Welcome to the City Council Oversight Committee meeting for Thursday, December 11th.

Our first on our agenda is update from City Care on the operation of the emergency shelter.

And I'd like to recognize Sean.

Yes, ma'am.

Uh to give us an update.

Sorry, I thought I was third, I'm first.

Number one year.

I can live with that.

16 bucks.

Okay, thanks, sir.

Hi, everybody.

I'm Sean Lloyd, Senior Director of Homeless Services at City Care, and I'm here to provide an update on shelter.

Yeah, I do.

That would be pretty cool, wouldn't it?

Okay.

All right.

Okay, so um we're gonna look at some of the numbers around what we've seen so far in shelter, like how many nights of rest.

Um, we're gonna talk a little bit about some of the patterns we've identified and some of the things that um we're seeing there in shelter.

And so we've we've provided 16,942 um shelter beds since we took over on January 15th of 2025, and that's that's a rough average of about 51 people a day.

Um the point in time count is is a system where all the providers go out and they count how many people are experiencing homelessness on any given night um or on a certain given night in the freezing cold in January, and so it's it's one of the ways that HUD requires cities to um get a snapshot of what homelessness looks like in the area.

And so our point in time count for this year, I think was 240.

Is that right, Heidi?

240?

Yeah, yeah, 240 people, and um and we've seen 397 unique individuals in city care um since January 15.

And so you can usually kind of kind of estimate that there's more people experiencing homelessness than you're ever going to count, catching a point in time count.

Um, so one of the things we wanted to implement was some housing navigation in our system, and and what we what we noticed looking at what data we could get our hands on before we came in versus what data we've gathered is that it seemed to be a bottleneck.

It seemed to be the same um 50-something people kind of staying in shelter for quite a long time.

And so one of the things we wanted to do was start working with people to go into housing.

Um we implemented doing housing assessments on the people who come in, and so we've done 186 assessments so far, which is um which is an assessment to um to measure like how extreme someone's experience is with homelessness.

And so um we've connected 24 individuals to housing so far for the year, and I believe that was 21 households um and 24 individuals.

So there was a couple people that we got to um join the household together and move into housing with each other.

So on demographics, these are all things that are self-reported or things that um we figure out as we develop relationship with the um the guests in shelter.

And so we've had 140 people um report as chronically homeless, and and we use the HUD definition of that, and what that means is um they've either been homeless four times in three years, totaling 12 months, or the previous 12 months straight.

Um, we've had 25 veterans.

I know last time I was here I talked about how our number of veteran count was um disproportionate to the amount of people experiencing homelessness.

Now that we've gotten a better picture at how many people are cycling through the shelter, it's starting to line up a little more with the rest of the nation on how many veterans, and um I believe we had six veterans go into housing since we started working with housing.

Um we had 368 people report mental health disorders.

Um guests with a physical disability, so that's about 39% of the guests, and um 173 have experienced domestic violence.

That's almost half.

So almost half of everybody who walks into shelter has had some experience with domestic violence with security, yeah.

January 15th, 2025 to um the end of November.

Race and age.

There's quite a large number of wider Caucasian people in Norman experiencing homelessness, which is 253.

And 57 people are African American or black.

That number is a little disproportionate to what we usually see in cities.

Usually the African American population makes up almost half of what homeless numbers are, even though they usually make up less than 16% of a population in any given city.

On the age demographic, we have seen an uptick in older people experiencing homelessness.

And it's not just older people experiencing homelessness, it's older people experiencing homelessness for the first time, which um which is something we've identified and we need to come up with solutions based around.

I know that it gets a little difficult sometimes with someone who's not quite old enough for Social Security, but but possibly not in condition to take care of themselves or work anymore.

And um, and we have we've put some concentration on building relationships to help people go into assisted living or adult care systems.

Am I talking too fast?

Okay, great.

All right, monthly income, fair market rent.

So I think fair market rent in um in Norman is 900 to 990 for a one bedroom unit.

Um it should be about 30% of someone's income.

So someone would need to bring home roughly 2,700 to about $3,000 a month to be able to afford a one bedroom on their own.

Um we have 60 people in shelter that receive from 500 to 1,000 dollars a month.

26 receive 1,000 to 2,000.

So they would technically have enough money to pay rent, but they wouldn't have enough money to pay for anything else in life at that rate.

Um, 12 people have $2,000 or more, which could put them in a range where they actually possibly could and they need a boost to get into housing, or um, or they really don't quite make enough over to afford all the things that we need to live.

And um, we had 271 people report that they have zero income.

Quick question on the housing.

Yes, you guys search for the next affordable unit all over Cleveland County.

Is that correct?

Yes, we we've had some people, we've had two people move to a different county altogether, but um, yes, we do look for available units.

We also have established now some relationships with some landlords, and we've taken over um a permanent supportive housing grant that's quickly allowed us to build better relationship with some of the landlords as well, and so um where we've run into trouble is finding rent and deposits for people.

Um we do we are now a recipient of ESG dollars, and that will allow us the ability to pay those deposits and um some of that first month's rent to help people move into stable housing.

Um we've we've also run into some issues with getting IDs and so I think we talked about that last time too.

Um but we're working on partnerships right now with a few different groups, and um and we've we've had some conversations in very very recent that gives us hope on finding some of those dollars to help obtain those things.

We can get some of those things with ESG dollars, but it has to be um the very last thing that's a barrier for someone getting housing, and we can't even get someone on the housing list and left unless they have those things in place, and so we get kind of caught in this circle where if we don't have those things, we can't even get you on the wait list, but we can't get those things for you unless you're on the wait list.

Um where is the income coming from?

So we've got 51 guests whose um income is coming from Social Security disability, 47 who are receiving social security, um, and 21 people who haven't earned income, so that means they're employed and working.

Um we've got six people that have um retirement from SSI and one person who lives off a pension from work.

Also, nobody hesitate to stop me if I'm if I'm going and you have questions.

Um one of the things we want to concentrate on is medical care, and so everybody who comes in, we know a few things.

We know if if we can secure at least um normal proper medical care for someone, it it usually takes less expense off the city because that's less ambulance calls, that's less walk-in visits to ERs, um, and that's less services for people experiencing homelessness that have to be provided by some kind of um medical system.

So we we've had 154 guests come in who are uninsured altogether, and 211 have state sponsored med or Medicaid, which technically in Oklahoma it's the same thing.

Medicaid is the state sponsored.

Um 61 people have Medicare, so that's that's about 15% of the population that we've seen.

Yes, ma'am.

So when we were talking about veterans, did they have any veterans' benefits or access to the VA health care system?

Yes, that's a good question.

So the individuals who came in weren't connected with VA services, so we do have a relationship with um with the statewide VA service that comes in to shelter and meets with people, and they have um they have been able to pull DD 216s.

Did I say that right?

214s I knew you would know.

Yeah, um, I practice that twice today.

Yeah, um we uh so we were able to get them connected to those health cares fairly quickly, and um we were able to get them connected to like HUD Bash and some of the programs that are made specifically for veterans experiencing homelessness.

Did I answer your question?

Yeah, because I was just curious if uh what number of them could be without health care or access to it given their status.

Yeah, so that's the tough part is um we can connect them to the service, but I don't know short of just asking outside of that, and there's not a way for me to capture that in regular data systems, but that is something we could possibly track outside of our HMIS system.

Yeah, if they obtain, I guess if they obtain health care.

That's a pretty good question.

I'm gonna talk to Keith and see if we can put something together in HMIS to where we could track if they obtain health care while there or well I was also thinking about the mental health care aspect of it all.

So yeah, thank you.

Yes, okay.

Um so there was there was an interesting stat that that I noticed in that um our native or indigenous population in Norman is a higher concentration of people accessing shelter than it is in most of the cities in the country.

And I I thought that was quite interesting.

Um 23 of our guests identified as native or indigenous, and um only six of them had native health care.

So that's that's what 26% of all the native guests aren't accessing native health care.

And I I found that quite interesting, kind of like the veterans.

Yeah, and so do they uh or do you have a connect and to native health care services uh throughout the state to if somebody's tribe is able to cover them?

That's that's a great question.

And so what we've had to do is we've had to help them get in touch with the tribe that that they're registered with or on the on the rolls with.

So um that's not something I can just make a quick connection for, but what we can do is set them down with the navigator or a case manager who can help them get into contact with that tribe to access those cares.

And just out of curiosity, veteran, native, whoever, how long does it usually take someone to get signed up and access actually have access to health care?

Is this like a one, two, three-month process?

All right.

Can I help answer a couple of these questions?

Yeah.

Um, specifically for indigenous people, the absentee Shawnee tribe will help anybody.

Like if you are indigenous, they will help you.

So if we can get a case manager to connect them, and the same with the VA SSBF, Bash, the people that are not accessing it, it's not that the resource is not there.

Those are the very two populations that if they're not receiving services, it's because they are either unwilling or unable to connect with the services in a way that the services work.

Or the services are off-limits to it.

Yeah, or they they were dishonorably discharged.

There's something that prevents them from they have access services before and did something that prevents them from receiving services, but we are not like other big counties where you have huge veteran populations that they don't have the resources.

If someone is a veteran in Norman America, there are services for them if they can cooperate in the system enough to access it.

So is if they're eligible, we have a lot of people who say, Oh, yeah, I'm a veteran, and then you end it into it.

Yeah, yeah.

You can't find any record of them ever having served.

So if it's somebody who is eligible for benefits, we get them hooked up as quickly as we can, but they have to be willing to return a phone call.

So it's really unique to the individual.

Yes.

And we have somebody who comes in weekly to work with veterans.

We have uh Mike Primo came back.

He was here before and had gone and he's come back and he'll drive anywhere, he'll go to any encampment as long as he can just get someone to engage with him, and there's a couple people like that.

It's just a matter of meeting the person where they are in a way that they can engage if they're able to.

Primo's an expert as well.

He's really good.

They've come out twice this year, too, and done specific targeted in Norman.

Like encampments.

Yes, like anybody who is medical care and all that build.

So kind of like a street outreach team.

They they actually organize it statewide, and they're they call it like hot summer, I don't remember what they call the bench like that.

Stand down?

Yeah, where they have specific days where they just everybody goes out from the offices, all the service providers are out in encampments on specific days going to the food and shelter parking lot, going to CCFI partner, like they're there making sure that they are as visible as possible to sign up as many people as they can.

Monthly or quarterly, or uh it's usually been they were done twice this year.

Yeah, they had to stand down from providing services for a couple months this year because of some things that happened at the federal level.

But there is access to a case manager through a phone number any time.

And walk-in services as well.

Yeah, okay.

Thank you all.

Thanks, Heidi.

You're welcome.

It's always good to have hiding here.

Um so last time we were here, you guys had requested just some baseline numbers and data on people coming in.

And so, in that um, we we pulled 69 people over right at about a month, which is which is not a large target group, but we could only work with who's coming in.

Um, some of the questions were what state are people coming from?

Um, what county are they surrounding cities or counties?

Um, and so some of that data was was interesting, and um Oklahoma, 55 of the residents or people who came in were were have been residents of Oklahoma most of their lives.

Um we had one person from Arkansas and 13 from other, and what others stood for was someone who was not from a surrounding state to the state of Oklahoma.

Um by county and city, we had um I made a mistake right there.

We had um 42 of the 69 people lived in Cleveland County before they were experiencing homelessness, and 16 were from Oklahoma City, and those were the two largest draws.

There was like two from Potawatomi County, and um 65 plus shouldn't be on that graph at all.

Um the last city they lived in, 35 of those people um started experiencing homelessness from the city of Norman, and so they were residents of Norman before they went into homelessness.

Um, 14 of them were from Oklahoma City, three for more, two from Shawnee.

But with that definition, that definition would be someone who was leased into a property in Norman when they became homeless.

Or you know what, I I might have said that wrong.

Maybe they weren't leased in, maybe they lived with their mom or their brother or yeah, I'd say too.

I've known situations where people came here for work, and the when they got here, that work was not actually a job that they could work, so then they're stuck here.

So they came to school OU.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's another one.

Okay, um residential data, so that would be point of entry.

That would be um where somebody stayed previous to coming in to shelter with us, and so 24 people were unhoused, so they were they were street homeless whenever they came into shelter.

16 reported that they were housed before they stepped into shelter that day.

Um, 13 said they came from another shelter system before they came into shelter with us at City Care.

Um, two people came from the county jail, and the hospital was one person.

Um I I didn't I didn't think the hospital report was actually accurate because I I know we have more people who come in from hospital.

The where it gets a little weird on that number is um a lot of times they went into hospital from shelter, and so they technically came from shelter before going into shelter, and 13 people refuse to answer.

I would like to ask about shelters, so that could be uh Salvation Army.

Is that really all we have besides like city?

Yes, that's that's it.

Uh I mean they could have came from food and shelter during the day, which technically is considered shelter, but um, but it's not overnight.

So why would people do that?

Why would they go from one shelter to time time period?

Some shelters do have restrictions, so you could um they might have a uh two-month stay time where at the end of two months you have to leave regardless if you're going into housing or not, and so they would need to find another shelter to go in because they haven't quite reached a place where they could move into housing in that two-month period.

Salvation Army is a two months, it's 30 days.

30 days they just increased it this year or 30 years.

Yeah, yeah.

