but it often gets lost. We don't have enough housing. We're working on things like permitting and sdc, the sdc conversation. I'd love to have the access to capital conversation for the capital necessary to build, because high interest rates lead to higher costs of building lead to higher rents. The graph councilor Green showed, is completely right. If we're raising the price of housing, we're going to see more houseless people, and we need to bring that down relative to incomes. We have a distribution problem that leads to vacant rates. We have to do work to figure out the number of three and four bedroom apartments available for lower income portlanders, and so that the waitlists we're seeing in some of these specific programs for that size can be filled. We definitely need to ensure our housing units are not vacant, that we run, and we need to look at long term vacancies in the long term, long term vacancies in the market and the. I have a budget note proposal to study long term vacancy fees. And finally we have agreed problem. And I'm not talking about developers here or most landlords, but I am talking about a few of them. I'm talking about the people who rent a place out for $1,400 and 15 and 16 when it gets renewed, and then the tenant moves out, and the next time it's listed at 2500, the people who don't negotiate on back rent, as the slides indicated, and or the people who build into their projections that they're going to hold on to the security deposit no matter what happens, the people who skimp on the maintenance or only do the landlord special. Again, this isn't all landlords, or even the majority of them, but the few that are doing this are making it harder for everybody else, all tenants and landlords alike. And so I bring this up to say I want to end the cycle of precarity that's based on all of this, having too few units distributed in terms of size in a way that doesn't match our needs, built too expansively to have low enough rent left vacant, and when they are rented, done in a way that maximizes the amount of money a person can extract from the 47% of us in Portland that are renters. Because that cycle of precarity is the primary driver for someone becoming houseless in the first place. And yes, there's way more to it than this. The people who have addictions before they become homeless, the income conversation and the workforce development piece, the fair wage standards piece, like what we adopted here on Wednesday and the labor rights movement as well. And part of it is providing the services that in other places might defray your income, like at parks. But foundationally, I just wanted to keep the focus on prevention, because as someone who's been real close to being unable to pay the rent several times, that's something that matters to me. And also because the easiest time to help someone get into permanent housing is before they're houseless in the first place, to just keep the housing they've already got.
216 So thank you, councilor. Councilor Zimmerman, I think you would put yourself back in the queue. You're done. Okay, councilors, we are actually two minutes ahead if we move on right now. Does anybody have any final conversational pieces?
217 I just really I, I want to just make sure I'm clear on that. Oh, I'm sorry I didn't wait to be recognized.
218 Go right ahead. That's okay. And you usually preside. It's hard. It's a different role.
219 I just wanted to clarify with the mayor that that day centers are a part of the plan that you're working on.
220 Yes. Two things. Yeah. We've got four day centers that are assigned to it, and then we'll work with the homeless service providers that are working in overnight to connect with those day centers. So trying to create that seamless response if necessary. I do want to answer all of councilor Canales questions he posed there. So I'm just kidding.
221 All of them. No.
222 Mr. Mayor, I don't think we have time for that.
223 Since we have a minute, I do want everybody to know from that immediate, action focused. Here's what I pulled out of that. And councilor Clark and councilor Green sros are definitely an important part. And we closed them, a lot of them, thousands of them in Portland, because that's what the nation was doing. And we took that deeply affordable stock off the market as we are gentrifying and so on. We opened the henry 4 or 5 years ago, and it's on fourth. It's an sro. It cost $37 million to renovate that building. So yes, we need sro sros. But again, we're looking at three year and five year and seven year. And yes, we need it. Deeply affordable housing. Home share counselor to that point the Portland access Portland housing access initiative is using rooms that are already available, like we used to do a hundred years ago, where a third to 50% of all Americans at some point in their life either boarded or rented a boarding, and then those are at seven, $800, and we can access those quickly. With the right incentives and protections for landlords and for renters. So we have an opportunity. I'm looking at how do we access housing within months, in place of years? How do we get deeply affordable housing, which is 7 to 800, which hits what anna and julian were talking about ssi and ssdi. We're looking at $7,800 there. We can we can match that up. So that's what we're trying to do this year. So thank you.
224 Thank you, mr. Mayor. Councilors, commissioners, we have one colleague each who have each said they will be very, very quick, both of them with hand motions. Commissioner edwards, go right ahead.
225 I just want to request that either next time we meet or we have a subset that we have councilor Avalos present her unified housing strategy because this is to me, the big connect. Thanks, councilor.
226 I know you've had some folks from the commission present to your committee. Maybe we can have you take some of your plans to the commission. Councilor Green.
