No, I don't.

Good afternoon.

The time is now 2 02 p.m.

on Wednesday, August 20th, and the City of San Antonio budget work session is called to order.

Madam Clerk, please call the roll.

Councilmember Corr.

Councilmember Castillo Angiano.

Councilmember Villagran.

Here.

Councilmember Mughia.

Councilmember Castillo.

Councilmember Galvan.

Councilmember Alderete Gabito.

Here.

Councilmember Mesa Gonzalez.

Councilmember Spears.

Councilmember White.

Mayor Jones.

Mayor, we have Core.

Great, thank you, Madam Clerk.

This meeting is to hear about budgets for the homeless services and strategy department, neighborhood housing services department, and the animal care services.

Eric, are you ready to begin?

Definitely mayor and council.

Um, in the order that you just stated, Mayor, we'll start off with um uh Mark Carmona on homeless strategies and services, transition to Veronica with Neighborhood and Housing Services, and then end with John with Animal Care Services.

So floor is yours, Mark.

Good afternoon, Mayor and Council.

My name is Mark Carmuna, the Chief Housing Officer and now Director of the New Homeless Services and Strategy Department.

For the last three budget surveys, residents ranked services to assist the homeless in the top two priority investment ratings for our community.

During the last point in time count, the number of individuals counted as experiencing homelessness was 3,625, a slight increase from last year.

As socioeconomic costs such as housing and health care continue to increase and impact our local homeless response system.

The City of San Antonio will now focus its efforts to address homelessness in our community.

I want to recognize some members of the homeless response system that are with us today, Nikisha Baker from SAM, Katie Wilson from Close to Home, Erica Borrego from Corazon, and David Hewitt from Haven for Hope.

The work of the homeless response system has increased and improved over the past few years.

We will need to expand and further align these relationships moving forward.

Through the work of the 43 staff members, the department will direct its efforts this year to reduce unsheltered homelessness, reduce family homelessness, and prevent homelessness.

The department will work, will focus its work to align efforts across city departments and external community partners.

We must build new cross-system partnerships with health care systems, the local behavioral health system, Bear County and its specialty courts, the community court system, housing developers, and social service systems, just to name a few.

We will continue to work upstream in the areas of prevention and diversion of homelessness to include financial assistance, case management, housing stability services, and legal services.

We must engage in deeper data analysis to better understand the needs and challenges of the people we're serving.

This will allow us to develop a long-term program and funding plan to address the comprehensive needs of the local homeless response system.

The plan should address both operational and capital needs.

We will need elements of housing to include emergency shelter, transitional bridge housing, supportive housing, and affordable housing as we work to prevent homelessness.

To carry this out, we will work on building a business case for the various types of housing needed for the unhoused.

Recently, the neighborhood housing and services department concluded its housing bond stakeholder sessions where there seemed to be a growing consensus in the community for transitional and bridge housing.

The department was created to elevate and better coordinate the city's response to its homeless residents.

We're leveraging existing resources from the Department of Human Services, and we will lead coordination with various cities departments and our homeless response system partners.

Our new department is carried out in six areas through our street outreach team, which we'll talk about some today, our encampment abatement coordination, our community connections hotline, through outreach shelter and housing contracts, and through coordination and administration.

But you can see the city of San Antonio carries out its planning and policy development function, public safety, coordination and facilitation.

We invest financially in this area and provide direct services.

Close to home is our HUD HUD designated lead continuum of care agency.

And then we partner with a number of nonprofit service providers, our faith-based organizations, health providers, funding agencies, and the criminal justice system.

At this time, I'll ask Patrick Steck to walk up and walk us through the proposed budget and some operational items for the council.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mark.

Patrick Steck, assistant director with the human services department and uh joining the as assistant director for the homeless services and strategies department.

Um I've been working in this space now for about five years and excited to be part of the new department under Mark's leadership.

Uh the fiscal 26 proposed budget includes 26.1 million dollars for the new department.

That is out of human services resources.

Um that about 21 and a half million is contracted out, and four and a half million is within the department for those 43 staff positions and operations of our direct services in the department.

Uh this the total proposed budget includes uh total homeless services investment of 30.5 million dollars, so four and about four and a half million uh other direct services are in departments such as solid waste, uh, neighborhood and housing services.

Um, and then our indirect costs of police and fire response to homelessness are estimated at about 23.2 million dollars, about 20 million of that in police cost, uh, the other three million in fire and EMS response runs uh for uh for homeless response.

Uh you can see on the pie chart on the right, about half of our uh funding within the department is dedicated to some form of sheltering.

Um $8.2 million investment to our Haven for Hope campus, about a million dollars for some other shelters, including the Battery Women's and Children's Shelter, and then 5.2 for our low barrier non-congregate shelter, which I'll talk a little bit more about.

It is the uh primary budget initiative of the FY26 uh proposed budget, which includes uh 4.8 additional dollars million additional dollars to continue that low barrier shelter for one more year.

Um, the low barrier shelter provides an alternative to traditional congregate shelters by providing uh a single room to folks who have been experiencing homelessness coming off the street.

The operation includes uh it's a 24-7 operation.

It includes case management, mental health services, and physical health, minor medical health care on site to address those conditions that are preventing housing stability.

It's been funded the last two years, uh both the lease and the operations of the facility through federal funds for fiscal 24 and 25.

And as I mentioned, the proposed budget includes 4.8 additional millions for the lease, and Sam Ministries will fund the operations support to continue that for an additional year through fundraising and other partnerships.

Uh, and then with our strategic direction, we will will continue looking for ongoing development opportunities to continue this.

It's become an integral part of our homeless response system.

Um so some of the results of this shelter, it's it is located downtown in a hotel facility that has 313 rooms.

Um the funding that SAM Ministries operations has operates uh 185 of those rooms.

Uh that's been the case for the last two years.

Uh, over the that two-year funding period where the city is invested with this those federal dollars.

Um this the shelter has served 526 individuals.

So that I have to note is over a two-year period of of the project.

266 positive exits, those are exits to um most 90% of those are to a permanent housing destination.

The rest are to uh a higher level medical care, maybe another shelter or a bridge housing situation.

Uh, we did have about 200 negative exits, and those are mostly folks returning to the street.

It's not a linear process getting folks into a permanent housing, especially when they have been living unsheltered on the streets for many years.

Uh the recidivism rate, this is returns to homelessness after permanent housing for this is about 11.1 percent.

Nationally, HUD tells us that uh the recidivism rate after a year uh for all cities, all communities across the country is about 11.8 percent.

Uh so slightly better at this operation than the national average, and especially notable given the uh high needs that this shelter uh for the clients that this shelter is providing.

Um as I mentioned, the plan for 2026.

We will um the budget includes funding for leasing the facility for one more year.

Sam has uh done fundraising to fund operations and partnered with Strac, our regional trauma coordinating entity uh to provide space for medical uh step down hospital discharges for people who are experiencing homelessness.

There's a lot of overlap with that population of who our street outreach is engaging with.

Someone is discharged to an unsheltered situation.

We're probably going to be engaging with them very soon anyway.

So that's about 50 beds of the of the operation for hospital discharge, but pointing to that as an example of an innovative partnership with those other sectors across the community to address homelessness.

Next, I want to cover a system wide level for the homeless response system some data.

Two ways of looking at this.

On the left is what our community dashboard, and this is a dashboard we've had on the city's website for about a year and a half now.

This shows the flow and progress over time of our homeless response system.

All partners total have helped for the first 10 months of our current fiscal year.

About 3,800 people move from the streets into a better living situation, whether that's shelter or directly into housing.

And about 2,000 folks who have been in shelters have moved into permanent housing.

Over that same 10 month period, we saw almost over 1,700 new people entering homelessness.

These are folks who have never been in countered by any homeless response system partner over the last 10 plus years that we have used the shared data system of our homeless response partners.

Mark mentioned some of the needs, the growing trends in homelessness.

We are seeing a lot of new faces, and that is a constant challenge of our homeless response system and why we need to address farther upstream.

355 people did return into homelessness.

We had we had seen them before, they were permanently housed and they came back to our response system.

This data lives, as I mentioned, on our dashboard to help show that flow of our response system.

On the right is our is from our point and time count.

So that's the one night snapshot close to home conducts every year in January.

By council district, you can see the concentration of unsheltered homelessness on the street, primarily districts one, two, and five in the downtown area in and around the downtown area.

But that is again a one-night snapshot.

Another way of looking at that one night snapshot is it does allow us to compare over time.

So this chart shows our point in time count over the last six years.

We did not do an unsheltered count in 21 due to the pandemic.

But you can see that our trend lines over the last six years, the gray bars is the street count, the unsheltered count.

We were making significant progress up until 2024, and then we did see a slight increase in January of 2025.

Very significantly, our sheltered population increased almost every year over this period.

We did a better job getting folks indoors.

And we know that the engagement level that we can have in a shelter is much different than we can have on the streets in getting folks that the their needs met and into a permanent housing situation.

Within that point in time count, we get data about some demographics of who's experiencing homelessness and why.

One subpopulation I do want to point out is young adults.

So those ages 18 to 24, that's the HUD definition of young adult.

From from last year to this year, increased from 178 to 200, a small piece of the homeless population, but a growing and highly vulnerable subpopulation that we want to put a lot of effort in.

We've seen this trend over the last few years.

And last year held a work session with providers informed by young adults with lived experience of homelessness.

And out of that held with the housing trust a really big amazing day with architects, uh, with people who are young adults who are experiencing homelessness at the time, with funders, service providers, and gave direction to the housing trust on some ideas of how they can build a housing intervention for young adults.

We have a great response system with Sam Ministry's drop-in center, their dedicated beds at Haven for Hope.

Thrive Youth Center operates shelter beds at Haven for Hope as well as a housing program.

UmTSA and our DHS next level program serving this population.

But we know there's still needs and a gap, and uh with the housing trust, we will be working on next steps on a housing intervention, what that could look like for the subpopulation.

Want to move to encampment abatements.

Market mentioned a top priority of city residents in the budget surveys.

We do have a coordinated process to assess encampments when they are reported to us, usually through 311.

We provide outreach and service connections to anyone who's there in the encampment, whether it's one person or a large encampment.

It does encampments pose health and safety issues both to the community and to the people who are living there in the encampments.

They're not safe places to sleep.

When we are removing an encampment, we do provide notification at least 48 hours in advance, both verbal and written on a sign.

And then we we always do a final outreach engagement before the site is abated.

Usually that's with our solid waste department.

We also do partner with TextOT on state right-of-way on expressways.

This year we're anticipated to do site abatements of uh 1,369 encampments, a little over our target of 1,300.

We set a goal of responding within 14 days, and we're averaging 13 days for the fiscal year from the time of call to an encampment abatement or solid waste, and this is just the solid waste crews removed over 2,500 tons from these encampments.

The average cost uh when we average it over the the solid waste uh human services direct cost is a little over $2,000 per abatement.

That doesn't include the indirect police department support time for for some of the support that they provide.

And I'll end with this.

The the most cost-effective homeless intervention uh is preventing it before it starts.

Uh Mark talked about this and how we coordinate with partners to provide supports before they are needed uh in the homeless response work.

But uh our community connections hotline this fiscal year grew uh and to incorporate benefits navigation that was previously part of uh a different team on DHS.

Uh when I present to community groups, I always give them two numbers, 311 to report encampments, and this number 2079 to connect folks with services.

It's open during business hours, during inclement weather.

We go to 24 hours to get folks into safe places.

But we are uh providing a whole range of services and service connections for folks who are in need.

