Okay, I'd like to call to order this meet this historic meeting of the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors, the Sacramento City Council, and our other city partners in Oak Grove, Folsom, Ranch Cordova, Citrus Heights, and Galt.

Madam Clerks, will you please call the roll and establish the form?

Good morning, Supervisors Kennedy.

Air Desmond.

Here.

Rodriguez.

Here.

Hugh.

Here.

Cerna.

Here.

Good morning.

From the City of Sacramento.

Council Member Kaplan is expected shortly.

Council Member Dickinson.

Vice Mayor Talamantes.

Councilmember Pleckybaum.

Here.

Councilmember Maple.

Here.

Mayor Pro Tem Gatta.

Here.

Council Member Jennings.

Here.

Councilmember Vang.

Here.

And Mayor McCarty.

Here.

And Rancho Cordova Council Member Bud is expected momentarily.

Elk Grove Mayor Singh Allen.

Here.

Citrus Heights Mayor Karpinski Costa.

Present.

Mayor Farmer.

Here.

Fulson Mayor Aquino.

Here.

Thank you.

Chairs, you have a quorum.

Very good.

Thank you very much.

Now, if you are able, please rise for the opening acknowledgments in honor of Sacramento's Indigenous people and tribal lands to the original people of this land, the Nissanon people, the Southern Maidu Valley, and Plains Muak, Potwin Winton peoples, and the people of the Wilton Rancheria, Sacramento's only federalized, uh federally recognized tribe.

Thank you.

And may we acknowledge and honor the native people who came before us and still walk beside us today on these ancestral lands by choosing to gather together an active practice of acknowledgement and appreciation of Sacramento's indigenous people's history, contributions, and lives.

Thank you.

Please remain standing and join us in the Pledge of Allegiance.

One nation.

This joint meeting of the County City collaboration on homeless services and behavioral health is live and recorded with closed captioning.

It is cable cast on Metro Cable Channel 14, the local government affairs channel on the Comcast and Direct TV verse cable systems.

It is also live streamed at Metro 14 Live.gov.

Today's meeting replays on Friday, October 31st at 6 o'clock PM on Metro Cable Channel 14.

The recording of this meeting can be viewed on demand at YouTube.com slash Metro Cable 14.

The Board of Supervisors and City Council members welcome and encourage public participation, civility, and the use of courteous language.

The members do not condone the use of profanity, vulgar language, gestures, or other inappropriate behavior, including personal attacks or threats directed towards any meeting participant.

Public comment will be limited to two minutes per speaker.

The co-chairs may adjust these times, including the total allocated time for the entire public comment period to ensure the orderly conduct of the meeting and to allow time for all scheduled business.

The recordings are shared to provide transparency and access to the proceedings of public meetings.

To make a comment in person, please fill out a speaker request form and hand it to the clerk staff.

The co-chairs will open public comments for the agenda item and direct the clerk to call the name of each speaker.

When the clerk calls your name, please come to the lecturer and to make your comment.

If a speaker is unavailable to make comment prior to the closing of public comments, the speaker waves their request to speak, and the clerk will file the speaker request form in the record.

You may send written comments by email to board clerk at stackcounty.gov.

Your comment will be filed in the record.

In compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, if you need special assistance to participate in this meeting, please see clerk staff for assistance.

Thank you in advance for your courtesy and understanding of the meeting procedures.

Very good.

Thank you very much.

So I'm gonna offer some uh opening remarks.

I guess I'll start with um this is uh historic meeting as uh has already been mentioned of uh the entirety of the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors, the entirety of the city of Sacramento City Council, uh, and uh the mayor's or mayor's representatives from the six uh suburban cities, other cities in Sacramento County.

Uh to my knowledge, we've never had uh a convening uh with this uh composition.

Uh and today's meeting obviously uh is focused on a one particular uh subject, that being uh homelessness, it's I think um on everyone's uh top of mind.

Uh certainly regardless if you are in the city of Sacramento, County of Sacramento, uh, or our other uh municipal uh areas within within the county.

Um this is our opportunity to bring everyone together, obviously, and to um communicate and collaborate in public uh as we should.

Um I think that the gathering is gonna provide a shared space for elected leaders uh certainly to learn more about uh what we're doing in our uh other respective areas of the county.

Uh but uh one thing I do want to emphasize is that we're not uh checking a box today.

Uh this is really about um taking away from this day uh a better future for how we collaborate and uh work together as partners to address what is no doubt the most complex, complicated uh subject in front of us as uh local electeds and uh certainly as you know uh members of uh the public in general and certainly um our CBO partners uh who uh without them uh I think we'd have a very different uh prospect for um how we address uh the subject.

Uh speaking of which we do have uh in the one of the West rooms over here a number of our uh CBO partners were blessed here in Sacramento County and our entire region with a number of nonprofits that are committed uh to uh flanking local government uh and we flank them as well.

We work in partnership uh to make sure that uh when we do set policies and we do appropriate resources, we do it with their input.

Uh and uh without them uh again uh I think it would be a very um uh difficult, uh much more difficult uh uh prospect for how we uh grapple with uh the subject of homelessness.

So I want to make sure that everyone understands that uh this is not just about listening to us and hearing from members of the public that might join us here at the podium later, but please take advantage of what uh our CBO partners have to offer during our our break a little bit later.

Um I want to uh I'm gonna offer some thank yous a little bit later, but I just want to thank uh upfront uh the individual to my right, uh Mayor Kevin McCarty.

Uh the mayor has been a steadfast um partner from the uh inception of this idea, which uh actually uh was something that was brought to my attention by my friend and colleague to my left, uh Councilmember Eric Guerra, who is um uh really been uh focused uh as all council members and and board members have, uh, representing the sixth district in the city of Sacramento, but uh to have this come together the way it did with uh the leadership of the mayor and the leadership of uh councilmember Guerra and myself, and certainly uh the vice chair of the Board of Supervisors, uh Supervisor Rosara Rodriguez, uh newest member of our board.

I think the four of us coming together as we have over the preceding months uh to help organize and provide input to shape what today's agenda is about and what we hope to um uh achieve.

Uh, I just feel that I would be remiss if I didn't um uh at the uh front end of today's agenda uh thank them all.

So at this point uh I'm gonna be quiet and I'm gonna let uh my partner uh mayor Kevin McCarty uh share some words.

Thank you, uh Supervisor CERN.

I know we have a uh robust agenda and we'll get to it, and and I'll try to be uh brief here, but um uh most importantly we're we're all on this together, as you noted, and I'm so pleased that we're here and I think it's powerful that we're here today.

Um, not only is it does it look like a powerful meeting, and we've all chuckled that we feel like we're at a UN meeting right here this morning, but um it's a powerful topic, and I think it it speaks uh volumes that if you ask people in Sacramento if they want to drive and see homelessness firsthand, they would probably come right here to right across from our city hall or the libraries here on any getting every given morning you can see homelessness firsthand and it's not just a city of sacramento issue we're we're all in this together and and I'm so pleased that our supervisors who don't represent any of the heart of Sacramento like Supervisor Rodriguez or or um Mayor Bobby Singhal and her Mayor Aquino realize that we are all in this together and uh today we're not gonna have one magic solution to solving homelessness.

It took us many many years to get where we are today.

It's gonna take us a while to work on this together and that's the key word is working on these issues together.

So uh thank you Supervisor uh Cerna for co-chairing this for leading this and I also want to acknowledge our our mayor pro tem guera who suggested that we do this and yes several years ago mayor Steinberg um and the then chair the board of supervisors I don't remember who it was at that time uh had an idea to convene the city and the county but as far as we know in the history of Sacramento there's never been a gathering of the county board of supervisors the city council and the mayors from from the cities across the region and so this just shows our commitment and better aligning.

I know that we're not gonna solve this by not talking together.

And so I also know that by being here together and communicating we're gonna increase our odds of aligning our resources sharing our ideas and walking down the path together and if there's one thing that I want to get out of this today it's not the single plan or the action item it's a commitment that this is um the beginning of a more structured partnership to work on the issue of homelessness in tandem so so with that we want we also want to thank our our partners who help on these issues it's not just the city and the county it's our federal partners from our congressional delegation from our our Congress members uh mainly for this area uh Matt Suey and Berra um also our legislative partners I know one has joined the audience with us today and our assembly member for the heart of Sacramento Assembly member Krell uh but also um our partners in all levels of government because we are in this together so with that uh let's begin let's get to work.

Thank you thank you.

Thank you Mayor and uh I do have one uh small list of thank yous again that I I really feel like uh I need to mention before we uh get to the substance of today um our clerks uh the the clerk of the board uh Nicole Lee and uh the city's clerk mini cuppy they're gonna be pulling double duty literally today and so uh wanted to first start with um a hearty thanks to to them for not just uh clerking today but there's been a phenomenal amount of uh time and energy that has gone into um uh setting up the room uh appropriately the logistics uh for uh getting 20 elected leaders uh in one place for one day to talk about uh complicated subject uh so uh I really do uh want to thank uh Nicole and and Mindy for um your help uh before today and uh during the course of today I also want to um uh give a uh shout out to Hang Wynn I don't know where she's at but uh she there she is she's our interim uh clerk of the board uh she's also pulling double duty she's also our registrar of voters uh and so uh hang has been just uh tremendous um partner uh working alongside uh our administrative leadership with our county CEO David Villanueva and his executive team uh most notably uh shoffon uh katari uh who we'll uh hear from here shortly uh but it really has been a great group of folks uh Emily Halcon, our director of homeless services uh coming together for the past uh few months to um uh make today uh what we know it will be, which is uh a productive day that uh one that uh at the end of it produces I think uh again a stronger uh future for how we collaborate and uh address the subject of homelessness.

So with that, I just want to then now go over uh briefly some of what you can expect in terms of the agenda.

Um, of course, we're gonna acknowledge um and uh kind of outline the distinct but connected roles our jurisdictions uh play in addressing homelessness.

Uh the county, I think as most know, uh, is responsible and provides uh core safety net services like behavioral health, substance use treatment, social services, and uh operate some shelters in the unincorporated areas.

Our city partners are responsible for citing and operating shelters for residents within their own jurisdictions.

Uh you'll hear about our coordinated access system as well as the partnerships uh that currently exist.

Uh shelter beds that are operated by both the county and the city of Sacramento are open to uh to uh obviously uh help um our common constituency regardless of political geography.

Um we want to certainly uh strengthen and discuss and strengthen those connections about our systems and how they align uh today.

Uh and then we're gonna have presentations from the county and city uh homeless teams.

Uh Sacramento Steps Forward and the Sheriff's Department highlighting progress and opportunities.

Uh we'll have a presentation from our county behavioral health team about services for individuals experiencing homelessness, including legal pathways into treatment for individuals unable to engage and care on their own.

Uh we'll be discussing potential and real impacts of the budget, our respective budgets and policy uh decisions and uh recent changes at the state and federal level, providing important context for uh all of our local work.

Uh after those presentations, we'll break for lunch and invite everyone to visit our again our CBO partners in the West Room, which is uh just adjacent to uh these uh chambers here.

We're gonna be reconvening around 1 30.

We'll move into a visioning session facilitated by uh mosaic strategies.

Uh again, they've been a great partner in getting us to where we are today uh in terms of helping shape the agenda, but they're gonna be uh critical this afternoon to kind of really um help this group of uh 20 elected people around this day as well as the public uh to really tease out uh what that brighter future uh can uh and in my opinion should look like.

Uh public comment will be taken after that.

Um, and then we'll have uh we'll have some final remarks, direction to staff on next steps.

So that is a very high-level uh general review of what you can expect uh today, and I believe at this point, uh, we're gonna hear from our county executive.

Thank you, Supervisor Sooner, and thank you, uh Mayor McCarty.

And uh welcome everybody, board of supervisors and county and fellowship.

David, can you bring the mic a little closer?

Thank you.

Thank you, Supervisor Cerna, and thank you, Mayor McCarty, and good morning.

Uh Board of Supervisors and uh Council members.

Uh my name is David Villanueva.

I'm the Sacramento County County Executive, and I just wanted to take a moment to thank you all for being here and and this is an incredible moment for us to pull all the county, the county and all the city jurisdictions together, and we were just incredibly grateful for everybody's participation in what we're doing.

I also wanted to thank, I know uh Supervisor Cerna had thanked a lot of staff.

This it took uh quite a bit to pull this together, and they've done a wonderful job pulling together all the technology and aligning everybody's schedules and getting us all pulled together.

So I appreciate the um both the city and the county staff and all they've done.

Just to give you a quick uh introduction of the folks sitting behind me and next to me.

So we not only do we have uh senior several senior executives from the county, but we also have the city of Sacramento uh interim city manager.

We have the city manager from um Citrus Heights, Rancher Cordova, and Elk Grove and Folsom City Manager.

Um we also have the city manager or representative from the uh city uh Galt.

We also have joining us in this behind me is uh the continuum of care chair and Sacramento Steps Forward representatives and also uh a representative from the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency.

Um we also have, of course, our county attorney, uh, county Council and our city attorney here.

And just wanted to uh introduce everybody behind us, and we're looking forward to hearing the discussion that you have today and moving uh both all of our jurisdictions forward with based on the information you provide today.

So thank you for your time.

Great, thank you very much, David.

Um at this point, I'd like to uh uh introduce our uh mosaic uh team.

Uh this is uh uh we have Matt Kate with us and uh Darby Kerner from Mosaic Strategies.

Um the county and city of Sacramento brought them in a few months ago to help us again with the with the process.

Uh both are partners in their firm, uniquely experienced in the world of public policy uh and public advocacy, and both have long careers in state and local government and are help are here to help facilitate a uh vision visioning session on responding to homelessness uh in a uh I'm gonna say countywide approach.

Uh we had many discussions about the use of the word uh regional, and certainly um uh have no um problem with the term, but of course, this is uh countywide, including the cities uh within the county of Sacramento that we're uh discussing today in terms of just setting the geographic um tone for the discussion.

Good morning, everybody.

I'm Darby Kernan, a partner at Mosaic Solutions and Advocacy.

We've had an opportunity to talk and meet with all of you.

Um a brief introduction.

Um I'm born and raised in Sacramento.

I grew up in the legislature, working in the Senate.

When I left, I ran the legislative department of corrections, their legislative team, and when I left there, I did work in the Pro Tems office running their public safety and mental health issues, and then went to the California State Association of Counties where I ran their legislative team for seven years.

Um Matt's gonna introduce himself briefly.

Problem number one is gonna be moving this mic up and down for my uh business partner and I.

Uh good morning, Matt Kate.

Um, as uh Darby said, we worked together at Mosaic.

Um I started my career here in Sacramento County as a prosecutor, also worked for uh the Department of Justice in that role.

That came with uh very distinct views because I had limited experience.

Uh eventually became the inspector general of California and joined the governor's cabinet as the Secretary of Corrections, and then uh was the director of the association of counties.

That brings much broader experience and a lot of humility, I hope.

As you see that all problems are complicated, especially this problem.

And so, Darby and I want to thank you very much for the invitation to take part.

We both love our city.

Uh we love the people here and appreciate the leadership.

We've had a great time meeting and talking with all of you and your staff.

Very impressive group, and we look forward to playing just a small part in helping to facilitate this meeting and try to bring out the views of uh the elected leaders here, all of you uh who care so much about this issue.

So thank you for the opportunity to be involved.

All right, now we're gonna start with some fancy stuff.

We're gonna do the Mentimeter.

So if you could pull out your phones, there should be a QR code behind your name tag.

And if you could pull up their camera, get the QR code and type in your name.

Now I'm gonna give you a minute.

And um staff are here to help if you need anything.

And good to go.

Okay.

Um, so we have three quick brief yes or no questions for you to start off this meeting.

And um, both Supervisor Cerna and Mayor McCarty were really interested in kind of getting folks' input at the beginning and at the end.

So we'll have another question at the very end.

We'll have a couple more questions at the very end of the meeting.

Are we ready to go?

Yep.

Okay, so the very first question is are you happy with the status quo?

Yes or no.

And then the second question, and answers will be up on the board.

Give it a minute.

All right.

The second question.

Oh, we're still getting, okay.

Okay.

In our city.

That's fine.

Yeah.

Got it.

Oh, so okay, I see.

We talked about that baseball game last night, right, guys?

Right?

Absolutely.

Yes.

Are they going to change it?

Oh, okay.

Oh, there you are.

We need a couple more.

Wait, what are we doing?

Nothing.

You wait.

Nice exclamation.

We are only.

Okay.

Only six minutes.

Okay.

The second question is Do you believe elected officials should be directly involved in addressing this challenge of homelessness?

Resounding yeses.

Okay.

I think we've got everybody.

And the final question.

Do you think elected officials from the county and the cities within the county are working closely enough together to address this challenge?

Mines is still on the old one.

Next question.

So as you probably can guess, our job is to challenge all of you on what those answers mean and to talk into some depth about what your views are.

We'll share what we know a little bit, and we'll be going into depth as during the visioning session, and then asking you some uh additional questions at the end to see uh what your um what your views are then and whether they've changed.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay.

All right, thank you.

Okay, our uh, I guess our first uh presentation.

Well, I need I need a cue here.

I'm I'm what's our what's our next step, Siobhan?

Our first presentation will be progress and possibilities, and Emily Halkin from the county will kick us off.

All right, very good, thank you.

I'm gonna beg everyone's indulgence uh again today.

This is not an easy task to try and uh manage this uh early complicated agenda here.

Welcome.

Great, thank you so much.

Good morning, Chair Cerna, Mary McCarty, members of the board, and our city councils from throughout the county.

My name is Emily Halkin.

I'm the director of the County of Sacramento's Department of Homeless Services and Housing.

And I'm really happy to be here today with my colleagues from all of the cities throughout the county, as well as our continuum of care partners to share with you some of the progress that we've made over the past few years to prevent and end homelessness, as well as the possibilities that we see as we continue our collaboration together.

As they stand up, each of my colleagues will introduce themselves to share some of the great work that they're seeing in their communities.

Great.

So while we're working together on more consistent and frequent ways to count the homeless population in the county, the point in time count remains a familiar and relatively easy to understand indicator.

But it is important to note that the point in time count only captures those who are experiencing literal homelessness on a single night.

And of course, the most recent point in time count was in 2024.

We do estimate that the total count of people who will experience at least one night of homelessness is likely two to three times what the point in time count is.

However, the point in time count does provide us some really useful information on understanding more about who is experiencing homelessness.

Some of the things to lift up, which are on this slide, 33% of our homeless population is black, as compared to 9% of our countywide population.

Almost 45% of those identified to the point in time count say that they are chronically homeless, which means that they've been experiencing homelessness for at least one continual year and have at least one disabling condition.

Twenty-five percent of those counted indicated that they've been a part of the child welfare system before they were 18.

And importantly for us, as we have this conversation, 62% of them identify themselves as Sacramentans, and 90% said that they had been in Sacramento for at least six months at the night they were encountered.

And of course, importantly, as today we're here to talk about solutions that are countywide.

While the unsheltered population is certainly concentrated in the city of Sacramento, as the mayor had said, including large portions of the American River Parkway, there is no community that is immune to this challenge.

There are counts of unsheltered homelessness in each of your cities and the unincorporated county.

Most notably is it was only just over 30 years ago that the federal government established what is known as the continuum of care and dedicated funding to that process, which today primarily supports permanent housing efforts as a lot as well as a lot of our system work that our partners at the COC do, and you're gonna hear from them in a bit.

Sacramento Steps Forward, of course, took over as the lead agency for that continuum from the county in 2011.

In more recent years, you'll see that many jurisdictions, including the county and many of your cities, have created dedicated housing and homeless staffing and invested many of your own local dollars towards this complex issue.

And it was only in 2019 that the state of California started to substantially invest in these efforts with the first rounds of the homeless housing assistance program or HAP coming to fruition.

And more recently, the City of Sacramento and the County of Sacramento, of course, entered into what is known as our homeless partnership agreement, and those two jurisdictions, along with our continuum of care, adopted a regionally coordinated homelessness action plan.

All of this, of course, means that we are investing more in a variety of programs that provide both critical services to people experiencing homelessness, but also to critical services that are addressing the unintended community impacts of unsheltered homelessness.

This is the first time we've ever been able to compile this countywide, but looking just at the funding that flows exclusively through the county budget, many of the city budgets, and the continuum of care, we estimate that in the last fiscal year, this community has invested over 418 million dollars in a variety of programs, which are detailed here.

The table on the left details the high-level program types that are being supported by these funds.

As you can see, most of the dollars fund those critical services to support people experiencing homelessness, shelter, housing, behavioral health, and other safety net services such as CowWorks, CowFresh, and Medi-Cal.

Given the county's role in overseeing these critical service programs, it's not surprising to see that 66% of the regional or countywide investment comes through the county's budget.

However, it is important to note that many of these funds, including ARPA and our HAP investments, are one time and many are not discretionary.

So as we start thinking about how the region might look at how we're gonna address homelessness together or differently, we must do it with a recognition that our actual discretionary funding is pretty limited, and that access to many of these services in the blue county bucket or pie piece are critical both in preventing folks from entering homelessness as well as critical to helping them exit homelessness.

And a little bit later this morning, our partner Alex from the National Alliance to End Homelessness is gonna dive more into some of these funding sources and how the current state of federal and state policy and budget decisions are potentially impacting the landscape of some of these critical funding sources.

So these investments have allowed each of your communities to innovate in recent years.

Each jurisdiction is gonna highlight just a few ways that they are doing new and creative things in their community and adapting to the needs that reflect the population that they see in their community.

I'm gonna start with the county.

Three things I want to highlight.

In the past few years, the Board of Supervisors has really focused on two initiatives to really work to address the unsheltered populations in the unincorporated county, but also serving countywide residents.

First, we have reimagined our outreach teams, increasing both the number of workers that are on the ground, but also ensuring that they're providing what we call case carrying services.

And this means that our outreach workers stay connected to people as they live outside as long as it takes to ensure a positive exit out of unsheltered homelessness.

I'm proud to say that in the first six months of this year, I just shared with the board last week.

These teams provided an average of 40 unique service touches per person living unsheltered and successfully moved over 200 of them out of unsheltered homelessness.

We do this in work with in partnership with Community HealthWorks or COHIWO, who's here today, and I encourage you to meet them and learn about the great work they're doing during your break.

Secondly, the county has pivoted our shelter approach to what we call safe stays.

Hopefully you've heard about these.

This is recognizing the impact of non-congregate service rich shelters, not only in engaging folks to willingly come into shelter, but also to increasing successful outcomes out of shelter.

Since 2022, the county has opened over 350 new beds in safe state communities, and we have another 225 that we are going to celebrate opening early next year.

And while the county is focusing on these crisis interventions because they are necessary, like outreach and shelter, we're also focusing on increasing permanent housing exits.

We know that without those permanent housing exits, these crisis interventions are simply a band-aid.

We're working to launch a flexible housing pool in 2026 in partnership with our managed care plans, to have a central place for landlord engagement and tenancy support, and to help operationalize what is a new CalAM transitional rent benefit coming through the managed care plans.

And I look forward to sharing more about that with your staff and hopefully with all of you in the new year.

With that, I'd like to pass the podium to my friend Nicole from the City of Citrus Heights.

So good morning.

My name is Nicole Piva.

I'm the housing and human services coordinator for the city of Citrus Heights, and I'm here to share how Citrus Sites is addressing homelessness and affordable housing through a balanced, compassionate, and proactive approach.

In Citrus Heights, we believe in balancing compassion with accountability.

That means helping unsheltered individuals access the resources they need while also protecting the safety, cleanliness, and accessibility of our public spaces.

Our homeless response and prevention strategy connects with vital services from emergency shelter, permanent supportive housing to mental health support, hygiene kits, and food through partnerships with Sacramento County.

Through the partnerships with Sacramento County and Community Health Works, Citrus Heights Heart, Sunrise Christian Food Ministry, we're providing pathways to stability.

With this work, it's not just about services.

We're committed to maintaining the quality of life for all residents by enforcing ordinances around illegal camping, dumping, and nuisance behavior to help maintain public safety and community standards.

We're also investing in the future of Citrus Heights with our beautification crew who is out daily cleaning up graffiti and abandoned items, helping restore the pride in our neighborhoods.

And we're making historic strides in affordable housing.

We've completed Sunrise Point Apartments, the city's first affordable housing project in over 20 years, providing 46 units of permanent supportive housing.

We're also transforming the Auburn Oak site into 88 units of affordable housing with on-site mental health services.

And through our partnership with Habitat for Humanity, we're building 26 single family homes on Cyanara Drive for low-income families, opening the doors to homeownership and long-term stability.

So through SERP through services, enforcement, and long-term investment, we're shaping a healthier, safer, and more compassionate Citrus sites.

Next, I'd like to introduce Sarah with City of Elk Grove.

Good morning.

I'm Sarah Vontrager, Housing and Public Services Manager for the City of Elk Grove.

I'm going to share a couple of the things that we're working on.

We are coming up on the first year anniversary of our year-round shelter, and that is in a leased facility, so we are already working on planning for our new shelter with a focus on trauma-informed design and being able to help both individuals and families.

So I would encourage you all to check out some of some of the renderings which didn't make it into this slide deck, but really cool design for that.

We have two full-time homeless services navigators who are really focused on specialty mental health and behavioral health services.

As we speak, one of our navigators is with someone at Sierra Vista who agreed to accept inpatient mental health treatment.

So we have been able to build relationships with folks and our navigation team has a better than 70% success rate at getting folks to accept shelter when they are living outdoors.

So we are really proud of that.

We also recognize that government is not solving this problem alone, and we've got many providers in the room.

Our partnership with one of our nonprofits in Elk Grove, the Elk Grove Heart, has been really fruitful for us.

Elkgrove Heart provides move in deposits and furniture assistance for folks moving into permanent housing, custom choices for folks that are what they want for furniture.

They also implement our motel voucher program for families and offer eviction prevention in partnership with Legal Services of Northern California.

And so expanding on those partnerships is something that Elk Grove looks forward to doing to make sure that we have a continuum from shelter, hopefully available same day when someone becomes homeless in Elk Grove to permanent housing and getting someone set up to succeed there.

I will turn it over to Stephanie Henry with the City of Folsom.

Good morning, Stephanie Henry with the City of Folsom Housing Manager.

With limited resources, the City of Folsom has focused on a collaborative, multifaceted approach to homelessness in our community.

At the forefront of this is our homeless outreach team or HOT.

This is this unique team is comprised of one sergeant and two Folsom police officers who focus on proactive person-centered engagement with individuals experiencing homelessness.

Since its launch in 2024, HOT has successfully cleared a number of illegal encampments to provide public safety in our community.

In addition, through a vital partnership with Jake's Journey Home, they have also been successful in connecting over 17 individuals with housing and support services.