227 Thank you. Madam. Madam president, mayor, you hit on something that's really important is the cost of some of these things. That's why I think it's really good. What director hissrich is doing with saying. Let's identify some some out of out of the money balance sheet, distressed properties and buy them, because you can buy them at $200,000 a unit instead of $600,000 a unit. So I just I flagged that and we should encourage that. I think it's great.
228 Thank you. Colleagues, I really appreciate this conversation. I think there have been a lot of different issues aired that really all tie back into this question about how we're coordinating, how we're working together, what these paths forward look like and, and what the timeline is on that. So I think there's more work to do, some for staff to help us do that, some for our representatives. There's for folks around this dais who sit on the steering oversight committee, and some for the rest of us as we work with our colleagues. So I know we'll be jumping into that and hopefully we can pull some of the work that's happening this summer into our next joint meeting. There are a few rapid fire items that we wanted to get follow up on from the last section, and I believe the first is from commissioner Singleton. But jillian, did you have a few things you wanted to say to introduce this section?
229 No, you hit the nail on the head.
230 Okay. Rapid fire commissioner Singleton.
231 Thank you. So in March of this year, in response to the announced homeless services deficit, I called for an assessment of shelter, outreach and administrative structures so we could review costs and outcome data on these investments that both jurisdictions fund. You received in your materials. A document with a I'm sorry, I didn't I didn't title this. I will definitely blame this on you all, but a document that is. Where did that go? What is this one called? Oh Multnomah county singleton hsd background outreach. And I just wanted to share a little bit on that and kind of walk you through part of what I did, and you'll see some handwriting on the side of that was I looked at the cost data, and from the other data that staff provided on the left hand side, I put average length of stay for fiscal year 24 and then 25. And then on the right hand side, I put positive exits by fiscal year as well. And what I considered in the positive exits bucket was if somebody left to move with friends or family, they went into treatment or they moved into permanent housing. So just to share that piece of that data and part of what I think, not surprising to anybody that we learned was that congregate shelter cost less. They have a shorter length of stay. However, they have lower positive outcomes. Our alternative and motel shelters, while more expensive, had better positive outcomes and much longer lengths of stay. I think we talked earlier what we heard from providers in the room was that lack of housing placement assistance, whether it's staff or client assistance, was a big barrier to them increasing their positive outcomes from shelter. When we looked at the data, a big question emerged for me that I think will really influence our approach. What do we want shelter to be? Is it a path? Is it a step on the path back into permanent housing? Is it a safety off the streets measure? Is it a mix of both? And that's something I think we have to talk about and decide how much we're investing in each type, instead of trying to do all the things at every site. Anna also mentioned earlier that some shelters have internal housing placement staff and client assistance funds. Some don't. That is true of our day centers as well. So I want us to be cautious about thinking day centers are going to be a solution for folks outside of a place to be during the day, unless we resource them to actually do housing placement work. And I think that people should have access to housing placement regardless of their city funded safe rest village, a congregate shelter, or they're just accessing a day center. I created the first in-reach team in our community to handle this issue and provide housing placement services for sites that didn't have it. An example of what happened is after one year of their work at dignity village, they were able to see the average length of stay dropped from 12 years to two years because they had the staff and the dollars to actually place people in housing. This is the type of thing I think we really need to wrestle with and decide what we're going to fund and how we want to fund and create an actual system. In that document I mentioned earlier, you'll see there's definitions on page one and two of the document to define what outreach is, what in-reach is, what navigation services are. They have different purposes, different outcome expectations. They cost different amounts, and they all have a place in the system. But again, we should have more intentionality about how we're funding those and how many of each type we think we need. I think that's a most of the outreach conversation was more of a narrative format, just because it does look so different. But I think it's important to just note that to me, these conversations need to bridge back together. It's not shelter alone. We have to talk about both components of that, that system, and make some decisions about what we want to fund and what type of outcomes we expect out of those providers. Thank you. Under five minutes.
