The Oversight Committee met on October 9, 2025, to receive updates on the Opportunity Knox litter abatement and wraparound services program, and to discuss new portable restroom options for city parks. The meeting featured detailed presentations by Environmental and Sustainability Manager Michelle Ladenbach and staff member Jason Olson.
Meeting Adjourned.
He's going to just joke once it right. Just gonna say the charms up. Sorry. Hi. Good afternoon and welcome to the Oversight Committee, our October 9th, 2025. First on the agenda is an update on the Opportunity Knox program. Sweet. Hi, I'm Michelle Ladenbach, and I'm your environmental and sustainability manager. And today I'm gonna talk a little bit about a better way, Opportunity Knox. It's our day beautification litter program with wrap around services. That's prior. Well, I'll go into that during the PowerPoint. But before I do that, I want to highlight that we have some great things coming up on October 18th. We have a cleanup at Sutton Wilderness. On October 26th is the Lake Thunderbird workshopping cleanup event at the state park. November 15th is e-waste. Everyone loves that one. It's gonna be at Westwood Aquatics Center though this year because of the construction at Jenkins right now. So and then on the 16th, we'll be cleaning up Colonial Estates Park. So I hope somebody will join us at those. All right, a better way opportunity knobs. Just to remind everyone, originally, oh, and to tell people who don't know yet. Originally, the litter program was designed to do open dumping abatement, to do litter control, crew stuff, to do water quality improvement. Water quality, yes, part of our TMDL stuff. Um ABWAC has a dual focus though, because now it's doing those litter crew functions, but also have the wraparound services to try to lead to a pathway of stability, right? It's managed by Mental Health Association of Oklahoma. This is Ronnie Warrior, he's the program manager, and it's overseen by the city. The purpose, a cleaner community, but also a pathway to stability. And it's funded by the opioid settlement funds and a city allocation. All right, so how does it work? Well, we have a van. It's a roving outreach van, and on a two-week period, so it's a two-week period, they take up to eight participants. It's voluntary, so they don't force eight people to come on, but up to eight people can participate for the two-week period. It's a series of three days doing litter control one week, two days doing it that the next week. The days that they're off is when they do wraparound services. So that's how the program works. Um $65 per day is the daily wage, and of course it's low barrier. There are no applications or anything like that. Participant impact, there's a daily wage and a pathway to stability, community impact, cleaner community, and also I feel like improved community relations, right? For everyone. So here's the staffing model. They do have four um permanent positions within ABWAC. You met Ronnie Warrior, the program manager. Right now, we did have an internal promotion. I was very excited. The van driver was promoted to the employment specialist, which means the van driver position is now open. It's being covered by the employment specialist, but it's open and it will be filled soon. Let's talk about results though, right? That's what we really want to hear. What have they done?