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.

That's a good ad.

All right.

Good afternoon, everyone.

I liked the ad.

In there.

Oh, birthday.

That's right.

I can hear.

I have Cookie Crumble behind me, right?

And my birthday month too.

So we'll do it.

We'll just go with it.

October is a great month to be born.

So happy birthday, Councilwoman.

Thank you.

Part of your birthday with us this morning.

Um I was going to say happy birthday for the days, but I'll just say it now because he won't be here tonight.

I mean, I'll be online, but no.

Okay, happy birthday.

Um, let's get started with rounds of introductions.

I'm Councilwoman Amanda Sanval, president of Denver City Council in Northwest Denver, and I'll start to my left.

Good afternoon.

Uh Councilman Watson, representing the fine district nine.

Good afternoon, Amanda.

So you're district five.

Laura Albitres, Lucky District 7.

Jamie Torres was number district three.

All right, so we have a great agenda in front of us today.

And I'll pass it over to our um partners at host.

Good afternoon, Jeff Kasitsky, Deputy Director for Shelter and Stability at host.

Uh Pauly Kyle, uh government affairs officer with host.

Um thank you very much.

This is again sort of part of our series of presentation of contracts to try to present things to the council in a more organized manner.

As with the congregate shelter, uh, we do not have any action items today.

The contracts will be uh going before you, I think, through a consent agenda sometime in late November, early December, but are going to present today on all of the um all-in-mile high uh non-congregate shelter sites as well as the micro-communities.

I just want to be clear this does not include the Tamarek, uh, which will be presented as part of our um suite of uh family uh serving contracts, which I believe we're presenting in December.

Okay, at the end of this month.

End of this month, my apologies.

Um today we'll be talking about adult non-congregate shelter.

It's the operation of two congregate hotel-based adult shelters uh with 471 units for a total of approximately 16.5 million.

This does not include the Comfort Inn, which we'll be presenting separately because that con that site is closing at the end of March and is not going to be under a performance-based contract and is very short term.

Um, and then the other, of course, are the micro-communities of five tiny home-based micro-communities with 242 units for a total of about 7.2 million, and one of those sites is closing in June, uh, which we'll talk about in a bit.

Uh so overall, 713 units total.

Um, 49 of those are ADA units.

Um, average length of stay in all of the sites is uh in 2024 was 138 days, uh, with 356 positive exits uh into uh stable housing or permanent housing out of the system.

Um, total cost um of these contracts is 23, uh 688 with an average cost of 93 uh per person per night.

And I want to thank uh Councilwoman Elfie Drez for requesting that we present this information in more of a table form, which you all have in front of you that'll I think make the presentation go a little bit quickly.

Um, as you see on the slide up there, uh you've seen this multiple times.

Uh non-congregate shelters fit into the system as part of our sheltering options that we have available for people experiencing homelessness.

Uh, there are also for many people a gateway to a variety of services that are available through the city.

It's oftentimes where they'll be assessed for coordinated entry uh for housing and get access to other services.

Um really quickly, the role of non-congregate shelter and my microcommunities is to provide like the rest of our shelters uh media low barrier access to life-saving shelter.

Um these shelters all have services available on site, including specialized assistance focused on helping people uh move beyond homelessness, uh, and they are provided um by our city partners or city contractors.

Wanted to talk about the access to non-congregate and microcommunities.

People always wonder, well, how do I get into one of these?

The number one priority for getting access is through shelter through any kind of special situation that occurs, a fire in another shelter, God forbid, or a flood in one of our shelters, or the closure of a shelter.

Those always are top priority when there's emergency situations.

But in our normal operations, that does not happen very often.

Our street engagement initiatives where we're our outreach workers are on the streets working with people who are sleeping outdoors, roads to recovery.

We also have a partnership with the VA, placing our unsheltered women and men who have who have served into shelter, and then general host outreach referrals, when we kind of get through, if we have beds available, our regular outreach teams who are maybe working apart from some of the street engagement initiatives.

And then lastly, we do are doing transfers from congregate shelter to non-congregate shelter through a smaller pilot, but eventually it's our intention that people who are not able to be successful in a non in a congregate setting have access to a non-congregate bed, like somebody maybe who's got challenges meeting their activities of daily living, or for whatever reason.

So this is sort of how these beds are accessed.

And then you've seen this slide before, just a reminder, you know, we do place a high premium on holding our providers and ourselves accountable.

This is just a list that you've seen before of all the various monitorings that we have.

Okay.

So I want to talk a little bit about all seven contracts that we'll be sending before you.

You know, it's a pilot because we haven't done it before.

We don't know if it's gonna work.

We're pretty confident that it will.

But it really was meant to do a couple of things.

One is to help our invoicing process uh go more smoothly.

Um it's really to help uh our providers really shift their focus away from um, you know, doing invoices every month that are just cost reimbursement and really focus on um outcomes because the all of the um their payments will be tied to outcomes will help hold them uh to a higher level of accountability.

And the way that I've been thinking about it is, you know, right now, I really would like the shift to move.

I mean, I think we all would like the shift to move from sort of finance focused um contracts to people focused contracts that we're not just focusing on, you know, is this widget an allowable expense under this executive order, but you know, are the people who are living in these shelters getting the services that they should be getting?

And it is are the host staff and our provider staff and our host accounting staff all like shifting our focus towards people and away from kind of a you know pretty complex uh process that you know, frankly, the city auditor kind of called us out on uh when the shelter system was audited uh last year.

Um, want to be really clear because I know some questions have come up.

Um, that if you don't meet your goals, do you not get paid?

No, you'll get paid for every unit of outcome that you're able to provide.

If you don't meet your goals, you're not gonna be able to draw down the full amount of the contract.

And if you do, you will, but we'll get into that for a second.

I think I already talked about why we want to do this, which is we don't want to be reimbursing costs, we want to be paying for performance.

And to me, it's more about shifting the focus to a person.

Um, just talk through really quickly, and again, this is a pilot, we can change it.

We don't we don't know if it's gonna work or not.

We think we spent a lot of time thinking this through, but um, this is how we're gonna move forward this year, and we may change the metrics next year, but the one of the metrics is um uh how many people do you serve each night?

Pretty straightforward.

Um, you know, you're basically your people nights.

Um, we want 90% of all of our uh available units to be occupied at all times.

If you outperform that and you underperform somewhere else, um, you'll be able to still get your full contract value.

This is a big chunk of the contract, it's 45% of the um payment is essentially tied to this.

Um, and then we have a capacity tracker that we use that you may have seen.

Cole's probably shared it before.

Uh, it shows um occupancy at the all-in-mile high uh sites, and that's how we will basically be billing um each night.

So if you had a thousand shelter bed nights and the rate is you know, a dollar a night, you'll get a thousand dollars for that month.

Um, next one is uh a rapid resolution conversation.

Uh we want at least 90% of all of the new uh guests coming into the shelter to have what's called, it's called different things in different communities, but rapid resolution.

I like to think of it as housing problem solving.

It starts with the question where was the last place where you were living, and how can we help you get back there?

And it's a really strength-based approach, not saying, Oh, you should go and live with your family member, or oh, you should just you know finish your degree and go get a job, or it's really asking people like how can we get you back to the last safe place that you were.

Um honestly, if we could get a five percent um success rate on people who are asked that question who end up getting housed, that would be really extraordinarily good in a community.

Many of our guests have so many challenges that they are gonna require additional assistance, but we it's really important that we make sure this is always being asked of all of the new guests.

So this is uh important but relatively small, it's only five percent of the contract.

They're expected to have this conversation within five days of somebody moving in.

Uh, the next is around case management, and I want to be clear it's housing focused case management, it's not any kind of case management.

Um we expect that every guest um at the shelter is having a conversation at least once a week with uh with a case manager at that site around a menu of services related to uh housing exits.

