Officials starting now.

Northfield soccer update you might have caught at the beginning of our mayor council.

If not, Councilman Gonzalez chairs, I will update you later.

Um great to see you all.

Welcome to Mayor Council.

Thank you for joining us on this lovely Tuesday morning.

Um we'll start with introductions, and we have a general session update this morning on our goals for quarter one.

They will walk you through.

Um, and we'll send you off to your wonderful post nuggets victory Tuesday morning.

Um Councilman Gonzalez, Terrace, you want to start with introductions.

Yep.

Uh good morning everyone, Sadana Gonzalez Coutianas, one of the council members at large.

Great.

Uh welcome.

Let's start with announcements and any announcements folks would like to make for the listeners at home or for any of your fellow council members to update us on.

Yes.

Yes, Madam President, I think I know what your update's gonna be.

Join us Friday at four thirty for the ribbon cutting for La Rasa Park.

Um two million dollars worth of improvements.

And then the next morning, I was just informing the mayor.

I about ten thousand bikers will descend at La Rasa Park.

They'll be coming down Federal down thirty-eighth and then to another stop within Denver.

So if you see tons of um Chicano Brikers, it's called the Chicano Pride Ride, and they give all of their um money that they raise for the Chicano Pride Ride to Inspire, which gives um scholarships to Latino um kids in the community, so they give directly back.

So hope to see everyone at the festiv festivities this weekend.

You don't even know me on the back.

Any other announcements this morning.

Fantastic.

All right.

We will head into an update that we have on our uh quarterly goals.

Um, as you all may remember, we launched at the beginning of the year each year a set of big citywide goals that we're focused on across all 15,000 employees and 27 agencies.

Um, and so we'd like to give quarterly updates to the public about what's happening on each of these.

We want you to be able to track them at home, know how we're doing, what's going well, what's not.

Uh we've also launched now a public dashboard.

So if you want to keep track of the progress, you can any day, just like checking on your favorite sports scores in Denver, you can also check on your city's goals.

And so uh that's also public if you want to track it.

But let me walk you through where we are on each of these, and happy to take questions if council members have them and we will jump in.

So, first, um, starting with our overall set of goals for the year.

Council Torres, I'm reminded of um the work you keep reminding us on around the community health assessment and how we believe that those priorities should be aligned to what the city is working on each and every day.

And so I think you'll see a number of those here.

Obviously, called out in the health assessment this year.

We're of course improving access to affordable high-quality child care.

You'll see that here is one of our goals.

Um, increasing the quantity uh and safety of affordable housing.

Um, that you'll see here.

Uh focusing on firearm-related homicides has been a continued focus of the health assessment.

You'll see that as one of our goals.

Of course, the continued focus on reducing overdoses, particularly among folks who are potentially unhoused or living outdoors.

That you'll see that as part of our focus, and then um focused on dropout rates among our vulnerable youth populations, where you'll see a number of our focus on both after school programming and youth works are directly linked to that.

So just wanted to name uh council tourists as helpful reminder that these are linked to the broad feedback we've gotten from people all around the city, and that we hope will drive change in an ongoing way.

Um let me walk you through where we are.

Uh, first one.

Um, this is the the two components of our vibrant goal.

One was about uh filling the three million square feet of office and retail space, as you may remember, about 25% of our tax base comes from downtown, and like many downtowns, we have more and more empty commercial office space.

So we're looking to fill that office space by converting it into housing, by uh attracting new businesses, by keeping existing businesses, by helping create more uh public spaces like child care facilities or space for artists.

So we want to really activate that space for the city as well as for the tax base.

Uh our goal was to build three million square feet this year.

The great news is we've done half of that already in just the first quarter.

So about 1.5 million of square feet has already been committed in the first quarter.

Um, big part of that is the 1.1 million square feet uh of the high fidelity project.

That's 700 units of new housing, and that will also include on-site child care at that site.

Thank you to the DDA and the council president's leadership on that.

The thing I want to name for you in this uh data that people might not see is uh we have 14 new retail openings.

Uh, that's been helpful.