We are also focusing our efforts on housing.

A prime example is the Bidwell Street Studios project, which is shown on the left-hand side of your screen there.

This project was funded by the California Home Key program.

It features 20 permanent supportive housing units, in which Hope Cooperative provides mental health service.

In addition, HART of Folsom also has four units on site to provide transitional housing services.

Also, I'd like to mention that HART is also expanding their transitional services by partnering with Oak Hills Church and Folsom Lake College to provide housing for transitional housing for individuals, students that are facing homelessness.

This project will replace two trailers on the church site with five small modular homes, and we'll provide stable housing counseling and educational opportunities for these individuals.

And then finally on the right hand side of the screen shows our project Habitat for Humanity.

When we raised the first walls of this project, we are wanted to highlight this project's success.

It will provide 10 low-income housing units for low-income families in the city of Folsom on a previously owned City of Folsom site.

This project actually is almost complete, and they will be having their um their what do they call it?

Home dedication ceremony on November 15th.

And with that, I would like to turn it over to Jenny with the City of Gulf.

Good morning, Jenny Carloni, Community Development Director with the City of Galt.

Due to Galt's small size and location and our extremely limited funding opportunities the city has for housing and homeless services, we rely very heavily on partnerships.

Partnerships are the key to homeless services in Galt.

We partner with South County Services, the Salvation Army, County Behavioral Health, etc.

Unhoused services are also mainly focused out of our police department in Galt.

We have a county-assigned clinician linked with our problem-oriented police officer.

They can respond to any call that may have a mental health component and work proactively to refer them to services.

As funds become available in Gaul, we are prioritizing those for affordable housing, but again, they're limited, but we hope to grow our affordable housing stock in the future.

And with that, I'll turn it over to Stefan from Rancho Cordova.

Good morning, I'm Stefan Heisler with the City of Rancho Cordova.

Umusing manager with the City of Rancho Cordova.

So in keeping with the City of Rancho Cordova's history as the home of the Maythur Air Force Base and the VA Hospital, the city has a strong interest in supporting our veteran community and our, I mean our county veteran community.

And so we've taken a little really heavy focus on helping our homeless veterans through the Maythor Veterans Village Project with our partners, Mercy Housing, Nation's Finests, also in partnership with Sacramento County and SHRA.

We've completed phases one, two, and three of the Veterans Village, which are 100 units of permanent supportive housing and 46 beds of transitional housing for homeless and disabled veterans.

With the success of that program, we've assembled the team once more to do a phase four.

So again with Sacramento County, SHRA, and also with Congressman Barr's office, Mercy Housing and Nation's Finest.

We're working on a fourth phase of the Veterans Village, which will be additional 70 units of permanent supportive housing again for homeless and disabled veterans.

And we're pleased to report that will begin construction early next year.

Similar to the other cities you've heard, we also have a homeless outreach team and community cleanup crew.

We've recently expanded that to be a seven-day per week operation.

Our team consists similarly of police officers, code enforcement officers, our homeless outreach navigators, and our community cleanup crew.

They retrieve over a thousand shopping carts every year and nearly a hundred tons of debris every year.

We also partner very closely with our Rancho Cordova food hub for the location of some of our homeless outreach team services.

Our team also includes a transitional house where we're able to put a handful of our clients into a transitional house while they work on a plan as they work towards permanent housing.

With that, I will turn it over to Brian Pedro with City of Sacramento.

All right, good morning.

I said we have two minutes, so uh Mindy, can you put two minutes on the clock and uh shove my mic off and two?

All right, I'll speak quickly here to make sure that we cover everything.

So the uh I am Brian Pedro, I'm the director for the Department of Community Response with the City of Sacramento.

Uh some of the uh teams that we have are our incident management team was implemented over two years ago with the intent of providing a collaborative response to help reduce the impact of homelessness in our communities.

It is a multidisciplinary team that balances the dual mandate of homeless outreach engagement, behavioral health, and enforcement in a single coordinated response.

We deploy various combinations of teams comprised of police officers, code enforcement officers, park rangers, firefighters, behavioral health clinicians, animal services, and outreach providers, totaling about a staff of 80 per day.

This model allows us to strategically deploy our teams to concurrently provide multiple services, reduce the possibility of enforcement in an area that our other service provider teams are actively working, and focus our police and code enforcement resources on higher priority and more impacted areas where outreach has already occurred.

Since inception, we have rapidly placed over 2,427 individuals into our shelters.

The next thing that we have coming up is our microcommunities, which are interim supportive housing on city owned lots where there will be no more than 40 per lot, 120 square foot manufactured homes with heat, air conditioning, microwaves, refrigerator freezers, on site security, full-time case management, transportation, and much more.

The program will target our senior population from our shelters, and we'll charge a program fee of 30% of the client's gross income, and we will initially be opening 160 units.

Our street to housing program is our rapid rehousing program that specifically selected impacted areas and intensively worked to connect everyone in the selected area with housing, continued case management, and rent for one year with the possible with the possibility of an extension.

The program was structured to provide 100 units.

We are in our final phase.

We have 93 units filled, and we have housed over 114 people thus far.

All right, what we have achieved.

So it might not have been a seamless and coordinated countywide homeless response, but each jurisdiction has answered the call and look at what we've achieved.

We've produced just shy of 10,000 shelter and housing options.

5,910 permanent supportive housing, permanent housing, and rapid rehousing units, 3,556 shelter and interim housing beds, and another 425 opening by 26.

And in addition to that 425, we have an additional 340 planned between our safe camping, safe parking, and microcommunities also coming online in 26.

This capacity has allowed us to get at least 10,000 people off our streets.

We, cities, county, nonprofits, community-based organizations, and volunteers have also helped tens of thousands more people through prevention, outreach, behavioral health, and various other services provided.

And these are many of the reasons why the largest 2024 homeless pit decrease in California for large cities was Sacramento.

Since no large city in the U.S.

has solved homelessness, our current measure of success is essentially comparing programs, performance, and metrics to other comparable large cities, and we are generally at the top or leading in most categories.

Since this is a rare occasion that we have everyone in the same room, and equally rare that we give ourselves credit, I want us to take a moment and give ourselves a round of applause for all the work that we've done and everybody that is in this room.

And I applaud some done work.

We all know there is more work to do, and that we need to be even more collaborative and accountable than ever.

But our local homelessness response system is far from broken.

With state, federal, and local funding uncertainty, I believe our next real challenge is how to restructure the current model into a more fiscally sustainable operational model and maintaining capacity while we provide legislative support to continue homelessness and social program funding because doing more with less is not a real thing.

Thank you.

And with that, I hand it over to Lisa Bates with our continuum of care.

Good morning, and thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today.

We applaud the actions that you're taking to collectively address homelessness in our community, and we acknowledge the responsibility we have to urgently address the issue to be accountable to the public and to the people experiencing homelessness.

I'm Lisa Bates, your CEO for Sacramento Steps Forward, or SSF.

We are a HUD designated agency for our region's continuum of care and the data administrator for the homeless management information system.

With me today is Joe Smith as well, the chair of our continuum of care.

So what do these roles mean in practice?

Every community in the country is required to have a continuum of care or COC, a collaborative body representing nonprofits, government, health systems, philanthropic organizations, and people with lived experience.

Together, the COC plans and guides investments of COC funding, and our role as SSF is to support that COC to ensure data integrity, accountability, coordination, and compliance.

In short, SSF acts as a support to our community's homeless response system.

We connect programs, providers, partners, so that they function as one coordinated network, ensuring people can navigate services more easily and move toward housing faster.

Our goal is simple to make homelessness rare, brief, and non-recurring.

This past year, our community has achieved some extraordinary outcomes as you have just already heard today.

In the last year, SSF has helped to bring over $90 million in state and federal funding to sustain and strengthen our response.

That includes the annual 40 million dollars in COC funding, a $7 million increase from the year before, supporting 35 local housing and service projects.

We've also helped secure the $53 million in state funding through the regionally coordinated homelessness action plan process, which aligns strategies across the city, the county, and the regional partners, and as you can see on this screen is the eight strategies that we have currently identified within our plan.

We have completed a federally required gaps analysis showing that with the right level and balance of investments, we could cut homelessness in half over the next decade.

We coordinate the point in time count, which was mentioned earlier, and we invite invite you to join us in January 2026 for the next count.

Through the coordinated access system, we have helped prevent homelessness for 840 households, sheltered 27 people, and housed more than 1,500 individuals.

And lastly, we've launched a housing families first collaborative, a four and a half million dollar pilot that will help at least 150 families secure permanent housing in 2026.

At the end of the day, we connect the data, the dollars, and the daily work of more than 120 organizations, many that are represented here today, and over 1,200 system users in our HMIS system, so that our community of many moving parts can function as one.

I was asked to share what we think the system needs.

And today, as has been mentioned before, we face a critical inflection point.

Even as our capacity has grown, our funding landscape is shifting rapidly.

Federal and state streams are uncertain.

The 40 million dollars that we receive annually from HUD that houses more than 2200 of our most vulnerable neighbors is now at risk amid the shutdown and proposed changes to HUD's processes.

Locally, we know we feel the pressure, the county has activated an emergency response due to the lack of CalFresh funding.

The housing authority is facing uncertainty with funding for vouchers that are housing thousands of people, and our health systems are managing cuts that ripple throughout the community.

Sacramentans still see every day in our neighborhoods, sidewalks, and businesses, the suffering that is real and the frustration that is real.

With these converging crises, one thing is clear and was noted in the poll that you just took business as usual will not work.

So what we uh at SSF and the COC believe is needed for our system is alignment, urgency, and informed decision making.

We would ask that as part of your deliberations in the afternoon that you consider the creation of a regional task force, a time-limited action-oriented group of elected officials, government staff, practitioners, and people with lived expertise, as well as certain sectors in our community, such as the health sector.

The proposed task force could be quickly and regularly convene to lean to learn, discuss, and act on the emerging and urgent issues.

It can develop actionable responses to the funding shifts that we're facing and strengthen the integration that we're going to need, as you hear from behavioral health resources next, the agility and transparency in how we address these emerging situations.

It could be focused, time bound, a commitment to act differently and more effectively together.

Sacramento Steps Forward and the COC stand ready as your informed and collaborative partner to support this effort.

We believe that by aligning resources, engaging and enlisting in our broader community, such as the faith communities, the community-based organizations, our health partners, local governments, we can multiply the impact and respond both with compassion and accountability.

So I hope we can take this moment of challenge to model the partnership and coordination our community deserves.

Let's build a system that is data-driven, partnerships are strong, and progress is visible.

Together we can ensure Sacramento's response to homelessness is not only compassionate but also coordinated, transparent, and effective.

We're ready to partner with you in this work.

Thank you.

Thank you, Lisa.

Before you leave, you asked us to consider a regional task force.

You have the leadership here of Sacramento County and its cities.

When you say regional, do you mean the sixth county region?

No, I mean within this.

Domina, again, ask politely and respectfully.

There's at least in my estimation that we need to kind of stay focused and understand this is really a county of Sacramento discussion today.

When I hear region and many of us have served or are sitting on the SACOG Board of Directors as well.

We use that vernacular to typically reference the six county regions.

So again, just for clarity.

This is about the cities within Sacramento County and the unincorporated county.

Thank you.

Next, we're going to hear from Kyle McDonald from SAC Metro Fire.

My name is Kyle McDonald, and I am the director of government affairs for the Sacramento Metropolitan Fire District.

We are proud to serve a population of approximately 725,000 individuals across portions of Sacramento and Placer counties, as well as the cities of Citrus Heights and Rancho Cordova.

In total, we cover 359 square miles with 41 stations.

On behalf of Metro Fire, thank you for the opportunity to participate in today's discussion.

We appreciate the collaborative approach being taken to address this important and complex issue.

The challenges surrounding homelessness and related emergency responses are evolving and multifaceted.

Metro Fire recognizes that this issue intersects public health, public safety, and social services.

Our role continuously adapts as we balance compassion, safety, and operational effectiveness.

Metro Fire continues to experience a significant volume of calls related to homelessness.

Since 2022, we have averaged over 8,400 calls per year related to this issue.

These calls often involve medical needs and fire or other hazard concerns.

The heavy utilization of 911 resources can strain emergency response capacity, impacting response times for other critical incidents.

At Metro Fire, we routinely look at innovative efforts to better respond to our communities' needs.

The right response with the right resources at the right time is a guiding goal.

To that end, we have implemented mobile integrated health units, utilize squads, and seek to ensure we are available to respond to the calls of our community, no matter who they may be or when the calls may arise.

In addition, we have partnered with the county, our cities, community groups, and more for outreach and preventative education on the use of NARCAN and other life-saving measures.

Addressing these challenges effectively requires coordination among all partners: federal, state, and local elected officials, fire, law enforcement, behavioral health, housing, and outreach teams, among others.

No single agency or entity can resolve this alone.

Solutions depend on shared strategies and sustained communication.

Metro Fire remains committed to working collaboratively with all stakeholders to improve outcomes for all members of our community.

We will continue to provide data, participate in joint efforts, and seek innovative approaches that enhance safety and service for the entire community.

Our focus is on sure is on ensuring that every response, whether emergency or preventative, supports both public safety and long-term community well-being.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And next we'll hear from Sheriff Jim Cooper.

Welcome, Sheriff.

Morning, thank you.

Good to see you all board members, council members, and mayors.

Where we were three years ago today, before I took over as sheriff, standing up a full-time hot team, supplemented by other units.

I want to thank the board of supervisors for the funding.

Right now we have 30 officers that deal with hot and pop day in and day out.

Our focus is on public safety.

Behavioral health is important, and so is homeless services, but public safety is a key in that also.

The unhoused have a right to be free of crime, just like the housed.

The sheriff's primary responsibility was focused on crime occurring in the homeless populations, primarily by other homeless.

The second responsibility was offering county provided services, but data collection was the key.

Everyone has data, but people ask different questions, and a lot of folks are reluctant to share their data.

There are virtually no longer any large homeless encampments in the unincorporated areas of Sacramento.

If they do pop up, we address the encampment within 24 hours.

For us, problems occur on unincorporated and city borders.

Direct communications between the Board of Sups and our hot team is key.

So we cut out the middleman.

So each of our board members has our hot and pop sergeants' phone number.

When constituents call them, they call that person directly.

So there's no middlemen, it's dealt with right away.

Nothing gets lost in the translation.

I think that's so important having that relationship.

So going back to data, over the last three years, we've had 20,000 citizens complaints, where citizens have called in regarding issues of homelessness.

Those are staggering numbers.

We've collected over four million pounds of trash that's been removed from our streets.

2400, excuse me, 2200 citations have been issued, 2,500 arrests and convictions, with 1,100 of those having violent criminal histories.

You know, one thing that I knew as sheriff coming in, there were a lot of unreported sexual assaults, and no one in the state of California, when they went out and took data ever asked the victims what happened were the victims of sexual assault, especially women and young children.

We did that here in Sacramento.

We arrested 52 sexual predators.

There were 7,000 cases of domestic violence incidents that were reported by women in these camps.

7,000.

395 domestic violence victims identified in these camps.

2,000 sexual assaults incidents occurred in these camps.

362 sexual assault victims were identified.

998 individuals were identified with a mental health flag.

Twenty, three hundred individuals were identified with a substance abuse flag, and 4,800 individuals got resources cards.

Sometimes law investment law enforcement intervention is the only hope for these people that give them help.

With law enforcement, we're out there 24-7.

A lot of these services that are offered by these organizations are basically nine to five Monday through Friday.

So we do thought on a regular basis.

So it's a big issue.

We've got to work together, and unfortunately, uh it's been politicized.

It shouldn't be politicized.

There's room for everybody, and we have to work together.

It's so important, and I don't see that.

They're reluctant for it.

In my time in the assembly, I was chair of budget sub-4, which funded Operation Roomkey and Home Key.

Um, that has limited success, but it's important, and I keep coming back to no matter what your circumstance, whether housed or in a house, you should feel safe.

There are predators in these camps that prey on other unhealth individuals.

You see it.

That's how it is.

And I've actually been out there with my hot and pop officers, asking folks, hey, do you want help and having conversations?

And there's just that segment that doesn't want help for whatever reasons, in addition to the folks that have mental illness or they're addicted to substance abuse.

It's one of those things.

So I think this is a great uh forums to start working together and having those conversations, but law enforcement has to be a part of it for too long.

Law enforcement was left out of it.

So thank you.

I'm having answering questions if you'd like.

Great.

Thank you, Sheriff.

Thank you.

I think it I think at this point, I think at this point, I would like to look to my colleagues here at the dais and uh see if there's any uh certainly any questions for um our sheriff, but uh any comments or questions relative to some of the other uh substance of what the speakers preceding speakers have shared for this panel.

Yeah, for this okay, Mary Kino.

Thank you, Chair.

Um, I actually have a question for Sarah from Elk Grove.

Um I believe if I heard you correctly, you said that your homeless navigators have had a 70% plus success rate in getting people help.

Number one, I want to know if I heard that correctly.

Secondly, if that's the case, that's very impressive.

Uh, because I think for many of us, the experiences services and help is offered repeatedly, and for the most part, it is declined.

And so if you're achieving a 70% success rate and having people accept that help, what is it you're doing that we're not doing?

So I think one of the core things that ElGrum is doing, closer.

Is that better?

No.

Okay, there we go.

Um, one of the things that is a hallmark of Out Growth's program is the connection with mental health services and the ability that we have because we have two full-time homeless services navigators as well as two full-time homeless outreach officers with our police department, um, and a relatively small population, right?

Less than two percent of the county's total experiencing homelessness.

We have the ability to see people really frequently, right?

Our navigators are out there, they're making contact with people time and time again.

So maybe someone doesn't want to talk to them the first time that they see them, but they keep showing up.

Um, and so we've we've actually had a lot of success um, given our navigator skill set at getting folks to accept mental health services, um, and then once they come out of that mental health service, if it's inpatient, um, there we guarantee the shelter bed for them.

Um, and so that that's been really helpful for us.

Um, I think that more emphasis overall on mental health services is something that shifted the results um for Elk Grove and and the overall dynamic.

Great.

Thank you.

Uh Mayor Singh Allen.

Oh, sorry.

Oh, uh, my mistake.

But I can go now.

Uh Mayor Farmer.

Yeah, thank you.

Uh, my question was actually for um uh Sheriff Cooper.

Um, he mentioned in his uh statement uh when he was giving all the statistics that um his contacts by the sheriff's department and law enforcement and the keyword was offering services.

I know um they just spoke to this.

I feel like our concern in Gault, even though our homeless problem our our homeless population is very small compared to the other cities uh here today.

Um, but what we see in Galt is that um, and we and I want to thank the county for giving us the resources that we do have.

We have a um mental health specialist that accompanies our pop officer.

But um we're probably looking at like 10% of people that actually will accept that offering.

When you offer the help for whether it's the behavioral health or um drug-related uh, you're getting like 10% of people, you're literally not accepting that help.

So my question is too, as it was echoed a minute ago, how do we how do we change that?

How do we change the the voluntary into some sort of um requirement because if most people with behavioral health issues don't recognize that they need help, and most people with drug addiction um don't have the resolve to self uh you know can turn themselves over to help.

So we're about 15% that that accept the help.

But the problem is you have people that are in the name of freedom.

If someone's walking around unclothed, eating out of a trash can, instead of being the adult in the room and saying, hey, you know what, we're gonna do conservatorship.

Can't get it through the legislature, no one wants to do it because that's the thing, it impacts the public.

When people are calling, I mean, 20,000 people, we have business owners that sign the trespass form so we can make a rest for trespassing.

That is insane.

It's impacting the public, and I think it's risen to the level that public is so fed up, they just don't care.

They're still compassionate, they want to get hope for these folks, but at some point we need the tools, and that comes from the legislature to be able to deal with some of this.

Otherwise, it's gonna be status quo.

We've done a lot and put a lot of money into the homelessness issue, and the needle hasn't changed a lot.

And one thing that I learned from going out there firsthand is um there are a lot of folks that don't want any help for whatever reasons, like I said, some are mentally ill, some have addiction issue, but it's it's deeper than that.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you for the question.

All right, now we will hear from Mayor Singhell.

Thank you, Chair.

Um, I also wanted to just elaborate on Mayor Aquino's um comments or question, and then also I'm Sarah Bontrager with our city.

Um, one of the reasons we're seeing great success in the city of Elkgrove, and I was that odd one who voted that I feel like we are we we are doing great things, and I was my vote was specific to our city, and our homeless navigators do a wonderful job that so much so that they actually know all of our unhoused people's names.

We we don't just see them as a number, these are individuals that we know by name and we know their individual needs.

So, you know, there are there are great programs that are working, we provide wraparound services in our shelters, and we have great success from those that are experiencing homelessness, getting moving on to permanent supportive housing as well as full-time uh employment.

It's not a one size fits all.

I recognize that as uh you know the second largest city in Sacramento County.

What homelessness looks like in our city is going to be very different than what it looks like in the city of Sacramento and in some of our other cities, and that is something that we all absolutely do recognize in terms of a one size fits all solution.

But what I am very proud of the work that we are doing in the city of Elk Grove meeting this moment head on.

So I want to just recognize that and thank you, Mayor Aquino, for recognizing some of the great work that's happening.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you, Chair.

I first want to thank all of the elected officials that are in the gallery uh that are not sitting up here at the dice, thank them for taking their time to pay attention to this issue.

It's very important.

Um and uh I appreciate the uh the presentation by sheriff and and particularly the fact of of kind of leaning in on public safety and that the folks living unhoused and living in encampments, they deserve to feel safe as well, and they deserve to uh to make sure that they're not being preyed upon.

And I think that there are certainly predators out there within those encampments and also within uh outside the encampment that prey on people, even if it's keeping them drug addicted and and and um you know, I think inflicting them and keeping them where they are.

But uh, you know, those of you who serve with me or have served with me know that I'm a fan of idioms and metaphors and cliches, and so I'll just say that one of the things that I'm hearing uh as I listen to these presentations is that if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

And I think that's one of the biggest shortfalls of where we are right now in response to this issue.

And so I want to lift up something that Lisa Bates said relative to our needs, alignment, urgency, and informed decision-making.

If that's not our north star for what we're here today, uh, I don't know what is.

But now, having praised something she said, I'm gonna criticize uh something else she said, which is the goal of uh Sacramento Steps Forward and our efforts to cut homelessness in half over the next decade.

If that is the brass ring we set for ourselves, we have already failed.

Um I think we can do more.

I think we can do it uh with that greater sense of urgency.

And so I hope that as we continue this conversation today, we we set our sights on on something um way more than cutting it in half over the next decade.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Councilmember Maple.

Thank you, Chair.

Um, I just have a quick question for the sheriff.

First, thank you for being here.

Or maybe the under sheriff, welcome.

Um, so something you said was around uh data sharing and some of the challenges with um gathering the data, being able to access the data that can help make informed decisions.

I was just hoping to get a little bit more detail or clarity on what some of those challenges are and how we can maybe collectively help address them.

So um the challenges have been overcome on data collection.

Um, we started early, uh several years ago, we actually built a database.

Um it's electronic.

So when our hot teams or our pot teams go out and they encounter a home homeless individual, whether it's in a camp or whether it's uh individual, um, we collect a lot of data, we ask a lot of questions.

Like, um, are you a resident of Sacramento?

Um, how long have you been homeless?

All the way down, do they have pets?

Um, what kind of structure they live in?

The mental health uh question is uh that's one that's really important, right?

Because it's been talked about a lot.

So out of um the thousands and thousands of people, and and a lot of this is subjective, right?

If somebody goes, yeah, if somebody doesn't say I have a mental health issue, a lot of it's visual.

Um there's been almost a thousand people out of um over four thousand.

So we got a quarter of our um homeless population that have obvious or admitted mental health issue.

The real problem, um, not the real problem, but uh a bigger problem is well over half of them have a substance abuse problem, and so we asked that, and then um the data is pretty extensive, and we've always been open as a sheriff's department to other um cities in the county that will share that and will help build it, and so um without the real data, because we didn't have that, we don't know what our problem is on a public safety standpoint as uh is law enforcement.

So that was it's really helpful for us.

Okay, thank you.

And then a quick follow-up.

So does that data then get put into the HMIS system?

So the coordinated access that we that we collectively use, or is that something that is only in the sheriff's department?

That's only in the sheriff's office, yes.

Okay, thank you.

We've never been asked that question, so but that's only we only collect that, yes.

Thank you.

Great, thank you.

Uh Councilmember Talamantes.

Uh Vice Mayor Telemontes.

Um, hi, so uh my question to you is you know, a lot of our businesses uh feel the impact of inmate or people being released from the county jail.

And um I drive on 12th Street and then it's a 16th street where every single day I know what time people were released and who has a bracelet on, and I see sometimes you know, people without clothes, and um is there a plan for every single jurisdiction for people to be returned to where the incident happened or the re-entry?

How does that work?

Yeah, this is a great question.

This is a question that's come up um since the sheriff and I have been back for the last three years, right?

How does the um the location, which I don't know if anybody would is real happy about the location of the main jail being downtown, right?

It's there, right?

And so um we we uh we do collect that data with inside the jails.

What a lot of people don't know is that everybody that gets released from the main jail is offered an RT pass free, a bus pass free, and then we've taken it on ourselves to enter into it's not a contract because it's free services with uh ride sharing programs.

That one's a little tricky, you have to be careful about it because if somebody's in there for domestic violence and they get released and they want to go home, you got to be really careful with that one.

So those three avenues of people, if they want to leave downtown and go somewhere somewhere else, it's free, free charge.

The sad part about that is it's well under 10% of the people that accept that service, right?

They either have somebody we we offer free phone calls, so as many as they want to come and get it right, and then the courts, right?

So um it's really important to understand that a lot of times we have to release people at certain times in a certain time frame.

We don't have the sheriff doesn't have the luxury of violating some of these constitutional rights going well if you don't have a right we're gonna keep you in here for five hours until you have the right the legislature did uh act on this and we offer this is that if somebody wants to stay in jail they can stay in jail uh up to 16 hours past the release time it's voluntary they got to sign a form and stuff like that but nobody wants to stay in jail for 16 hours the numbers on those are I mean dismal you know we might get one or two that go yeah I I like the booking tank so I want to stay here for 16 hours so um it goes back to data again right um it's it's really important when you're talking about the impact of the main jail on the homeless is downtown and this is where we could probably collaborate a little bit better is really start taking um or sharing the data with everybody on how many people took the services and how many but I mean one of the things that I'm super proud of um that sheriff and acted before we got here we didn't have a clothing closet now we have a clothing closet right if somebody gets um booked in the summertime and released in the winter time we give them a we give them a sweatshirt we give them sweatpants um same thing um in the summertime we give them a t-shirt so um we're really trying really hard um on the release issue a lot of this is out of our hands but we're trying and I think the collaboration of the data will be could be really important beneficial because it will take that if you see the data and it's really not the problem then we can move on to what are the problems.