It might be getting your vital documents ready, it might be training around um, you know, like living in a in a non-subsidized unit in a private, you know, how do you pay your rent on time?

What do you do if there's a problem?

It's getting people, it's also talking to people about the emotional challenges of losing your community, maybe that you had in the shelter and talking through how they're gonna get uh you know a new community in their new home and what will they do to help keep themselves housed.

Um so we expect that uh 80% of all households will have uh at least one conversation a week with their case manager, um, and the provider will be paid for each uh encounter that occurs.

But for them to draw down the full amount, they need to do four a month.

Um, and again, I think I've spoken about this before holding providers accountable to exits into permanent housing when they don't have access to that housing is kind of not a helpful thing to hold them accountable to.

We want to hold them accountable to what they have control over that's gonna drive people in the erection of housing, including the rapid resolution conversation and the case management.

Um, lastly, and related to this, uh, we expect that 90% of the households staying in our shelter are active in the community queue, which is MDHI's, you know, housing queue.

That means they have to have been assessed for housing.

Uh, they have to have had a one-home coordinated entry assessment, and they have to be in the system in the queue.

And um the other, so it will require it being checked because the um assessments are only valid for a fixed amount of time.

So you need to make sure it's a it's an um active assessment and that they're in the queue.

And again, this is probably one of the most important things our shelter providers can be doing for us.

So that's why we put it in here as a you know, important um component to the performance-based contracting.

And then, really quickly, uh, we will have dashboards that look sort of like this for each one of these metrics that the providers will have access to, and our program officers will have access to.

So we're able to see in real time like how how you're doing.

So if you're a provider and you're like, oh, this won't happen, I'm sure, but at 50% vacancy rate, uh, we're in huge trouble.

We better turn all these units over tomorrow, or we're not gonna get paid what we need this month.

Um moving on.

I'm gonna go through these really fast because you have the table in front of you.

There's like a lot of slides, um, and I know some of them are gonna warrant more discussion.

Um, y'all already know what non-congregate shelters are.

Um, the one thing that I do wanna point out here is that uh we went through an RFP process back in the spring.

Uh, it was pretty extensive and intensive.

Um, and as you know, we've selected uh three new providers, which I'll talk through in a moment.

But one of the big things besides performance-based contracting, I want to call out is we asked each provider to tell us how would you like to keep your building safe and secure, to give us a security plan, like what's your model for doing this.

Um, and uh, so we're gonna have some changes around security, which is also going to change the pricing a little bit.

Um, Tamarek uh will be operating the same with uh general services contracting with Securitas to provide security.

St.

Francis and Urban Alchemy are going to be doing it a little bit differently, which I'll talk about in a moment.

Um, but want to say this was decided through the RFP process and through the proposals that we received from the providers.

So moving on to the Aspen Um 200 uh 24-7 site serving all populations, individuals and couples.

Uh, it's a hotel, it's in district eight, 289 beds available at that site.

Um, the total contract amount for uh, well, the new provider that we are proposing is Urban Alchemy.

Uh, they're a national nonprofit that provides shelter and engagement services to create peaceful and supportive environments.

Um they work on helping rebuild uh community, both through their work of their own staff and through the guests at the shelter, and have a long history of providing this type of shelter in different communities.

Um their contract would be a three year, all most of these contracts will be three years.

I'll explain when they're not going to be.

You'll see it's a total of 30 million dollars.

It's a 9 million, 9.8 million for this year, and then as we talked about before, we've got COLAs built in that are of course subject to appropriations, but um to help the providers.

Uh you'll see a big jump in the budget from 7 million in 2025 to 9.8 million.

Um, part of that is due to um right sizing the cost of the contract, um, just providing colas and making sure proper wages and um, but another big chunk of that about 1.3 or 1.4 million is security costs that weren't in this contract last year.

So that's why you're seeing the big jump.

Um they have 64 FTEs budgeted, 93 dollars um per month.

Uh, this is what the rate card looks like.

Um, it's based on the budget and based on the metrics that I went over.

So, for example, they will get $60.67 per person per night, 1,519 for the rapid uh resolution conversation.

You maybe, whoa, that's like a lot of money for one conversation.

Um, that's a one-time occurrence, and it's just with new guests as they're coming in.

Um, the case management is 512 and encounter, and the community queue is again a one-time payment of 455 for making sure somebody is in.

Um, this is not a, I'm sorry, there's a monthly payment for making sure someone's in the community queue each month.

Um, of course, these tie to the total contract value, they can't exceed the total dollar amount even if they exceed all of the um metrics.

Um last year, average occupancy was 90 90%.

So we expect the new provider to keep it that level or better.

Average length of, say, was 167.

Positive exits was 160.

New providers, so kind of not worth comparing this to last year's metrics.

Um moving on to Stone Creek, uh, also known as the best west Western, uh, again, serving all populations, individuals, and couples, also in district eight, 182 beds.

Right now we're working on a lease that will extend this site through uh June 30th, 2020.

Doesn't mean or 2030.

My apologies, it'll stay open that long, but that's kind of where we're at with the housing authority who owns the building.

Um, St.

Francis is the new provider.

They're currently running Comfort Inn, which is closing, so a lot of those staff will just be transitioning from Comfort in to Stone Creek.

Uh they will be operating security.

I should um sorry, they will be operating using a contractor.

They have a contractor, they're using a comfort in.

It's gone very, very well.

We've had no major issues there.

Same contractor will be moving over to Stone Creek.

Uh, this is a three year contract, um, $6.5 million for year one and then increasing over time.

I also should go back and I apologize, um, but I think it's important to note that Urban Alchemy is providing their own security with their own staff, which is what they do nationally in all the shelters that they operate.

So no private security company, but for the budget, um, driving probably crazy by going erratically and randomly through these, but um, all right, we're on uh she gets me.

Um, their dollar amount also jumped up because this includes their security contractor at about 1.2 million as well.

Uh 30 FTE budgeted does not include the security staff and a slightly higher uh 98 per bed.

This is because of um economies of scale, frankly.

It's a much smaller site than um the Aspen uh rate card.

Just gonna zip through this, set up the same way.

Um last year, uh, this site or in 2024 had 88% occupancy, so we're hoping to see better than that moving forward.

Average length of stay was 200 um days uh with 127 positive exits.

So those are the um shelters, and then for the micro communities, um y'all familiar with them, tiny homes provide the same services as the rest of our shelter system, um, but providing them in a smaller environment and individual units with shared bathrooms.

Um, the Aladi uh is um uh in district 10, 44 beds.

Um, and when I say possible closure, just to be really clear.

Um, the aspen doesn't really have one because there's no necessary necessarily a plan there.

These are all tied to when the zoning runs out on the sites.

Um, and we haven't made any decisions necessarily except along Monroe, but I thought this was important information for you all to have.

Um, and Aladi Village is only going to be a two-year contract, because we're not sure what's gonna happen in 2018.

So we may come back with an amendment, um, but we only are running these through the full year that we know that sites going to be open.

Um, and you'll see the cost starts 1.3 million roughly escalating with a colour in year uh two.

If you repeat that date again, you said 2018.

Sorry, thank you, sir.

Uh, gone too fast.

March 15th, 2028.

I'll take us back in time.

That's right, we're not going backwards.

Uh thank you, sir.

Um, their 2025 budget was 1.5 million.

This budget has gone down, and you say, Well, we thought you gave them a cola.

Um, we um a lot of the staff from the micro communities and actually from the larger shelters were providing housing navigation services.

Those are all have been moved to the housing central command, which uh Midori will be presenting about in two weeks.

Two weeks.

Thank you.

Um, but the you know, price the bed per night's $80, and they have 12.5 FTEs there.

Um, and this particular site I will say also does include um some uh security on site as well.

Not 24 7, but uh rate card um looks the same.

All the rate cards are gonna look the same, just the dollar amounts are different based on the budgets.