232 I believe.
233 So good. Work jillian. I think the next one is with you and your team talking about the shelter availability tool.
234 Yes. Thank you.
235 That would be me. Okay. Next slide please. So this is a quick update on our shelter availability tool. And what this is it's a mobile app essentially that allows folks who have access to it to see real time information on where shelter units are available across the system. It's got a comprehensive resource directory. It pulls directly from our system in real time. And it also has a mapping function. The intent of this tool is to give outreach workers just that, that much easier of a time, identifying where there might be a shelter bed so they can refer someone to that bed. It is not intended to replace sort of the informal networks that people have, but it's intended to be a tool to kind of reduce the workload that it takes to connect someone to shelter. Next slide. We first piloted this tool. It's August 2023. It was actually 2024. Our apologies for the typo, but we piloted the tool last summer and phase one was limited to the shelter set aside program, which is about 100 beds with a couple different providers. We chose that pilot because that was a known capacity. It was a manageable amount of people to kind of test out the tool. So they've been using the tool since last summer. As they piloted it, we were able to make improvements to improve the tool. So it was a better, better able to connect folks to shelter. What we focused on was making that information more easily available and easier to digest. An outreach worker has a limited amount of time to engage with the person and keep them engaged, and they don't want to be fumbling with an app that really makes it difficult to connect to that relationship. We also focused on improving data reliability and data the accuracy of where the units were. It is very hard to build trust and easy to lose it. What you don't want to do is tell someone there's a bed somewhere and have that bed not actually be available. So that was a big focus of the pilot is increasing the reliability of the data. So the update that we have next slide is that we are now in phase two. As of last month, we have opened up the number of units in the tool and the number of folks who can access the tool itself. As of last month, all of our adult shelters that have an open referral process are are ported into the tool, and you can see availability of those units. So those are shelters where previously you could walk in, you could call, you could sign up on a website. They were able you can get sort of first come first serve access to those units. There's not an established referral process through a community partner. So it's not all units, but it's all of them that have that open referral process. We now also all outreach groups that either contract with Multnomah county or who refer into those shelters can be using this tool. So we've we've added beds and we've added folks who can use the tool itself. We are doing user training both live and via video, and we're continuing to collect feedback on how the tool is working for those folks as we go to continuously improve the tool. Does that. Oh. Oh yes. The one last thing I wanted to say is, as we are collecting that feedback, we are building towards improving the tool itself, but also our new hmis system. We are, as you know, I've talked about working to procure a new hmi system. That system should have this functionality built in. So as we collect feedback about this interim tool, we're using that to design what we implement in the community moving forward with our new system. Phase three will involve adding more user groups and more resources as we can, and it will align with the implementation of the new system. That is a very quick update on that tool.
236 Thank you.
237 Next overview is from healthshare on case conferencing.
238 Yeah. And this falls into the category of work all of you need to know about. So that's why adam is here today.
239 Welcome. If you could introduce yourself for the record. And then we've got some time set aside.
240 Hi folks. For the record.
241 My name is adam peterson. I use he him pronouns and I'm here today representing health.
242 Share of Oregon. My role there.
243 Is. I am.
244 The portfolio manager.
245 Of healthcare and homeless services integration. So let me just say it's it is mildly terrifying, but also very exciting to be here. Hold on. Let me pull up my notes. You know what? Let's go for it. So okay, to begin with, it is a little bit odd to be up here presenting by myself, because this work is all about bringing people together, and it's all about partnerships. And I would be very remiss if I didn't mention my partners in the homeless services division, lori. Kelly, aaron pirtle-guiney, jenny greenberg, and lisa rose gagnon. Without them, we wouldn't be here. And I also have to really thank our partners at metro regional government. Without them, I wouldn't have a job. This is a metro is using an innovative funding funding model to support healthshare to take a much larger role in healthcare and homelessness innovation. And so we're going to have three people dedicated to this at healthshare. So liam frost and ruth adkins have been incredible advocates for us, and we're really just thankful for their partnership and then also our healthcare partners and our homeless services partners. Again, we couldn't do any of this without us because the whole process is bringing all of those people together to the same place to create positive change for people on the homelessness continuum of care. What what we've done and what I'm really excited about is we've created formal pathways for people who are in that homelessness continuum of care to access healthcare care coordination. Less than 2% of healthshare membership is engaged in care coordination programs. And what we're doing is creating this formal pathway in order to get the most the people who need it the most on our homelessness continuum, connected to those individuals who can get them the care that they need. And we're very excited about what we've been able to do thus far with them. And these didn't exist two years ago. The pathways, in order to be able to communicate the ways in which we can do this work, it takes a lot of people behind the scenes to work a really hard in order to allow community systems to communicate together. And so what what we now have is the outcomes of that years of hard work from people, lawyers, data people, and everyone else coming together to be able to do this differently and better. Next slide please. And how healthshare fits in is as the largest coordinated care organization in our region, we cover 460,000 folks, many of whom many of them are the people that we're all serving here, those that are housing, insecure and engaging in homeless services. So healthshare, as I mentioned with our