Um that concludes our presentation for the homeless services and strategy department.

Uh now turn it over to Veronica for NHSD.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, Mayor and Council.

Oh, good, thank you.

Who's as tall as Patrick or David, right?

Good afternoon, Mayor and Council Veronica Garcia.

I'm the director for the neighborhood and housing services department today.

Um joined by Ian Benavidez, our deputy director, and Veronica Gonzalez, our assistant director, as well as many high-level managers from the NHSD team.

Want to extend my sincere thanks to the team and all of our partners who help us deliver these housing programs every day.

We'll start with an overview of the department as well as some high-level summary of our strategic housing implementation plan, our proposed budget, um, go over an update on the housing bond, and some highlights.

NHSD was created in 2017 when the city reorganized housing functions to take a more strategic and focused approach on complex housing challenges.

Today, NHSD is made up of several service lines, including housing policy, housing stability, our home rehab and preservation programs, development, oversight of our federal HUD grants, as well as oversight of our affordable housing bond.

We're a team of 121 people who deal with complex housing issues every single day.

This work requires not just technical expertise, but also innovation, collaboration, and a deep understanding of the city we serve.

Our impact is amplified by the strong integration across each of these service lines.

For example, while one group is in the justice of the peace courts helping someone who's facing eviction, another team is in the community, providing renters' rights workshops and helping families understand their rights before they enter crisis.

We know that this work cannot be done alone, and each of our programs involves community partners to help us reach even more people.

In short, NHSD was built to be responsive, collaborative, and focused on results.

We're proud of the work we do, and even more proud of the impact we're having across the city.

Affordable housing remains a top priority community priority as evidenced by the community budget survey.

But it's not just a City of San Antonio plan.

It's also shared and co-created by Bear County, Opportunity Home, and the San Antonio Housing Trust.

One of the goals or the high-level goal of SHIP is to build or preserve over 28,000 affordable homes over the 10-year period.

And half of those homes are for people below 30% of the area mediated income.

To put that into perspective, a three-person household at 30% AMI or below makes less than 26,000 a year or about 1255 an hour.

Creating housing that's affordable at that level takes significant resources and focus, which is why the SHIP really centers those that are most in need.

Our strategic housing plan also includes 36 strategies to help us achieve and guide how we reach our housing goals.

Many of these strategies highlight the need for more holistic approach to service delivery.

One example of that is how we support homeowners through home rehab programs as well as filing for the exemptions, protesting their property taxes, as well as giving them the information so they know how to maintain their home in the long term.

We are on track to meet our production and preservation goals, but it's clear that sustained investment will be critical to keeping that momentum going.

In 2026, we'll focus on several strategies that are in the ship, including stabilizing neighborhoods.

As San Antonio continues to grow, we will help ensure new growth supports affordability by developing code amendments to support density bonus programs and expand our affordable housing options.

For strategic land acquisition, we'll partner with the San Antonio Housing Trust to acquire land near transit corridors that can be transformed into even more affordable housing opportunities.

In tandem with land acquisition, we want to ensure our investments are impactful and we're increasing housing access for vulnerable populations, including people who are exiting homelessness.

This coming year marks a pivotal moment for both it's both year five of the ship, and it is time to develop a new five-year consolidated HUD plan for our federal dollars.

The progress over the past four years has shown that collaboration drives impact.

So we'll be working with our partners to update our data, recalibrate our housing goals, and look again at our federal funding priorities over the next year.

As we've seen, improving housing affordability requires a strong foundation of program delivery and funding.

To provide context on how we've built that capacity over time, this slide highlights NHSD's budget history.

Between FY 2020 and FY 2024, the city significantly increased investment in housing and neighborhood services.

This funding expanded the department service delivery and laid the groundwork for homeless and social service needs.

During this period, the department also scaled up internal capacity to support our major initiatives such as home rehab and our housing stability programs.

Today, the general fund you can see is proposed to decrease from 24.4 million this year to 22 million in 2026, which is a $2.4 million reduction.

These reductions, which I will go into, are based on more efficient service delivery and right sizing the budgets based on our annual spending.

The total budget proposed for next year is $90.5 million, including $30.4 million for affordable housing, $41.5 million for our affordable housing bond progress, and the remaining funds are needed to deliver essential programs and services.

This includes our homeless and social services, community engagement and ship implementation, our incentive programs, as well as overall project management and support.

Our affordable housing budget includes investment to help us maintain a high level of service delivery across our key initiatives, such as our home repair programs, eviction prevention, rental and down payment assistance.

Ensuring people have access to stable housing remains key, and our programs are designed to support both renters and homeowners.

I'll begin with eviction prevention.

City staff are at every single Justice of the Peace Court eviction hearing to offer support during what is often a very difficult time of someone's life.

We also, with the continued investment of 100,000, we're able to support our legal aid partner who provides free legal counseling and support to more than 300 families each year.

Next, our rental assistance and relocation assistance programs.

This is one of our highest needs in the city.

And the city has ensured that we have a sustained budget of $5.7 million for next year, which will help over 1,800 households.

This program provides up to three months of rent and utility assistance or relocation assistance to help someone move to housing that's more affordable, really ensuring people can stay housed.

We're able to continue to support home ownership through our down payment assistance program, which helps first-time homebuyers with down payment and closing costs, offering forgivable loans of up to $40,000 to buy someone for someone to buy their first home.

Finally, our on we offer ongoing support for both renters and homeowners, which is critical, and we have on our team HUD certified fair housing counselors that can help someone whether they're navigating a lease, resolving a tenant landlord issue, or trying to save their home from foreclosure.

We firmly believe that the most affordable home is the one that someone is already in.

And two key programs that are driving our home preservation efforts are major rehab and minor repair.

Together, these programs represent a combined investment of $14.7 million to help nearly 500 families next year.

Major rehab supports homeowners with significant repairs, such as repairing foundation, rewiring electrical, installing a brand new roof, everything and up to including full reconstruction when homes are so far beyond the maintenance needed.

Complementing this work is minor repair for smaller repairs like fixing a leaking roof or replacing broken windows.

But beyond the repairs themselves, we're also investing in homeowner empowerment.

This year we provided home maintenance classes in partnership with Lis San Antonio to over 175 homeowners, equipping them with the knowledge and skills so they can care for their home in the long term.

We're also helping residents with wraparound services such as connecting them to utility assistance or other programs for which they may qualify.

And we know very well that we need to be more efficient with our funding.

So this budget reflects $1 million reduction from the general fund, but we will still be able to serve $455 homeowners with the funding.

This is because we've been successful in partnering with nonprofits and helping them stretch city dollars further.

Our nonprofit partners do this work in neighborhoods.

They're able to utilize volunteers and sometimes donated materials, and they can reach homeowners for programs and some that sometimes don't qualify for the city program.

So with this investment, together working together, we can still reach the same number of homes.

Next year we will be expanding partnership and working with SAWS and on a program to help repair or install lateral connections, which is a big need we've heard, and we will also be supporting the plumbers to people program with additional minor repairs for plumbing.

We also will continue to help address the effects of extreme heat by installing cool roofs in urban heat island areas.

Together, these programs help reflect our commitment to preserving housing, protecting our most vulnerable residents, and building a more resilient San Antonio.

In addition to preserving housing, we want to also make sure we have to continue to create new affordable housing opportunities.

Our incentive of programs are aligned with our housing goals and ensure that our limited resources are going to those with the greatest need.

We plan to leverage $6.7 million in federal funding to help close funding gaps for projects that create affordable homes, particularly those for 30% of the area median income or below.

In addition, we'll continue to offer city fee waivers to reduce development costs.

While these waivers do primarily support affordable housing, you can see they also extend to our economic development initiatives to align with broader community goals.

Next year's budget does reflect a $500,000 reduction of fee waivers, which right-sizes our budget with our annual spending.

And lastly, the inner city incentive fund will remain a flexible tool to support projects that align with our ship or stimulate economic development.

This fund is especially valuable for projects that may not qualify for bond or federal funding, such as the YWCA Women's Live and Learn Center, which is a transitional housing project funded by the ISIF, offering temporary housing as well as education and job training to young women.

This includes funding for rehab and new construction of multifamily housing, permanent supportive housing for individuals experiencing homelessness, as well as the construction of new single-family homes.

To date, $127.8 million of the bond has been committed, with about $22 million remaining to support ship-aligned projects.

This investment is already delivering results.

Across these five funding categories, the housing bond is supporting the production or preservation of over 5,000 homes, leveraging near more than $822 million in private and state investments.

Of these homes, nearly $1,500 are deeply affordable.

And homeownership opportunities are targeted to families at or below 80% of the area median income.

I always love to highlight this.

The average sales price of one of the housing bond funded homes is $170,000, which is well below market rate in San Antonio.

By the end of 2026, we anticipate the completion of over $4,300 homes as a direct result of these housing bond investments.

And I'll also note we're not just creating low cost housing, but we're also ensuring that the housing is high quality with support services on site to help families stay housed long term.

Key among our SHIP strategies are public information campaigns that empower both community members with information they need to stay housed, whether they rent or they own.

The property tax help campaign in its third year, we are in partnership with Bear Appraisal District, and we host workshops around the city, one in every single council district, for homeowners to learn about how they can protest their property taxes and receive the exemptions that they're entitled to.

This year we had over 1,300 attendees, and the average savings per household was about $500 across all taxing entities.

For renters, our rent wise SA hosted workshops for housing hosted critical information on local, state, and federal laws.

We offer these workshops in partnership with the Fair Housing Council of San Antonio, which is available after each session to further help renters who are facing issues.

This year, for the first time, we also hosted sessions for landlords or housing providers who want to learn more about landlord tenant laws and best practices.

For these sessions, we work closely with San Antonio Legal Services Association, the San Antonio Partner Apartment Association, and the National Association of Rental Property Managers.

For all of our campaigns, we have year-round online resources available, including video series.

Housing is more than just shelter.

It's stability, dignity, and hope.

As part of our broader SHIP implementation, we are launching a citywide public information campaign rooted in a simple but powerful truth.

Everyone deserves a safe place to call home.

This campaign is designed to build understanding and support for long-term housing solutions while confronting the stigma that too often surrounds affordable housing, while working hand in hand with our community stakeholders to highlight the deep connection between housing affordability and homelessness and really show how our efforts are already changing lives.

Meet Norma.

She lives at an apartment community made possible by the 2022 Affordable Housing Bond.

She is raising her granddaughter on a fixed income.

Before moving in, she faced daily uncertainties about how she'd afford rent, health care, and other daily living expenses.

Today they have a safe home filled with possibility.

Norma's story is one of many.

These are our neighbors who need a chance and a home.

We work to ensure that residents, stakeholders, and the decision makers come together around a shared belief.

Housing is the foundation, and our housing investments support many other areas of our work from health care, public safety, and education.

Next, I'd like to introduce John Gary, the director for animal care services.

Good afternoon, Mayor and Council.

Um, John Gary, I'm the uh new director at ACS.

I've been there just uh almost eight months now, and so uh I'm I'm pleased to be able to bring up and present to you the FY26 proposed budget for animal care services.

Uh before we get started, I did want to recognize that three of our advisory board members are here with us today.

Uh Rita Broadagum, uh Karen Spears, and Kathy Davis uh have come out today to help us support, and they've been a big part of what we do at Animal Care Services for quite some time.

Uh just a quick overview.

We'll be going over the department uh budget, our proposed budget, uh, and then we'll we'll talk about some of the programs.