Um average occupancy at Aladdin was only 64% in 2024 compared to 77% at all microcommunities, but our expectation is 90%, um, and believe that's a reasonable expectation.

Um possibly the challenge here was that they had a very short, relatively short length of stay, just 10 uh five days with a 40 percent or 35 percent positive exits to housing.

Um moving on to stay in.

Uh a um tiny home village run by Bayod Works at um serving all populations, but generally we don't serve couples at these sites.

Uh District 8, 54 beds.

The zoning on this runs out at the end of 2027, but you'll see at the on the next slide.

This is only a one-year contract because as you know, we haven't we had an RFP out and are negotiating with a provider to turn this site into permanent supportive housing.

We given the loss of federal and state housing resources, we don't know the timing.

But in the event that it could happen in 2026, and I hope that it does, um, we are only doing a one-year contract on this.

Um, and we'll come back if we if we need to.

Um, uh stay in.

Um did see uh in slight increase uh in their budget, um, $91.91 a night um and rate card again looks the same.

Uh their data um 76% average occupancy um length of stay was 106 days um and again about 35 percent positive exits.

Um moving on to La Paz Um in District 7 uh with 60 beds uh zoning on this site or possible closure the uh January 31st of 2028.

Uh so we did this one also as a two-year contract um in the event that this site is gonna close, we would just close it at the end of 2027.

If that were to happen, um and uh the budget um again escalates.

And then moving, it's gonna keep moving us forward 17.5 FTEs.

Here is the rate card.

Um slightly higher um occupancy rate compared to the other micro communities.

Uh, average length of stay of 150 and 36, about again, looks pretty consistent.

About 35-36% of the micro-community residents are exiting to permanent housing.

Um Steel Street.

Um District 9, 40 beds.

Um, zoning runs out end of October 2027.

Um so we are doing just a one-year contract on this site for now.

Um, 1.6 uh million.

Um down slightly for the reasons that I just mentioned on the other site with 17 FTE and a cost of 110 per person per night.

Um rate card looks the same as all the other rate cards.

Um, and we don't have uh data from 2024 because as you may recall, this used to be a um safe outdoor space, um, you know, sanctioned encampment, whatever you might want to call it.

Um, so don't have comparable data uh from 2024 to share with you.

And last but not least, Monroe Village, um in District 9, 44 beds.

Um we are uh zoning on this site.

Uh there is actually two sites that run out of different times, but our proposed closures at the end of June.

Um, as you know, due to both this reason as well as budgetary constraints.

Uh so this budget is just four or six months.

Um, and the cost uh with 18 FTEs, the cost for that six months would be $92 dollars per door per night.

Um still planning to do this as a performance-based contract, uh, even though it's ending earlier, just to provide CVC with some consistency in how they are doing the billing.

Um sorry for that lengthy presentation.

I hope the document in front of you makes it a little bit easier to absorb.

Again, thank you, Councilwoman, for the suggestion.

And happy to take your questions.

Hi, Sam.

Thank you.

Even though it's a quick run through, it's a really important update to the whole entire system.

I made a mistake and did not acknowledge our two council members online, Councilmember Lewis and Councilmember Pro Tem Romero Campbell.

So thanks, ladies, for joining us today.

First up in the queue, we have Councilman Abidres followed by Councilman Parady.

Thank you, Council President.

And thank you for this spreadsheet.

It is helpful.

It would be helpful to have a little bit more of the data because we have the exits, but not how many people are exiting in general.

So curious about that, but I know you had that on some of the slides.

I'm a little bit surprised by the number.

Is this how many people?

Oh, so that's in 2024.

Because I remember last year we were we were talking to them, and there was only like five exits, like two housing.

And so I wanted to know.

I know at one point positive exits were including death, and so I'm curious: has that changed?

Um, what is included in a positive positive exit?

Yes, I I don't um I I can tell you what's in positive exits are moves to permanent or stable housing, like if somebody were to move, you know, into a rapid rehousing site and get their own place or permanent supportive housing, or if they were to move to like uh, you know, somebody's being moved to long-term care permanently.

Uh that would count as a positive exit.

I I believe that the question around deaths was should they be counted as a negative exit or another category?

And I would say it's you know, it's another another category.

We can't can't blame the you know, people pass away and it's not um, it's it's part of life.

So I think in moving forward, we'll just report those separately.

Okay, that would be helpful, and it would be good to know too still, even though it's not part of your exit, it's positive or negative.

Um, if it is a third category, it would be good to know.

I mean, I think it's something we definitely want to track when we're looking at the success.

Um, the cost per night is actually very similar in a lot of these, which was surprising.

Um, does that include food?

Does that include the supportive services?

What does that include?

Yeah, um, excellent question.

It does not include food, um, or I would say like major maintenance at any of the micro-communities that's handled by general services and the food is provided through another contract.

And the health care is provided through other contracts.

Um, yeah, there is a separate contract that DPHE has around provision of behavioral and um health services at the sites, and then our guests also have access to um health services through CCH, FQ, they have their own FQHC, but none of that would be included.

But all of the kind of case management on-site social services is included at the Aspen and Stone Creek, uh, these now um do include security costs uh embedded, it also includes food, but it does not include the work that general services does around building maintenance.

So and I was noticing that um, for example, the state in micro-community has a really high rate of positive exits compared to like La Paz or Monroe.

Um, and so I was wondering is there a best practice that they're doing?

Is that something we're monitoring and like guiding?

Um great question.

I I cannot tell you from 2024 um, you know, exactly what the you know best practice may have been that um Bayod was doing, but can certainly talk to them about it.

But also want to say that starting in September of 2024, um, the city is really um air traffic controlling, if you will, people out of these sites and into housing.

So, um, sometimes, like what will happen.

So, for example, in 2025, you're gonna see a slowdown um in exits because when we closed the Radisson uh a big chunk of our housing efforts went into the closure of the Radison at the end of 2024 and through the first quarter of 2025.

So I don't believe there's any necessarily any best practice, and we've gotten pretty consistent across each provider how this gets how this is being managed.

Okay.

Numbers to date would probably be helpful too, just to kind of know if that pattern is continuing or where we are in general for these.

So you have like positive exits for 2024.

So if we had some data from this year, that could be helpful.

And then my last question, and I'll get back in the queue if no one else has questions.

About Monroe, can you tell me about why that one's closing, why that one was chosen to close?

Sure.

Um, because these are sites are all set up, um, you know, they were they got from my understanding, and um Cole might be able to answer some more questions, but they were received temporary zoning and which allowed them to operate as microcommunities for four years, according to um city planning code.

This was just the first one that um reached that point, reached that.

Yes, and it's being, and I should also say all of these sites were planning to develop into um permanent supportive housing or into affordable housing, which we're very excited about.

There's an RFP, I believe, out from uh the opportunity side of host.

Um, and whereas I feel like these are really shelters are obviously needed and really important, um, they solve sleep housing is what solves homelessness.

So we're we're glad to see these transitioning into um permanent supportive housing.

Okay, great.

And I just for La Paz, since I know CDA owns land, I'd be curious how that unrolls, but we'll continue that conversation here.

Okay.

Thank you.

Next up, we have Councilman Sawyer followed by Councilmember Watson.

Thanks, Madam President.

Um thanks, Chef and team.

Really appreciate this.

Can you just tell me how you made the determination of the weight of each of the factors that are going into the performance contracting, right?

Like I don't have the slides up because I'm like deep in this, which by the way, thank you for this.

This is very, very helpful.

Um, but you know, there's one that's like five percent of the value of the contract is based on this metric, and 80% is based on this metric or whatever.

Like, how did you guys shake that down?

There were um many, many, many meetings.

Uh, we've been working with some advisors who've done this around the country as well as all of our our staff uh who work on this, um and it is not tied to cost.

So just to be because that was one of the original things we looked at, but most of the cost is gonna be tied to the operations, so it would have over emphasized um shelter bed like I I believe it's would have been about 75% if we just went on money.