So 120 days, maybe 60 days, and there's a you know, they're quite again if they're except they can go 120 days, they have to make progress, whatever they're doing.

So this is Salvation Army.

Okay, and that tracks with yeah, they they've changed their they've been stepping their Norman so that it comes directly in line with what they do in Oklahoma City, and I have it's been so long since I looked at I couldn't tell you what it was.

I don't know, I would trust that.

Okay, it as long as they are making progress.

Now, if somebody is there and not making progress, it's significantly less than that amount of time.

It's usually 14 to 21 days.

I'm gonna miss did you say these the status just November or what's the time frame?

The time frame is um three months, or what is it?

No, it's it's about a month.

It's right at a month, yeah.

And it was um mostly October.

October, okay.

And we'll get this residential data quarterly moving forward.

No, this was uh survey.

This was this was data that was ran on a survey outside of our regular data.

Yeah, we were curious about the jail when just because of the county taking on extra folks and how people are released from jail.

Yeah, so um, there's a possibility that some of the refused came from jail, but I I can't guarantee that either way, but we only had two people who reported that they discharged from jail that day.

And did they walk all the way down into central Northern?

I don't have that answer.

Okay, I was just curious.

Yeah, that's a that's a great question, but I don't have the answer.

All right, appreciate it.

Sorry about this.

Um, so case management housing navigation.

This is this is some our some of our advocacy um points by type.

And so advocacy could look like a phone call, it could look like giving someone a ride.

It could look like going online and signing them up for some kind of service.

Um you guys have a copy of this in the slideshow.

You can look at it if you're interested in um indirect numbers, but for sake of time, I won't I won't talk through every single one.

I will say that um we've provided a lot of service towards housing and towards identification and documentation, and and those are the two things that we have the most restrictions on right now achieving, and so um the hope is that we can continue to put some things in place to to where when we're making those advocacy points, we're finding success by service type.

So um this is referrals made, so this isn't just a case manager helping somebody through a process, this is actually a direct referral that's made for a service, and so we've had 92 housing referrals, 18 medical service, um, 36 people have been referred directly to mental health, um, 26 have been um referred to shelter, and so what that actually was was somebody being referred to like food and shelter for meals or some kind of daytime operation, and 121 different social services.

So that that could be mental health, that could be um snap benefits, it could be anything that's um based off social services, and we've we've transferred four people to uh substance abuse treatment uh council member Bruce.

Can we go back to sure?

I just wanted to try to understand the state.

Sure.

So these counts there were period time, you know, it was from January to look at the numbers.

It's it technically wasn't from January, it was technically from um April for these numbers because we had to get HMIS set up in a way for us to be able to track this.

So when we came in, the the system wasn't being utilized to its full capabilities, and that was one of the things that we had to do and get in place was a way to make these referrals to make these advocacy points and track them in the data system.

So my mind you have 50 average 51 and 952 and nine, and take an okay, these are probably multiple reference, are these multiple one to many?

One to many is the relationship.

One individual we refer to multiple times.

That could be yes.

Okay, or is this for us, or you only count that individual one time, no matter how many times you're from that's not makes sense?

It does make sense.

No, so the answer to that is one unique individual could receive multiple referrals.

How about when you could I have multiple referrals, just one individual and housing, and you count that person one time or multiple times?

No, we would only have one count for someone being referred to a housing option.

Yeah.

Yeah, there are um so one person could receive housing referrals, and one person could that same person could also receive mental health referrals, but we won't count the same person four times for housing.

Right.

And so that's perfect example, and it's like man, you put a lot of resources, one guy, you only count them once, you only have nine two hits, but you're if you really count by event, you might have 500 in that column.

That's right.

Yeah, that's right.

Okay.

Because one person would receive housing referrals, but what would happen is they would be with a housing navigator, and that that navigator would go in and mark that I've made housing referrals, but they're really referring to 10 places, you know, not necessarily 10 to be exact, but they're referring to multiple places.

Does that make sense?

Kinda okay.

Um these are some of the places where um we've made those direct referrals, and so that was one thing we talked about before was us putting together a system to where we have a way to tell where we're making the most referrals to and who they are, and so um obviously DHS is high because that's SNAP benefits and and some of the things we need.

Um the uh Norman Mental Health is um someone we use regularly, and um we've made 42 referrals to them to date, and food and shelter, we've made 25, and so that would be like food and some of the things they need to um work during the day and possible case management.

Uh when we were talking about how you're limited on getting people IDs and all that, is some of that work happening at food and shelter during the day when people have that capacity to work on that process, absolutely, yeah.

Yeah, and so um I I don't know what um what funds they have access to or don't have access to, but I do know that they do directly help people obtain some of those items as well, and also if if you were going into housing per se at food and shelter, you would have to have those items also.

So they do provide some case management.

Is city care struggling on the IDs and all that because of funding?

Um part of it is funding, yes, for obtaining those items.

We've got dollars in place that we could use to get those things, but they're restricted funds, and so we're we're running into that situation where we can't submit them, but we've also had a few partnerships with with some of the religious community that has um provided some funds to obtain those things, and we're currently working on partnerships now with other groups as well to maintain that.

So next quarter we could see a few more people get their IDs and be able to get into that on that wait list.

That's right.

Yeah, and so um from that wait list.

It I don't know if I've I think I got a slide in here on some of the housing stuff in a minute, but um the wait list for Norman is actually open back up, and so I think we've housed three people with vouchers now from that wait list, but they were previously on that wait list before city care was ever in Norman.

Okay, so it's been over a year, yeah.

The list was closed for 18 months.

That's right.

Yeah, I remember there was like funding issues.

Council member Bruce.

So it's really educational.

I think case management, I think you know, there's a file, electronic case management.

Yes, hey, this is what we're doing, and is that is that in some HMMS?

HMIS, it's homeless management information system.

So it it has stuff uh related to referrals, history referrals, yes, and then everyone on the continuum care has access to that case file.

That's that's a great question.

So that's something we're moving towards here.

I don't I don't think there's a huge utilization of HMIS current run.

The only people we currently use HMIS are people who will receive funding, either ESG or COC dollars and bridges recently, like this year has decided they will start entering an HMIS.

So that is five of 20 agencies that use HMIS.

Are you talking federal, state, or municipality?

ESG is passed through funding, it passes through for our continuum, it passes through ODOC.

It's by continuum.

And then PSH funding is also HUD funding that is distributed by the Continuum of Care.

Yeah.

So it's federal with local past.

Anybody who we made less than five referrals to, um, I didn't mention McFarlane is one of those um religious organizations that's helped us with IDs and some of those items.

Um, and 14 people have been referred to um veteran affairs for some of those things, and then 13 have gone directly from SSBF into housing navigation in case management within.

Oh, that's oh, sorry.

Sean and I speak a language called hoodies.

So we these acronyms mean a whole lot to us.

We sometimes get to talking and forget that they don't mean anything to you.

So SSVS is social services for veterans families.

PSH is permanent supportive housing.

HMIS is our database.

So if that happens, just flag us down.

We're happy to explain.

Yeah.

So let me finish and then Heidi will explain every year that I said Councilmember Dixon.

I know I think it was maybe our last time you were here.

Um we talked about rotary doing um kind of ID expos, or you guys partnered with them.

That's such a good question.

I had the most amazing conversation this morning on um trying to bridge that gap to get us in to talk to those groups.

Um it hasn't happened yet, but I believe they're on board, and I think that we can make that.

All right, are there any other questions?

That's it.

There must have been enough information if I got no more questions.

That was nice to have the information too.

It's very helpful.

Well, if anybody wants information, just email me or call me.

I've I've got all kinds of random data points over this.

Thanks, guys.

Thank you.

Okay.

Item two, update from the homeless coalition on the home base action plan.

Everybody.

Hello.

Recognize will you hold it, present?

Um well, hello to everybody who's here today.

We're um happy to um see all of you.

And um, I just wanted to say um thank you for your time today.

So, council member Grant, Mayor Holman, Council members.

Um, I'm Lee Hall, former Ward War Council member from 2019 to 2022.

And during my time on City Council, I was an active participant in the ad hoc committee to address homelessness that was created by former mayor Brea Clark with the immediate task at the time, and remember this was 2019, to find a solution to locate and fund a temporary emergency night shelter for their winter months of 2019, because no other entity was able to make that happen that year.

My commitment to finding solutions to address the complex issue of homelessness has remained steadfast since then.

Today I'm here with Heidi Smith uh to present the work of the homeless coalition.

In September of 2024, Heidi and I created the homeless coalition with the purpose of commonly um of reviewing, updating, and annotating bridging the gap, action steps to end homelessness, commonly referred to as the home base action and implementation plan that was presented to the city council in February of 2022.

Um this plan was created from the information gathered from the homelessness gaps analysis that was presented and funded by the city council in September of 2021.

The homeless coalition consisted of 14 members representing the diverse interests of our community, and I'd like to take a moment just to recognize and publicly thank the members of our working group for volunteering their time and for the robust discussion over 12 meetings that has led to the report that we're giving to you today.

Um that's Rachel Freeman and Sean Lloyd from City Care, Kara Fritz from the Central Oklahoma Community Mental Health Center, Scott Martin, Norman Chamber of Commerce, hi Scott, Richard McCowan, uh chair of the AIM Norman Housing Strategy Plan, Lieutenant Lee McWarter, um of the North Police Department, Scott Meyer with McFarlane Methodist Church that Sean just referenced the work that they do, uh Darrell Sanders, um, who was responsible for veteran and community resources at Oklahoma Complete Health.

Um, Mayor Stephen Tyler Holman, uh, Shannon Stevenson, Anthony Curinton, and Lisa Craig, all with the City of Norman.

And two of our members have also experienced homelessness themselves.

In addition to reviewing and updating each of the 47 action steps, the members also identified the highest priorities of the homeless coalition, and I just passed out a handout that shows those highest priorities in rank order as determined by the coalition.

Those six action steps are highlighted also in the document that's attached to your agenda that Heidi will talk about a little bit more.

Establishing one permanent year-round shelter with day and night services was unanimously identified by members of the coalition as the highest priority.

So I would like to take a moment to congratulate, congratulate each one of you and the city staff and your successful acquisition of property for the location of a permanent shelter.

This really is a moment to celebrate a community working together to achieve a common goal.

So we all appreciate your relentless efforts to try to get that over the finish line.

So thank you for that.

The task of the coalition was to present a holistic picture of the work that is currently being done and identify gaps in service that remain to be addressed.

Although the goals, strategies, and action steps contained in the study created a specific roadmap and timeline for the council and the community to utilize, it should be considered complementary to other action steps that may have been taken by other community stakeholders.

It really is a village when we're addressing issues like this.

The needs of our community we know are not static and will necessarily change over time.

Some of the steps that were identified in the 2022 study may not be as relevant in 2025.

Similarly, the needs of the community have evolved in such a way that would call for additional action not contemplated in the original study.

The coalition addressed all of this by reprioritizing multiple action steps while continuing to support 40 of them that continue to provide a valuable roadmap going forward for the city council and those who would provide direct services to our unhoused neighbors.

While the work of our homeless coalition has come to an end, the other goal of our working group was to explore building a larger entity representing all sectors of our community to continue to collaborate with the city council, the city of Norman, and other community stakeholders to provide coordination and collaboration to continue to fill in the gaps in service, similar to the model of the homeless alliance in Oklahoma City.

To that end, some of our members of the coalition have transitioned to a new coordinating team chaired by Dan Strawn, retired director of the Oklahoma City Homeless Alliance.

So I am excited to tell you today that Home Together Norman was created to focus on meeting the unique needs of Norman and capturing the positive momentum of recent community conversations as well as to support the leadership of the city council in addressing the needs of our most vulnerable in our city.

So our mission at Home Together Norman going forward is together we will make Norman a community where everyone has a place to call home.

So now I'm going to turn it over to Heidi Smith for a chance to highlight some of our claims.

Hi everybody, I'm pretty sure I know everybody here.

Everybody has been to Clubhouse and come and had lunch with me or everybody except one person whose initials are Scott Dixon.

You can use my slides.

I can use this slide next one.

I trusted slides.

Yeah.

I can double-click.

All right.

I I don't have a lot of slides.

I believe everybody was sent this update document.

So I'm just gonna leave a lot of time for you guys to ask questions because this is way too information to cover, too much information to cover in 10 minutes.

But if you want to look at the uh handout that Lee gave, these are the six uh prior priorities that were recognized.

Um the highest priority, of course, is a permanent shelter.

Uh, we know that's something that's been lacking in our community.

Um, and we honestly, as a group, didn't spend a whole lot of time talking about that because it's kind of the most obvious one and the one that everybody is putting the most work towards.

Um these are in order of priority on the list that Lee provided.

So 2.2A, and let me go back just a little bit.

So the home base action plan gave a series of steps that said this is important in our community.

Some of them were really accurate and some of them were a little more generic.

Some of them, the more generic ones were really not applicable to our community because of the size we are.

Things that the city of Los Angeles or the County of Los Angeles can do, we can't even come close to touching, but that's the difference between having a population of between two and 300 people experiencing homelessness and 60,000 people experiencing homelessness.

We are also in a really unique place in Oklahoma in that we are not urban, so we're not Tulsa, we're not Oklahoma City, they have vastly more resources than than we do.

