Good evening.

We will begin our committee of the whole.

Deputy Chief Otis, do you want to come up to the lectern, please?

And welcome.

Thank you, President Tomonic.

Counselors, good evening.

I wanted, I'm here tonight because I am excited to share with you an update about our unhoused response coordinator.

I want to give you a little bit of background first.

As you know, we had hired somebody internally to work on this position initially.

And that person had done a great job of documenting our cases, working with contractors, kind of helping us develop a process.

That gave us a chance to go back and look at the job description and look at the work that had been done where we wanted to go with this position.

And we had tried to shoehorn that position into an existing position, and unfortunately it just didn't work.

So we went back to the drawing board and we uh wrote a new job description for this unhoused response coordinator using best practices and then trying to fill some of the gaps that we had identified in the initial process.

And um, you know, some of those gaps were um the fact that when we were working with our unhoused population um trying to connect them with stakeholders who could connect them with services, we were also trying to do enforcement at the same time.

And that was detrimental to the folks that we were trying to serve.

So when we created this new position and uh went through a lengthy process of interviewing some really great candidates with some great ideas, and ultimately um we hired um our uh the person who is now doing that job in uh July.

And since that person's been here in July, uh we have really streamlined our process, and I'm gonna allow her to kind of explain what that process looks like and kind of how um you know how that works.

But I think the biggest takeaways that I think you need to be aware of is that um the unhoused coordinator has really worked to build bridges with our stakeholders and to really um getting the right services to the right people.

The city of Duluth does not do social services.

That's not what our role is, but um the the unhoused coordinator is able to work in partnership with our stakeholders who do provide those services and to try to identify those gaps and find efficiencies in that process.

And I think what we've seen some really good success this year.

We've seen people that um have gotten housed.

Uh we've seen smaller, more manageable camps, and we've got more trust and created more buy-in with our our stakeholders.

So with all that being said, I would like to introduce you tonight to Emma Springer, our City of Duluth unhoused response coordinator.

Thank you, and welcome, Miss Springer.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me today.

I appreciate the time.

Um like Chief Otis said, I started in July, and really the focus of my first two months was mainly on reaching out to internal um organization or units within the City of Duluth as well as all of our partners throughout um downtown as well as West Duluth and throughout the whole city area.

Trying to, like he said, build those connections and sort of figure out what the picture was from all parties of how our unhoused response had been working and what things were maybe considered um pros, cons, and how we could work to strengthen those gaps.

Um part of that has been the streamlining process, which we included the flow chart, if you will, of how we're responding to encampments at this time.

So their first piece would be the notice of campus sent to life safety.

Encampment notifications come in through kind of four major ways.

The first being in an internal encampment email that's shared within city employees.

That goes straight to myself as well as our city code enforcer and our couple of our parks maintenance individuals.

Calls to DPD, which then get sent over to our office, calls to life safety, and then the park reporter, which is for our parks and rec and parks maintenance staff, where they can inform us of anything that they've seen, and then sometimes more anecdotally we'll hear things or get information on something.

What we've been doing is first sending those out to outreach and being sure to include what the language is when the notification comes in.

So sharing exactly why somebody felt they wanted to inform us of a camp, whether it had to do with like trash accumulation, if there was concerns about sharps, if there was just a concern in general that people were sleeping outside and wanting to make sure that they had resources.

So outreach is connected with first, and then from there we determine who has property ownership, since that will sort of determine what the next steps would be included on theirs that private property.

We would then talk with the property owner to see what they would like to have happen.

So we have had some individuals who are okay with a camp or a tent or two staying on their land for however amount of time, and if that's the case, then outreach connects with the individuals there to make sure that they're receiving services.

Um, and then we do like a weekly bi-weekly check-in just to make sure that things are still going okay.

Um if the property owner would not like somebody to stay, then we would begin a removal process where enforcement would go through and connect and have people move along to a different space just because they weren't allowed to stay on that private property.

And then the other more not city property, I guess, is the MINDOT property, so Minnesota Department of Transportation, and then state and county property.

As far as my position, that just looks more like monitoring weekly while those entities are kind of figuring out what they want to do next, or how they would like to proceed with the camps that are on their land.

As far as city property, if it belongs if the camps are on there, kind of have three different statuses.

So high priority are camps that are not fall or sort of fall within a couple different guidelines.

So if they're within a thousand feet of a school trail, playground or park, sidewalk, street business, or residence, then those are gonna be a little bit more of a high priority examples being like Leaf Ericsson or the Rose Gardens, so those city parks that are highly trafficked.

Um those we would let outreach know, and typically they get out there within a couple of hours, and then we also have enforcement go out, which would be our code enforcer, and then an embedded police officer to speak with the folks who are staying there and just ask them to pack up and move to somewhere different.

Um, and then outreach is letting them know about the different opportunities they have as far as the services we offer within the city, like Chum and UGM and Damiano.

Um, if it's more of a medium priority, that'd be like a seven-day placard.

So maybe it's somebody who's staying a little bit more remote and away from certain areas, but they've got a lot of trash accumulation or too many items, then it looks more like connecting them with outreach and then letting them know they have seven days to sort of figure out where their next step is going to be.

Um, and then our third would be the low priority, which is more so we do have a couple of spots where we have campers staying.

They're not generating any sort of calls or notifications.

We know of them from maybe one situation or one report.

Um they're following our expectations of like no needles or foils present.

Um I go, I provide sharps containers and education on how to properly contain their sharps if they have any.

Um they're keeping their trash contained.

There's low traffic, it's probably like two or three tents, um, and then there's not any police calls being generated.

So with those, we're just checking in every week to see how they are.