partnership through metro, are creating a much more structured way in which we're doing this called the regional integration continuum. Through expanded data sharing and through data analysis, we're able to have a much better idea about who these folks are and how we can serve them. And commissioner Ryan or councilor Ryan brought up the, the idea of how do we not have healthcare data? How do we not have behavioral health data? That's a question that we're trying to solve with our partners and with Multnomah county, in order to be able to share that information back and forth and be able to say, this is the extent of the problem, and this is what we're doing to fix it. And part of it is this coordinated hub for homeless services integration that we're calling the regional integration continuum. Next slide please. So it began in Washington county. We had a very small pilot project that started in 2020, and then kind of limped along through the pandemic, but then started case conferencing in earnest in 2023. We that was a not the entirety of all the health systems. But then once we brought everybody to the table and brought all of the health systems and this would be everyone healthshare works with our providence, our kaiser, our legacy, pacific sources, our care, oregon's and our OHSU, bringing everyone to the table to be able to say these are our most at risk individuals and our the thing that makes this really interesting and unique is homeless services providers are the ones who are bringing folks to this space. And so they're the ones who are identifying the people that are within their care that most need services and that most are that have those unmet healthcare needs. And that could be physical health, that could be behavioral health, that could be substance use disorder, durable medical equipment, not having their pharmacy needs met. And it's a really great tool for them because they know the people and they've created those trusting relationships with them so that when a healthcare care coordinator tells them how to get the thing that they want and how to navigate to it, and can often refer to them in that same space, it's a really effective way of creating positive change within that person's health. Health. Next. Oh, and then it's transition to Clackamas county in March of 2024. And then now in November of 2024, we started in Multnomah county with a project that was focused on older adults. So folks who are 55 and older experiencing chronic chronic homelessness and in permanent supportive housing, and we just expanded our, our, the capacity in order to be able to serve everyone who is connecting to a, a coordinated entry program, which is really exciting. And so we're much expanding the scope now that we've learned a lot from the pilot program, it's time to expand and begin serving more and more people from Multnomah county. Next slide please. And so who's at the table. It's the second and third, second and fourth Wednesday of every month. We have the folks from healthshare. Trillium health plans is a partner in this work kaiser OHSU care Oregon, providence and legacy pacificsource homeless services providers are at the table. The homeless services department, behavioral health division for Multnomah county aging, aging, disability and veteran services. And then you can see that we have a number of homeless services providers at the table, and we're still actively recruiting more. And soon we are working. We're working our release of information process to be able to add street outreach and shelter programs to this as well. So we're and really going to hopefully learn more that if we needed additional space, we'd be able to create that space and the ability and the partnerships we've formed are going to allow us to do that, which is really fantastic. Next slide please. And so this isn't just a healthcare project. This is a community project. We had an initial data run of the first 237 folks who have been through this process since April of April of 2025, and you can see that about half of them are healthshare members. But we're it's not just that, it's folks with medicare only uncovered folks, folks with open card and folks who are dual covered. This isn't just a healthshare project. This is a community project. And we're treating it as such. And recognizing that everyone has access should have access to this information that we're being able to share. Next slide please. And what we're seeing is it's working. First of all, we are the cover story of street roots this week, which so if you are happen to be get a copy of it that a large story from from that the fantastic story about this work is in street roots right now. But what we're seeing from that initial data run is that we have we are decreasing emergency room utilization for people after their case conferencing time. We are increasing access or increasing primary care engagement. Homeless services providers are saying that they feel like they have partners in the work. And we're healthcare. Healthcare is engaging with people they wouldn't otherwise know about or no have no have those needs. And so we're engaging with the hardest to engage populations. And so all aspects of this work are working. Next slide please. And that's what we got. That's our project I think I went over my five minutes I apologize.
246 Adam you're perfect. And I just want to say part of the piggyback on his mention of bringing outreach into the space. And I, I just want to celebrate something for a moment. The reason why we are moving that direction is one. When the city declared the 90 day fentanyl emergency, I think I got the name wrong. It's the early 2024 or whatever it was. It was only for 90 days, but sky kept that table going. So every Wednesday morning at 8 a.m, there's a ton of behavioral health people who come together. That includes chat, fire, psr library. Everybody is at that table. And just this week we sent out a survey to all of those folks to say, okay, we're talking about bringing you into this case, conferencing space. What are the barriers? What are your dreams and desires about that? Just celebrating the evolution of that work. The more and more we talk, the better it gets.
247 One thing I did forget to mention, I apologize, is that the case conferencing work is just one of six what we're calling ecosystem investments that healthshare has made, and healthshare has invested $3.8 million in order to better understand and better create access for care for folks with substance use disorder or severe and persistent mental illness into proven programs or promising programs. And it's something that we're really proud of and believe is going to make a difference in the whole ecosystem of the people that we're serving and that we're all trying to serve together.
248 Thank you very much. Are we getting commissioner Moyers report from somebody else, or are we skipping that for today?