Supervisor Rodriguez thank you chair so I I want to highlight something that I've been very critical about um for this past year and that is um first I want to say to Lisa Bates thank you for your presentation today and um one of the things I heard is the collaps the um uh a new model that would include elected officials so Sacramento Steps Board has had the continuum of care since 2010 and currently today there have been no elected officials on the board for Sacramental Steps Board or the continuum of care and so I think to to make that request now because it's been vocal just uh to me isn't doesn't seem like it's the right time I think that this is an opportunity for these elected officials here to look at a new structural model that will put people who have been elected to to give direction on this problem that has gotten worse for the past 10 years.

Thank you.

Councilmember Jennings thank you very much we've talked about the um substance abuse program substance abuse that goes on with our homeless populations what are some of the programs that had have had some of the greatest success with our homeless population.

So specific to the homeless population unfortunately um back in 2014 um when Prop 47 came along we had to do away with a lot of our drug courts right so that really tied the hand of law enforcement um and the courts and the DA getting people help that really need it with substance abuse and giving them diversion programs.

Now with Prop 36 we're back to where we were in before 2004 and one of the things that state sheriffs and Cal Chiefs push is funding for that right so I think that's the big hole is the sheriffs in the state Sheriff Jim Cooper want people to get help that have a substance abuse problem unequivocally we want people to get help but as cities and counties face Prop 36 that was passed by 70% but it's unfunded that's going to be a struggle just in our jail alone since Prop 36 passed and it's been what eight months our our jail populations went up by over 200 um residents and it's it's gonna get more.

So I think that um the existing programs are all the with the homeless are all through behavioral health services and again when you have thousands of people and 14 this is worth it for us, right?

14% is a small number, but it's important because 14% of four over 4,000 people that need help that's significant.

And so our our hot teams and our pot teams um move those people that and when I say get help, I want to get off the streets.

Not somebody that's just taking a pamphlet.

Um we've handed out um almost 5,000 pamphlets.

Um not those um some of the people just take them and throw them away.

Um but it's those people that really want help, they get help.

One of the things that we're proud of um with our behavioral health services and the sheriff's department's uh relationship and the and the board of supervisors is a couple years ago.

Um we had a couple incidents where we had um uh a mother that was a victim of domestic violence and she had three kids.

Well, she went on a waiting list with her kids to get a bed.

Well, that's unacceptable, right?

From our standpoint, we're on the streets, we're seeing the real time victimization and need.

And so, in collaboration with the county, they've opened up um some emergency beds so we can take those people off the list and they can they can get housing that night.

Um, that would be nice to do with people that have substance abuse that really want because there are people that are addicted that actually want help, right?

It'd be nice to be able to get them into a diversion program immediately.

Um that would take the courts and the DA to be, but that that would be a really innovative idea to do that.

Um, treat it like we did um our our victims and getting them the help they need immediately without getting on a wait list.

Um I'm gonna take this opportunity uh to just uh remind folks that we need we have a very full agenda, so uh certainly want to give everyone the opportunity to uh to speak here.

Uh but if you could keep your uh comments brief, that would help us kind of get back on track.

And I know uh Siobon is going to uh chime in here and remind us all too that the next section on behavioral health, I think will be um, I think uh productive context to um maybe elaborate on some of these subjects.

So you might want to hold your questions or comments until we uh hear that part of uh today's agenda.

But Javon, did you have anything to add?

No, thank you, Chair.

I was gonna just mention Dr.

Ryan Quist from behavioral health will be here to discuss exactly some of the questions that you're um asking right now, and also Tim Lutz, our director of health services, can talk to you a little bit about our partnership with the sheriff's department in the jail when it comes to jail releases and linking folks out as they come out of jail to various services, including shelter under Prop 47 in Cali, and we've been able to really lift up some of those services.

So he's happy to expand on that if you'd like.

Thanks.

Thank you, Sean.

Uh Mayor Korpinsky Costa.

Thank you, Chair.

I think it was.

Thank you, Chair.

Um, I don't see our um my our illustrious district attorney here, but my question for the here.

Oh, is he here good?

To I my question is to what extent does the county as a whole participate in the community prosecution process?

Because they seem to be, you know, pockets of enforcements, but not available to the county as a whole.

Is that because it's too expensive, or is it because we don't have enough staff, or is it because of some legal issues?

So it seems that it's because we didn't we we want one, we don't know how to get one.

Good morning, by the way.

And I do want to first of all uh recognize and extend my sincere gratitude to the leaders assembled in this room.

Um, this is a historical meeting to address a historical crisis, and frankly, the people of Sacramento County have faced the brunt of this crisis, and I know it's whether it's Citrus Heights, whether it's Rancho Cordova, Folsom, the unincorporated area down to Elk Grove and most definitely the city.

And what I was saying, regards to our community prosecution unit, it is something that is very robust.

Um, but the fact of the matter is um we have staffing issues in my office, we do everywhere else.

Um we have a community prosecution unit.

Um, it's funded um, for example, um, in the unincorporated part of the county.

I know recently, through the leadership of both um Supervisor Cerna and Councilmember Roger Dickinson, there was funding that was uh discovered and allocated for the north area in Sacramento, a traditionally um underserved community, and that community prosecutor is working hand in hand at this point to create what I call a core program.

So, our core program, and I think it was one of the questions we had earlier about how we go about addressing homelessness.

And there is constantly this dichotomy that you know you must either choose enforcement or you must choose compassion, where they're not mutually exclusive of each other.

Frankly, it's not compassionate to let people die in the streets, it's not compassionate to let the community suffer with encampments, whether it's children, whether it's families, whether it's small businesses.

So, what our core program does at the DA's office is it takes individuals who've been arrested for a series of offenses, nonviolent offenses, and we stack them on top of each other, and we offer the individual basically an opportunity.

You can either accept treatment or you can spend time in custody.

And when we have people that then accept treatment, we work with St.

John to get them into our program.

They get released from custody, they get transported by the Sheriff's Department into treatment and they get the treatment.

And honestly, I would love to have that program work, you know, in terms of the entire county in all the cities.

But the fact of the matter is we need to be able to have the resources so that I can allocate that.

Because otherwise, I have to take somebody off of sex crimes.

I have to take somebody off of gangs of homicides to staff that and if I'm gonna staff that I need to have the resources to be able to do it.

And I know that we were recently able to do it over in the north area, and I would love to expand it to the county.

And that is one of the emphases that we're working on.

Great, thank you.

Thank you, and thank you for coming.

And I do need, I apologize, Lee, but I do would ask to to focus three areas, and I I know I'm jumping ahead a bit, and I apologize, uh, Mr.

Chair.

Um, but I am asking um for further collaboration, and this is what we have here, but there are three areas of focus.

Number one is that finding that collaboration.

I know I'm working with Councilmember Jennings on a responsibility to shelter program in the city, and I would love to see that where somebody needs to accept shelter.

And if they don't, then we need to have compassionate enforcement, and that's what we're doing in um in Councilmember Dickinson's area.

And I would love to see an expansion of that.

I would also like to see, for example, um, increase transparency in terms of data.

I know Sheriff Cooper talked about that in regards to making sure that that data is shared, shared from the continuum of care because I can tell you right now that law enforcement is not receiving the data from the continuum of care.

And I will say it, and I may step on toes, but we need to have that data so we know how to proceed.

And what are the metrics that we have?

What metrics are we gathering from our CBO partners in our city and our counties to show that we are succeeding in getting people off the streets?

And the third area I'll say is this is that we need to increase efficiencies.

And I'll give an example of non-efficiency.

The St.

Clair Hotel downtown is being managed by Mercy Housing, and it was funded by SHRA to the tune of $600,000 per unit to renovate.

And we frankly have had six, excuse me, almost 800 calls for service over the last year and a half.

I have an individual that grabbed a dresser and threw it off the second floor onto the streets.

I've had people with knives and guns and sexual assaults at that location, and frankly, we have not had a good neighbor policy enforced there.

And I think that we need to be more efficient.

SHRA is really efficient in certain areas, but frankly, control of SHRAs or relates to our homeless um, you know, um processes should move back to local authorities or to another authority that can have supervision.

And so I may be stepping on toes, I may be saying things out of place, but at the end of the day, that is what we need to do as elected officials.

And I will end with this.

I stood here three years ago when I was sworn in and I said an old African proverb: if you want to go fast, go loan.

If you want to go far, go together.

And what we have here today is an example of leadership that is moving forward together, and thank you so much.

Thank you, Mr.

Deer.

Councilmember Guerra.

Uh thank you, Chair.

Actually, I appreciate the DA for his comments and one of the questions that I have for our executive uh staff for both this uh the county and the cities.

Um, and it I don't need an answer now.

In fact, I prefer it if it's in the afternoon.

But one of the things that I've observed in just preparation for this meeting is how much our uh city staffs and uh county staffs and different jurisdictions, I'll just say jurisdictions because we have Metro Fire DA and sheriffs here have interacted, and uh and one of one of the things I I'd like to ask is uh how the interaction between those jurisdictions differ.

Um I hear you know, the success that is happening in Elk Grove, maybe with the county, uh some with the city, it could be through population.

But I think understanding how those interactions to the point that the DA made on collaboration, I hear uh, which is very positive of this conversation, a willingness of how do we share more.

Well, for a long time we've we've gone at it alone, and so how do we do more of that?

Uh, to Lisa Bates' points about alignment and informed decision making.

I think if we got that, uh if we were to think through in this conversation, um getting that information.

And then the second one is uh we also heard some concerns about, you know, uh statutory restrictions that we have at the state level, and I I think the the the help that this is creating or the informed uh information here is is for us to collectively be able to say, hey, we agree on on some of these challenges that are at the state level, whether it be a reimbursements for our fire uh departments, whether they be city or metro, uh, or uh or restrictions on on how our jail operates as well.

I think those are uh uh the in those two areas uh statutory, you know, maybe restrictions that we have no control over.

But second, how the interactions differ.

So maybe if that answer, I don't need an answer now, I'd prefer it in the afternoon.

How do those interactions differ between the jurisdictions so that when we do look at how we govern together, we can look at uh the effective process for that?

Thank you, Chair.

Very good.

Councilmember Vang.

Thank you, Chair.

Uh, just a few comments.

Um, first just really want to thank you for your leadership and bringing um all of the cities within Sacramento County together to talk about this really important issue that is uh the uh top priority for our region.

Um I know today we're discussing our current systems, and um this afternoon we're gonna have an opportunity to do the visioning part to strengthen um our collaboration.

Um, and uh we just heard earlier from uh various cities uh about the great work that they're doing, and so also just want to give kudos to city staff for the great work that y'all are doing uh to really address homelessness, um especially on the behavior health and mental health uh aspect of that.

Um, and also uh shout out to all the navigators on the ground that does the day-to-day work because we know that turnover rate is really high when we talk about building capacity uh for this type of work.

Um, but I just uh want to draw attention to one issue that I know uh wasn't on the agenda, but I know it is on top of all of our minds as well, and that is drawing attention to housing uh in particular because it's absolutely connected to the issue at hand.

Um I know that homelessness is not only visible, it's uh what we often see, what we hear from our constituent, but also want to talk about the invisible invisibility of homelessness as well.

Um, as of September 30th, I just want to share with all of you we had over 97,000 individuals that were on the waiting list for housing vouchers, and 41,000 uh of those individuals were actually families on the wait list.

Um, this is a tsunami waiting to hit us, and um truth is uh we can do everything we can on the ground to address the crisis on the street, but if we don't move upstream, uh we're gonna still have a huge issue.

And so I think it's really important to acknowledge that our housing costs have fell to keep up pace, leaving thousands of vulnerable individuals in our uh county homeless.

Um, and that's just housing voucher, but I know that there's this conversation about unhoused folks being quote unquote resistance.

Um, there may be individuals that may refuse to take shelter, uh, but I also just want to just share some data that to date, we have over 3,000 individuals, single adults that are actually on the wait list just for shelter, right?

And so that's really important to acknowledge.

Of those three thousand, eight hundred and fifty of them are families waiting for shelter.

And so we also don't have the capacity right now to shelter and to house people, and so I want to make sure that we're keeping uh the conversation focused on that as well, because we can't just be focusing on the band-aid uh portion of homelessness, but we have to move upstream and really talk about the need or the lack of affordable housing in Sacramento County.

And so I'm looking forward to the conversation, the visioning that's gonna happen this afternoon, and hope that as we're talking about whatever model we decide to come up with, whether that's continuing the MOU or discussing about the JPA model or discussing any kind of governance model, that we ensure that affordable housing is part of that conversation.

Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember.

Okay, I think next we're gonna have Dr.

Quist.

Yes, our next presentation is behavioral health engagement strategies and legal pathways to treatment.

And Dr.

Ryan Quest will kick us off.

Thank you.

And Dr.

Quist, welcome.

And I know you're a veteran presenter, often appearing before the board, so you know uh that uh we're gonna uh take up the uh the slack here uh with your time, unfortunately, so we can get back on schedule.

So I'm gonna encourage you to uh be as brief as you possibly can.

Um, and if uh we could kind of hold our questions until the end, that would that would help us get back on on time here.

Great, absolutely we'll focus on that.

Good morning um uh board members, uh, city council members.

Uh Ryan Quist, behavioral health director for Sacramento County.

Um I was asked to come today to talk about uh the very topic that um uh mayor Farmer brought up around what are our options when an individual does not want to voluntarily uh take advantage of of what services are available to them.

So we will hit on those topics.

But before we get there, did want to give you just make sure we all have the same uh starting point regarding what behavioral health services is.

So Sacramento County behavioral health.

Uh, our mission is to provide a culturally competent system of care that promotes holistic recovery, optimum health, and resiliency.

We envision a community where persons from diverse backgrounds across the life continuum have the opportunity to experience optimum wellness.

We are uh we are a health plan, so we actually have the same responsibilities as any of your managed care plans that you're used to working with Anthem, Molina so forth.

Um we are a health a health plan.

Our responsibility is to provide services to Medi-Cal members who have uh a medical necessity need for specialty mental health services, which represents those with the most serious mental health challenges.

While our other managed care plans are responsible for those with mild to moderate mental health challenges on the substance use side, we provide uh substance use services across the full continuum.

So anybody who is a Medi-Cal member and needs substance use services, we have the responsibility to provide those entitled services.

Just to give you a little bit of a landscape, um, we have an annual budget of 668 million dollars.

Uh we have 659 county employees that work.

However, we are 90% contracted out to work with uh CBOs within within our communities.

We have 161 provider agencies with 238 programs.

We try to estimate what sort of a workforce does that constitute within Sacramento County, and our best estimate is it's well over 3,500 people across Sacramento County who are working to support the behavioral health needs of those here in Sacramento County.

We serve approximately 40,000 consumers a year in our inpatient and outpatient programs with 300,000 um served when in our prevention and early intervention programs.

We also have very uh well-established and um uh active uh media campaigns with um around 500 million impressions a year.

That means how many times people are exposed to our messaging.

The main uh uh funding mechanism we uh educate the community about is the fact that in order to pull down those Medi-Cal dollars, those are federal funds, but in order to do that, we actually have to use our local county dollars in order to provide the Medi-Cal match, which is approximately 50% of all federal funds that we're pulling down into the community.

So, of course, we see that as our our number one ethical responsibility to pull in as many federal resources as we possibly can in order to serve serve our communities.

This is a breakdown of our budget.

On the top, you'll see the different funding sources of the dollars that are coming in to behavioral health.

And I'm not going to go into a lot of detail there, but it just sort of gives you a picture of how we are working with our federal revenue, which there is labeled in blue under patient care revenue, and then how we use our other dollars.

People are very familiar with MHSA, but you can see how big that is in comparison with our other funding sources.

The county itself provides us with our 2011-1991 realignment, and you can see how that sort of is in comparison with the other funding sources.

And then on the bottom, you can see where those funds go.

So we have adult services, children's services, our inpatient beds, our substance use prevention and treatment, and so forth, where you can see our where our various funds are going.

I will note here that I've been here since 2019, and in those in that time, six years, we have almost just barely not quite, but almost doubled the budget in behavioral health.

Thank you to the support from our county board members for continuing to expand the amount of resources that are available in Sacramento County.

In addition, those resources that we're spending on our unhoused population and the services that go along with that.

So that's including housing as well as actual services.

The amount of money that we're Emily was able to talk about what those dollar figures are, but I want to highlight that in those same six years, that amount has almost exactly tripled in the amount that the county has invested in serving our unhoused populations.

This is our overall continuum.

I'm not going to go into a lot of detail.

I just want to highlight that we have a very robust continuum of care ranging everywhere from prevention and early intervention programs up through our outpatient programs, and then of course, all the way up through acute care when you think about our inpatient settings where individuals are receiving inpatient care.

So we have a very robust continuum of care.

In terms of voluntary services, we have as part of that investment in our unhoused populations.

We have our heart team, homeless encampment and response team, which I know many of you are already very familiar with.

They are now approaching their fourth year anniversary in terms of being able to provide services where they actually go out into the wherever individuals are.

Used to be when there were a lot of encampments during the pandemic, they would be there in the encampments.

Now that they're not in as many encampments, we continue to do a lot of outreach and engagement with individuals on the street who are living unhoused, offering them services and trying to get them engaged into services, and they will continue to visit them repeatedly as many times as it takes in order to try to encourage them into services.

In addition, we have our the way we've structured our outpatient system that's particularly designed in order to support our unhoused population.

We have 11 what we call core sites that are geographically dispersed throughout Sacramento County in order to make sure that we're geographically close and providing access to services.

Each one of those 11 sites has a community wellness center, which is a walk in center.

Anybody can walk in at any time.

It is designed specifically to be attractive or engaging for our unhoused population, offering services such as laundry, such as showers, such as food, such as other activities, in order to try to engage and create relationships with our unhoused populations so that when they're ready to uh agree to participate in services that they are we already have a relationship with them and and can make that happen quickly.

So those 11 sites again are represent an expansion.

Those are all voluntary services at each one of those 11 sites.

We also have contracted two outreach workers where they those outreach workers are responsible for going out to the communities surrounding it and their catchment area that they're that they're responsible for serving.

And I invite all of you, in terms of the different core sites that are in your areas of responsibility, they are interested in having relationships with you.

If you see individuals that you feel like maybe aren't getting outreach to or that haven't come to the attention of our course sites, we invite you either through me or through directly with the provider, develop those relationships.

They'd like to know they need that intel.

Where are the individuals who are unhoused where they can continue to send their outreach workers to do that engagement?

Okay, so now to the subject that I was actually asked to talk about, and that is what are the opportunities that are available to us when an individual does not want to voluntarily participate in services.

I'm going to talk about this as court involved or justice involved treatment programming.

So the first one we'll talk about is assisted outpatient treatment.

This has been around for a couple years now.

We did opt into it.

The main, I mean now fast forwarding at Supervisor Cerna's request.

This particular program is designed to for individuals who are not voluntarily engaging in services.

The key highlights here on this slide are the bullet points down a few that say it's for people who are two or more hospitalizations or mental health-related incarcerations in the past 36 months, or one or more acts of serious violent behavioral health behavior towards self or others in the past 48 months.

And so that's the main population that are focused on for that one.

The individuals who can provide referrals, these referrals come directly to behavioral health, Sacramento County Behavioral Health.

It includes that list of folks over there on the side, mostly adult family members or other adults that they're living with, or other service providers.

Judges and first responders are also able to provide those referrals.

I'm not going to go into this particular slide, but this sort of gives you a roadmap for what the how the how it works, what how the process works for people to go through assisted outpatient treatment.

And then the next one I'm going to talk about is care court.

And for care court, there are some differences.

So it's now schizophrenia plus bipolar one.

It is necessary for us to make sure be clear that this is for people who are not clinically stable or in ongoing voluntary treatment.

The individuals who can provide file petitions, there's a long list of folks who can file petitions.

It basically falls into a few categories.

It falls into family members, service providers, and first responders.

And it can come through a number of different venues for those petitions to be filed, and then we we connect them with the most appropriate services within our existing uh within our existing continuum.

We also have rather robust mental health diversion program.

So I'm going to go into a little bit on that.

I will say that we have a very broad, let's say, portfolio of different collaborative courts is what we refer them to.

I'm going to focus here really on mental health diversion, which is probably the most common one that we're seeing these days.

So mental health diversion was passed in July 2018 as Penal Code 1001.36.

This offers pretrial dismissal and record record ceiling for individuals in the criminal justice system with a qualifying mental health disorder.

It requires them to successfully complete treatment in order to get those charges dismissed.

Suitability for mental health diversion, it's going to be the underlined word.

So I'm not reading all this to you, but basically they would respond to mental health treatment.

They consent to diversion and waive their right to a speedy trial.

The defendant agrees to comply with treatment as a condition of diversion, and the defendant will not pose an unreasonable risk of danger to public safety.

So we have this program is extremely uh active.

Um we so far this year have received uh we've done a court assessments for 587 individuals, which is uh way up over the last few years since this law was enacted.

So we we see a lot of folks coming through this particular program, just as a point of clarification for mental health diversion, uh behavioral help does not make any comment on the actual charges themselves.

That is irrelevant to our assessment.

We just simply do an assessment and say, are they eligible for services or not?

And then we allow the court process to go through its normal process to determine whether or not those individuals will be approved by the court to be in mental health diversion.

And then the last area that we're going to talk about is conservatorship.

So pathways to conservatorship, the first step is hospitalization.

So individuals will first go through a typical hospitalization visit where somebody was a danger to themselves, others or gravely disabled.

That can come from a number of different um venues.

Well, um, now it popped back up.

One more after that.

There you go.

Um, thank you so much.

Appreciate your support.

All right, so um lots of different uh ways to initiate this process both through voluntary services as well as in voluntary services, emergency departments, crisis stabilization units, we have our urgent care clinic.

Um, and then uh basically they go in through an acute psychiatric hospital, and then through that process is how they then qualify, determine whether they qualify for a conservatorship.

And this is the fast-forward version once again, but basically we've all heard of a 5150, right?

5150 is a 72-hour hold to assess them for whether or not they need inpatient care.

Next, after that, 72 hours is we then also go through the court process for a 5250 for 14 days, a 5270 for 30 days, and then if continue to need care, um it's possible for the courts uh through the judicial uh review process for the public guardian to get involved, do an investigation, and then go through the process of either a temporary conservatorship, which lasts for six months, or a full LPS conservatorship, which lasts for one year.

And so this is the way in which we sort of get we have to go through all those different steps in order to follow the the uh judicial process, and um just to give you a little bit of a context.

Currently we have somewhere in the ball, I can't tell you today today, but the last report that I had was of uh we had about 261 LPS conservatorships.

So that gives you a little bit of a context on the scope of that particular program.

And thank you.

I'll stop there and certainly open to any questions you may have.

Thank you, Dr.

Quist, Mr.

Mayor.

Thank you.

I I wanted to um to dig into this a little bit.

Um I guess the big picture is we're here talking about homelessness, of course, and the capacity issues and our solutions and you know the the the untalked about issues too much is addiction, the triangle between homelessness and addiction and mental health, and not all homeless are addictive in mental health and vice versa as well.

Uh so maybe you can just two things.

One, um, give us a bit more um hope that this is really making a difference.

In other words, the last five years, as you alluded to, uh the voters uh went and passed Prop One to help fund behavioral health beds.

Um we passed, and you know, I was part of that process in the Capital Crop a couple blocks away to address the gravely disabled population and on SB 43 and then with the care courts, is there is this feeling that these three changes are going to make a significant impact for people who have untreated mental illness who we see walking in our communities and frankly right outside this library on most days.

And I I don't know if the public nor I think, oh yeah, we we checked that box and we've solved the issue.

So so help us give us a little hope that these tools are allowing us to move forward and serve this this these untreated individuals in our communities.

Uh the place let's see where to start.

Um so I I would first highlight that um absolutely there have been a lot of changes that have happened over the last few years.

Uh we counted how many new initiatives, and it was in the ballpark of 83 new initiatives just for behavioral health since 2002.

So lots of new initiatives.

Um a majority of the time though, these new initiatives, I'm not answering your question directly, but a majority of these times.

So, for example, with proposition one, we took our existing funding and we basically moved it around in order to show that it needed to be used with new requirements and in different ways.

And um we we and in spite of that um Sacramento County has been doing a very aggressive job of expanding what resources are available within our community.

We have added um 131 new substance use beds with another 78 on the way.

We've increased how much augmented boarding care that's available, our crisis residential programs have increased, um, we've increased how many acute beds are in the community.

So we continue to make sure that we're increasing and making more resources available.

I think our number one challenge, if you talk to the service providers, is that we have such a limited, we can we can treat people, but then the problem is if we treat people, then where do we actually have to get into the challenges in a second, but maybe just asking in a different way.

So most of us here have been on ride-alongs with our fire department or police department, and and we've been told we can't help that individual because they don't want to get help.

And so we've been banging our head against the wall, and Sheriff Cooper mentioned this earlier, and so we passed multiple measures.

I highlighted three, we mentioned 80, and so we've given more tools for our first responders and behavioral health people like you to get people treatment who sometimes say, I don't want it, I don't need it.

So give us a little hope that things are in the right direction on that front.

Um, and then I'll give you the second question.

What more do we need to do, us collectively, to help make that hope even more uh promising to make a difference?

Well, I can tell you that every day our service providers are reporting great outcomes with uh with those that they're serving.

For folks that come into our services, they are less likely to experience additional homelessness, they're less likely to experience additional justice involvement, they're less likely to have another hospitalization.

So for those who come into our services, that's that in terms of the actual compelling people into services, that that is um, I think there's a little bit of a misunderstanding on that a lot of times across all of these different initiatives.

Um the extent to which we can actually take somebody who does not want to engage in services and force them, compel them to take medications, that's not and that's not a reality.

The the um uh sorry, lost that train of thought.

Um, I think I think we continue to want to continue to engage with individuals.

Oh, even if even if they're in one of these problems, we know that um if it for services to be effective, they have to want to get better.

And so that's one of our biggest challenges.

Even if we have court compelling somebody saying you have to do this program, if they're in the program, the challenge is we have to get them to actually want to get better and actually change their behaviors, whether that's their drug use or mental health.

Okay, and then lastly, maybe we can just zero in on what we can do because I I support these measures.

I think there are people out there that need compulsory treatment.

I think the people of California clearly believe that it was super controversial pushing these uh measures years ago, but I think that there's been a shift that you know, we're not gonna go back.