So honestly, we went on like discussion around relative importance, and for us, the most important thing is that our shelter guests are being um, you know, we're helping them move beyond homelessness.

So you'll see that 55% of the outcomes are tied to that to those efforts to help people move beyond homelessness.

However, we also needed to acknowledge the fact that this is such a big the operations of the site and making sure the units fill is also important.

Um so it was really just through a series of discussions.

We also developed like a sandbox that we were um working with where we would we were running like dozens of scenarios through to make sure that like this made sense um and we weren't overweighting or underweighting, or we weren't gonna we also want to make sure our providers this works for our providers financially.

So uh it was there was a lot of factors and many many meetings.

We started planning this um in May, so um, yeah.

Got it.

Sorry if that was No, that's super helpful.

I just needed to like sort of understand was there, was there like you know, specific reasoning behind each of the weights or whatever, and that's a pilot, right?

So if those weights need to be shifted or something like that, there's the opportunity to do that.

Yes, and we also built some wiggle room into the system, and then there's also an opportunity to change like so to change the rate cards.

So, for example, if you know, again, knockwood like 10 units in a stack were knocked out by a flood, uh, we would have to adjust the rate card because um everything is tied to how many people are living in the site at a different time and if they're now you know 10 units offline is really 10 fewer people that we would expect to be living there so there's a lot of um wiggle room built in and again um this is a pilot so we try to make it as simple as possible and then you know we'll adjust if if we need we're certainly hopeful it's gonna work exactly okay that's great um I'm also just curious so the Seal Village costs per bed per night is significantly higher than any other cost per bed per night and we also um like we don't have any data from them uh in from 2024 like the value of it I just that's kind of a red flag for me that there's no data and it's real expensive compared to everything else.

So I'm just curious how you are looking at that as host and is that something that um you know will be addressed potentially when we do start getting more data.

Yeah I mean we do we are looking on a regular basis and I my apologies for not bringing two date um data but I think CVC's doing quite well at all of their sites I I will say you know sometimes there's just nuances in how the budget gets set up or somebody was you know the maybe you know somebody's built to multiple contracts I'd have to go back and look and see if but I will also say if you notice it's the smallest site um and that makes a huge difference so economies of scale and in my opinion on the on these types of programs when you're running a 247 operation so if you think about like how expensive it is to have somebody there 24 seven for more or less units is really going to skew the the cost per night okay that's really good to know thanks for flagging that for me I will say the one thing that is not on here is the um the average of how much is how how many beds are filled each night right it's really concerning to see on the slide deck that we have microcommunities that have a 55% you know rate there those is that same issue happening where that 55% rate is 55% because there are just so many fewer beds or is that a problem?

Both yes yeah I think both and I think that's also why um one of the reasons why we want to move to performance based contracting because you know we could end up spending down the full dollar of the contract and have a building that's 70% occupied that won't be possible anymore.

We will not be paying the full value of the contract for a building that's not fully occupied.

Great thank you or that doesn't have like extraordinarily good outcomes on the services side.

Got it but yeah really appreciate that thanks uh council member Watson thank you council president and Jeff and Polly I think great information from the team but to add on to councilwoman sawyer's question if we are seeing consistently with the dashboard on a month to month to month to month you're at 74% obviously you're not spending down because you're not at a 90% what are we doing to increase that gap?

I mean are there things within the performance uh the process that you're looking at not just to save dollars but also to build up capacity and so that we can actually attain the the target for our goal what are those um yeah thank you for that question and I'll you know I think it's on brand for me to be pretty transparent about um these sorts of things right now our program officers spend way too much time scrutinizing invoices and part of why we're moving to performance based contracting is because now when they get an invoice it's all gonna be about what what you're speaking of about performance and we absolutely are going to be that's so their job will be shifting towards, you know, hey, not like whether this expense was allowable this month is really around whether or not this providers meeting our expectations, and if not, how can we assist one of the things that we're doing um in December?

We're having a uh I don't know if host ever did this before, but we're having a provider's training slash conference with all of the new, well, all of the providers of microcommunities and um and hotel-based non-congregate sites to really walk through all of this and to kind of set some baseline expectations and provide training.

So I I feel like in 2026, um, this is going to be a monthly conversation that we're having as opposed to, you know, it happening maybe a quarterly quarterly meetings.

Right now, I mean, I think we do some of the same things, which is when we see problems, ask the provider what's going on.

We provide training, we develop, um, when we see a trend, we'll develop like a video based training on that particular topic.

Um, but frankly, it needs to happen more often, and I think the shift will um move all of us again away.

And and I'm not, I just want to be really clear to all the, especially all the program officers who are watching me.

This is not throwing shade at all on the work that they do.

It's just the way that our system was set up before versus how we're gonna try it.

I think is gonna give us more time and energy and muscle to focus on on outcomes.

Yeah, it was more of a widget-based uh system.

Um, so uh you had a dashboard, you had a widget, hit the widget, we get paid.

Performance is really outcomes of humans.

You know, really what you're trying to make sure that people's outcomes are better going through this process.

Um, question for, and one of the providers I'm very familiar with Vayod, um, because of what I felt the excellent work at the Radison.

Is there anything within your performance-based contracting that actually tracks above and beyond?

For example, they odd had, and I'm not sure if I'm giving away some of the secret sauce, but they had phenomenal contracts that they did on their own for food.

So they had a pantry they created that provided additional food above and beyond the allocations for dollars for food for that a city had within their process.

Do they get plus points?

What is the process for going above and beyond, like, for example, supplementing the food outside of the regular contracting process?

Yeah, so there's no, and under the current what we're proposing for at least for 2026, uh, there is no you know, reward for anything outside of the four metrics that we have laid out.

But if, for example, um you are able to have a 95% occupancy rate, but maybe you're only doing a 75% um uh hitting your you're only hitting 75% of the goal around case management instead of 80.

Uh you'll be able to sort of make up for the um make up for the difference.

So you'll but you still can't go above and beyond the um maximum value of the contract, and legally couldn't really think of a way to like put in a bonus or anything to that effect.

I'm thinking highlighting that as well.

I think that's a value added, actually, it's a cost savings uh that they built into their process because they were getting food donated at a very high level from nonprofits that cost the city nothing, but they were leveraging those food that those those meals they were fantastic meals that they were providing um to folks at RASA, not asking to go above your contract or simply saying highlighting for us so you can demonstrate really, you know, the positive outcomes um to the folks that some of these service providers are providing.

Thank you.

One last question, uh Council President, it's uh a tied question concerning HMIS and corrupt data and usage of that.

Um speak to me on I know on some of these you identify for the housing management information system that they are were looking at the data from there.

I didn't see consistently throughout, maybe I just missed that.

Talk through how HMIS is being updated on MDHI is coordinating within your process and ensure data is not corrupted, um, that things are being verified, um, inputs are correct so that the performance base is being paid out based on true data.

Yeah, thank you.

Uh, and just for your last question, um, our providers will still submit quarterly narrative reports, so we'll encourage them to include in those reports anything that they're doing above and beyond the outcomes that we're tracking.

Um thank you for that suggestion.

As far as so, the way the metrics work, there's two different sources of data.

One is a uh capacity tracker which tracks the number of units that are available and occupied.

That's separate from HMIS, unfortunately.

Um maybe someday we can we'll merge those two things.

Um the other three metrics are all based on HMIS data.

Um, we have made a couple of changes to how HMIS is rolled out in Denver, especially how people are able to track what services are being provided right now.

There's a menu of I don't know, it's like 80 services, and it gets it's easy to make mistakes.

So we've dialed that down to um make it a little bit more clear.

We're working really closely with MDHI on data quality.

We have a new data team at host that's doing a phenomenal job.

And then we're also doing trainings of all of the we have a staff person who's been designated to do you know one-on-one trainings with the providers on on their HMIS input.

