Good afternoon and welcome to the regular meeting of the Public Health and Safety Committee for October 15th, 2025.

I am Jason Chavez, the chair of this committee.

Before we convene our meeting, we have a presentation of honorary resolutions.

We are pleased to welcome guests to the space to share in presentation before taking up our agenda.

Our resolution today is recognizing the month of October as Health Literacy Awareness Month.

I'll now invite any of my colleagues up here in the dais to join me in the front so we can read the resolution with staff.

Come on up.

Health literacy in October.

This resolution, we're going to be reading it with everyone up here.

So we'll all take up a paragraph and then we'll talk a little bit about it.

So it's recognizing the month of October as Health Literacy Awareness Month.

Whereas October is nationally recognized as Health Literacy Month, and it is a time to recognize the importance of making health information easy to understand and the healthcare system easier to navigate by encouraging use of plain language, acknowledging the welcoming cultural differences and clear communication.

These efforts will help both city employees and community members find under understand and use health information to make informed decisions that support their health and well-being and those they care for and second one.

Whereas most adults in the United States have trouble understanding health information.

This can lead to poor health outcomes, higher medical costs, and a lower quality of life.

That is why it's so important for the city to share health information in ways that are clear, respectful, and easy to understand.

And whereas the city of Minneapolis is working to remove the barriers that make it difficult for community members to get understand and use health information and services.

Whereas health literacy is not an individual's responsibility only, but a responsibility we all share.

And whereas in Minneapolis, many communities members' first language is not English.

Whereas health misinformation has made it increasingly difficult for community members to access clear, accurate, and science-based information.

This highlights the vital role the city of Minneapolis plays in advancing health literacy and supporting residents in making informed health decisions and whereas health literacy impacts and benefits all.

During this month, the city will raise awareness, support actions that improve health literacy, and stay committed to making health information and services clear, accessible, and easy to understand for everyone in Minneapolis.

And we want to make sure if staff want to make a few comments before we move towards the next part of the agenda, that would be amazing.

Yeah.

We're very excited and appreciative of the council and city of Minneapolis recognizing October as health health literacy month, and that we recognize health literacy is not extra work.

Health literacy is not work we're doing in favor for someone or as a favor to anyone.

Health literacy is the work of the public health department and of health itself, and it's shared by all to improve our lives, our health, and the well-being of our city.

And health identifying disease and developing treatments is an essential part.

And equally essential is making sure people are aware of those services, understand them, and feel confident engaging with those services.

And health literacy guides us to recognize the many steps and the human experiences that shape those journey to getting information to action from care offered to the care received.

And so when we honor health literacy, we're honoring every person who reads a prescription in hopes they are doing it right.

We honor every person who nods politely through the instructions, though they may make no sense to them.

And we honor every person who has bravely ever asked, can you say that again in a way I can understand?

And so, because of this, through health literacy, we hope to make health a shared possibility for all.

Thank you.

Would anybody else like to say anything?

Otherwise, we'll just go over here to take a photo with the black tape.

So thank you all.

Before we begin the meeting, I want to offer a friendly reminder to all members, staff, and the public that these meetings are broadcast live to enable greater public participation.

These broadcasts include real-time captioning as a further method to increase the accessibility of our proceedings to the community.

Therefore, all speakers need to be mindful of the rate of their speech so that our captioners can fully capture and transcribe all comments for the broadcast.

We ask all speakers to moderate the speed and clarity of their comments.

At this time, I'll ask the clerk to call the role so we can verify a quorum for this meeting.

Council President Green.

Present.

Councilmore Rainbow.

Present.

Is absent.

Almost auto.

Present.

Vice Chair Wansley.

Present.

Church office.

Present.

We have five present.

Let the record reflect that we have a quorum.

I'll remind my colleagues that we'll be using the speaker management today.

So please make sure that you're signed up.

Colleagues will now go through the consent items.

Item number one is a resolution we presented earlier on health literacy awareness.

Item number five is authorizing a revenue contract with the Minnesota Timberwolves for bomb detection security services.

Colleagues, um is there any discussion?

Are there any items that anybody would like to pull for further discussion?

All right, no one is on queue.

So with that, I'll move approval of those items.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed say nay.

Any abstentions, and those items scary.

Our next item is a presentation providing an overview of the Metro Transit Safety and Security Action Plan.

We'll be hearing from General Manager Leslie and Police Chief Joseph for Metro Transit.

And I'll invite our presenters to get us started.

Welcome someone.

Thank you all.

Thank you both for being here.

Good.

All right.

Chair Chavez committee members.

Uh good afternoon.

My name is Leslie Kinderis.

I'm the general manager at Metro Transit.

And I'm joined today by Interim Chief Joe Dotseth.

And we're here to provide a public safety update with a focus on how we are implementing Metro Transit Safety and Security Action Plan.

And I just want to say thank you for inviting us to share this update with you today.

Safety is not just a priority at Metro Transit, a core component of how we do our work, and we know the safety of our riders and our employees is of the utmost importance.

So we look forward to sharing some information with you today, answering your questions, and receiving your feedback.

An overview of the safety and security action plan itself, and then several updates specifically pertaining to our police department.

So just as an overview to Metro Transit, we are the largest public transit provider in the region.

We operate fixed route bus, light rail, and commuter rail transit.

We serve 65 communities within the seven county metro.

And the other bullets on here just give you a sense of our size and scope.

We have over 3,400 employees at Metro Transit.

We have roughly 700 buses, nearly 120 light rail vehicles, over 900 9,000 bus stops.

And in general, our system is growing this year alone.

We're opening three new bus rapid transit lines, opened the gold line back in March, B line and June, and we'll open the E-line in December.

So we're a growing system.

We're also a system in the process of adapting to ridership change, which I'll talk a little bit more about in a moment.

On this slide, too, just noting our mission statement, we connect people, strengthen communities, and improve lives by delivering high quality public transportation.

Just to give you a sense of who we serve.

In 2024, we delivered about 47.5 million rides.

29% of the rides are taken by people who are between the ages of 18 and 24.

One third of our rides are taken by people who live in households earning less than 25,000 a year.

And 35% of the trips on our system are for commute purposes, which is down from when we had conducted the survey behind this data back in 2016.

Top destinations in our system include both downtown Minneapolis and downtown St.

Paul, University of Minnesota, the airport, and Mall of America.

So to put the safety and security action plan into context, I wanted to step back and mention Metro Transit Ford.

This is our strategic framework that really guides our work across Metro Transit.

We recognize this is an exciting but pivotal time for transit.

As I mentioned earlier, we're a growing system, but also a changing system.

Ridership behavior has changed since the start of the pandemic, and we're focused on ensuring we're adapting and responding to the needs and interests of the people we serve.

And this is really the framework we use to do that.

We identify three strategic priorities as part of Metro Transit Ford, employees, experience and service, and the safety and security action plan that we're here to focus on today is really a core part of that experience priority.

So just some background on the safety and security action plan.

This is a document that we developed back in 2022.

It was endorsed by the Metropolitan Council in June of that year.

But the start of the process that led to the action plan came in June of 2020 when the chair of the Metropolitan Council at that time following the murder of George Floyd called on the council to review the Metro Transit Police Department.

Starting later that year into 2021, the Metropolitan Council contracted with the Citizens League that did some extensive community engagement to really understand what public safety on transit means to people, to riders, to community members, to our own employees.

From that feedback, the Metropolitan Council formed a Metropolitan Council work group of council members that took in that community engagement, gathered additional information, and ultimately directed staff to develop a safety and security action plan.

So that document again uh endorsed by the council back in 2022 is comprised of 43 action items.

Those action items are spread across three areas of work, improving conditions on our system, so training and supporting our employees, and uh part or engaging with customers and partners.

So 43 action items is a lot.

We're not going to go line by line through that today by any means, but we do have the entire action plan on our website.

And in addition to that, one of the directives we've received from the Metropolitan Council is to come to them each quarter and provide a status update on this work.

So all of that information is available on our website as well.

A central thrust of this work is our coordinated layers of official presence.

When doing public engagement on public safety, one of the most common comments we receive, a key theme is people feel safer on our system when they see an official with Metro Transit present.

Back in 2022, when we started the Safety and Security Action Plan, the Metro Transit Police Department really was our layer of presence on the system.

Metro Transit Police Department sworn officers were the ones who conducted fare enforcement as well as all other responses to police calls for service.

Since 2022, as we've implemented the safety and security action plan, we've continued to support our police department, which is a foundational piece of this work, but we've added additional layers of presence.

Beginning in 2023, we started piloting the use of contracted supplemental security at key locations.

We select those locations based on ridership data, calls for police service, employee feedback, rider feedback.

We currently have supplemental security presence at nine locations and are about to expand that to 16.

I'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment.

So that's a new layer presence under the Safety and Security Action Plan.

In 2023, as part of the Minnesota transportation omnibus law, that included provision to start the transit rider investment program.

So beginning in 2024, we have trip agents, transit rider investment program agents also riding our system.

Part of that 2023 legislation also changed how fair non-compliance was handled.

Prior to 2023, it was a misdemeanor in state law to ride without paying.

The law was changed to allow the Med Council to instead issue administrative citations, which are not criminal citations.

That has further allowed us to have non-sworn personnel that are based in our operations department, which are the TRIP agents, doing that routine fare enforcement and leaving our police department to focus on serious public safety concerns.

In addition to that, as you see on the side, we have a real-time information center.

These are not people who are on our system, but they are part of our eyes and ears.

They are situated in our police department, monitoring real-time camera footage and helping support the response to incidents on the system.

We have our community service officers, which are not sworn police officers, but people who are in training to enter into law enforcement careers base in our police department.

The chief will talk a little bit more about that program and how we're growing that program in a moment.

And finally, I'll mention safety ambassadors.

In St.

Paul, we've started partnering with the downtown alliance to have safety ambassadors at several locations there, and we are in similar conversations with Minneapolis DID as well.

So I mentioned supplemental security.

Again, we're in the process of expanding that.

Right now we're transitioning to a new vendor, so we'll have more specificity in the coming weeks.

But this will include a new locations in Minneapolis.

Currently, we do have supplemental security at 46th Street Station, at Lake Street Midtown Station, at Franklin Avenue Station, at our 35W and Lakes Street station, in both airport terminals.

We are going to add warehouse station and Nicolette Mall station as part of this new contract.

How many people and how many hours a day their staffing varies depending on need.