I like to say and put it put people back in the state hospital system with Nurse Ratchet, but we there are certain individuals that that need compulsory treatment.

I think that we've acknowledged that, but it's not always working.

So, what do what do we need to do to help make the system?

What tools do you need from us to help make this work better?

To be very direct, we need housing.

Um we have a shortage of housing.

We have a vacancy rate.

We have a vacancy rate of about one percent, according to recent HUD analysis, and we're you know, we're have our service providers report every day that they're having the hardest time finding uh locations for people to be housed.

So they'll have them in services, help them with their substance use, and then where do we put them after they come out of residential treatment?

We need we need places for them to go.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor.

Uh, just a quick time check.

Just a quick time check before we get to my colleagues here that are in the queue.

Sioban, what do you suggest in terms of maybe um on the fly agenda management?

Yeah, so one option is given the interest in this discussion, we can certainly put the federal and state impact discussion right after a lunch break if you'd like to do that.

Let's let's do that.

Uh, assuming that uh we're gonna eventually catch up here.

Sounds good.

All right, we will catch up.

Thank you.

Very good.

Uh uh Supervisor Hume.

Thank you, Chair.

Um and I thank you for the agenda management because I think this is really the thread of the sweater that runs through all of our uh responses, and and what I would hope that would come out of a more coordinated um focus and discussion is is really what this interface looks like and a lot of the questions that the mayor was just asking and and the information that you're providing.

And so I don't know that I fully uh hatched my analogy earlier about the hammer and the and the nail, but the fact of the matter is where I think our response falls woefully short is that it has to uh escalate to the point of justice involvement before we really can start to utilize some of these other tools uh available to us.

And I think we need to fix that, whether that's a legislative fix, whether it's a societal fix, whether it's just a realization of the amount of help and the depth of help that that is needed.

We've got to figure out how to bridge that gap better.

And and yes, we do need housing, but we don't need the 600,000 to a million dollars a door housing.

We need more housing, period, across the spectrum.

We gotta figure out how we break loose with more housing.

Um, but in addition to that, we need the facilities, we need the capacity, we need the bandwidth, and we need the uh legislative um ability to be more efficient, effective with our administration of mental health and behavioral health services.

Thank you.

Good comments, thank you.

Uh Supervisor Rodriguez.

Thank you.

Uh I think I was in the queue.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Supervisor Desmond.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair, and thank you, Dr.

Quiz.

I want to go back a little bit to uh Mayor McCarty's uh questions for you about what more can we do.

Um, you know, you talked about Cure Court, you talked about uh AOT or Laura's law.

We are not seeing statewide um as much participation or as much success in either of those programs as we expected.

And that's that's among all the counties in the state of California.

Um I also I appreciate that you mentioned that we have expanded capacity dramatically in Sacramento County in along our behavioral health continuum.

We did that in response to I believe it was a RAND study.

They came in and looked at where our um insufficiencies are in Sacramento County.

But I I do think one other other tool that we we the sheriff talked about it and some others have mentioned it is is the Prop 36.

Uh, a lot of people, you know, there's whether you're for or against it, the reality is it passed with 70% of the vote in the state of California.

But but part of that was there were two big parts to Prop 36.

One was that people were tired of seeing what was happening in their communities with both retail theft and open air drug use, but people wanted to retain the treatment focus of Prop 47, which is what now I think everybody, even those who were opposed to Prop 36, have come together and said we may not have liked, we may have opposed this, we wanted more of a Prop 47 approach, but now we all have to insist that our state legislature funds the mental health diversion resources that are necessary to carry out, I think the promises both prongs of Prop 36.

So that that's one thing I think we should we could all be doing together is advocating for more of those resources.

Because like the sheriff mentioned, there's a there's a lot more people in custody because of some of the changes with Prop 36, but we don't necessarily have the treatment resources.

It ends up becoming an unfunded mandate from the state of California that is not appropriately funded for us at the local level.

So I just want to really highlight that.

I agree with you on the housing as well because after we get people stabilized, after we get them the help they desperately need, we need a place for them to go as well.

But I wanted to highlight the Prop 36 uh aspects.

Thank you.

Ring it, thank you.

Now we'll go to Supervisor Rodriguez.

Thank you, Dr.

Chris, for your presentation.

Um I had the pleasure of serving for a city that was far this from the city of Sacramento prior to becoming a board of supervisor.

And in working with our nonprofits that oftentimes worked with individuals who had behavioral health, access to behavioral health was one of the challenges.

It was somebody who's not going to go from the from the city of Bolsom and come down to the Sacramento area to access behavioral health if it what if it meant for their continuous care.

What advice do you have as you have all of these cities and the county here when it comes to being able to uh get more better access for people that are unhoused that have behavioral health needs that need this type of care in order to be able to stabilize their mental health condition?

Um I'd say become very familiar with our 11 core sites.

Um they're all walk-in.

We do we change, we made a dramatic change since I've been here where you do not have to come through the county and get our approval to access services.

You can go directly to any of our 11 core sites and um get assessed there uh at any time.

So the idea is we wanted to make it very much accessible to anybody who wanted to access those services.

The well the wellness centers are walk-in, and then you just have to let them know that you want to take advantage of an assessment and get into services.

And are those services uh are they accessible to people that may not be closest to the area that's great as well?

Absolutely.

And then they're each each one of them, it's part of their contracts, it's part of their core value system is that they will also go to where the individuals are.

So if it's necessary to engage with people to actually go wherever they are, those those core centers will do that.

I just want to make one more comment.

Um and presentations at the county.

I'm such a big fan of the behavioral health mobile units that allow uh us to take services to the encampments so that if somebody needs their monthly injection, they can they we can access them through those.

And so I appreciate that the work that has been done to be able to get those services to the encampments instead of expecting individuals in the encampments to come to get services.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Uh Mayor Farmer.

Thank you, Chair Cerner.

I wanted to piggyback a little bit on what Mr.

Desmond and uh Mayor McCarty were talking about with uh relation to the care court.

When I first heard about those programs, I was very excited.

I thought this is what we want.

This is where we where, you know, we have people in our small town who will be picked up for let's say vandalism or something, uh, homeless individual, individual clearly suffering from mental illness, and then two days later they're walking around in town again and we're like, well, what what happened?

I thought there was a system where this person would get diagnosed and get the help.

I have a family member, uh, a cousin who went through the same thing.

Uh we were trying to help uh it was frustrating situation, uh, ended up getting arrested for vandalism.

We're thinking great, he's gonna get, you know, diagnosed in the system, is gonna get, you know, they're gonna diagnose his needs and then he'll put and no, uh, you know, back on the street every time.

Um it's frustrating because I feel like things like Prop 47, even though some of those were backpedaled with Prop 36, um, you know, things like Prop 47 where you uh, you know, drug drug use or or drug, you know, all drug crimes are pretty much just a slap on the wrist or citations these people are not um being forced into something where they can get that mental health.

Um so I I just feel like from the city of Galt that the care court or that type of um thing where uh either a first responder or law enforcement can diagnose that person or whatever that's the way I'm understanding it, can then um uh you know, recommend that person get into some program.

I don't feel like that's happening as much.

Um, that's on that subject, and then just to pivot a little bit on what uh uh Ms.

Vang and and Supervisor Hume mentioned about the housing, I 100% agree on that too.

I mean, it's like pulling teeth to get anybody to build affordable housing in Galt.

I mean, you have things like the affordable, you know, the housing accountability act, right?

Which which originally was intended to be focused on very low income or moderate housing.

That's been morphed by all kinds of amendments and legislation now, and pretty much all it does now is just it's just big developers hide behind it to just build regular houses, you know, 600, 700,000 houses.

That that is not even helping get affordable housing built anymore.

The word affordable is like ridiculous.

It's like that's just a buzzword.

Um, I mean, if you really want to again uh be preventative, we have to look at people that are on the verge of becoming homelessness and get them in affordable housing.

I live in a small town of Gaul where you can't even get apartment for less than like $1,700 a month.

We haven't built an apartment in 20 years.

We can't even get developers to look at our city to build apartments, much less low-income apartments.

And on one side, we pass things to say push housing first in our state, and on the flip side, we mandate all the types of things that these houses have to have, which makes the cost of building those houses astronomical, and developers have a hundred thousand dollars into a house to send permits before they even start building those houses.

So, I mean, there's all these things that are they're affecting, but I I just my frustration is housing, yes, we we need affordable housing uh to prevent homelessness, I believe.

And then on the other side of people that are homelessness, I believe the prevention uh by the behavior behavioral health aspect of it is frustrating for us.

So thank you.

Thank you, Mayor.

Uh Mayor Sing Allen.

Thank you.

Um, you know, I want to recognize and reaffirm some of the comments that were made by our sheriff, our DA, um, even Supervisor Desmond.

And that is really a recognition of the political roadblocks that exist.

They exist when it comes to housing.

Good, they're there.

And so just you know, what's it getting that information that transparency of data is absolutely needed.

Um, the metrics are needed.

But going back to proposition 36 that uh Supervisor Desmond mentioned, because it does connect to addressing homelessness, and that is the drug treatment uh funding that is necessary along with mental health services.

And going back to the politics of this, where you know, 70% of voters passed this.

It was a mandate, but the governor and the legislature failed to fund it.

Now I recognize there was not a funding component, but that is also the job of the legislature and the governor to recognize the will of the voters and find the funding.

If there's funding for pet projects, there's funding for this huge um statement coming from the voters that we want to see results, and so as we navigate um these discussions, drug treatment funding, mental health funding, those are things that we're we can do as much as we can do at the local level, but we need those supports from the state.

Um then on the housing crisis.

Could not agree more.

Um, and part of that is also the politics uh and recognizing the cost of building versus the reality of what the needs are.

We need to have a realistic balance between between both.

Supportive housing and permanent supportive housing is what's needed.

I from what I'm seeing, at least in our city, that's where the need is greatest.

It's affordable housing.

Um, what does that actually mean?

You know, you got to be in certain percentiles, but where we can address head-on that crisis where people are just shy of falling into homelessness, it's having more of those supportive housing and permanent supportive housing where we have wraparound services and maybe can save them from falling onto the streets.

This is a huge, huge issue, but I'm also just being realistic of what's also happening at the Capitol and where we are at the local level and what we can actually do.

Um so it's frustrating to say the least, but I'm hopeful with this group where we at least we're having the conversations and maybe we can ask for more accountability.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Vice Mayor Talamantes.

Thank you.

I have two questions.

How many inpatient beds did the county have?

566.

566.

Okay.

And then are these primarily funded through the state or federal, or what is the budget impacts from the state and the federal government look like on that?

And that you know what that might be a question for later, or unless you could just answer it right now.

Um we we pay uh so the as of as of this is as of last year.

Um the acute beds, because they're freestanding psychiatric hospitals, they were a hundred percent funded by the county for Medi-Cal members.

Um, as of now, uh beginning July 1st, 2025, um uh it is now it now is 5050 with uh Medi-Cal revenue coming from the feds due to an initiative called BH Connect, one of those other 83 initiatives.

Got it.

Okay, thank you.

Councilmember McGura.

Uh thank you very much, Chair.

Um so let me start off with on the housing question, uh, because it's my understanding that the courts are not considering SB 43 conservatorships because we don't have the uh the appropriate or the adequate housing.

And so, in essence, it's in a SB 43 conservatorship is ineffective in the county.

And at least my understanding, and maybe I may be wrong here, but uh it's about we're about two years out before we have that level of housing.

I I guess the question then is is there an interim measure to be able to use that tool before waiting two years before that type of tools available to to the county?

Um and then and if the issue is I mean, look, it uh the the conservatorship supports all of the county.

So is that one where as we discuss in the in the afternoon where it's located or how it's built, is that where all the cities and the county come together and say, hey, look, we got to get this this adequate housing for SB 43 conservativeship built.

Where can we do it quickest and fastest?

I mean, it do you have an answer to that, or is this a conversation for the afternoon?

I I would um be very direct and say SB 43 did not have the impact we expected it to have.

Um the fact of the matter is that um, you know, so really quick SB 43 says you can now hold somebody against their will for grave disability, meaning they're unable to care for their own food, shelter, clothing, as a result of a substance use disorder.

The the new part was the substance use disorder.

Turns out law enforcement, uh others within the community, um, if when they saw somebody who was gravely disabled in the community, they didn't know whether it was a mental health or a substance use issue, and they were taking them to the hospitals anyway.

So since the um implementation of SB 43, we've seen the best statistics I have, which I don't know that I real feel real strong about them, but the best statistics I have is we've had about 55 individuals who were hospitable were brought to an emergency department due to substance use only.

We have a lot of folks that come in for co-occurring mental health and substance use.

That's very common.

So we still have a lot of those, but those were happening before SB 43.

For those SB 43 cases only, 55 people, what we see is the best to our understanding is that they come into the emergency department, they metabolize whatever substance they're on, and now they no longer meet the criteria for grave disability.

And so then we try to get them into services, but ultimately now they cannot be holding voluntarily.

Okay.

Well, to that point, I and I would agree with how the mayor characterized it.

Many of our folks will see uh or law enforcement will see people on the street, and because of substance abuse, they're having that scenario.

And so I I'd still see this as a critical tool for the county.

Now, this is probably one where uh again to my second question earlier, we need to have a collective uh uh recommendation on changes to make that tool more effective for us.

The the next question I have here is on the care courts, because now cities uh can also petition, and the city of Sacramento has started petitioning itself.

I think any city here can also begin to petition uh for CARES court, and and it's not the panacea that we expected, you know, that's that's for sure.

Uh but uh it is another tool that we do have.

I think this is one where um the from the start of it, there's been some growing pains between the city and then the county being petitioners.

Um what are the recommendations to better better align those efforts so that the city and the county are actively getting more success through those care court petitions, and also uh if um if a petition is denied um uh then what other uh treatments or how do we move them into the conservative process conservative process so that that person just doesn't end up back out on the street.

Um so just as a reminder, care court is actually a petition to the court and it goes directly to the court, and then it's a court decision regarding what is the disposition of that particular case.

So Sacramento County, we have our program that's up and going in terms of being able to support the care court process.

We have tried to make it as easy, it is not easy.

I'll say that the paper, there's paperwork you have to complete, it's not easy.

But we've done everything we possibly can to make it as easy as possible in collaboration with the superior court, superior court has their self-help center that's available in order to help people, family members, for example, figure out how to fill out the paperwork.

We have our behavioral health team.

If you did a keyword search for Sacramento County care court, the first two hits are usually um the court and our behavioral health team on how you can contact us in order to get support in completing those petitions.

So we're we're very um, I'd say assertively implementing this program so that we we've been filing our own petitions as well in order to help people get people into services.

Uh, some of our psychiatric hospitals have identified people who thought that they thought were eligible for the program, and we as behavioral health were happy to file those petitions on their behalf.

So we're trying to do everything we possibly can to take advantage of this new tool in our toolbox in order to get people into care.

Now, if people um ultimately are not found to be eligible of the program, we also very assertively engage with the individual and offer them services that we can provide.

And actually, we've had a fair amount of success with that, because um a lot of times these are individuals that never came to our awareness.

We weren't even aware that these individuals were in the community needing behavioral health services, and so when we become aware that they they are in need of our services, I mean that's what we do.

That's what why we exist is we want to provide those those services.

So we very much are happy to um connect them with the services that they uh I appreciate that.

I think the I think the level of success in that transition is something on data collection, we should uh itemize and say, hey, what should they didn't if they were denied where and they go to this service, what it what is their outcome on that?

And the other thing that um I've seen is that our higher high utilizers are referred to these services, uh, but then they don't they don't get the services from uh from the information we're getting at the at the city level.

So maybe if we can figure out where's that gap where where they're not connecting, um I'd like to see okay, is there is that a structural issue?

Is that an issue that we need to look at in our governance model uh to make sure that we're not losing people through the uh through the gaps?

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Thank you, Dr.

Karpinsky Costa.

I have a two-part question years ago.

I used to be a person sleeping on a bench outside our library, and that person was there all the time.

So and all of a sudden, once the person wasn't there anymore.

So I was told his family came and claimed him and now he's back with his family.

So my question is when people leave your facility and you need housing, do you ever consider maybe now that he's kind of straightened away that his family can take him in and do you make efforts?

And part two of the question is I recently heard of a policy where they won't tell families where the homeless guy is, other than yes, we we we have him, we know he's out there, but they won't give locations because the policy is that he has his privacy rights and whatever.

So is that a policy that needs to be addressed?

Because I would think that once they get a little, you know, reformed or helped and on medication, the families can become great assistants if they have one.

We absolutely support individuals reconnect with their families every opportunity we possibly can.

So for example, if somebody's leaving an inpatient stay and we need someplace for them to go, other family members are absolutely an option that we try to very assertively pursue.

Um that that is a great option for for individuals.

So we take every opportunity to try to reconnect individuals with their families.

In terms of um, I I am not sure that I I'm I'm not sure that I've ever heard of that instance.

I'm wondering, Emily, if you do you know anything about it.

Well, for the police departments, they won't low tell the family where the person is.

I think the question.

Yeah, I think the question was um if we get a family member contacting us to try to find a uh family member who's experiencing homelessness.

Can we and do we release information on if if they're known to us?

And the answer is um our HMIS database also has security requirements and release of information is required.

What we actively do and we get these requests not infrequently is we'll put a note in the HMIS system saying your family member is looking for you.

Here's their phone number.

Here's how to connect with them, and we'll let the outreach worker know to proactively give that information to the family member.

We can't though release information on what shelter they're staying at or what what outreach worker they're engaging with without a release of information from that individual person.

Hope that helps.

Partially answers because you're not sure if the person that's homeless has the mental ability to agree or not agree with the connections.

Thank you.

Uh Councilmember Maple.

Thank you, Chair, and I'll make it very quick because I know we're behind schedule.

Um I have a question specific to care court.

You mentioned that there were 587 assessments done.

Um is that correct?

That was for diversion.

For diversion, okay.

I have the numbers though.

Well, specific to the diversion program, how many of those assessments actually led to someone being placed in the program?

That's a completely court decision.

So you so that data is in track, or you can we it is, but I'm wondering if I brought that one.

Okay.

So you can also maybe get it to me in the afternoon.

Um so just kind of curious on that, and then on the care court side, how many people have gone through the process and then actually been placed?

Sure.

We have 113 petitions filed, and then uh we'll follow up on um how many were um engaged in services.

Thank you.

Just to follow up, is that one thirteen roughly reflective of the population of the county?

Was there is there is there proportional participation from the city of Sacramento, for example?

We we don't for behavior, we really don't see jurisdictions.

Um, so we don't really pay attention to where people are um in terms of application uh petitions filed.

Um I don't believe we've had very many petitions filed by the city, if that's what you're asking.

Yeah, that's what I heard in the disappointing.

Thank you.

All right, very good.

Thank you, Dr.

Quest.

All right, Siobhan, just check me here.

Uh so we're holding federal and state for the afternoon, correct?

That is correct.

So you can decide how long of a recess you'd like to take.

Uh, we're not gonna hold the the public up, so we are going to have a shorter uh lunch period, and we will stand in recess then until 1 30.

Okay, I'd like to call back to order this historic meeting of the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors, the Sacramento City Council, and the mayors of our six other cities.

Madam Clerks, will you please call the role and reestablish a quorum?

Good afternoon, Chair from the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors, Supervisors Kennedy.

There, Mr.

Kennedy Kennedy, Mr.

President.

Are you here?

Desmond.

Here.

Rodriguez.

Here.

Hugh?

Here, Chair Cerna.

Here.

And from the city of Sacramento, Councilmember Kaplan.

Councilmember Dickinson.

We'll be here momentarily.

Vice Mayor Talamantes.

Here.

Councilman Robert Plucky Baum.

Here.

Council Member Dickinson is here.

I apologize.

As is Vice Mayor Talamantes.

Councilmember Pleckibaum?

Here.

Councilmember Maple.

Here.

Mayor Potem Gata?

Here.

Councilmember Jennings.

Here.

Councilmember Vang.

Present.

Mayor McCarty.

And from the City of Rancher Cordova, Councilmember Budge.

Here.

Elk Grove Mayor Singh Allen.

Here.

Citrus Heights Mayor Karpinski Costa.

Present.

Galt Mayor Farmer.

Here.

And Ful Submair Aquino.

Chairs, you have a quorum.

Very good.

Thank you very much.

Again, I want to thank the presenters from this morning's session.

I think it was led to a very good conclusion in terms of expressing the interest on some particular subjects associated with the broader issue of homelessness, which I think we'll probably carry into the afternoon.

I'm going to look now to uh Chabon Katari to kind of give us an idea of what to expect now in the next couple hours.

Great.

Thank you.

Shivan Katari, Deputy County Executive for Health and Human Services.

And I wanted to just follow up on a question that had come up earlier today and then give you answer a couple of other questions as well.

So Councilmember Gera had asked the question, and I'm gonna I'm gonna interpret it the way I think you meant it, and correct me if I'm wrong, Councilmember.

What are the differences in the services in the different jurisdictions and how, as a result, how are the outcomes different?

And one of the things that I wanted to just mention is, you know, behavioral health services, as Dr.

Quist talked about earlier, have really been evolving over time as we've seen more funding, more initiatives come our way.

And we can we want to continue to iterate and evolve these services and adapt to where the changing needs are.

So as he referenced, we have these 11 core centers throughout the county that are intended to really be access points and serve.

And those core centers were placed where they were based on our data, based on heat maps that showed us where the needs were.

Now that being said, those decisions were made two, three years ago, and we know that the county is constantly evolving and adapting, adapting.

So we want to be partners with all of you.

We want to have these discussions, whether they be in forums like this or with your teams, to make sure that as uh the needs grow as the needs evolve, we're able to adapt those services, and that's our commitment to you.

In the meantime, as we are having those discussions, I definitely want to encourage you to reach out to myself, to Tim Lutz to Dr.

Quist, and we'll have those conversations on a jurisdiction by jurisdiction basis.

Additionally, some jurisdictions bring resources to the table and um and some differing amounts of resources to the table.

So, for instance, you heard about Elk Grove this morning having certain navigators that they pay for out of their budget with that, and there's other jurisdictions where the county provides those navigation services or those behavioral health services.

Once again, this is uh we're building the plane as we fly it, and we want to be able to adapt, and so we're gonna have continued conversations with your teams to make sure those resources are deployed where they need to be, where the folks are.

I also just wanted to mention that there was some questions about data that came up this morning.

Uh we want to be able to provide you the best data possible.

So we did write down those questions.

We're gonna continue to write down your data questions throughout the day.

We will send a follow-up email to everybody here on the dais with links to dashboards that we have developed that are on our website, care court related, mental health diversion related, and more.

So you can get real-time data month to month and see how those numbers evolve over time.

There's actually even more interesting data on there that we want you to have an opportunity to look at, and it will it will help to make it part of the public record if we send it to you that way as well so that the public can see it as well.

So with that, I want to introduce our next presenter, and we're really um happy to have Alice Alex Vizatsky with us today.

He's a senior California policy fellow from the National Alliance to End Homelessness, and he's joined us today to discuss some of the state and federal impacts to our safety net that will affect the dollars that we're seeing today and in the future.

So thank you, Alex.

Very good, thank you.

Welcome.

Thank you so much, Mr.

Chair.

Um, thank you, committee members, for the opportunity to present to you today.

My name is Alex Vysatsky.

I direct California policy for the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

For those that are not familiar with the Alliance, we're a nonpartisan organization based in Washington, DC, and we've spent the last several decades looking at both the data and the practice around what works to address homelessness and lifting up what works, both to folks on Capitol Hill to increase budgets and to change policy around homelessness, and also bringing that to the rest of the of the country to try to influence practice.

Big picture, my task here today is really to help set the stage and the context as you all wrestle with these complex questions around governance so that everyone has a baseline understanding of the funding and policy environment that state and federal government are creating for all of you to operate in.

This is going to be really important so you can all kind of develop a shared understanding of what does and does not constitute success because ultimately some measures of success are going to be highly dependent on the availability or dearth of resources, housing resources that are coming down from state and federal.

Governance and how local partners collaborate with each other is critically important, but it's not a replacement alone for having sufficient housing resources to get folks that are experiencing homelessness back into housing.

So I'll talk a little bit about what the kind of status quo is at the federal side, what we see coming down the pike, and then similarly on the state side.

We are already starting from a place of insufficient federal resources to address this problem, right?

Housing assistance is not like health care, it's not like education, it's not like food assistance.

It is not an entitlement.

Just because you are eligible to receive housing assistance does not mean you will actually get that housing assistance.

Nationwide, only one in every four households that actually is eligible and qualifies for housing assistance is actually able to receive it.

And that varies significantly across different kind of sub-populations.

If you look at single working age adults, only one out of every 12 that is eligible for housing assistance is actually able to receive it.

And this, I think, more than anything else explains kind of why we are in the crisis that we're in, right?

We don't have housing that is affordable for low-income people, and the safety net to make up the difference there is is woefully insufficient.

So that's kind of the picture that we're starting with, and I want to credit our partners at the Center on Budget Policy Priorities for this great graphic there showing that.

A couple of the kind of primary federal housing programs that you should be aware of.

The biggest program far and away is tenant-based rental assistance.

This includes programs like the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program that provides housing assistance to hundreds of thousands of households here in California.

And then just in the Sacramento County area, about 13,000 households having vouchers administered by SHRA alone.

The primary program that focuses just on homelessness.

This is the Continuum of Care program.

This is a program that in the last fiscal year brought a little over 700 million dollars to continuums of care across California.

That program is really focused on rental subsidies in support of housing, rapid rehousing and other types of rental subsidies that can be used on the private market as well as supportive services.

And that's a program that brought about 40 million dollars to the Sacramento COC last year, the vast majority of which went for permanent housing uses.

And then the last program I'll mention is the emergency rescue, or sorry, the emergency housing voucher program.

This was a program that came out of one of the COVID rescue packages and brought 15,000 housing vouchers dedicated to people experiencing homelessness to California.

Several hundred of those being utilized here in the Sacramento County area.

This is not kind of an exhaustive picture of resources, but I think these three programs we'll talk about as being somewhat indicative of the federal landscape here.

So what's kind of on the immediate horizon, right?

We had a White House budget proposal earlier in the year that proposed extremely deep cuts to rental assistance programs, a 44% proposed cut to rental assistance programs nationwide wholesale elimination of entire programs like the community development block grant program.

We have now watched as Congress kind of takes that budget proposal, and you know, as Congress maintains the power to budget, they often view the White House budget proposal as a suggestion and not so much as a dictate.

The budget bills that we saw out of on housing out of both the House and the Senate largely rejected those deepest cuts and chose instead more or less to maintain kind of what is that status quo here on housing, which again is already a status quo that leaves a lot of people unable to access assistance.

