The Everett City Council's Community Health and Safety Committee met on September 3, 2026, to receive a detailed update from Snohomish County officials and the Salvation Army on the new Everett New Start Center, a bridge housing program designed to transition homeless individuals to permanent housing. The presentation covered the center's structure, eligibility criteria, referral process, services, and community impact plans.
All right. Good afternoon. This is September 2nd, 2026. We're at the uh Everett City Count Council Chambers for the Community Health and Safety Committee meeting. I am Councilmember Tui along with Councilmember Weir here this afternoon. Today I'm real excited for this update. We have a Snohomish County update on the New Start Center that's in Everett. Real anxious to hear how all that's going. So I'm just going to go ahead and turn it over to Julie and welcome all of you. Thank you. We're having some technical difficulties. So bear with me while I just click. The audio is making a lot of noise. I don't think now so we can just try. Yeah, I can't figure out why I can't get over to this section. Okay. All right. Okay, there we are. I'm going to hand this over to this side. So thank you for having us this evening. I just wanted to start with some opening remarks. Um, we're excited to be here to have a conversation on the Everett New Start Center. Um, we'll start with just some introductions. I'm Julie Moore. I'm chief of staff to Snomish County Executive Dave Summers. I'll let my colleagues introduce themselves. Hello, I'm Susan Christ. I work for Snomish County. I'm in the Office of Community and Homeless Services, and I am a supervisor overseeing the contracts for this effort. Hi, I'm Captain Jen Pack myself as well as Captain Stephen Pack, my spouse, oversee all of the Salvation Army operations here in Snowhomish County. And I'm McKenzie Orr. I am the program director for the Everett New Start Center. So before I hand it over to the subject matter experts, just want to give some brief background. Last Friday we had a wonderful grand opening celebration of the Everett New Start Center. We had a few members of the Everett City Council there for the celebration. So that was wonderful. There's been some really good articles in the media about the event and the building. I don't know if you've had an opportunity to check those out. By way of brief background, we'll get into this more. Four years ago, Snomish County purchased two properties with the vision of turning them into bridge housing. And bridge housing is a temporary transitional housing with wraparound services that's meant to help homeless individuals get a fresh start. And to that end, the buildings were named the New Start Center. We've got two of them, one is in Edmonds and one in Everett. Over the last four years, there's been a tremendous amount of work poured into these buildings into this project. There's been testing, decontamination, repairs to pipes, underlying moisture damage, lots of additions to lighting and security, complete overhauls of client rooms, shared spaces, and much more. Unfortunately, this was not a quick turnaround project, but that's okay. It's intended to be a project that saves lives for generations to come. The purchase and renovations were made possible by ARPA Funds, the Federal American Rescue Plan Act Funds, along with uh County Affordable Housing and Behavioral Health Funds. The Edmonds New Start Center was the first of the two buildings that had opened, and we celebrated that grand opening on June 29th. The Edmonds Center is being operated by the YWCA, and they've been slowly ramping up their services and have started welcoming uh residents.