But overall, what's been beneficial about having supplemental security as an additional layer of presence is it provides us flexibility to respond as needs evolve.

Again, this is a pretty new program.

We currently have just shy of 80 trip agents between our own employees and our contracted trip agents.

We're still working to grow that program as well.

We're hoping by the end of this year to hit about 100 trip agents.

And in our proposed 2026 budget that the Metropolitan Council will presumably adopt later this year if it moves forward as proposed.

We would add another 57 trip agents next year.

Trip agents are focused on our off-board payment system, so our light rail, blue line, green line, as well as our arterial bus rapid transit system, and well, bus rapid transit system generally, they're on orange and gold line as well.

Uh and so their role is to inspect fares uh and issue administrative citations if people are found to be noncompliant, but they're also there to assist uh riders to answer questions in state law.

Uh, they're required to carry Narcan.

Uh we provide them with first aid training, with de-escalation training.

Uh, and overall, our hope is as we continue to expand our trip uh program, we'll continue to increase that uh welcoming uh sense uh and safe sense of experience on our system.

I mentioned that we are in conversation uh with Minneapolis DID uh to do something similar to what we're doing in St.

Paul, just as another addedly are using uh safety ambassadors to be more present at key locations.

Uh so hopefully we'll have more information on that front soon, but just wanted you to be aware that we are looking at growing that in Minneapolis as well.

Uh and then Transit Rider Social Services uh as part of the 2023 transportation omnibus that I mentioned earlier.

Another provision in there was uh a 13-month project called the Transit Service Intervention Project.

Uh that did conclude in June of last year.

Uh and we learned a lot from that.

It was specific to LightRail.

Uh it directed us to increase both code of conduct enforcement as well as social service connections among riders uh as part of that uh pilot or that project effort.

Uh we are going to continue to fund that type of work.

Uh we're actually in the process of reviewing proposals now and are looking towards an early uh 2026 start for the next round of contracts uh to support that work of connecting riders in need uh to social service resources.

Uh and at this point, I'm gonna turn it over to interim chief dotseth to talk about community service officers and other PD updates.

Thank you, Leslie.

You're welcome, Chief.

Chair, committee members, good afternoon.

My name is Joe Dotseth.

I am the interim chief of police at uh Metro Transit.

Before I talk briefly about this slide, I just want to acknowledge how important the safety security action plan is for the police department.

And really thank the general manager publicly in front of this committee for her work really organizing and getting the safety security action plan together.

The safety security action plan really was a game changer for the police department.

This is my 24th year in law enforcement, 21 of those years have been at Metro Transit, and as the general manager spoke to before, most of the issues on the transit system.

Our previous response was solely reliant on the police department.

And I would argue, based upon what I call our whole community approach to public safety, that just wasn't effective, right?

While we made progress and we responded to incidents, that really wasn't what I would say would be the best practice of that.

So the Safe Security Action Plan really is a big deal for us.

And as I go through my presentation here and some of the progress we're making, it really is the forefront of that is the Safe Security Action Plan again, led by the general manager.

Our community service officer programs really is our cadet program at Metro Transit Police.

So it's people in uh school that are seeking to be police officers.

They are a layer of presence on the system.

So right now we have 20, actually, we have 28 community service officers.

We started this program in 2008, and we've never been above 20.

So there is a real progress in that.

And we just actually met this week, and uh there's double digits that are still in the next phases of this program.

So I'm very confident by the end of the year, we might see 40 community service officers in this program, which is is fantastic fantastic.

Critical pipeline for recruitment for us.

Get often asked this question a lot of like what's going on at the at the transit police department.

And in my 21 years being at the agency, I firmly believe the agency is at one of its strongest points, if not its strongest points since the inception of the department in 1993.

And people often ask, well, why is that?

These nine goals that are on the screen right now really are because of that.

We have a very strategic mindset right now, a whole community approach to public safety, a policing as a service mindset.

There's much more to policing, especially the transit system than just issuing citations and arresting people.

That service mindsets are very important to us.

And then really empowering our workforce.

I'll get to a slide here in a moment.

Our staffing numbers are definitely trending up in the right direction.

That's because we're empowering our workforce.

But when you look at these nine goals, these nine goals are so important.

I carry them around in my pocket everywhere I go to talk about that.

Everything we're doing really focuses back to these nine goals.

Employee development, our recruitment efforts, our retention employee satisfaction, our crime reduction strategies, our focus on community policing.

The transit police, I would argue is one of the most community focused police departments in the region, if not the state.

We're providing exceptional service to our internal and external partners.

And we have a proactive uh community outreach and engagement uh strategy and our professional delivery of police services.

And again, all those nine goals that we're working on right now, they funnel back into a whole community approach to public safety, policing as a service, and empowering our workforce.

Staffing, we're in a we're in a great spot.

And so while these numbers here, uh, you're seeing on the screen that it says there's 113 actual officers and we're authorized for 171.

Five more officers start this month.

We'll be 118 police officers by the end of the month.

We haven't been over 117 since August 2021.

I just want to repeat that.

August 2021, 117 police officers by the end of the month, we'll be at 118.

And we have many police officers in the background stages right now.

Our community service officer program, again, uh should say 28 there.

We're authorized up to 50.

I'm very confident we're gonna be at 40 community service officers by the end of the year.

And our administrative team, uh, prior to being in the interim chief, I was our captain of our support services division and oversaw the admin team.

We've had a real shift of uh trying to focus some of the duties that a sworn officer would be doing before.

We'll take emergency management for an example.

Before we'd have a sworn officer doing that, we really want the sworn staff being on the system doing police duties.

So now we're focusing on having an administrative person do that work.

So that work continues.

You'll see uh we have an 87% retention rate.

We are not seeing a mass exodus of police leave people leaving the transit police.

I had a goal this year of hiring uh 30 police officers.

Uh, and I just had a meeting yesterday.

We've hired 40 staff this year, and as we prepare to the end of the year, my goal now is 50 staff by the end of the year, and I'm very confident we're gonna get to that number.

So that's fantastic.

We have a be the difference marketing campaign that you'll be seeing out and about here shortly.

And when you think about being a transit police officer, right?

Community focused, beat-oriented model policing, policing as a service, that be the difference campaign is really resonating with the staff that we're recruiting.

We're also focusing on what we call values-based hiring.

We're working with uh retired sheriff Dr.

Matt Bostrom on a uh values-based hiring initiative, which focuses on respect, service, and honesty.

That is in our job application, that's in our interview questions, that's everywhere.

Building what makes a good transit police officer.

And I would say that that respect service and honesty is at the forefront of that.

We have an officer that uh will be starting next month doing full-time recruitment, so we certainly understand the need for that.

Uh, Lieutenant uh Mohammed who's in here today, she's assigned to the office, the chief leading those recruitment efforts as well.

Uh our explorer program, so really thinking about uh the cities had a very successful explorer program for years.

Uh we're gonna launch that as well at the beginning of the year.

So when you think about that pathway to police officer, right?

An explorer program, which generally is designed for high school students, right?

But it'll build that path for people to join our explorer post, right?

They can join then our community service officer program.

We're paying for their tuition as well, up to $18,000.

They can work part-time, they get benefits as a community service officer, they get to know what the police department is, right?

We're a very diverse police department, which I'm very, very, very proud of.

And they just get to feel that.

So that that pipeline to be a police officer is definitely built.

And then I talked about our values-based hiring initiatives.

Uh certainly hear a lot about you know what is the crime that's happening on the transit system.

And every quarter, we, as part of the safety security action plan, go to the Met Council and provide an update.

Serious crime on the transit system is very low.

Serious crime on the transit system is very low.

And in fact, it is decreasing.

Last quarter when we went to the Met Council, we saw 13% uh decrease in serious crime.

Those numbers that you're seeing on the screen are very low to the overall numbers.

And those are quarterly numbers too.

So even when you think about quarter two of 2025, 221.

And when we say top seven crimes, those are essentially part one crimes, those are serious crimes, crimes against persons, uh, they could be robbery, assault, uh offenses to that nature.

There's small numbers than the overall, overall percentage of that that's happening on the system.

Uh presence by numbers, really, we talk a lot about proactive policing, and that's what the transit police does.

When I say proactive policing, that's our officers being out on the system, being visible, and handling calls and initiating activity, right?

So when we talk about calls for services, calls for service numbers going up, that's a good thing for us.

And we're our number one call for service that's gone up this year is a directed patrol, and that's when the officers are out on the system using the computer-aided dispatch system to indicate their presence on the system.

And those numbers, there's a 74% increase from this time last year of our officers being active.

That's them just on the way here.

I saw officers, our officers out on the government uh plaza there.

They're being active on the system.

And they're also addressing crimes that are happening on the system.

And um total reported offenses.

This is a uh a slide deck here, and I just want to wanna briefly talk about what these numbers mean.

So when we see an overall number, like we'll use quarter two for an example, that 2160 number previously talked about the part one crimes being 221.

That 2,160 overall offenses for quarter two, that really indicates the three top offenses there were smoking, right?

Smoking on the train, right?

Smoking on a board of vehicle, trespass and vandalism.

So we're driving a lot of that overall number.

So when we see that number up there at 2160, a lot of it has to do with the fact that the transit police are being active and we're addressing issues on the system.

So when we break down that 2160 just about every quarter, it happens to be what we call quality life crimes, right?

If people are smoking on the train, they could be drinking on board a vehicle, uh, the trespass disorderly kind of quality of life's crimes, right?

Crimes, what we call call the quality of life crimes, that's what's impacting perception on the system.

Like I certainly know that we need to work on perception of what's really happening on the system, right?

And these numbers are to help to provide overall snapshot of serious crime, very low, but we understand what these overall crime numbers look like.

This chart, too, as we see crime rate per 100,000 rides on the system, the red line is serious crime, very, very low, right?

It's made consistently low over time.

That blue chart has to do with the quality of life crimes, and we impact that.

So when we go out there at the beginning of the year and we do a lot of focused enforcement details, we'll see those numbers impact, but you really gotta dive into what those numbers look like and back to the previous chart, those quality of life crimes that impact people's experiences.

We 100% are addressing those issues, and that's why you're seeing these lines like that.

The return of the police beats, you know.

I came in in Metro Transit in 2004, I was hired for the the blue line, and we had uh beats everywhere.

And under my leadership, we're bringing back these police beats.

They are integral, intrical, integral part of our success.