Uh spend a lot of time on public safety as well as our pet care connect program, which are which is our special community outreach program, uh, our spending efforts as well as placement, community outreach, and then uh at the end uh the budget survey.

This is just a quick overview of the department.

We have a total of five divisions uh, as you see here.

We have our field operations, uh placement and shelter are combined uh on this slide here, and then our clinic operations as well as our support division.

Um, field as you can see focuses on field response, first response are dangerous and bites, uh, cruelty investigations, as well as our CASA team, which is the uh team that we have that actually goes out and provides uh follow-up support to uh the work that our other field officers have done, as well as uh provide resources to people in our community to assist with uh keeping animals in the home.

Our placement team obviously focuses on our adoptions and getting our placement, the live placement that we have at the shelter uh foster and rescue, uh as well as just uh the shelter team is responsible for the animal care and enrichment of the animals.

Uh clinic provides all of our clinic support, our spawner surgeries as well as just the treatment of animals that are entering our shelter each day.

We uh do a lot of education and outreach, uh, which uh is something that is not common in a lot of large uh municipal shelters.

I'm glad that we have such a great team that's able to provide that, as well as just our open records requests, our fiscal responsibilities, uh, and then our volunteers.

Uh this slide uh actually demonstrates uh we did uh initiate our our strategic plan in 2023.

Uh these are basically the five main categories from our strategic plan, uh supporter safe and community for people in our neighborhoods, protect the safety and humane treatment of pets, champion a healthy and thriving work first, foster positive connections with our community, and then support placement of pets for life.

Uh we have actively uh we use this as a guide in our day-to-day operations.

Uh you know, at due to recent events that happened in the last couple years, we've spent a lot of time on our on our public safety side of things and the public and uh with our field services program.

Uh but overall, this this is our guiding uh what we use to guide us through our decision making uh and our metrics that we measure it uh every month.

I want to show this slide because it shows the investment that we've had in animal care services uh in San Antonio over the last several years.

As you can see, since uh fiscal year 2019, our our budget has uh a little over doubled.

Um, and I think the the great work that you're gonna see presented today and and the increase uh in what we've been able to do as a uh department within San Antonio uh it's shown uh that they that the dollars are being well spent, and so we're very thankful uh for what we're able to do.

This slide uh is our overall proposed budget.

It's that's uh overall we're at 33.6 million.

We have 245 total positions.

Uh I did want to uh point out a couple.

As you can see, about 27% of our um total budget is our field operations, so the the public safety aspect that we talk about a lot and that we spend a lot of time and focus on uh is about 20, like I said, about 25 percent of our budget, nine million dollars.

As well as uh something I I really uh like to point out is our spayer neuter efforts.

Uh we spend uh right around six million dollars each year.

Uh that's that's an increase when we just opened up our two new clinics, which we'll talk about a little bit later, but that's unique to San Antonio.

Not very many municipal shelters are spending that kind of money on uh these type of efforts.

Uh there's not very often we get to be proactive in animal welfare, and this is and this is one way that we're able to do that.

So, first off, we'll talk a little bit about our public safety.

Um, this shows uh the slide shows an increase in enforcement and accountability.

The dangerous dog uh compliance increased from 55 to about 84 percent uh over this year.

Um, and then in July, we um sorry I'll get to that here in a minute.

Uh we double the number of David dog investigations in FY24, and um when we double these investigations, we also doubled the number of staff.

I'm sorry, we we doubled the number of investigations in FY25.

We doubled the number of staff in FY24, and so with the number of staff that we've seen and increase the number of officers that we have in the field, we've also uh that's created more casework.

And so the number of dangerous cases that we're working uh is is up over 100 percent.

So uh that has proposed some challenges for us, but uh our team is doing a really really good job uh all things considered in the increase that we're seeing.

Uh the citations, as you can see, were up about 106 percent compared to FY24.

Uh and then uh our biggest changes that we happen this in the past December and in this current fiscal year was our changes to chapter five, where we increased uh the minimum fines for bites, free restraint, and repeat offenses.

This slide uh kind of demonstrates what one of our main um metrics that we use for our field services program.

Uh this is uh we incre we in FY23 when we began these initial efforts, we are only uh respond to about 44 percent.

Currently, we're about 83 percent, and and I'm happy to say in uh just this past month in July, it's our highest month in the history of ACS.

We we can uh responded to 94% of our critical calls.

So the the work that our our officers are are doing um is working, they're very effective.

Uh we've had a great academy classes that are really doing great.

We graduate our next academy class uh next month in uh with another 15 officers that will be going out to the field.

And so we we anticipate actually hitting our goal a little bit earlier.

Uh this is kind of a timeline that we have to achieve that ultimate goal of 100% uh which we expect to hit sometime uh in that July to September of 2026.

Uh and we were asked uh during uh the initial budget uh presentation about our non-critical call response.

So we did want to touch on that a little bit today.

As you can see, we're we're we respond to about 32% of the non-critical calls, which is our strays, public nuisance calls in our permits.

So which that is actually up since we uh began these efforts as well.

Uh when we began these efforts in FY23, that number was only 19%.

So we're seeing an increase in both of those with the extra funding that's been put in place for our our field services team.

The next slide I want to talk about is our pet care connect program.

There's especially on the field services thing uh side of things.

We really there's not very many opportunities for us to be proactive.

Uh and this program has been huge for us.

It's a pilot program.

Uh we have uh so far we've been in districts one, two, uh three, five, and then four is upcoming uh in the in just a few weeks.

We'll be in September, we'll be there in four.

Uh and what this program is is we uh we identify neighborhoods uh of the greatest need, uh a lot of it has to do with call volume.

Uh and we we go out to that neighborhood.

Uh it's very resource intense.

We we take a team uh that involves pretty much almost every uh division of our of our department is out there in some way.

Uh we go door to door, we provide resources, anything from dog food to microchips.

Uh we will have pop-up vaccination clinics and microchip clinics in that neighborhood.

Uh we partner with Daisy CARES as well as the Spain and Utah Network for those efforts.

They're they're good partners of ours and help make that program successful.

And as you can see on the slide, we've we've reached uh over 4,000 homes, 600 direct interactions with our community, uh and then 1,400 different types of pet care resources, and that could be anything from dog food to callers to leashes.

Uh our staff loves the fact that we've freed six dogs from chains since we uh began that program, and over 100,000 pounds of dog food have been given away.

Uh very proud of this program.

It's it is very labor-intensive and very resource intensive, but uh it's it is our one of our few opportunities where we get to be proactive.

And the whole point in this program is getting into neighborhoods and making non-critical calls, addressing them before they become critical calls.

And uh we're I love the direction that this program is going.

Very proud of the team uh to be able to do this work.

Talk a little bit about our spaydooter program now.

Um as you guys know, we just opened up our two uh clinics uh just this past summer.

Uh the West Clinic is uh is really up and rolling.

It's it's it's booked uh surgeries through September so far.

Uh East Clinic is is is starting to catch up now.

We're finally getting uh going there as well.

We've done over uh almost 500 surgeries in those, or I'm sorry, over 700 surgeries in those two clinics now.

Um next year we're we're think we're gonna do as many as six thousand.

Um, or that's the goal anyway.

Our target is six thousand next year.

Uh with our current vets uh availability that we have, we will we do believe we'll be able to reach that.

Um we've seen an increase in surgeries that we've expect we expect over about six and a half percent increase in surgeries over um over the next year.

So very excited.

Uh the progress we've made.

We as you can see on this slide, uh we did have a goal of about 41,000.

Uh we we are just under 39,000 that we estimate to finish uh FY25, but we are very confident in the goal next year of the 41,000 with these two new clinics on board.

We'll talk a little bit about placement now.

Our um our life saving efforts have we've just done I couldn't be more proud of the staff.

We've seen with with the increase in the number of field officers that we have, we've seen an increase of about 2100 animals that entered our shelter this year so far, and and despite that, the numbers for our life saving have gone up.

And so we've seen a 19% increase in the pets return to homes.

Uh 12,000 pets are transferred to our to our rescue partners that we work with.

Um our live release rate, again, despite the nine nine percent increase in our intake, uh, continues to do well.

And I want to talk a little bit about our live release rate because uh I know you all get a lot of emails about the amount of euthanasia that's happening, and and we too are concerned with that, but I I think it's important that we recognize where we truly are, and uh our our current live release rate for dogs is 85% for cats is 90%, with the overall live release rate of 86 percent.

That's the highest, uh second highest in the state of Texas in large municipal shelters.

Uh, and we're very proud of that.

There's not very many shelters, especially large municipal shelters that boast that kind of live release rate.

And just so we're all on the same page with what live release rate is.

It's live release rate is is simply the percentage of animals that have an outcome that is a live outcome.

And so uh we accomplished that several different ways uh this year.

We've increased the number of large-scale adoption of events that we've done.

Uh over 450 adoptions have happened at our large-scale adoption events.

And then upcoming October 25th, we have Dogtober, which was another annual event that is another huge festival, fall festival type event that we do there on our campus.

Paul Chang had over 3,000 attendees this year.

And we're hoping to be able to repeat that here next month in October.

So hopefully you all come out to take part in that.

Also, I wanted to mention we were able to acquire our South Kennel building this year, which is just south of the of the current campus.

It had added an additional 30 kennels and about room for about 18 small stainless steel kennels.

It's going to give a lot time for the harder to place animals.

And we do have an improvement this proposed for this next year at 169,098.

And that's basically the M and O for that new building that uh that we required.

Talk a little bit about our community outreach, our wellness clinics.

We are uh we are exceeding every everything, uh every goal we've set for our wellness clinics.

They're uh doing really, really well.

Over 400 team, over 1,400 pets served at our two uh mega uh clinics.

We had a mini mega and a mega uh at Whitley Heights.

The the mega event uh at Wheatley Heights did just under a thousand.

Uh we have another uh mega event coming up uh that we're uh have another goal of doing another thousand that will also be in uh Wheatley Heights.

Uh we are very fortunate to partner um with Banfield.

Uh they're uh they're basically the Pet Smart veterinary clinic that's in the Pet Smarts.

Uh they have agreed to uh sponsor that event and bring their their staff out and help us uh be able to do uh another mega event, which is something we didn't think we're gonna be able to do, so we're very grateful that they were able to step up and do that for us.

Uh and then our regular vaccine microchip clinics.

This is something else that's very unique to San Antonio.

There's not very many uh municipalities across the country that are they're offered especially this many free space or free uh free vaccine and microchip clinics.

Uh so far, we've served over 6,000 pets, well exceeding our goal.

And then I'm gonna talk a little bit about our marking that we uh received funding for this last year.

Uh feel very grateful to be able to do some marketing and have the team that we have there.

Uh as you can see, we launched a billboard campaign that launched in May.

Uh, you can see the billboard, the billboard that you see there on the screen.

That is actually in the Pearl area.

Uh, and then we had 24 junior billboards that went out uh through neighborhoods uh around various locations around the city.

Um and then I I did want to mention our uh pet networking team.

Uh that is a pilot program that we launched in April.

It's two members that are focused on taking high quality photos of adoptable pets.

Uh they take an average of about 600 photos per month, uh, and they feature about 75 plus uh pets per month on social media.

Uh the reason why I point this out is because pictures matter, uh, and that sounds uh odd, and I will show some the next slide about our pet search page, and you can really see why pictures matter.

But we found that if we're able to highlight these animals uh through these pictures, over we have an over a 90% placement rate for the animals that we highlight through social media by just putting them in a different light.

This I I definitely wanted to highlight as well.

We worked very closely with our IT team, very thankful.