249 We're skipping that.
250 Okay, just confirming colleagues. We have about 15 minutes to take. Any questions on any of those three rapid fire sections that we just heard. If there are any comments that you have, clarifications that you need made to make sure that we have all the information we need, does anybody need to weigh in on these pieces? Councilor Novick you had said you might have a question for the next section. Is that the case?
251 I had a question for commissioner Singleton about about outreach, but she's not here to.
252 Hold to that. Counselor Smith, did you have something? Go right.
253 Ahead, ma'am.
254 Thank you so much, madam president. And this I love that whole idea of the app. I was like, that's.
255 Yeah, yeah.
256 That we need to have this health care stuff. And that's why I think we were all saying the same thing when we were saying once, I should just be doing everything so that they can have the services for all of this wraparound supports and that, you know, that there's we're not creating levels, different levels of support for different homeless people, because I would like to have access, gillian, to that app so that when and have my staff have access to it. So when people call and they call us asking about what to do, where are the where are the beds and all that kind of thing, I don't know if we have something like that. Skyler.
257 Yes, we have a rudimentary version, but we're actually partnering with our outreach team, uses the this app that they were just talking about, right?
258 I love it I love it. Keep doing that. Thank you.
259 Chair vega.
260 Peterson thank you, president pirtle-guiney. So I did it right this time.
261 Good work.
262 Thank you so much, adam, for the presentation. I just have a question. Have we identified the universe of folks within Multnomah county that would benefit by this? Because I'm just thinking about scaling. You know, it's a pilot right now, right. And just thinking about how we how we would scale this.
263 That's our biggest question. And why health share is really trying to look at it from a bigger perspective of we know that right now, this could serve about up to about ten people every two weeks, which is a great thing. And we know we need to scale this and have access the information that we're sharing it shouldn't. Some of it is really easy to access or should be easy to share, such as does somebody have the Oregon health plan? Who is their primary care physician? Do they have any upcoming appointments? Some of those things are we're coming to these case conferencing sessions with those questions in mind. And one of the things we're really trying to do is say, how do we answer those easy questions so that there's we don't have to wait two weeks to get those questions answered. And I think through what we're looking at, that as our scaling, part of part of our our way to scale this is there's always going to be a place for intensive care coordination, meetings of the right people, talking to the right people, that that will never go away. But what we can do is to create better access to information at earlier in somebody's stay, so that we wouldn't need to get to that point.
264 Thank you.
265 Councilor Novick.
266 Yes, thank you, madam president. Commissioner singleton, I just wanted to see if you could elaborate on your evaluation of the county's existing outreach systems, your plans to sort of reconstruct the outreach system. And also, mayor, since you're proposing additional outreach workers for the city, I'd love to hear some sort of back and forth between you on outreach and coordination thereof.
267 Let's start with the commissioner, and then mr. Mayor will go to you.
268 Thank you. And thank you for the question, councilor. I didn't get into outreach too much when I was trying to do my five minutes. So in addition to the outreach assessment work that we did as a county commission, which again included city of Portland, thank you again for making time to make sure we had all the data from the city as well. Part of what we came out of that with, from my perspective, was we actually need to create a system. And simultaneously, the homeless services department has been working on revamping outreach so that across the entire county there's zones, there's specific teams that will work in different geographic assignment, that they will have similar resources across, so that it's not kind of if you happen to run into a worker downtown, you get referrals. But if you run into a worker who has housing placement somewhere else, you get that really rightsizing that. So everybody has similar services. They will, of course, do referrals. The culturally specific providers will conduct outreach across geographies. I think the intention is to have I know you're talking about case conferencing. We used to do an outreach and engagement work group where outreach workers all met together to talk about different folks. I hope that's a part of this. I know there's still some fine tuning design that happens, but for me, that was always valuable because I could pull in folks who had expertise working with youth. When I went to into a camp and there were some young people there, I could also then work with, I think they're now at the city, but formerly the cascadia outreach team, who had a who could do really that behavioral health care. And so having those spaces for them to case conference and work together, I think is another component of what outreach can and should look like. I will say, and, mayor, you and I have talked about this a little bit as well, is I'm I'm worried about additional workers that aren't a part of that whole design. And I think it's really important that we create that with intentionality. And so if there are going to be additional workers, again, what is their role? Is it really just referring people or getting folks into shelter or to a day center, or are they a part of the housing placement outreach work? Are they a navigation worker? What is their role and what is the purpose and outcomes we expect of them? And how do they again, how are they a part of the whole system as opposed to another one off team?
