Welcome back to this weekly meeting of the Community Planning and Housing Committee with Denver City Council.

Your community planning and housing committee starts now.

It's like we are on airlight and here are a little chimes.

So I feel confused.

At any rate, here we are apparently in the community planning and housing committee.

It is Tuesday, September 16th.

I'm Sarah Parody, one of your council members at large, chairing this committee today.

We have a couple of briefings, no action items, nothing on consent, so just a great learning day for all of us.

And I will start with council member introductions to my left.

Good afternoon, Daryl Watson.

Lewis, I think you're next.

Oh, Chantelou is District 8.

Hi, Diana.

Good afternoon.

Hi.

Good afternoon, Diana Romero Campbell, Southeast Denver District 4.

We're all a little fried from getting a thousand-page budget book yesterday.

To read it.

Digging into that too.

Jamie Torres, West Denver District Three.

Great.

I don't think we have anyone online.

So I will turn it over to our friends at host to introduce themselves and brief us on congregate shelter, winter shelter, transportation contracts, everything coming up as we head into another winter.

Good afternoon, everyone.

I'm Polly Kyle with the Department of Housing Stability.

Hi, I'm Jared Powell, Director of Shelter System Operations.

Good afternoon, Jeff Kasitski, Deputy Director for Shelter and Stability.

All right, and you guys, the floor is yours.

Okay, thank you very much.

Um good afternoon.

Um this briefing is part of our efforts to not only get our contracts all signed on time this year, but also to present them to you in a more organized manner to help uh you understand how these contracts fit into the homelessness response system before we ask you to approve them.

Um, as Councilmember Parity said there's no action items today.

I will just say I wish that we had all the contracts uh ready for you, but we're uh unfortunately a week behind.

Um, so they will be ready uh next week um to move forward.

I also want to say um we know that uh we've been bringing a lot of briefings to you, but this is also part of our plan to get a more organized RFP process where we'll be doing uh a third of our contracts um every three years, so you won't be getting inundated with all this um host contracts all at once.

This this year is kind of a bridge year to that.

And Jeff, if I can interject on that for council members, since we don't have um the contracts ready to vote on those action items today.

I just would say um we'll plan on them going through on consent, but if you do have concerns and want to call them out for votes, um they'll be coming through in the next um one or two meetings, I think.

So just keep your eyes peeled for that, and I will try to remember a pause and check in with everybody very intentionally about those since they're tied to the presentation that's happening today.

All right, thanks, Jeff.

Um so we are today uh focusing on congregate shelter, shelter transportation, and cold weather shelter.

Um I should also talk about what we're not covering today.

Uh we're not bringing forward at this time uh family shelters, any of the day shelter or bridge or domestic violence shelters.

These are kind of the um kind of legacy straightforward congregate shelter sites.

Um also not including congregate shelter that uh host doesn't fund.

There are other shelters in the city that we're not, we may partner with, but we're not funding them.

So uh this is the list of the shelters that are in green and then the two uh transportation contracts and the two uh cold weather contracts in blue.

Um so uh for this trunche of contracts, uh it's for nine congregate shelters that serve um adults and youth over the 18 to 24.

It's a total of 1,623 beds.

Um 95% or more are occupied on any given night.

Um the shelter transportation is uh what we call the circular route, which uh transport folks from downtown shelters to other shelters throughout the city, as well as uh transportation services that we need to use during cold weather.

And then we'll be presenting the two contracts related to cold weather shelter that we anticipate serving 150 to 600 or more max single adults and then 50 to 400 families each night during the cold weather.

You've seen this slide, maybe be the third time, but how all of this kind of fits together in our homelessness response system.

We've got prevention and then diversion, which we've already talked about, outreach, which we'll be bringing forward in a few months.

Shelter, and then from shelter, our rehousing work that we do, and of course, our affordable housing units.

So what's the role of shelter in a good, highly functioning homelessness response system is to meet in a very low barrier way immediate needs to life-saving shelter for people to experiencing homelessness.

They often act as the gateway to our homelessness response system.

It's often people's first connection to us, if not through outreach.

It's not the only access towards affordable housing or towards rapid resolution, but it's the primary access.

And that includes both these shelters as well as the non-congregate shelters.