One of the things in talking with Sean and Key to Home and things like that is they have a diversion process before they do an assessment, and we do not have the resources to do diversion here because honestly, the only thing the only people we can divert before getting an assessment here are veterans, and we can send them to veteran services because there are resources for that.

Or if somebody is experiencing domestic violence, they would be diverted to women's resource center because we don't want them put in national databases.

They have very different stipulations around the information that is taken from victims who are actively fleeing domestic violence.

So we're not rural either, and rural has its own set of problems.

I like to call Norman the biggest small town in America.

It feels pretty pretty, you know, hometownsy small, but it's not.

We are an actual full-fledged city with city issues.

So we're in the unfortunate position of not getting funding at levels that make resources available at for things like identification.

Um I was having when CityCare first came, they were like, well, how do you get identifications?

And we're like, well, you work the systems that you have because we don't have an organization whose specific model is to do identification and things that we had done in the past, like the identification fairs through the Sheriff's Department and the Norman Police Department.

Uh, after COVID, they don't issue IDs that way anymore, so you can no longer use systems that used to work because of how the state and federal systems work.

So you run into these roadblocks.

Um permanent shelter, the first one.

Uh the second, create a coordinated citywide street and encampment outreach team that includes staff from a mix of different disciplines, including street medicine, social work, nursing, behavioral health, and housing navigation.

Um, we currently have Care Fritz who does outreach.

She works at Central Oklahoma Community Mental Health Center.

Um Lee McWater by default because when somebody calls, he has to go out there, he's doing outreach, he will take care with him.

Um we do not have any major organization, major nonprofit that is working in Norman who has a full-fledged outreach team.

COCMHC has one or one person, other people go out with Cara occasionally.

We know that that is a gap in our community.

Uh second one, uh prior to prioritize the development of single room occupancy buildings.

So that's an SRO.

We have money to do that.

It took three years to be able to purchase a property.

We finally were able to do that.

Yay!

I will tell you, I work at Thunderbird Clubhouse.

The place where I sit the majority of the time, it is literally outside my window.

So Thunderbird Clubhouse has been trying for 10 years to buy that property because we wanted to do housing or something with it.

And I don't know what God's Anthony Purinton plays to.

Something happened, and that property came through.

And then the shelter property came through.

Yeah.

I will tell you this.

We've seen two huge steps and forward fermentum, and that brings a lot of hope.

And I gotta tell you, from somebody who works getting money from the federal government, we need a lot of hope.

Um, the next one is expand the high-lex successful coordinated efforts to assist people experience home experiencing homelessness to obtain identification documents and connect them to public benefits.

That's supportive housing, that's case management, that's some of what CityCare is doing.

We need more case managers to do that.

Um undertake a community-wide engagement campaign that includes landlords, people recently housed, the business community, and other leaders to dispel common myths about homelessness and celebrate progress of the community's efforts to reduce and end homelessness.

That's a huge thing.

Um of my absolute favorite things to hear is nobody says anything about homelessness in Norman.

And I'm like, well, there's this collaboration of agencies who have been doing this work for about 30 years.

So we understand and I understand that people just don't know.

They don't know what homelessness really looks like.

They don't know what the face of homelessness is.

They don't understand that a huge portion of the work in homelessness services is prevention.

It's the people that you don't see that are not hitting the streets where a huge percentage of the dollars and the resources are going.

One of the things that we're starting to experience, like uh Sean was saying is people because of housing affordability, inflation, stagnated income are being displaced.

And that's when you're having people who are in their 50s and 60s and experiencing homelessness for the first time.

That has been a very invisible problem that is about to become more and more visible as the federal resources begin to plateau or be cut, you're gonna see more people that have used prevention services that are going to become street homeless.

Hopefully, not, but if the trends continue the way we are, that's what you're going to see.

Um that education campaign, a huge portion of Home Together Norman.

My personal challenge for 2026 is to see how many people, if what happens happens and there is a bond issue around anything for funding for the shelter, however, this that plays out, I'm gonna see if I can get 500 people out knocking door.

I mean, like I have in my head a number, and I'm like, how many people can I get out knocking doors so that we don't get defeated by less than a percentage point this time.

How many people can we get out and say, okay, people have been talking about homelessness in Norman for a long time?

How do we make this a reality for the people in our community that are vulnerable?

So all y'all will be getting emails from me.

I'm gonna expect all y'all to be knocking doors.

I'm everybody I've ever met has been announced.

So that is one of the true emphasis of the education campaign coming in 2026 from Home Together Norman is how can we make sure that we take advantage of the opportunities that are presented to our community?

And that there really is things going on.

There really are people that are out here doing it, and it's not that it's not that nobody cares, it's not that nobody's doing anything, it's a resource issue.

Um provide additional supports to participants who execute who exit shelters to permanent housing through proactive case management and best practice strategies.

Once again, that is more case managers.

Um this idea that somebody gets a house, this idea that somebody's just given a house, and then all of a sudden everything's peachy.

That is not how this system works.

Uh, permanent supportive housing works on the basis of I understand that if you've been living outside for three and a half years, when I put you in an apartment, you might have some adjustments to do, and you might need some help with that.

And this idea, prevention is for those people who are paycheck away from homelessness, who a flat tire or five days off work caused them to not be able to pay their rent, and then they got evicted.

Or in November, they didn't get all their snap benefits, and $300 in SNAP benefits didn't come in, and they had to choose between paying their rent or feeding their children, and they chose to feed their children, so now eviction is coming.

That's what prevention dollars do.

Um, but if it's somebody who has a chronic chronic mental health issue, has chronic homelessness, these are people that are going to need wraparound services and support well after they get into a unit.

Um, one of the other big things that's not necessarily addressed here is affordable housing, will be something that we are helping home Norman.

I just forgot what somebody tell me what the name is again.

Together, yeah.

I can't remember that.

I don't know why.

I look at it like three times a week, and it still won't.

Well, no, I was gonna say in that uh was a 19-page action step.

Uh, we were talking about an affordable housing and uh study and strategy, and our pro housing grant is gonna help us with that.

Yes.

So that is coming.

I I tell everybody, housing and homelessness are not the same thing, but they're like cousins.

You cannot house somebody if you don't have affordable housing.

And when you're in affordable housing crisis, your low-income affordable housing crisis is significantly worse than that.

If somebody doesn't have an income and they can be put on a permanent supportive housing grant, you have to find someplace that's all bills paid, which almost doesn't exist anymore because if they're in an apartment but their electricity gets turned off, they're no longer considered housed because that is under the HUD definition, you can't pay for it because it's not fit for human habitation because they don't have utilities.

So it's just these cycles of things.

But if any of you know of any of apartments for around $800 that are all bills paid in Norman that would like to house somebody who's been evicted a couple times, please call Thunderbird Clubhouse and let me know because we have about eight people we could put in there right now.

And it's that those are the barriers that become the biggest issues.

I also had made a note about landlord mitigation fund, which I did not write down which uh the action steps that was, but it was basically further action needed.

Um I guess CityCare had talked about developing relationships with landlords.

Is that something that is a barrier to accepting Section A or vouchers?

Yes, it is sometimes definitely a barrier.

Some people won't take Section A vouchers at all.

And sometimes the reason for that is because if you're gonna take a voucher, you have to pass a pretty rigorous inspection.

And and quite frankly, some places can't pass those inspections for the amount of dollars they're asking for in rent.

Um the places that will take those inspections, though, are usually top costs, usually pretty decent places.

And the landlord mitigation fund is something that's been bounced around for several years.

It's a great idea.

One of the excuse me, uh, permanent supportive housing grants is actual a lease grant, which is a form of that.

So you're leasing actually from an agency or a nonprofit, and then they sublet to other people, and that helps because the landlord knows they're gonna be able to come, and part of that grant helps pay for repairs if somebody is damages the leased unit.

It's also easier to get some of those people to engage if you have proof that the client has case management.

And if they're if they're coordinating with case management instead of just a client, a lot of times people are way more apt to say yes.

So being a section eight, yeah, and if they know that the check is coming from Thunderbird Clubhouse by the first of the month every month, that is also a huge benefit.

Assurances, right?

Mayor Holman.

Yeah, um, so um assume that there was not a single private property owner in Norman that was willing to rent their houses out and accept vouchers, and we only were relying on Crimson Flats or McKenzie Gardens or whatever, just at the top of anybody's head, do you know how many units we have in Norman that are that are just public housing?

Public housing, not very many.

Rose Rock, and I I can't tell you how many units are in them.

I can find out and send it to you.

But Rose Roch, McKinsey Gardens, the one on the rock 38 for both those, though.

And those have minimum age, yeah.

No, yeah, it's a minimum age is like 65.

Yeah, for Rose Rock and McKenzie Gardens, I know you have to have a mental illness.

Okay.

Um, and then there's one other, there's a less than two other properties, but I would say the whole number of units, if it's 200, I'd be shocked.

I'd be shocked if there's over 200 public housing units.

It's gonna be somewhere right in that.

And Rose Rock is, I mean, Roserock has a lot of units in it.

And but it's for seniors.

Part of why we pursued the Crimson Flats for part was so we could have a guaranteed place for 40 years, I think was the agreement that we'd be able to accept.

But one of the things I've observed though is a lot of the, at least in my personal experience, the a lot of the uh property owners in Norman and maybe other places that have properties that they're willing to do that for tend to be older, sometimes are much older than the average population.

And I don't see a lot of uh people in my generation buying houses to use them for that purpose.

I see them getting bought to be flipped, and how much can we rent?

Can we get out of this thing is what I mostly see happening.

So and then from some of those older property owners that do still rent their houses out for vouchers, they say, well, concerning about how long I want to keep doing this because I'm getting older and I can't keep taking care of these places, or if they get there's holes in the wall, and I can't just keep doing it, or I can't afford to, or whatever it may be.

And so they've asked about you know some sort of funding source or insurance program where if they sign up, something gets broken by the tenant, then they're covered and they don't have to take out a pocket to make the repair.

So I've heard that kind of feedback, but that's been one of the big concerns of mine is that traditionally the type of property owners that that allow their properties to be used for that or are passing away, and their kids aren't seemingly carrying on that torch with those properties.

And if we aren't building something like Crimson Flats, then there isn't very much even if somebody has a voucher, where are they gonna go use the voucher?

I will say one of the most effective programs that has happened since COVID with some of the COVID dollars is the housing navigator that works for Norman Housing Authority.

What's Mike's last name?

Um he goes out and talks to landlords.

He's not finding units for people, he's actually going out and engaging with landlords and asking them if they would be willing to cooperate in the Section 8 program.

And while there are less properties that do that than when he started, there are like 50% more units.

So he went from like 1,000 units that would take Section 8 to 2,000 units, and he continues to maintain that as a relationship with those landlords and to increase the number of units that will take Section 8 vouchers.

And quite honestly, that is the key to getting from stepping out of homeless, specifically chronic homelessness is a Section 8 voucher.

People aren't going from chronically homeless to self-sustaining.

That's not the step that happens.

They go from chronically homeless to a permanent supportive housing environment, and then after two to three years, hopefully to a Section 8 voucher, they're going to continue to be on some kind of supportive service.

Since we are seeing seniors uh in that demographic first-time homelessness, is that Section 8 like applic applicable to them?

It will be.

Um, they can get on Section 8, usually, especially since they usually have Social Security or some kind of income.

The problem becomes Section 8 waiting lists were closed for 18 months, and when they opened it back up two weeks ago, three weeks ago, their waiting list was like three to six months.

Um, and they were issuing a small number of vouchers.

I will be shocked if by the end of January, if the list isn't back up to 24 months, you're gonna be at 18, 24, 36 month wait list again.

And it started from where they turned it off.

Yeah, yeah.

So it wasn't those are people who have been waiting now.

Yeah, to right to even get on the list.

Yeah, yeah.

So we had over 18 months where people couldn't even get on the list.

So we are seeing a very small wait list right now, but that as soon as those people who haven't been on been able to get on for 18 months, find out that they can start applying again, that list is going to grow.

Yeah, um, and then also in that action plan 19 uh pages.

I saw outreach team and mental health outreach, which we have been talking about our opioid abatement funds uh to potentially hire a case manager who would go out, and then also a community resilience manager who would help coordinate on the city end.

I am all for any other people that can help do this work.

Um so um my I I have heard about that and had a couple conversations about that.

My one concern with that is I love more case management, but until we have the resources that those case managers can use, that still becomes a stamp assembling block to actually getting people off the street, right?

And then I saw member Bruce here.

So you know, when I look at this from my framework, I you know, I see a 24, 26 MPAs, and they all do certain functions, and some of them swim in the same swim lane because they do those same functions, and uh you know, I look at demand across each one of those functions, and I think, well, there's gotta be a central entity that will facilitate that, manage that for awareness.

I understand that's the uh continuum care from I assume all MPAs almost all are probably part of that continuum care.

So not to for some reason.

Right.

The the the caveat I would give is functionally I am the COC, and this is my second job.

So I still have my other full-time job at Thunderbird Clubhouse.

So the capacity is not where it would be for most communities, and it's a collaboration of volunteers, unless they're receiving funding, I can't ask them.

I can ask everybody to do anything, but I cannot mandate that anybody do anything.

Like I can mandate if you get COC funds, you have to enter in HMIS.

But if you're not funded, then I can request it, but that's uh that's a pretty heavy ask.

I understand.

I understand that it is a uh secondary tertiary responsibility, and it's a massive responsibility, no doubt about that.