269 Councilor does that answer your question?
270 I guess that answers my question. So I'd love to hear the mayor's answer to.
271 Mr. Mayor, please.
272 Thank you.
273 Councilor Novick. Let me start. Anna had presented at our steering oversight committee the shelter guidelines, and number two was safe and appropriate diversion. It's a very important component when operating a shelter. And I will start with two stories, and I'm going to turn it over to you to explain how our outreach workers will work. On Tuesday, we had a 72 year old woman on our streets who had lived there for ten years. She is now with her sister in oklahoma. That sister called sky this week crying and said, thank you. And so while she called sky, it was kim, our outreach worker, our five mighty outreach workers. Just yesterday, we got a young man back to his mother in nebraska. That mother called sky. She's getting all the credit for kim crying and thanked her. So those are the real tactical wins that we're getting. Housing doesn't always look like housing in our community. It happens to be housing wherever that need may be. And their loved one might be as well. But with these additional shelters, we're adding we need that opportunity for connection. Sky, why don't you explain the engagement zone and how those are? Because growing our shelter system without the appropriate connection to services is just sheltering our unsheltered. But we need to house our homeless.
274 Yeah, absolutely. And, commissioner Singleton, I know we've had this conversation a little bit before, but look forward to future conversations as well. I think we've been deeply involved in the conversation. A lot of that team is here who've been doing that work on an outreach strategy. I've been really grateful to be involved in those conversations for six plus months. So we really want to make sure that the city team is embedded in a lot of that coordination and that work. I mean, I think that was one of the reasons that they piloted a lot of that first phase of that app, the shelter availability tool, and we were really grateful for that partnership. I think our vision for our city outreach folks, kim, as the mayor mentioned, does incredible work. And we've asked her kind of what she's seeing on the ground, what are the gaps that she's seeing that she needs to really connect different people to resources? Some of that is standard street outreach, kind of traditional, really meeting folks where they are on the street, connecting with people who may, in some cases have been on the street for years or decades. She sees a deep need for housing placement. Just so many people, I think, are calling our street outreach team with needs that exist kind of beyond what that team was envisioned for. So retention services, housing placement, navigation. And I think in that aspect, there exists a really important conversation for all of us to have in terms of coordinating those geographic zones, but also what function different outreach workers will provide, something that folks might not be aware of. I know, commissioner Singleton, is, is that our outreach workers are the only outreach workers that are really working alongside police or our camp removal folks. So if I have a police officer who really needs to connect someone to resources, my outreach team is the only outreach team I can call. And that's the only outreach team. Those five people are the only outreach workers that those police officers can call. They also work alongside a lot of our other resources within the city. My biz workers who are working out in the field, water bureau workers, they call our outreach team. We coordinate with them. Pbot, for example, coordinates with our outreach team as well. So I think they're serving a lot of really specific needs in the community that weren't really being addressed by other outreach teams, and I think provide an important gap measure, frankly, that I think needs to be coordinated across the region. But the functionality, the day to day work that they're doing, I think is a little bit different, frankly, than what's happening in other outreach teams and really important work that's happening across the city. But we have, you know, we get calls every single day. I've worked with a lot of your district admins on folks. How do we connect these people to resources? And I think we need a better system to be able to coordinate direct access to different outreach providers. I have historically just really needed to rely on city outreach workers to do a lot of that work. So I think I look really forward to the geographic zones, I think would be a game changer. Coordinating between all those different groups would be a game changer, and maintaining some functionality. To the mayor's point, I mentioned it earlier with commissioner or councilor Ryan's question. The engagement zones that we are being asked to create around a new shelter. So we're standing up a lot of new shelter. We have some existing shelter, and we need to make sure that, folks, if the shelter closes in the morning, have access to resources that are nearby. And I think some of that will include shuttling folks to those resources. Some of that will just be conversation. I will just say my one of my outreach team members spent the last four months, every single day going to the moore street shelter for the salvation army for two hours every morning. And it breaks my heart that he had to do that every day of the week, Saturday and Sunday. And so I would love more capacity to be able to address that specific need. And so that's just one example.
