The Anchorage Housing and Homeless Committee convened on Wednesday, December 17, 2025, to review the outcomes of the third tranche of Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA), receive an updates on the city's shelter system, and hear reports from the multidisciplinary outreach (Hope) team. While committee members expressed deep disappointment over the return of unused ERA funds to the treasury, they also acknowledged the successful immediate housing of over 700 households. The meeting highlighted a significant shift in service integration since previous years, though concerns were raised regarding the sustainability of long-term housing retention and the visibility of unsheltered individuals who remain outside the current system.
How about now? Okay. I'll start over. Welcome. Um calling to move calling to order this meeting of the assembly housing and homeless committee. It is Wednesday, December 17th. It is 1049 a.m. Um we are we're gonna get started. I know there's a few members that are running late, but we're gonna go ahead and start. Um so uh we'll we'll do roll um just on on the phone, Mr. Johnson. Are you there? Yes, I'm here, thank you. And Miss Baldwin Day, are you there? Yes, I am. Thank you. Um Jared Gerker, right? And this is Cameron Perez Rodia. Um okay, so we're gonna get started. Uh we have um uh our first item on the agenda is the Anchorage Health Department. If you'd like to go ahead and come up. Um and actually, folks from from the mayor's office and others, there's plenty of space up here. Why don't you just come come on up? Um that way we don't have to wait for you in the transition. And uh introduce yourself for the record, and whenever you're ready, you can get started. This is Jed Drolle, uh community systems program manager for Anchor Chalk Department. Kimberly Rash, Anchorage Health Department. Okay. Uh so yeah, we'll go ahead and get started with this presentation about uh emergency rental assistance outcomes and performance. Um have the next slide, please. Okay. Um so for this uh presentation, I'm gonna give a brief overview of the um ERA program, um, then look at the spending and outcomes uh actually both collectively for the program and by grantee, um, some of the feedback that we got from grantees um and then the commitments that our program is making um based on lessons learned from uh how we've done this program. Next slide. So um just high level overview, and this is um to to be clear, and this is on the um uh agenda here uh as well, but just want to emphasize this is the ERA two tranche three funding only. There are there's previous funding, there was ERA one and then ERA two. Um ERA uh two was split into three different tranches, and our program only managed the third of those. So this doesn't um take into consideration the uh previous funds um from ERA, um just that tranch three. So tranch three, um, we got four about four million dollars total. Um, and we ended up spending uh about three point two million dollars. So we just you know um fair fair warning, fair notice. We we will be returning some money to the treasury. Um the and I'll go into uh some of the reasons for that um later in the program. But um we did spend most of it. Um tranch three, we uh had a very compressed time frame because we couldn't access uh tranch three until we met a certain spending um threshold of tranch two. Um and by the time we we hit that, it was uh March of about March of this year, and then there was a very hard deadline for all ERA funding of September 30th of this year that we had to spend it before. And so that was kind of a major constraint on how we set up the program. Um and that is one of the reasons that um some of the money did end up not being spent. Next slide, please. So client served. Um, in in this case, we actually uh uh exceeded expectations.