However, we are seeing a lot of policy changes being pursued, which we'll talk about in a moment, that are being pursued by the administration that though they are not necessarily direct cuts in funding, effectively function as deep cuts by removing numerous people from their from their ability to access assistance.

Just briefly on these on these proposals that of course are currently stalled with the federal government in the midst of a shutdown.

We have a house proposal that still creates some cuts for Californians trying to seek rental assistance.

We have a Senate proposal that's a little better when it comes to rental assistance and homelessness funding, but still largely keeps our resources flat, despite kind of growing need.

So that's the universe of those proposals that are kind of dueling as we discuss how to get out of this shutdown.

On the emergency housing voucher side, this is again a program that came out of the American Rescue Plan that was passed during COVID and brought 15,000 vouchers to California.

This was a program that was anticipated to have funding until 2030 to support folks exiting homelessness back into housing in the private market because of rising rental costs.

We saw the money the money for this program go a lot faster than it was anticipated to.

So in July, we saw an executive order from the White House on homelessness that really talked in more theoretical terms about a desire to strengthen emphasis on treatment, strengthen emphasis on forcing people into treatment, and sort of eschewed housing being seen as a critical component of ending people's homelessness.

But with executive orders, you know, they're not necessarily tangible direction.

It's it takes time to see how the federal departments are actually going to interpret that executive order and translate that into action.

We're just now starting to get some of the first indications of what of how this executive order is translating into policy and how different policy changes are going to roll out.

One policy that's being discussed is taking away housing assistance for mixed status families, families with mixed immigration statuses, which of course will have a big impact for California.

And then another critical piece for our homeless system is the Continuum of Care program.

Again, this is a program about 40 million dollars to Sacramento, 92% of which goes to permanent housing, existing permanent housing supporting people in PSH, supporting people in market rate housing as well.

There was reporting in Politico a few weeks ago indicating that the administration was going to issue a new notice of funding for the continuum of care program, and that that was going to contain significant changes to how this program functioned and place caps on how much of any Continuum of CARES award could go towards permanent housing and cap that at 30% of a communities award, which for a COC like Sacramento effectively means 25 million dollars dropping out of existing already built, already occupied permanent housing.

So these are supportive housing residents that are at risk potentially of losing their subsidies, folks with disabilities, folks fleeing domestic violence, older adults, an extremely vulnerable population that's at risk of losing their housing.

Again, this notice of funding has not been released yet.

All we know about it is really from this politico article from a couple weeks ago.

So there may be further risks to funding, further policy changes that are on the horizon coming out.

But I think this is indicative kind of of some of the policy context that we're facing.

And then, you know, I'm sure the uh folks here from the health department can speak much more ably to this, but you know, we are have already seen policy passed through HR1 earlier in this year, which is going to be devastating for folks' ability to access health care benefits, and it's estimated that up to 3.4 million Californians could lose their Medical coverage.

Again, this is not all through funding cuts, but a lot of it through policy changes.

Added kind of red tape, whether it's eligibility redeterminations happening on a much more regular basis, additional verification requirements, and reducing things like retroactive coverage, all of which we've seen in previous uh attempts to do this, has resulted in people losing their benefits.

Um very sobering reality that California and that communities in California are facing here.

So I'll pivot from that federal landscape to talking briefly about the state.

We have kind of seen three eras of homeless funding in California.

Prior to 2019, homelessness was very scantly funded by the state.

We saw very small kind of niche programs funded by the state that targeted key subpopulations, such as youth exiting the child welfare system or older adults.

And these programs also only funded kind of small chunks of the system.

For example, they would fund rental subsidies, but not outreach, not housing navigation.

And then starting really with the new administration that came in in 2019, and uh boosted by uh strong budget performance, especially with federal assistance coming through the COVID packages.

We saw this kind of wave of innovation, this wave of new programs, fueled again by this COVID spending that came from the state.

And that kind of went through the end of 2022.

The last couple years now we're in a we've moved into a third kind of era of California homeless spending.

And the era we're in right now is a little bit of a pullback.

A lot of these investments that came during that second kind of surge of investments were really were all one-time funding sources.

They were funded with general funds, they did not have revenue sources behind them.

And so we started kind of each new budget cycle back at zero.

And we're now in this moment where California state faces structural budget deficits for the next few years and has been slowly kind of peeling back some of their homelessness investments.

So I'll kind of motor through these slides here.

But these are a lot of the programs that existed prior to 2020 that were really kind of niche directed at specific populations.

We then saw this kind of wave of new investment in programs like HAP that you now all uh know and love, uh programs like HomeKey.

Um but again, these programs were really funded through one-time investments and don't have kind of stable funding moving on into the future.

We also saw this surge in funding for uh behavioral health and homelessness programs kind of tying those together.

Um, HAP has been the most kind of consistent uh program funded by the state, it's really the only program that funds everybody experiencing homelessness, can serve everybody experiencing homelessness, regardless of whether they're you know an older adult or whether or not they have a behavioral health condition, and it's the only program that can really fund all parts of the homeless system.

Um as I think your administrative uh staff all know, it's a program that's changed every year.

Um, it's and has had sort of different and changing accountability measure measures.

Um one of the really innovative things about HAP was this regional planning process that was instituted in the fifth round of HAP.

Um, and again, this is a program that we've seen the funding amounts go up and down each year, right?

So it was stably at a billion dollars for four years.

Just this past budget cycle, however, uh drop down to 500 million dollars.

So a 50% cut in what we're seeing from from HAP, which has been the most stable program to date uh at the state level.

Um I do want to just take a moment uh though, and recognize that when we have seen investment and stable investment from the state, we have seen outcomes, right?

I think nobody would get up here and profess, as you all answered in your uh survey question at the beginning, that we've done enough.

Nobody would say we've we've solved this problem, right?

But important strides have been made, right?

Because of the consistency in HAP, the state has seen over 80,000 people move from homelessness back into permanent housing because of HAP alone, and that has also translated in over 4,000 people in the Sacramento uh COC moving back into permanent housing, and that has kind of slowed the rise of homelessness here in the state.

Uh if you look outside of California at the rest of the country, homelessness has risen eight times faster than it has within California between 2023 and 2024.

Um, so share that to say that, and and I share this with with state legislators and with the administration all the time, right?

That the key here, the key, it's not the moment to pull back from new investments at the state level, right?

It's it's the moment to kind of stay the course and stay.

Isn't the problem though for California when you look at the real numbers though?

When you when you say that we're not rising as fast as other states, it's all relative terms of percentage versus the real numbers, correct?

When you say the real numbers, I mean, like maybe we're not rising as much as as fast as we had in the past, but it's a bigger state than many other states, and we have a larger homeless population, so the real numbers uh are still going to be comparatively greater than some of those states that are seeing, you know, uh relatively uh huge increases.

Yeah, I mean, we have seen homelessness on a per capita basis, um, remaining stubbornly high in states, especially in an unsheltered context across the west, across the south, places like uh Florida and Arizona.

So I think you're right that California starts from a from a place of a larger population, but this has become a nationwide crisis, right?

This problem is no longer unique to California.

Oh my gosh.

Thanks.

Um, uh the reason I the reason I interrupt and ask the the question is or make the um observation is that if we were if we as local elected policymakers were to present what you just said to our constituents, uh they they I don't think they would really have much um uh empathy for for that particular statistic.

They would uh cite what we hear all day long, which is, you know, what people see during their drive to and from work or on their way to you know pick up their kids or go to school, which is uh, you know, the the next group of folks that are underneath a bridge or living in our parkways, and so um I just think we have to be careful with how we understand statistics.

That's my point.

I think it's a great point, Mr.

Chair, and I think herein lies the problem with a lot of our discussion around homelessness is that homelessness is the result, of course, of larger structural factors that go well beyond the actual response to homelessness, right?

It's a result of unaffordability of housing, of stagnant wages, uh of all these things.

So I think of it like the emergency room, for example.

You want an emergency room that is gonna be quick and efficient and provide people great care when they come in because they have an emergency, but you don't necessarily point the finger at the emergency room, right?

Because people have medical emergencies that are bringing them in in the first place.

So that's not to say that we don't need to have hard discussions about how to ensure the homeless system is effective, but it's only accounting for kind of one side of the equation, and that's how we get people out of the system.

Supervisor Rodriguez.

Alex, thank you for your presentation.

Uh so uh you know, as I as I dove down into homelessness, some of the major problems, and we have really significant problems, while the pit count says 6600, the reality number is somewhere between 10 and 12.

Sacramento counties is enduring one of the greatest demands where we have so many people that are wanting to move to the Sacramento region, which is going to continue to impact this problem that we have.

We have bottlenecks at the shelters.

We have bottleneck, we have people in permanent supportive housing that from what I uh understand no longer are requiring needs of their wraparound services, and so we give it we've given people the ability to opt out.

Some of the major crises that we have is at the very low affordable housing.

And so if we're not moving people up, and we know that that very low affordable housing is really truly the area that can allow people to get through the street level shelters to to shelters, and then and then reevaluate the permanent the people that are in permanent supportive housing.

In my opinion, I've heard physical disability is a ability is uh can will allow somebody to get into permanent supportive housing, but we have people with living with disabilities that live in regular other type of housing.

Premise supportive housing being the most expensive, that is in my opinion, crippling some of the funding of what goes into managing homelessness.

It's like as though we need to re-evaluate the individuals that in the PSH level.

But my question here is if we know that very low affordable housing is the answer to much of our our problems, why are we not emphasizing and maybe putting more funding into this area so that we can build that particular type of housing that has the greatest need.

Yes, Supervisor, I think I think uh it's a great point.

We're gonna need uh really a spectrum of resources to address this crisis.

I think for the people with the most acute needs, you know, supportive housing is shown to be in it the most kind of effective intervention.

Um but there's other interventions like building new affordable housing, but also interventions that don't require um, you know, capital investments in building a new building from the ground up, right?

Things like rental subsidies uh can get people back into existing housing in the private market, um, right now, right, without having to wait uh several years for housing to be built.

So I think it's all about figuring out what's the right mix, and I'm glad you mentioned that bottleneck because that is a very real concern, I think, in a lot of systems around California, um, and having that mix and full spectrum of housing interventions to get people out of homelessness is how you kind of unstick that bottleneck.

Yeah, I guess my point is permanent supportive housing um is I agree, it is the greatest need, and it's the best way to stabilize somebody who may have behavioral health or other type of conditions, but once they are stabilized, we should work at moving them into other type of housing so that we can continue to bring in people that have really great needs on the behavioral health.

So thank you.

Thank you, Supervisor Rodriguez.

Uh, and thank you, Alex, for the uh the presentation.

Um I know we still have uh a lot of work uh ahead of us uh today and and after, um but uh I think giving us some uh understanding of what is obviously a very fluid situation, especially as it relates to the federal government and um almost hourly, what uh we need to do to um I think stay flexible is really critical for us to keep that top of mind.

So this is a very helpful and timely presentation.

Uh any further questions for our yes, thank you, Chair.

I just wanted to say thank you.

Well, it's good to see you in person and not in a Zoom box.

Um, but I I mostly just wanted to say thank you for um being stark and real.

I think it's important not only for us but for the public to see the challenges that are before us, not just locally at the state level and at the national level.

Um, but also wanna thank you for your advocacy because I know that in addition to this hat and other hats that you've been working to make sure that we keep a lot of these funds uh at the national level and at the state level, and to make sure that cities and counties are able to get those funds as well.

So I just really wanted to appreciate that work and uh I know it's hard.

So thanks.

Thank you, Councilmember, and thank you, all committee members.

Thank you.

All right, Javon.

Great, thank you.

With that, I'd like to invite Matt Kate and Darby Kernan from Mosaic Solutions for this afternoon's visioning session.

Good.

Woo!

This is a surprise.

Good on that sound.

Yeah, brainstorming after the I know.

Okay.

Are we okay?

Come here.

Who's managing the sound?

We need the uh remote mic.

Volume up, it's really strong.

Who mooted me?

There we go.

Um so um you have just passed from the presentation portion of this uh afternoon to the facilitation portion.

For I don't think I need to explain facilitation to any of you.

That means this is about you, not about us.

So we're gonna do our best to engage you in this conversation, uh, stay out of the way as much as we can and try to move us forward.

Um as I said earlier, it's been a privilege and super interesting professionally for Darby and I to be a part of this for a couple reasons.

Um, number one, because we were able to get engaged in something that we all we personally care about, professionally care about, but also we've been able to get to know you better and get to know your views on this critical issue, and I think we've both enjoyed that.

Um there's really two ground rules for uh this afternoon.

Uh number one, it's super important that you engage with each other.

And number two, it's important that you don't do that so much that someone else can't follow rule number one.

So the this is starting to sound like marriage counseling.

Mr.

Chair, that's correct.

A little temperance.

A little, I hear you to be saying, yes, and uh those kind of things.

So uh you'll get it as we go along.

Uh we're gonna start today just by talking about what um uh what came through your um discussions with us so that hopefully we can short circuit or um shortcut some of that with each other so you'll know a little bit about what the consensus items were or near consensus, uh and then you'll see some survey results, which we're gonna show in just a minute.

This part will take about 15 minutes, uh maybe 10.

And then we're gonna turn to um the areas that you all expressed you cared about the most.

Uh and I won't hide the ball from you.

I can tell you uh that most of you said, I think electeds in this Sacramento County, Sacramento Cities, uh this group need to be more directly involved in our structure around how we manage homelessness.

Um you all said uh yeah, I think really all that you uh appreciated the strengths you have in your staff, in your CBOs, in your partner organizations, first responders, etc., and you want them engaged in a real way in a future structure.

Um, and then third, you all said we want this new structure to be as efficient and effective as possible in reaching our goals.

Uh, and I don't care what else comes through this other than we've got to be as effective and efficient as we can going forward.

And then, of course, as an aside, you all said please don't waste our time with just another listening session.

So, Matt, can I can I interrupt real quick just because I I don't want there to be any confusion for members of the public because you you you went right into kind of uh prefacing uh the fact that we're gonna be talking about survey results.

Um, maybe you can just explain um real quick what you're talking about for uh for the sake of people that may just wonder what what are we talking about?

Yeah, what you're sure.

Um our attempt before um interviewing and sitting down with each and every one of you about what your thoughts are about addressing homelessness in Sacramento and about today's meeting.

We provided a qualtrix survey to you that just had various questions for you to answer, and really it was to kind of um break the ice so we could start talking and understand what the starting point was.

So we created several slides from those conversations so that we could kind of present those today and show you what we've heard from all of you.

Yeah, just I just wanted to point out it's not the brief little survey we did earlier this morning.

That's not what we're talking about, so um, with that, uh what we're gonna do is we'll report out on the survey and the and those interviews, and then we'll gonna go into leadership structure.

Uh we're gonna talk about the role of staff, uh, the role of stakeholders, uh, the role of CBOs, etc.

Um, we're gonna talk about what this a new organization might look like, a multi-jurisdictional organization might look like, and then we'll we'll wrap up and have some opportunities to talk with each other about what we're gonna do going forward.

So, Darby, part of that.

Okay.

So, um the first question we asked is um how important is each of these community voices.

And I'm just gonna for those if you can't see uh board of supervisors, homeless population, city council, county staff, local city staff, continue of care law enforcement, CBOs, housing authority, hospital first responders, etc.

So, um what you'll see is that um the mostly red, which is critical, yellow, very important, purple, moderately important.

Um all of this is very important, obviously, but uh the board of Supervisors and city council members themselves were uh near the top, along with the homeless population, and then right below that was your city and county staff.

Um, and then it drops off a little bit from there as you go down the list.

Uh you'll see, not surprising once you learn a little bit about our uh interviews with all of you.

Right.

Um so go ahead, Darwin.

Um, so the second what slide is from your city and county perspective, describe your level of concern with the state of homelessness.

Um the city of Sacramento definitely was one of the largest the concern, and this is from all of you in various jurisdictions.

So it's um from your perspective, and the county of Sacramento also was, and then as you went down the line, it was a the concern definitely decreased.

Yeah, and the key thing about this slide is that everyone weighed in on everyone else, yeah.

And so not everyone knows everything about everyone else, but this is the group's uh general viewpoint, right?

Uh, this is what I mentioned earlier, uh, in terms of most meaningful challenges.

Uh you've heard this all this morning the lack of housing, uh funding for programs and services, the handling of homeless encampments, efficacy of programs, uh, and then lack of consistency uh across jurisdictions.

I just make one point about this slide, and that is um all of you shared these concerns, and what came through over time is what if we can do if we can have a structure that better addresses the top four, then I'm in.

Let's see, there you go.

Um, what should the county and cities in Sacramento prioritize to improve the management of homelessness?

Programs and services was very high priority.

City and county coordination was also funding, policies, community awareness, and shared governance, and so those were the priorities that came through the highest level policies for um was really stark, and then the program and services.

Correct.

Um, no surprises there, I assume from anybody?

All right, then that's it, right?

I'm sorry, uh Council Member Vang, do you not have um a screen right in front right there in front?

Okay, I thought yeah, I think it was in the packet, but any other questions about the slides or the results of those surveys that you conducted.

Uh Councilmember Guerra.

Uh yeah, yeah.

You know, can you maybe uh dive in a little bit between the two?

Uh city and county coordination versus which is number two, and if you add the uh priority level two, it adds to significant to shared governance, which is almost at the very bottom.

Can you maybe uh uh elaborate a little bit on the distinction and the conversations you had during your survey conversation?

Yeah, I think um what seemed to really come out is that across jurisdictions you want better understanding of what's happening and knowing that um in other cities that services are being provided to, and that it's not just in certain areas, and I think that came across is that making sure that countywide services are being provided, and then that led into needing coordination among your various cities and the county so that you have a better understanding of what's happening in all these different jurisdictions.

Yeah, and I would I would add that in the interviews, it became as we had uh discussions about programs and services funding, etc.

Uh, I don't think there was a lot of preconceived notion about what shared governance was.

It wasn't until we got into conversations with people, um, that it came out that you oh I see, yes, I want to be involved, I want to be involved in a way that impacts uh my community the best, and it and I think that may involve uh us as a county and multiple cities within that county, but I don't think people got that out of the first gate uh out of the term shared governance.

Very good.

Can you go back to the slide?

Can you go back to the slide that had the um priority?

I think it's one slide back.

One more.

That one?

Yes, this one here.

So this one uh from your city-county perspectives, describe your level of concern with the state of homelessness.

It's this is a very interesting one because if you talk to anyone, any member of the public, a resident, a business owner, they will tell you that the number one concern of having a business in in California in Sacramento, you know, or uh, is homelessness.

Homelessness impacts residents, homeless impacts businesses, homeless home homelessness impacts people's quality of life, but it doesn't sound like this is reflective of what we hear out there.

It well, I think this is reflective of when people come into the city of Sacramento, maybe they see it's more apparent what homelessness is versus if you're in Folsom.

Well, even I having been a resident of Folsom for 20 years, and having served as a city council and own the business, I can tell you that you have a conversation, and I talk to a lot of people.

The issues are homelessness, but yeah, it it here, as far as it being a critical issue is not, it just doesn't seem like it's reflected.

If you did a survey of the public, this is us though, correct?

Yes, this is from your perspective.

Right, this is us as us as elected officials, right?

But what I I guess my point is this is not doesn't appear to be reflective of what residents and business owners out in the county say is the problem.

Most people will tell you homelessness is the number one most critical issue, but it's not reflective here by us as elected officials, is my point.

I think we um the way the survey was though, just to kind of give you uh it's uh it was a concern for everybody, but you are picking and um rating where the highest level of concern was with homelessness, so within the county, the city, and then the other cities, and so grove may not have weighed in on fulsome not being aware of it, but may have weighed in on Sacramento.

Excuse me, Chair, yes, please.

Sorry, I hit the speak button instead of the mic button.

Um could you please, just for everyone's edification, and I think this goes back to the chair's point about what we're actually talking about.

How was this survey disseminated and to whom was it sent and when did we respond?

Sure.

It was um emailed out to all of the electeds that are here, and to um key staff in your area, so your city managers, for example, um, or the county um office, um, or your homeless individuals that work on homelessness, and it was a eight question survey that was used prior to sitting down as Matt and I, as the facilitators of today's session, wanted to get more familiar with your views on where the crisis points were, what your interest is, and where you want to focus, and these were the key um issues that popped out from that.

Okay, so from this, we then set up interviews with all of you.

Uh, thank you for your willingness to sit with us uh in for some um for more than an hour.

Um, and so as we talked about what you want to see going forward to address to better address the issues that you have in front of you as electeds, what we heard over and over again were quotes like I was elected to push for progress on this issue.

My constituents expect me to take an active leadership role on this issue.

I want action.

Electeds are too removed.

I want to know what other jurisdictions are doing in real time.

Our city is happy with our progress, but we understand that it's a regional uh county region problem for us, right?

Over and over again, um, there were uh some folks that felt pretty good about where they are, but the vast majority said, if we would like a structure where as an elected official, I'm more involved in real time.

And so that's the first topic we want to we want to address today.

If you have a new um structure, what would it mean for you to be more engaged as an elected official?

And I'll put a little bit more on that.

So, how would you be more engaged?

What would be the most important thing for you as an elected official to be involved in?

Um, and uh what would be the benefits of you being involved directly as an elected official in a future um either multi-jurisdictional or shared jurisdiction organization on homelessness is the question.

And we'll we'll take comments.

Question on the floor, generally, intended to spark uh engagement and discussion.

I guess I'll um I'll start.

Good.

We have some folks in the queue here, but I'll start.

Um so uh for speaking from my experience uh uh as a unique uh county district that overlaps with the city, 97% of the uh people that I directly represent in the district are city of Sacramento residents.

Um for me, it would be to have uh uh I guess improved nimbleness uh relative to our district staff working with our professional staff uh at both the county and the city, Sacramento, uh to be able to uh respond um in maybe not uh as close to real time as possible to constituent concerns.

And we I think we we have achieved that in concept.

Um it's certainly better than it was say five years ago, I would I would say uh but to uh improve upon that and and have the resources to be able to um work with uh the city's department of community response, who is really kind of addressing um that immediate constituent need uh relative more to kind of the municipal services side of things, um, or perhaps a constituent that is wanting to help someone that's homeless, home uh suffering uh homelessness, where we the county can then more swiftly bring um behavioral health services, mental health services, uh perhaps even uh sheltering uh services and merge that immediately or as close to immediately with what the the city's side of the equation is.

That would for me be a better future for how things are done generally, so to have that ability to um and to have my own district staff uh be able to help marshal those resources um uh faster.

So we're gonna change the usual process too.

I know that we'll call on the people here, but we're not gonna we're gonna kind of take control from the mayor and the chair to kind of have a little more conversation.

So I do want to actually come back at you a little bit about that.

What do you think doesn't happen today?

Because I think the one thing we have found is the city of Sacramento and the county staff of Sacramento work very well together, they are constantly in a communication, and so for an elected though, what does that mean to you?

If they're talking, how do you improve upon that by being involved?

Well, like I think the theme of my response or my um comment was temporal, right?

To do to do what we're doing, which I I don't disagree, where it is it's working, but to have it work faster, because that's the expectation of our constituents, and yes, sometimes those expectations can be a bit on the um uh unreal side in terms of you know to get it done in 10 minutes that you know that's some probably not gonna happen, but um you know uh we've I've heard way too often from constituent that says, hey, listen, we contacted your office five days ago.

The you know the the person that's still not getting services under the overpass is is still there, and I have never seen anyone there from the city or the county.

Uh, what's happening?

It's been a uh a work week.

What what are you doing?

That that's that's what I'm talking about.

Is to do build upon what we're doing that is working, but be able to deploy it um in um a more swift manner.

Good.

Supervisor Desmond.

Well, now that I know you'll be challenging me.

Well, I will, don't you worry?

So I I think you know, in answer, I guess, to the question about what would I would like to see is um I think about all the the things we've been talking about today and hearing from the different jurisdictions about what they're doing.

We've never really had a formal forum to do that on an ongoing basis.

We've done it kind of ad hoc.

We've done it where county staff goes to the various city councils and talks about what we're doing.

We've had the homeless policy coordinating council, which was a I think a you know, relatively feeble effort to get people from other uh cities within the county engaged at the level that I think the city of Sacramento and the County of Sacramento have been engaged.

Um, I think that's a glaring omission in our approach to homelessness in the county, and I I think having a formal forum that meets either monthly or every other month or even quarterly, where we can sit down and bring to the table as elected officials that are all represented, represent each jurisdiction within this county, to bring up, hey, this is what we're doing in Elk Grove.

How do we make sure we're tapping into county resources?

Uh, this is what we're doing in Citrus Heights.

How do we make sure that to quote my friend and colleague, Supervisor Hume, we're not squeezing the balloon and it's blowing up in a different in a neighboring jurisdiction.

How do we make sure we're coordinating that better?

Um, I just think even having that forum, and and it provides it's it's agendized, open to the public, where we can we can try to resolve things within our own jurisdiction, what we're doing, but there are a lot of things that we won't be able to resolve without the coordination and partnership of surrounding jurisdictions and probably county and and county social services supports.

I I just I think we could we could really do a heck of a lot better with our approach to certainly unsheltered homelessness if we had that.

Yeah, all right, uh, Councilman Dixon Dickinson.

I wanted to say supervisor, it's very tricky.

Can't keep a job.

Um, thank thank you, thank you, Chair and Mayor, and thanks for the to all who are participating and all those who've contributed to to today.

I want to answer this question with a little bit of a uh of a predicate.

Seventy-seven percent of the homeless in the county are in the city of Sacramento by the numbers we have.

Forty percent of that 77 percent is in district two of the city of Sacramento.

That means 30 percent, roughly, of all the homeless in the county of Sacramento, are in District 2 of the City of Sacramento.

And I don't want to overlook District 4 with the river district in downtown.

Certainly, we're somewhat the same math could could apply.

But what that means is that district two of the city of Sacramento is the most significantly affected of any part of the county in terms of the impact of homelessness.

That means that it affects parks and streets, creeks and streams, businesses and neighborhoods, and most importantly, it affects the people, the people who are trying to maintain desirable neighborhoods, the people who are trying to create businesses, the people who are on sheltered, and in need of assistance and help and safety.

So when you ask me, what is it that I would be most interested in in terms of uh a role, it would be to be directly involved in the allocation of resources that address homelessness to be directly involved in somewhat of this uh mirrors uh Chair uh Cerna's statement in the delivery and implementation of services and and programs, in other words, directly involved in the governance and willing to accept accountability for that necessarily.

Sounds good.

But it means also in that allocation of resources, something we have not talked much about this morning.

It showed up on one of the charts, and that was about the extent of it, and that's putting much more of our resources into prevention.

