The meeting began with an update from CityCare on the operations of the emergency shelter and then moved to a discussion of public restroom facilities at the transit center and Andrew's Park. Council members and staff discussed challenges, data, and potential solutions.
All right. Welcome to the City of Norman oversight meeting for August 14th, 2025. The first item on the agenda is an update from CityCare on the operations at the emergency shelter. Hello, everybody. It is a pleasure to be here. My name is Mallory Lee. I'm the shelter director. And to my left is uh Sean Lloyd. He is the senior director of homeless services for city care. Um I'll be presenting the slides today. So if you could just follow along with me, I think everybody has slides. Um we'll go ahead and start. We take a look at the table. Um here. Um, this shows the nights of rest, our nightly average and the individuals that we've served over time. Um, our nights of rest, as you can see, was over 10,000 nights of rest. Um, our nightly average is 54. We have 52 guests nightly. We do leave an open bed for if the police have an emergency, if there's a domestic violence situation, and we also had the large capacity of numbers during the time that we had the winter storm for a certain amount of time. So we do have some times we go for a little over on the uh limit, but we usually stay close to 52. Um, the unique individuals um identifies the unduplicated number of people that we serve the shelter. The point in time count I like to um kind of bring to the front this year for Norman was 213 experiencing homelessness with 74 unsheltered. We've recorded 297 unique individuals coming through our shelter, which indicates you know potential need for increased capacity down the road and just kind of shows that the need is still there for this shelter being present and in place here in Norman. This also kind of shuts down a little bit on the interactions when they're off the street when they come into our shelter at night, can even from interactions with the police and local business owners and stuff as well. On the next slide is our housing connections year to date. Can we get it stuck? Um, we are looking to expand our housing opportunities here in Norman. We've successfully housed 16 of the individuals that we've had with us. 18 of the veterans that we've served has been um kind of a primary focus. We've housed six of those individuals, and we are actually in the process housing and transitioning six more of those individuals into housing. We've used resources such as a VA and HUD Vash to get those um partnerships going, as well as other community resources like the COC and partnerships with other community entities. We also have implemented the tracking system and HMIS business objectives, which allows us to monitor all the incidents, referrals, number of individuals transitioning into housing, and various points of advocacy. In July alone, um we had 14 chat assessments done, which in total would bring us to 128 assessments for the year. Can I ask I don't know the acronym, but what does chat stand for? They're coordinated housing assessments. They let us know the vulnerability of the person to prioritize who's gonna get the housing resources first. It's like a triage of me, basically. Yes. Um I'd also like to add that the documentation uh resources, barriers that we have when we have our guests come in. A lot of them don't have documents, they don't have IDs, birth certificates, you know, driver's license, tribal IDs, things like this. And so we try to build partnerships with local entities. Right now we have a partnership with McFarland and First Presbyterian Church in regards to helping with vouchers to get IDs for our guests. And because of the vouchers for housing is kind of shut down. It's a long waiting list. They're served still serving people from last year. This has become kind of a barrier. So getting these documents and having the funding available to receive these documents to move forward to get these people into housing is a big barrier for us because we don't have the funds at the moment to provide as many birth certificates and social security cards and things like that that we need for these guests. A lot of them come in, they don't have any of these things. They've been lost, they've been stolen, or they never had them to begin with. So we want to make sure that we have this kind of funding down the road.