So I think I think of things through you know, how do you make this easier through software and using the cloud about this is my swim lane, this is what I specialize in.

I'm with I I have a swim lane with several other partners, and I only can provide so much to the table.

This is my capacity, and then this is where I'm at real time any given time with that capacity.

My partners know that too through through reaching up to that cloud-based system through you know through the web, saying I got room, send them my way.

So it's it's very efficient.

Then you then over time you really know I have too much capacity, or too little.

Does Oklahoma City have something like that?

Um HMIS is no way that doesn't do it.

That doesn't do it.

I'm not convinced there's a separate system.

Um their continuum of care may be more robust, more staffing, where somebody could track and kind of play that traffic.

Oh, no one's no one's tracking besides the MPHV and information about the capacity, and this is where I'm at.

There are softwares that do that.

I do not think Oklahoma City has uh one there are a few that are kind of they don't function really well, but they're loosely kind of spreading out.

Um but what we do have in Oklahoma City with our HMIS system is we have automated systems, and so um when somebody makes that referral to housing or to one of the units, all of our available units in the city are on one unified list, and and that that referral after they do what we call um it's a chat here.

I've I've got to remember so many assessments and OC in Oklahoma City, which is the same assessment essentially that we do here.

Um that automatically puts them on a buy name list, and that buy name list automatically distributes those referrals to the open units, and so that's that's kind of how we keep up with that same system is we have automated systems that plug people to those services.

Well, I would think this would be a good area to explore about using the web with your NPAs to understand capacity and where I'm at this point in time, so it's a real time system.

And to me, it's not very it's not it's not I put these systems together all the time in the government related to hey, or app related to contracts across multiple entities that specialize in multiple different things.

So it would leads me up to the other question.

You know, I understand there's a you know whole spectrum on housing issues, whole spectrum, depending on where we're adding that spectrum.

For example, at this point, you know, on the need for a permanent shelter, how do we know that hey, there's really a capacity issue per permanent shelf at this point?

We know that we know that, but how do we know there's gonna be a capacity issue based upon anticipated increase in capacity with your other MPAs?

I would say the the way that I know that now is I'm starting to see numbers.

The prior the prior runner of the overnight shelter, the data was not great.

So I am starting to see numbers come out of city care.

So I know Harry Schmidt over at Norman Police Department from a previous job, and he does their data, and he was like, 600 people a year are experiencing homelessness in Norman, and I'm like, you're not right, and this is a data guy, and he's like, No, I have the data, and I'm like, that I don't have any other data points that could lead me to that.

And all of a sudden, CityCare comes in and they're starting to do chat assessments, and I can trust their HMIS data, and it's not that we have 80 people that have stayed in shelter in a year, it's 397, and you still have a quarter left, which means that yes, by the time you count transients and everything, you're looking at yeah, 600 is a reasonable number, and we know capacity.

We know that there are people that are not staying in shelter who probably would if they had a place where they felt safe just from point in time counts and talking with other providers.

We understand the capacity will that there are people who want to be in shelter now that did not feel safe to do that, and as that gets safer, that number doesn't our capacity doesn't grow to allow them, and then inclement weather also is a huge deal.

Or have room, you've got couples who won't stay without their partner, and then you've got people with dogs and pets.

What I'm trying to say is that down at the uh first entry until I am homeless, where I need shelter, I need emergency shelter, or I need temp shelter, you know, right now we have a capacity at 50 or city shelter.

How do you know that there's other NPAs uh that are in the continuum of care that their capacity is this at this point in time, and it's this six months from now, a year from now.

How do you know?

How do I know what their capacity will be?

I mean, is there any documents?

Well, from a shelter standpoint, there are only two providers.

So it's either city care or salvation army that are providing overnight services.

So Salvation Army has a plan that they've had some trouble getting off the ground as far as being able to provide more beds.

City care in conjunction with the city of Norman has a plan to provide more beds.

But so they're here in Norman, they're not here in the rear army.

Yeah, no, no, they're just in Norman.

That's not in the wheel.

Yeah, we brought them back to present their master plan.

They've had a lot of turnover there and no one with somebody that's just the one show remote.

Yeah.

I don't, I would not imagine so I reached out to two different contacts, hadn't gotten a call back yet, but based on that recognition that they've had some turnover, yeah.

I don't know.

Maybe the phone's not being answered.

Yeah, they've been understaffed for about three months, so they're they're just now putting on more staff.

I heard last week.

So I'm I'm just if there's 10, you know, they're like increase their capacity like significantly.

I'm saying, wow, that's that's fantastic.

Uh, how does the city manager know that?

How does the mayor know the aye?

How do the members of council know that just basically their outreach asking if we had uh five or six million dollars laying around uh that we could uh contribute and participate in the expansion of their beds.

Uh they've had some, they've got real property, they have an architect.

Um they've got plans, they started their uh capital campaign.

Um it's just there's there's contact through a handful of uh avenues uh including you know their their contact with the Norman police department and uh members of the Salvation Army and their participation and other uh service clubs and so the the conversation takes place um and they'd like to get up to a hundred beds is the number kind of stuck in my mind as to what the looks like that's like two or three iterations out from the yeah, that was a wish list for them.

I think you should invite them for a meeting with you as city manager, understand where they're at the South Age Army as far as execution of their design.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, absolutely.

So there's no fuzz on it.

And then I think they should come back and brief the mayor and then the city council at home.

Hey, this is where the this is where we're at.

We actually that was instructed in the finance committee last time.

That's great.

How long ago was that?

A week.

Week.

That's great.

Just waiting to get that return phone call and we'll book them.

All right, and the other point to make with that is that the Salvation Army is a high barrier shelter versus I don't think so.

I think you need to check your information out from what I understand, they're all inclusive.

The only thing they provide exception to is uh I don't I think it's a high barrier shelter.

I don't think so.

By the definition of low barrier and high barriers, I think they think they exclude one type of party, and I think the may or the lieutenant over there can clarify that.

It also they require identification, and that can be that is considered a high barrier if you require identification.

We're struggling to get people anyway.

Um, if there are no more questions, I want to recognize council member.

I do have one more.

So what's the definition of low berry shelter?

There's no check at all.

There is a security check, but there you don't have to have identification in order to I'm gonna let you know, I'm gonna let Sean answer that question.

It means that you don't have a lot of programming around being able to access shelter, and so you can you can access shelter whether you actually choose to participate with extended care or not.

And so when I say extended care, I mean wraparound services like case management, housing navigation, and there's there's no time limit.

Um there's no requirements for um you wanting to go into sobriety or um ID or any of the things documentation-wise that would stop you from accessing shelter.

And can I just add to the low barrier part?

Because it is in uh the revision uh we don't have any green zones, it is something outside of the scope of City of Norman.

So when we talk about low barrier, we mean there are some people who can't stay there because they have convictions, so not necessarily no barrier.

Um if that answers that, I'm gonna move to council member Gannisberry because he's been waiting and then Dixon.

My main thing that I just wanted to bring up also is the the 19 pages that y'all supplied us something with all the actions and everything on there and everything like that, and reading through that.

I want to thank everybody that served on your team to get us that document first and foremost.

And one thing that I felt very you know, it's a bad thing to bring no matter what, because it's just a bad thing we deal with in our town and everything, but the fact that every line had something that thanks to y'all, Norman was doing something to help with that.

But on 99% of it, Cleveland County and Moore was doing nothing about that, you know.

So I in defense of that document, and since I'm the one who wrote all that, I will not say they are doing nothing.

I will say I am not aware.

Yeah, of what yeah, but the majority of the thing.

The majority of it we did not know anything that they've done yet about it, and everything like that.

But participating in the continuum when you guys mean yes-ish.

So I can get a hold of them when I need to.

Sky, we have one person from the city of Moore that shows up several times a year.

That they will help with the pit count.

They they they are more engaged than they have been before.

Are they highly engaged?

No.

But my biggest thing is to thank the committee that you formed to see this all the way through to a document that we can go by and everything like that, but also to be still engaged enough to start another program and another extension of this to still continue the conversation to try to get there.

And it's very much appreciated.

All right, Councilmember Dixon.

Um, do we see any impact um in the near future or homeless situation if HUD changes their policy for um the use of uh funds for permanent supportive housing from 90% to 30%?

It is gonna be that is one of my next points that I was gonna update.

You know, I could talk for an hour and a half on what HUD is about to do, and I'm not going to do that.

I'd be happy to have a prolonged conversation with anybody in January about that.

Um what they have issued is a total 180 degree ideological turn from the housing first philosophy, which says if you can't get stabilized and have a place to live, it's really hard to get off drugs.

If you are not stable enough and know where you're going to sleep tonight, treatment is a difficult thing to obtain.

That's housing first.

Treatment first says get clean, then we'll talk about getting you some housing.

It's conditional.

And it was the philosophy in the 90s and early 2000s, and HUD, it was not evidence-based, it didn't prove to work.

They've gone to housing first, it is as evidence-based, it's worked the best of any systems that we've seen.

It is not a silver bullet, it is not implemented in the ways that true housing first is in most communities, so it is not as successful as it could be.

Um, but they wanted to change back to a treatment first model in 60 days.

They gave us literally a 60-day funding opportunity that should have run last July, and they announced it on November 14th, due on January 14th.

My hair was on fire for 15 days trying to figure out what was going on, listening to all kinds of different things.

Scott Martin was kind enough to get us to get me and Dan and Mark um Smith from Tulsa Housing Solutions uh in the room with some delegates so we could try to fight this at a congressional level.

Um HUD pulled withdrew that notice of funding opportunity saying we're gonna issue it again, so they could issue it tomorrow.

We don't know.

Um they pulled it because they like 21 states and two major national organizations took them to court to stop them from doing this, especially in this time frame.

Um what it will essentially do is take 70% of the permit supportive housing monies that is received by most communities and potentially devoted somewhere else.

I didn't vote for the way presidential election, I did not remember.

Do we know like what percentage um we're currently using for sports housing 97% in our community?

But surely if they're flipping the 90 to 30, whatever and making it be treatment first, there's surely hundreds of millions of dollars going into treatment, so we can send people to oh yeah, there are so many beds available.

Like Sean, you just pick up the phone and to get you to want treatment, right?

27 million dollar shortfall in our middle health part.

Yeah, I mean, literally, and if I who a privileged white person with good insurance, when I had a kid that was in trauma, it took me 45 days to get her an appointment with a mental health provider.

And that was three years ago.

People who are struggling, it is 60, 90, 120 days out for an intake appointment.

And your honor, the fascinating thing about that concept on a nationwide basis, there may be a couple of communities that have capacity, and they may think great, we'll use those dollars and just bring on board some more practitioners to meet that demand.

And they may think, great, we'll use those dollars and just bring on board some more practitioners to meet that demand.

Um it's boy in Oklahoma, I'm not aware of capacity in existence.

Um anywhere, and actually in Norman, the loss of capacity, the loss of contracts to the virtue center who provided those services, a big contract loss to Red Rock Behavioral Health.

Um, yeah, we have fewer services today than we did a year ago.

So and our the entitlement CDBG dollars we receive as the city in Norman's a little over a million a year, and you think we we're not gonna enter the clinic business with $700,000.

Well and the providers are are out there also.

I mean, thank goodness the nurse practitioners can get their psych certification.

Um previously, if you were just a you know family nurse practitioner, you could also do psych stuff with a little training, and now they do have to get certifications, I believe, but the MD sites and the DO sides are not.

They're not out there.

Yeah.

Well, and I will say, as as devastating as this is gonna be for rural communities, hang it up.

Yeah, it's gone.

I mean, like it's gonna be bad for us, it's gonna be bad for Tulsa, it's gonna be bad for Oklahoma City, but this is going to destroy providers in rural communities.

So then we could potentially see you're going to see people from going to migrate to cities, yes.

Okay.

Well, it's not a rosy outlook.

But I appreciate the momentum we have and where we're trying to go.

Uh, even though the mountain keeps getting taller.

I would like to just make one more point.

Um, Sean referenced the pit count.

Yay, pit count.

Last 10 days in January.

We're gonna go outside at 4:30 in the morning.

We're gonna meet at 4:30.

We're gonna go about 4.45, 5 o'clock, send people out to encampments and count the number of unsheltered homeless people in our community.

I know Josh Hinkle's been there the last couple years.

I know I'm gonna see all of you at 4:30 over at the development center volunteering to come out for pit count.

If you don't want to volunteer at 4:30 in the morning, I have a I have opportunities all day long.

And into the evening.

And into the evening.

We're going to count the county.

Yeah, yeah.

Yes.

What we do is we send people out to known encampments, places where people have been spotted.

We work with the police department and the action center in CARA and find out where people have been spotted in the previous about month.

And we go specifically out to those places.

Uh, we hit all the big public parks.

The very first year I did it, we hit every public park.

We don't do that anymore because if your public park is the size of this table, there's probably not a homeless person sleeping there.

Um, so we have like zujed the list for the last couple years, and then we go where we know people are, and then places like um Sutton Wilderness, we have groups that are there all day, and then we have groups that are outer day shelters and at the night shelter counting.

So we have all kinds of opportunities.

We'll send you out with good people.

We don't ever send anybody out by themselves.

We're very safety conscious and safety aware.

Uh councilmember because couch surfing uh counter as a point of contact for Norman.