Now there's two different ways that uh so host has an automated dashboard that we're gonna be pulling HMIS data from.

That's what we're gonna use as our source of truth for the invoices.

The providers have the raw data, and they are welcome to run their own reports and compare it against ours, and then we have a process for disputes.

If if there's a provider's like, no, I serve 90 people, you know, not 80 people, um, they'll be able to submit that data to us, and then we'll you know, look at where things may have gotten corrupted or wrong.

So that's been built into the invoicing system as part of performance-based contracting.

Very helpful information.

So Polly and Jeff.

I would recommend limiting how much data is being collected that's not also being aggregated into HMIS.

Because the solutions are regional.

And if HMIS is being done different in Denver, the largest municipality, and we are looking at um uh desperate impacts based on migration and folks moving in and out, it's hard to track.

And so I know you're doing that.

I know both of you are concerned looking at that, but um separate little dashboards that don't roll up.

Hopefully, that migration happens sooner rather than later.

Yeah, we are not allowed to have like different outcome data, but it's all that we're really changing are um like a drop-down menu of services, those services are built into the system.

So there's categories that we can't change.

We're only customizing it for exactly that reason, councilman is to keep it the same regionally to you know maximize the benefit of the partnership through MDHI.

Awesome.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Councilmember Torres, and we'll wrap up shortly as we have another briefing.

Okay, thanks so much.

Yeah.

Um, so looking at kind of the lowish occupancy numbers at umadi and stay in.

Um, what's the issue?

What was the issue in placing there in 24?

Um, I'll be honest, I do not know, but I can I can find out.

Yeah, okay.

Um, because I can't imagine we didn't have people needing uh a bed or one of those units.

Um just worried that we underutilized um uh something that we were paying for.

Um, on the seeing kind of some consistency, I think Stone Creek um had some dramatically higher positive exit numbers.

Um, really curious maybe about how where they were finding more success than others, but seeing others stay closer to the 35 to 40 percent range.

Um, is that just what we have capacity for?

Like, I'm I've always been really curious about how many might be going into the permanent supportive housing pipeline that we are helping to build as a city versus other um exit uh positive exit outcomes, right?

That maybe they did go back home or um with a family member or um, so genuinely curious about like where is the pipeline working that we're building for, and that could be a future conversation, Jeff.

But we're working on it.

Okay, okay.

Love to understand a little bit more about that, and if we're still investing in the right place to be investing in order to get folks moved from here to permanence.

Yep.

I I think um last year, no, 2024, we saw like a nine percent exit um like positive exits like overall out of our system, which is one percent higher than what the national average is.

There was just a study that came out that said most homelessness response systems are only able to help about eight percent of the people who come through the system.

Um so uh but I'd like to see us do better than one one percent better.

So we are we are absolutely working on that, and I think the housing central command that we set up is kind of trying to bend the system towards like a more efficient use of the resources that we have for for all people in the entire shelter system.

Okay, I just curious about those who did successfully move out.

Um, was there length of state also that three to four month period of time, or were they out sooner?

I'm sure every case is different.

Yeah, I mean, this is the average that we've provided.

So um, yeah, I mean, there's some people who are there for three days and some people who have been there for over a year.

So it is depends on the person and their their circumstance, but we try to meet everybody where they're at and not um exit folks out of the shelter system, you know, until either they choose to or their behavior isn't consistent with you know a safe environment for everybody else, or or you know, in best case scenario, they they are finding housing.

Okay.

Because it's a part of their uh performance-based standard, the um I feel like there's a dual responsibility on the occupancy, um, because like you know, uh the gathering place and Colorado Village Collaborative aren't out there finding people to come to their micro community.

There's some other mechanism that puts people in those beds.

Yes.

Um, and so if it like continuing these for one two years, um, whatever their the duration is, um, if we're part of the problem in actually getting the that occupancy number higher, um I want to better understand that like where we're fixing that piece, um, and the role that we play, so it is um just it is occupied, right?

Yeah, I mean our 2025 data is better and we have changed how we're doing it.

We have a staff person who's sort of again air traffic controlling people into the beds.

Uh they meet we meet every morning at 8 30, um, and haven't had like an issue of not being able to get folks placed into the sites.

We also are changing the requirements of our providers um around that they have to be available to do intake um at least Monday through Friday, like nine to five, because that's also been an issue.

Some of the sites were only doing intake through hours that didn't necessarily work for our unhoused neighbors.

So we're we're trying to we've we've made a number of changes, and I think the numbers are are better for 2025.

Okay, great.

Thank you.

Thanks, Mother Chair.

Thank you.

Council.

Yeah, in fact, I'm sorry, yeah, we're no sites below 85% in 2025.

Okay, in group case a lot, great.

Thank you so much.

Just one more questionslash comment is um, I have heard a lot from the GNC committee and the neighborhood RNO that they have concerns, and when they ask about certain things, um, we're told they're it's not contracted for them to give us that data or to go to an RNO meeting or to participate in that.

So, one thing I would ask is before this comes before council, if you could meet with, and I would also be interested to hear the people living in these places.

Do they have big concerns or questions?

If you could have a little bit of feedback of how we're incorporating the community's feedback into some of these ideas, and maybe some of this is helping resolve that.

So that would be something I think would be helpful.

Um, I can share with you that in the contracts and the program standards providers are required to attend uh and one RNO meeting a month, they're required to provide a um telephone number and also to be monitoring the outside and calling 911 or 311 if there are issues around the sites.

This is something that we spoke about, council member Watson and um kind of locking that into the program standards.

Um, thank you so much.

Thank you.

One question I have, I can see in the presentation.

Are these contracts already coming?

And we've already approved them, and then you're giving us an update on them.

No, these are contracts which we will be bringing forward to you uh sometime in probably mid-November.

Okay, and then we typically, that's completely extra.

Yeah, unfortunately, our idea was to have them all done as we brought them to you, but uh it hasn't working out.

Maybe hopefully next year we'll continue to get better at uh at the timing, but certainly we'll not have any of them coming to you in July of 2026.

So we'll have another just to um button it up, would have another opportunity to ask questions and an opine on these.

This is like a little teaser because then you'll be asking us to move these advanced these to city council and adopt them to the contracts.

Is that correct?

Yes, okay, awesome.

Um, one thing I would ask is if you could send us the contract language prior, as soon as it's done.

I know that we'll all want to be reading these, and it's I'll just say it's really hard to read these on Friday and then vote on them on Monday.

So even if you can get them, I know it's always not um feasible sometimes to be able to get them at committee, but if you could get them for us at Mayor Council so we have some time to read them, so we're not asking questions and um not approving them on the floor, that's really helpful.

Would it be helpful just to have like one like all the contracts are essentially the same, just the contract template?

Yeah, okay.

If even if you have draft date, then our attorneys can share amongst attorneys so we can see it.

Okay, thank you.

All right, next up we have Cole giving us an update on Colchandler, um, presentation on non-congregate shelters.

Thank you, okay.

All in mile high.

Sorry, my computer decided to update right at the same time, so all I can see is that my apps are updating.

All right, great.

All right, good afternoon.

Um, thank you all so much.

I'm Cole Chandler, senior advisor on homelessness in the mayor's office.

Um, and I am here to provide the update on all of my high expenditures.

Uh, it was requested last time I was in committee for the quarterly briefing, and so wanted to uh come and provide that for you.

Um, so here's a bit of a presentation overview.

Um, the first section is about the impacts of all in mile high, and just focusing on the outcomes of what we have achieved together.

Um, then I have a little bit of a just overview looking at the full picture from 23 all the way to 2026, and then we'll go into detail for each year 2023, 2024, 2025, and then we'll look ahead to 2026 as well.

So that's what's in this presentation.

Um, and I'll do my best to move through all this information quickly.

So, this is um information that you all have seen before as we've provided a quarterly briefings.