Five new uh office uh deals for folks that have moved to downtown for the first time.

And a lot of you have asked about retention.

What are we doing to retain the people that we currently have?

Uh separate from this 1.5 million.

We've also retained 241,000 square feet of leases.

So those are businesses whose leases were up.

They could have chosen to leave the city or leave the neighborhood, and we've extended those 241,000 square feet, and so that's in addition to the 1.5 million, but I think is a really important if we're adding new space but losing the space we have, it's not a net win.

So we focus on both of those.

Um, in terms of our second goal, which is continue to focus on delivering the catalytic developments on time in 2026.

That includes all of our bond projects where you can see the bond dashboard where you can track each of the projects and their progress there.

Also includes some of our other significant projects.

Uh, I think Councilwin Alvidres has been very involved.

Obviously, we're excited that the Denver Summit completed their land purchase at Santa Fe Yards.

Um good progress on that one.

Still ongoing conversations in the community about the Bronco side at Burnham.

That includes that they both submitted their large development review and the infrastructure master plan, and then we have the small area plan at Vurnham Yards is continuing through a community process uh that's moving forward, and so those are just some individual updates on those on those projects.

Um affordability, um, we have two components here.

One is bringing on 2,500 new affordable units for those folks watching from home.

An affordable unit means the rule of that unit is that you don't pay more than 30% of what you make to rent.

And so uh if you make sixty thousand dollars a year as a teacher, your rent would not go above around $1,500 a month, and the rent cannot go up unless your income goes up.

So this is really affordable units targeted at all of working Denverites who want to be able to afford to live here.

You can see this graph is very helpful.

Megan and our amazing team made this.

What this shows you is we are on track, but it also shows you the slope of when those units are set to come on.

So that curve tells you when we should see units coming on based on the deals we know are coming through.

And so you'll see a lot of these units will be opening in the latter half of the year.

We know that we're planning for that.

So you might say, gosh, it seems like that graph is not very big in March.

That is true, but we are on path to where it's supposed to be.

As long as these other units come in on time, we will still hit hit that goal.

Um good news is this year we added a goal to just permit more units of all sorts so we could get more and more supply into the housing stock because we saw a lot of uh slow down the number of people that were that were permitting new units.

And so the goal was to bring on 5,000 units this year.

Uh this we're now almost 2100 uh actually exactly 2157 in the first quarter, so that puts us on track to meet that goal.

We hope we'll see more and more of the market recovering, which means more folks uh being able to build.

So that's uh a little of the updates on the affordable.

Obviously, work going that you all know about on unlocking housing choices and um doing work right now with extending the STP deadlines for folks that have projects in the queue that we want to make sure actually get financed to let you all know.

We have about 20,000 projects, 20,000 units that are in the queue at our planning department that have been stuck because of hard interest rates, hard to finance.

And so our hope is we could meet a lot of the needed housing, and we can just unstick a number of those 20,000 units that are stuck.

Um next one.

Uh Safe, I'll give you an overview here.

Uh we have two goals here.

One is decreasing gun-related homicides, which as I mentioned comes uh straight out of our community health assessment.

The second is on reducing shootings in high risk areas, and those are our place network investigation sites.

Uh I'll I'll name for you the this is the data by the end of Q1.

Um you'll see we're flat on citywide firearm homicides at the end of Q1.

We are still down on number of people shot about 17%, and citywide violent gun crime is still down about 35%.

That is the good news.

Um I'm gonna give you an update in a minute because as you know, we've been concerned about uh uh some of the violence in the last month of April.

That's been our worst month of the year.

Um, and so I'll come back and show you the updated, what we have is updated in the last month because this was as of March 31st.

Um but uh in terms of the unmitigated good news is our place network investigation sites are working really well.

We continue to see dramatic drops in those uh places year over year, and so happy about that success and we'll continue to support that work going forward.

The add of one I'll mention to you is if you just look at this, um, this is where we are as of right now, almost at the end of April, and you'll see the difference here is that we had we had seven uh uh homicides in the month of April alone.

