Music Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Welcome, everybody. Good afternoon. Thank you for being here. I will now call to order the September 17th, 2024, meeting of Social Services and Public Safety Committee. First, we will start with an approval of the July 2nd, 2024, committee summary. Are there any additions or corrections? All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? And that motion passes. Next, we have our annual Office of Homelessness Prevention and Intervention update. and I would like to welcome our homelessness prevention manager, Jeff here at Therese. Thank you for joining us today for this update. Thank you. Good afternoon and thank you for having me. Thank you. All right. So we're going to go ahead and start with just some of the basics as a refresher, this time with a couple of positive updates. So as most of you would know at this point, the Office of Homelessness Prevention and Intervention was created in 2014 as a recommendation out of their then-Mayor Gray's for the Greater Good Report. A need had been identified for an entity to serve that could provide the capacity and infrastructure to support the efforts of the local homelessness response system. At the same time, through ordinance was the creation of an annual set-aside that created the Innovative and Sustainable Solutions Fund. We used that funding to pilot innovative programming within the community, replicate best practice models to see what might be successful within our community. That had been a fixed $750,000 annual commitment until a recent ordinance change. And in 25, it became a percentage of the previous fiscal year's revenues, effectively doubling the fund for this fiscal year. Another positive aspect of progress is that the Office of Homelessness has become a staff of three. In fiscal year 24, we had an HMIS data analyst position that was funded. So we are happy to expand our staffing. As such a small staff, we don't have a large capacity to do direct service work and primarily serve as a coordination and planning office. So some of the responsibilities or duties that this office would carry are going to be demonstrated here, grouped into the general areas of coordination, facilitation, education, and advocacy. You'll probably find this slide to be a little bit busy and text heavy, a representation of the extensive duties this office holds. Shortly after the office was introduced, it became the local continuum of care lead agency as well as the local homeless management information system or HMIS lead, fulfilling many of the duties required of our community by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. That would include things like operation of a coordinated entry system, our mechanism for outreach assessment and housing placement, conducting our annual point in time count, and management of our homeless management information system or client records system. Beyond the requirements of HUD, this office also fills just the general community and government needs addressing the issue of homelessness. Oftentimes this is going to be things like coordinating system plans larger than any one organization, such as our annual response for winter weather, but also things like engaging the public advocates and officials like yourself in making recommendations regarding system gaps and issues facing the homeless population. Typically, we also provide you with some kind of update regarding LFUCG's investment in addressing homelessness. This time around, we're going to focus on the period between fiscal years 20 and fiscal year 25. During this period, LFUCG has invested over $44 million to address homelessness from local and federal sources. That includes several increases specifically within fiscal year 25. We saw approximately a 25% increase to the annual funding committed to our emergency shelter operations. We also again saw an increase to the Innovative and Sustainable Solutions Fund, almost at 100% increase to $1.4 million in fiscal year 25, and an allocation of $2 million for our winter response. Just a couple of minor notes on this slide, there's definitely still some funding to be determined within fiscal year 25, such as through the Continuum of Care program. my office is currently working on our annual application for that federal grant source at the moment. Additionally, I would note that for fiscal years 22 through 24, our annual operating budget for the Innovative and Sustainable Solutions Fund had been funded via ARPA dollars, where typically it would come from the general fund. Next, we're going to provide some updated data from our Lex count, or annual point-in-time count. This is a count that is conducted annually in the last 10 days of January each year. It is conducted under guidelines set forth by HUD, and as such, we tend to have very consistent and reliable data from this source, which lends itself to longitudinal analysis. It provides a snapshot of what homelessness looks like in our community on any given night, but also allows us to understand trends within our data. of note within the 2024 results we had only a nominal increase in the number of persons approximately 10 persons or a 1.2 percent increase but there are some other trends of note for example there was a substantial change in the number of persons identified as unsheltered on the evening of the count increasing from 38 persons in 2023 to 82 persons in 2024 This is also consistent with data that we collected in other areas of the count. For example, with additional seasonal capacity, the system saw an increase of 6% in the number of shelter beds available on the evening of the 24 count as compared to 2023. However, 2% fewer persons resided in shelter on the evening of this year's count. Similarly, we saw that within our unsheltered population, about 50% of individuals were a part of multi-person households. We know that we have a shelter system presently that is highly segregated and often high barrier. Typically, those shelter resources are segregated on the basis of gender and household compensation. And we currently lack a shelter that can accommodate couples without minor children. Additionally, about 49% of those that were identified as unsheltered reported being homeless for the first time, potentially not knowing of the resources available within the community. Other trends of note included a decrease in single adult homelessness, as well as veterans experiencing homelessness. Persons and families, however, increased this year, returning to levels seen in 2022. In 2023, we saw a record low in the number of persons and families, the lowest level in the history of the LexCount event. So we really kind of just returned to the levels that we were at in 2022. As the LexCount represents a static data set focusing on one night of the calendar year, it's helpful to understand the scope of homelessness that we would see on an annual basis. The COC's Longitudinal Systems Analysis, or LSA, tells us that our local system serves closer to 5,000 persons annually across all different service component types. We also each year provide you with an update regarding LFUCG's homeless encampment standard operating procedure and camps where we have conducted cleanups. addressing homeless encampments this is going to represent all of the public property cleanups that were conducted by lfucg for which we directly incurred costs in fiscal year 24 we completed 28 camp removals that included 18 unique locations with multiple sites that saw repeated encampments For example, 15 cleanups were tied to six emphasis areas. LFUCG maintains a small number of locations where we have had frequent and repeated issues with encampments that maintain permanent signage that alerts people to the fact that there is limitations in residing in those locations and that they may be cleared without notice. However, we still typically try to respond in a compassionate way, and if we know that there is going to be a routine cleanup of those sites, still making efforts to reach and notify individuals. Both the total cost and the average per cleanup cost increased in fiscal year 24, with a total cost of nearly $52,000 and an average cleanup cost just under $2,000 each. For some context, we conducted 25 cleanups in fiscal year 23 with both a lower total cost and a lower average cost. Unfortunately, these issues are likely to continue as we see the implementation