Um, we're proud of the data that we have uh really achieved the largest reduction in unsheltered homelessness in recorded history, 45% reduction over the last two years.

Um, and among uh major cities participating in the 2025 point in time count, we have the lowest unsheltered count among those cities, and so you can see that data on the side.

Um, one of the other points that we've shared out with you all is that we have seen a reduction in um deaths among people experiencing homelessness across the entire system, and so that includes people that may have died outdoors, people that may have died in our shelters.

We think that's an important outcome that we're tracking over the last couple of years as well, and so wanted to highlight that.

Um, recently, the urban institute who is contracted to do a long-term evaluation of this effort, released some initial findings that demonstrated that we have reduced large encampments by 98% citywide.

Um, and so not just in the downtown core but across the entire city.

Large encampments have been reduced uh 98% since the start of this initiative.

Um, and so I'd encourage you.

I think that report was just coming out the day I was in committee last time, but I'd encourage you to go find that.

We can find it online.

That's right, yep.

Um, and then obviously the how of how we've done this is largely by moving people indoors, and um that's what we'll get into in the next sections as well.

Um but system wide, we've moved more than 7500 people indoors, more than 6200 people into permanent or stable housing over the last uh couple of years.

And so that's how we've been able to achieve this by standing up sites, um, aligning our street outreach efforts, and moving people um indoors and providing access to supportive services.

And so um looking at what we've achieved, wanted to have uh comprehensive conversation on what the costs and expenditures have been over the last uh two plus years.

Um, and I also wanted to just make sure that we're really clear about what we're talking about when we're talking about these expenditures.

And so this slide intends to show the sites that are in and considered in for this presentation and the appropriate costs.

And so I should actually pause here and just say a word of thanks to BMO and the Department of Finance to Host and Dottie and General Services and DDPHE and Dito for over the last month or so since I was in committee helping me to compile these expenses related to all these sites and really go through contract by contract and identify what we would share in this presentation.

But for the purposes of this effort, this is about the initial sites that we brought forward through what was called the House a Thousand effort at the time.

And so that includes those eight sites that we went out and did 60 community meetings talking about that I came forward and asked you all for contracts for, what felt like every Monday night in council during that time period.

But we're talking about the Tamarack, the Aspen, Stone Creek, Radisson, Comfort Inn, Stay In, La Paz, and Elati.

And I want to just pause there for a second because Steel Village and Monroe Village, which were historic sites, not including in this data set, street outreach efforts, things like that that existed prior, not including that in this data set.

I'm talking specifically about what it cost to acquire, construct, operate, provide supportive services for these eight new sites that we brought forward as a part of this initiative.

And so with that, this is really the overview looking at 2023 all the way through 2026.

And so this is kind of the big picture, and then in the next few sections, we'll zoom in on the year by year.

We've provided updates on 2023 in the past.

You know that most of the expenses that year hit really late.

2024 was the much larger year in terms of the investment, and we've broken that out in terms of what was recurring costs and what were one-time federal funds that we invested.

And so you can see that investment there.

And then 2025, that number is based on a calculation of what have we spent to date, and based on what we have in contract and planned expenditures through the end of the year, what we anticipate will spend at the end of 2025.

And then 2026 is based upon the 2026 budgeted numbers from each agency for these to support these sites.

And so this is the big picture.

But I think you know, the overall story here is that just like cities all across the country, we saw unsheltered homelessness increase, especially during the pandemic.

We had an influx of one-time federal funds.

We utilized those to create infrastructure to buy new hotels to create microcommunities to really help address this problem.

As you can see in the blue line on the screen, we've made significant progress, a 45% reduction in unsheltered homelessness.

And now, over the last couple of years, following that one-time federal investment in 2025, our costs have stabilized, and in 2026, our costs will continue to decrease as we move forward.

And so that's kind of the overview, but now we'll go year by year.

So 2023 expenditure review.

There were really three major buckets of expenses in 2023, and so Dottie led on our site preparation and construction work for five hotels and three micro-communities.

Obviously, the three microcommunities being La Paz, Elati, and Stay In.

They did site preparation, they brought units to sites, hooked them up, all that sort of thing at the hotels.

Even if it was an operating hotel, there was still some site work, there were submittals that needed to be done to CPD.

We had to work on fire and code maintenance and all those sorts of things.

And so there were updates made to hotels in many cases.

And so in 2023, Dottie spent about 6.3 million.

Host, had two major buckets.

One was in the one-time category, the acquisition of the stay-in-hotel, which we're including here because the microcommunity that's located there on that site, and then obviously many of the sites were only open for a short amount of time in 2023, as you saw on the prior side with the open slide with the opening dates.

And so in occurred very minimal hotel operations and services costs in 2023.

But the impact of that was six new shelter sites open, two micro communities under construction, over 1,100 people moved indoors, the 10 largest encampments closed in 2023.

Moving forward to 2024, so Dotti again had 9.3 million dollars for site preparation and construction for the hotels and the microcommunities.

Hit related to hotel acquisitions in particular.

So this is when we brought forward the contract and it was approved to purchase 4040 Quebec.

4595 Quebec, which is a DHA-owned site, had a major investment of ARPA dollars to help that acquisition to complete 7525 East Hampton, which is the Tamarack.

We saw the acquisition of that through COP, and then the purchases of the sleeping units for the three microcommunities all hit utilizing federal funds of 63.9 million and one time dollars to bring those sites forward in 2024.

And then in terms of the recurring costs, hosts obviously had the majority of those related to the service contracts and operations for the eight sites that were all operational at that point.

In 2024, they spent 41.2 million dollars on those contracts combined.

And then general services oversaw the maintenance, repairs, utilities, and security services for the three city owned hotels and the three microcommunities.

Clarifying that that does not include the non-city-owned hotels.

So at that time, the Radisson and the Comfort Inn, and that's why specifically talking about the three city-owned hotels where GS has a role.

They don't have those in the sites that we master leased, but that totaled 5.7 million.

And so by the end of 2024, we had really completed the build-out of this program.

We'd added over a thousand new units in a little over 18 months.

We brought 2233 people indoors, 850 of them were housed.

And as you saw previously, unsheltered homelessness decreased by 45%.

Moving forward to 2025 expenditures, this is where we are when we started pulling these numbers.

For the most part, these are as of the end of June.

In some cases, we had numbers through July, and so this is reflecting the expenditures of each agency by the end of June or the end of July.

DDPHE has spent 235,000 on their behavioral health services contract, physical health services contract with the Carter Coalition for the Homeless, which Jeff mentioned earlier.

Dido is new to this universe this year, in terms of the workforce services for rapid rehousing clients that they're offering.

They've spent a little over 93,000 at the midpoint of the year.

General services, again for the same scope related to maintenance repairs, and security had spent 4.1 million at this time, and then host for operations and supportive services at the all-in-mile high sites had spent 17.2 million as of the end of June.

And so at that time point, end of June, over 1400 people have moved indoors or moved to shelter, 740 to housing.

And so that is where we are at this, or at that point of the year, June, July, AIMHI expenditures being on track to stabilize as we had planned in 2025.

And then looking ahead to 2026, as you know, aim high expenditures will decrease next year, we have on the screen the DDPHE budget for $800,6,000 in the general fund.

Dito workforce services for the full year is anticipated at $200,000.

The general services budget for next year for the three city-owned hotels and three microcommunities is at $3.2 million.

And then hosts service contracts and operations for seven AIM high sites coming in at $37 million.

Again, just noting here the Radisson Hotel, which was leased closed in March of 2025.

And then Comfort Inn will close in March of 2026.

And so that's some of the reason for that reduction.

But we've brought that planned expenditure down to 41.2 million for 2026 at this point.

And then finally, just kind of looking ahead a bit globally.

And I think this is one of the things that, you know, even tying into Jeff's presentation from earlier.