Um, and so that is by far the worst month we've had in the last two and a half years.

Um, it is what pushed these numbers now so that we are at uh 18 total homicides for the year.

That is up from last year, which was a historic low at this location, still significantly down, almost 50% down from either 23 or 24.

Um so uh the year to date we are up.

Three year averages were still significantly down, but we're obviously um both heartbroken uh and very, very, I think feel a sense of urgency about action to make sure we can reverse that trend of April.

Um, but that has been our most dangerous uh month uh maybe since we've all been on this council together.

Um but that gives you a little bit more in case you say, wait, doesn't feel like that's been a great quarter.

It was through March 31st, April 1 to today is the where we've had the challenge.

Um, next slide.

Uh this is an update on our all-in mile high.

Just a reminder for folks watching at home, the council members know this very well.

Our homeless discount is a little different from the rest of our metrics.

We get safety data daily.

The formal homelessness count is a point-in-time count that happens once a year, and so we set this goal in December to reduce it by 75%.

That will include both a count that we did in January of 25, which we'll have data from in the next few months, and then the whole year's worth of work will be measured in a point-in-time count that happens next January in 26.

So in 27.

So this will be a goal we'll be tracking progress on really into 27 because the count is a little bit delayed.

Um right now we have about 539 folks moved into other all-in locations or moved to what we'll call non-congregate shelter.

About 604 moved up and out to housing.

That's we want to keep moving more and more the exits to housing number because that creates more units to move people off the street and into.

Um that includes, by the way, the closure of the Comfort In where we have transitioned uh all those folks into either permanent housing or to another transitional housing site.

Um, the other one we added this year was that we were responsive to people's reports or concerns around folks that were homeless and how we could get them the services they needed.

Our goal was to get this to a one-day response.

We've been building the data system with our team for how to both track our responses and how to track the final outcomes of those of those interactions.

And so right now we're on track.

The goal is to be able to do one day by the end of this year.

We want to do that even faster.

What about 2.3 days right now?

So we're on track.

We want to continue to see that response time come down, and uh to see our closure rate uh continue to go up with that that is a little bit of the data on where we are, and we've launched this integrated system for the first time where we have a software that tracks all of our engagement with all our individuals, whoever responds, whether it's a public health worker, whether it's a host worker, whether it's a star van, whether it's a police officer, so that's now finally uh uh uh channel into one database we can track and share with you.

All right, next one.

Bit of updates on climate.

Um we have two components here.

One is 5,000 new clean energy systems citywide on track here.

We have about 1,300 done so far.

This will break down for you what those are water heaters, space heaters, electric heat pumps, solar panels, EV chargers.

If you want to do this in your own home, please reach out to our climate office.

Someone will text me the website they should go to to find uh any of the services that exist because these are easily available and a lot of them are subsidized to make them cheaper for you to implement.

We want to really focus on the fact you can get to cleaner energy and cheaper energy at the same time is our goal.

Second one is our 50 acres of green infrastructure that helps protect against heat islands across the city where temperatures are increasing, adding more green infrastructure.

The first one of these projects you probably see council members right in front of your front yard is the uh the react the sort of reactivation of the uh of the green space in front of City Hall, which will now be moved to native grasses that consume much less water but are equally beautiful.

So that's up and moving.

Finally, our young people last goal.

From the two components here.

One is we are working with a set of community members and nonprofit partners around a plan for comprehensive citywide framework for affordable reliable child care.

We're doing one-on-one conversations, we're meeting with small groups, we have a work group uh working on plans for what the long-term strategy can be to how to make sure child care is affordable for everyone from birth really up to high school graduation.

Um then for those of you at home, if you have a young person in your home who is looking for a job, whether it's a niece and nephew, a grandparent, a child, a sibling, we are doing intensive focus on hiring up for summer work.

We have the mayor's summer youth work program, and our goal is that every high school student will have a chance to get a work experience before they graduate, and that will be about 5,000 more young people we'll put into out-of-school and work opportunities this year.

2,500 young people is our goal to be on the job at work.