So as we speak right now, there are officers on in the downtown Minneapolis beat.

There are officers in the Hamlin Midway beat, and we have an officer assigned to the airport full time.

We also have a substation at the Mall of America that partners with the Mall of America and the Bloomington Police.

As we increase those staffing numbers, more beats will come back.

Certainly understand other beats inside of the city that we need.

I know that we need a Lake Street beat.

I know we need a Franklin Avenue beat.

I understand the importance of those beats, but those beat officers, especially transit policing, building that relationship, knowing who the community members are, knowing what uh businesses need to speak to, the partnerships with the precinct inspectors, that's so so important in these beats are coming back and they will be continue as we get more staff.

And when we hear from the community, you know, we have an issue going on here, we have an issue going on here.

One of our number one responses will be to put a beat there and put quality officers there to address those problems.

I wanted to talk briefly about an initiative that we started.

Well, this is on University Avenue in St.

Paul.

I wanted to just talk about it because it's a successful initiative, in my opinion.

We certainly heard from our ridership of uh issues on the green line that we needed to address.

So what we started working on with our partners in Ramsey County was essentially we needed to do something, right?

And we're attending meetings and we're talking about stuff.

That's great.

But at some point we needed to do something.

And so that was the that was the whole point of the Safe and Strong University Aven issue initiative.

It was collaboration between police uh departments, uh service providers and prosecutors, really three-pronged effect, right?

So you think focused enforcement, right, between the police departments, us, St.

Paul and Ramsey County Sheriff's Office.

You think about the service provider connection, right?

Because we don't want to criminalize these low-level offenses.

That's not what we're trying to do.

But our homeless action team, award-winning homeless action team, that just yesterday we're on a detail at uh US Bank with.

They're on the community, they're connecting people to services, also working with Ramsey County Public Health and their social justice programs over there to provide that second component of this program of connecting people to services and the third component, like I cannot thank uh Ramsey County Attorney Choi enough for his leadership of getting the city and the county attorney and the courts together.

So when we were issuing citations, there essentially was going to be uh not only want to say a special docket, but some type of special attention to these transit crimes.

This initiative worked.

I really really believe it worked.

Did we solve all the problems on University Avenue this summer?

By no means.

Were we out there all summer being proactive and being in the community connecting with with the community members 100%?

In fact, uh, you know, I get the opportunity to serve on the Hennepa County Criminal Justice Coordination Committee with a couple of of the council members uh here present today, and that committee, we've I've talked briefly about this initiative there, and there is some interest with city officials and leaders about how can we duplicate what we've done in University Avenue in some of these areas.

So high level conversations that I've had with uh Inspector Gomez and Sheriff Witt, but like we do want to help partner and lead some of these successful initiatives that we've had in other areas here in the city.

Uh these are some of the initiative, the numbers there again, just from our initiative.

We're working on uh a progress report.

This is just our numbers, right?

We have St.

Paul police numbers, we have public health numbers, but you can see all the contacts that we had 1,312 hat contacts or homeless action team contacts, right?

You know, we had 5,633 directed patrols.

That's officers being visible and being present, just like the general manager was saying about layers of presence, the police being out there, and especially our officers, you know, we want the public to know when they see a transit police officer that that is something they can go to, like they're here to help.

And we had 6,877 officer initiated calls.

And on the bottom, you can see 90% of all of our calls along the corridor there were because our officers took action.

So even if something bad happens on the system, we are responding to it, and we're holding people accountable.

Our officers are on the system, they're being active, and I'm very, very thankful for all the work that our police officers do.

And the arrest numbers, we didn't have a lot of arrests there.

24 arrests and 32 citations throughout this period, but this detail was not about focused our enforcement alone.

And then uh really the last slide here is just the work that you know, not just we're doing in the city here, but within the region, you know, the transit police is all based upon partnerships, partnerships, partnerships, partnerships.

And you know, I get the opportunity to serve as the chief right now, and going out throughout the region and connecting with our partners, it's it's so important, right?

It's not a cliche to us.

We understand that.

We understand our partnership with the Minneapolis Police Department is very, very important, which I am here to say that it is in a very good spot.

Our connection with all of the uh precinct inspectors uh, you know, they have my number there.

We're constantly communicating them when there's issues in the area that we can come help support MPD and come to be a solution wherever we possibly can.

And then, yes, work on focused enforcement details.

Uh we particular we uh uh go to the MSTAP meetings every week.

Uh, Captain Ahmed, who's our patrol captain, who's very involved in MSTAT meetings actually has a table there, so we're connected with what's going on inside of the precincts.

Our transit response unit, I talked about our hat team, homeless action team, um, our transit response unit, we've brought that team back.

They're actually out there uh addressing serious issues in the crime.

They were just doing a focused enforcement detail in the city yesterday.

I talked about our homeless action team.

And you know, back to partnerships and being a good partner and trying to come up with solutions.

I get the opportunity to serve on the downtown council's foundational safety plan for the 2035 plan.

So they're actually meeting this afternoon and that Lieutenant Mohammed is at for me, but that meeting is important to us.

Like, how can we be good partners inside of the city and support the residents of the city and just and be good partners and be a responsive police department?

And then these law enforcement work groups, as we've started new lines.

We actually uh yesterday the the first train was moving on the tracks yesterday out to Eden Prairie.

Um, and we started a law enforcement work group out there.

These law enforcement work groups meeting on a regular basis is so important to us instead of meeting when something you know bad happens, and then we're first getting to know each other, like you know, I know it's a cliche too, but relationships, relationship relationships, they matter, right?

And for us having these work groups and having these pre-conversations before something happens, it's a big deal for us.

So with that, thank you for the presentation, General Madrid Gondoris and Chief Dotseth.

I'll check the queue to see if any of my colleagues have any questions.

I'll first pass it to Council President Payne.

Thank you, Chair Chavez, and thank you for being here.

I uh my question I think goes back to the previous slide around partnerships.

I noticed that you're in 63 communities.

I'm assuming that means 63 different agencies that you might be collaborating with.

Um to what extent do we formalize these partnerships and joint power agreements, or is it more um casual than that?

No, uh Chair uh Councilmember, great question.

Great question.

Great question.

And we do formalize these partnerships through a joint powers agreement, right?

So about two years ago, we worked with our office of general counsel, which is essentially our attorneys of the Med Council and came up with a template.

So as we've been refreshing all these partners and conversations, these joint powers agreements under these templates is kind of one of the forming, it's the formal part of that partnership.

And for us too, when you think about the transit police statutory responsibility, right?

Very specific to transit policing.

Not that we can do general law enforcement, you know, very similar to maybe what the Park PD is doing or the U of M is doing.

We are especially police department.

Those joint powers agreements allows us to address doing general law enforcement in the in the city.

So great question.

Thank you, Chair Chavez.

Thank you, General Manager Cadaris and then Chief for being here.

I'm also grateful for my staff, Celeste Robison, who worked with you all to organize this presentation for today.

And it's reflected in our public safety work plan a desire to learn more about how safety initiatives are being rolled out at Metro Transit and ways in which we can strengthen collaboration.

I think your presentation honed in on that.

I will also note I represent an area of the city that is lucky to have really strong metro transit infrastructure, including the light rail, bus rapid transit, and a regular bus service as well through Metro Mobility.

And I believe my area has some of the highest highest uh ridership rates in the city as it has the largest concentration of students with the University of Minnesota being there.

Um also Augsburg University is also in the area.

So we have lots of young people who are using public transit daily and relying upon it to basically have a support the needs of their everyday life.

Um and I'm very proud that this council has really done the work to support public transit.

We have our goal of um every three out of five uh trips in the city being made through either uh public transit, through scooter, or basically other means outside of just using a car by 2030.

So we know in order to reach that goal, it's important to have a public safety or public transit system that is also um safe for all riders to use.

And the work that you talked about today is very crucial in making that happen.

Um also want to note that um another reason we wanted to bring you all here is of course this this motto that you all have embraced that the city is also um integrating as well as uh as having a more comprehensive coordinated approach around public safety um and specifically having more expansive prevent preventative services before relying on just our armed first responders when there's a crisis.

And I think you all have done a lot to wrestle with that dynamic in your action plan.

Um and one of the things that I wanted uh some follow-up on, you mentioned the safety ambassadors program.

Some of this work I think largely used to be contracted to external groups in addition to relying on first uh or response.

I wanted to hear a little bit more of um how you're you've worked to bring a lot more of those safety services in-house.

Um the city of Minneapolis right now, a lot of our preventative work.

It's also uh supported through external organizations through contracts, um, and we've done a lot of work to streamline that and and foster greater oversight and metrics, um, but also thinking through how do we continue to make that work more sustainable?

And I think you all have looked at that by bringing some of those resources in-house and having a more centralized model.

So I wanted to hear a little bit more of how you've navigated that.

Sure.

Yeah.

Chair, uh Councilmember Wansley, I'll start and then maybe have the chief talk about specifically with MPD, like how that homeless action team has approached this.

But yes, in general, as we build those layers of presence, we have a mix of metro transit employees and contracted work.

So our police department, as well as uh most of our trip agents, our metro transit employees, our supplemental security service, and uh a portion of our trip agents are contracted.

And then that other program that we're in the process of moving to the transit rider social services approach, that will be us contracting with uh community-based organizations to offer that.

Uh, one of the lessons we learned through doing the transit service intervention project, uh, that was part of the 2023 uh state transportation omnibus uh was the importance of us though, hiring staff to support that work.

So we have made that internal investment uh to make sure we can coordinate effectively and really support uh the people or the organizations we bring in by contract to do the social service piece.

Uh so it's a blend.

Uh and it's uh I think one of our you know, motivators is to be able to act with urgency on this.

So, for instance, when we started the transit rider investment program, our very first trip agents uh were contracted because we were able to amend our supplemental security contract to do that.

But as uh we've grown that program, we've been able to do that by hiring uh MetroTrans in place.

So it's that's just an example of how this is evolving, but fundamentally we're trying to be as responsive and again act with urgency to address the the concerns of our riders and employees.

Uh but maybe just uh if Chief can talk about the homeless action team because that's an example of the team are police officers, but they've also contracted over time for additional support.

Yeah.

Chair, council member.

Yeah, I think it's a blended approach, right?

So our homeless action team, while that's in-house staff that is doing stuff.

We've also made it a priority, right?