Couch surfing is not considered homeless by HUD.

Gotcha.

Uh Councilmember Bruce.

What that number that Pitt numbered it.

It's a number that is very, very, very soft.

Yes.

You know what I mean?

Yes.

It's a software.

It's a huge undercount.

I don't know how they take that in account.

And is the federal, or you think the federal is changing it somehow in the future to do something else?

Uh I wouldn't, I couldn't tell you what is happening.

I don't think HUD knows what's happening at HUD.

Like they have cut significant portions of their staff, and nobody knows what's going on at HUD right now.

So how that's gonna affect their algorithm for how they distribute money, I would not even begin to guess.

But every COC is required to participate.

Every COC has to be.

So this is gonna happen 10,000 times.

If you get federal funding, you have to run a pit count.

It's effective for HUD for it to look like all the numbers are lower because that's less dollars they have to distribute.

So I I wouldn't imagine they're gonna find a system to make them accountable for more dollars.

And uh in that bane, uh, could we have an RSVP sent out to us when it's time for a pits we can put it on our calendar?

Save the I've already got it on my to-do list.

Yeah, uh whenever it comes through, Stacy, we're pretty good about clicking that button and then it's on the code.

I'll send you calendar invites.

And I'll tell you from doing it for the last four years or so, the 4:30 in the morning shift has hot chocolate.

So donuts don't know.

I do if you come to the COC event, we have donuts.

It's it's my little piece of comfort for all the people in the COCE.

Very rarely show up to a meeting without donuts.

Okay.

I always got something.

Well, thank you for all your time and research and for the community conversations that have been happening in the background.

I'm encouraged.

But you know, it's gonna be a slog.

And everybody has my number.

I think everybody has my cell phone number.

If you have any questions, please text or call me.

I'm always happy to have a conversation with the caveat that if you ask me about what's going on at HUD, I will tell you what I don't know, which is a lot.

Yeah.

All right.

Uh moving on to item three discussion regarding possible amendments to the short-term rental ordinance.

Recognize attorney Jeannie Snyder to present.

Do you need a password apparently?

Big boys.

The prices run.

Well, I'll start by saying I'm Genie Snyder with this assistant city attorney.

And if there's Bryce, it is about he knows exactly what to show up.

Yeah, we do.

Oh, did you bring your phone in?

Okay, we're gonna go for it.

Or I just hit a button.

You all know me.

The least one escape.

Not a lot of me doing next.

I'm hitting that, it's not coming up.

Here comes here comes my boss.

He does everything.

I'm the least likely in the group.

Where did Robin go?

Uh she had to leave.

Oh, puoy.

Uh, I do know what she would ask.

Okay.

Okay.

It happens.

I'm gonna do that.

Okay, so um it says on here amendments to the short-term rental ordinance, but basically, I'm giving uh kind of a big kind of just a general update on what's going on and then answer some questions on how you guys want to go with this.

I first want to give just a quick background because only Mayor Holman was here during all the beginnings of this.

Um, and just so briefly, we started talking about this in late 2017.

There was one property on the west side that the neighbors were unhappy about, and it was like our first kind of really known short-term rental, and it went from there.

So you can see I've been to Oversight.

Uh, we first started talking about in February of 18.

I came back to another presentation, and we were talking about occupancy tax, and we we estimated around a hundred short-term rentals.

I came back in March.

Continuing discussion about should we have categories during that time?

I didn't, I was gonna bring him in for show, but I didn't my show and tell.

I have three notebooks that stand this high.

I've kept every minute, every handwritten note.

Um, and just to see that I went back through all those.

But we discussed zoning districts and minimum distance between units and how many units should be on a street.

All that was discussed.

We continued through 2018.

Uh we had some drafts of it, we kept talking.

2018 was a big discussion year.

Um, we were we went into talking should it be special or permitted use, and if the center city form-based code had questions about that, uh, that's when I first came in contact with a monitoring service on who can find out you know what short-term rentals are operating in your community.

Um then we go into 2019.

Uh inspections were discussed.

Should we notify neighbors?

I did start contracting with before we even had the ordinance with host compliance.

Uh, Mindy and I um, and I would do want to introduce everybody knows Janita Hatley and Mindy's not here.

We do operate as a team on managing the short-term rentals.

Um, a guy from Austin came up, he had short-term SDR helpers, then he sold to host compliance and host we contracted with them.

They got gobbled up by Granicus, and it's it's just been snowballing with these monitoring companies and what kind of data is available.

Uh, at that time in August of 2019, there was 171.

They were giving me that data at the time, is what we had contracted with them for just so we'd know where they were.

Um then in October of 19, we're still talking.

We should have could an LLCO corporation own uh a short-term rental.

We discussed that for quite a bit, and then we came back in November and they decided to what about insurance?

Should there be an inspection fee?

Should there be a limited number to own?

And so we we really kept talking about that.

By this time in March of 20, we have 206.

Uh and keep in mind at that time we we were only monitoring them, we were not licensing them really.

Then if we we got the ordinance together and it went to planning commission.

We had to do some zoning ordinance changes to allow them as a permitted use in those zoning disk districts.

And then finally in July of 20, we got council approval on the current ordinance.

And we started licensing in about August of 20.

And so keep in mind that was kind of COVID too when we were right in the middle of trying to uh work on that.

But during all that time, people were still, you know, these short-term rentals were popping up.

So that's just an overview because we spent about three years or more working on this.

Um so where are we now?

Um we've got this was as of last week.

We have 429 identified licensed properties.

Um council member Grant wins the award.

She's got 214 in hers.

Um I went through the whole list, and this is this was just me going through the list, eyeballing property owners.

Um I had no way to like you know get it out.

Is I found that there were six owners who had four uh had four short-term rentals.

The current ordinance says if you want a fifth one, um, you've got to go to special use.

Well, I did notice on a few, you know, they might have you know the Scott LLC, and then Jeannie LLC owns the next one, and then that so it might be one owner, but the actual owner is a LLC or a corporation.

So, but I've I've not got any more than that.

I I have discovered and I didn't get into the weeds with it yet.

There is an apartment complex that has more than four, and it was in a multifamily unit that already, so it wasn't a it wasn't a single family home.

Well, well, we didn't it it it it it snuck by us uh council member.

I mean, we they they're not all owned by the same person, they're not and and they're they were also owned by an LLC, so there's about nine, but I don't believe they're all owned by the same person, but they really are.

Okay, I don't really have problems with them other than they have difficulty keeping up with their paperwork.

So uh Rick told me when I first started working here 25 years ago that uh we have experts that live that work for the city of Norman at all fields engineers, lawyers, planners, everything.

Well, we have map people, GIS people that I you know, so I finally started connecting with Joyce and Rick Austad over in GIS because uh Janita reminds me, and so they did I can do this on our software program we have, but this is a better one, and so this gives you an overview of where they are right now, though.

But I did go through mine and I was able to, and I'll just kind of click through them.

Where are they in ward one?

Um licensed short-term rentals.

Here's ward two.

Um I could have, you know, I was trying to keep it on one page of paper, you know.

If you wanted to in your ward, I can get you a more detailed map.

Uh, and I have an example of that in a little bit, but then ward three doesn't have very many ward four is overloaded with that's the 214.

That's row of action happens, and lots of going on in ward four.

Ward five has a smattering.

In the beginning, I had a few more out in the uh rural area, but uh not any more.

Ward six, and when I look, and if I'd have made it better so you would see the little cluster of dots, it would have gotten too too much for me to copy.

Ward six, and ward seven doesn't have very many, and neither does ward eight.

Um obviously it's clustered in ward four.

Um, I don't get a lot of complaints, and I'll talk about complaints in just a minute.

Uh but the a lot of the complaints are the complaints about other types of rentals, you know.

Um this is where I wish that Robin had stayed.

I was just gonna say I think there's the theory about ward four, is that that's where people are more likely to have accessory dwelling units that already exist or a another house or something like that that's smaller, I think.

So that might be a reason why there's a lot more.

Ward four is there's a bunch of additional accessory buildings that people have on their properties already.

Yes, that have been historically been apartments or something, right?

And I will say um the big party house that I've been talking about in another meeting with a whole house and uh more pricey neighborhood, yeah.

Uh the one the majority of the short-term rentals are one single family.

The majority are they're not ADUs.

Uh, I didn't get I didn't bring that in here.

We've got about 82, 83 percent of our main structures, uh, 80 users around 5%.

Okay, so there's not a lot that are it's mainly single family homes from what we're seeing.

And I was I hate that Robin had to go, Tyler had to go ahead and leave because I'm using her as one of my big examples.

Robin is the president of the old silk stockings neighborhood, and she's been in contact with me over the years and oh last year or two.

How many do we have?

And I was doing this very time-intensive way to try to track and just her because I could find the map for just old silk stockings.

Well, then again, Janita reminds me that we have experts in our on our staff, and I got Jen uh Joyce over in GIS to map it out so we could eyeball it.

And so we we could do this if we have boundaries, and this is the old silk stocking boundaries.

This neighborhood, and I think Robin would have brought some of this up.

Um, you know, they're concerned, they don't want to have one whole street that has five or six on it.

They do have property that has been bought and renovated in for short-term rentals.

There's pros and cons about that.

They are improving the property, they're cleaning up their properties, but yet their concern, and it could be a concern for other neighborhoods, is she's just my example, is that and then they're not they're not neighbors, they're not families that are moving into these uh houses, they're turning into short-term rentals.

So, but when you look at there's 17 here, and I did go through those.

They as of the assessors website, there are nine of them that are owned by individuals, six were owned by LLCs, and two were owned by trust.

So I used to just give her the list of the addresses.

Well, this really gives a good in the small area of 17, a good pretty bird's eye view of what's in uh that neighborhood.

And I'll just say uh two things about that neighborhood.

There were two the legal ones that we got on to because they're there were spUDs and it was not in their list of uses, and then we had that sneaky lawyer come through and try and get us to do it, the very tail end of an agenda without any prior conversation with other myself or the neighborhood.

Um, and to my knowledge, those are now long-term rentals as they were intended.

If you'll recognize when you cross the the railroad tracks on acres, acres, and on this north side, there's some new apartment-y looking things, and they were sold after they were built and then went into, but before that, the guy had a PUD or spUD, and he did not put as one of their permitted uses as a short-term rental, and so they're not allowed.

We do have people before they get a short-term rental, they better, or they find out they could be in a little bit of a mess.

They contact Janita or somebody in planning and they will look at the address and determine, or when they're asked for a license, are they allowed?

They're allowed a lot of places, but if we had an issue out at the vineyard townhomes, I think they're called something else out there, but say H O N.

Yeah, they're just the ones that were the zero lot line, not the bigger houses.

And somebody bought the house, bought furnishings, got it ready to do a short-term rental, and does and realized it was a PUD or spUD, and they were not an allowed use.

And we told them no.

I mean, they came and met with us.

It was a former OU athlete who lived out of town who had a business and was anticipating the SEC.

I don't know what they did with that property, haven't looked lately, but it was not allowed in that particular.

There's a few other areas that it may not have they might not be allowed in, or if your HOA, your covenants don't allow them.

So it's really important for people to uh make sure that their property before they spend the money and buy it, and or you know, if they're allowed because Janita and and the planning staff do all that.

And the second part of Robin's neighborhood is um the perception that a whole street is being uh taken up, and I'll say the one with the cluster of about four stars.

Uh but that's Peters, Hubert, Hubert, and Crawford.

Yes.

And so just knowing who lives over there, the perception when there's all the on-street parking and it's a lot of activity, but they know those homes are not occupied the rest of the time.

Right.

And so you know, we we can do that with some time.

It does take GIS.

I can't do it in a day.

Joyce needs some advanced time to get off her other stuff.

Well, we we could figure that out, but again, we're winding it right.

We're dealing with over 400 now.

Yeah, and so I would just say for since she's not here to speak.

That was kind of old silk stockings ask was could we geographically limit how many can be clustered in an area?

Uh I yes, we could find the way if that's what the council wants, and we can discuss that, but uh that would uh if you you're the one who helps check if they're going to if they can be not licensed.

But I mean, if that's what the council wants, we'll figure out a way to do it.

Um, I'm sure there's areas in your your I mean I'm gonna be a yes on geographic uh limitations just because of how many are clustered in Ward 4, and this is where the uh the the oldest affordable housing stock exists, and so there's a lot of competing uh between the housing market, market rate, affordable housing, visitors, uh footfall houses, you know.

It's competitive.

Some places I've seen around the country, and I haven't done a big deep dive lately, but I I can on this is they may limit how many can be in, you know.

Maybe Norman only wants to limit to 400.

It's a moratorium, you know, and then you can only have 400, or you we're not gonna allow any more for so many you know months, whatever it the number does go up and down because we get calls every day is oh, I don't want to do that anymore.

A lot of people think, oh, I got grandma's house, I'm gonna make some money on a short-term rental, and they realize it's a business and it takes time.

So the numbers do kind of fluctuate a little bit, and some people have just gotten tired of dealing with it and they end up either making them long term or they're gonna sell them.

I we've we've seen kind of a lately that's been happening.

Yeah, uh, that people are like, you know, we're I'm out.

I it's worrying about paying the taxes, and I can have it cleaned, and I've got to have it ready and all that.

So it does fluctuate.

But if that's something yes for me, I don't know about other council members.