They they built this page working with our team uh for us.

As you can see on the left, that that was our old page.

Uh, and just a couple of weeks ago, we were able to launch the new and improved uh page.

It has a lot more search options uh for our customers.

Um it's the second most paid uh visited page on the COSA site, over 420,000 visits a year.

Uh shows all adoptable pets.

Uh, it's used by owners of lost pets, potential adopters, fosters, and rescue partners.

Uh, and again, this was done in-house by our CoS IT software engineer team and our COSA web team.

So very thankful that they were able to work with our team to put together such a quality product.

Uh, and and uh again, our marketing uh team, our communications manager spent a lot of time working with them to make this happen.

All right, we did have uh some reductions proposed for next year.

Uh I was very fortunate.

Our team uh did a very great job of going through our our budget and and looking for ways to to meet the reductions that we needed to make.

And uh so what you're seeing here is uh we we saw a reduction in about in uh right size of our temporary salaries uh in our microchips.

Uh there will be no uh reduction in physicians for ACS, and I think it's important to point out that this will not impact our services.

We will still be able to give out uh the microchips, there's no changes in there.

We still give our community and our residents free microchips.

Um, and um it does not affect our um our positions in any way.

Uh and then we had a small reduction to our travel uh and training budget uh by shifting some of that training that we were sending officers to to uh available online uh courses that we're able to get their uh C's that's required of uh our anal control officers.

Uh and then uh this last slide is talks about our uh revenue enhancements.

We were able to uh make a few increases to some of our uh permits that we do, uh and this slide is just reflective of those changes that that we're proposing to make.

Uh and that concludes our presentation.

So uh we're happy to answer uh questions.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr.

Marcona uh Carmono, excuse me, uh Ms.

Garcia, Mr.

Gary, for your very uh helpful and thorough presentations.

Um got a couple of questions here.

Um the uh the first two presentations, I think um, for many of us are um listen to with great interest as we look at the changes in our economic environment and what are the things that we need to be already thinking about um given those that are vulnerable already on the not maybe not quite homeless now, but on the verge of being so, and how can we be proactive and thoughtful about where we may be able to um frankly help ourselves now to be able to have those resources in place should they very likely be be necessary?

Um and again wanted to uh again re reemphasize that we are gonna do a tabletop exercise that helps us really understand what assumptions we may or may not be making, how we can better collaborate with the county and how we can better collaborate with some of our other partners, um, frankly, who themselves may be uh impacted by uh the decrease in federal and state funding as a result of what's what's happening at those two levels.

Um and we know again just how vulnerable this is.

I was at the uh um uh point in time presentation that Katie and her team uh very helpfully laid out and and understand just how sensitive uh how fragile our community is in this.

And Katie will correct me if I'm wrong, but that stat that sticks out to me is you know, uh a 100% increase in the media in rent in our community uh leads to a nine percent increase in the unhoused.

That is, I mean, for many that's just you know, again, a dinner, but for for many it shows just how vulnerable and as well the uh the majority of folks unfortunately impacted by this are our young kids, right?

Our children.

So um thank you for the presentation and thanks for laying out um can your current um your current efforts.

Um there was one slide that talked about um um data collection and the need to better do that.

Can you speak to how your budget helps you better collect that data and if you had additional resources, what um what additional data would you be able to collect and and analyze?

So currently uh the way that the new department will be laid out, Mayor Jones, is that um we will do shared services with the Department of Human Services.

It has capacity currently uh for data analysis, it has three three or four staff, if I remember correctly, that work on that.

Um so we will start there.

We receive information from all the agencies that we have financial investment in as well as the agencies that we work with in the homeless response system.

We coordinate regularly with close to home on data governance.

Um I think increased investment allows deeper analysis, quite frankly.

And um can you speak to some of that?

So some of the deeper analysis really speaks in my mind speaks to as I think about this.

Um who are the people, for example, let me just give an example.

So the Strac investment that's gonna happen at the low barrier shelter.

So our ability to be able to coordinate with Strac on those individuals that we're working with allows us to be a part of discharge planning.

So when somebody is at the hospital and they're released back out into community, our ability to understand what their conditions are, their need for case management, their need for prevention services, rental assistance, those different types of things, having that deeper level of analysis allows us to go as well as develop new partnerships with health systems, with the behavior health system.

So the coordination of data and I think the sharing of data allows us to go from outputs to more outcome information.

Couldn't agree more, which is why I'm going to be very specific in terms of if there are data sets or investments in data capturing that you would like there that you're looking for that you don't currently have.

Again, I know this is your proposed, but you know, if you had additional resources, what could that help you do?

I think again, we're all quite um concerned.

You know, when I look at um a hundred thousand dollars, for example, that helped 300 household, 330 households stay in their home.

I mean, that is a great ROI.

Um, and when we look at what is going to uh again, what's going to happen in our community, ensuring we have additional resources as folks may need to enter into that process.

So that's what I'm looking for additional resources, what that what might that be able to help you better understand, but then also help us proactively um proactively address.

I I mean I if that number could be a that was if we wanted to help a thousand households, right?

If we wanted to help 2500 households, how could we what is that number?

So please provide that information.

We will uh thank you.

Um to your colleague.

I saw the average length of a shelter stay is 132 days.

Um is that average?

I know you said our recidivism after permanent shelter uh stay at permanent shelter is on par with what the national average is, but is our average length of stay on on par with what we see in other parts of the country?

Uh roughly yes.

I can get you the exact national average, but um that is roughly what we're seeing, at least in other shelters in our community.

Okay.

Yes.

I didn't want I didn't know if we were folks were staying there longer and we're still seeing kind of the same outcome on the other side, but welcome, um, welcome better understanding that.

Um and councilwoman Castillo wasn't here, but I'm guessing she maybe she'll ask this question when they did the concentration of homelessness and the concentration in in D5.

Can you help us understand?

I mean, the the comment that she made the other day was that that is because it's it's that's where Haven is, right?

It's near Haven.

So is there any other maybe this is one of the other additional data sets or approaches to uh and analyzing that data would be helpful, which is how can we understand where folks are actually you know coming from versus just our um in that in that county?

Sure.

So um that the data would be through our our street, the work of our street outreach team.

So we the point in time count one night, uh just a few hours in the evening.

Uh that does help us collect the the geographic data.

Um but our annual throughout the year every day, we're doing street outreach engagements.

Um we've had some some really good productive conversations with close to home and Haven about how we can enhance our data tools.

It's in process with Haven for Hope's HMIS team already to collect better data through our street outreach teams.

Um they're already collecting that client data, but being able to map it has been uh a bit of a challenge.

Uh we do map our encampments when we do encampment uh coordinated abatement events.

Um but that we have that in progress already.

I think we'll be uh only improving the data collection.

Street outreach is a uh notoriously hard to track the data for um as folks move around, but uh, do you think we're making good improvements there with our HMIS homeless management information system uh team here in the community?

Okay, thank you.

Uh Ms.

Garcia, you mentioned a um a one million dollar reduction.

I think that was specific to minor repair, if I heard you correctly.

Um you said there was a reduction of one million, but we're still meeting the same need.

Um can you help us understand how such a significant reduction allows?

And you said folks are sounds like trying to do more with less, but in my experience, that's like never the case.

You do less with less.

Um, can you help us understand how that one million dollar reduction allows us to still meet the same need?

Yes, we're working with um several nonprofit partners.

Um, probably the biggest one is CPS Energy, and they in particular will use our minor repair funds to make some smaller repairs to the home that otherwise would have disqualified the family from using uh receiving Casa Better weatherization improvements.

So by leveraging our smaller investment to complete minor repairs in the home, um they're using their funds to make the dollars go further.

So we can, while our dollar per family may be less, they're still able to get significant minor repairs to the home.

And CPS is not our only partner.

We also have several other smaller nonprofits.

Um, Merced is a partner, Blueprint Ministries.

Um, this year we're partnering with just a just a couple more that are already out there in the community, and that's how we're able to still reach the same number of families, um, but they're using either their own leverage dollars or in some cases, donated materials or even volunteers so that the dollars go further.

Mayor, just for context, what what we had primarily been you relying upon before was our own solicitation method, those contractors coming under contract with the city, and I think what Veronica and the team found uh this year in this year's budget was that if we leverage those other partners, at the end of the day, we're getting the same amount of work done through different methods rather than direct contracting with the city.

So that we're going to continue to do that.

Um for Mr.

Gary.

I appreciated your your pet care connect program, and it reminded me uh we it's uh it's almost like a hot spot policing effort uh that we need to better collect some data on.

I mean, I think that's helpful.

You did four, I mean four thousand homes, fourteen hundred pet care uh resources, all all of that was just in four weeks.

Yes, we do we do uh basically one every other month, and we and it's about a four-week project when we're there.

Okay.

And and so all of that to say um just like in the hotspot policing, how are we collecting the data about what are the you know the second and third order effects as a result of these investments?

Are we seeing decreased calls and X or Y, decreased reports of X and Y?

Those are the types of things that I think would help this body understand um if that was how we could make that pilot one more successful, but then something that may be something we permanently consider.

Yes, absolutely.

That's one thing we're doing right now is collecting data, we're really focusing on call volume uh and request for service uh that we get in that area.

Uh it's still early on to be able to tell if we're really making an impact yet, but we're hoping over as this year goes by and we continue to do through that the program and then monitor it, we'll be able to get some real data uh hopefully next year and be able to really uh know the effects of the program is having.

Yeah, no, I I appreciate it.

And it's again it's it's not a large sum of money, but you are correct.

This is probably the something I get the most emails about, most direct messages about, most phone calls about.

Um so uh you know how we can show how our investments and incremental investments lead to the outcomes that our community wants is is very helpful for us.

So thank you.

Okay, with that, let me um first ask um the planning and community development committee chair, uh Chair Mungia to provide uh his first comments.

Thanks.

Yes, thank you, Mayor.

Um so homelessness, uh housing, ACS, I mean, talk about true core services for the C of San Antonio and and really on the ground work helping people every single day.

Uh very, very important.

So you'll start off with homelessness and housing.

You know, the mayor um in her memo gave our committee a charge, which I'm sure you have read by now, which is to focus on housing for veterans, LGBTQ plus, unhoused youth, um, folks with disabilities, uh hearing impaired, vision impaired.

Uh and she gave us a great deadline January 15th, so no later than.

Well, let me let me just say um that is an immediate focus, right?

So a task force on those folks that have traditionally been underserved and underheard.

So, yeah, let's see how fast we can go to help these most vulnerable.

Um, and then what lessons learned our results of focusing on that in a short amount of time.

Thanks, Chair.

Okay.

So that'll be item number one on our first agenda, so get prepared for that.

Uh and that's a great charge.

I think there's some work being done between us and of course uh housing trust is an amazing partner that is doing a lot of great work.

So uh, you know, when it if if someone from homelessness can come up uh and go back to the slide about direct and indirect services for homelessness.

Can you talk about the costs for each of those?

So on the on the indirect slide, I mean go back.

So the direct amount, Councilman, that that is gonna go into the department for its core services is the 26.1 million.

The additional 4.4 million is in the direct homeless services with other departments, primarily solid waste and uh NHSD.

On the indirect side, um the estimate is around roughly 23.2 million is indirect in police and fire EMS costs.

So does that figure for the direct services include federal grants that we're still utilizing, ARPA?

Correct.

Okay, so if you take out ARPA, what is the direct and indirect cost look like that's not gonna be here in a year or two, so go ahead.

Go ahead.

I'm gonna have to do math.