So as you're going through all these different priorities, even for us at the police department, our staffing numbers as we're getting ready to increase that, right?

For almost 48 people this year by the end of the year.

Like you have to shift some priorities in ensuring that we're providing service to people priority, right?

So our homeless action team along with we have a partnership with Mental Health Minnesota.

I think you do have to have a blended idea of it, but it just it has to be a priority.

And then to the board the general manager is saying you have to act with urgency on it.

And that's part of what the Safe and Strong Initiative was.

You know, and I think we're all in those meetings like that.

It's great.

It's great to be in a meeting and talk about you know, root causes and try to get that, but at some point we need to do stuff.

And so back to our sense of urgency.

That's what about a lot of our plans are.

We are not gonna solve everything, but we want to be out there working towards what those solutions look like.

But I think a blended approach, you know, for us has been successful.

Yeah, and I'm hearing also just the focus on a community orientation.

Um, what also I forgot what the slide specifically was, but she mentioned of course the proactive policing and how that correlates with um not necessarily the highest amount of arrest.

And we actually had a presentation just last PHS meeting from uh Ramsey County John Choi around the similar thing around their non-fatal shooting task force of being more proactive and using resources a lot more strategically, but not with the goal of saying we're just gonna send everyone to prison, but actually building those relationships, addressing some of the root causes and bringing in that supplemental support while also balancing the needs for first response urgency.

Um I did want to clear uh get a little bit more clarification on some of the numbers.

I forget which slide because we don't have a presentation in front of us, but it was uh Chief, you were going down that one.

Sorry, the crimes reported per 100,000 rides.

Just once I get a sense of um in 2024, there was somewhat of a divot or a decline.

Um, and we're seeing the slight uptick.

So just once again, your understanding or observations, what my hat contributed to that.

Uh Chair, Councilmember.

I think again, the for me the takeaway for this slide is the red line, right?

Serious crime very low on the system.

That blue line, we have a lot of say, especially if we're being proactive on the system and making arrest.

I would like to see that blue line be much more stable.

It should not be like this, but it really comes back to us doing enforcement, right?

So when we had a dip of a dip down there, that could be we're we're we need to do more enforcement, right?

So I think back to finding what that's sweet spot of that line is, we still need to look at that, but it could be a variety of reasons, right?

And my belief on that aspect of it is is that we might have had some different priorities at that time.

So when we see these higher speaks, it's probably really coming back to us doing enforcement.

Where again, I want to see that line be much more steady over time.

And yeah, it needs to be more steady over time.

Yeah.

Thank you for that.

And once again, overall, thank you for coming to present to the committee.

I know this was months of coordination um with you all, so I'm very grateful that you all were able to really share some of the innovative work and data-driven work that you all are doing to improve public safety outcomes while also addressing livability needs amongst our public transit system and to be able to share that with us as we're thinking through further collaborations with you all and how to support the work overall.

So thank you.

I'd also like to acknowledge the presence of councilmember Cowdery.

Next up, we have Councilmember Pomassano.

Thank you, Chief Dotset and General Manager Kendarus.

Um, the these numbers of um top seven FBI level crimes.

Um they actually surprised me based on how often I hear issues, and I guess I recognize in looking through your slides that they're more livability issues that people are reaching out to complain to me as constituents.

You know, I I got a text message the other day saying, is it even possible to wait at a bus stop without someone doing drugs right next to me?

Right?

Like I I think that the lower level crimes um are probably the biggest deterrence to ridership.

Um the issues that I hear about most often on bus rides from people who are bus riders are that people are drunk or high or having a mental health disturbance to others on the bus or harassment or multiple of these kinds of things.

Um I am I represent a part of the city that is particularly not great about bus and transit connectivity.

Um there have been efforts to make it better, and we're especially excited about the new E-line, but it's hard to get people enthusiastic about it when they talk about not be feeling safe on a bus.

Um I have a teenage son who I spent time this summer teaching him and his friends how to get around the city on a bus and trying to help them navigate that.

Um yet I struggle, I recognize this isn't connectivity, isn't it isn't the focus of this presentation, but I I struggle to get anyone serious attention to address gaps in service for students.

I have a whole group of students in a neighborhood that would need to take two bus at least one bus change and then walk five blocks to school, and these are high schoolers that start pretty early in the morning, and that's just not realistic.

You're never going to get teenagers to go and take transit to school when their parents feel like they're not safe on a bus and they don't recognize that there's maybe different times of day in different parts of where people are transiting to and from the issues happen, and they're not going to um become regular adult users of transit if they aren't offered that opportunity without it being really, really hard for them.

Um in terms of supplemental security, I'm curious.

Um, are there undercover people riding the bus?

Are there undercover metro transit police on some of these buses?

And can you tell us a little bit about that?

Yeah.

Chair, council member.

Uh yeah, there is.

So part of our transit response, you know, while they're in a uniform, we do have officers that do what we call plain clothes details that's out there as the as we get more staff.

Do we have more of those operations out there?

Yeah, we will have more of those out there, but we do do some of uh some of those details as well right now.

I'm really glad to hear that.

Um, because um when I am reached out to, I have responded in that way, but I didn't realize that that was necessarily still happening.

Um, for example, a constituent reached out to me.

He was on his way home from his election judge training over on East Hennepin trying to get home.

And there were disturbances on a bus that led to kind of a brewing altercation where um the bus driver had to get one party off the bus, not even at a bus stop.

Um they were on Franklin by then instead of East Tennepin, they were all the way down on Franklin.

But it's um is it possible to um deputize somebody to remove someone from a bus, or like do you need to be a licensed police officer to have um I would assume that anybody that works for Metro Transit could say uh you need to leave.

Um, but I also respect and have a relationship with a neighbor who drives for metro transit, and I I appreciate how really hard that is to be driving a bus safely down the road and dealing with issues on a bus.

Yeah.

Chair, council member, you we really want the police or the official presence to be the ones, you know, asking people to leave.

You know, we certainly understand, you know, if an operator, we want de-escalation to really be the primary focus of that.

So we certainly understand if you know an operator or if a trip agent is out there, some official transit presence, like what type of you know, situation they're they're putting themselves in.

So we really focus on de-escalation and and to call us, right?

Call the police.

I mean, we just don't know how these incidents are gonna escalate and we just want to de-escalate and you don't call us.

That's why we're here.

So, you know, de-escalation, very important, and we really would ask that the police respond to those incidents.

Not that some other official presence can't ask somebody to stop.

It's just everybody feels a little bit different on the in the system.

And then just I just wanted briefly, and maybe the general manager will probably, you know, maybe follow up on this, but we understand there's an issue of perception on the transit perception of safety, right?

And so, you know, we're lucky enough, and I'm very thankful that we're here to share this presentation with you all.

We are out in the community everywhere right now, sharing what's really happening on the trans system.

You know, working on trying to have positive stories out there, our social media is back up, we're constantly having positive stories of what the police are doing, what the trip agents are doing, what all of Metro Transit is doing to combat that perception of safety.

But some of the other committees that I sit on, and I'm sure many of the council members the same thing, perception of safety, wherever we're at in our community.

It's a struggle we're all facing.

But I can say the approach that I'm taking and the general manager as well.

We're going everywhere to talk about what's really happening on the system and share our stories and let people know that the transit police and metro transit, not just with the safe security action plan, like call us, call us, call us, call us on these things, and we will be responsive of it.

And that is back to when I was talking about that whole community approach to public safety.

That's not a cliche for us.

That's how we're running public safety and transit police initiatives right now.

I appreciate that.

And let me be the first to say that I don't consider myself a regular transit rider, but I have not experienced those kinds of issues on buses myself.

Um but we do, as council members up here, become that first point of contact when there is a problem.

Um and it's been unfortunate to hear, particularly, and I recognize you have like 790 plus bus shelters, but the issues at Eighth and Hennepin had gotten pretty untenable recently over these past few weeks.

Um and those are things that keep people, people from Southwest Minneapolis from using transit as a regular rider downtown and back.

Um how we are working across jurisdictions to help with safety here is really important, like you said.

Um I had started by reaching out to the council member uh of that particular area of Ward 7.

I reached out to Shane Zan, I reached out to downtown improvement district and to MPD.

And last Friday night I happened to be at 8th and Hennepin and noticed that um MPD had a large visible presence there.

Um, and they were really working hard to take what would by your tables be considered nuisance issues, but a lot of drug use and a lot of um kind of brewing antagonism and fights and drug dealing and that just they're not it's not okay, and it's not gonna help people use the buses um in larger numbers until we can curb that.

So I hope that we can continue to do that work downtown because I have noticed a difference from three weeks ago until last Friday night around Eighth and Hennepin, and it's really important for us to do that.

So thank you.

Thank you.

Next up, we have Councilmember Rainbow.

Uh thank you, Chair.

Uh so good to see you, uh, General Manager in Chief.

Thank you for coming down today.

Uh I know how busy your schedules are.

And uh as you're aware, I represent a lot of users in the Mill District and Northloop and tourists, tourist commissioners.

And since uh the summer of 21, I really noticed the level of complaints about transit just dropping and dropping.

In fact, this summer has been the lowest of all the times I've been in office.

So I want to thank you for that.

I'm really grateful that uh the safety ambassador program that you've piloted in St.

Paul is coming to Minneapolis.

Uh that's uh it's needed.

So thank you.

And and I I want to leave uh leave you with this.

I did have a chance to meet the two B COPs at work Nickelamore and outstanding personalities.

They could be a public relations agents instead of sworn officers.

But they really add a lot to that public safety for our transportation in downtown.

So thank you very much.

Thank you, Council.

And next we have Councilmember Chadry.

Thank you so much, Chair Chavez, and thank you so much.

Um GM Kindaris and uh Chief, really appreciate you being here.

Um I just wanted to share some feedback that I've heard from constituents over by 46 and Hiawatha Station.

Uh, it's good feedback.

I think the efforts that we have been working on uh between the city and metro transit are really making a real difference and community members have noticed it.

Uh they the porta potties going up over by there was a huge deal.

Um that was an area where a lot of people very clearly needed to use the bathroom, and there were no like publicly accessible bathrooms, and that's changed a lot.

Um it's also been helpful to get that additional security over at 46 and Hiawatha, and also the conversation about keeping the pedestrian pathway open was really appreciated.

I think there's still maybe some more work to do there, maybe a conversation about what we can do together in terms of lighting to kind of help the situation.