And if you are a small business owner, mid-sized business owner, we would love to have you sign up to be someone to host and hire uh a young person this summer.

It can change their lives, and we think make your life a lot more enjoyable along the way.

Um so that is the that's our final of the sixth.

Um, with that, I will stop and happy to open for questions anyone might have uh or any comments if you do before we head on.

Yes, Councilman Alvidros.

Thank you.

Um, my question is about the affordable housing goal.

You mentioned 20,000 units.

Are those a hundred percent affordable?

Are those mixed income?

Thank you.

Um, for those of you that are following at home, Councilman Vidros was talking about we have 20,000 units that are stuck in our planning department queue.

It means someone applied to build some units and then they have let that application language.

They've not come back, they've not moved it forward.

So they kind of started the application, never finished it.

And those are units of all income levels.

Those are market rate units, they're affordable.

Single family home, it could be a high rise.

Yeah, it could be anything.

That's literally any housing unit in the city and county of Denver.

And do we have any information on what the different issues are?

I know you mentioned interest rates, I know you mentioned other things.

The biggest one overwhelmingly, and you um Brad Buchanan from CPD could certainly council give you a deeper debrief on this, but when we've talked to them, overwhelmingly the issue is financing, as they can't find a way to finance the projects they're trying to get through because either the cost of borrowing money is too high, or they don't have the investors that are that are there yet to move it forward.

So we did with the permitting timeline has not been a problem for those folks.

They've all stalled for financing is the feedback we've got.

So we're trying to see if there are ways in which there are any buckets of dollars that we have that could help specific projects move forward, um, or if there are things we can do to make the designs cheaper, but that's been the biggest challenge.

Great.

And then I just wanted to bring up that we had a rezoning on South Lincoln Street for Colorado Coalition for the Homeless in 2024.

They don't have funding, so there's that, and we have two archway developments in my district that are you know, are they all through the process, but they don't have funding.

So if you're looking to fund any affordable housing, we have a few projects in the district.

Just wanted to update that.

I appreciate that.

Thank you.

Madam President.

So also it's not just the funding, it's the LITEC projects.

So the light the low income tax credits, they've actually been awarded outside of Denver.

Historically, they've been awarded more in Denver.

And so what we're seeing is that we're not getting the awards in the time that we want to, so we're having to push those awards out.

Um the one on South Federal, uh, or North Federal, where I'm have one working on Colorado Collection from the homeless.

We don't think we're actually going to be applying being able to apply for those low income tax credits until 2028 because the awards are going out different, and CHAF is looking at things.

So it's it's a complicated capital stack, and then drawing down the Prop 1, 2, 3 dollars has also been more complicated than people have thought.

So I keep putting pressure on the state because we're doing our part here.

We have Aheart, we have all the things we actually need our other partners to show up too.

So put pressure on your state reps.

Yeah, for real.

Yeah, and our friends of the housing and financing authority.

Well, we think that we are building higher density of affordable housing than anybody in the state.

We think a disproportionate amount of resources should be in the places where the most units are being built, and so we're gonna keep pushing both for CHAFA funding for Prop 123 funding for state funding.

We think that um that's really important part of the puzzle for a lot of these folks.

That's great to hear.

And um I'm also happy to hear that other places, the side's number are also building affordable housing.

That's also a good thing.

They're building on there also.

I think there is a real desire to do it.

You see it in all the mountain communities, you see it in the suburbs, see it across the front range.

And then my second question, um, I'm curious if this is anywhere in the goals.

I know there's it doesn't seem like it is, but one of the things that has been concerning to me is the overdose depths.

Is that fit in here somewhere?

Uh it well, it does.

Um, it is not a directly measured uh part of these goals, but it is part of our public health priorities.

That's true also for suicides as well as for overdoses, because those are as we've seen our homicide rate drop significantly.

We are now losing more people in the city to suicide and overdose than we are to violent crime.

Um our public health team is tracking that.

We still find that the most effective strategy to prevent folks from overdoses is to have them indoors in a place where they have access to treatment and services, and so we still see the highest percentage of folks overdosing are those that are still living on the streets, and so uh that's a big part of the strategy is to bring them indoors and get them services, but that is an ongoing area of focus.