Because let me just finish this sentence, Darby, and then and then you can interrogate me if you choose.

I do.

Because the reality is that we are never in to use uh a paraphrase going to build our way out of sheltering homelessness.

We have to get to the front end of the equation.

We have to prevent people who are at risk of becoming homeless from ending up in that condition.

And by the way, it's a lot less expensive than it is to help people off the street once they're there.

Doesn't mean we don't address people on the street.

We all we all realize the necessity of that.

But if that's where our emphasis is and that's all we do, we are never going to succeed.

So I want to, for my part, play a role and a direct role in those kinds of conversations and decisions.

Okay, um, if I just yeah, one thing that we forgot to tell you is that we're doing in 30-minute blocks, so we're gonna kind of stop certain sections, but also we need to raise the conversation up because today our conversation is about a shared governance, and I understand each and every one of you as elected have your districts that you are that is your number one priority.

But when we're talking about that, and I think you covered quite a bit, we want to just remind you we're talking higher level today, too.

I was just gonna say thank you for those comments and especially your passion uh for wanting to be directly involved in why um in my all I'll call out Supervisor Desmond because I've known him forever.

You know, he had similar passion about the unincorporated areas as you could imagine, right?

And many of you have similar passions about your area, and all of you wanted to be involved for similar, not exactly the same, but but you many of your colleagues and many of the folks around the table, they care so deeply.

That's part of the reason people we that we got that people want to be involved.

So thank you for that.

So Matt will get hired again and I won't.

We've got that settled.

Councilmember Maple.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Um, so I want to echo a lot of what Supervisor Desmond said.

I think that there is a real desire to have a public meeting space, as evidenced by the public here, um, to hear about these issues, to understand what's going on in real time.

Um, and I I think it would make our jobs a heck of a lot easier too, because you know, we're not all embedded in the same places all the time and may not always have the same information, and so having a space for the public can come in and learn on a regular basis about what's going on, the good work that is happening that we know is happening, and to get their questions answered would be I think a very high priority um for me and being engaged in that in any way that is most appropriate, um, is is key.

And then I think also having a space where we can make joint decisions.

Um, and and uh I'll bring up an example of that.

If we wanted to do something really transformative, a lot of people come to our council meetings and talk about something like Haven for Hope in Texas.

It's brought up quite often as a campus model where you could have, you know, potentially hundreds or who knows, thousands of people come in and be able to receive the help they need in one place.

It's really unclear how something like that could happen right now because there's there's so many silos and decisions that get made in separate places.

Uh, and so yeah, it would be great to have one place where all the information exists where the public can hear about it and where joint decisions can get made um to help address the scale of the problem.

Love it, I appreciate it.

Um, yes, thank you.

Um, two things.

Uh one, uh I would like to agree with um councilwoman maple and Mr.

Desmond uh that I think yeah, moving forward uh having a forum like this is better because what what typically happens is we would have somebody come down to Gault, for example, and meet with us and tell us about what's going on, and then we would give some input, and then that gets taken to somewhere else.

There's just a disconnect, you know, because you have this go-between.

Whereas if we all sit around like this and we all share our thoughts, I feel like we're all, you know, my someone who says something here makes me think of better thoughts.

Like, oh, I agree with that, and then, and so we're just feeding off each other and we're coming with better ideas.

Um, you know, as most of us practice at our perspective, uh, you know, whether it's a city council or it's a board of supervisors, you know, what we what we do in our council is we express an idea like we would like to do this, and then the staff says, okay, we get what you want, we're gonna come back and propose options of how we can do that.

We could do the same thing with this group.

This group could say we want to you know see more focus on prevention, okay?

And then whoever the staff is that's our staff, for example, would then come back at the next meeting when we all meet the next month and say, well, here's some options of how we could do that, and then we could all either vote or give our input or however we would determine what we're gonna do, but so we just treat it just like we do at home in our own entities, but we do it as a collaborative effort here as one.

That's the first point.

Second point is I agree with Mr.

Dickinson, and I didn't take your comments as being selfish with your district at all.

I think your comments were very high level, the highest level there is, and I agree 100%.

Prevention should be number one.

What I see in these slides is the word prevention, preventing.

I see prevention mentioned everywhere, but yet 418 million dollars, only one percent got spent on prevention.

I think we got I think we're putting the cart before the horse, so to speak, and I think we need to be focusing more of our efforts on the prevention side, whether it's you know, uh, and one idea would have is uh lobbying to get more money on the front side to have more affordable housing built, more affordable housing on the front end would keep people from becoming homeless, and if they were homeless and we needed a place to put those people after, that affordable housing could also serve that same purpose.

So it's a win-win on the front end and on the back end.

But anyway, that's my thoughts.

Thanks.

I appreciate it.

Uh Councilmember Kaplan.

Thanks, Darby.

Um, I want to agree with uh many of my colleagues around this, but when we talk about shared governance, um, I want to kind of drill it down a little bit.

Shared government governance is this is the number one issue in each of our districts.

So I don't want something that may look like another board or commission we're on where there's only two or three people from a jurisdiction because my community is gonna come to me and say, Well, why aren't you on this?

Homelessness is the number one thing, yet I don't have a decision making or a voice on that.

So when we look at shared governance, while it might be clunky having all of us in a room, but doing this in a way that we create where it's based off of a mission, it's based off a vision and it's data-driven because what I've not heard is when we talk about this, we can talk about a lot of things, and our community needs to see that when we're putting something into place, is it working?

Maybe we have data that says in GALT, it's not working, but in Roger's district it is, and that's the data we need to see to be able to have that conversation of how do we allocate our resources better?

But it comes when all of us are together in a shared governance.

So I I know my community would be against having just a select few on a decision making model that would come with how do we allocate resources in that regard?

But I really think if we move forward with this type of uh shared governance, that we do need to have a mission and a vision and the and the data that that bears it out.

That's perfect.

Thank you for adding that.

Supervisor Hume.

Thank you.

So for my edification, what I'd like to see come out of this isn't so much a governance or an allocation of resources as it is an interactive real-time feedback loop surrounding policies, surrounding funding sources, surrounding the changing environment.

Because this is uh the uh I think number one in our face failure of our government and our society as how we operate.

And I you know, as the sort of winds of change shift policy, I'd like us to be operating from real-time data.

Who's doing what?

How are we doing that?

For example, did you know, Roger, that in the BHSA, which is the reconstitution of the MHSA, prevention is precluded from being funded?

We cannot fund prevention in BHSA.

Those are real-time problems that are happening outside this room, happening outside of all of our collective diocese, and yet are do we know that that's a thing?

Do we know what is working in uh in Natomas, but not in Gaul?

Do we know how to access the county services that Dr.

Quist held up?

Um, do we know how federal policy is changing and affecting what programs we can't fund and the efficacy of those programs and and whether we use models from other uh states and places?

So for me, I would just like to see that we're using uh real-time information, data given uh to all of us at the same time, interactive, iterative, um, because the work that SSF is doing is so data heavy, but I don't know that most of us on this dais could name numbers of how many housing units do we already have, how utilized are those housing units being, um, etc.

Same thing with the county.

How do we access those services?

So uh anyway, that that's all I have for now.

But I I would just like to see that sort of that iterative dialogue where we can start to tweak and define how we view each other's responses and and work towards a common uh purpose.

Appreciate that.

And before we go to Supervisor Rodriguez, we have about 10 minutes left in this section on leadership, and then we're gonna be going and moving into partners and and what the details, a little more details of what this would be.

Thank you.

So we've all been presented with the proposal of the Sacramento Housing and Homeless Board that really lays the those electives at the very top that give direction.

That mapping would be incredibly ideal.

But if there was one thing that I would add to that process, it would be to hire somebody who is a professional and uh like lean six sigma or lean methodology that is that is an expert in helping us identify pain points and inefficiencies, and how to identify when funding is um being spent too much in one area, or that can use some cut or maybe some redirection.

Um I'm really big on that.

If you're gonna make decisions, make decisions based on data, but I don't know if the data that we currently have is uh is the right data for us to be able to utilize, or is there other data that can be given to us to allow us to make immediate decisions when something isn't working out?

And it's okay if something isn't working out, the important thing is to redirect, and so um that particular model is great.

And the uh one thing other thing I would focus on are outcomes.

That you know, I you can't you can't manage what you don't measure, and that's the bottom line.

I think you council member Gier.

Uh thank you, Darby.

So you put your name in three times.

What's that?

What are you doing here in the ad?

We really really gotta speak on this one.

No.

Uh no, I I first off I think one yes, a single place to have this conversation, and I'll just bring one anecdote when I did the point-in-time count uh last year.

We went underneath the Howe Avenue Bridge right next to Stingers, and um uh the and right side by side, spoke with the uh young lady who had been living there for you know a few months, but she was from Rancho Cordova and ended up in that situation right next to her in an RV was a gentleman who uh was Cal from the Calvin L Grove Florin area.

Uh and so I think understanding how all of this, because I would wager that the 30% of the county that's in District 2 in Roger Dickinson didn't grow up in district two.

So the very nature of the the transient population of their transient nature is uh is something that we have to grapple as as a county that you know uh folks fall into those circumstances, uh circumstances from different locations.

So having that conversation here with us as the uh as those leaders helps us identify you know, okay, what is happening?

You know, if we're gonna focus on prevention, well, where is it happening?

Why did that person in in this part of the county fall in that scenario?

So I think uh to Rich Desmond's point, yes, single location where we can have that, and building on the real-time feedback.

I think that is critical because um that helped us in the development of the partnership agreement between the city and the county, and as you mentioned, but your experience is that the city and the county are communicating.

Very well, and even with that experience, there are times that our staff don't exactly know uh what we're doing all the time, and that's because we obviously have different roles, but I think that that real-time feedback loop helps make sure that we don't drift apart and that we keep that level of communication happening.

If there's anything, I think that was highlighted by Councilmember Maple at one of our council meetings, was that the um the grand jury report identified that the county needs to bring in all the cities, and one of the points was to build off the partnership agreement.

And the partnership agreement was successful in the sense because everyone on the city and the county had to vote and make a decision.

And I think being the reason, you know, yes, the question why an elected should be involved is because then electives have to vote on scarcity of resources and where we're gonna focus on the priorities.

And if we don't do that, I think sometimes what happens is that we spread uh everything so thin and don't make those decisions, and it is up to us to figure out where that priority is and make that that tactical decision.

Uh finally, I'll just say that you know, our housing uh is a regional, our housing challenges are regional in in the sense of it's not just the county, but it is also the entire surrounding counties, West Sacramento, I would probably say is one of our closest housing markets.

So, figuring out how we address that is uh an important tool.

Yes, um, but we have to start with our county first, so agreed, thank you.

So we have the last two speakers before we move on.

Councilmember Talamate.

Thank you so much.

Um I want to start off with echoing Councilmember Dickinson's comments as district three, neighboring district two, like I just see and feel the impacts of homelessness every day, um, every moment of my life, and so uh the survey that showed what how we feel about homelessness that you interviewed all of us, I think is very telling because when you see it and you feel it, it's on your mind, and it's something becomes a priority, even though Sacramento, like homelessness is a priority for the entire region.

And uh this presentation by the federal and state landscape on homelessness by Alex earlier is very daunting, and the reality is we're gonna have more unhouse people in Sacramento and in California because of the impacts of the federal government and the state government, and like Mayor McCarty always says, we have to do more with less.

And I just feel like, and you know, like Mayor Farmer from Gaul, I mean, it's so refreshing to hear that they're looking to build more housing and the challenges that they're having happening at are happening in Gaul is something that you know doesn't cross my mind.

And for me, I'm like, okay, let's build more housings, build more housing.

And when you have leaders in different jurisdictions that are like wanting to step up to the plate, for me from Sacramento, it's like how do we become helpful?

Yeah, right.

And that's where Supervisor Desmond's comments on structured conversations to be able to address this that happen monthly, or a JPA as you know, shared governance.

I'm looking forward to the next steps in this conversation.

Um, but I think that these are all just really important.

We have to do more with less, and now is it's so important for us as elected officials in the Sacramento region to sit somewhere publicly and have these tough conversations so that we can fly on the same airplane.

Agree, thank you.

Okay, um, the mayor from Folk.

Uh I just want to pose some kind of questions as food for thought, and I say this with all sincerity, but I I wonder about the role uh for suburban cities and some sort of government structure, um, because we, you know, for the most part, I think those of us in the suburbs are managing our homeless issues pretty well.

You know, in Folsom, we have about a hundred.

Um I would actually respectfully disagree with my former colleague.

Um, if you pulled the people in Folsom right now, homelessness would not be the biggest issue.

Uh at least not from those residents that I hear from.

It's traffic, it's development, it's e-bikes and e-scooters.

Um, and so I kind of wonder what role we we have.

Obviously, the majority of the of the population is concentrated in the city of Sacramento, and I don't say any of this to disparage my friends in Sacramento.

We don't have some of the same challenges that you have.

We don't have the population numbers, we don't have a county jail where people are getting out, you know, let out at all all hours of the night.

So I guess my question is how do we collaborate with you?

How do we be good neighbors?

Because of course we want to do that, and there are times when if you do a sweep of the American River Parkway or something, we do see an influx of people move east, and so what you do does affect us, and vice versa.

But I just kind of wonder how how we um contribute in the most meaningful way to some sort of governance effort to make sure that we can continue to manage things the way that we are, but while also being helpful to those of you who are dealing with the biggest impact, like uh council member Dickinson's district.

Great, thank you guys.

Um we are gonna really encourage everybody to talk to.

So if you're sitting here, because we are controlling the mics, we might call on you too.

So um, but now we're gonna go to um partners and staff involvement.

And so I think what we've heard a lot about is that staff are really critical because they are the the feeders of information to you.

But I guess if any um multi-jurisdictional government agency exists, who do you think is part or important to be involved, minus just your staff and you as electeds, and Matt will be facilitating this part?

Yeah, as I was listening to you, you can't help but put yourself uh in your shoes.

I mean, I'm sure all of everyone here kind of thinks to themselves, geez, what would I do if I was up there?

And how would I get myself, how would I get involved and yet make it nimble?

How would I manage the particular issues that my jurisdiction has while trying to be helpful to our sister jurisdictions?

Really uh not easy questions.

Um and ultimately, just again to bring us up, keep in mind what we're trying to do is make sure that when you're done here, you've heard one another and what your views are on the role of leadership, right?

So hopefully we've done that.

And then secondly, now we're gonna talk about the role of the stakeholders, the staff, um, the CBOs, uh, the COC, right, the um the other uh nonprofit organizations that are involved in leadership, SSF, all of the first responders that we've heard from today, all of those, um, do they have a role in this organization?

I'm sure in some way they do.

Um, but what is that role?

Is that part of leadership and voting?

Is that uh as staff to you?

Is that as a subcommittee?

What might that look like in a future uh organization that you think would be helpful, meaningful, important?

And again, the goal is to hear from each other, learn from each other about this is super hairy, this one, right?

It's got politics all over it, there's all kinds of advocates on all sides, and everybody's in the room while you share your thoughts.

Beautiful.

What could go wrong?

Um, but it's also very important for you to hear from each other about the role of all of these um professionals, all the volunteers, all of the experts uh that are on the streets and they're in the offices that that you all know so well, and uh what is not?

And so uh kind of a difficult question.

You can come in easy uh if you want, uh, but I think it's important for you to hear from each other on this part, because after this half hour is done, the next half hour is gonna be talking about what in the world is this organization, a multi-jurisdictional organization.

What does it you need to get right?

You know, what is it?

What's gonna be a game changer in that organization?

So let's start by talking about these stakeholders and others and their role.

And um, who would like to go first?

Okay.

Why not?

Big big question here.

So I'm trying to break it down into its core elements.

What are the role of professionals?

Is your is your actual question?

Yes, yes, and okay, and and CBOs, volunteers, others that are that may be involved, but sure.

But yeah, I can say and just speak from the city of Elk Grove's perspective, we have an invaluable partnership with our local nonprofits.

We as a city government, we can't do all the work alone.

So we rely on those partnerships.

And there's some great partners here right now.

Uh, the gathering in, for example, does they um operate our our year-round shelter?

They are the experts on providing the tools and the resources and wraparound services that are necessary for us to be effective.

So I have I place a high value in experts.

We're elected officials.

We're not subject matter experts.

Uh officials make better decisions when it comes to allocation of resources, because we do have to do more with less.

I agree with that.

I think there's a larger role that needs to be played with law enforcement.

We know, and that includes both police and fire and sheriffs, because they're obviously the ones who are the first responders.

They're on the ground all the time, and yet they're not always in the spaces where policies are being talked about or financial decisions are being talked about as it relates to homelessness.

And I think there's a lot that we can learn by having folks in the room and can talk about their real life experiences.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Yeah.

I think it's really critical that all those that uh are involved with or affected by this issue are uh at the proverbial table, have a an opportunity to express their their views, their viewpoint, their priorities.

And I'll I'll dip into the historic vault just a little bit.

Uh um when Mayor, then Mayor Fargo and I as chair of the board got together uh to try to uh build uh a 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness in 2006 or so.

What we what we did was created an advisory group.

Uh it was a simpler time, a little less complicated, a few few less agencies involved.

Um the county was the continuum of care at the time.

Um but what we did was populate that advisory committee with everybody who had a stake in the issue from those who are on house, providers, uh builders, the business community, the faith community across the board, so that so that we got those voices at the table, and I think they were uh critical to uh the development of that tenure plan.

Then once we put together, and obviously we had the help of staff from uh SHRA from the county, the city, once we put that plan together, then of course it went to the board and to the and to the council at the time for for approval.

Now I'm not I'm not uh suggesting that that's that's the template in in this moment and in this time, but but I d I do think that based on that experience, which uh was um quite successful until the Great Recession came along uh it illustrated the point of of the necessity of having having those voices uh in a position across the spectrum that that they can uh they can influence.

Not necessarily have a a vote ultimately.

I think that uh that does need to reside with the elected officials, but uh for the most part, but but they can have an influence on uh on the work that that's done.

Thank you.

Um I'll hold my mic, maybe I'll ask your follow-up in a minute.

Uh, uh, or excuse me, I'll get I'll get to the right uh title in a minute, council member.

Uh council member uh talamantes.

Um I think that a weighted voting system, like we do at SACOG, that I know Supervisor Desmond worked hard at, um, would be appropriate for this.

You know, at the end of the day, the county board of supervisors, they have health and human services, and we, the city of Sacramento, and other agencies should step up with affordable housing.

And I think that we all have a role to play in this, um, including SAC steps forward.

You know, I know that they used to be under the county.

Maybe they go back under the county so that we have less spending less money on administrative resources and using it more on people and housing.

Um, and I just think that we need to have very clear set expectations for the joint powers of SHRA.

You know, we're gonna go through a transition and they have three different bodies of government that they report to.

So I think that continuing these conversations monthly until we arrive at a conclusion of what kind of how we want to fly our airplane would be really important.

Okay.

Um let's see, Councilmember Jennings.

So I think a lot of this has been said already, but um I'm in a I'm in a mindset that all hands are on deck.

I think that when you invite all hands on deck to the table, those who want to get involved in trying to be a part of the solution to help make this a better situation, their their information is is invaluable.

You can't you can't get enough, and then each person can pick where they can serve best within that process once a plan is developed and put into action, whether it's in a community like D2 has talked about, or whether it's in a city or within the region.

So I just think that there's an opportunity for everybody, and it's not just the people, it's the it's the institutions, it's our churches, it's our community-based organizations, it's our fraternity and sorority brothers and sisters who are out there looking to do work in the process.

So all hands are on deck, and I think we need to provide that opportunity so everybody feels like they can come to the table and they can be a part of the solution.

Thank you.

Uh okay, uh, yes, Councilmember Cow.

Thank you.

Um, so I I want to clarify this is asking specifically how do we want to look at our partners and staff involvement, right?

Correct.

Okay.

Want to make sure I I comment specifically on on that.

Um it's kind of been said, but I want to make sure we pull it all together where we talk about our nonprofits and how important they are, and having those with lived experiences, but it's also bringing those on the front line of our police and our fire and our EMTs and in Sacramento Department of Community Response and the and the psychologists and those that are giving those services as to we might come up with an idea, but those who are the boots on the ground is does our is our can we implement that idea?

And that really does take the partners and staff involvement of we have a global idea, but I want to make sure we're getting from every aspect because no one answer is the solution.

So we're gonna need multiple solutions, which means we're gonna have all aspects of staff and nonprofits and community partners that we're gonna need to engage.

Okay, I'm gonna ask a slightly different question.

Let's turn to staff in particular.

Um I think Darby and I were just blown away by um the staff members that we talked to and the work that they're doing behind the scenes.

Uh it was really impressive uh from all of the cities and from the county.

Um, and so how do you engage them in a new organization?

How do you make sure that they're used to the best of their abilities?

Or do you have what do you have to share with each other about the role of your city and county staff in making a new organization run uh optimally?

Mr.

Mayor.

I guess uh the thing there is is why does it have to be a new organization?

For example, uh, you know, before you know my time with the city, we worked on getting some money for cleaning up encampments and the city and the county partner together to do the safe stay uh tiny home site on Stockton Boulevard, Supervisor Kennedy and Garrett's district and they you know brought their um combined resources from the city and county together and they had their two distinct bodies and they pooled their resources.

I think that's I think that's the key kind of diverging here is look if you look at the question earlier where the priorities lack of capacity I think it was shelter permanent you know what have you interim housing or lack of funding we know that the whether or not we have more money or less money we still need more capacity to get people off of the streets.

And let's face it we have fewer money coming from the federal government massive threats in the current administration pulling back like the last presentation the state you know budget situations not great even when it was okay our allotment for our hat money went down we did better as Mr Pedro said our money went down as well.

Our city general fund we're not in the position to dip in next year do more we're facing a sixty million dollar deficit so how do we use our resources and be smarter like economies of scale like okay a little bit of you a little bit of us will do more over here together you know we go together and so I don't know if it's this new organization working together but how do we use our existing talent and resources to to to do actually it's it's unfortunate that we have to do more with less we don't want to do that.

We don't want to brag about that but that's the reality and so how do we focus on that equation.

Yeah thank you for that um and I when I say I misspoke when I said new organization in particular what I mean is new uh could be uh a new MOU it could be a new collaboration could be lots of ways for the jurisdictions around the table to work collaboratively to work together on an approach.

And so I don't mean to to um nickname it one thing or another but I your points are very well taken about that.

Um council member Garrett.

Well thank you I I think the the mayor and I both punched at the same time I think it was and this to that similar question uh and similar response because I worry about sometimes um you know another level of government another layer of government that that may complicate things.

If it can help us focus then there's a positive to that.

But does it have to be a new government I don't know what I do know about our staff and I you know I just I want to commend how hard and how much time and what I do worry about our staff is burnout you know and that of all the CBOs.

I uh and that's because many times our staff are also involved in other parts of doing the the day-to-day work of running a city or a county or jurisdiction and so the the distraction sometimes from from this issue because there's so many facets on uh that affect folks that are are on the street um are not just you know one department so that so I think the the you know to maybe put it on the flip side uh is the the the issue we want to uh avoid is is that that burnout and and that if this is our top priority how do we either align our current cities or jurisdictions so that we don't um so that we we don't lose that focus um you know yes you could achieve that through creating an entirely new entity right um you know the we actually dissolved an entity the solid waste authority you know for you know and it and and while I enjoyed that authority I think it we've been able to manage well without it uh and reduced one level of bureaucracy but so I I but what I would worry about is again um the system that we have now I think is a fragile one uh and one that could lead to burnout and we lose that expertise of what's helped us succeed.

So the whatever we do, what I liked about using an MOU or something is that it produces clarity for staff on their roles and clarity for the jurisdictions on their rules so that we don't get that conf that that miscommunication with staff.

And nothing frustrates them staff more than them feeling like they've wasted their time and energy on a lot of uh you know, maybe busy work or misdirection and then being reprimanded by by elected officials for not achieving that.

I was just speaking that as a staff member before, you know, uh working for an elected official.

I would just note that Matt made that mistake, and I I cut off city council member Dickinson.

So we're running even on this now, because that was a mistake.

It's not a juror, we're not talking about creating new, but the one thing we did here is you wanted more cross collaboration between yours.

And so I think that's when we're talking about well, what does that mean and who should be part of that, right?

So please take away organization or new entity.

We don't mean that.

We mean if you are gonna do something, whatever it is, who do you think has to participate in it?

I guess as short as to say that I see the role of staff, whether they're in a city or county or or DA's office as colleagues.

Like their job is to work together to achieve that outcome.

And we should create an environment where they feel that if it has to come always to the elected officials and and have politics involved.

I think that that's where things can get much more diceier.

And I do have a lot of faith in staff that when we create environments like today to meet that they can actually produce a lot more.

I mean, just that the connecting and prepping for this meeting has created so much dialogue between jurisdictions and staff that we're gonna benefit from it in the future.

So I'll just leave it at that.

Thank you.

Okay, let's uh go to Supervisor Hume.

Thank you.

And these are some great comments, and I think it goes back to what I was mentioning earlier about the importance of an iterative dialogue, because we each receive presentations from our staff and maybe from SHRA and maybe from SSF, and maybe the cities can uh either receive or request presentations from county staff, but what we don't do is sit down together and talk about well, what does that mean in relationship to this other thing that we heard and what this guy just said about this thing over here the last time we were talking about this?

And so for me, that's where the I think the real benefit in this could come from is not that we're acting as subject matter experts or that we're trying to you know get in and and actually make the soup ourselves, but we're the ones that get held accountable every so often by the folks that want to see positive progress being made.

And if we can't start to figure out how to connect those dots and and redirect where need be, and sometimes learn from other people and what they're doing and how we can take that back and apply it and sort of do these little SWOT analyses of everything that we're trying.

To me, I don't care you want to call it a JPA, an MOU, a BBQ, whatever.

It's it's the fact that we're actually having a conversation together in real time, countywide, what are what are we doing and how can we do it better and build that that throughput and that capacity regardless of the silo, so that we're not out there expecting everything to be every everyone at the same time, right?

Yeah, so thank you.

Mayor Farm.

Um, yeah, uh what Supervisor Hume was saying, and I hear from some other people, uh, I think it's important that we have the right people to table, but I want to caution everybody that we don't we don't start overcomplicating this.

I feel that I feel the sense in the room that we're trying to overcomplicate this.

We have people saying, Well, we need to have this person to the table, we need to have fire and and law enforcement at the table.

I agree, those people are the sometimes the first point of contact, and input from them would be great.

Um, you know, people are saying, Well, we need to have some nonprofits at the table because those are the people that are out there doing the work in the community.

We need to have someone who is formerly homeless so we can give a first-hand perspective.

All those are great suggestions.