And um one thing I wanted to share with you on the city end, my office has been working pretty closely with the neighborhood safety department to take funding that we had allocated um in the 2023 budget.

I had led a budget allocation for uh something related to transit safety.

It came from the public safety aid that we got from the state of Minnesota.

And that is turning into a program for um on the ground case managers and social workers, uh, really proudly led by Let Everyone Advance with Dignity who has a mission of doing robust casework and preventing law violations to uh from even occurring.

And so that would be nearby the light rail station and that corridor, and I think it'll be excellent to see kind of how that partners with the work that you're already doing.

Um I don't I believe there's another uh station that they'll be nearby, but I can't remember off the top of my head.

So I just wanted to say um constituents have been seeing a difference, and I oftentimes hear from many constituents um that rely on transit and over over in the 12th ward, there's a bunch of um different hubs that make it really easy for people to use transit that they feel like um things have changed a lot from two years ago.

So that's really great.

Um the question that I had was about just a little bit more uh on the learnings that you had from your TCP pilot.

I think like what were like the biggest challenges and what were kind of like some of the surprises that you saw, and what do you hope to like bring into the next iteration of this work?

Yeah.

Thank you.

Uh Chair, Councilmember Chowdhury.

Uh yeah, excellent question.

I think one of the findings that's affecting our next step is the importance of separating out presence for code of conduct uh enforcement and presence that's really more about connecting with riders and offering connections to social services.

That that latter type of work requires a lot of ongoing contact and trust building versus if we have uh presence on there that's more addressing smoking or drug use, like that's a different type of interaction.

The way the transit service intervention project initially started is we had groups doing both, and we found that we really want to focus our transit rider investment program agents on, you know, that kind of continuous regulation on the system, checking fares, reminding people code of conduct, uh, but then this new round of transit rider social service uh contracted personnel will be more focused on connecting people to services, and we're trying to make sure we're doing that in a way that isn't duplicating other entities' work, but rather helping um navigate uh in getting people connected with whether it's a county program or other program.

So uh that's one example, I think, is just thinking um based on what we did learn from that initial transit service intervention project and where uh the needs are is you know, really honing in on how do we help um address that gap between what people may need on our system and how to get connected uh to resources in our community.

Um that's one that comes to mind, but certainly we can provide more information based on the evaluation we've done too.

So that would be great.

Um yeah, I would be really curious to know also if you want to follow up the kind of service providers that you've worked with in the past and the type of services and like kind of how you measured success because coordination I think is the hardest part, right?

Especially when it's like on the ground in a train car.

Um it's not always the easiest place to be like let's do a housing assessment or let's figure out the next steps for paperwork to get you to treatment if if that's something that you want and a number of other things.

Yeah, follow-up.

Um my last question is for you, Chief.

I just had a curiosity, just looking at your recruitment and pretty excellent retention rate.

What is the what is like kind of the demographic makeup of your force?

What's the age and other demographics?

Where do your recruits come from?

Chair, council member, great question.

Everywhere.

You know, when I say that the transit police is one of the most diverse departments in the region, it's true, right?

We're at about 36, 37 percent diversity number.

Uh our female officer forces at about 22 percent, and we're in the 30 by 30 program, which is our pledge to be 30 percent female officers by 2030.

So you think of the work that we've done to maintain a diverse police department, right?

Diversity means different things to different people.

Our department speaks multiple languages, they're from all over the state, all over the country, all over the world, and that's what makes our agency so reflective and powerful, I feel like in the community.

I worked at the organization when we weren't that diverse.

Did we get stuff done?

We definitely got stuff done, but I don't think it's effectively as we do right now.

So as we're recruiting and when the council members and the communities sees this be the difference campaign.

I keep going back to it.

It's going to resonate with people because getting back to focusing on the values of what we're hiring, right?

The values of respect, service, and honesty.

That's what we're hiring, right?

We're hiring people with those core values, and then we're training them for all these, you know, the tactical stuff, right?

Because we want to hire for character and train for skills.

So our department is made up a wide variety of people from walks of life, so which makes us, I feel like so effective in the community.

You know what your average age is on in your department?

Uh Chair, Councilmember, I I don't have that one.

That's the one question I will follow up on that.

Okay, yeah, I'm just like trying to understand if you're like a younger.

So, you know, as we think about the staff that's onboarding, especially I think about back to that pathway I talked before about our explorer program, our community service officer program, which we have a community service officer pathways program as well.

So our CSO program, traditional CSO, much like the cities do when you're in school somewhere going for law enforcement or pathways program.

You have to have no, we have to be in school for law enforcement.

And we partnered with our HR team on that, so that program has been very successful.

The state has a program called IC POET that is similar to that, but we just kind of decided to do our own, right?

And that's very impactful.

And the people that are in that pathways program, all different ages, from people right out of high school to people thinking about a second career.

Do we even have a couple people that um I'm not sure if they're in their third or fourth grade, nonetheless, we want them to be part of our team.

So there is a while, our officers on the street, you'll probably see that when the public's out there's some younger officers out there.

We're building uh uh force of age, you know, from all over the place.

But all that's a good question.

That's a metric that I will follow up on.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

Thank you so much for the presentation.

We really appreciate it.

And yeah.

Thank you.

We appreciate the work.

All right, colleagues for the discussion.

I'll direct clerk to receive and file that report.

Our next item is a presentation providing an overview of the environmental health food, lodging, and pools program.

I'll now invite our environmental health division to introduce themselves and get us started.

Welcome, Cindy.

Good afternoon, Chair Chavez, Council members.

I'm Cindy Wackworth.

I'm the director of environmental health in the health department.

Is this picking me up?

Okay, perfect.

Uh my divisions programming is often referred to as food lodging and pools, as these are the programs that are delegated to us by the state.

As you can see, there are many different business types that fall under these categories, and they each have their own nuances.

Whoops, this has a mind of its own.

There we go.

Um these are the ones that are delegated to us through the Minnesota Department of Health.

Um, you can see that it's a wide range of uh businesses, especially food businesses.

Um, some of them serve special populations, like young children in schools or daycares or the elderly, and and even just these uh subtle differences affect the food that can be served because there are some foods that can't be served there because they're considered too risky.

We also have board and lodging that includes hotels and lodging houses such as sororities, fraternities, and sober homes.

And then the pools include all the municipal pools, such as the outdoor pools operated by the Minneapolis Parks and Recreation Board, as well as any indoor or outdoor pools, such as and spas that are associated with hotels, apartment complexes, condominiums, and gyms.

We also have a delegation agreement with the Department of Agriculture, and these are more establishments that are food businesses that would be considered grocery or convenience stores, so mostly prepackaged or baked good category.

The authority to license and inspect and enforce these laws comes to the city through two delegation agreements, and this is allowed under Minnesota Statute 145A.

The delegation agreement also stipulates that we adopt the state statutes and rules, which we do by reference in our ordinance, and that we cannot be less restrictive.

There are many purposes for the Minnesota Health, yes, the Minnesota Health Codes, and those are to safeguard public health for residents and visitors, reduce the risk of foodborne, waterborne, and bloodborne illness, protect consumers from potentially devastating health consequences and financial losses, maintain uniform standards for safety throughout the entire state, and establish a standardized approach to inspections.

Some of the advantages of having a uniform risk-based inspection program include setting of reasonable fees, licensing each establishment annually, conducting inspections, responding to complaints, including foodborne illness complaints, and documenting follow-up activities, maintaining inspection reports for historical purposes, and plan review.

This helpful table shows the breakdown of where authority lies, whether state or local, so it's more clear what we have the authority to change and what we do not.

And as you can see, the vast majority of requirements flow directly from the state through statute or rule.

There are some activities like license required and license types where we echo what the state statute or rule says.

Even some of the time place manner are modified by statutory definitions, but the city squarely has the authority to determine zoning and fees charged.

In addition to our delegated responsibilities, there are other programs we inspect based on city ordinances.

This includes tattoo and piercing, tanning, laundry, dry cleaning, massage plan review, and then staple foods is a program that addresses food deserts to make sure there's healthy food available in all parts of the city.

And green to go verifies that all two-go foods and drink containers are reusable, recyclable, or compostable.

I'm gonna highlight some of the things that we've done in this last year, not our complete body of work, but just some things that I thought were might be of interest.

It keeps jumping ahead, so I'm just making sure I'm on the right slide.

Our programs are systematically evaluated by both the Minnesota Department of Health and the Minnesota Department of Ag to verify that we're following all the rules in our delegation agreement.

So they do a thorough review of our ordinance language, our policies and procedures, our SOPs, to make sure we're following them as written.

They review our inspection reports, they make sure we're hitting our required frequencies on how often we go out to inspect.

They review our plan review applications and correspondence.

They shadow and evaluate our staff in the field on inspections, they verify we're following up on complaints, and they verify we investigate foodborne illnesses.

So fine-tooth comb.

We are in the last steps of our evaluation by the Minnesota Department of Agriculture.

They have nine different standards.

They verify every four to five years.

The kickoff was last June of 2024.

We've gone through the evaluate draft evaluation and submitted our comments, and the final should be coming soon.

We do know because we got to see the draft.

We have a few minor things to tweak, but overall we're passing with flying colors.

With MDH, they review us for eight different standards.

They do two standards a year.

This year we were evaluated on standards five and seven and met all of those requirements.

Next year we go through standards four and six, and then we start the whole process over again.

So a key to our success is our commitment to self-evaluation and continuous improvement.

And the core is the standardization of our own staff.

We have three internal program leads who are standardized by both state agencies, and these program leads do a series of joint inspections with each of our inspection staff.

And they're actually graded on multiple areas during joint inspections.

So things like communication, risk factor survey, good retail practices, and then they also have additional exercises like food flows, risk control plan, and shell stock source identification.

This not only assures that our staff are standardized and consistent in their approach, it also helps make the food more safe.

I don't know if you're aware of this, but Minneapolis is recognized nationwide as a leader in the food inspection program.

I can't remember a state or national conference I went to where somebody didn't say, Oh, you're from Minneapolis, we use your HACCP plans, or we use your fact sheets, or you guys have things available in so many languages.

So just wanted to kind of lift that up.

This is one example.

City staff designed and conducted a study of cooling methods, working with local food businesses.

We used a data logger or multiple data loggers to capture time and temperature of 223 recipes.

And this was done a number of years ago.

But getting published takes time.

And we really did discover that there was a better way to cool food.