of anti-camping provisions included in House Bill 5. We are aggressively and assertively trying to pursue additional shelter options, currently working on a shelter feasibility study with EHI consultants. But as you all know, the establishment of permanent shelter takes time and is not able to immediately meet the needs of all persons that are experiencing homelessness. In terms of outcomes related to service efforts within active encampments, the majority of camps that we cleared showed no signs of active encampments. Would involve things like the routine cleaning of the emphasis areas or clean up of debris from abandoned camps. We had only nine camps that were active that were worked toward removal. Within those nine camps, a total of 17 persons were engaged, and we continue to see about a 50% success rate. rate. Of those that did engage nine persons, we had significant steps towards permanent housing with four individuals achieving permanent housing prior to camp removal. Where permanent housing was not achievable on that timeline, there were still significant steps like connecting persons with identifying documents, medical insurance, or access to treatment. Still, eight persons declined services and voluntarily relocated we've been again communicating with our counterparts in Louisville about once a quarter they've recently began to track their success in encampment outreach efforts and are seeing similar levels of engagement than we are moving on to an update on our strategic plan we are We are currently approaching the end of our strategic plan with this year and 25 to go, and a little over 50% of those recommended action steps having been completed or ongoing. Those are structured into the overall areas of community outreach and engagement, preventing homelessness, policy and advocacy, and expanding both funding sources and permanent supportive housing. examples of this work currently underway this office recently completed the development of our onboarding curriculum for case managers that is an online learning management system aimed at helping to decrease the training and development burden on individual organizations we see a very high level of turnover with staff in this field which oftentimes would prompt either the provider or an entity like my office to engage in training continually over the same key concepts as we lose people within our field. Another effort has been to revamp our local assessment tool used for our coordinated entry system. That is, again, the mechanism that we use to assess persons and place them into available housing resources. We are moving away from a widely adopted tool called the VI-SFDAT, which has fallen out of favor in developing a local tool better suited to our needs. This would give us a pathway to hopefully improve the assessment of acuity needs, give a pathway for assessors to provide some input on those needs, but also focus in on the factors that our local system and providers feel are most key in understanding risk factors related to homelessness. As I mentioned, we're also in the process of working on a shelter and transitional housing feasibility study. That is something where we have worked with EHI consultants on aspects of their affordable housing needs assessment related to homelessness, giving them a strong foundational understanding of our system and local efforts as we transition into the shelter-specific study. That study is expected to be released in spring of next year. Another area of continued focus is development of a housing flex fund. What we find is where we have oftentimes long waits for grant funded housing programs, there might be pathways that people could more rapidly exit homelessness if they had access to flexible dollars to meet more nominal needs. That could be something like the ability to pay fees, rental or utility arrears, maybe even costs related to transportation or job-related needs. So this would be an effort to try to see if by providing flexible dollars that aren't available through other financial assistance programs that we might be able to rapidly transition some folks into permanent housing. we've also talked in the past about how there is a challenge in identifying affordable housing options even when there are things like vouchers or rental assistance that are available to remedy this we funded recently a program with the lexington housing authority to recruit and incentivize landlords to participate in housing assistance programs they have now identified staff who are currently undergoing training and are going to be meeting with our office next week to begin a deeper dive into our programming and help us to recruit landlords for participation another area in which we've had some struggles is in the capacity of our provider organizations coming out of the covet 19 pandemic a lot of our providers are struggling with capacity to meet meet increased needs in the area of housing with limited options for scaling up things like staffing and funding. This office has made a concerted effort to attempt to help build that capacity of our providers by assertively trying to outreach to new providers and applicants for available funding. For example, as we currently work through our annual continuum of care competition. Are you, you're almost done, aren't you? I'm almost done. This is the last slide. Go ahead and finish. Thank you. So we've provided multiple layers of technical assistance aimed at trying to encourage new applicants to that project. That includes an informational webinar and scheduled office hours. We've additionally used local dollars through the Innovative and Sustainable Solutions Fund to also work with smaller or newer organizations and help pilot them on local dollars, work with them on things like invoicing and grants to increase their knowledge, experience, and capacity to take on later funding opportunities from state and federal sources. Questions? Thank you so much, Mr. Heron, for this. I'm sure there will be plenty of questions from my colleagues. Starting with Councilmember Plumman. Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Mr. Heron. That was a lot of good information, a lot of activity on. And Councilmember Thien and I have been on the HPI board now for a long time. And we've really watched these good things happen over time, a lot of progress, so congratulations. In your presentation today, you talk about the cleanups, and 15 or 54% were tied to six emphasis areas. Could you define that, the six emphasis areas? Yeah. So where we have areas that we might see repeated encampments, our policy does allow us to designate a limited number of emphasis areas. Those are listed on our website, but also would include permanent signage at those locations that advises people that camping is not permitted and that that area could be cleared without notice, making sure that people don't unnecessarily lose their belongings, but that we have a pathway to quickly address issues that might arise in those locations. Okay. Great. Thank you. That's my question. Thank you. Council Member Savigny. Thank you, Chair, and thanks again, Jeff, for the presentation. And I witness all the things that you do out there in person sometimes, and I do really appreciate the efforts that you make. There was an article that Councilmember Sheehan showed with me earlier, about maybe a month ago, that was about how Boston was being super progressive. and they had basically staff to help people with vouchers, because I know I've met people who were housed in one of our temporary shelters who had vouchers and who were struggling. And they had basically a program where they were, I would just basically say expediters. I mean, they were basically helping someone who was homeless find a home, and they were interacting with landlords. They were making sure that everything was done and the paperwork was done quickly to try to move things along. And at a place where housing was a difficult thing to begin with, they were more successful at placing vouchers than any other city in an expensive city. So I just thought that was creative, and I didn't know if any of the programs that you mentioned, if there's room for something like that or if you think there's a partner that might be good for that. Yeah, there's several things that we have funded recently that are going to kind of tie into that area. The Landlord Partnership Program with