But I would always also caution you if you form an organization that has 200 seats at it, then we're not gonna get anything done.

Um, I think if we had, you know, those of us that are here and we had another table that had someone representative from fire, whether it's you know, SAC Metro or it's you know, whoever doesn't matter as long as it's first responder representation, someone from law enforcement, it could be someone from the sheriff's office or from police department, it doesn't really matter which jurisdiction.

I think they're gonna have the expertise in that.

Um, obviously somebody who's an expert at housing, so we have those experts.

Maybe we have 10 people, and those basically are our advisors.

So we we meet, we talk and decide what we think the change needs to be.

We don't really know how to execute it because we're not the experts we just say this is what we like to see different and then we get f input from them and then you know they come back and say well this is based on what we heard at the last meeting this is what we think we could do to execute it.

I mean we can sit here and go on and on about how we're gonna do all this I just want to warn everybody that this is what government is good at is creating a lot of bureaucracy and red tape and complicated stuff and I was on that policy council that Mr.

Desmond mentioned and we would just meet and there was like 50 people on Zoom and we would talk and nothing ever got accomplished and I feel like I just don't want to fall back into that again so I think it's keep it simple so that it can be you know that it can be functional and actually do something.

So yeah.

Thank you.

Mayor C.

Allen I I will say I just echo what Supervisor Hume and uh Mayor Farmer just stated I I agree wholeheartedly in what what you have stated I'll just just double down a little bit on the importance of staff.

I think one of the reasons we've been successful in our cities we have a great relationship with a very strong governance team and our staff do an excellent job making sure the elected are aware of different things that are taking place in the community.

They're really being proactive instead of being reactive but having that governance team and relying on your staff um starting with the city manager and and with Sarah and everybody in between has really helped us I can tell you when I started when I was first elected mayor to now and the complaints that we get are just some of the concerns as it relates to homelessness has I barely get anything a week in a given week at this point.

Having that year round shelter made all the difference by bringing them indoors and you're not seeing the encampment but we rely as elected on our staff and not really the other way around we we rely on our staff but just having those retreats and with goal setting and being able to identify our objectives early on and then working together collaboratively but I think having this kind of um you know whether we call it a JPA or an M O or what did you say Mr Hume a BBQ?

As long as it has vegetarian food.

I think that this is the this is definitely a step in the right direction this is a great approach for myself I'm really looking forward to collaborating with my regional partners from the other suburbs of what's happening in these other regional cities and how we can be better partners with each other and learn from each other and seeing what's working and what's not working.

So I think that we have a good system in here.

I don't know if this is monthly or what it what it's gonna look like but I definitely support I know that yeah one more group um that's uh but I do think that there is tremendous value and we want to be able to bring staff in terms of at least being a part of this group so that when we go back to our jurisdictions we then can report out and then figure out sort of the best next steps as well but um going back to your original question on staff invaluable invaluable okay supervisor Rodriguez.

So when we look at the current structure of how we're um how we're managing homeless uh at the county with its services and throughout the um uh jurisdiction of SAC County it's not working and that's I think we all can agree that whatever we're doing right now is not working ten years ago we had two thousand homeless today we have uh approximately 10,000 and it you know I it it if we continue to do the same things that we're doing it'll be very incremental steps to be able to tackle this issue and get to uh you know if our goal is zero functional zero where there's a bed for every head then we're not gonna get there which is why I'm such an advocate of the best investment we can make is to hire somebody who is a black belt and Link Seg Zegmar Kaizon that can organically walk us through all of these processes and all of these pain points and identify identify uh processes that may be costly and you begin to make changes and redirection, but that really is going to be one of the best investments that we can do for ourselves for a county that no other jurisdiction has done.

And I'm one of those where you know, uh I I'm a high execute, so I want to move things fast, and things are moving so slow to be able to get people off the street and uh if I mean if that's our ultimate goal is to get people the help they need, and so um I'm a fan of process improvements, continuous improvement, and I believe this meeting should be monthly.

Thank you.

Uh Councilmember Bank.

Thank you.

Um, just want to make sure that um I'm asking you the question that you asked us is basically clarity on roles for staff electeds.

Is that we're still on that question?

And CBOs, yes.

And CBOs, okay and others, and others, okay.

Great.

Um, yeah, I first I just want to say I I definitely echo my colleagues on on this large dais.

Um I think we um all recognize that we're gonna have to do more with less, um, and that that's gonna mean that we're gonna have to collaborate more than ever.

And so I agree with uh Supervisor Um Hume and everyone else that mentioned that I think having these standing meetings are gonna be really key because the collaboration part is of utmost importance.

Um it is true what they say, uh more hands make light work, and so I think that's really important.

I just also um wanna just mention the grand jury report.

I know um whether we're deciding, hey, we're gonna keep everything as is and just have these ongoing quarterly meetings, um, the grand jury did find in 2002-2003 that the county and seven incorporated cities has failed to cooperate, coordinate, and collaborate to create a comprehensive plan to attack the homeless problem.

So I think it's important.

I think just to acknowledge the grand jury's findings that um we can't just do business as usual.

It's not working.

I mean, that's the reason why we've all come together, right?

Um, and having a meeting like this is important, but I think what's important for me is that whether it's an MOU or a JPA or whether we come back here again.

I think the clarity on the coordination is so key.

I think the clarity on understanding the role of the county because they oversee the behavioral health component, cities do not, the role of cities, whether that's law enforcement, housing, right?

That's really key.

Understanding the role of our CBOs, and I think making sure that we align our resources and we're all moving together on the ship is critical.

So whatever we decide to do, MOU, JPA, we all need to be moving in the same direction on making sure we align our resources on that one goal.

Um, for staff, I just want to say, you know, their job is to present the data for us so that we can make informed decision, right?

Um, and their job is to implement the vision, right?

And we lean on a staff because they are um expert, professional expert in their field.

As for careholders, you heard from Councilwoman Maple, and I just want to echo what she said is that you know, all policy solutions that we have should be informed by those that are closest to the problem, and that include people with current and past lived experience of homelessness, right?

Um, because they are oftentimes even frontline service providers in the CBOs.

And so I I have seen that the greatest innovation in ending homelessness always take place at the community level, no matter what.

And so they are the true expert of their lived experience, and we have to make sure that our care holders are really truly part of that conversation and not just a checkoff box.

And then as for elected, we are held accountable to the voters, right?

I mean, at the end of the day, we should make the decision on allocation for decision based on data, based on outcomes what staff gives us, gives uh provides us.

But if we're not doing a job, then we'll get elected out.

Um that's right, we are elected by the people, and our job is to oversee budget to make sure that we're putting funding uh in programs that produce the best outcomes.

And if we're not doing our job, then the people should organize and vote some of us out if we're not doing our job.

If we're doing our job, then we stay in office.

But that's the whole point, right?

These seats are our not ours, it's the people, and we're not doing our job, then this is also a call to like the community.

Like if electeds aren't doing their job, then we need to organize and make sure that we have representative that's gonna really meet the needs of our people.

Thank you.

All right, that's uh very helpful.

We appreciate this.

So it goes without saying that we have many jurisdictions represented here, and each of you at the end of the day need to go back and talk to your colleagues about what the right approach is.

Um, and we wanna spend.

Sorry.

Okay, darling.

We want to spend the last um kind of substantive half hour um talking about this uh collaboration, right?

Collaboration between uh the county of Sacramento and the City of Sacramento, the suburban cities, collaboration that you guys have all described.

And what are the benefits that you would look for in that collaboration?

What is it that you want to see that would make it worth your while to be here today, that would make it worth your while to go back and say yes, I'll engage to collaborate more closely with my colleagues in some manner.

Um, and I'll do so because of X.

And this is why I care enough to go back and say yes, I'm gonna work on how do we work more closely together uh within the cities and counties of uh within the cities and counties here in Sacramento.

Um I'll just give you an example that we, you know, some examples that we heard just to start the conversation.

So we heard about data collection, for example, and that's been brought up today.

We've heard we heard a little bit about clarity of goals amongst members.

We heard from you about accountability, progress, et cetera.

So, and there's there's a number of other reasons why people around the table have been shown an interest in collaborating more closely together on a going forward basis.

But I think it's important for you to share with each other why it would be worthwhile for you to take the next step after this one and talk about a collaboration to work together on this issue.

And Darby, I'll do that.

Yes.

And can I can I interrupt real quick?

Uh again, back to a little bit of agenda management.

Uh, just so everyone is aware.

Uh I believe uh Madam Clerks uh that we have about 20 speakers so far signed up to speak.

And they've been and they've been waiting patiently, so we wanna uh be efficient with our time and get through this.

It's important.

But uh we also want to hear from the public this afternoon.

Definitely, but I would also really like to hear from the people up here who haven't spoken yet today.

So I'm gonna call on Supervisor Kennedy um first, if he doesn't mind.

Why are you so shy, buddy?

So you're right, you're right.

Derby, you won't be hired again, I knew that at the beginning, don't worry.

But it was a pleasure working with you.

So I I've got uh a take that's probably a bit like a turd in a punch bowl that I'm going to throw out there.

Okay.

Well, never mind.

Uh just kidding.

And and that's um a couple of things.

First of all, uh I thought it was an interesting comment that Dr.

Quist made earlier that could be seen as kind of a flippant comment, but it was actually quite real and and authentic in which he's when he was asked about uh breaking off the numbers that are in different jurisdictions, and and he said uh to paraphrase that we don't look at it in behavioral health as jurisdictional, and the reason being that it's our role as a county to provide those services, both from a legal point of view and perspective, but but also a moral one, that we're gonna provide those regardless of what your geographic or political boundary looks like.

So we're always going to be as a county of Sacramento in every one of these jurisdictions, regardless of what comes of a process like this.

We don't need an MOU to do that.

Um, here's the part that won't necessarily be popular to everyone.

Um I agree and appreciated uh Marikino's comment in that what we've heard today is a few things.

One is that the smaller jurisdictions are doing a good job.

Uh and that yes, their problem isn't quite as daunting, but they're actually managing it well.

And if you looked at the uh the the answers to the questions, I think that that's fairly universal.

I mean, you saw that it's the highest priority among people at the county and the city of Sacramento, not as much in the smaller jurisdictions.

Not to say it's not important, but to say that they're managing it.

Um so uh now I'm gonna talk about I've heard the word data be thrown out here today many, many times, and I agree we have to make data-driven decisions.

Well, if we're gonna make data-driven decisions, we have to ask ourselves why do we need a JPA or whatever you want to call it, an MOU among eight jurisdictions when really the problem is uh primarily in two jurisdictions.

Uh the city of Sacramento, as we've heard, you know, the numbers probably pretty accurate, has somewhere around 77% of the homeless population.

Supervisor, sorry.

Uh council member Dickinson, I think was right on on that.

If you were to take the homeless population in what could be seen as the largest city in Sacramento, and that's the unincorporated part of the county, uh, and then you were to mesh that with the homeless population in the city of Sacramento.

You have addressed by and far a vast majority of the homeless population.

So I guess that's why I'm saying, do we need to continue to have conversations among ourselves as all of these jurisdictions?

Yes, we should do that anyway, regardless of what the subject is.

We should all be doing that on a regular basis, whatever regular is, we can define it another time.

But is it necessary to have an MOU on this particular subject with eight entities when it's really the vast majority of it is impacting two of those jurisdictions?

Well, let me push back a little bit there, all right.

Um, as we all noted that a lot of the homeless population is transient, so where your problem is today doesn't mean that's where the problem is tomorrow.

So everybody talking and understanding that is pretty important, right?

I think also just in the we had the opportunity to talk to each and every one of you.

And the one thing we learned is each city was doing something really great to address homelessness in their jurisdiction.

Um in Elk Grove talking with Sarah and the mayor was really great to hear.

I've lived in Sacramento my whole life.

I didn't know that was happening.

I think if the opportunity for everybody to sit and share that information, it's why you go to these public meetings at schools and hold town halls.

You're hearing from the public, and so it's not just your public, it's the whole county, right?

And you're not necessarily pushing back.

I mean, I didn't say that we have stopped communicating, I think that we need to, but my point is though, is that the for example, and we've heard it today from a number of people, both staff and up here, that the partnership agreement before the that was developed between the city of Sacramento and the County of Sacramento has been for the most part successful.

Does it need to perhaps be revisited and expanded and it that perhaps?

Uh, you know, because we have if you look at the deliverables in that 16-page document, which I was one of who negotiated.

If you look at the deliverables, we've by and large uh met most of those deliberables, if not all of them, and so do we need to continue to grow on that?

I think we do.

I just think that we get hung up on things like JPA and all of that.

We'll blame Matt for that.

You're not gonna do that.

All right.

Uh, I'm gonna get to this in one second, but I'd actually like to talk to Council Pucky Vaughn first because he hasn't said anything yet today.

I'd like to associate myself with all Supervisor Kennedy's comments, thank you.

That easy reads.

Okay, Chair.

And I would just, if I could, right before the chair speaks, is uh we did hear from a number of you who said, just you know, if it makes more housing, if it brings if there's a way, if it brings in more money, if it provides more services, great.

If it doesn't, I don't care, right?

And so I think you know, we hear that back uh some in some comments about this.

It's got to matter at the end of the day, and so um just want to be appreciative of those who had that viewpoint and were so strong on it.

So I'm sorry, Mr.

Chair.

Yeah, no worries.

Um I'm actually enjoying kind of sitting back and listening to the discussion here.

I think it's really um healthy and it's uh inspiring too.

So uh thanks to everyone who's uh participating.

I I guess my thought is uh I really uh want to stress and agree with um my colleague uh supervisor Kennedy about and others who have uh uh I think communicated, don't get hung up on structure or um you know what we would call this necessarily.

I think we're all to a person interested in avoiding um having to reinvent the wheel.

The partnership agreement to the credit of those who were the architects behind it and those that continue to be the representatives to it, including Councilmember Maple and Councilmember Guerra and Supervisors Kennedy and Desmond, I think offers us, everyone here, uh an opportunity to explore it further and see if it makes sense.

Maybe not for all the cities.

I mean, you have two uh smaller jurisdictions here who I'm not sure if the challenge is elevated uh to a point where there's a shared sentiment that you need something like a partnership agreement.

But uh let's not lose sight of the fact that I think we we currently have something in front of us that structurally works to identify the expectations, the accountability, roles and responsibilities that is very helpful and very useful so that we don't get hung up on um you know doing this to one another.

Um I I guess where the the last thing I wanna um communicate here is I'm much more interested in kind of understanding like where like the gaps analysis, what what where are the voids?

Where um aren't we doing so well on our report card?

And how do we um instead of uh having uh a lot of um uh mental gymnastics around you know the structure of things, how do we really look at the substance of filling those voids where we're not um doing so well, whether it's on the affordable housing side or whether it's on uh the programmatic side uh or our you know are we even able to be creative enough to respond to current uh state and federal challenges that are coming our way.

To me, that is really the you know the guts of the the matter um uh as I listen to my to my colleagues and uh again really I do appreciate everyone's uh contribution, but I'm much more interested in understanding and being very honest with ourselves about what's missing and then how do we how do we address that?

I appreciate that.

Before I go to people who have already spoken, I wanted to see if council member budge wanted to say anything, just checking, not calling on you.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Um I completely appreciate Sarah's comments and Bobby's comments as another small city.

Um frankly, we enjoy a very healthy working relationship with the county, and I don't say that to shine boots.

Um, when we incorporated in 2003, we knew we were not going to be uh able to fund a huge city bureaucracy to do everything to everybody, plus the fact that we have a lot of service providers that are not city entities.

So we started off with what used to be called uh two by two meetings, and we continue with all of our service providers, but specifically with the county.

Um we've collaborated with them on Mather Community Campus.

Um we certainly could not have um we would not be in approaching our phase four of Mether Veterans Village where we have 150 formerly homeless veterans and some families living, if it had not been for the cooperation with the county.

Um yes, we do contract with the county sheriff's department, and we still enjoy a very healthy relationship there.

Our hot team is a multidisciplinary team made up of um fire and police, and um, and our navigator has almost always been somebody who was formerly homeless, really putting us in touch with that.

And the hot team actually has a transitional uh house that they can put people into.

But we continue to work with the park with the county on a variety of different uh programs, and um, and our our one staff department person sits on the continuum of care and works with other organizations throughout the county, so that are addressing this subject.

So um, from my perspective, we're doing a good job of collaborating.

I'm sure there are avenues where we could be a little better, but um, between that and heart and rebuilding together, and um we even worked with habitat in a in a couple of areas.

It's wonderful.

Thank you.

I appreciate that.

I want to just check with the mayor over here, Citra Sites.

Did you want to put did you want to contribute?

Just you haven't talked today.

I just want to make sure.

Well, thanks for calling on me.

I'm mostly here listening, as some people may not know.

Uh we're one voice.

We go back to uh the rest of our fellow council members to get more input.

So my personal input I don't feel is as important as our our community input.

Um, but again, as a small city, any thing you form, here we are again where the small cities are the minority of the combination of the county.

And there's more of you than the city of Sacramento and County.

The city of Sacramento and the County generally, you know, dominate the the majority of the votes on all the committees, all the regional boards that we're on.

So the little cities, and you know, I we believe that the county is responsible for services.

We don't provide that much other through the navigation that we use the county for, and we we prefer to work on housing.

Um you talk about homeless prevention, you know, and our city took some of our budget and gave it to Citrusites Heart 40,000 for rental assistance.

So we do a lot more in our own community that this board, whatever you talk about, would not have apparently the authority to do.

I did not know that you could not use your funds for for prevention.

So I I don't want to speak on for me because I don't think we need to participate in much.

We need mere information to help, but I don't know that we need to participate in governance because okay.

That's me, though.

That isn't the four of the council members that I serve with.

So I you know don't want to speak as a majority speaker.

Sounds good.

Thank you.

I just wanted to make sure everybody had a chance to speak today.

Um and so let's go to Folsom.

Um thank you.

So I do think there are two um main reasons that that this sort of forum is very helpful as a representative of a suburban city, and that is number one to understand all of the resources that are available.

You know, understandably most of the resources are concentrated in the city of Sacramento as they should be.

I did not know about the 11 core sites, but I took a note and I will be learning more about those.

Um but the second thing is I think it's a great forum to share best practices.

Um, you know, for example, in the city of Folsom, we have about a hundred homeless.

Our our most problematic site the past couple years was state-owned property, Department of Fish and Wildlife.

And we went back and forth, our police department, our city attorney for years with the state to get them to authorize us to cite people for trespassing.

We finally got that form signed earlier this year after years of effort.

I'm sure all of you have state-owned property in your jurisdictions, whether it is problematic or not, I don't know.

But if we can share our form with you, tell you who we talk to, whatever, maybe we, you know, there's their strength in numbers, so thank you.

Thank you.

Council member Dickinson.

Just uh two points.

Um first of all, you know, it's not that we don't know what works to help get people off the street.

We do know.

We do know.

We it's not the same thing for every person, it's a variety of of approaches.

But whether it's it's housing first or it's or or it's emergency shelter, transitional housing and permanent or permanent supportive housing, whether it's the types of services that are needed.

We we get thousands of people off the street every year.

Yes.

What we don't do is prevent people from ending up on the street.

And so uh I I think the issue here is not whether we we um know what works.

The question is, and I think one we uh uh uh identified at the outset is are we as effective and efficient as we can be with the resources we have to help the most people possible.

So that to me is a bottom line goal of having these kinds of conversations uh and these kinds of of deliberations.

Is there a construct here that will work better than what we have today in terms of achieving the optimal outcomes that I think we all agree on, which is reducing the number of homelessness, homeless, excuse me, and helping those who are on the street and keeping those who are at risk from bending up on the street.

Second second point is I want to I want to repeat something the mayor of the city of Sacramento said at the outset.

We're all in this together, and to address uh Mayor Aquino's question, which I think is a quite valid one.

I think there are a number of issues in our county indeed in our region, but I understand we're limiting ourselves to the to the county where we uh all have an interest.

And uh acknowledging Supervisor Kennedy's point that the vast majority of homeless are in two jurisdictions uh in this county.

Not nonetheless, there are issues, whether it's historic preservation or it's transportation, or it's air quality, or it's water supply.

I mean, we can go down the list where we may have a greater or a lesser interest, but we all have an interest.

And in this case, in my view, when someone is uh diminished in one part of our county, we're all diminished wherever we are in our county.

We all have an obligation, we all have a royal uh role to play.

We have the allocation of resources where the smaller jurisdictions I think can play a huge and important role in helping the larger jurisdictions here, just as in many cases the larger jurisdictions can do things that are helpful and supportive of the smaller jurisdictions.

So while I think it's it it's fair to say we don't necessarily need a uh uh an arrangement that that uh brings everyone to the table, certainly not if they don't want to be there.

My hope is we will come up with something that does.

Because we are all in this together.

I like it.

Um, thank you.

Um, and I want to completely agree and align myself with Council Member Dickinson.

I know that we're running short on time, and I want to make sure that we also have time to hear from the public who I'm really interested to hear from as well, because I think probably some of the best ideas yet are to come.

Um, but I really wanted to also ground myself and us in this conversation that everything that we're talking about that's happening in this room and they may lay in the days and months ahead is impacting thousands of people that are outside right now, some of them may be sleeping right outside these doors tonight.

Um, and that this is really key to everything that we're doing, that this is about real lives.

Um, and I think about the fact that the winter's upon us.

I was really cold when I walked in here this morning.

Um, it's gonna get colder and colder, and there's still you know, thousands of people that are gonna be outside and are lacking of resources, whether that be a roof over their head or socks or water or food.

Um, and so again, whether or not we work together, what that looks like, and I think most importantly the time it takes for us to figure that out is is key.

Um I would put I would say that we move urgently because I I think that this is a crisis and that this the this needs urgent action.

So I haven't really heard that said as much, and I know everyone feels that way.

I just want to like put that front and forward, this is urgent, and so I hope that whatever we decide to do, whatever that may look like is something that we can move quickly towards.

Um it's a challenge in government.

I know I I can't remember, I don't know how long it took from the time you sent a letter to when we actually had this meeting, but I think it was seven, six, seven, eight months, something like that.

And so, you know, to the extent that we can make decisions and move quickly.

I think that's a really good thing.

The your original question is what what should it do?

What should we focus on?

For me, it is making shared decisions.

That's something that's really challenging for us under this current structure.

We have independent bodies that every decision has to go independently to all those things, and then if those ascensions happen, they come together, and then we have to do that for everything.

This is why I advocate for a JPA.

Now that's the word that some folks are barbecue or whatever, maybe.

Um, this is why I think it's important.

We have to be able to nimbly make decisions in a shared fashion.

I think it's really important that we are.

I know that everybody doesn't play the same role.

I hear that a lot from some of the smaller cities.

I agree with you.

I don't think all every city has the same role to play, but I will say that you can go to shelters in the city of Sakamoto, and I'm sure in the county, and you will find people from every one of your jurisdictions.

And I'm sure that you'll go to every one of your jurisdictions and you might find people from the city of Sacramento.

That's because people move.

And so while we may not all have the same role to play, I think it's really important that we're at the same table and that we make shared decisions.

Number two, I think it's really important that we share resources.

Again, not in the same way.

I don't expect someone in a smaller city to contribute in the same way financially or otherwise that we might in the city or the county.

Um but even just sharing ideas, being in space together is really, really important.

Um, and so they have to go together, and this all goes to efficiency.

We're constantly assessing what do we want to accomplish?

Is it functional zero?

As Supervisor Rodriguez mentioned, okay, what's that gonna take?

What are our metrics?

How are we basing this?

And constantly assessing that in public and behind closed doors to be able to figure out whether or not we're doing the right thing.

I know that happens all the time in our individual jurisdictions, and our staff do incredible work and work together very well.

Um, but we have to do more with less, which has been said quite a lot.

Um, and the last note that I'll make, I know that um Council Member Vang read from the grand jury report.

Um there's actually been several grand jury reports that have been released over the last 10 years, and all of them have recommended a joint powers authority or some formalized shared governance structure.

It's really hard for me to wrap my mind around why we would not at least try it if it's something that multiple grand juries of independent citizens have come together, research, looked at, and found the same problem and same suggested solutions.

So I think it's worth at least at least a try, especially when 15 years ago the city and the county voted to create a joint powers authority for homelessness, but it never occurred.

And so those are those are my my wishes and desires that we share resources and that we're able to utilize an economy of scale by working together because we're gonna have to do that when we have less resources.

Thank you.

Yeah, and I think you guys have all said, so we know the COCs are most likely gonna lose a lot of their funding.

Um SHRA has a whole bunch of money, but you're not necessarily always in the loop on what that is.

The county has their funding, but it's very structured about how they can spend it.

Each city has their own budget, and so I think alone just talking about that and bringing an understanding of where everybody is working, really helps clarify what any MOU, organization, whatever the thing is that brings you all to talk is really a good point.

Um I'm gonna note we just have five more minutes of this, and then we will do some wrapping up.

So I want to go to council member Kaplan.

Thank you.

Um I think when we say what do we want, I want to address what I haven't heard yet.

Is we have a trust problem.

Sometimes we have a trust between elected officials, we have trust issues between the community, the unhoused, we have trust issues.

So I want to echo what my colleague council member Maple said.

I think why support whatever structure it is, I support something in writing.

Elected officials, we're all going to change, but we're gonna hear from the experts, and so we need to put in writing so that we have consistency, we have accountability, and it does not rely on the elected official or the politics that are coming first in the I instead of the we of those on the unhoused and the we of those that need to stay into housing or have a hard time getting the affordability.

So we make decisions, but let's put a structure in writing because history has shown over and over again, which why we have multiple grand jury reports that there is a trust issue and elected officials say a lot of things, but we don't follow through.

So I think having that structure is absolutely essential, so it lasts beyond all of us here sitting at the table.

Yes, and I think you it's Sacramento County and city started that with the partnership agreement, right?

And that kind of laid the groundwork for more.

So appreciate that.

Okay.

Yeah, thank you.

I just wanted to say, you know, there's been some discussion about some maybe some of the smaller entities.

I mean, I I think it's safe to say that I represent the smallest entity here.

We probably have about 30 or 40 homeless.

So uh one would be easy to say, well, we don't want to be involved because you know we get the smallest, and it's not really a so-called big a problem, but it is a big problem because when you're in a small community like Gault, uh, even though we only have 30 people, there's probably not one single day that I don't get a text or an email or somebody walks into my place of business and wants to show me a picture or is concerned about a homeless person that's um that they're concerned about in our community.

So it's amplified the fact that we're that small so it's just as important.

I also believe that decisions made by larger agencies are going to affect the smaller agencies.

So it's important that that we have a seat at the table.