So working with other experts, Nick Corrine from our division published the results in the Journal of Food Protection and then presented locally and natural nationally on this approach.

This was really elevated nationally, cumulating in recommended change to use this methodology in the 2025 conference for food protection.

That's where people go if you want to change the USDA food code.

And it was a recommendation for a code change that the FDA is going to incorporate.

These changes centered on allowing more temporary tattoo events per year, and this has been a really popular change.

We also created an active managerial control toolkit to help food businesses and their management teams improve their food safety.

So this is the website we created, and it steps through six core areas to provide, and it provides educational materials, helps them do root cause analysis, and shows them what inspectors are looking for.

The applications are all in English and Spanish.

Talks about propane and fire safety, and also the green to go requirements.

We work closely with homegrown to prevent wasted food.

We assisted with the creation of the technical guide, and this includes short videos, printable resources, and all of this is on our website and in multiple languages.

There were also some updates to the pool code that we made.

This was to align it with the state's code.

Originally, we had been more restrictive.

And we also created guidance for the new Virginia Graham Baker rule to address drain covers and the issue of section entrampment to help help businesses be able to determine if they needed to upgrade their drains.

Another big focus of our division is educational outreach to business owners and food workers.

This is offered in a number of ways.

It includes in house consultancy, classroom, and online training.

We had 40 businesses that were enrolled in our serving safety program, serving 443 learners.

Businesses completing the training had a 42% reduction in the number of violations on their health inspections after the training as compared to before the training.

I mentioned that we're known for our resources.

We also are very focused on creating videos, posters, fact sheets, and job aids in multiple languages to support food businesses.

Additionally, there was funding this year.

To date, there have been three cohorts, two in Spanish and one in English that have participated in four classes per cohort.

So far, 75 people have attended at least one class.

33 have attended four classes, and 19 from the first two cohorts have passed their CFPM test, and the third cohort takes their test tonight.

After the cohort training wraps up, the consultant offers open office hours to provide technical assistance to prospective vendors.

We also held seven in-person classroom trainings for 144 learners in English and Spanish.

And we also offer online training for food safety and food allergen awareness.

These trainings are free for Minneapolis food workers and are available in English and Spanish.

Some are available in other languages.

In 2024, 479 people took the basic food safety training, and 237 people took the allergy awareness training.

We assessed our data for frequency of priority one violations.

These are the ones that are most likely to lead to foodborne illness.

And the two we addressed were both through education and equipment were proper use of concentration of the sanitizer and proper cooling.

And the last project I'm going to highlight is our commitment to writing in plain language.

I thought this was very appropriate to highlight after the health literacy resolution where there was a focus on plain language.

So we rewrote the top 130 most frequently called food code violations.

Many like the one shown here start out with a postdoc reading level.

And we rewrote them all to six and eighth grade level.

This is not only important for readability and comprehension, but it also makes makes it easier to translate or interpret in other languages.

Thanks so much.

I'm going to check to see if any of our colleagues have any questions.

Councilmember Pompsano.

Thank you, Director Wetquorth, for this presentation.

I always enjoy hearing your annual report.

And congratulations with your work on food cooling technologies and inclusion in the food code.

I think it's neat to see Minneapolis as leading the way, and as someone who cooks a lot of food in mass quantities for teams of athletes these days.

I think it has to do with shallow pans, but then in the photos, there was some sort of implement inserted into deeper tubs or something.

Can you explain a little bit more for the general public share?

How you do what are the best practices that you found about cooling big food vets safely?

I think a lot of people want to know, including myself.

Yeah.

It's changed the way I cool food at home, I will say that.

So the best method is considered the passive method, and that's having no more than two inches of food in a pan.

So I will I I'll make a big pot of chili and I'll pour it into cake pans, and I'll fill them no more than two inches, and I put them uncovered in my fridge.

That um that two inch seems to be a magic number for where food is cooled and you don't have to stir it or um or take temperatures to make sure it hits the cooling curve, because there's there's a cooling curve, and this is what was so difficult for vendors and food food people who are making food that's hot needs to be cooled, is you need to go from 135 to 70 in two hours and 70 to 40 in four hours.

And if you didn't hit that first mark at 70, you had to reheat it up to 165 and start that whole thing over.

So you were constantly taking temperatures and uh logging the temperatures so that you could tell if you were hitting those parameters.

Um otherwise there's uh a tendency for um a toxic bacteria that can make you very sick to grow.

Um so maybe my old way of throwing the chili pot out the back door in the winter was not the best idea.

It's uh only if you bring it down to two and then yeah, throw it out the back door and keep the dog away.

So I know, I mean, I I know that restaurants dread the health inspector.

Um but it's because of the work of you and your staff that we can safely eat in restaurants and stay in hotels and swim in pools and buy our produce at the farmers market, and we really appreciate it.

Um the body art events are still a relatively new concept, I think.

Um but I'm interested to know how your staff are staying on top of and inspecting these events and these artists.

Yeah, we um they're required to fill out a special event permit for the tattoo um to tattoo in a place that isn't like a standard tattoo business or body art business.

And so we have guidelines for hand washing and the antiseptic cleaning and everything else, and then we um go out and inspect it.

So we have staff out pretty much almost every weekend all year round, but definitely in the summer, uh we have um staff out that go to all pretty much all of the events in the city of Minneapolis.

Um I think so far there have been.

Let's see, I wrote it down.

300, oh in 2024, there were 312 food events, and then um I can't remember the data.

I think it was about 15 of the tattoo events.

I know we had one last weekend, and we dispatch people out to inspect.

We take food service very seriously, especially this uh the special events.

Um we did have the largest outbreak in the city of Minneapolis in our Fair City's history since it's been recorded at a special event from a vendor.

Um so we know that that's uh a place we need to concentrate.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Great.

Thank you so much, and thanks for the presentation.

You're welcome.

All right, colleagues.

See no more discussion.

I'll direct a clerk to receive and file that report.

Our next and final item is a report related to youth and adolescent diversion, deflection, intervention, and delinquency prevention programs.

This is a response to a staff direction pass at the end of last year.

And I'll invite Dwight Miller, management analyst with our policy and research division to get us started.

Welcome.

Thanks for being here.

Thank you for having me, Chair Tavez.

Oops.

Good afternoon, um, Chair Chavez and Council members.

My name is Dwight Miller of the legislative research and oversight department.

I'm happy to present about youth diversion, deflection, intervention, and prevention, um, which is a mouthful.

Um here is the staff direction.

I want to uh as you can tell, there's a lot that is covered.

There's a lot that's covered within the report.

This is a very high-level overview.

I really wanted to highlight some of the things that um learned across the nation from other cities.

I mean, also get a high-level overview of what's happening here in Minneapolis.

Um, so I really um encourage you to be able to um dig into the report.

But for this presentation, we're going to have a high-level overview of just youth justice and also just youth support um happening within the city of Minneapolis.

So before we get into kind of prevention, intervention, diversion, which is all defined within kind of the first few pages of the report.

I kind of wanted to kind of think about this mental visualized picture of what we're talking about.

Um when we're thinking about the the landscape, think about it as a funnel, a series of levels of funnels.

Um and at the widest, we have the prevention and then kind of at the most narrow, narrow um intervention portion is the juvenile justice service.

And so when you get into the juvenile courts being involved.

At the wise level, prevention, you really think about like broad community supports.

Think about school, school engagement, mentorship, family stability, keeping youth from entering the system at all.

That's what we're thinking about when they think about the prevention level.

As we kind of go towards down the funnel of as at risk use moved around a funnel, you have intervention.

Um intervention, we're thinking about youth are beginning to show some risk factors.

This is when youth might be you know missing school a little bit more.

Um you notice some things happening at home, and that might be some family instability.

Um, and that is whenever you know the system, and we're talking a little bit more about the specific interventions, might offer things like case management, um, redirection to help um stabilize families, um, deflection programs to redirect the behavior.

Um, as we continue to go down the funnel, we have diversion, and this is sort of the more formalized um approach to being able to keep people keep youth out of the juvenile justice service um courts.

And this is the narrowest point where we talk about alternatives to youth, such as law enforcement um and prosecution.

We're looking at alternative um ways of doing that and thinking about how do we really learn holistically what the child is going through, learning the family situation, and being able to divert them away from the court system in general.

Now, national research has shown that diversion is a cheaper alternative to the formal court system, is a more effective way of being able to avoid further engagement within the court system for the child and also the family, and also leads to lower um engagement with law enforcement and also with the court system as adults.

Um so it is a win-win-win and also seen as the kind of a best practice for juvenile justice.

Um, and as far as that's sort of where we ground into our why.

What we're trying to do is trying to aim, kind of from a macro standpoint, keep costs low, but also be able to have the best outcomes for um humans as they're going through um you know life in general.

So, what do we have here locally?

So I like to think of it as co-centric circles where we have the statewide level, we have the county level, then we have the more local level.

From the state level, there are kind of three or um programs I want to point out.

Um, first is the youth intervention program, or YIP, um, which provides grants for over 100 organizations statewide.

There are around 40 plus organizations in Minneapolis or that serve the city of Minneapolis that serve youth 10 through 18, focusing on after school programs, mentor programs, restorative justice practices.

Um, along with YIP, there's also YEPA, which is the association of youth intervention programs.

Um, and this helps professionals get training, professional development.

It does advocacy for the YEP program.

Um, and so these things are kind of put hand in hand.

There's also the Minnesota Youth Program, which is administered by the Department of Employment and Economic Development.

Oftentimes workforce development and workforce training, employment is seen as a way of being able to engage youth maybe outside of school or outside of more traditional mentorship roles, and being able to engage them into something that might be you know a career pathway that might get them from going into more delinquent behavior to more pro-social behaviors.

So this youth program administers four about four million dollars statewide and actually impacts around 275 to 325 youth a year annually, depending on the capacity of the local program, um, which is Minneapolis Youth Workforce Program, which might you might know this as more of a step-up program that's related to this grant program.

Um, and then finally we have the juvenile justice advocacy committee.

Um, this allocates federal Title II funding and oversees statewide compliance of the juvenile justice delinquency and prevention act.

Um, Jack has meetings, has different chapters locally and also convenes with other states, JACs to be able to understand what's the best juvenile justice um approaches, um, oftentimes focusing on diversion um before you you know, before you ask, I've asked several people about the federal vibe of just where we're at with federal funding for youth prevention, um delinquency prevision.