275 Commissioner, did you want to follow up on that?
276 Yes. Thank you. I just want to follow up on a couple of pieces. One, I think it's really important that everybody is clear that all of our street outreach workers, as well as our shelter providers, if they have client assistance dollars, they also support people getting back to family, if that is their placement need. And it is out of out of town. So that is not something that needs to be a specific function. It happens all the time. I've had a lot of people back with their family in other countries. Even so, I just want that to be clear that that's not a specific function that just happens with 1 or 2 teams. The other piece I will say is, I think it's really important you're bringing up exactly what I would encourage you at least to look at the cost differential. I run a shelter that was just overnight only. We converted to 24 over seven while I was there, and we did that because of the queuing and folks not having a place to go during the day, people being stuck either waiting to get in or as they're getting out trying to figure out what to do. And so at some point, if you're putting all those dollars into more outreach, you're essentially paying for something that might actually be more expensive than leaving the shelter open 24 hours. And that was part of what we discovered is we were doing this work before. And again, these were city funded programs. So I do think there's a little bit of need to have folks get up to speed on what has historically happened and some of the why different decisions were made. I think a little bit of that has been lost in staff turnover over time and the shift of some of the work to the joint office, but there is a lot of history there. And lastly, I'll say the city of Portland actually used to call my program when I was running join to tell us about a week ahead of time before a sweep was going to happen and our team would go out and talk to people and either support them in relocating or engage them and help them get them into housing. Or sometimes we were looking for specific folks that we had housing opportunities for that if we lost them in a sweep, they would lose their housing opportunity. That stopped happening. And I think that we're now recreating things that actually functioned with existing outreach workers in a partnership in a way that we lost. Again, just I think, because of attrition. But I think we're recreating some things that we could actually do differently and maybe more cost effective.
277 Commissioner, if I may, I think really important. And I just want to give credit to the navigation outreach team that actually has been doing that work prior to a removal, and we actually have been engaging with them three different nonprofits for a couple of years now. So I think that work did continue really important and not the same as being able to work alongside police and offer that shelter in that moment if someone's there. So I think we really appreciate the navigation team, and I just wanted to share that.
278 Councilor Novick any follow up or can we move on?
279 You can move on.
280 Okay. Colleagues, there are three more people who have asked to speak. We are right at time right now, but I want to make sure you can all get a quick word in councilor Zimmerman.
281 Thanks. I think this is an important conversation. We do have folks go ahead of sweeps. I think we need to be very clear about that. And that's a really important that I don't think anybody argues with. I want to emphasize, though, that we've had to, at the city level, hire outreach workers because those that were funded under county contracts and refused to do the work. And that is a lot of the reason why, for whatever philosophical reason, these nonprofits have refused to do some of the stuff as it was when there was a police nearby or a different type of thing that sky's team would ask them to do. And so that's pretty troubling to me. I think that I think that both can exist. I don't want there to be conflict between both types, but I think if the county is not going to insist that their nonprofits support all different types of actions, then I do think we have to have this councilor Commissioner singleton, you noted earlier, I don't think we should place the prioritization decisions on the nonprofits. I, I agree with you. And then I would ask for a similar thing as I don't know that the nonprofit gets to tell us where outreach workers can and can't go. I think we're the ones paying the bill and we should drive that. So this is complicated, and I think that I appreciate that you brought up some of the history there in terms of how we used to with join, but we've we have created a, I'll call it, kind of a band-aid approach at this city. And, and I'm supporting the outreach worker piece here. But if we could get to a point where none of the nonprofits who are funded in this system can tell us no, we philosophically disagree with where the system is going. Three strikes. You're out with your contract. I'm comfortable if we do that, but I think we've kind of given a lot of power to the nonprofit providers in a lot of spaces to kind of drive this, and I think we're the ones who set the priorities. So I hope we also apply that to outreach. I appreciate that skye has built a stitch to a gap that we had, because police should not be the primary thing, but when police are there, having an outreach worker makes their interaction better, I think.
282 Thank you. Councilor councilor Morillo.
283 Thank you, council president councilor Commissioner singleton, I just wanted to say thank you for saying that because it definitely reflects what I see on the ground when I talk with unhoused people in my district. I, I think as the city councilor That has experienced homelessness, other people on on the streets who are currently on the streets and trust me with their stories in a different way sometimes, and I just had an experience last week where I was talking with a youth advocate who's unhoused, who's 24 years old, in a wheelchair on the streets, who helps other youth get connected to services and is frankly brilliant and doing a lot of the work that I think sometimes other outreach workers do. But they've taken it upon themselves to help out other youth on the streets and get them connected. And something that happened was that, and I've seen their campsite numerous times, you know, it's a small group of people who are under 24 years old who have tents, and it's about three tents for maximum, and their campsite is usually very clean, like, I never really see garbage or anything. And this person had a job training lined up that then got interrupted that they missed because of a sweep, because they had to relocate that day. They lost a they lost the opportunity to do that job training and potentially get hired. And then they were frantically messaging me because they needed help and they needed to relocate. They needed food. They needed water that week. And so I do think that there is a missing link, and I've seen that very personally and directly with my constituents in district three, even those that are unhoused. And it's something that does need to change. So I appreciate you naming that. I also want to push back a little bit on councilor Zimmerman's statement, because part of the reason that we contract out with experts is because they know more than we do on what people on the ground are experiencing, and so they work directly with these populations in a way that we up here on the dais, we don't all the time. And so I think that there is a push and pull where we have to have the broad vision about what we are doing as legislators with our city. And we have to listen to the experts on the ground who work with these vulnerable populations, who know what's working and who know what's not. And so, yeah, I'll just leave it at that. But I, I'm very concerned about how sweeps are happening in our city. I think it's pretty harmful. And the amount of I can't tell you the amount of times that I've talked to unhoused people who are ready to get back in the job market, are fully capable of doing so, need help getting back into housing, and then that process is interrupted by a sweep. So thank you.