You know, I think when we initially brought these sites forward as part of the emergency declaration, focused on standing up the all-in-mile high system and finding ways to better connect people from unsheltered homelessness.

Um we were really looking at it as more of those programs being their own independent entity as we move forward, really working on broader system integration and how we loop all of this together into a cohesive homelessness response system.

You've seen that in the ways that we've reported on our public dashboard this year already demonstrating more of our citywide approach.

And so that will be one of the major focuses.

Another focus will continue to be our street engagement activities and our multi-agency coordination of those, ensuring that we're able to connect appropriate people to the appropriate services every single day, really utilizing 311 response in order to be able to get to every call that comes in and dispatch teams and ensure we're able to connect people to services.

And then I think something we've talked about and recognize the need for, certainly at the street level is expanded access to treatment and behavioral health services for high acuity individuals that remain outside.

And so while we're obviously extremely proud of the work that we've done to be halfway towards our goal to end street homelessness in two years, we know that there's many folks that are still on the streets.

You all get calls about them every day from your constituents, so do we, and we want to work to continue to adapt and meet the needs of those individuals.

And so these will be some of the themes that we move forward as part of a really a system-wide effort and system-wide focus in 2026.

And so that is the end of the presentation, and happy to see what questions you have for us.

Thank you so much.

That was a great presentation with a lot of information that we'll have to digest a little bit for me at least.

First up, I have, I believe I have councilman Sorry, followed by Councilmember Albitrez.

Thanks, Madam President.

Thanks, Cole.

One question on slide eight that I kind of don't understand.

You talked about it a little bit in the later slides, but as we're looking at sort of the downward trend of cost after 2023, when was the total cost was a little over 120 million?

Um, if we're closing some of the sites, why are the costs essentially staying the same?

Like the closure of those sites only takes out a few million dollars, right?

It is essentially averages out to 42 million dollars a year or forever more, based on what you're presenting to us here, and so like closing those sites should reduce those costs more than they are.

Otherwise, why are we closing those sites?

Yeah, right.

Like there's got to be an economies of scale here to take advantage of.

It just doesn't seem to me like closing those sites is adding the kind of cost savings we really needed to have added in order for this to be worthwhile.

Yeah, great question.

Thank you for that.

Um so I think a couple of things, obviously, in some of the cases, the planned closures are mid-year, so they're not full year closures, right?

And so it'll continue to take a bit of time before we see that fully hit year over year.

The other thing, even as Jeff just talked about, um, is that some of the sites that we're continuing to operate, the cost of doing business at those sites will increase as cost of living adjustments take place and just the cost of doing services continues to rise.

And so we're working to offset that um piece as well.

Um, and then the final piece related to that is uh in some cases we are bringing security services inside into those contracts, and so there's a bit of offsetting that's occurring.

We are seeing a reduction.

I still still think it's you know, it is a reduction.

No, for sure.

It's just my question to you is like, is the value of that reduction enough to make that reduction worthwhile because we're getting we're deleting a significant number of beds that we need.

Fair.

Yeah, and so I think the point being that if we were to you know maintain those beds while cost of services rises in the future year, that we would actually see an increase by the measures that we're taking, we are decreasing the cost.

Um so it the it's the combination of those things mid-year closure, cost of services increasing, offsetting security costs, um, and so that is all factoring together to help us create a reduction instead of an increase.

Okay, I really appreciate that.

I guess my concern remains just in terms of like we are creating a reduction in 2026.

We don't see on that slide what it's gonna look like moving forward, right?

But without closing more beds, we're not going to continue to see a reduction.

These costs are gonna start going back up again.

So the the graph is gonna look like a V.

Sure.

We are only just seeing one half of the V right now.

So in the slide that you showed us.

So I I guess I'm a little concerned about like what this looks like in 2027 and beyond, because those costs are gonna keep going up.

Yeah, so you're talking about the cost of services continuing to rise.

Yeah, because all because the cost of money today is cheaper than the cost of money in three years, right?

So I mean that's natural at some point, but like we can't celebrate it as a giant win for one year when we're only looking at half the V.

And in order to achieve that V, we've closed a number of shelter beds.

Yeah, and I I appreciate that point, but I thought you were gonna give me extra credit because I gave you 23 and 27.

I know, and I do appreciate that call.

Appreciate you so much.

I do.

I don't have 27 for you today, but I really was trying to be as comprehensive as possible.

You know, the ask for today was to come forward with 24 and 25, brought 23, tried to forecast out to 2026 as well, and obviously we'll stay in the conversation.

Yeah, I do really appreciate it.

I just want to make sure that we're like getting the most out of the system that we created that we spent a lot of money to create, right?

So, um, that's why the question I also, so second question, you have heard from me a lot lately.

Yeah.

Sorry.

Um, but also like I drive 13th and 14th to work every single day.

And I have seen at least one very large encampment on either 13th or 14th or both, yeah, every single day for the last three weeks.

So, what is going on that we are seeing this uptick in unhoused residents?

I can only speak to 13th and 14th, and then some that we have received from our residents in district five, particularly out east, like by the Aurora border, but I don't know if other council members are experiencing the same thing, but it's sort of extraordinary how many more people in the I would say the like since Labor Day for sure, um, we are seeing on the streets again.

It's like shopping carts, full encampments, the whole situation.

Yeah, great question.

I think a lot of that is still anecdotal at this point.

I'll say the data doesn't necessarily demonstrate that we have more people staying outside.

The trends year over year are that you always have more people outside in the warmer months and less people outside in the cooler months.

Um, what we're seeing when we look at our reports on homelessness are 311 reports that have come down year over year, they've continued to drop at the same rates.

And so we're down 65% from where we were at this point in 2023, and it's down from 2024, and the trend line literally goes down in the winter, up in the summer, but at the same rates year over year.

And so I'm I'm looking at that every single day.

Every time one of those calls come in, we're sending a team out when you all fly.

Yeah, I really appreciate it.

You're you guys have been fantastic in responses.

And we're working on those responses.

Um, you know, and we're doing our best to understand the numbers of folks that are at this street level.

We are, we are not.

Like I'm saying, the data is not indicating that we're necessarily seeing more.

However, when we are encountering folks, we want to do our best to get to those.

We do know that East Colfax, which these are 13th and 14th, but that has been a challenged area, and we are thinking about some um uh some focus area operations that we could have along that street.

One of the things that you know hosts will be bringing forward in future weeks is um their street outreach and community ambassador contracts, and we think that those can help make an emphasis in some of our more challenge areas where we just know we're always gonna need folks that are on the streets that are in those areas so that we can help connect people to services, and so really trying to take a comprehensive view of it and build out the strongest system that we can and continuing to track the data, so yeah.

Yeah, I really appreciate that.

And I I guess you know, when we're looking at these numbers, we're not looking at the indirect costs as well as right, like those the numbers on the slides you showed us are all direct costs that is like the cost of us managing these eight sites, right?

That doesn't cover legal, that doesn't cover for the contracting, it doesn't cover HR, it doesn't cover finance, it doesn't cover you know travel, it doesn't cover training, it doesn't cover any uh accounting, like it doesn't cover any of the um indirect costs that we the support IT, right?

Like all of those things that we have taken on, in addition.

Um, and I guess my concern is what we're looking at these numbers and we're looking at um essentially 41 million dollars a year plus a 3% cola into the future to maintain these sites, and that is only for eight sites, right?

That does not include any of the indirect costs, that does not include any of the kind of other stuff that is going on, like at some point we need to have a conversation about the fact that the city of Denver does not have the tax base to maintain this level of responsiveness into the future.

We just don't, or we're gonna have to cut every other kind of service that we provide for every other city agency to our residents.

Like we can't afford this perpetually into the future.

And so I really appreciate what you guys are doing.

Just because we can't doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

Um, and also we have to have a conversation about reality here at some point.