Yeah.

So without the without the ARPA that's included, um the total grant amount is about 7.8 million of that amount, about 2.7 million is of remaining ARPA funding from home ARP.

Okay.

So what is that total investment on the cities then look like on direct services compared to the city?

So that would be about 23 point uh 23.4 million.

Okay.

So uh and in years past it was even less in direct services by by a great amount.

Uh and so I know those that indirect costs with police and fire EMS, that and then solid waste also included in that is a fixed cost that it will always be in the budget recognition.

That's the department.

But when we're barely matching direct and indirect services, I think that's a problem.

Obviously, that's a question of resources and the things that we have available to us, but I don't know that we're gonna make great strides um if those two are very similar.

So coming to the next question, um abatements.

So I know last fiscal year the city increased dramatically the abatements across the city of San Antonio.

Um I assuming this past fiscal year we've done the most we've ever done in the city's history.

Um has that reduced homeless population?

I think what we've seen in the abatements is that um it has increased our ability to serve people in shelter, uh, which was a primary focus and allows us to have better engagement with people.

Um and then when you look at the number of new people coming into homelessness councilman, I think it makes it difficult to capture an absolute number for you because we have such a high percentage of people that are first time into homelessness coming into the system.

I think the abatement increases uh the public safety for both people that are experiencing homelessness and people that live in that community.

Um then our ability to engage people through that process helps as well.

Yeah.

So I think there's certainly a balance to be had with that, and even there's a lot of people that would disagree on that statement, you know, that there should be a balance.

And there's of course a lot of folks and advocates that don't want any abatement at all.

Um so I just want to make sure that the public understands that an increase in abatement doesn't solve the homelessness problem that we have.

Uh it is simply trying to mitigate, you know, encampments and of course drainage channels and private property issues.

So just want to note that.

When you do all the data, do you track the amount of um deaths that you encounter with homeless folks that are out on the street?

Yes, sir, we do.

Okay.

So I'd like to start seeing that a PCDC reported to us because I think it's important for folks to know that uh unfortunately our people, San Antonians are dying on the street homeless.

Uh and so it is a crisis that we have on our hands.

Um I like what you said earlier that that Patrick said, you know, this is not a linear process when it comes to housing folks.

Um and I think I talked to Peter Anofer last night, he said that y'all are working on uh some marketing to kind of revamp that communication process with residents, uh housed residents to kind of understand that better.

And when it comes to the low barrier shelter downtown, who owns that property?

Uh it's owned the properties owned by an entity associated with McComb's uh enterprises.

Okay.

And how long is the lease that we have to run that as a homeless shelter?

Current lease is through uh October of 2025.

This October?

Yes.

Uh this funding it would be then extended for another year.

For another year, okay.

Right.

Have they expressed long-term interest in doing that?

Uh I'm not aware.

Um that's a conversation we can have later about what's the long-term five-year plan for that process.

Uh, because that's gonna be you know devastating to have that go away uh without a plan in place.

Uh and obviously, while we've been making great strides in the housing bond, the per PSH is is the hardest thing to accomplish, um, especially from the ground up.

So that's something top of mind for us uh as we move forward.

But you know, we've had some great um outreach coordinators in D4 across the whole city.

Uh I don't know.

I think I still have a vacancy in District 4 for homeless outreach, so I'd like to know where we are on that.

Um, and if there is a future plan to continue to add more, because obviously they're the direct connector piece.

Um, and they are very obviously very separate from the encampment folks.

So I know there's coordination, but that's that's very different, and we need more of those.

And again, when it comes to homelessness in in District 4, it's mobilization of resources.

We know we do not have a homeless shelter.

I don't know what the closest one to District 4 is.

It do you do you know what that is?

That could be the low barrier shelter at this point.

I mean, I think we would have to look at our overall capacity.

The the other comment I wanted to make, Councilman, is that part of the building the business case has to include what the long-term strategy is for the low barrier shelter, but all types of shelters.

So it's shelter, it's transitional bridge housing, it's permanent supportive housing, and that's where the multi-sector disparate cross system collaborations and partnerships come in.

We can't come back year in and year out and talk about a one-year lease because it doesn't help the overall effectiveness of the city.

So I think we need to map that out where all these different folks are or these different places are.

And you know, if it's true that a lot of homeless folks are primarily residing in areas that they grew up in.

Obviously, there are some perceptions of certain shelters that may no longer be accurate but are out there, especially for women, is very difficult.

And I'll tell you these two really quick stories.

I went to an encampment site.

I saw, you know, what looked like a memorial, and I thought maybe it was somebody's pet.

Um it was a memorial for a uh stillborn child that a homeless woman went through.

Uh went to another place.

Um there was a homeless woman who told us that she had been um sexually assaulted twice.

Not by another homeless person, but by somebody who drove a car.

Um, you know, so these are some really intense things that are happening out there.

And these are behind people's houses in district four, right?

That we are just not fully aware of, or the public doesn't quite understand or know.

Um, so we need to do a good job of letting folks know what's exactly happening out there.

And I think one of the ideas you shared with me in the past around faith communities is resource hubs.

I think is a viable option to consider as we do the inventory of all the shelter capacity that we have, what resource hubs through faith communities could look like.

Sure, yeah, and I'm glad you brought that up.

I have an old CCR my predecessor wrote that I helped with called a declaration of a housing crisis back in 2022.

So I'll leave you with a copy of that so we can go over some ideas that uh could still be you know in that that might be relevant.

Um so I do have some other questions for NHSD and ACS, but I'm about out of time.

So really quick, you can't say ACS without Rita.

So Rita, you're uh District 4 appointee, you do amazing work.

You've been at ACS for how many years now as a board member?

I think since 2010.

Since 2010.

Uh, and you know, read it real quick about Spanuto Rita was motivated to come and work with ACS because in the early 2000s, this city was euthanizing dogs by the pound.

Uh, so we have made great strides to to turn that around.

So, more on that in the second round.

Thank you.

Chair Corps, please.

Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you all for their presentations.

Um, this is really important, and I love that we're um talking about some of these issues back to back with public safety because we talked yesterday yesterday about how they're intertwined, and so I'm glad we get to have these conversations so we don't forget that they're intertwined.

Um, so I'll start off with my comments for the home of service department.

I was really excited about this because I was thinking that this shows the community that we are um focused on this issue.

And I've gotten some comments from some community members that are concerned that departmentalizing doesn't necessarily mean that we're focusing on it more.

And so I want to make sure that we actually set real outcomes for the department for this upcoming year of what we can say we've been able to accomplish now because we have a specialized individuals focusing just on this issue because I think Eric said it when he was briefing me, it's the number one issue that's come up in our community, and so I think there's a lot more that we can do to support in in a compassionate way, and I think that's probably what many of my council colleagues will say today is that we've got to figure out how to better address this issue compassionately.

So, starting off with the low barrier shelter, I was super excited when this came off the ground.

And I know Lori, I want to credit you on your leadership on this because you've been really advocating for this, and I'm really grateful that's in the budget for a year.

I want to thank Councilmember Mungia for bringing up that one year does feel a little bit short-sighted.

Um, and so I I I um echo his comments on that.

Like, what's our long-term plan?

And I feel like all of my comments today are going to ask for more money, and I'm not really sure where you're gonna find this from, but um, my first ask for more money is we um to we have 313 rooms in this space, and so we could shelter an additional, I think it's over a hundred, um, and we're only funded for 185 rooms, so we still have capacity.

I know we didn't um last year we didn't go to full capacity because of operations costs, but if there is if someone writes us a check for 1.5 million dollars, I would advocate for us trying to get to full capacity here because I have heard it as being successful as a way to get folks in to um a shelter space and then on to permanent housing.

In addition, um, my council colleague at the very end mentioned permanent supportive housing, and I think we need to double down on figuring out how do we do that.

I was talking to a nonprofit last week at the housing conference, and they actually support nonprofits in building up the capacity to do so.

So I'd love to talk in PCDC as one of our first tasks as do we have enough capacity because CM is great, but and and we are appreciative for Sam if there's any leaders in the room here, but um that they are they are they've got their hands full, so we've got to build up more capacity on the ground to do more permanent supportive housing developments.

Because SAM is great, but and and we are appreciative for Sam if there's any leaders in the room here, but that they are they are they've got their hands full, so we've got to build up more capacity on the ground to do more permanent supportive housing developments.

Um, in addition, I wanted to say the point in time count.

I don't know how I missed this, but I must have missed the reveal of it.

I was kind of I was glad about the sheltered.

We've seen tremendous growth in the last six years about how many um how many more sheltered spaces that we have for folks, but the increase in unsheltered from last year I was kind of disappointed with.

Um we had set this big goal in I think fiscal year 24 for the decrease, and then um so I I'd like us to this gives us a charge, right?

It gives us a charge to say we have a lot more work to do in creating more sheltered opportunities for folks.

Um some of us who are on the housing trust got trust got to hear the whole briefing on the youth housing summit, and it was incredible.

And some of the things that they mentioned were safety and food security as some of the top things.

So want to make sure that you you not want some of your partners have to be the food bank and considering how we can address some of those issues as well.

And then the last thing, my council colleague mentioned the street outreach team.

I also love the street outreach team, and I'd also charge you, Mark, to think about if there are ways that we can either change the capacity or figure out the right structure.

I've talked to some of our local partners who do street outreach, and quite frankly, they have a little bit more bend than we do, right?

They can do things that we may not be able to because they're city staff.

So I'd like for you to explore what are some of the challenges that our street outreach team faces and what's the outcome we are hoping from them.

Like ideally, it's number of number of folks that are sheltered, but what are some of the additional outcomes that we want them to uh work towards on a day-to-day basis?

Um, shifting over to NHSD.

Um we I was we advocated so much last year because it was a different summer last summer, but we were able to put an additional million dollars in both the major and minor home rehab programs, and those have now gone that additional million dollars has been removed.

I'm really bummed to hear that.

So if we have another two million dollar check, would like to add that to that component.

We have so many folks.

We have over a wait list of over 200 people on that program.

I think there are still some kinks to work out in that program that we need to address, including when people are denied the window in which they can submit for the paperwork that's needed for if they are denied, but we really need to figure out how do we get support because uh our housing strategy is based on both rehab and new development.

So we'll just wanted to echo my support and continuing the work for for that.

In the rental assistance program, we had asked for some data about the program, obviously super important, but we noticed that 12% of our folks that apply for that reapply annually, and so just would want to look at in as we upcoming and also probably in PCDC, how do we better connect them with resources for folks that are applying?

Are they getting a connection to ready to work?

Are they getting a connection to all of the other services that we provide to help them continue to grow and achieve opportunities?

On the affordable housing piece for NHSD, this is such a big important conversation right now.

Uh, we have some LITEC deals that have been awarded, and all of us, all of our council colleagues have to come together to support our affordable housing projects.

It is so critical because if we tell if these folks have gone through so much work and then we deny them at the council level, it will really hurt our ability to achieve our ship goals.

Um but that being said, one of the things that we don't have is updated demand data for love for families that are at specific AMI levels.

So our ship goals set targets, but they used it based on census data, and I'd love for us to think about how do we get a more updated demand count of families that are at the 30% AMI level, maybe families that are at 60%, so we can use that to leverage folks to push to say, look, we know in district one in this area, there's X amount of families that are on a wait list looking for 30% AMI, but we don't have that granularity.

So that's one thing that I've always felt like we could push forward on.

Um, and do an update maybe to our ship.

Like we we always track the progress.