I think we're all as someone said we're all doing probably a good job trying to mitigate our own problems in our own ways and each of our cities has handles things in a different way because it's a the problem is different for each of us.

We handle ours probably a little bit different than maybe the city of Sacramento would but I think we could all agree that the problems that I think that are the biggest problems that are affecting uh that are going to make the biggest difference are not problems that are within our own jurisdictions.

They're not problem that you guys can solve within the city of Sacramento.

They're not problems that you can solve within the city of Folsom they're problems that are going to require us advocating as a group to the state or the higher level things like affordable housing things like how behavioral health is funded or or treated whether or not we have more mental health facilities all these things are not things we control within our own jurisdictions whether it's Gault or or a larger city.

So I think it's important that we understand that one of the roles of this body will be that we're forming what I would call a coalition and we are going to to do that to strengthen our voice to the powers that be outside of our little regions.

And um lastly I would like to say that um that uh I agree we all are on together I would I would highly hope that all the cities including uh for those reasons I just stated that every city would would have a seat at the table uh whether or not um because what maybe 30 homeless people today in Gault um could be affected and it could be a hundred tomorrow uh if if if we don't if we don't uh keep our eyes on the ball so I appreciate that and before we go to Councilmember Gira I kind of want to just throw out a couple more things that we didn't talk about that could happen by having a regional approach though that we thought was really important.

First of all you're in Sacramento so addressing political roadblocks that came up a lot earlier if you're all together and you go to meetings here in Sacramento you have the ear of everybody and that is something if you work together countywide really has strength I want to put that out and also one of the things that we know is as a region and countywide you have the ability if you're all working together to get state grants to get federal grants to grow the work you're doing whether it's in workforce housing whatever that is and so when you all move together you are stronger than if you individually move.

And so council member Guerra and then you took the words right out of my I I was just gonna say like we really are stronger together and we're facing some headwinds of very large uncertainty.

And so we while we may have been able to function and move and the needle in the positive direction we we don't know what's going to happen moving forward.

And so I think the more we can figure out a way for us to uh to look one work together have a unified message uh understand how people are going to be affected uh because we will learn that during our point in time count when we go out and talk and survey to people on on what their circumstance is I think it'll help us be able to respond quickly so to to that point I think you know whatever uh system we design it it also recognizes that we have different strengths from different jurisdictions and different needs in those uh I I see clearly as I one I'm I wanted let me just say to my colleagues from the suburban cities I'm I'm really heartworn I'm you know by the the the interest and compassion in in wanting to be part of this and I think that really shows some true leadership to saying look you know it's easy as uh as as mayor farmer said it's easy for us to just say, you know what, we're gonna pull back, but the fact that you are willing to to do this and and to say that maybe it's and we're not gonna resolve it today and figure out what that looks like today, but finding a path forward and a commitment to uh to meeting again and figuring out what that looks like, I think is it's it's powerful.

It shows a commitment that we're in uh moving together, and even to you know, my my my good friend Supervisor Kennedy, who we were involved in the negotiation of that that partnership agreement, and it showed results.

Uh, even if if uh if that was it, the reality is most of the funding is requiring a countywide approach.

Like it's require most of the state funding that we see are requiring this level.

So figuring out how we make sure we don't, as I say, uh leave money on the table and make it matter.

I think that is you know where we have to start thinking about not just for the sake of creating something new, but for the sake of it, as uh as Matt mentioned, mattered.

Um I'll just uh you know end by saying I think for for me it's important for us to be ready for the significant challenges we're gonna confront at the federal level, at the state level, uh, and uh be able to be nimble.

And and this at least, even if I I think I'm gonna coin the term the the coalition, you know, even if it's just the coalition meeting and then figuring out how we iterative, because when we started talking about the partnership agreement, we didn't even know what that would look like.

We were just kind of making it up, and it was like eight in the morning.

Uh Rich, I don't know if we were all awake at that time during when we were trying to discuss this idea, but but that idea came from us just sitting down without an agenda and thinking through what is it that's gonna help us work together.

So um I I will say that yes, I do agree to your point.

There are we have for the city and counties perspective, we should revisit the partnership agreement.

There are clearly things that have changed since that time frame.

Prop one wasn't there, care courts wasn't there, you know.

As mentioned earlier, SP 43 wasn't there.

So there are there are things that we I think should revisit and update, but I think we're at that next step of saying how how do we engage all the voices on our suburban cities so that as uh as you know Miss Korpinski Kostin mentioned, the mayor here mentioned, um, when we make a decision, we make it and also knowing that it'll impact our neighbors and that making sure that those decisions are included with that.

So to that point, yeah, I think stronger together and advocating uh you know down the street stronger together is gonna help us.

Definitely.

Well, and Mayor McCarty is the one who gets the last word.

Yeah, I'll try to I try to wrap it up.

I you know the big picture is um I'm heartened by all of this.

I I wanted to go last.

I heard all the comments on here, and if you look at you put all of our comments together and have us like a Venn diagram, it's clear that we want to go further working together, even a smaller jurisdiction uh who's who's concerned that that some land use and and uh financial issues and not maybe as much as their issue.

I think they realize it is our issue as a whole.

Uh plus there's there's so much learning.

Just earlier we talked about care courts and we had an aha moment, like the city isn't implementing it that maybe that the city of Rancho is or the county, and if we just had an as needed conversation, maybe our staff wouldn't get it.

But the electeds have a different, you know, acuteness to those issues, and having a structured participation, I think is so key.

Yeah, I I want to give um uh you know applause to my van who brought this up, but really council member maple asked me three years ago to author a law to set in course a structure which could be voluntary.

So I I still think it's it's easier to have people agree to participate than forced shotgun wedding participation.

So I I do support that.

Um but nonetheless having a structure where people can come in with their own kind of accommodations, and then just the the the last point before I move on is yeah, as somebody who who um helped write nine years of of state budgets, I've seen over and over, we're scoring whether it's education, housing, homelessness for cooperation.

You know, the the last we're focused on the half allocations is that was a big piece of the equation, is how our jurisdictions working together with the city and the county.

So I see it being more, not less, and so whether it's homeless money or frankly, affordable housing money.

Maybe there's some money that we can get in the city of Sacramento, and we don't necessarily have the land and ranch shows, oh, we have the land right out here, and so pooling our resources together that's uh a voluntary uh equation to this, I think is going to allow us to answer the call for solutions to our problems.

Great.

So uh we're gonna defer to the chair for a minute.

We still have uh about a 10-minute wrap-up and a medi meter, but we defer to you.

How about a five minute wrap-up and then we're gonna have a five-minute bio break for this room?

Uh and then uh and then we'll uh come back and uh uh hear from the public.

My understanding is we have twenty, about twenty three or twenty-four speakers.

So um really looking forward to hearing from the public and want to make time for them.

Sounds good.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

So thankfully, uh, because of the good work of the mayor, um all those words I don't need to say.

Um we uh we did hear about your desire for um more involvement and leadership, your respect for and your um the need for uh close working relationships with staff with CBOs with first responders with healthcare.

We heard that as well.

We knew you were gonna say all of that, and we said in the beginning that uh this wasn't a meeting about what form collaboration takes, but it was heartening, as the mayor just said, to hear about all of your um willingness to go forward and have further discussions about that collaboration with one another, and that's really what the uh the future is about as you advocate together, as you um look out for each other, as you try to make progress on a very difficult issue together.

So thank you for that.

And Darby, do you want to wrap up?

Yes, so we have two more questions for you.

Um so if you could go back to the QR code on the back of your name tag, that's what it's called.

Um, and type in your name again.

Yeah, I choose that away.

That first question is, do you feel we made progress today?

And I'm glad I don't have to black out the screen right now.

Okay.

A few more.

I think we're waiting for a few more.

Sure, look at a lot.

No, it's not, no, last half full.

I think council members.

We're gonna give you one more minute.

Somebody answer something.

Yeah.

So let's have all the answers.

Yeah.

And I think mostly we're seeing a progressive that everybody feels like they made somewhat progress today, which is really good to hear.

And I will see.

All right, I think we got it here.

All right.

So now we're gonna go to question two.

The final question for the day is are you willing to commit to continuing this process of building a multi-governmental body to work on homelessness?

Whatever form that might take, but are you willing today to lean in and say yes, we're willing to come back and keep doing this?

All right, and we've got everybody's answers, and I think you know, overwhelming people are very leaning in and supportive.

And again, we appreciate thank you.

We just want to Matt and I want to thank you for the opportunity to speak to you guys today and work in facilitating this meeting and this section.

Thank you.

Great.

Thank you, Darby, and thank you, Matt.

I appreciate your work.

I think they deserve a round of applause.

Okay, Madam Clerk, Madam's clerks, did you uh each or one of you want to um offer uh a statement before you uh break here for five minutes?

Thank you, Chair.

So when we come back from our recess, we'll take public comment.

So we're asking all members of the public if you can please go to the lobby to sign up to speak as chair mentioned.

We have about 23 speakers signed up so far, and we'd like to get everyone signed in in the queue.

Okay, very good.

And before we break, just a friendly reminder.

Uh those that are uh planning to address uh this body, uh we want to make sure we hear from all of you uh before people start to leave the dais here this afternoon.

So we're gonna keep comments to two minutes, no more than two minutes.

If you could kind of plan ahead uh so that we can uh get everyone uh here that wants to speak, and we have the full compliment of uh elected people here to hear your comments.

So with that, we are going to be in recess for five minutes.

Yes, and there are snacks in the back of the room.

Okay, I'd like to call back to order this historic meeting of the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors, Sacramento City Council, and the uh representatives from the cities of Elk Grove, Folsom, Ranch Cordover, Citrus Heights, and Galt.

Madam's clerk, will you please call the roll and reestablish quorum?

From the Board of Supervisors, Supervisor Kennedy, Rodriguez, Hume, here, Chair Cerna.

Here, Supervisor Desmond is absent.

Okay, all right, very good.

And from the city of Sacramento, Councilmember Kaplan.

Councilmember Dickinson.

Yeah, Vice Mayor Talamante here.

Councilmember Plekibon.

Councilmember Maple.

Here, Mayor Pro Tem Gata.

Here.

Councilmember Jennings.

Here, Councilmember Vang, here, Mayor McCarty.

I'm from Rancher Cordova, Councilmember Budge.

Appears absent.

Um, Elkgrove Mayor Singh Allen.

Um, Citrus Heights Mayor Karpinsky Casca.

Present.

Thank you.

Um, Galt Mayor Farmer.

Here.

And Folsom Maricino.

Here.

Chairs, you have a forum.

Very good.

Thank you very much.

Uh, Mayor Kinney, you have the floor.

Uh, yes, I we had a council meeting tonight at 5 30, so I apologize, but I am going to leave here at 4 30.

Um, just want to thank you, um uh Chair Cerna, Mayor McCarty, and everyone else for the good dialogue today, and you can certainly count on Folsom to um to be part of this effort.

So thank you very much.

And I apologize to the public uh for those I won't get to stay to hear.

Very good.

Thank you, Mayor.

Appreciate it.

Okay.

Um Madam's clerk.

Uh I believe we'll now continue on with uh public comment.

So uh if you could please call the first speaker.

First speaker is Lorena Moya.

Lorena Moya.

And let's do this uh because we're gonna start losing folks.

If we can call uh or if you can note three people at a time, that way maybe they can line up in the um in the hallway there.

And if we could have Giazid Jesse Bermudez also line up in Mike Jasky.

Great, thank you.

Lorena Moy, on behalf of the office of assembly member Maggie Corral.

The assembly woman had to leave early today, but wanted to give her sincere thanks to everyone for coming together.

Uh, she fully supports local collaboration and wants to engage and help however possible.

This year we passed AB 348, which provides full service partnerships to individuals who are most at risk of homelessness.

We even worked closely with some of you in this room.

The assemblywoman and her team stem can stand committed to this issue and look forward to continuing to collaborate.

Thank you.

Great, thank you very much.

Mike Jaske.

Oh, afternoon.

My name is Jesse Bermudez from the Office of Assembly Member Stephanie Wynn.

I'm her district director.

I just want to say thank you for bringing this, bringing you guys all together for the invitation and for allowing us to come and see and be a partner because it's not just a local issue, it's also a state issue.

So thank you.

Very good, thank you.

Good afternoon.

My name is Mike Jasky, representing SACT Act.

I'll paraphrase written comments that were submitted to the record.

These comments will be in two parts, focusing first on the looming funding crisis and principles for how to our local community can address uh the cutbacks in state and federal funding.

So first part, the looming crisis.

ZACTAC believes that any specific organizational proposal, whether it's something like Senator Ashby's SB 802 or the county's uh partnership proposal were developed in a business as usual environment.

Mr.

Vasotsky's presentation shows that massive federal and state funding cuts mean we do not have a business as usual climate going forward.

In fact, his analysis uh omitted a number of factors that all make the inference for the future more negative.

Excuse me, along with a loss of support for permanent supportive housing and services, new people are going to become homelessness.

He told you there were 12,600 uh public housing slots in Sacramento.

A large fraction of those are also going to be defunded, and so people we currently have funded or excuse me, housed in public housing will no longer be.

And it needs to be your focus, the existing systems focus for the next uh six to eight months.

I will not go through uh all the details of the principles that we propose that you follow in dealing with this looming crisis.

My colleagues are going to uh handle those.

But if you give me 15 more seconds, I just want to uh say a little bit about the fourth principle.

It's to use behavioral knowledge tempered with local data to guide decisions, and the importance of this is that part of what the federal government is doing is explicitly following the Heritage Foundation.

Can you wrap up 25 points?

Mr.

Jasky.

There are ideological pursuits that are going to be followed that will, in addition to the budget numbers that can please us wrap up.

We want to hear from everyone.

Thank you.

Uh so I will uh turn things over to the next speaker.

Thank you.

Linda Wheaton, Meg Gunderson, then Andy Cramer.

Hello, I'm Linda Wheaton, also from SACT Act.

You have appropriately noted the importance of greater attention to prevention, the importance of housing, and of data and statistics.

You have an opportunity to address that yesterday with maintaining the funding that you currently have and the obligations that you have under that funding, beginning with the COC.

So you have an opportunity to join to uh join in advocacy for HUD to proceed with a planned two-year NOFA extension of the existing money and not capping permanent how permanent supportive housing, which has been a great priority, that we cannot afford to have people unhoused from again.

So it's significant progress has been made in recent years on a plan with a strategy and framework and performance metrics, which are required by the funding sources to address them.

So the strategy framework of prevent, respond, and resolve, remains appropriate, maintaining or going forward, and certainly an assessment of prioritizing how we how we do support those most at risk of being unhoused is critical.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Hello, my name is Meg Gunderson.

I'm a volunteer leader with Sacramento Area Congregations together and the Unitarian Universalist Society of Sacramento.

I'm a resident of Land Park.

And these are also from the comments that we made in writing.

Our first principle we propose you to use is prioritize prevention of displacement of people from publicly supported permittives, permanent supportive housing, and private housing units.

It's more efficient, a better use of funds, and more humane to keep people housed than to rescue people after they become homeless.

The current and impending federal and state funding cuts threaten this strategy with withdrawal of supports not just for housing but also for health and child care and food assistance.

Therefore, a primary principle of this collaboration among all the local jurisdictions, which we're happy to see, should be to protect residents at risk of losing their housing.

Like pain management.

Healing is faster when you keep pain at bay from the start.

If you wait until you're in pain to address it, it takes longer to recover.

The loss of safety net and housing funds makes collaboration and creative approaches to problem solving extremely important now more than ever.

Besides collaborating, collaborating amongst all of the governing bodies and coordinating the resources, collaborating with community, advocacy, and religious organizations to mobilize public and private support is crucial to meeting this looming crisis.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I'm Andy Kramer, also a volunteer leader with SAC Act.

I'll be the last speaker in our group.

I'm speaking to the principal, the fifth principle.

Educate the public on the effect of the funding cuts and federal policy changes and local actions to minimize the impacts on homelessness.

Public misperceptions of the causes of homelessness will likely obstruct the implementation of local actions to address this growing crisis.

The false narrative that attributes homelessness to individual failings, such as drug addiction, mental illness, or personal choice ignores the root causes, such as the lack of affordable housing and economic instability.

This in turn can lead to discrimination, making it harder for individuals experiencing homelessness to access services and NIMBYism, which reflects the fears that homelessness facilities will degrade housing values in the surrounding neighborhoods.

Academic research, however, refutes these fears.

All told, these false narratives drive local actions that are punitive and criminalize homelessness rather than drive real solutions, such as providing supportive services.

The looming funding cuts and federal policy changes may only exacerbate the problem of homelessness as homelessness increases and the public becomes increasingly frustrated.

To maximize the effectiveness of governmental actions to address homelessness, the city and county have a role in educating the public as to the root causes of homelessness, the negative impacts of funding cuts and federal policy changes, and the actions that you are contemplating to address these issues.

Thank you.

Julia Marks, Barb Bram, and Michelle McDougal.

It's a little intimidating.

Good afternoon, Chair, Council members, and partners.

My name is Gillian Marks.

I am a public health nurse and the director of Calim at Community HealthWorks.

Um, we are a Sacramento-based nonprofit that helps residents connect to healthcare, housing, and essential supports.

Uh, our thank you for bringing us together and for your commitment to improving how we work across systems.

Our team of over 125 community health workers are trusted navigators who live in many of the neighborhoods and share many of the life experiences with the people we serve.

Each day, community health workers meet with people wherever they're at in hospitals, shelters, encampments, and homes.

We're present in many of the cities present today on this meeting and as well as across the county.

Through programs such as Calim, our team provides outreach, housing navigation, and care management services to help people stabilize their health, secure permanent housing, and connect to social supports.

Our team also serves the re-entry or justice-involved population by doing inreach and also helping people returning home from incarceration by assisting them in rebuilding their lives through enrolling in healthcare, connecting to primary and behavioral health care.

We also make sure that thousands of residents keep their Medi-Cal coverage, helping people renew their benefits and overcome barriers such as transportation, language access, misinformation related to federal immigration policies, and more.

We see every day how coordination between government entities, health systems, and community-based organizations changes lives.

We also see how barriers can emerge when that cooperation breaks down.

We're proud to partner with both the county and the incorporated cities, and we fully support any approach that improves coordination and speeds up help for the people who need it most.

When partners and systems work together, progress happens faster.

Community health works.

We're fortunate to see the impact firsthand.

Real lives becoming healthy, housed, and hopefully.

Thank you again for working towards great alignment across jurisdictions.

We're proud to be your whole health partner.

Thanks.

Good job.

Hi, I find it very scary that you don't have a firm grasp of the gaps and the voids.

What have you been doing for the past four terms?

Supervisor Cerna.

And I also find it scary that our council member from District One has absolutely nothing to say about the homeless situation in his district, basically, no representation at all.

So I wanted to talk about Dayton metrics.

The sheriff does have a dashboard right now that shows that especially violent crime is dramatically down, even though our population is growing.

And I know uh DA Ho said that he wants safe places for homeless people, but he destroyed camp resolution, which was working, and two people died after being thrown from that successful camp.

But this is what I want to talk about specifically to our county executive and the sheriff.

I was in front of the jail last night almost 100% after hours release, didn't receive any resource guide, closed closet, phone charging, Uber Exodus project, which is supposed to be happening right now, zero, no emergency beds.

Then one releasee told me that during his booking, a smallish man, somewhat mentally ill, was um questioned something that the sheriff asked him to do, and he was smashed to the ground.

Four people on one person on each limb.

Um and then two other people deputies were beating him.

And then this happened again.

I'm running out of time with this um man who was naked because it was strip search, and he said, What?

He turned and five deputies are on him, pinning him to the ground, beating him and asking him to do things when he's on the ground.

So, yeah, I think we have a little trust issue a little bit, and I also think that when the county executive.

Thank you.

Michelle McDougall.

Michelle McDougall.

Michael Michael Milton, Jeannie Wells, Sakeem, Shannon Shaw, Daisy Modrigal.

Y'all see me all the time, which all yeah, you know, I would like to be able to tell my story.

So y'all got you guys know who I am.

I am a part of the homeless community.

I I am, I have been through the through the shelters.

I am waiting for SHRA to help me.

It has been years now.

I've been coming in front of you guys.

Um, and now I would like to say, I want to accuse um Mary Liz back here of embezzling the money.

Okay, I got it.

Let me just let me just write read down what I wrote.

But um, hello, our Michael Milton, you know, um from Sacramento.

I was in the Sacramento B a few years ago about homelessness.

I'm here to accuse the mayor and Mary Liz of SHRA of embezzling Sacramento's money from Gavin Newsom.

You know, SHRA received about 50 million dollars and it's been closed for three years now.

And for the last three years, you know, uh in the last three years, uh Santa Barbara, though, where Mary Liz is from, they just opened up a new uh uh thing of old folks homes out there, but they didn't put Sacramento first.

But how do we have something new in her city?

But we're not putting our money towards our town.

But he used to work for the uh SHRA too, so he should have a good idea of what to do and how to help Sacramento.

But he's just struggling around with his head down and stuff like that.

And 55 up and up communities is the only thing that's going on.

Now, next is I got the rules changed after uh SHRA gave me Section 8.

They denied my Section 8 because I didn't turn on my paperwork on time.

So I got the rules changed, and they said, okay, well, we'll email everybody to make sure that you don't if you get it, uh, you don't miss it.

Now, they still deny my appeal after I got the change made.

I still got denied.

So then after that, now February 15th, they said uh you got conventional housing now.

You back you pass your background check and your credit check, and they still, this eight months later, still haven't done anything.

SHRA took that money and ran.

It's been closed for three years.

I haven't been having appointments.

They're not helping anybody.

That's where the problem is.

If you guys put your money with SHRA in Sacramento, your money's gonna get embezzled.

Straight up.

They're taking the money because if if it wasn't, if it wasn't getting taken, if the money wasn't getting taken, it would be more apartments in Sacramento.

It would be more buildings built in Sacramento, the money would have been outsourced to Santa Barbara.

Next speaker is Jeannie Wells, Shaquim, Shannon Shaw, Daisy Madrigal.

Following Daisy is Herman Barrahona, Marjorie Beezer.

Good afternoon, esteemed members of the city and county council.

My name is Shannon Shaw, and I am here today representing One Community Health as the Vice President of Programs and Development.

Our street medicine team, supported by both the city and the county, is on the front lines of our community's housing crisis, offering primary care and behavioral health care five days a week.

As a health center serving two 20,000 lives annually with 8% or 1,562 patients experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity this year alone.

While our data is compelling, I am here to offer the truth about engagement to put human dignity back at the center of this discussion and to push back forcefully on the harmful repeated generalization that our unhoused neighbors review refuse service.

We cannot blame the burdens of broken systems on the backs of our vulnerable population.

The truth is our unhoused neighbors are desperately seeking help.

This year, one community health is on track to exceed 2,300 total medical and behavioral health visits on the street.

This is not refusal, that is a desperate call for help being answered.

Our success is rooted in dignity.

We meet people consistently where they are, removing systemic barriers to care, and successfully supporting patients into transitional housing.

The success is fragile without a systemic moral commitment from this body.

I urge you to consider intentional long-term funding for community-based organizations led by those closest to the issue.

And we may already have a blueprint for collective impact in Sacramento.

Just last night we celebrated 10 years of the Black Child Legacy Campaign, a profoundly impactful model of which Chair Cerna has been a relentless and committed champion.

The BCLC is an evidence-based framework that defined by real cross-sector collaboration, not just words, but by action proven by impact.

Its strength lies in community-led incubators comprising CBOs, county service providers, school systems, and healthcare professionals who are aligned around a single North Star goal.

The work is meticulously measuring the monitor through continuous quality improvement lens.

And we should consider how to leverage and adapt the Michelle C Mana model to tackle the homelessness crisis.

Thank you.

Thank you, Shim.

Want to double check for Shaquim and Daisy Madrigal.

Herman Bahona, Herman Barahona.

Good afternoon.

My name is Herman Barahona with the Sacramento Environmental Justice Coalition in the Sacramento Homeless Union.

I'm here on behalf of six people who died at Camp Resolution the moment the city decided to evict them.

Six people with whom we're offered services.

And then after we allow them to visit and meet with them before the eviction, these folks were told that they would not be housed because they were liabilities.

One of them was Sean Adams and her husband.

They died in a motel that their doctor was paying for because the city could not house them after the eviction at Camp Resolution.

These cases are a simple but tragic example of the negligence of human beings that matter.

They matter to us.

And I hope that this effort begins to see the dignity that needs to be given respectfully to all of our folks.

We had a PRA request to the County of Sacramento for the year 2024.

Your medical records tell us that there are 37,000 cases of people who are unhoused, enrolled in the medical program.

A case is defined by two or more people, including children.

So we know that that number goes up to 50,000.

So if you know that you have 50,000 people enrolled in your medical records, you know how to reach them already.

You know how to come up with effective prevention strategies, so you don't have to look for them.

We just need to keep them in a consistent place and work with the medical history that's active because of billing purposes to serve them better.

The city of Folsom has close to 5,000 people who earn less than two thousand dollars a month.

They are on the edge of homelessness, and many of your cities have the same populations.

So I urge you to please consider that the way that we're treating the poor has to be through the lens of impacted folks.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Marjorie Beezer, Daryl Rogers, then Noah Cassor.

Thank you, good afternoon.

I'm Marjorie Bizo.

Um I live in Sacramento County, represent a whole host of demographics.

But today, here is what I want to share with the listeners.

This is from the King James Version of the Bible.

It says, Master, which is the great commandment in the law.

Jesus said unto him, thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind.

This is a first and great commandment.

And the second is like unto it.

Thou shalt love thy neighbor as who thyself in it.

On these two commandments hang all the law and the profits.

Why is that important in this context?

Homeless, our homeless are the least of us, or among the least of us.

I hear about data-driven decision making, evidence-based approaches.

I absolutely agree.

What I'm also well aware of, I'm a researcher.

I lecture research methods at Antigua State College.

I mean, I look like it, but I do.

Also, what I know is data is only good as good as its source.

So yes, we do need data-driven results.

We also need data-driven options, but we also need to have the human voice and a human lens.

When you speak about me, you have to speak to me and with me.

And then to say I don't get a vote, I don't have a voice, I listen to you.

But here's the thing: because you listen doesn't mean you have to act.

Because you listen does not equal you have to act.

That's a big concern.

And I am currently, as I'm standing before you right now, I am one year housed on the 30th of September 2025.

Okay.

One year.

I am formerly the counselor of her majesty's prison antiga and barbuda.

I have a degree from SAC State.

I've done this, I've done that, I've spoken at the UN, I've done this, I've done that.

What does that mean?

Homelessness is for anybody.

Circumstances change, and I realize my time is done, but I do want to leave you with this message.

Nothing about me without me.