Council member Bruce.

Yeah, just uh refresh my memory on the definition of a uh short-term rental.

Oh, I did not bring that with me.

Less than 30 days.

Yes, I mean I can live in it as a my house, I can live in the rest of the you know, the months and I can short term rentals 30 days.

Oh, it has to be less than 30 days to have to pay the occupancy tax of short-term rentals.

So if it's that's a hotel, that's a definition of a hotel.

If it's over 30 days, that's a long-term rental.

So if you rent less than 30 days, you're you're a short-term rental, and then you're required to be licensed and pay the occupancy tax.

I have people who rent as a short-term rental, they live there, and on the weekends they'll move them and their children to their mother's house, and then they rent out the short-term rental whenever they need because that's how they're making some income.

The majority of those don't.

The majority don't have the property owner in the nobody I know of has a property owner living in the house while you're renting.

And I know you probably don't know, but you might know this.

So I'm I'm just doing an impression like 35%, 4% of the uh residence where people live.

Yeah, R1, R3.

The rentals 35% of Norman.

40% Norman.

Rentals.

And I'm thinking, well, this is you know I keep hearing that.

I don't I don't know that number that could be correct, but I could mean there's short-term rentals for 30 days.

It could be either someone in there with you know the rest of the year, or no, it could be just ball game days.

It's it's rare, it's just ball game days.

Sometimes people make enough that they just don't want to mess with it the rest of the year.

But the majority, I think people are renting them, trying to rent them out for the all the time.

But there are people because some folks want them, the owners want to be here on game days, and they're in it themselves, and then they want to rent it other times.

The other thing that came up was the capping of a certain number.

Well, that's oh well.

I didn't even thought about that.

So do they pay now anything now for short-term rental?

You know, what is it for the cost for short-term rental permit?

Oh, I'll tell you here in just a sec.

Okay, right here.

So that becomes a very hot commodity cap on it, right?

Uh I know they didn't put the actual dollar amount too.

To get a license for a short-term rental in Norman, it's a 100, it's basically 200, and that includes an inspection.

Janita's staff inspects every short-term rental at every renewal point every year, and that's she has four staff that do other stuff.

Uh Mindy wasn't able to be here.

The tax revenue, some of that it jumped a little bit.

I don't remember when we had when did we increase to eight percent?

Uh 23.

23.

So that's when we saw when we started doing this, we were like, oh, we'll get about 30,000.

You can see how that's increased.

And this was just as of the end of January, June, June of 25 short-term rentals that we collected was about 550,000.

There are some uncollected out there, and I've got some things in the works on another ways.

I'm thinking that we can do a better job of making sure, but that that's for another day.

But our licensing fees this last full fiscal year, we we uh brought in 77,400.

Um the hotel occupancy tax.

I noticed in the paper it was a little bit of different percentage on some other guest tax discussion this week, but this there's how that uh is that's where those fees go.

Um we currently are with Decker Technologies, they charge us about $25,000 a year to do they have a complaint, they help uh they know where the everything's is, they send out letters to people, they do a big thing.

And I told Matt this guy, Mr.

Davis, I would add this in here.

He's a new director of customer service for Decker as of September, and he's an OU grad from 2008, and his parents still live here.

I will mention you, Matt, because he was really excited that Norman was a part of the group, but he's gonna try to drop by.

Maybe he'll be around on Christmas.

But so I've got a uh we talked to Alabama football a couple of weeks ago.

So I'm I'm glad to have somebody uh they have excellent customer service.

Mindy, Janita and I we email our guy.

I I know I email him five or six times a week with the question, and they're really really good, but we could not do it without him because we got to know where these people are and collect the money, and we we try.

Um, I asked Kyle, our customer service, you had asked me about the fees.

He he believes the average fees anywhere from 200 to 350 across the country.

I've talked to another company about another thing I'm trying to work on.

It could be a little higher.

I get complaints from the folks.

I'm like, you rent that a night at 200.

If you can't pay 200 for a fee, you don't need to be in business.

So we we could consider raising that.

And that has come up because uh director Francisco had given us like a long sheet of permits and fees, and as a council, we haven't as a body given him enough feedback on that, but it would be my preference to raise the short-term rental.

And I I mean, we have uh one property right now.

I looked it up for the playoff game.

It's an 8,000 square foot home on West Norman.

It looks like a castle, and next week they're getting $1,500 a night for the playoff game.

They're making money.

That's not every night, and that's not every house.

The average, I think it's probably around $300, but we have some that are $125, one, you know, what $100, and and off times they I've seen some for $99 or $110.

So obviously things go up on game weekends and graduation, but it's not just the six nights, six weekends in Norman that these things are full.

So there's there's the money part that um uh Janita provided me with this.

Um her staff is busy.

I mean, she she monitors every application that comes in every day and then assigns an inspection to it.

She maybe can give you a little more info, but the inspection is like we've got to make sure there's fire, uh smoke alarms in every bedroom.

The windows have to open every window has to open and close.

You've got to have egress for fire, you've got to have whatever else, and our her staff is excellent about going back and making special plans to meet people.

Um, but they do a good job.

Uh, just quickly the there is a we do have an online complaint that people can go online and make complaints.

We've got a we set up a designated phone call phone number that they can call that's online.

Um, and then if it's if we get an email or phone number, I get it, everything's directed to my office.

I they can contact the action center and Janine don't put your number.

They can call me or Janita and we will get on it.

Um, I will say when I get to this next point, what I've noticed that I need to do some work on.

Well, let me start with this.

Sarah Kaplan did again.

We have experts.

I am not this expert on housing.

If council member grant wanted some information about it, I had no idea how to go do that, so I called Sarah Kaplan.

And she put all this together.

Um, and I can have uh Kathy's office email you all this this one page if you want.

But how many what is how many housing sales do we have and what's the cost?

So in 24 36 percent were under 200,000.

I thought this was, and then she's broken it down by warts too.

So I think everybody would be interested in that, and I'll get that out to everybody.

But um, I don't know where she got this.

You go, she was like, Oh, I can get that from the accessories website, and I said, good, because I don't know how to do that.

But I thought it was really great information on just home sales, and um, you know, but I've known people, I mean, uh, people are spending.

I I can think of two houses this quick that spend almost well, three, it's over $700,000, and they're operating as short-term rentals.

It's amazing to me, but it's surprising what people will spend or are spending.

Um, I just and I didn't I think I'll just send you guys the whole PowerPoint.

Uh went through all the SEC cities.

Everybody has some kind of short-term rental ordinance except Florida right now.

Florida has they've eliminated permitting.

I didn't call anybody about why they did that.

Uh I've got a little more information on Tuscaloosa that I can get out if I need to.

And then Mississippi State, Starkville's in the process of it.

But I mean, Starkville is tiny.

Um, I have talked to the person in Columbia, Missouri myself a year or two ago.

I can't even remember my question.

Um so I I thought that was all SEC.

Everybody has one.

I mean, they're all dealing with it.

Um I thought of this idea, and and I need to I need to do redo our website, and I'll probably have to get Sarah Kepler or somebody who knows how to do it better than me.

But uh Major Barber told me about Calvinston, he visits there a lot.

He said they've got over 4,000 short-term rentals.

So I went to their web page, and I think this something this might be something that we could put together and that they call it a good neighbor brochure that you know, people who would go to that our web page could maybe have better information about this.

Maybe somehow we do mailers to owners, I however would be best to put it out.

I thought that was kind of an interesting, it's just a little two-page thing.

Um so we maybe you can cut off at the past a little bit about this stuff about give them information.

And Janita's working on a a brochure or a flyer herself about uh for other things, but sanitation rules and just things like that that might be good for everybody to have.

Maybe they print we can print the brochure somehow, or they can print them off themselves.

But I thought that was a good just an idea.

I mean, Galvison's website gave me some good ideas.

I'm gonna need somebody who's a little more creative than me, but I'll be I'll be glad to do it.

But just like quiet hours and where are you parking and places who they should call?

I thought that would be please.

We'd be giving out the information.

And so that was kind of it on what I had to present.

I I didn't really bring the ordinance in.

There's a couple of things I kind of need to tweak myself.

Uh we've always said the applicant has to be the property owner.

Well, we've got a lot of property managers, not a lot, but we people who are doing property managers in Oklahoma City gets an affidavit signed by the property owner that allows John Smith to be that.

I kind of need to tweak that up a little bit.

Um but for the most part, I don't see a lot of problems.

We've had police respond, and there'll be a party there that somebody rented them.

I had a mother let kids, high school kids go over there, and usually we get a hold of the owner and they've shut them down.

Oh, I had a question about fines, and um do if we give them how much are they, or is there a cap on five?

I've only done one or two.

I mean uh we could we've we have not filed a lot of charges because by the time we get to that, Janita Mindy and I have talked to the people, we've got the taxes paid up or whatever, but it would be 50 to 750 dollars for penalty range.

We've just never gotten that far on it because we've kind of jumped in there and got got compliance.

I've not had a lot of complaints come in.

Sometimes it's people like, I think I have one next door to me.

Can you tell me if it's licensed?

You know, I I just they don't know, or what is going on over there?

What is that?

That's really what I get.

And I would say uh on the website, I'm like blinking because it's been a long day, but is there a requirement to tell the people around you that you are starting a short-term rental?

We had lots of discussion about that in the beginning, and we've what the council at the time sighted on.

They wanted at least a courtesy notice to go out.

So the the short-term rental owner is supposed to fill out the local contact, which they're all required to have.

If you live in Texas, you still have to have somebody that can come over and take care of something.

And they've got to distribute it to certain houses in it in the area, not the whole area, but it's like across the street, adjacent behind you, just so your immediate neighbors know.

Now at the time the council just wanted that to be a courtesy notice.

Uh, I don't have I don't they it's not like they send it to me and I send it out.

I mean, that's that could be something that we could beef up a little bit and make it, but it's on the website that they have to do it.

We've got uh quite a few uh questions, you know, FAQs on there, everybody knows they're supposed to pay property, I mean they have occupancy tax, and then they act like they're so surprised.

But uh I I do believe that I need to do a revamp of the web page.

Okay, um, I would like to require notice.

Uh I know because I have 214 of them currently uh which is about almost half.

Uh that I would like to limit them geographically speaking, especially in the sensitive parts where we have that affordable housing stock, which is why I had asked about uh you know, are these market rate homes?

And I know they're like very far end, you know, we're seeing like expensive homes being used for this, but it uh does seem like the obtainable housing is being used for this purpose.

There's a lot of you know, basic three-bedroom, two bathrooms that are being used for it.

I will talk with Rick a little more and and with you maybe more one-on-one on exactly the limit geographically.

What do we do with the ones that are already licensed in there?

I imagine they would just roll off and not be renewed, you know, that number.

Because that's gonna cause a stir.

It's gonna, I mean, I'm just saying it's gonna mean these people have purchased property or made it, but I mean, whatever y'all want to do, I'll I'll do it.

But I mean it would be fair if we did limit them geographically speaking, that was the parent.

Or uh how many on the street or with an award uh too.

Uh I know the same everywhere, but um by street, maybe by neighborhood.

Uh I need to get a I'll talk to Joyce and get maybe a little more detailed of at least war for ward four, so I can get a better bird's eye view of what ward for what you know, where is the clusters or whatever.

That's gonna take a little bit, and I can I do know other cities do that.

There's a lot of litigation out there about short-term rentals too.

Uh Dallas tried to say you can't have any, and then then there's lawsuits that have you know taken over on that too.

So I I was I believe I'm correct, I'm sort of correct on this.

In 2008-ish, a couple of guys in San Francisco, there was a big event or something, and there was like not a lot of hotel rooms or something.

So they rented an air mattress and their apartment for like a thousand dollars, and that's Airbnb, and the short-term rental market is probably about a 40 billion dollar market now.

And that's kind of and that's only in less than 20 years.

So it is it just since we've been involved in the last five to six years, it has it has exploded into a business that but I will probably need a little more one-on-one with you on, you know, exactly that, and I'll uh I'll start with some other cities, but and uh like I said, I I think if we do geographically limit it, you know, letting those permits exist until they decide not to renew and then you know equalize.

I'll have to think about how exactly to do that.

There's a lot of streets, and how do you do four here and two there?

But it'll take some brain power that I'll have to get some help on.

Council of Rivers.

You mentioned also about a cap.

Are you really thinking about that?

You know, think through about a cap as far as number, and you would raise the licensing limit.

Uh what?

You know, yeah, the fee.

Yeah.

So is that what I'm saying?

Yeah, we can increase the fee.

Don't know how other awards feel.

I don't mind them being uh, you know, spread the wealth through other wards, but then being so concentrated in the core is problematic.

Um, but I don't necessarily see capping them at a number throughout the city being the answer to solve ward four's issues.

So that's why I just throw out it's gonna take we'll we'll just have to dig a little deeper into that.

And in the meantime, I'm going to ask Daryl's not here.

I think I could get the extra money.

It didn't cost that much last year.

I I last year he had me.

Last year he had me had the monitoring companies it wasn't in our package, so I had to pay for it.

How many were rented on game days?

I'm very curious about the playoff game next weekend.

And uh I I'll see if maybe I can squeeze it out of them to see if they can tell me how many.

It's I don't have a way to say, oh, we have you know 412 were rented.

They can do that.