You guys know I love that dashboard, but maybe it's time to come back and revisit where we are on that.

Um, and then as far as just quick housing goals that uh folks have heard me talk about before is more missing middle housing.

So, how do we continue to build?

I actually got my UDC briefing this morning, and some of those state laws are gonna be very interesting as to how they play out for our community with zoning.

Um, but we'll have to kind of address that as they come.

Also thinking about more small scale rental rehab.

Like we have so many apartments that are like two and three, um, either two, three, four, six units that still have HVAC systems that are like in window air conditioning.

How do we get those apartments updated without increasing the prices when an investor buys them?

And and then the lastly is just thinking about more development downtown.

Everyone knows we're really excited for Robert E.

Lee around the corner.

That's hopefully going to be developed pretty soon.

So continuing to create workforce housing downtown is is really important.

And um, hopefully, all of our colleagues will mention the housing bond that we need to make sure we get on for the May if we do put a bond on because we've already sped through all of those dollars.

I think that's the fastest bond that got released because our our public works, no dig on public works, but our housing bond dollars got uh already released out to the public.

So maybe we need to start needing to do a competition, Eric.

Um animal care services, John Gary, I want to thank you for the work that you've done, your leadership.

Uh you came in and you just hit the ground running.

I so many times will email the wrong John Gary.

I'll send I have so many times emailed via instead of ACS and vice versa.

So I've got to make sure I get that right.

But you've been doing a great job.

I think you you you we have a great team over there.

We've made significant increases to ACS the last few years.

It's not as significant this year, which Bill's like, oh, I wish we could keep it, but obviously different dynamic.

But I think that increase has definitely helped.

I know there are still areas that you feel like we need to push and grow in, but um Mayor mentioned this too, and I think the more proactive work that we do with the Casa Outreach, I've mentioned it a few times is really important.

And the website, I remember sitting in an ACS website and looking up the Austin um Austin website previously, and being like, oh, theirs is cuter.

And so I love I love seeing the updates that we did, and to do them in-house is uh even more incredible, a good great use of um efficient dollars there.

So the only thing that I want to focus on the last piece in the last minute is we got data about the Westside Clinic that Councilwoman Aldera de Govito and Councilwoman Castillo really advocated for, and I just kind of hopped in on.

Um, but that clinic has been really awesome, but it's not at its full capacity.

We're not doing surgeries at the full capacity yet, is what I learned.

It could be doing up to 25 spay and neuter, and it's only doing 19.

So I want to think about what is the way that we can make sure we are getting full capacity there every single day.

And when we had our a community group meeting with all of the nonprofit partners, they said one of the biggest challenges that we face for spay and neuter is vets, and so let's explore in public safety what a vet tuition program could look like for the city because I remember approving that uh budget item for contract vets, and it was not uh it was a significant amount of money.

So maybe we can create a vet tuition program for to support that.

But thank you all so much for your work.

Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you, Chair.

Um, Councilman Castillo Angiano.

My apologies, my apologies.

Chair View Gadon.

Thank you, Mayor.

I'm gonna try and keep this as brief as possible because I have quite a few, and I want to get through this.

So I want to start with the fact that um I've shared before that we must move out from working in silos.

I want to see more partnerships between neighborhoods housing and services development and the department of human services.

My question to you, what I what I would need from you, um Eric, is this human services and strategy that you have put forward as a department?

I need to know how much that is costing the city to create a new department.

And you can you can give this into to us in follow-up because I know that means um new director.

Well, we have a director, but that means new staff.

What does that mean in terms of staffing?

The other is I have another department, which gets us to I believe 44, and I want to make sure that there is communications between these three departments because of what's happening, is so um is so overlapping and and related as we move forward.

So uh I I'd like to get that.

I want to thank Mark and Patrick.

The one thing that I take confidence in this new department is I'm very familiar with Mark and Patrick's work, and they have been really good at reaching out to other departments and communicating goals and expectations on how we we handle this housing crisis.

And I'm I'm gonna talk about it as yes, a homeless and service strategy, but it is a housing crisis that we face right now.

Um we do need to discuss our our affordability.

We also do need to see how much, and I've said this again before, and we need to strategize more, Mark, is how many of these uh motels and hotels along the southern sector are um pseudo servicing as low barrier or um as low barrier shelters because or affordable housing because they are taking people that get paid monthly.

So I want to look into that.

The other thing I'd like to see, especially for this new department is real tangible directives and goals about where we've seen.

Uh we heard the stat that um we have new people to homelessness.

What is what is the result of that?

Is it the is it the lack of affordable housing?

Is it the lack of uh are they are they working poor?

Are they not working?

Uh are they they dropouts?

Is there an addiction issue?

Uh y'all know that I believe permanent supportive housing is the answer as we move forward.

We just experienced that uh and Veronica can speak to it about how difficult that is.

Well, Veronica Ian and the entire team about how difficult that is to do in a district and to communicate to people that this is not that we should not stigmatize that.

So I really want to see us move forward in that and really have that conversation between these three departments because unless we are talking to each other, because some of our partners that are here, and if you are uh if you're if you're working with the homeless or housing, can you just raise your hand and you're a partner that's here that does that?

I thought I saw some.

Thank you so much for your efforts and what you do, and we could not do this without you.

So I think it is key and imperative that you're part of these conversations and say this is how often we would like to meet and be part of these conversations.

This was the number one topic of conversation at my town hall on Monday.

I had a Mr.

Lee, he's a uh uh Marine Del Bosque, and he shares something, he's like it's not that we have to think out of the box, we have to start thinking like there is no box, and that was so insightful because when we talk about these issues, when we talk about housing, when we talk about homeless, we need to put everything in the toolkit to address that.

I had another resident that said we need to talk about the addiction issues.

We need to know what drugs they are using, how we battle that, and what where in the community we can target people for that.

So district three is ready to give their input into share, and I want to thank my staff who did the impossible.

They united Union Pacific Tech Stot DHS, State Reps Office, ESAFE, Solid Waste, and Development Services Department to address encampment issues, and that is what it's going to take.

A large conversation on that.

So I want to thank that.

Veronica, thank you for the information.

There is one stat that I'm worried about when we meet our ship goals, and and you're gonna be like, I've heard it, councilwoman already.

But it is rehab because I think we are losing, we are losing, we're gonna I I think we're gonna lose that fight.

Rehab has been really slow in my district.

I've had I've had fires, we've lost housing.

So I really want to get those numbers and where we just need to do new builds in terms of multifamily, and you know that's that's a priority for me, and I I appreciate the cuts that we made, but we do need to look to the future, and I'm not sold on land banking if we can bring rents down because I'd much rather bring rents down than look at at uh land, except for I'm gonna call it robili just uh for the downtown because I really think that's an opportunity, but again, that that is to to save that is gonna be very pricey because some of these older buildings are just near impossible to save.

Uh that one is different, but the others um maybe not.

So I want to move over um to animal care services because as y'all know, uh my predecessor was huge on getting uh spay and neuter clinic on the South Side because of the problems we had there, and uh, if there has been an animal care issue, we have we probably have addressed it in district three.

Um met with the advocates, and I see John's here, and um John Vachum's here, and now we've got John Gary, we got all these Johns working on this problem.

I expect y'all to get a solution, but we are making progress.

I think the one thing I want to go back to say is we need to remember when we say hello to the the dogs and our animals that eventually there's gonna be a goodbye, and it's either we're moving on, we can't uh have them anymore, how do we say goodbye?

And I think that's one thing as we move forward in the marketing campaign is what do we do when we say goodbye?

And I have rescued um th three dogs, and I have two at home, and I've had to say goodbye to three well, the past three, and now I have two, and it's hard, and it's been everything from old age to you know, one was severely ill, and we had to put them down, and then one got out and got hit.

And we need to have those conversations with with uh with people who who are pet owners, and we need to understand how we're gonna address that moving forward.

Uh don't be off ad.

Um so I'm a huge dog lover.

I want to give a shout out to Mr.

George El Garcia for his service to the advisory board, and for District 3, Emily Casso, who when I first got in four years ago called me out about what I was gonna do, and I brought her into my office and I said, Well, what are we going to do?

And now she's out there in the streets making sure we get pets spay and neutered.

The other thing we're gonna need to look at, and we're gonna need to look at policy for all of this.

These three issues are going to make take new policy from this council.

When it comes to pets and fencing, we are going to need to have a conversation about coordinated fences.

We are gonna try and need to have a conversation about how we keep them in.

And I know there are some neighbors that don't like it because aesthetically they don't think it's pleasing, but it keeps the dogs inside the yards.

So we're going to need to have that conversation.

We're gonna need to talk UDC code, unified development code as we move forward on this because we need to keep the dogs inside.

Um the activists of my district have invited to take all our council members on a bus trip to tell you to show you citywide where the dogs hang out and where we have the problem.

But I I'm I a bus trip is hard, so I I want them to give me the addresses so you can see at yourself.

But within district three, we have dogs that um they just think they own the middle of the street.

And John Gary and I were there when we did the pet care team, and we were knocking on doors, and a dog was in the middle of the street, almost got hit.

Um, I've had dogs roaming in packs where uh David McCarry can talk about it.

We had to do an overnight sting operation to bust this pack of dogs, and we got it done.

So there we do need to address that, and um I I invite the new council colleagues to just uh whenever you need, I can give you the stories of the dogs.

So thank you so much for that.

But there's gonna be policy that needs to be written, and I suggest we we start working together to get it done.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

Uh Councilman Castillo Anguiano.

Thank you, Mayor.

Uh, I just want to start off with a few comments uh for the homeless services.

Um, so we know that in our two surveys, homelessness and affordable housing both ranked really, really high with both of these surveys, and I think that this just is a clear mandate to address concerns um for homelessness in a manner that reflects our principles as a city, and it all is also driven uh by the research on what is most effective, right?

And I really like that in the presentation there was a slide that highlights um that the fastest growing population experiencing homelessness is children under 17.

So when we as a council speak with our residents, we really have to get them to understand this issue, and we also have to debunk the myths that exist around homelessness and especially youth homelessness.

Um and we also have to resist the temptation to resort to the easy answers and to seek out our own confirmation bias.

Um and with the work that I do at Thrive Youth Center, we also work closely with Haven for Hope, the Yes Center, and other community partners to serve LGBTQ plus youth who are experiencing homelessness.

Um and I also was able to participate in the pit count last January, um, which was really really incredible to see because I talked to about maybe 15 plus individuals, and it was really, really amazing just having those conversations with them and figuring out uh why they're in the current uh place that they're at.

Um and so, in my experience, if we as a city want to address homelessness, we can't just afford to continuously grow the police force.

Um, and now keep in mind that the top issue our residents asked us to address is homelessness, and I don't think that you do that by investing in more police.

You invest in the services that help people in need, um, like mental health services, youth mentorship, education, uh, you invest in activating vacant properties, you invest in our homeless outreach team, and above all, you invest in affordable housing.

You don't just vote against it when it comes to your neighborhood um or your district.

Um, and I was actually listening to a podcast last night uh on La Mesa with um a few folks like Brian Kassnop Chasnoff, um, close to home, um Centro and Sam Ministries, and I really encourage everybody to listen to it because it was really incredible when they talk about families in need, right?

Like what is it that families need to exit homelessness?

It's financial literacy classes, education and job training.

Again, mental health issues, substance use treatment, whether it's inpatient or outpatient.

And these are all needed so that way families can get housing stability and be self-sustainable for a very, very long time.

So when we're talking about housing them, the real work starts when you get them housed.