LHA primarily kind of serves some functions in that area. Right now it's going to be one liaison that's going to be working to recruit landlords. there is one-time payments that can be given as incentivization to participate a limited damages mitigation fund but also just someone to help landlords become familiar with paperwork and processes someone that they could reach out to and say I don't understand how to complete this form can you help walk me through it so we are taking administrative steps in that area definitely if we have success with that program we could potentially expand that by providing some more frontline type staff that might be able to help conduct housing searches, housing navigation in the field. We also utilize the housing advocates and Commissioner Lanter's office to help serve some of that function, just helping people to identify when they do have a voucher or some kind of assistance available, who might accept that, who might work with particular barriers on a household's background. We also had recently funded an intensive case management program with Independence Place that works with individuals that would have disabilities, typically complicated physical and mental health issues, and helps them identify and pursue all different pathways to housing, whether that be through our coordinated entry system or some other form of assistance. So we do have some work in that area, but definitely some potential to also expand. Thank you, and thank you very much. Thank you, Chair. Thank you very much. Vice Mayor Wu. Thank you, Chair, for recognizing me. Thank you, Mr. Herron, for your update and overall the work that you do. Looking at the five-year strategic plan that goes from 21 to 25, so we're about three and a half years into it. And it looks like you all are halfway through your recommendations in terms of being completed. Are you all on schedule with these recommendations? And are you facing any particular challenges to implementing those? Yeah, so unfortunately there are going to be some items which are likely not going to be fully achieved within the five year period. Some of that has to do with the level of investments that were recommended for those particular interventions. For example, piloting of a prevention program that would take millions of dollars. As we've seen that the housing stabilization program that we operated with coronavirus relief dollars spent through significant sums of money very quickly. And we haven't yet been able to identify a sustainable source to fund a program at that level. That's where I'm trying to find options that get us kind of to the same results while maybe being at a more feasible scale for us, like trying to introduce the Housing Flex Fund that might kind of have a similar effect in terms of either preventing or rapidly exiting persons from homelessness. And can you talk a little bit about how you all, when you came up with the 55 recommendations and actions, how you all prioritize and order them? um so i was not in my position at the time that the strategic plan was first developed had worked under polyuretic when that was developed and in terms of prioritizing largely as i came into my role in 2022 it's been a matter of identifying what we kind of have the capacity to implement now try to complete as many of the action steps that we can and then trying to find new strategies for approaching those that we currently lack the resources to implement. And then what does the timeline look like for building the next strategic plan? So that's probably going to be something that I'm going to be starting around the beginning of the calendar year to make sure that we have plenty of time to engage stakeholders and develop the plan. A special emphasis being placed on how we can revisit action steps that maybe haven't been fully achieved, but then also looking at the ways in which our landscape has changed since the pandemic. The plan was developed primarily in 21, released at the start of 2020, and released at the start of 21. So at the time that it was developed, a lot of things were different about the work that we do. For example, the affordable housing challenges have increased, And unfortunately, additional legislation has been damaging to the work that we do. Thank you very much. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Council Member Ellinger. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Mr. Heron, for this update. You said 825 for this 24, and is this from when you do the count in January? That is that through HUD? Is that how that works? Because I'm always trying to figure out that that 825 when the number that we also heard from a group of people, I think the Central Kentucky Housing Homeless Initiative, the Catholic Action Center, and the Street Voice Council, their number comes in over 2,400, which is like three times that number. How do we correlate those two numbers? Yeah, I'll preface that by saying that I'm in no way involved with the count that's conducted by the Central Kentucky Housing and homeless initiative, have no direct knowledge of their methodology. So I can only kind of give general overview information, but largely it's going to be the difference between assessing literal homelessness versus a broader lens of housing insecurity. For example, there are going to be persons included in that other count that would be in situations like where they are doubled up, perhaps staying in a motel on their own funds, or some other kind of marginal housing situation. which HUD would not include as literal homelessness. They also would be looking at things like the number of persons that are in recovery programs, where those persons may or may not be experiencing homelessness. It's not a requirement for participation in that program. So while there's definitely utility in looking at the broader issue of housing instability, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. comparison so they are going to have different data thank you and then in your strategic plan you said you've had 55 recommendations actions and 24 28 recommendations completed what do we still have of those that we still have to work on that will be in the and it was kind of right up in our priority list i would say the largest area of unmet actions would be in the expansion of permanent supportive housing permit supportive housing as a model is highly effective and creates cost savings for the community with people having lower utilization of costly emergency services but it has been a challenge for us to be able to identify funding to scale it to a level that we truly need for example our annual funding through the innovative and sustainable solutions fund by ordinance is not supposed to be used for ongoing operations of any particular program shelter or organization so it'd be something that we could potentially use in conjunction with other funding like funding through the office of affordable housing which we're looking at right now but it's not good as a standalone source to continually long-term fund permanent supportive housing units because typically we would only fund something for a period of about one to three years and try to transition it to another source so really we just lack the ability of a sustainable source that we can scale up permanent supportive housing to the full need that the community has and then one last thing um we received an email going forward because last year from november to through march we had the facility there that we we erected that was crossed from uh the hope center and then the y but that's my understanding we won't be providing that this year what's our our and i am is it all right for me to ask that at this point or we're still in the process or I'm going to be talking with you later today about the same thing, so that's fine. Okay. Yeah, unfortunately, we had a very highly successful season-long approach last year. We managed at that one temporary shelter alone to serve over 1,000 unique persons during the course of the season. And we saw that it was serving more than just persons who were entering from a literal homeless situation. About 50% of persons were already in a homeless situation when entering that shelter. The other 50% were coming from settings like institutional stays or even directly out of a rental unit. It was a good safety net for our community. However, the YMCA was not willing to