And across the board, I've not seen any worry about the federal government cutting Title II funding.

Um I've really tried to ask.

Um, and if I'd be interested if you have if you heard other things to hear from you, but um I haven't heard anything as far as people being worried about the federal funding on this particular strain of work around um delinquency prevention.

Together, all of these structures create kind of an ecosystem that helps support Minnesota Minneapolis locally through the different programs that I'm will highlighted within the um report itself.

Kind of the next co-centric circle is Hinnepin County.

Um, the Hinnepin County Attorney Office handles most of the diversion um and Minneapolis youth as far as juvenile justice.

Around 30% of the juvenile cases the Hinnepin County actually is makes contact with goes from precharge goes diversion.

And that decision is made by the attorney's office.

Usually this means creating an action plan and also comes in con comes in collaboration with the community provider.

Traditionally, that provider, you might have looked on the website, says Headway or UOBO Emotional Health.

As of this summer, they actually have new contract with different providers, which are on the screen right there.

I do want to highlight a few of them.

A restorative justice collaborative, which is really shepherded by the legal rights center and also involved the restorative justice community action, creates an overseas restorative circles and community accountability agreements.

They also have a contract with North Point Health and Wellness, which provides more of a mental health approach to diversion, and also Kinte Circle, which provides culturally specific diversion services.

Along with those, there's also some other ones that are highlighted within the report that offers an array of services for diversion and con in conjunction with Hinnepin County.

Collectively, these efforts show kind of a progress in Hintenpin County towards doing using more diversionary tactics for juvenile justice.

And you can see in the report that there's actually an increase in the number of cases that the proportion of cases that get diverted from the traditional justice system to more of these diversion tracks where they're thinking about the whole child and also being able to make sure that we redirect them to more pro social behavior.

So outside of just the diversion, which we already realize is like kind of later in the funnel.

We have also intervention and prevention that are being kind of helped up and propped up by the Hinnepin County office and also Minneapolis Public Schools that I want to highlight.

From Hennepin County, um the family response stabilization service offered out for rapid crisis response within an hour and provides short-term stabilization and referrals for family.

As I mentioned earlier, a little bit within the first slide, school engagement is often seen as a way of being able to prevent youth from being able to kind of move down the funnels and also provide a good platform for intervention.

The two programs I want to highlight is be at school program, which processes around 10,000 report truancy um reports annually.

By truancy, we're meaning chronic absenteeism, which is for them seven missing seven days or more of school.

Then a be at school administrator will go in and try to contact the family, figure out what's gonna what's happening, figure out support services, figure out how can we get that student back into school.

The problem, the rub with the be at school program, um particularly from the Minneapolis Public Schools perspective, is that of the 1,823 cases of referrals that were referred to be at school, there was a 7% engagement rate.

Um so there's not a lot of engagement from the Minneapolis Public School perspective of like we have these referrals and they're getting engaged.

A lot of it has to do with the fact that there are three people in the Hinnepin County attorney's office that are handling all these referrals.

Um that's 10,000 a year.

So there is definitely some capacity limitations at the Hinnepin County level.

Minneapolis Public School, which I want to remind everybody that's been it was kind of told to me that 50% of youth in Minneapolis actually go to Minneapolis Public Schools, the other going to other um districts in the county or charter schools or independent schools.

Um but Minneapolis Public Schools, they have their check and connect program, which offers a more hands-on approach.

These folks are in the schools, they're making relationships with the families, they're developing relationships with the students, and they're handling trudency that way.

The only problem with the um check and connect model as far as where it is currently is that it's not in every school, and oftentimes, and you can probably guess that the amount of intervention and amount of intensity is going to take a lot more resources than at the beat school, which has that breadth that we like.

Um, so that's sort of the prevention landscape that we have that's formalized, and once again, there's more of this in the report itself.

The city of Minneapolis has a lot of work being done for both diversion and particularly prevention.

Um the neighborhood safety department manages a variety, a large variety of different prevention contracts with community-based organizations in the city.

Um, this is highlighted once again in depth in the report.

Um, but the neighborhood safety department, I want to just shout them out that they are really trying to think about how do we think about our contracts and connect the folks, convene them, being able to be able to have a little bit more impact on contracts outside of just a contract by contract basis and thinking very strategically.

Um the city has two major initiatives that I want to highlight.

First is in a partnership with Tubman, the Inspiring Youth Program, serves youth ages 10 to 17 who have experienced or use violence at home, in school, or in community.

Tubman focuses on building safety, emotion regulation, and stability through long-term mentorship.

Over the last year's program, 74% of youth improved school attendance, and 79% reported stronger relationships with adults, showing meaningful behavior change driven by consistent engagement and trust.

I want to really emphasize that relationship with adults.

Throughout the literature, um having a relationship with a trusted adult is one of the biggest and most impactful means of being able to prevent uh youth from going down the formal justice track.

Um, is being able to have somebody that they can go to whenever they're in need or they need support.

Um, and so being able to have strong relationships is vitally important.

Um, the second um diversion program I want to highlight is one from the Minneapolis Police Department where they're working with restorative justice community action partnership to try to divert engagement with youth to restorative circles instead of going through the formal process of um arrests.

And so this program, which actually speaking to both um RJCA and also Minneapolis Public Police Department, right now, last I heard from them, it they feel like this is a really good place.

They really got everybody aligned after a few years of trying to get aligned.

Um, and so really excited to hear more and more as kind of the years go on about how that is making impact in the city of Minneapolis.

So, national landscape.

I actually covered five um different counties and cities.

I will say that most of the diversion, similar to Hennepin County, Minneapolis, most of those diversion programs are handled by the counties at the county level rather than at the city level.

But you will see some at least some connections between the city and the county as I go through this national landscape analysis.

Um, Harris County, which is Houston, um, similar to Minneapolis, Houston is recognized by UNICEF as a um healthy place to raise children and a healthy place for children.

Um, and Houston, what they illustrate really is just the a wide array of diversion programs in Harris County.

They have around eight different pathways to address different issues and diversion and different offenses, um, which gives you a lot of options.

One that they actually highlight to me was the first program, which stands for flexibility, intervention, restoration, support, and transformation, which is an early intervention model for youth who committed low-level or first-time offenses.

Rather than processing the case formally, youth are referred to community-based organizations and it which includes counseling, family engagement, and service learning.

Along with that, they're also referred to other another county agency, Harris County resources for children and adults, which connect families and supports families, connecting them to mental health care, housing, and youth mentoring, along with being able to engage with schools to be able to have a little more proactive approach to being able to understand what are the needs of children to prevent them from being engaged with the youth justice program in the first place.

Um, I really want to emphasize that it's not just one office of the county that's handling the work in Harris County, that they're working in conjunction with other offices.

So when we talk about inter, kind of interlocal, um, intra-local cooperation, Harris County provides a really good example of that.

King County, which is over in Seattle, where Seattle, Washington is located, really prevents it.

Sorry, the presents an excellent example of community engagement and diversion process, and along with building a trust between community and justice system and embedding public health.

Diversion in King County is actually handled by the juvenile superior courts and the prosecuting attorney's office.

Um so it's a little bit bifurcated.

Really, the prosecuting attorney's office has a first crack at it, and then it kind of trickles down into the juvenile courts, um, superior courts.

Um, superior courts were established first, and then you have the prosecuting attorney, which kind of created a supplemental program.

The juvenile courts actually utilizes the community accountability boards, which are composed of trained residents such as teachers, elders, and faith leaders who meet directly with the youth and family and co-create an accountability agreement, which can be a letter of apology, restitution, community service, participating in a culturally um relevant skills or skills-based program.

Um this really emphasizes how do we, as community members, come together, wrap ourselves around this youth and their family to be able to provide them support and get them on the right track.

Um, and along with that, the prosecuting attorney's office, similar to Hennepin County's attorney's office, has a diversion partner, restorative community pathways, which does restorative justice work with the community, um, and that's what their bread and butter is.

Um, so once again, we're seeing within the King County, we're seeing really deep community connections along with this concept of how do we get more restorative practices.

The one other thing I want to note is that the prosecuting attorney's office actually is their program is managed by the Department of Community and Human Services.

So this is seen as more of a public health perspective rather than a public safety perspective.

Clark County has the harbor.

And the first thing I ask Clark County is why is it called the Harbor when there is no uh ocean or seas or Great Lakes around there?

And a lot of this has to do with the fact that the Harbor is seen as a beacon.

What they want is some but an accessible place for people to one stop go in and get the services that they need for law enforcement to be able to point them to that direction, for schools to be able to point them to that direction in order to be able to get the services that they need.

The Harbor, which is a juvenile assessment center, which is nationally recognized, has four locations and provides walk-in services, um, and also along with that has an on-site benefit navigator.

This benefit navigator, which is um for a V Harbor specifically, actually able to get families benefits within 24 hours of asking and requesting, um which includes Medicaid.

Medicaid is definitely important for supporting families in regards to mental health services.

Um, if you're wanting to have long-term mental health services, you need Medicaid, and the Harbor has been able to figure out a way to do that in a very quick and efficient time, which they credit to dedication and having a dedicated staff person instead of having a case worker, a person who has a caseload that's outside of just you know the harbor and to other um entities.

Um along with that, I will say that it's also very recognizable from the community, um, and people know this as a place to go.

Um, and so I really this is similar to the YCC, the Youth Connection Center.

Um, there's a few things that the Youth Connection Center doesn't have, which doesn't qualify it as a juvenile assessment center.

Um, speaking with Hennepin County Attorney's Office, they are they have thought about and looked into what does it take to make it a juvenile assessment center.

Um, but I do want to like highlight if you're looking at this and you're saying we have something like this, have something like it, but not exactly, because there's certain steps that you have to take in order to be a qualified juvenile assessment center, um, which is at the um National Assessment Center's website.

Moving down the river to Ramsey County, um, Ramsey County really stands out as A, as I was looking at diversion um innovations.

Ramsey County came up just as a cursory glance, so have to dig in a little bit more.

But really, what um it really shows is a what happens when you rethink your justice um program.

Along with that, what does it mean to have strong community involvement?

Um Ramsey's County's reimagined justice for youth initiative was launched in 2019 after extensive pre-work assessing gaps in the youth justice process and racial equity gaps that occur.

This main innovation that they came up with was the collaborative review team, which takes prosecutors, defenders, community members together, and they make collectively make decisions about youth cases and also how to create a restorative um centered action plan to get them back on the right track, similar to the community accountability boards in King County.