And so I just want to say I was very, very pleased to have the homeless services have its own department where we can have a particularly single, uh singular focus on this issue.

Um so let me transition to the outreach workers.

It seems like they have the most difficult job, and we're basically counting on them to be the front line of this huge issue that most residents want us to address, right?

And when outreach workers attend our neighborhood meetings and take off uh take on tough questions from residents and also go on all parts of the city, uh whether it's underpasses into ditches, alleyways behind commercial shopping centers, basically everywhere where you uh might find folks to hang out, and so I really want to see what we can do to increase our support for our outreach workers.

Um and then I guess I had a question.

I wanted to see if we had any vacancies within our outreach team.

Yes, council member, we do in currently uh in district four and uh in district ten, uh, both in hiring process to to refill those pretty quickly.

Awesome.

Thank you.

Um I guess because I'm just concerned that we might have a high turnover in this position, and I'm trying to figure out what our leadership is gonna do to address that high turnover.

Um and then also, do you does our outreach team currently have hazard pay.

No, sir, they do not um have a hazard pay.

We do we have um gone through compensation analysis with human resources over the last few years as we've built the team.

Um this year created uh uh another level of uh position within the team to provide a promotional opportunities for this this team to to address your questions.

Um so we have addressed compensation in that way, but hazard pay, no, no.

Um yeah, um, I guess I'd like to see what we can do with that because they're going into hazardous situations, and I witnessed it at the pit count.

We were literally um walking five minutes into a forest just to find somebody in an encampment and try to make conversations and build that trust.

Um so I'd really like to see what we can do there.

Um, and then when we talk about beds uh for the low barrier shelter, I know that oftentimes um outreach workers have concerns that sometimes there's no placements uh for clients it uh at these agencies we find.

Um and I'll give Thrive for an example.

We have about a 10 uh person wait list, and you know it's really really hard to you know figure out how we're gonna get that youth in.

Um, and so I I've heard that most of our outreach workers feel that they can be more successful if there was um transitional uh more transitional housing beds available.

Um but I wanted to see as a city um what we're doing about accessing more beds and whether the city would even be up to exploring a city-owned transitional living center.

Like I guess theoretically, what would that look like?

Or is that not something that we're maybe trying to do?

And I think that probably goes to your point, uh, Councilman Mugia.

Um with that.

Yeah, council member.

In my mind, I think thinking about this, it it really has to be part of that long-term strategy.

So what's the capacity that we need for emergency shelter?

What's the capacity we need for transition on the bridge?

What's the capacity we need for permanent supportive housing?

Working at Thrive, you understand that somebody coming out of shelter may not be immediately be a great candidate for housing.

Right.

They may need some period of transition.

That could be one year, that could be two years.

And so the capacity of our system to be able to do that is gonna be critical to answering some of those questions.

So the questions and the answers tie together, but so we have to think of it as a continuum, I think.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I would love to see what we can do to just um figure out like a five-year plan or just something because I know that's when we um it because it's only gonna be one year, and I know that these folks might just end up back on the streets, which is kind of what we don't want.

Um, and then with the abatements, slide 11 highlights the average cost of 2,046 per abatement site with uh 1,369 abatements events this year.

That's almost three million dollars allocated to abatement sweeps.

And um remind me if this is including the um cops getting involved.

So the 2046 does not include the indirect cost of fire and EMS.

I mean police in fire, does not.

Um, I guess I'm really curious.

I'd like to see what that number is.

We can calculate that for you and get that to you, sir.

Awesome.

Thank you.

Let's see.

Yeah, because I guess when it comes to abatements, outreach workers kind of tell us that sometimes they get a police officer that's willing to work with them and then sometimes they don't.

And I've physically seen uh a cop being just very very aggressive towards our unhoused folks and I want to make sure that we're minimizing that.

And then I had some really really simple questions for uh I think it was uh Veronica with NHST.

I wanted to see how we're changing the home rehab process to make it more accountable to the homeowners.

Yes so um last year we updated our program policies um to help families who maybe don't need the full major rehab which it does um all supported mostly by federal funds so that program requires full home ownership of the home all homeowners living in the home so our minor repair program now supports families who only have partial ownership tangled title all that's clear and you're able to participate in minor repair and that helps us um reach families we maybe otherwise wouldn't have awesome cool um and then have we hired a uh new product manager for home rehab we are still um in the process of the hiring the administrator cool and then do we have someone that speaks Spanish on the team we have several staff members who speak Spanish beautiful um and then just with uh animal care services I'll be quick I just wanted to give y'all some kudos I actually met with Gary and uh the team yesterday and it was really awesome just finally being able to connect with them I've been a huge fan of y'all's work since I was a kid so just you know major kudos um and then for the pet connect program I know our office was able to join ACS in July and it was a very wonderful day of canvassing and just connecting with our neighbors um as soon as we were able to identify someone we had a truck ready with resources following the walkers to provide cat litter food uh and microchip pets and when maybe dogs were found or uh were found free of restraint um the owners were educated on spot to include fence and repair uh and tethering so that was really really awesome and I want to uh rehighlight and keep on everyone's awareness that Councilman McGee Rodriguez's previous C Cr in collaboration with D10 and D3 to explore the creation of a new ACS a full service compass on the eastern sector of the city and we've mentioned it before but it does need to be highlighted that the current campus is clear across uh the other side of town and when our constituents are reporting um you know whether it's roaming or dangerous ammo uh animals there's often uh it takes hours or days so I wanted to see what our if we know what our current response time is uh to just get an officer out there in in those areas so uh our our critical response that we right now we focus on getting to the calls uh but we are starting to look at the SLAs I can tell you uh that um when we we looked at that number actually just this week and and 76% of the time we get there on time.

So we we we're doing a pretty good job in that area as well.

Awesome yeah I believe that's all that I have thank you mayor.

Mayor just one clarification so councilman that when when those calls come the the animal care officers are not at 151 they are deployed throughout the city so they're not responding from one side of town to the next um otherwise we would not be hitting 76%.

So they're all distributed out throughout the day and and night but just wanted to make sure you understood that appreciated your questions councilman um spurred one for me which is um if we would uh get a uh map of the where the abatement events are taking place I mean to understand if 75% of these are at like 10 locations um it it's helpful to understand where we may need to have other resources in that area thank you council council member white please thanks mayor um I'll pick up where the councilman left off on that CCR um that I partnered on on Councilman Raquim Rodriguez as well as uh councilman Via Gran uh I I do think we still need to continue to look in if we need either a full facility or even a satellite facility over on the other side of town and I will mention that uh the Animal Defense League which is in my district does have a and uh some additional property uh over there that potentially could be a a cost efficient uh area for perhaps an ACS satellite office that that may make some sense so uh thank you councilman for for bringing that up uh uh John I just want to say thank you for the presentation um I I commend a ACS for for uh raising the dangerous dog compliance rate uh over the last uh two years from 55% to 84% um it's it's really been been great work uh by your organ organization both before you got in and and then you continued it um afterwards uh also the uh ACS has nearly doubled the the critical call response rate from 44% to 83% uh in the in the last two years as well so uh a really impressive turnaround there and uh you know I think it coincided with with the additional resources we were able to to get a uh ACS in the last couple of budgets so thank you all so much for that um we have a disagreement on this homeless hotel

So uh a really impressive turnaround there and uh you know I think it coincided with with the additional resources we were able to to get uh ACS in the last couple of budgets.

So thank you all so much for that.

Um we have a disagreement on this homeless hotel.

Uh I I've I respect everybody else's uh position uh on this, but I will tell you that 4.8 million dollars from our our general fund budget uh for the homeless hotel.

I just think is uh is not how we should be using our money when we have so many other uh needs, most specifically in the areas of public safety, um infrastructure.

What we're doing, I mean I I've looked at this this homeless action plan from several years ago.

You know we've been trying to reduce homelessness.

Uh it clearly hasn't worked.

Um I just I I'm not sure that we actually have a real plan to to attack this problem or or a plan that's gonna pay any any dividends.

So uh maybe somebody can answer, you know, this year again, pouring a bunch of money into this homeless response.

Why do we think where it's gonna work any better this year than it did last year or the year before?

Councilman, I I think uh to answer your question directly, I don't know that one year over and over is the answer, but I do think a long-term strategy is.

As I mentioned earlier, I do believe that emergency shelter to include low barrier shelter has to be part of the plan.

Is there a better cost effective way to do that, a better uh investment amount?

Yes, probably so.

And but I think we have to figure that out.

I think we have to build a business case for this that includes other sectors besides the city.

So I think hospital systems, I think behavioral health systems.

I think the county has a big role in this when you consider the investment that they have in mental health.

So, yes, councilman.

I think combining those things can create a longer term plan, which creates maybe the ROI that you're looking for long term.

Uh, but year in and year out is going to be challenging, and I think that's what the city managers charged me with.

Yeah, and and uh I mean listen I don't know that I took down the exact numbers, but we have the slide on on how many people we actually, you know, the the hotel was only 90 percent full, I I think I saw um uh over the last year.

And it's almost equal positive what we're what we're calling positive results and negative exits, right?

I think a few more positive than negative.

And and if you even if you just take the the quote positive results that we're getting from from people that that leave the homeless hotel, I mean we're we're looking at somewhere over 20,000 dollars a person to put somebody in this in this low barrier shelter again if we're just looking at the quote positive results.

And and and I I would be remiss if I if I didn't question the term positive, because I'm not sure that somebody going to the low barrier shelter and then being moved into additional housing that's paid for by the taxpayers is quote a positive uh result.

And um I can tell I have some disagreement uh from District One.

Um but listen, I I think that this is something we really need to look at.

We are in very difficult uh fiscal times right now, and 4.8 million dollars is a lot of money to be uh to be you know put putting people in this in this hotel with results that I would deem mediocre to be nice.

Uh and so um uh I think this council needs to needs to re-look at uh at what we're doing here.

You know, we've used uh ARPA money, right, over the past few years uh to fund this thing.

Uh I I did not think we were gonna go dip into the general fund to do this.

Uh as has been stated earlier today, we we do not have a plan for this moving forward every single year.

Are we gonna continue to to rent out this hotel at a uh at a price of almost five million bucks of of taxpayer money a year?

I mean, is that is that really what we're planning to do with with taxpayer dollars here?

Uh I certainly hope not.

Um the 183 rooms, sorry, 185 rooms, the facility has 313, and we are funding 185.

Is that is that is that right?

That's correct, Councilman.

And so we're not paying for those additional rooms?

The full lease is 313 rooms.

Our staffing capacity is 185.

So we're and our staffing capacity, but it's not the cities, it's Sam and Straxity for the operations is 185.

I'm sorry, yeah, 185.

But what we're paying for the entire thing, we can just only use 185.

Currently.

Okay.

Well, I mean, and we think that's gonna change.

Well, this is where the partnership piece comes in.

When we look at other partners like health systems, criminal justice systems, can we identify other sources of funds that can utilize the remainder of the capacity that we have to fully utilize the lease?

Yeah.

Okay.

Um because that's a that's a lot of unused space there that we're paying for.

Uh I asked this the other week at the budget hearing.

Uh I have heard, and and Eric, you and I argued a little bit about this uh a year or so ago.

Um people from other cities, homeless folks either either being busted here or coming here.

Um, you know, but potentially uh folks that not only are not citizens of San Antonio, but potentially not citizens of the United States uh being sheltered in the in the homeless hotel.

Do we know do we know who exactly is staying there?

Do we have re um information regarding who who goes into this low barrier shelter?

Yes, sir.