allow us to return to their property for that project again this year, which has created some complications. We've had difficulties in identifying a subsequent location that would be adequately zoned and where we don't face significant amounts of opposition. also struggling to identify an operator for that shelter the hope center finding it to be infeasible for them to operate without that close proximity to their existing campus so at this time lfucg is looking to contract with motels to secure a block of rooms for the entire season and is working to develop partnerships with a number of organizations to deliver supportive services to help maintain persons through the season but ideally also move many to permanent housing thank you my time's up but i do have one more follow-up for that but i'll come back thank you thank you and council member james brown thank you chair and thank you jeff for your presentation and your your work on this on this issue um i think council member elegant touched based on it somewhat and that's expanding permanent support of housing. If funding to create and to help that issue is challenging, what more can we do to help make sure that that happens? Because it seems like that is a long-term sustainable answer to addressing homelessness. Yeah, I think definitely we have some ability locally that we could make moves to address that. one consideration would be now that we're looking at a higher level of investment in the innovative and sustainable solutions fund, if we wanted to revisit that ordinance to potentially remove that limitation on not doing some kind of ongoing funding towards a particular project. Because right now what we don't want to do is launch a large scale pilot house persons for one to three years and then take the housing away when there's no longer funding available. Additionally, you know, just as we have done an investment in the current fiscal year's budget to address winter warming, it might be an ideal for us to look at if we don't modify that ordinance to also make an allocation that would directly go to development of permanent supportive housing. Okay. And without adjusting the ordinance, and I see Polly in the audience, Is there a way that we can support or the Affordable Housing Board can support a project that does do that? Is it, could the funding go towards a developer or development that is designed to be just that and not transitional housing but permanent supportive housing? Absolutely. And that's something where we're very fortunate to have Polly back with us where she really understands the work that we do, the needs of our population, and we've had several internal meetings already since she's rejoined LFUCG about how we can do things like use funding through Innovative and Sustainable Solutions Fund to help pilot some of the supportive services in combination with those affordable housing dollars to get to that end goal. We already have some potential projects identified that we're trying to look and explore further how that might operate on the practical level, but we do see that as one of our primary avenues to achieving the goal. okay one but just for net exploring that and i agree now form a two strategic plan is there a regional component in their and no i know i'm the funding that comes to fake county needs to stay in funding count and pay a county and address the folks that that live here but i wonder if there's any coordination with uh... contiguous counties about uh... initiatives they may have a project they may have to better do a regional approach to addressing the issue of homelessness. Is that part of it? So our current strategic plan only focuses on Lexington, Fayette County. There's not a larger regional effort that's included there. We do participate in a number of different platforms that we coordinate with our regional partners and the surrounding areas. But it's something that we haven't taken a formal strategy to address. some of the things that we've done more informally is working with some of the providers that we've connected with trying to help support them in terms of if they want to try to scale up the funding that they are receiving and the efforts that they're able to implement so we can create a system that serves more than just Lexington because we do see a number of persons that come here from other areas. Typically that's going to be roughly about 10% of the population that we serve here. but it could potentially fluctuate. I definitely could share stories of folks being transported from communities and dropped off at the Hope Village without so much as a phone call in advance and definitely where that resource might not have been the best fit. So I know it does happen, and we do have some relationships that we can work towards that, but at present we would lack an organized strategic plan that is on the regional level. Yeah, and I think that's one way to try to address this issue, not to just lessen the burden in Fayette County, but to just strengthen the whole region. And I just know recently in the news I heard about improvements or good things about Jasmine County and then also in Clark County in regards to their sheltering situation and what they're doing. And I think if we can, I guess being the regional leader, help lead that conversation and guide it, I think it could be successful, so I'm interested in that. But thank you again, and thank you, Chair. Thank you. Council Member Plumman. Thank you, Chair, also for allowing me to ask another question. I was curious, because House Bill 5 went into effect on July 1. Can you give us an update? Are we doing any of that fining right now? Is there any resource if someone does get fined that they could be assisted? Obviously, I think it's kind of ludicrous that it even happened, to expect homeless people to pay this fine. But I just didn't know what an update is for Fayette County, or locally. Yeah, definitely it is unfortunate legislation and something that we're all trying to really quickly adjust to understanding what it means at the practical level and how we can try to scale up services and resources to try to address, trying to presently work with the Fayette County Attorney's Office to understand how we might ensure connection with services for persons that go through the court like right now one of the barriers has been that we don't have always an advance notice of when those cases might appear on the docket so it's not truly effective to have an outreach staff member just in court all day every day but we're exploring all different kinds of avenues for how we can ensure that if persons are cited that they do have that service connection that can potentially move them towards more sustainable housing unfortunately you know we didn't really know exactly what level of citations that we would see in advance and it definitely has created some situations where there are increased reports of of activity that needs to be addressed have there been any citations to date there have been citations to my knowledge that would probably be a better question for law enforcement to directly answer but I believe there was a recent open records request where there was approximately 30 of those citations for the first two months of July and August okay great thanks for the update thank you chair thank you councilmember Ellinger I'm sorry just a second yeah yeah well you can go ahead councilmember Sheehan thank you chair for recognizing me because I'm not on this committee. Thank you so much for your presentation, of course, all the work that you do. Speaking of the court systems, I know we have several different programs within our court systems, like our mental health court, the drug court, the juvenile court. I have heard, but have not verified this myself, that in other locations, maybe outside of Kentucky, that there are programs for folks experiencing homelessness that have a specialized kind of program within the court system. Is that something that has been talked about here at all that you know of? So definitely familiar with some of those programs. For example, one of our primary outreach staff comes from a community where they had such a court. The thing presently that we're seeing is they had a much higher level of those cases that they were seeing, making it a little bit more feasible to implement. That is something that as we continue to look at data and trends, it could be a viable approach for us to potentially implement. Definitely something that's been a part of conversations that I've had initially with the Fayette County Attorney's Office, just to kind of understand what would their capacity be to take that on. But it is something that we are looking at, and if we find that the level of need is there, it's definitely a potentially viable pathway. Yeah, I'm thinking that we might see more cases considering the state law, But, you know, LFUCG has contributed to some of these court programs, either through a pilot or some sustained funding. So that might be something that we would want to discuss and look over for the future. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Council Member Ellinger. Thank you, Chair. Mr. Herron, following back up, you said there was 1,000 people used that facility in the wintertime? Yes, 1,000 unique persons. many of whom did not stay long term i would say a large number of those persons had shorter term stays that would be only a few nights kind of a better representation would be that the average nightly capacity of that shelter we had about 135 persons there on an average night at the peak during the polar vortex in january it would have been a peak of 221 persons I guess and that's my concern is if we're going to be doing 75 hotel beds how are we going to decide who because it looks like more than 75 is going to be needed then then that number we are hoping that when we finalize contracts that we'll have more than 75 rooms that initial number was based off of what we believed that the budget would sustain but also what the capacity of our partners to provide services would be able to maintain we have been able to identify some vendors that are going to be working with us to give us some discounts that help us really maximize that effort and so we should definitely be ending up with more than that number of rooms but we're going to have to be creative we're going to have to do things like potentially especially during more inclement periods of weather double persons up making sure that there's kind of some outward expectations at the front end of what people can expect and it may be that during inclement weather you may have a roommate also we are going to have to have some established priorities in terms of focusing on more vulnerable populations first like those with minor children those with more significant medical issues and knowing that we are going to have to closely monitor our activities throughout the season to see what we could do to meet the needs I I definitely think that we are going to have a smaller capacity than we did with the Hope Village, which is why we really wanted to return to that model. What was the cost of the Hope Village for the time? So the overall funding that went towards the Hope Village was through two phases at $1.76 million. There has largely been a processing of all of the invoices. there's a little bit of funding that currently remains for some final site restoration but i would say we probably saved about 300 250 000 on that overall budget coming in closer to 1.5 million and that just leads me to my final question or where do we stand because when we went through fund balance last year we we had a feasibility study i think of 200 000 where do we stand on that feasibility study and when will we be getting that because we're going to be coming back to fund balance in the end of october november and looking to possibly because you if if we keep doing this this temporary stuff at some point we it looks like we're going to have to come up with a permit facility and and where do we stand on that so um that shelter feasibility study is just now beginning and won't have the results available for this year's fund balance conversation it's expected to release its results in spring of next year it's the same team that's conducting the affordable housing needs assessment which they're currently wrapping up and intend to present to you all very soon and they have gotten considerable knowledge and information from us through that process and we are in the process of getting them kicked off on the activities that are specific to the shelter study but it's definitely not going to be available for the fund balance conversation I share your concern with the level of temporary investments. As we looked at sites for the winter, we tried to look at sites that had viability for purchase and permanent development. But unfortunately, we encountered significant barriers and were not able to achieve that. So it won't be done by, you say, not until the spring? Correct. So it's been almost a year then since we initially did that request for the feasibility study, was it not? So that the money, yes, was committed during the fund balance conversation, took some time to go ahead and get that item through council. And again, they are wrapping up the affordable housing needs assessment, which I understand is a little bit later than they intended to finish that study. Okay. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Mr. Aaron. Thank you. Council Member Fogle. Thank you, Chair. Do we have the data of how many families with children and how many people who had medical issues was awarded a room at the hotel last year? Do we have that data? We do have some baseline data, the caveat being that we can see fluctuations and what the previous year or previous year's data might show could differ from the presentations that we see within our system this year. The item that you're going to see from me later this afternoon in work session, we are taking a remaining balance that we had from some of our ARPA dollars and going ahead and pre-funding a hotel program that's specific to our families with minor children. So that way we can maximize the $2 million commitment for this year to address the other populations and would already have a substantial dedicated funding amount for our families with minor children. Okay. It's definitely going to be something that we have some information on, but we may find that we have to make some adjustments. So that question was just leading up to if we have 75 rooms available, and we know the children and the families and the medical will be the priority, that doesn't leave very many rooms for the unsheltered with that 3,000 plus people that are on the streets. So the families should come out of a different pot of funding and rooms leaving the rest of that to fall into the general response. And right now we are tentatively going to be contracting for closer to about 95 rooms. The final number contingent upon how those agreements come to fruition and what's ultimately approved. Yeah, cuz I'm pretty sure myself and the rest of the council is really worried about that 1100 Fayette County school kids who are, that is a proven fact, that are homeless. So that is wearing in me. And then the next question that I had for you, and thank you for the hard work. I know that we have been piecing things together. And so it is really a little bit more difficult than what my fellow colleagues can even imagine when you're out there seeing it from day to day. So my biggest worry is, and I want to touch on the feasibility study that came before council. I know we have the data piece, right? Because we all talk about the data and how many people are in need. So the other piece of that feasibility would be like locating a piece of land to build this permanent structure on. So it's going to take until the spring to locate that land. So I'm just trying to get that wrapped in my head about why this feasibility study is taking so long. And it won't be ready for the fund balance. And I know that it's almost a hurry up and wait game, but this has been a crisis for so long. Way before I came on council, it was a crisis. It's gotten worse over time. And so I just didn't understand why it would take, because this should be like an emergency situation for the city, for the council, for us to dig in and make sure we won't see those headlines. I'm going to say this until we have a permanent structure. The headlines where someone is freezing in their car or freezing on the sidewalk or the lady from the Salvation Army a couple of years ago that froze just a block away from the Salvation Army in the streets. That is our responsibility to do something about this. So this is not geared towards you because I see the work that you're