Great.

I'd love to have one of those briefings here eventually, that'd be great.

Thank you.

That's all I have.

Would you uh council would you like to focus on the overdose question specifically?

Uh, would be great.

Overdose and suicide.

Okay, great.

We'll have our public health team come, that'd be great.

Yes, Council Torres.

Thank you.

On the um unceltered homelessness, um, can someone from your team send me the 2023 point in time?

It's not the dashboards not on MDHI's site anymore for that year, just so I can see one of the one of the um data points that came out just in a news report from that one was families unsheltered.

Do we have a number for families unsheltered from point in time this year?

We do have it.

Um I don't know what is off the top of my head, but we do have it.

I get it to you absolutely.

Great.

I know the overall number I think was 1431 in 23, um, but what the specific family count is, we can get to you that as well.

Okay, super.

And then um as it relates to homicides, um, apart from maybe the standard DPD response when um homicides occur.

Does this is there anything that um uh your teams are doing that includes like a a DHS, a children's affairs, an OSC OSCI response to each circumstance to kind of evaluate is there something else that um other needs that needed to be met or um things that that family needed um that could be addressed in that in that crisis.

Uh there is actually Dr.

Ben Sanders and his team at uh at OSEI have our office of neighborhood safety, does immediate response and outreach to each of those families, usually with uh what we would call violence interrupters or their the program support to say what's going on with your family, other services we can provide.

It is often uh a goal to prevent retaliation, right?

If your family was a victim of violence, how do we make sure you don't now go seek revenge on another family that they see as being involved?

And so those partners are working very actively and aggressively, and if there is any need for housing or social services support, and then Ben's team connects them through any other city resource, so that is one that we're quite actively involved in.

Okay, thank you.

Thanks.

Uh yes, Council President Pro Tem.

Thank you.

Um, Mr.

Mayor, so I have one around um similar to um council member Torres's for the all-in-mile high.

The tracking again is everyone, and I think there's that nuance between like chronically homeless and family and maybe putting some milestones to addressing those.

I know different resources go in.

But that's also, you know, how are we tracking our families?

Because it although it's going down in one area, it's rising in another.

Yeah.

Yeah, we can certainly again disaggregate for you the impact on families and how they're progressing.

I don't know if we have a separate indicator for chronically homeless uh as a category, but we do certainly for families, and we could we could get that data to you for sure.

Awesome.

And then I had another um question around child friendly.

Um of the I'm just looking here.

So I think it's helpful.

Um looking at the PowerPoint for the child friendly, but it's engaging with the one-on-one conversations with providers to validate their experience.

Is that tracked through Office of Children's Affairs or how exactly are we tracking?

It is uh Jess Ridgway, who's our executive director for the Office of Children's Affairs is leading these conversations with providers all around the city, people from her team at Children's Affairs and and her directly.

Um that's helping them figure out what are the biggest challenges, what would you need to be able to offer more slots?

Is it workforce, is it facilities, is it permitting?

Um, and then what do we see as what's working in other places that we could help build on?

So that that's exactly what she's doing right now.

Okay.

Um if there are folks you want to suggest for us to reach out to or include, she'd love to talk to them.

Okay.

I'll I'll reach out to her, but I think that that's just critically important right now, especially since you know, we have a lot of providers that have gone away that are no longer in, you know, providing services, and we just see this rise in need um for young people.

And I think you mentioned it just briefly in your comment, but there's there's that gap of time for like those middle school, you know, elementary, middle school, and high school.

So I think that we're missing it's not the missing middle, but it's kind of like just an overseen uh age group that often I think needs sometimes the most engagement.

In terms of the middle school years, yeah, that is where our real focus on our out-of-school programming is is focused on middle school.

So that's a lot the work opportunities are really high school focused, but the out-of-school programming for summers and after school and weekends is targeted specifically at middle school through the MySpark program and others that you know.

So that's been the real focus there.

Um and then somewhere in the link between child care and workforce development.