Um, this is right now currently in its fourth year over the three years that it has full data.

They reviewed 884 youth cases, diverting most of them to community-based accountability, and of those that are diverted to community-based accountability work, um, which is usually restorative, 10% recidivized or re-offended within a year.

Um, going back to recidivism, just to make a note of that, which I made in the report.

Um, oftentimes we think about benchmark, recidivism is used as the benchmark.

After speaking with some justice professional, recidivism is sometimes seen as not the end-all be-all because it is one data point that doesn't look at the entire child.

So there's certain um justice professionals I spoke with, didn't want to use recidivism as a benchmark.

Um, so thinking about when I think about benchmarks in the report mentions this, think about just what are the things that are happening that are like sort of the best practices that you see echoes of throughout this nation, um, which throughout this having collaborative teams, having community involvement seems to be one of those.

And lastly, and certainly not least, I want to cover Baltimore City.

Baltimore has been making a lot of positive national attention because of their reduction within their murder rates and also just within crime in general, and also their youth engagement.

Um, that is really um focused.

This is really attributed to, from my angle, the leadership at the city level, but also the engagement with ROCA.

Um, the mayor's Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement really manages a lot of the pre-arrest diversion.

They're actually expanding their side step program, which is focused on the west side of Baltimore to the entire city of Baltimore of this upcoming year, um, which is just kind of a pre-arrest youth diversion program, which is similar to what we've already spoke about before.

One thing that the Monzi team does really well is engaging the community, engaging youth and really leveraging their partnership with their schools.

VOCA, which is not an acronym, it's just ROCA, is a nonprofit which is based and started off in Boston and moved to Baltimore due to a personal connection between the ROCA founder and being raised from Baltimore.

Provides three years of cognitive behavioral therapy, employment readiness, and wraparound support.

This is a very intensive program, and it really is meant for those youth which other programs doesn't fit for very high-risk youth.

Really the two major practices I want to highlight from the ROCA.

There's a whole list of things that they do.

But the one thing that they really do a good job of is rentless outreach.

Average amount of outreach it takes for a youth in Baltimore to be engaged with ROCA is 20.

And if you think about just the B at school, compare that to be at school model, which is you know, uses maybe five or seven outreaches, right?

20, and that's the average.

And even speaking with ROCA, there's like we sometimes go 50 to be able to reach a student because that is like they want to really make sure that they're contacting the student and giving them wraparound support, usually trying to get them first stabilize the situation and then get them engaged within the program for more formally.

And along with that really outreach, they also have this rewired cognitive behavioral therapy, which is their signature evidence signature evidence-based therapy that's designed specifically for youth to expose who are exposed to chronic trauma, really tries to get them to focus on emotional regulation, impulse control, decision making, really just how do you think and react without having a fully um developed prefrontal cortex?

How do you think take that seven-second pause and say, maybe I need to back away from this possibly violent situation?

Um they actually train Rewire CBT um to other localities and not they don't have to adopt the entire ROCA model, but they just train those staff about rewire um rewire CBT and actually speaking with the ROCA staff, they're actually talking to St.

Paul, they're training their Office of Neighborhood Safety, um, some folks on the frontline workers there on um rewire CBT in November of this year.

Um and so, and that is from ROCA as ROCA who said that.

And so this is something that is also spread across the nation to sites that are not also having the workforce development and the more intensive program.

Um I just wanted to make sure I highlighted that.

So areas of consideration.

So taking it together, there are a few areas of consideration for the council.

The council can strengthen cross-system collaboration.

Um, authority for prosecution rests within Hindepin County.

However, the council has very good convening power to coordinate resources among city agencies, among education partners like Minneapolis Public Schools and County Partners.

Regular joint convenings could align goals, reduce duplication, and build share accountability for outcomes.

The city could also work to improve data sharing across the city and the county for better measurable outcomes and also to be able to understand who our kids are.

Right now we have silo systems, but we're all trying to help the same kids.

Um, how do we be how do we better share information and data to help with being able to serve those kids there within our community?

Um the city could integrate diversion and prevention to broader public health effort, simple similar to King County, being able to think about this from more public health standpoint, um, along with it being a public safety standpoint, might be able to help you know invite more innovations similar to like rewire CBT.

And then also lastly, the city council could elevate youth and community voices.

Um there are some formal advisory structures such as the youth coordinating board that can be tapped into to be able to ensure that youth voice is being given to about youth programs and youth diversion programs, um, and being able to leverage those voices might lend credibility, might build community between the um whatever diversion program happens or diversion work or preventive work that the city is involved in with the community itself.

Um, along with that, the um YCB has a master plan which kind of echoes a lot of the stuff within the report and a lot of the areas of consideration.

Um, and so that might be a good starting point.

So that is all that I have as I've been able to kind of distill from the broader report.

Um I can accept any questions from the presentation or about the report.

Thanks so much for the presentation.

I'll type the queue.

We'll first pass it to President Payne.

Thank you, Chair Chavez.

Thank you for the support.

This is really helpful.

And it I I think was it myself and Chair Chavez that co-authored the staff direction.

This grew out of um we had a fairly informal convening of the city attorney's office, youth link, and a number of other youth serving organizations.

And I think that it became really pro uh clear that the degree to which the coordination is kind of like one of the missing pieces here, and I'm really grateful to see that highlighted here as one of those really tangible actions.

Um I'm wondering through your research, do you feel like you have a good landscape of all the various organizations and stakeholders that could help create that roadmap of coordination, or do you think that is uh a deeper line of work that we need to start taking on now in our roles?

Thank you, Chair to Council Member Payne.

I think the key word is all.

Um I feel like I have a really good start of like these are the main players if we're talking about the bigger, broader um sense of how to move the needle here.

I think the biggest gap is probably within the education because I was speaking to Minneapolis Public Schools.

I did not have um time or resources to speak to other charter schools or other school districts that our school our students might go to because this is not from research, it's just sort of from lived experience.

I know that schools oftentimes are really good at diagnosing problems and being able to get that intervention.

Um so I think that might be a gap, but I do think as far as like kind of major players, I think this report kind of gives a good um roadmap to where to start.

Um, but I will not because there are a lot of mentoring programs.

There's a lot of like kind of smaller nonprofit church programs that are all kind of part of this web.

Um, and so that's that's what I mean when I say all like I don't think this report captures all um because all is a very very large number.

Yeah, that's really practical.

Thank you.

My pleasure.

By Chair Wansi.

Thank you, Chair Chavez.

Also, thank you for this presentation.

I did want to know if you could send the updated slides.

I've noticed there was a little bit of a change to the clerks because I was like following in there.

I was like, oh, this is great.

Um I did want to also back to the um the city of Minneapolis landscape uh where you overview some of the things that we have here.

I did want to follow up and maybe also the CAO could speak to this.

I and Chair Chavez, I believe we invited uh the CAO office to be part of a presentation last um summer to specifically looking at youth diversion programs, and I thought we offered one through that, the CAO office um in partnership with another community organization that used restorative practices.

I just wasn't sure if that's is that still ongoing or not.

Um Mr.

Chair, Councilmember Wansley, I I'm not familiar with it.

Sorry.

Um I am not familiar with that particular invitation, but um that may have gone through our criminal division okay um uh deputy uh David Bernstein, but um I can follow up on that for you.

Awesome.

Yeah, um, Chair Councilmember, I think that was the Tubman inspiring youth because I reached out to the county um attorney's office, uh the city attorney's office um to talk about it.

And I already spoke with Tubman but previously beforehand, and so getting connected to Tub, I didn't got connected to Tubman, which was a great reunion.

Um, and so that was a program that was that we're talking about.

Thank you.

Yes, that is it, because I believe it was Tubman representatives who also came with our city attorney's office from the criminal division to talk about that.

I was like, wait, I know we had another program house in the CAO.

I was like, oh wait, is that not happening?

Um so thanks for that clarification.

And then the youth coordinating center.

I'm trying to recall if is that the newly launched center from the county.

I know um I sit on the criminal justice coordinating committee, and as highlighted here, there was an identified gap um around placements, long-term placements, or a hub for young people who have made contact with the criminal justice system so far to get kind of a concentration of like resources.

And our meeting last spring, they mentioned there would be something opening up this fall.

I don't know if this is the same thing.

Um but yeah, I just wanted to get a little bit more context of like the YCC you were referring to.

Yeah, um, the YCC, it's because the YCC used to be in um collaboration with the City of Minneapolis and also Minneapolis Public Schools.

The Hinn Hinnepin County now is going to eventually, I think 2026, um, kind of take the realm of um take over the helm of the YCC and be the sole funder.

Um along with that, they were talking about these conversations with um Sarah Davis and Morgan Clintz.

They did speak about having it not be centralized in just the one but possibly having other having other locations.

However, what I can do is I can follow up with them and get back to you about getting specific I think I know what you're talking about, but I want to make sure I'm saying exactly what you're talking about making alignment.

Yeah I I forget the name and I can follow up too but I know this was a major thing 'cause what has been identified amongst like county partners too is for again this small population of young people who are um having some contact with former you know justice processes.

Um the issue is there's no placements for them.

And that's something that Ramsey County has been doing well.

They've been able to establish a network of community placements for these young people that also links the wraparound services.

I know our Hannapin County attorney um Mary Moriarty has spoken very much in favor of it would be great if we could replicate that because right now it's you know you have young people who are engaged in the process.

We know who they are or the systems know who they are.

They just have nowhere to send them for like that more intensive coordinated support.

And sometimes there's challenges back home where they can't go back there but that's their only option and then they're put back in this place where they're engaging in these cycles.

So I know community placements and it has been a top of mind conversation amongst that crew of folks and this idea that they were going to open up some type of center this fall they really celebrated in this meeting to say okay this is one of the first of many things that we're going to do to try to address that gap.

So if yes whatever you might be thinking of if you go following I'm gonna make sure that yes yes most definitely thank you and yeah that's all the questions I had um I think it'll be great to further tap into the youth coordinating board piece too around how we're in uh uplifting young people in that space as you highlighted uh but yeah I'm looking forward to digging uh further into the report and some of the recommendations that we could be looking at on this side um to support thank you um well thanks so much for the presentation the work that you and the team did on this report we really do appreciate it uh seeing no further discussion I'll ask the clerk to receive and file that report and see no more discussion on anything else I will declare this meeting adjourned