doing and that the office is doing. And it's not for my fellow council members, but it is for us. So if not us, who? Who's going to get this done? I definitely understand and share the concern. Again, I spent a significant amount of time during the spring and summer months trying to work towards establishment of a permanent location, which unfortunately did not pan out. The feasibility study was always outlined to have results that were produced in the spring. We had to go through two rounds of an RFP process before we identified and contracted with the vendor. And again, they are completing a previous study as they begin our study. I understand that definitely I share the concern that this is a need that has been ongoing, and I've tried to, as you mentioned, piece it together and do the best that we can with what we presently have as we work towards that goal, to the extent of spending my Christmas vacation and 24-hour contact with providers, trying to assertively locate and move persons into shelter, motels, any resources that we can secure. We've done a tremendous job at that level, but it really is going to take the establishment of some new permanent shelter resources within our community. We want to keep permanent housing as the primary form of investment, but until then, knowing the challenges that we face with affordable housing, it's such a lengthy process for someone to move into housing that we need immediate short-term options that are available to persons. A lot of our existing shelters operating medium to high barrier or just simply not being able to accommodate some of the compositions and issues that they're being presented with. It's an urgent need. Well, I want to give a shout out to Bluegrass Navigators while we're at this point. And Madam Chairperson and Council Members, I would like to shoot the thought just went out of my head. But I just, I'll come back because it is something really important that I wanted to get to. I'm asking that we asked Mr. Ed Holmes to present to us. He is, I believe that company is the one that's doing the feasibility study and maybe he can bring us up to speed on exactly where he is in that feasibility study. That's what I wanted to say. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Anybody else? Well, I wanted to say a few words. First of all, I wanted to say thank you for all of your hard work. I think you have one of the most challenging positions at LFUCG, and I know you hear from my constituents and me a lot, and I really appreciate all your hard work on an issue that is just very, very complicated. In some of my investigations and traveling to other cities, one way that some cities are approaching the issue of homelessness and a lot of folks on the streets is with street outreach workers. And I know that you are doing that in partnership with other agencies as much as you can, but I think I've heard you say you wish you could have more of that. What is the possibility of really amping up our street outreach to engage with these people over and over again to try to get them the resources that they need? Yeah. So we've continued to go back to the Innovative and Sustainable Solutions Fund to fund street outreach several times as we view it as an essential component of our system. Where we have that restriction on the ordinance to not continually fund the same project, We've done significant modifications to each round of that program to try to push the model forward. The largest issue is going to be just the sheer level of scale that we have. They would have, with the Hope Center's team that we presently fund, they're going to have four base positions, two peers and a clinician in addition to a supervisor. And that staffing is just not adequate to be able to interact with every single person. that we might see within our system. And that's already a significant investment of just over $300,000 annually. So we need to definitely continue to identify sustainable sources for outreach. But to put things into context, Louisville within their government has probably 10 positions that are just dedicated to addressing homeless encampments in terms of prioritizing which camps are the most urgent to address but also with outreach staff housed within their government and so in context I have three staff including myself for my entire office and all of the duties that we cover so I definitely would love to have more resources in that area presently we're working with the Hope Center that we fund a team with Community Action Council funded through SAMHSA grant and working with the rescue missions privately funded outreach team okay thank you so total right now there's only four workers so across all teams we're probably looking at about 10 staff that are full-time dedicated to outreach at 10 full-time okay but those are partner staff yes we don't have any that are direct LFUCG employees okay well I think I will like to you know I I would like to explore that more and see how we could maybe make the team larger. Sorry, I'm struggling with my voice today. Well, thank you so much for your time and the presentation. Thank you all for the opportunity and for your continued support. Thank you. Next, we have the annual NAMI Fayette Mental Health Court updates. and I'll ask the speakers to come up and introduce themselves and I'll ask Councilwoman Gray if she has anything she would like to say as well since this is her item. Thank you, Chair. As we all know, the importance of not only our physical health but our mental health. When our mind isn't right, our body's not right. And so the mental health court has been doing a mighty work in our community, working with individuals, ensuring that they have the wraparound services that they need. I'm looking forward to your presentation and how we have grown from last year to this year and throughout the years and where we're going to go. So the floor is yours. Thank you, Councilmember Gray. All the friends on the council, friends in the public, it's good to see you all today. Bill Buckman, I'm the coordinator with the Mental Health Court. I'm here with Phil and Kelly Gunning, with NAMI, who administrate the court. And I think most of you all know a lot about our court. Can you hear me okay? I usually don't need much amplification anyway, but I know most of you all, I think, remember, we were just here four months ago. And kind of detailing, giving you a lot of the nuts and bolts. So I can tell you what I'm not going to do today. You can rest easy. I'm not going to subject you to death by PowerPoint today. You're not going to go over the same old slides that I went through. I do have a couple slides that I want to touch on that are real important to me. But just to update you, it has just been four months since we last spoke to you. So a few updates since then, since we last presented. We've got seven more folks who graduated our program in that four months. We've added six new starts in that four months and we're starting two more tomorrow. So graduated seven, got eight, that's kind of how it goes with us. We've got this continued increased growth, kind of exponential growth really, based on our strong referrals from the court system and real need for what we do in the community. So that gives us 32 graduates over 37 months. Let me see if I can just move on. I'm gonna blow through these and go to this one. This was one of my favorite slides right here. I depend on the math of Phil Gunning to help me out with this slide. Math didn't really get me into social work. But so if we're looking Looking at a 37 month period here, we've got these 32 graduates. We figure, let's look at the bottom line, it's what we figure our savings to the city is $5,265,819. What we do is we take the estimated cost of incarceration of folks, of these graduates, and then add in associated policing costs. So it's a pretty significant number, which brings us to more Phil's math. We look at during that period of time, the city invested $790,000 in our program. With that $4,655,819 savings, that's the return on your investment at 589%, right? I love to come in here and give this to the city. 589% return on your investment, right? So, but let me go back for a second. Let's look at that bottom line. That doesn't include a lot of stuff. We just can't really figure you all because I want to tell you folks when they come to us, they get referred to our program. Usually