So it's like I don't see Dito kind of represented as far as like making that connection because child care is such a workforce support.

Um, and in our conversations and what I hear from from folks in my community is you know, we want to work, we don't have child care, and trying to balance those two things.

So I think there might be value to be able to link some of some of that data.

Um this, I'm glad that you asked that because this team uh is actually a joint partnership, the child friendly goal of the children's affairs team and the economic development team.

So they are both working collaboratively on this and particularly on the youth work programs they run together, but even on the child care solutions, they uh our economic development team very much sees that as a solution necessary to help business grow and people get good jobs is the availability of child care.

And then just one last thought or comment around the increase in gun violence.

Um I know that you know, from the chart that you showed, are you looking across the city where that gun violence is occurring?

We are, and there are two things that are noteworthy.

One is that um so far none of that gun violence in April has taken place in any of our PI locations.

Um so what we see is the places where we have heightened collaborative community-driven strategies that include comprehensive approach to public safety, it's really working.

Um there's more work for us to do in other places, and I think there um are some different dynamics driving some of those.

Um, but uh we are tracking that carefully and and driving uh stepped up interventions both in terms of community resources and in terms of patrols and police presence.

I think um so in Southeast Denver uh we've there have been a lot of incidences that have added to that number.

Um I'm not quite sure how homicides are tracked, if it's you know if it's the outcome or if it happens on location or if it happens later at the hospital or something like that.

Um that's a nuance of how that data is um it is the place of the incident.

So if someone is shot at a certain location and eventually doesn't survive their injuries in the hospital, that's always attributed to the location where the incident happened.

Okay.

Um I didn't know if it was just the homicide if it occurred or in that place, but that's helpful.

Um there has just been an increase over the last over the last month.

And again, different incidences, different, you know, not all concentrated in the same neighborhood, but has definitely um occurred more frequently than we've had in the past, especially in this last month.

So yeah, this has been the hardest month we've had uh so far in three years from our data.

And they've all included they've I think half of them have there's been four two who've been involved.

Yeah, so you're just still trying to figure out like what's happening, separate incidents, incidences and so forth.

So I appreciate the moment going back and trying to figure out and looking at the groups of what is happening or how those families can get there so thank you.

Um thank you, Mr.

Mayor.

Um a couple of things I just wanted to when you mentioned first uh uh Dr.

Sanders uh team about the office of the city specifically.

Yes.

Um we learned I think that there's two teams there, some that are on the OSCI team and some they're on the neighborhood safety team, but it's a collaboration of both.

Well, I think we had learned recently.

Well, we were we were recently talking about the fact that we lost a lot of dollars from the federal government for violence interruption, and so there's some work that needs to be done to like bring that back up to par.

Um that conversation at all?

Uh I have uh talked to them about that.

Um I think we've had the same team doing the work pretty successfully for the last two years, I think with good results.

Uh, I think this was a real aberration this past month, and so I think there's always more we can do with more resources, but then their conversations with me, that has not been their direct concern the last month.

They work with um uh additional community organizations that are embedded in the community and are very familiar with a lot a lot of the members in different neighborhoods and have been the ones to usually respond, and so I think we just need to take a look at that because I think it's important as we're having these conversations around the uptick in violence, um gun violence specifically, and and looking at you know, do we have all of the proper resources funding in place to make sure that we're still providing those programming and resources at the same level?

Um the other side of that I was going to ask um was about sorry, can I just add my notes?

I was taking notes.

Um, on the child friendly slide, do you can you tell us what funds are being utilized to to address these goals?

Do you know what funds are tied?

I do.

So some of these on the right hand side, particularly the work programming and um the after-school programming, some of these are Broncos funds dollars, so subsequent to the amendment that the council helped bring on those dollars, that's a significant part of what's funding the out-of-school programming.

I think most of that.

And then the work opportunities is I think still through uh an economic development and Dito uh fund, but the out-of-school programming is certainly Broncos fund dollars.

Okay, great, thank you.

You bet.

Um, and then councilwoman Torres, you asked about the point in time when it comes to family um homelessness.