I'm gonna see if I can convince them to at least give me for one week in that stack because I'm very curious with oh, you the playoff and graduation in one weekend, how many were rented?

Okay, and uh just thinking for the future, just really want to make sure I'm clear that uh they will require short-term rentals when they come online to notify the neighbors.

Yeah, we they are required, but I don't have any mechanism to make sure that they do it, so I'll figure that out.

We have to modify the ordinance.

Yeah, we we didn't it would take some amendment of the ordinance, but is that well, I was also thinking of part of the permitting process.

It's like it is, they're required to do it, it's on the website, but it's at the time the council just wanted inwards of courtesy notice, and they're required to do it, and do they do it all the time?

Probably not because I send it out and send them to the form sometimes.

So we maybe could tighten that up a little bit on and I do think that would be helpful because if we think about neighborhoods like old silk stocking where they're organized and they have a point person in their neighborhood, that that person uh could be the one to reach out to the property owner and kind of head some of the issues that we get with parties and other things before it becomes a problem.

I don't get a lot, I I personally don't get phone calls or charges in municipal court that there's been parties at these short-term rentals.

Uh now that that may happen.

I sometimes they don't call it.

Sometimes they don't call that out of all the 430.

I don't but I don't live next door to one leader.

And I'll say uh when I did the Ward 4 quarterly meeting, it seems like a lot of people didn't recognize there was a place where you could go complain.

So some of that might be on the residents thinking they're just being overrun and there's nothing they can do.

It's on there.

There's there's a place to go to the on the website and click on there and do it.

All righty.

Okay.

I have a granddaughter doing a choir program, so I'm gonna step out.

Thank you.

First man.

Let's just run through it.

We can be done.

Okay, because it's it sounded like they're gonna have to research it more.

Okay, and finally, we're gonna do right to counsel with city attorney Rick Knight's present.

I'm gonna have Mike Figgins come up.

Uh he's gonna help us out tremendously with regard to this particular issue.

He is the current executive director of legal aid services of Oklahoma, and they've got right to counsel, they've handled those issues both in Oklahoma County.

You go have a seat call standard.

Um he graciously, I talked to him for the first time yesterday and asked me if he could make it graciously agreed to come down and help talk through some of this.

But what is the right to counsel in eviction cases in particular?

And it's a state or local policy guarantee tenants access to an attorney when facing eviction.

Um in Oklahoma, eviction occurs pretty quickly.

Um, once that document is actually filed with the district court, I believe the hearing has to be set within five days.

You have to appear.

Um, if you cannot establish if you get evicted, obviously if judgment is awarded in favor of the plaintiff, usually you're given about a 48-hour time period that you actually have to move out, find someplace else to live.

Um right to counsel in explications usually applies to low-income tenants.

Um cases involving loss of housing, which in Oklahoma we call forcible entry and detainer.

Um, there may be some administrative or some administrative or other court proceedings that are related to eviction that there was applied to.

Why does it matter?

I mean, eviction is pretty fast in Oklahoma.

Um, seven to fourteen days after filing, um, you're probably gonna be looking at having to find someplace else to live.

Um that will be difficult.

I guarantee you'd be difficult for me because I got a lot of stuff, but uh most tenants appear alone while landlords routinely have counsel.

I tried to do a all cases filed in Oklahoma in certain counties are on OSCN, so and I can search them by date.

And all those cases in Oklahoma in Cleveland County would be forcible entry entertainers or full of small filed a small claim action, so I can go through and look at all the small claim actions, and I can figure out which ones are forcible entry and detainer cases.

The difficulty is for those cases, they do not upload the documents, they don't upload the petitions, and I can't really look at that to tell you.

I can look at it, I can look at the docket and tell you when it was filed, what the judgment was, but I can't tell you the whys.

Why was this person has to leave it have to do with not paying rent, it have to do with damages, it'd have to do something else along those lines.

So it's really difficult to get really good statistics or a good handle on.

I can tell you how many are filed.

It also doesn't tell you because Cleveland County also includes Noble Moore and South Oklahoma City.

Sometimes you can't tell where that particular case arises from.

A lot of them I can recognize the apartment complex.

I can Google search it and tell me where it is.

Um, but not all of them are that way.

A lot of them are filed as LLCs.

And I have absolutely no idea whether I want to see it located or that where their rental was located.

Um I was erring on the side of leaving those in when I was looking at that information, but it's really really time intensive.

I think I did two weeks, it didn't be two days to go through and figure out all that stuff.

So that really wasn't that helpful.

I don't I it probably would yield some decent information if you could um drill down into those a little bit more, but you literally would have to take all those over to the district court and ask them to pull all those files and give you all those records to be able to figure that out.

But the consequences of addiction include one of them is homelessness, because again, a lot of those people, especially low income, if you don't have some place to live and you get evicted, you might find yourself homelessness.

The other issues have to do with job loss and school instability.

I know that's school instability is one of the factors that legal aid looks at, and we'll talk a little bit about that issue in terms of Oklahoma City.

A lot of times, if you've got a kid that's going to school and you're evicted and you don't have a way to get that kid to school, there's gonna be a lot of instability with regard to school.

We used to do truancy fairly regularly.

One of the things that we would talk about in terms of truancy violations is if you go down to Lexington and you were to talk to most of the people that are incarcerated there, one of the consistent things you're gonna find is most of them were truant when they were school age.

Um, because that just tends to lead to unfortunately those types of issues.

You heard earlier about long-term inability to rent due to court records.

Again, Norman is unique in that we have two competing sort of populations for those low income rentals.

One are university students, the other one are people that may be homeless.

And when you have that, and I've got a landlord, who am I gonna rent to?

Evictions on their record because they've had some difficulty, or these college students don't have any eviction on their record, they're gonna put two or three kids in there.

More likely than not they're gonna be paying their rent on time because they're splitting that up.

More likely than not you're gonna go with that group of college students, which lowers the amount of housing available at that level for people.

Um, so you have those two competing population, which makes us a little bit unique in that respect.

But again, having those evictions on your record definitely does not help with regard to moving forward in terms of renting housing in the future.

Um, and then again, that's an increased demand on local shelters and services along those lines when we have those completely evicted because they for whatever reason they may be in evicted for.

Um local programs typically include an eligibility and eligibility issue.

For example, you're gonna have usually there's an income eligibility sort of criteria.

Um, for example, households under one 100 to 200% of the federal federal policy, federal poverty level, or however you wanted to sort of um to create that to fix that particular eligibility criteria.

Um, scope, we talked a little bit about all stages, very like I said before, very important for those attorneys to get involved on the front end of those cases because there's a lot of decisions that get made in the litigation process.

You may agree to something early on that has a negative impact on you down the line, and maybe if you had counsel, you wouldn't have agreed to that, or you would have you know come up with some sort of other idea, or at least you would have been given the consequences of if you agree to this, this is what can potentially happen going down the line.

And a lot of times, if you don't have that advice very early on, it could be problematic for you.

Armin, our court does have a mediation which can be helpful with regard to getting some of those issues resolved.

But again, if you really don't know what your rights are, it's really difficult for you to go into a mediation and be effective or effectively advocate for yourself if you don't know what your rights are, and attorneys can help with regard to those processes, and then of course, you have the actual hearing, and then you potentially have some appeals where it's appropriate to have counsel during that entire process.

Delivery model, this is one of the things that we were struggling a little bit with.

And I did talk to Michael a little bit.

The lady who is the director of legal aid for our county is Holly, and I don't know how to pronounce her now pronounce her last name.

But Holly and I were on the board of we were on the Cleveland County executive board for quite some time, so I'm not I know her fairly well.

Um, we did talk about the issue of municipal attorneys.

Could you hire another attorney, put them in the city attorney's office and have them do that type of work?

The answer is no, because our charter specifically provides that one attorneys in the city attorney's office only represent the city, and it pre prohibits our attorneys from having outside clients.

Um, the other issue that we talked about is if you were to represent an outside client, you probably would need insurance because again, if somebody in our office did something, we just fire.

We're not, I mean, we we don't have separate insurance because we're self-insured.

But if you're gonna be representing somebody outside the city, and they alleged that you commit malpractice, that's gonna create a problem because our viewably we could say they're outside of scope of their employment.

We're not gonna we're not gonna cover them for that.

So then you put that attorney out there on their own having to potentially answer to that litigation as to whether or not they committed malpractice or not, and whether or not they owed that particular person any damages.

So that creates difficulty when you talk about doing it from the perspective of a municipal staff attorney.

Um one of the other things I did notice, and I did listen to Mike did a um a podcast one time with a couple of other individuals, and um one of the things that they did mention is OCU does have a tenants rights clinic, and OCU was the law school that's downtown Oklahoma City.

They do have a tenants wife clinic.

The difficulty is they will advise people from throughout the state, but they will only represent tenants in Oklahoma County.

So even if you qualified under their criteria, if your case is in Oklahoma County, they can't represent you.

I did look online at OU.

I don't think OU has a 10-age white clinic, but I mean if we thought about approaching them to see if they would be interested in doing something like that.

Um but that is one of the things that I did notice that they have an Oklahoma County that we don't have.

Um legal aid services of Oklahoma did at one point in time have some ARPA funding.

I know for Cleveland County we had some ARPA funding that they were able to offer this service to um tenants in the areas that they serve, which is Cleveland, Pottawatomy, McLean, Hughes, and Seminole County.

Um they serve that our office that's based in Cleveland County serves those particular counties.

Um right to council, they have it in Oklahoma City County, Oklahoma County, counterprogram in Tulsa County, and but those are done by done by zip code.

And Mike told me the zip codes based on one is based on truancy level, the other one is based on I think you told me problematic, problematic landlords in those particular zip codes that they've identified.

Um, you were able to get some help in Oklahoma City and Tulsa's the same, it's done by zip code.

Um, but of course, that depends upon the funding mechanism and whether or not those funds are available for that type of service.

And then Michael's, he's like I said, he's the executive director for legal aid services of Oklahoma and has a lot of knowledge and expertise with regard to this issue.

So I am going to let him talk to you a little bit about his perspective with regard to this issue because when Jeannie was talking earlier about I said a long time ago, we have all kinds of experts.

He's definitely a person I would go to to ask the questions about this issue because he definitely has a lot more experience than I do and some insight that can be helpful with regard to you guys making this decision as to whether or not you think this is appropriate or which way we need to have.

So I'll turn it over to Mike.

Thank you, Rick.

And I'll try to be brief about respect of your time.

Um so, right to counsel evictions.

Think of a bathtub.

Plug is in the drain, the faucets on, it's running, it's running.

Eventually, it overflows.

So you think, oh, I better get a bucket, a second bucket, a third bucket.

It's like, oh, what am I gonna do?

That's evictions.

It's flowing over the tub.

Somebody needs to turn the faucet off.

If not off, at least to a trickle, and that way you can control and kind of have a handle what's going on.

In this county, you're dealing with 4,000 evictions a year, eviction filings.

That's 4,000 families who are living in affordable homes, more than likely, who have lost their homes, and it's pretty constant, it's around you know, three, four hundred every month.

Um that's a significant impact on those folks.

And you heard earlier about services that they need.

I mean, it's profound.

As Rick says, it's a scarlet E.

So, yeah, they can get housing, but it's not housing you and I would want to live in.

And it's probably not healthy for their children, but that's what they have to do.

Uh, if they have to come up with deposits, it's a big challenge.

And it's depressing and impacts people mentally as well.

So, you know, you're forced out of your home.

Um, and it's not because you're a bad tenant, it's not always because you don't have the rent.

We see clients all the time who have the rent.

Uh, they offered it to the spouse, but the husband didn't know, or they offered it to them and they said, Well, we don't want it anymore because you said something, so we don't want you here anymore.

We don't like you.

So there's lots of reasons why people get evicted, have nothing to do with not being able to pay the money.

And during an eviction, you lose your stuff, stuffed donuts and get moved.

As Rick says, school's an issue.

Absenteeism is a big problem in Tulsa, growing problem in Oklahoma City.

And if the kids aren't in school, the school is not getting Title I money.

And homelessness, you heard about that today.

So it affects employment, it affects credit, uh, and it's just nothing good comes from it.

So what legal aid does is we try best we can to go upstream.

As Rick said, the earlier we get people, the better.

All too often, oh, I spent my rent money because I had to fix my car, I had to get to work.

And uh, you know, I got two weeks now, I'll get the rent money.

Well, inevitably two weeks is there, and they're getting a notice.

If they get a hold of legal aid at that joint juncture, we can talk to the landlord.

And you may think, oh, landlords must hate legal aid.

Landlords love legal rate.

Why?

Because we will work out a deal with the landlord early, where the landlord doesn't have to file the landlord's attorney, landlord doesn't have to file anything in the court, landlord doesn't have to worry about vacancy, cleaning things up, re-renting.

That's a big burden.

So we say, hey, he spent the money on the car, he'll make it up in the next two months, he'll pay you extra.

Work out a payment agreement, everybody signs it, everybody's happy.

And it helps to have a lawyer by your side.

It makes a difference.

Even when there's another lawyer, and as Rick said, landlords have lawyers, um, debt collectors have lawyers, batterers have lawyers, uh, the people who I represent don't, unless it's unless it's legal aid.

So the landlords like it.

We try to go upstream, and we're successful.

We did an evaluation uh when we were going great guns there in Oklahoma City with the with the zip codes.