on low level charges, such as we have a lot of assault, fourth degree, domestic violence, minor injury, or no visible injury, or a trespassing. you know, often associated charges, you know, minor drug possession charges. What's happening is these folks, when they get to us, I'll tell you, the police and the emergency responders have been out to their location a dozen times in the past before then, right, with their family. We're talking about people who are living with some type of mental illness, And they've learned that often they can self-medicate themselves with substances and alcohol, which works, which alleviates their misery until it doesn't. Right? So we're talking about self-medicated, untreated folks who are getting into arguments, screaming matches with their neighbors, with their wives, children, you fill in the blanks, girlfriends, boyfriends. And the police are being called. It's disturbing the peace. And so dozens, dozens of trips sometimes until somebody has to make an arrest. You know, they have to get them. So they're in this revolving door cycle. Then they come to us. So those are those associated charges we can't really figure. How many times has this happened? So what I want to do then is what I want to do is tell you a personal story, which relates to somebody that came to a young lady that came to our program in 2018. from just that kind of environment. She lived with untreated clinical depression and severe social anxiety. She's in her 30s. She's learned that alcohol makes her feel better. It can give her some confidence. It can help her cope with social situations. And her and her longtime partner, they drank together. They lived together. worked okay until it didn't. Continuous fights. Police call to their house multiple occasions. So finally, she gets arrested. You know, the shouting escalates to pushing and shoving. The police come in, they have to take somebody in. They take her to jail. She has a domestic violence assault fourth charge. She comes to us. She says, yeah, I'd like to do the mental health court. So took this young lady. We have a year-long program on average for our folks. Took this young lady two years to do our program. And I think towards the end, I don't think she wanted to graduate because she was doing so well. She had the support she needed. She had human connection. She had love. She was going to therapy. She was getting treatment. She was getting her medication. And she was employed. She had gotten a job at a nice restaurant here in Lexington. and gotten promoted by the end of the time, by the time she graduated, she was the catering manager. This job, we finally, we made her graduate because she was doing so well. Still with her partner, longtime partner. And then she gave back to the community. She started helping us by doing second chance employment at the restaurant that she was the manager of by giving our folks chances, you know, because some of our folks, when they come to us, they've still got charges. They don't get expunged until they graduate, so it's hard for them to find a job sometimes. She was helping us with jobs. She also became an inaugural member of our alumni group, which we started in 2021. When she came in, she said, this is great because I've missed this. I miss this connection. I miss being with my people who understand me. We have these groups. I want to put in a plug for the participation station run by NAMI, which is one of the most crucial pieces of our programming. All our folks, we do all our mental health groups there. All our folks love to come in and interact with their peers, with the community navigators we have there. It's just crucial. So we're having our alumni group meetings. Here this young lady attends regularly. And she's got social anxiety, so it's tough. We don't get a lot out of her sometimes. She'll sit there and I'll try to pull it out of her. How's it going, Jane? You know, everything all right? You still, you're doing okay with your therapy? Yeah, everything's okay, right? Works okay. And then she'll go back to listening. So here, a couple of months ago, we found out, got a call from Jane. She said, my partner's passed away. terrible, unexpected, tragic passing of her life partner. And I know, you know, we probably all know something about grief. But what we might not know about is what it's like to live with grief, that kind of grief. When you also live with clinical depression, when you're also a struggling alcoholic, when you also have severe anxiety, think about going to the hospitals, the funeral homes, the gatherings with social anxiety. And so Jane didn't come to group for a couple of weeks, and we started getting worried. We knew she needed some space, but we reached out to her and just didn't push, but just told her we were here. We want you to come to group. We want to see you. We love you. And so she finally, after about four weeks, she came back to group. How's everything going? It's fine. It's okay. Everything's okay. You know, we didn't push her. She came back the next week. How's everything going? Uh, I want to tell you it's terrible. She said, it's terrible. I want to talk to you. It sucks. Um, well, are you, uh, are you going to therapy? Well, I haven't been to therapy. Um, are you taking your meds? Well, I haven't had my meds. Um, have you got your meds? No, It turns out what we didn't know was that her life partner was the one who really pushed her and kept her going to the doctor and made sure that she got what she needed. And so we're not judging her. She says, you know what I really want to do? I really want to drink. I feel bad. Things aren't working. And we didn't judge her. None of her peers judged her. But we gave her love. They gave her love. and somebody said, hey, Jane, how about if you get an appointment? Could I remind you? And then everybody said, hey, could we remind you? Can we put your appointments on our calendar? And she said, oh, my God, yes, you can do that. She made an appointment. She called us, our little text group, and she said, here's when my appointment is. And so last Thursday, she got four texts Thursday morning, said, Jane, you got an appointment at noon today with your doctor. You know, and she texts back, thank you all so much. She made that appointment. She got her meds, you know, and we checked on her. I want to tell you that this is what this programming does. and multiply this one person by the story, by the 68 graduates we've had over the course of our time, right? Over the 32 graduates in the last three years. These are individual stories that happen every day. And these are people, and we're not just talking about saving money for the city, right? We're talking about people's lives and the trajectory of their lives. So I just want to thank you all for everything you do for us. And I want to give you Kelly Gunning for a minute. Thank you, esteemed friends and colleagues. I'm really happy to have this three minutes and 48 seconds to tell you that our people are highly visible in this community, right? Y'all hear about them all the time, right? Our people are highly visible. So it doesn't make sense that when they need help, they immediately become invisible. They fall through the cracks. Our people are crack people. Not crack the drug, crack the gap. The gap that keeps them from experiencing the fullness of their humanity. And now guess what? If we don't help them, it keeps us from experiencing the fullness of our humanity as a community. So I really want to thank you for endorsing this court through your support. Because these are the gap dwellers that we work with. These are the invisible people. These people don't have three strikes against them. they have 10 or 12 strikes against them. All of them have an ACEs score above 8 or 10. Multiple diagnoses. Co-occurring substance use disorder. But because of what you've done as a community saying this is important to us, then the things that Bill just told you about get to happen. They're real things. They're real people. And guess what? They're not lost anymore. They're not lost anymore. And guess what else? They're not visible in the community anymore. Not because they're in a crack somewhere, but because they've assimilated into the everyday existence that we want for our citizens and for our loved ones and for our people. You've done that. You know, this past legislative session has been really, really