Uh I don't have the exact numbers, but I do have some information based on the meetings that I've been having on this.

Um what I have here is it it says, well, unsheltered family homelessness decreased by 83% in the 2025 point in point in time count.

Family homelessness has increased by 150% between 2022 and 2025.

Um, and that it's expected to continue to see a similar trend of of increase in overall homelessness among families.

Um the family shelter wait list has increased nearly 200% in the past two years and is currently over 350 households.

So I think it's it's sometimes harder, I think, to get that point in time count because family households is obviously more than one person.

Um, but that's just some I guess information that I had received um from partners and and city partners as well.

So just for food for thought.

Um just for folks listening at home, I think there's a significant difference between what we would call unsheltered homelessness for families and sheltered homelessness.

When you think of often folks, when I think of homelessness, I think of someone that is living outdoors on the street.

Um the number of families with kids living outdoors on the street any given night is near zero in Denver.

Um the numbers that we're talking about are folks that are experiencing shelter homelessness, which means maybe you are in a shelter, you are on someone's couch, you may be in a vehicle, um, you may be uh in a congregate shelter.

Those are all things where we think there is an urgent need for action, but it is a different risk than folks that are sleeping on the streets, which is uh for that, that family number is near zero.

So I I will say that there's still unsheltered homelessness.

Like I don't believe that that is zero.

I mean, we have reports all the time, and we've seen it with our own eyes.

And so I just I don't want to give I just don't want to there's lots of I guess interpretations, but even based on the information I have here, it does specifically say unsheltered homelessness.

Yeah, and we usually, whenever we get and we work with the activists on this and advocates, whenever we get a report, whenever we get a report.

I have not known of a night in the last year where I've gotten a report that we have a child sleeping on the street, we were not able to get that person into a shelter or bed that night.

So when that happens, usually they notify us and we move them immediately.

And so I think that's plenty of work to do.

I do want folks to know that there it is not true that there is a widespread practice of children sleeping on sidewalks in the city and county of Denver.

That is not the case.

Um along the same lines with the um all in mile high slide.

Um can we go to that slide?

Thank you.

Thank you.

On that slide, uh so I'd asked this question in my 101 briefing.

Um, and I just thought it was it because the goal on the right-hand side, the address all homeless reports within one business day.

I'd asked for a little more detail about what does that mean and what does that involve?

It seems very vague.

Um because just because you're addressing the reports, doesn't mean that something has been necessarily resolved.

Um under the progress piece where it says 67% cases closed within 48 hours.

I also asked what does that mean?

Because coming from being a social worker like casing, closing a case doesn't always mean success.

Um, and so it it's I think that is important to know is like what is the actual outcome of those closed cases.

Uh is it that somebody is then being asked to move from the location that they're at?

Is it that we're connecting them to rapid rehousing?

Like what are some of the things that are happening for the closed case?

And it's okay if we don't have the information today, but I just thought it would be helpful for us to have a better understanding of that goal in particular, and then what the outcomes are saying about that.

It's a great question, and I've asked the same thing, and the short answer is yes, we will have that specifically for you in Q2.

Right now, we've just started training all the teams on gathering this data, and what we're asking is exactly what you asked, which is what services were offered, what services were accepted, what was the end outcome of that?

Um, and that could be you know, shelter services, housing services, mental health services, benefit enrollment, and so uh we have started tracking that data and should have it much more cleaned for you to see by Q2.

Great, great question.

Watson.

Uh first uh colleagues and mayor, uh apologize for running late.

I had a a quick little community dialogue this morning on specifically on safety.

And so when we go back to the safety slide, um uh was at um the House of Hair in Park Hill and speaking with neighbors on um what their perceptions are as to what's uh occurring.

Um and one of the gentlemen that were there um was familiar with the person that was shot in Mondello recently.

I'm not sure if it's exactly in Montbella or not, I don't have the specific details.

I don't receive those briefings if it's not specific within my district, but it's around the Montbellow area.

Um one of the felt the questions um he had that he elevated was the importance for us to be looking at what are we doing for youth um as school guard now closing.