Uh, we had a professional people come in and evaluate everything we did.

95% of the time, we achieve the goals of the client.

And it's different when you have an attorney, you're treated different, the court treats you different, the landlord treats you different.

You're a given respect that you wouldn't have otherwise.

They listen and they're agreeable because they know if it gets messy, it's gonna cost a landlord a lot of money.

And so they want to resolve things, let's work things out, let's make a deal, and that's what we do.

And sometimes you can't make a deal.

I mean, there's there's people getting evicted for discriminatory reasons, and we don't stand for that.

And if we have to file complaints and we have to bring litigation, we will.

But the bottom line is once you get that reputation, it's like, oh, well, geez, legal aids representing this tenant, we better, we better make a deal.

And that's what they do.

And uh, so still though, once we get somebody out of the eviction, we're not done.

Because there's still the biggest problem, poverty, or some kind of aspect of poverty is why they couldn't pay the rent or or having a hard time.

So we do everything we can to increase their income.

If they're disabled, we get them on disability.

If they're unemployed, we get them on unemployment.

So many of our clients have never filed taxes in two, three years.

We get them earned income tax credits.

The average earned income tax credit for a family in Oklahoma, it's almost three thousand dollars.

We have settled evictions just by going in, showing the landlord, here's the claim from the IRS, it's coming in the next two weeks, and they'll say, Oh, okay, well, if the money's coming, yeah, I can wait.

And so we do all these things to get more money into the house.

You'd be surprised how many people work and don't get paid.

We can collect unpaid wages, there's unpaid child support, lots of revenue sources.

Then we look on the other side.

There's the money going out.

If you've been incarcerated, you have fines and fees, and everybody has them.

And the the thinking is oh, if I don't pay those fines and fees, they'll put me back in jail.

So I have to choose pay the fines and fees or pay my rent.

Well, I'm gonna have to pay those fines and fees.

Legal aid gets those waived, they just go away, they're waived, but you have to have an attorney, you have to go to court, but we get that all done, and the next thing you know, they have more money, they have significantly less debt, and they're better off.

And we work with them in capacities of you know, make sure they're getting snapped, making sure they're getting health insurance, and we stick with them.

We check on them, and that way they're never gonna face eviction, more than likely, and they're gonna be somebody who's gonna be a better tenant as well.

So it's easy to fix, and you know, the 4,000 people losing their homes every year, maybe that doesn't have to be.

And if it's not, that's a lot less uh the homeless services you talked about, because there'll be less people and there'll be more people housed and they'll be housed in a way that they can maintain that.

Any questions?

All right, council member again, this barrier.

Um said what you mostly deal with the Oklahoma City area and everything, metro type area and everything like that.

Does your fee to you know what you operate on, obviously, and everything to help these people?

Where does your funding structure come from the most?

Where does it come from?

Well, in the past, it comes from grants that don't exist anymore, the ARPAs and the ERAPs, and uh I mean it's called right to counsel.

You know, I I it doesn't write to counsel implies, hey, I have a right.

You owe me an attorney.

And I don't know that that's reasonable, but certainly right now, there's almost no or very little access to an attorney in this county.

Uh, if there was significantly more than there is now, it may not be a right, but certainly a lot more if not all of those 4,000 people have access to legal services.

And what we charge is one full-time attorney, I mean full-time, it's all they do is stop the evictions and get these people rehabilitated is 100,000.

So if he did, you know, if you had five and a couple paralegals, that'd be about 600,000.

And if you had five attorneys who did nothing but evictions, they would do approximately uh five a week times five is 25.

I mean, yeah, you're getting up to uh you know 100, 200 a month.

And again, the the numbers I'm looking at, the three, four hundred, those are filings, they don't all end up in evictions.

You're making a big debt.

You're making a big impact.

Does Oklahoma City uh council or anything like that?

Do they give any money or donate to the wave themselves there to help supplement some of your Oklahoma City?

Yeah, yeah.

They did.

I mean, when we had the ERAP, there was millions.

And uh now in Tulsa, for example, the foundations are paying most of the freight for that, but the city is just city themselves though, do not need either of those two.

Okay.

Um, and just uh just to clarify that, and what we talked a little bit about um for that program again, Cleveland County or legal aid for our area did have that service before, paid for by ARPA fundings.

They had two attorneys that did that at about 100,000 apiece.

We also talked about one legal assistant.

So if you had the two attorneys and the one legal assistant, and this number comes from from Chat, the legal assistant number comes from Chat GP about what the average cost of a legal assistant in this area is.

That number is about 265 a year.

Funding models, again, you could take it if you found the money in the general funds, you could make that appropriate, you could make that expand from the general funds.

Um I don't think we have any ARPA funds left over, or we don't have other isn't any other federal funds available, like Mike was saying when they're available.

Some of it comes from philanthropy.

We did talk a little bit about the transient guest room tax, but that's an issue that you'd have to submit to the voters because the the way that that is structured right now, um, that those that revenue has to be for tourism purposes.

Um, so that would be we've talked about raising it.

One of the things that we talked about is would the majority of counsel interested in putting something on there that also talked about um allocating some of the that funding with regard to um legal assistance with regard to people that are being evicted, but those are sort of the thought processes with regard to funding model, and there could be other potential funding sources out there.

I just I just don't know about at this particular moment.

I don't have a question.

Are you done?

Yeah, go ahead.

Go ahead.

Um, so for uh is this the needs are for the county or for Norman?

When I talked to Holly, it was more when she had an attorney that did this work for her area, and I'm going to assume it was for all of those counties.

Now, when I talked to Mike a little bit because we were talking about the thought process of okay, how do you pull out just the Norman people?

But remember in Oklahoma and Tulsa County, it's based on zip code.

So one of the ways, I mean, there is a mechanism on their website for you to apply for that type of assistance.

But they also will go over to the courthouse during those um small claims dockets, set up a table that has that information, you would come and inquire, they would check to see whether or not you're in that zip code.

If you're not in the zip code, sorry, we can't help you.

If you are in the zip code, yes, we can.

So that would be a similar mechanism.

I would think that if if we were to do something like that, it would be probably run the same way.

I know Judge Shielders has her small claim docket every Friday.

And you know, I'm looking at when I looked at that two-week time period, and I just started the first the first um business day in January of 2025.

There are a couple of days where there weren't that many filed, there are a number of days where there were 30 or 40 filed.

Um, and like I say, when I look at the disposition dates, a lot of the disposition dates were the same day.

So all those people were over there at the same time.

Um, you know, getting their cases either adjudicated.

A lot of times um, unfortunately, what'll happen is you'll be late on your rent.

He knows you're going to pay it late, but yet you've got to show up to court.

He wants you to pay the filing fee along with whatever you're in arrears for.

You go to court, you pay him, it gets dismissed.

But again, you now have that, you've created that record for this person going forward where anybody can pull it up, pull your name up on OSCN and it's going to tell me this how many times you've had that um forcible entry entertainer filed against you.

And again, part of it is probably education.

I know Daryl and I did talk about even if you didn't necessarily do the full-blown program at a minimum.

Could we put something on our website to where people had questions?

And I know the city clerk's office, their action line probably does get some inquiries.

I know every every once in a while our office will get an inquiry.

It'd be helpful if we knew what those resources were, so we could even if we weren't providing the program, we could say no, but this is where you can call for somebody to help you with those issues.

Um I was initially thinking of Andrew K because it was just one lawyer, and I was just thinking to for Norman that could be like a pilot, as it were.

Um I was talking to uh assistant city manager Stevenson and Parks Director Olson earlier, and it sounded like uh Anthony Francisco was telling us that state statutes say that the guest room tax actually has to be for uh tourism and whatnot.

And so even if we did change our ordinance, there would be a conflict.

I'd have to go look at that.

That's not what I'd have to look at.

Question mark, I guess we could look at that.

The other thought was that we could put it in the social and voluntary services, you know, how we do that funding and then just allocate from the general fund to this particular uh use to legal aid.

Um so that was another thought about how we could kind of pay for one lawyer who's dedicated to Norman issues, uh, so that folks can not be fast-tracked into homelessness.

And I think that's an issue we'd sit down with Mike and Holly and sort of talk about their thought process on that issue.

Yeah, your idea of a pilot's a good idea that we come back and say, This is what we've done with one, and it's you know, if it's like I think it's gonna be, you may say, Wow, well, that's great.

Okay.

Councilmember, council member Gainsbury.

With your expertise and everything, um, and hearing about a pilot of possibly one attorney and everything that realistically, you know, when you have one of you know, you mentioned one, two, five attorneys working on them, you know, and that's all they're doing.

How many cases uh week uh or month can one attorney handle successfully note that 95% rate and give it it's each person their full you know time in it.

It'll depend on the level of experience, but generally speaking, it's gonna be five to seven.

We're talking about contested evictions a week that they could do.

And so that's you know, 40, 50 a month.

I mean, that's an impact.

And uh certainly we'll have to probably come up with some priorities to decide who we help and maybe who we don't help if we if we're busy, and those priorities are probably involved people who are you know, obviously facing eviction or have some kind of a reason or defense, and we can we can really help them.

Gotcha.

Thank you.

And we did there's a little bit out when I was looking at this earlier.

Um, there were things like seeing, I mean, you could have it where your priority were were families with children, or your priorities were seniors, disabled person, yeah, or people in those categories.

Um seniors is a great one because we just heard earlier that it was basically first time older folks facing homelessness, uh, and most of it is the rent and the bills.

So uh councilmember Bruce.

So you talk about augmenting, you know, asking oh you to have a similar program that they have in the city.

Yes.

And they came back with a formal response, said no.

We haven't asked them.

I just I when I was when I talked to Mike this afternoon or this morning, and then I was looking for information about him to put on this PowerPoint.

I came across a um a podcast that he had done with the Bar Association, actually with John Morris, who used to be the executive director of the creeping of the Oklahoma Bar Association, and he would do podcasts about different issues, and one of them was about the housing issue, specifically about this issue.

Is when they I listened to that podcast, I heard somebody mention the fact that I was see you had a program.

I'm like, that's interesting.

I know OU has a legal clinic, and I know OU's legal clinic um does do some civil cases.

I know the lady who's the director of the OU legal clinic.

I just haven't, I mean, just because Dak came to mute it out and have time to contact her to sort of talk through with this issue with her, but I don't have a problem doing that.

The OCU clinic, like even the OU clinic, if there was one, it's a teaching tool.

So that's it, it's me as an attorney with you know, two or three students telling them how to do things, and and they're not gonna have the capacity to look beyond the eviction, and they're really not gonna have the capacity to do any appeals again again because it's it's instruction, and it's good instruction, they do a good job, but they're limited as to their capacity, what they can do.

I understand.

I'm I'm just looking for your 4,000 heck of a lot.

And looking at your expertise, I'm thinking if there's an agreement already OU and share some of that knowledge with the students.

That's 4,000 for the county.

Um we're probably thinking maybe a couple hundred a month for Norman.

If I'm looking at it, if I'm remembering, and I well, you're if I'm remembering it's only gonna be able to handle if I'm 20, you know.

Well, if I'm remembering 30 a month, period.

Yeah, if I remember the information I put together, and it's the first two weeks in January of this year.

And again, we're probably erring a little bit on the high side because the ones I had questions about I left in.

I think that number was 174.

Well, that's a two-week time period.

Well, I'm interested in exploring a pilot for us.

Uh and it could involve the OU legal clinic.

I understand the limitations.

Um, but given what we're seeing currently in Norman, I think it would be pretty good investment.

I think I was reading uh it was Oklahoma watch or policy institute said for every dollar you spend on uh helping people with the fiction process, you're saving about seven dollars and twenty-seven cents elsewhere.

So I think it would be beneficial, and also seeing the fastest growing uh segment of the population of seniors.

But we also I I mean, back when I was an OE student and I was uh doing my journalism assignment, I went to an end homelessness coalition 2015 meeting that was like a public meeting you could sit in on, and I was hearing about a family living in a car out at Lake Thunderbird.

Uh, and I know that hasn't really changed, like it's 2025, and there are probably other families that are in a similar position.

So, if not more, because also Oklahoma Watch had an article that came out that said the SNAP uh freeze during the government shutdown has strained people.

Uh hi to you.

You want to say something?

Oh yes, two things.

Legal it was a game changer during COVID, and when the eviction moratorium hit, and then after that happened, and they set up a table at Cleveland County Courthouse, and we're just helping people, and it was a huge huge I mean pound of prevention.

So it it stops homelessness.

So for my perspective, yay.

Also, that Oklahoma Watch article was was excellent.

And one of the things that they did is they provided leaflets to the people who were the county sheriffs who were going out and serving the evictions that they provided him with a slip of paper that they could put in that gave contact information, like you're being evicted, who's here's who you can call for help.

And that may be just a small little thing, but to be able to get the word out directly to people who are experiencing homelessness for a marginally low sum of money, but the problem then becomes who's gonna answer the word email.

Are there any other questions or thoughts from counsel?

I see you shaking ahead.

Move forward.

I like the pilot idea.

Yeah.

Trying out, figuring out how we can get something going.

Yeah, I would love to bring this back to oversight, we can put some more info together and explore what a pilot uh would entail, what it would cover, uh, who might be our partners, and how we'll do funding.

Okay.

Well, if there are no other questions, I'm gonna call this meeting adjourned.

And thank you, everybody for.