tough. Tough for people like me. Tough for people like me that go up there and cannot believe while the whole state was moving toward funding more mental health courts, funding more diversion, funding more crisis intervention, funding somewhere like the new Empath Center. We have a legislature that is so tone-deaf that they come up with a bill like House Bill 5. They want to take us backwards. Well, guess what? I ain't going. I am not going. I am not taking my people and letting them go either because guess what? They're starting to glimpse the promised land. They're starting to see that I can do this, but I'm going to need a little help. I'm going to need a little help. Thank you for hearing your people. My God, thank you for hearing your people. Thank you for hearing me. I lost my son, but by God, nobody else is going to lose their son if I have anything to say about it. And thank you for supporting that. Thank you so much. And thank you for your passion and compassion that you have for our community. I know back a few months ago, you shared about the aftercare program, and today's the annual update. So I'm glad that we got to hear from you. Does anyone have any questions? Council Member Gray. Council Member Gray. Thank you, Chair. So before the meeting began, you mentioned to me about losing. Could you inform the committee about what we spoke about prior to the meeting? We've been blessed over the years to have a couple from our community gift us the building that Participation Station is housed in. Participation Station is a unique one of a kind program that operates on the Boston model of psychiatric rehabilitation. There's no other model like this anywhere in the state that I'm aware of. We're at risk of losing this building. I'm really scared. The building is going to be for sale if we can't come up with enough money to buy it. So we are going to approach and have approached about the residual funds that you have left. Something I heard you talking about earlier in November, October. There's maybe some funding available. NAMI is working really hard to raise as much money as we can through our NAMI walk. We typically have raised, it's October 12th, thank you, at Eastern State Hospital because Eastern State Hospital is celebrating their 200th anniversary as the longest continuously operating mental health hospital in the country. And this is our 20th year of the NAMI walk. As you probably remember from our earlier presentations, The way we were able to start the mental health court was through funds we raised at the walk. We had nothing. We just started the money on our, we started the court on our own. We had a judge and we had volunteers and we had passion and we had a vision and we knew what to do. And so the walk will fund at least a good down payment on the building, but we can't fund the whole $275,000. So I bet y'all will be seeing me because we cannot afford to lose participation station. It really focuses in on the seriously mentally ill population that I'm talking to you about. The ones that don't have one diagnosis, but they may have serious mental illness, co-occurring substance use disorder, intellectual developmental disabilities, trauma, deep, deep trauma. Let me tell you something, you guys, trauma is at the basis of everything we see. Every single thing we see. It's not what's wrong with these people, it's what has happened to them. So if you hear anything about participation station being in need, I hope you'll think about that participation station, or PS as we lovingly call it, is the hub of our warm line, of all of our outreach, of all of our recovery programming, all of our rehab programming. It hits everything. There's spirituality. We have a full-time chaplain there. We work on the whole person, and not just for our mental health court, but for our whole community. I am not a number brain. Phil could probably tell you how many people we see there in a year. I know it's a lot. I know it's probably in the neighborhood of 1,600 touches per quarter, and maybe more than that, because I don't even know our numbers. But I'm not a number head, so I'm sorry. But please, remember what this program does for this community. Thank you so much. Thank you. Councilmember Sheehan. Thank you, Chair. You mentioned the MPath Center. And I know I had heard that you were part of one of the service organizations that has partnered with the Impasse Center. Do you want to talk a little bit about your experiences so far? I would love to. Seven years ago, I met with Mark Birdwistle at UK, and we brought him a model that Louisville was using called the living room model, which was a no barrier 23 hour bed or chair for people to come in where police could bring people that were in crisis in the street into this place and they would be wrapped around. What do you need? What do we need to get you going? Are you stable? Are you sober? What do we need? But there was no barrier. This is so important. No barriers to care. You know, a lot of times if the police pick up someone downtown who's intoxicated or on drugs, they have to wait until that person sobers up to even get them in the hospital. Okay, because they can't test someone who's drunk. Not this place. You walk in, you get help immediately. In the first month, they've seen over 300 people. Most of those people were diverted successfully, not to hospital, not to jail, but agreed to go to a next day community appointment. The failure to keep rate on those appointments was very low, and here's the beauty of it. This is the gap filling of that experience. Guess what? If they got into the empath center, they were given an appointment for 8 o'clock the next morning. If they didn't show up by 830, guess what was happening? We're out looking for them. We're calling. We're finding them. We're saying, okay, did you forget? Oh, I couldn't get a ride. Well, we can arrange to help someone get you here. Can you get here at X time or tomorrow? So even if we lose them for a minute, we're not losing them for another month to go circle the drain in the community. And by the drain, I mean draining themselves, draining our community resources, recidivizing through every possible corner of the system. This is a game changer and it works in collaboration with another game changer, which is the new urgent treatment program at New Vistas campus. Now this is not open wholesale yet, but it is open to the people that are coming from Empath. So nobody's waiting. This was the piece we've been missing for so long, you guys. Every single systemic change I've been involved in in my 28-year career has taken seven years. It's like it's a magic number. So it was seven years from the day we took Mark Bird Whistle, that model, to the day that we sat in the grand opening on July 31st. So it's working. thank god for our people that are getting the help they need thank god for our police that they're not tied up for three or four hours waiting to see if someone's going to be admitted they bring them and they go hallelujah can i get an amen amen crisis intervention you know she said it's intervention and prevention so if you look at you know uh agencies like one lexington right prevention so we're all about that and colleagues i um have the there's folks that work with the empath center that serve on the hpi board with me and i've asked for them to come and present to us after the empath center has been open for about six months so then they can have some data and things they can share with us and experiences to give us kind of an update for that center so i'm excited about that thank you chair thank you so much very very needed I know that those services have been needed in our community for a long long time so thank you again for the presentation and answering questions and for being here once again with us if you would go to the referral list there's a few things that we're going to update that are not accurate but if you have an item that you have an update on if you would please be willing to tell me now if you want to remove something let me know we still need more items in this committee so feel free to be thinking of public safety and social service items that you would like to refer to this committee does anybody have any updates I'm not We're going to go through each one at this time. All right, well thank you very much to everyone who came today and to my colleagues and we are adjourned.