I mean kids are gonna be out of classes coming up.

Um and he said that his son um is familiar with the person um that was harmed, and that there may have been additional harms because someone who was there uh purportedly committed suicide based on what they saw.

Um so the uh the downstream impact of the violence obviously will not, and for folks watching and folks um you're we're never gonna be able to capture that information within these data points.

But my curiosity for the administration um and your thoughts on um having that coordinated approach.

What are your thoughts as to the steps we should be taking?

And I'm sure you said this, and I apologize for missing um kind of the coordinated steps that uh uh the administration is taking to make sure that we obviously have a police response um to uh the activity, making sure that we are connected, but also for um uh support for youth for school activities, events.

Would love to hear a little bit more, and once again, didn't want to be redundant, but uh just wanted to ask you for the question.

Good to see you.

Um I think you're right that it's a couple of components.

One is certainly prevention.

What are we doing to give young people positive pro-social things to do after school and in the summertime, and that is the major focus of our child-friendly goal is if you are for folks you talk to in Park Hill or anywhere around the city, we want to put all of our high school kids to work this summer, and actually the city is going to pay them a bonus of 250 dollars for getting a job and keeping a job, and so we'll both help connect them to jobs, we'll pay them a bonus.

And actually, the city is going to pay them a bonus of $250 for getting a job and keeping a job.

And so we'll both help connect them to jobs, we'll pay them a bonus.

We have employers who are excited to bring them in, and so we think that's a really important opportunity for uh youth in the summertime.

We're folks we have specific folk uh programs focused on uh kids coming from the highest risk environments who might need more support or more opportunity.

Some of those uh jobs we subsidize entirely.

We actually pay the full salary for young people if they might have a harder time getting hired for various reasons.

So we have a whole range of options.

We'd encourage you to reach out and do that.

Uh and then we also really focused on after school and summer programming for younger kids.

If you're a middle school student but you're 13 and want something to do in the summer, we're focused on activities like summer camps at the Science Museum or the Zoo or athletic programs or um uh artistic programs that you can do.

So we are funding those more aggressively this year to get more kids into those.

And then, in terms of we talked a little bit about the team of violence interrupters we have that whenever there is an incident that happens, what often can happen is one incident leads to two or three or four incidents after that, because if there is someone who shoots someone else, there is a push for vengeance or payback or retribution, and you can get a real cycle of violence that starts.

And so a lot of what our team does at the Office of Neighborhood Safety is preventively working with families and individuals who have been at risk of either being victims or perpetrators before to prevent them from being at risk again.

And then once there has been an incident, working with them and their families to help stabilize them, support them, get them services they need so they're not pulled into a deeper cycle of violence.

And we have seen a couple of these incidents where we've had one incident that then leads to a second, the suicide you mentioned was the tragic uh second step of that.

Um and we see a number of these incidents that are around otherwise illicit activity we're trying to stop, whether it's uh you know illegal gun sales or legal drug sales that are deals that go bad and end up with violence.

And so we think some of the broader work on crime prevention in those categories also help avoid violence.

Thank you so much, sir.

Just one quick point.

This Saturday, um, we're having a discussion at Cleveland Early Learning from 10 to 12.

I want to thank Esther and her team for really coordinating with Dr.

Sanders and his team and really all other departments within the city that provide support for youth, um, and that will be a part of this coordinated effort.

And so um I appreciate the work from DOS, um, OSCI, and all of the other groups, uh, OCA and others that will be present on this Saturday at uh Cleveland Early Learning.

We'll love to be able to share more of this information from the administration and and hopefully more folks from the administration will uh be able to participate.

Uh, President Coleman is gonna be there from the Senate, so we're gonna have folks from the state and local here to speak to communities about uh making sure we're keeping families safe.

Great.

Happy to help and make sure we have folks and resources there.

All right, thanks, sir.

Thank you, Madam President.

Any other questions?

All right.

Well, wonderful thank you so much for your time.

Thank you, members of the public to joining.

Uh with that, we are adjourned, and happy Tuesday.