Like we cannot keep paying for this out of our general fund ourselves every single year into perpetuity, unless we expect to reduce every other service that we offer our city.

Like end of story.

Thanks.

Council Member Alviders, followed by Tworth.

Thank you.

There's 10 minutes, I think we have to click it over.

Okay.

Um, yeah, I would love to see how much of these are general funds.

I know a lot of them are ARPA, especially the one-time.

So that would be helpful to see.

So to think about how it goes into the future.

Um, but I did have a question.

I was a little confused on the slide on 2024 one-time costs where it says site preparation and cost for five hotels.

But or on 2023, but we hadn't acquired only one at that time, which was the state in.

Um, yeah, so as you recall, we were in the process of acquiring all of those.

In many cases, the expense actually hit in 2024, but we still had site preparation for them.

And most cases we had uh in all cases, we had site control over them.

We were operating them by the end of the year, but the actual closing hadn't occurred until 2024 in the case of the Aspen, in the case of um the 7525 East Hamden, in the case of the deal with DHA.

Uh, but we had site control for all those sites, and so we were uh doing the site preparations and operating those sites as well.

Okay, and then um we didn't take on any debt for any of these, right?

They were all just paid for with ARPA funds.

Correct.

Okay, um back to indirect costs, is the housing command costs in here.

Uh that's not.

So we're considering the cost of operating the sites, the supportive services are so to the extent that some of what Jeff has described around the um what the housing the navigators are doing within the sites, the resource navigators, that's in there.

Um, sort of the role that Jeff described of the housing command center sort of orchestrating, that is not um uh connected to this cost.

Okay, and then um one thing that is a little bit confusing over the years, which could be helpful to have some more information is internal versus external costs.

So, like now we do housing command, we did have certain providers for health.

The EPHE has those costs for 2024, 2025, where were they in 2023?

I know they existed, but um, so that part is just a little bit confusing.

And then um, actually, with you about that for a second.

So I think that is part of why I put this slide together that's on the screen to try to be really clear about uh exactly what we're reporting on.

Um, and that's also part of why I say that you know, in 2026, we really want to view this as one entire homelessness response system, like in a way, everything is in play on everything related to addressing homelessness.

I wanted to be really transparent and provide to tell you guys when we push this initiative forward and brought these eight new sites on, what did it cost us for 23, for 24, for 25?

What do we expect it will cost us in 2026?

But as we move forward, this is one homelessness response system, and the more we try to draw the boundaries and the lines, this the more tricky it becomes, and so I think the best way to talk about this is our broader system.

Um, and so uh just wanted to point that out.

Yeah, I think eventually having that broader system will make a lot more sense.

And then lastly, I just wanted to say we are experiencing some more encampments, mostly along the river in the district.

And I also have been very curious because there's been a high level of arson, and I don't know if that's connected to homelessness because it does seem to be like people trying to survive outside, or but it's not even in the winter, like there's been a higher level of arson all year.

So I just wanted to flag that to see if there is a correlation.

So something you just interested.

I'll ask Dember Fire about that.

Thank you.

Thank you, thank you, Councilman Torres.

Um, thank you so much.

Just trying to um reconcile some of the numbers that I had in my memory, particularly around our 2024 spend numbers and hotel acquisitions.

I remember um, I think it was 4040 Quebec, was established with an 83 million dollar master lease.

Um I'd have to follow up with I'd have to get back with you on that.

Okay.

That doesn't sound right to me 83 million, because I think the total acquisition was more around 40 to 43 million.

But did we lease we leased it first?

So where was that cost absorbed?

We had a yeah, so the initial deal was that there was an external partner that bought it, we had a master lease with them, then we complete we closed uh once the ARPA funds came in in 2024.

Um I feel confident saying there's no world in which it was 83 million, but I will follow up with the specifics of that deal and how that came together.

Yeah, that would be great.

That's the note that I have.

Um bill number 2314.

I would need to go back in and um and figure out what that amount was and just where it falls in your category because that uh any additional money over um its portion of the 63.9 million just isn't in the list, yeah.

Um, so we'd just be curious about that.

Great, thank you.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Yeah, um, so thank you for the presentation.

Um, and the metrics.

I I think that was the one, if I remember correctly on my notes, the one who asked for how are we spending all of these dollars?

Um I do know that when I first came into office, um, the public comment at City Council was all about sweeps.

I you were on the other side, and you heard all of those public comments, and we sweep to nowhere.

I'll remember never forget that statement.

Like, where are we sweeping them, sweeping them to nowhere?

We're putting them somewhere else.

We don't get those public comments anymore.

We do get the public comments about family, um, that there are families that need sheltering.

Um, and so there has been a big change in the experience, the Denver rights uh for people experiencing homelessness.

I would get tons of emails about large encampments throughout the city.

We don't have those anymore.

Um, I'll never forget the one in Councilman Torres' district.

Um I think that it was huge.

It was one of the bigger ones that I had ever seen.

Um, and so I'm proud of the work that Denver has done.

I also am concerned.

How do we maintain it moving forward?

One thing that I I'm sitting here thinking about the Urban Institute.

How do we ever have we gotten an update on how the social impact bond project is doing, or do we keep that out?

Because that's not part of all in mile high, correct?

Yeah, that and again, that's another you know, point of like these lines that we've drawn and how we talk about this as a whole system in regards to the social impact bond.

You know, Jamie or Jeff would be best poised to talk about that.

Um, I don't know if there's any update you want to offer.

I would just I think we only have three more minutes, but I'm wondering if maybe I we could put we could bring that back to committee and see how have like I feel like they're all factioned, like you have this, like it you have this, and sometimes, like at high school, you're like, well, I'd sit at that table, and I'm gonna sit at this table, or I'm gonna how holistically are we looking at all of the um progress that we've made from when Denver passed the social impact bond, right?

Because that was that that helped create a foundation for a lot of the work, and then we've done this, and then we had ARPA funds.

So the reason why I'm asking that is because the only way to do forecasting is to look what where you've been, and so I'm just trying to figure out as we all sit here and think about the proposed 2026 budget.

Um, how are we gonna use all of the different models and different um tools we have in our toolbox to be able to be successful during the budget um workshop and recommendations?

I didn't vote for CBC, but it's not because I didn't not support them.

Sure.

I'm just concerned about the permit and how do we figure out this permitting, and that's something that we have to take on on city council because I was the one who worked with Tina Axelrad to create that permit during COVID for Regis and for all these other places.

So I there's always time to do a supplemental in the spring once we close out the books in March.

And so that's that's kind of how I'm thinking about all of these budgets, is I really need to see the closed-out books for 2025.

Um colleagues, we had a uh interesting committee meeting before this one that talked about the forecasting and how when did we see this coming?

And it was, you know, it's been coming for a while.

I think I was all very surprised by how far we had seen this budget shortfall coming.

Um, but with that being said, I think we have a lot of tools out there, and a lot of times we keep focusing on this term deficit and budget shortfall, closing of shelters, and I want to change that into the abundance and a lot of the good work that we've had and the change in the tone of the emails that I'm getting, the change of the of the public comments that we're seeing on Monday night as someone who has to preside over the council meetings and see who's coming.

It has shifted, has definitely shifted.

So I just want to acknowledge all of that hard work and also figure out how are we going to be able to even maintain all of this?

Like the social impact bond, at least it's perpetual funding, if I remember correctly.

Not perpetual, but it has a funding, it's not from our general fund.

And so, how do we use all of these other models that we have to sustain the amazing work that we have to date?

Because it takes a whole team.

All right, so I'll bring that up to the um the complimentarity and pro tem.

I think Pro Tem's watching, and if you sit out on your radar, maybe we could have just a slight update and one of the next times we all come on the um social impact fund.

All right.

Well, with that, colleagues, we stand adjourned.

Um, I think we have some consent agenda items agenda item.

Um, and I will see you at 3 30 in the council chambers.

Thank you all.