284 Councilor Kanal can you do it in one minute or less?
285 Yes, madam president, I just wanted to ask if I could follow up with the mayor and Portland solutions. I'm a little troubled to be given two presentations on the same topic, where one time I'm talking about the outreach workers that I earlier said very positive things about because of the argument that it would prevent the use of police officers in these conversations and the redirection of police resources to the things that all of us in Portland want them to go to, you know, high priority calls, active shooters, all that sort of thing. And then to have the argument be given that the main reason that they're viable and important is because they work with police. So I want to understand that a little bit better. Before I say another strong statement either way on it, but I just want to note, I'm a little troubled to get two pieces of information that seem contradictory at first glance. In two presentations less than 48 hours apart, so thank you for.
286 That.
287 Councilor, if I just may. That's an excellent point, and I'm sorry if that if I conflated those pieces. So the majority of what our outreach team does is not next to police, but it is one function that I think is not provided by other outreach workers. So I was giving it as an example. I apologize for completing those.
288 Councilor Avalos, did you have a very quick announcement?
289 Yes. Thank you. It kind of goes into the spirit of what councilmember Morillo was just saying. And I think that as leaders and policy makers who make decisions on behalf of vulnerable communities, I would really encourage all of us to make our best efforts to stay grounded and connected to the people that we're trying to serve, so that our decisions are actually informed by, informed by them, not simply on behalf of them. And so to that end, in one hour I will be attending cultivate initiatives meet and greet. It is hosted outside of menlo park safe rest village at 122nd and Burnside. This is a community event to build bridges with our unhoused neighbors. There's going to be food, music, and a petting zoo, so I hope you join me.
290 Woo! Let's go!
291 I'm excited to join you there. Mr. Mayor, would you like to start off our series of closing words?
292 Well, thank you.
293 Impromptu. But yes, you know, I came into this job wondering what the results were going to be and how hard we were going to have to push. I must say that it's getting easier with the conversations that we have hard conversations. But I'm I'm grateful for the chair and I'll acknowledge we've had some very difficult conversations. But I must say that they're yielding results that are benefiting portlanders. And I want to give jillian some credit. We had some very difficult conversations, and then anna and the team, I like the information we're getting and I see I see progress and I just appreciate the partnership and looking forward to working with the commission and with the council to really care for all portlanders, which is really at the heart of what we really want to do. Thank you for this opportunity. Council president.
294 Mr. Mayor, chair, would you like to make any closing remarks?
295 Yeah. Thank you, madam president. So, you know, I just really appreciate this time. I hope people felt like we had more time for conversation. It wasn't just so much information. We were going to try to build on that. I think the conversations that we are going to have, again, like we have a lot of work to do on both these bodies for our budget, getting ready for it to pass our budgets in June. But I'm really looking forward to this conversation that's going to be critically important about getting to a shared vision, a shared plan, and ways that we can invest most strategically with the with the resources we have to address our homelessness crisis. So I'm really looking forward to that work. Thank you.
296 Thank you, mr. Mayor and chair vega peterson for presenting some information on your ideas today. Thank you to our staff for bringing us the quarterly updates so that we can all hear at the same time, with the same words, how things are looking within our joint system. Colleagues, I appreciated having time for discussion today. I hope you all did too. I appreciate those of you who made that request. If this was helpful, we can do this again next time. We'll have another quarterly update in a few month, and I hope that we can use these quarterly updates as an opportunity to help provide some guidance to the steering and oversight committee, and to our mayor and our chair and our committee chair on how we can move toward that more unified aligned system that many of you talked about today. We know that we don't have enough resources to serve all of portlanders who are struggling. All of the Multnomah county residents who are struggling. And the more effectively we can work together, the better. I think we can serve all of our constituents. So thank you for putting in the time today. And with that one minute early, I will close our joint work session. Thank you all very much.