So ID, I mean it's a low barrier shelter, but to access part of the systems either at Haven or at the shelter require ID.

And so um that is one of the requirements.

And so we have we have an idea of who's staying at the in our shelter capacity.

Okay, and so it requires an ID.

So are the people staying at the low barrier shelter San Antonio residents?

I can find out for you, sir.

I I believe the answer is yes, but let me get you exact information.

Okay.

Um there's also there's no requirement that any of the people that stay at the low barrier shelter uh accept any sort of um treatment of of any kind.

Is that right?

I'm not aware of that.

No, that that's the that's a that's not a requirement.

It's a requirement, it's not a requirement in the sense that when you come off of the street, you're initially off of the street, getting shelter, having lodging, having meals, but the goal is to be able to access case management and other services, if that's what you are asking.

Right.

But no requirement that anybody accepting.

Off of the street, no.

No.

Okay.

Again, I think I think we're providing these folks shelter.

Um the plan has to be for all able-bodied folks uh to to get treated and then become self-sustaining members of society if that's possible.

So to me, that's what a positive outcome uh looks like.

Uh the final thing I'll say on housing is again, when we're talking about affordable housing, uh the the way to make housing more affordable that doesn't get talked about enough is to keep more money in people's pockets.

Uh stop taxing them, stop hitting them with additional fees uh uh on everything.

Um additionally, it's about economic development, right?

Let's bring more jobs to San Antonio, let's create more jobs in San Antonio.

Let's do more to make businesses thrive, hire more uh and pay their people better wages.

Economic development, we need more of it here in our city.

Thanks, Mayor.

Councilwoman Mesa Gonzalez, please.

Uh thank you, Mayor.

Uh thank you to our city departments for presentations and all the work they've been doing.

Uh start with our our new homeless department.

Excuse me, homeless services department.

Um there's a lot of, I think uh Councilwoman Sook brought this up, but there's a lot of nonprofit partners in the room.

I'm seeing all of them in slide four, really to me is just the epitome of what partnership looks like uh with the city of San Antonio with all those logos.

A lot of these folks are in District 8, and so I know there's a lot of work uh that's behind each one of those logos.

So thank you for the work that you're doing in our city.

My first question, just um on the grants on slide five.

It says 7.8.

Is there a goal for for kind of increasing that or is that kind of a standard number?

Where what does that look like next year, year after?

Yes, Councilmember.

The the majority of that is federal grants that are entitlement grants, so formula through HUD.

Um so we get a set amount from HUD every year, uh small grant from the state of Texas, and then as Justina shared earlier, some of that is uh ARPA funding, uh, but most of that is entitlement funding through HUD.

Okay.

Thank you.

And on the ongoing development for the longer term low barrier shelters, can you kind of get into that or talk more about what that looks like?

I think it's at the end of slide six.

Here.

Right there, the ongoing development for longer term low barrier shelter options.

So I think that the the idea is how can we more outfit services or even partnerships at the low barrier shelter?

Right now it's the city, it's Sam.

But what would the low barrier shelter look like when you think of it in terms of a multidisciplinary approach?

So if you consider Bear County, if you consider behavioral health, what would those options for development look like?

It's part of the program plan that I mentioned in my presentation that has to include capital and operational costs.

So that's how I'm envisioning it right now.

And is that a department?

Is that a conversation just within the department?

Are are we bringing folks in?

No, it would require the community councilwoman.

It would have to.

It would have to be other partners coming.

That's the whole idea of this department on the strategy side.

So the mayor asked earlier about what what would be the outcome of deeper analysis.

I think it gives us the information to create the correct strategy to address the issue in the community, and I think that in ties into your question.

Okay.

Um on the low barrier shelter on slide seven.

From the low barrier shelter, they move into permanent supportive housing?

They can.

Or to connections with family, I'm assuming.

They could be connections with family, they could be permanent supportive housing.

It could be transitional shelter as well.

So that sound operates a transitional living center.

So even because they operate the low barrier shelter, some of those folks could transition into a longer term, like a two-year stay, because they may not be ready for housing directly.

And are we able to keep track of them once they lose, leave that low barrier shelter?

We do, and for how long?

That that's what we want to start to look at is how long are people where are they going?

Yeah.

Are they re-entering the system?

Why?

Right.

We need we need to understand that at a much deeper level.

Okay.

On the 355 return to homelessness on slide eight, do we have did they receive any services from us at all?

Or they receive some service somewhere along the homeless response system.

So it could have been of us, it could have been one of the partners on the slides, but what we learned was that they did come back into the system.

And so the question, so but realizing too that for some people, if there's deep addiction or there is how that you've been unhoused on the street for many, many years.

On average, it's going to take you four or five attempts before you start to get into a longer term approach towards your situation.

So that's part of what this number looks like.

And are we following kind of that attempt, right?

What attempt are they on?

And how we address them at that particular stage.

We understand that we we have a better understanding of what that is, and I think that gives us examples of the partnership piece that I talked about.

So if there's deeper mental health issues, how are we coordinating with the local mental health authority or other mental health providers to address specific more treatment types for the individual that we're talking about?

And do we have a breakdown of kind of I know we've talked about youth and families, but do we have that breakdown as far as single parents, families, youth that are in these numbers?

I believe we can get that from close to home.

I think they're still in the room.

I I believe we can access that information for you, Councilmember.

Okay.

Breakdown for the I think Councilwoman Sug brought this up as well, just connecting at some point connecting them to the other services that we provide through pre-K, Ready to Work, Alamo Promise.

Where does that happen?

I know we've got this specific um young adult slide, but just where does that fit in in this picture?

That in my mind that's the coordination piece.

Yeah, okay.

And so as people are going through this issue, you know, we have right now an agreement between ready to work and the San Antonio Housing Trust to make sure that ready to work is each one of those new sites, those new housing development sites moving forward.

I think the same type of idea can apply in this area.

Okay.

And just a couple more, and this is really more on 11 and 12, is really more slide 11 and 12, is just a breakdown.

I think other folks had asked for that.

So a breakdown of those um abatements and of the calls that are coming in through the hotline by district.

It's important to understand where all those calls are coming from.

So thank you so much.

For neighborhood and housing services, this brings back a lot of memories from my time in the mayor's office.

Thinking about our affordable housing framework and our first housing bond.

And so I know this department is working extremely hard, and so thank you for all the work that you're doing.

I really just want to support all the efforts that NHSD has with when it comes to ship and our all of our goals around affordable housing.

Do we have I guess a breakdown of what those strategic land acquisitions look like?

I know that there's other nonprofits that are also in this land banking.

So are we coordinating with them or how does that look?

Yeah, we're coordinating with the housing trust to identify land, and it doesn't have to be vacant land, it may be existing buildings along the green line or the silver line specifically, because we were tasked with trying to connect how affordable housing along rapid transit corridors that we know are coming.

So we're already coordinating with them on possible options, and before any land is purchased, we would come to city council with those recommendations.

Okay, thank you.

We have a number, I think the highest amount of multifamily units in district eight.

Um but just grasping what that looks like, right?

It's a housing affordability issue that we've got teachers, we've got single parents, we've got nurses, uh, college students, um, high school graduates, um, college graduates, right, that are trying to find that place and find that home.

So just really changing that narrative is helpful uh for every district that has uh those folks in there.

So uh thank you again for all the work that y'all are doing.

Um those are all my questions.

Um Councilwoman Castillo.

Thank you, Mayor.

Think too so thank you to all the folks for the presentations, beginning with animal care service.

Of course, want to thank John Gary for his work.

It's great to see uh the West and East Side span neuter clinics up and running uh and to see that those numbers continue to go up and the expectation continues to increase.

Um but I also want to thank, of course, Karen Spear, our ACS uh pointee, uh, always ensuring that those slots for the span neuter clinics within district five uh are are taken up, and if someone doesn't show up, she's always on the phone making sure that that slots filled.

So uh we're extremely grateful to Karen and her service, not to just District 5, but just ensuring that we're addressing animal issues all throughout the city of San Antonio and of course uh John Bachman for ensuring that this council stays rounded during public comment uh on what the needs are and what potential solutions are to addressing uh this crisis that we're experiencing.

Um with the Ark ASAS team, one thing that our constituents really value is one the rapport that they're building with the animal care service officers, but of course, those uh resources that are provided, uh whether it's food, tethers, uh, and addressing the fence issues is a really important one.

And I'm not quite sure if this is a budget request uh or maybe it's maybe potentially finding a different vendor, um, but there's sometimes comments around like how like maybe we could have a better fence put in, right?

And understand we're working with the budget we've got, um, but if there's opportunity for us to get different material or something where it's a sturdy, uh more sturdy fence would be of value to um just the public as a whole.

So just grateful for that work.

Um, and of course, it's as folks have mentioned, right?

This is one of our core services, and it's evident in the presentation, right?

Seeing uh the amount of enforcement, seeing about the uh ship microchipping as well as the span newer services that when we invest in these core services, we're keeping our community safe, and it's evident in the in the numbers on the presentation.

So I would like I'm pleased to see we're going to continue to uh invest in ACS.

Uh and I would be remiss if I didn't think Officer Smith, who's always at our neighborhood association meetings, uh making sure she's answering any questions or misconceptions around what animal safety and accountability looks like.

Um moving on to um I was gonna say Department of Human Services, the new housing division over Mark Carmona.

Um, thank you for uh visiting with me yesterday to go over some of the details of what this can look like.

Um what I shared yesterday during public safety, whether it's a neighborhood association meeting or a constituent who wants to speak with me directly, their version of public safety when I ask what the concern is and what what it looks like, it's always related again to vacant structure, a vacant lot where folks may be occupied.

And when we get to the root of it, right, it's not necessarily a public safety issue that they're telling you about.

It's they're telling me they want to make sure that the individual next door is getting housed.

And another issue that they've brought to me, and it goes into the conversation about encampment sweeps, is that we are now having a higher volume of constituents calling us about new encampments and new neighbors.

And I've had a woman uh just last week share, you know, I used to know who my unhoused neighbor was.

Now we're seeing different faces every day.

I prefer to when I knew who was there.

Um so I think we do need a revisit on how these encampment clearance uh are impacting the unhoused individual, but also how the public feels in terms of is this working or not?

Um, because what I'm hearing from my constituents is it's it's not working.

Uh, and I think there is value in shifting those dollars into permanent and low barrier shelter rather than you know putting unhoused folks in the situation where they're losing very important documents, IDs, socials, uh, pictures of loved ones, and so on and so forth.

Um so in terms of the remaining dollars for, and I'm overlapping with NHSD a bit, uh, for land banking.

Uh is that going to be the full remaining bond dollars, or is it are is there still going to be funding remaining for potential gap funding for permanent supportive housing?

Sure.

We have um what we briefed recession when we took the last round of housing bond projects was that the remaining about 20 million would go towards land banking.

Again, that does have to come to council for approval.

Um, but we do have nearly seven million dollars available from federal funds for gap funding, and that is for multifamily and single and um single family as well.

How many for gap funding?

Sorry.

Uh 6.7 million.

Okay.

Thank you for that.

I had um a constituent who participated in the conversations around what that RFP can look like or the land banking conversation, um, but also hearing from homeless providers, right?

I think there's value and potentially splitting that.

While I am supportive of land banking, I do believe we need to support uh the gaps in terms of whether it's Habitat for Humanity or any permanent supportive housing project, uh ensuring that we're able to do both, right?

And I understand land banking looking at the costs, it's it's in the millions and it's only going to get us so far, so many properties.

Um but my concern is we may uh not be able to keep up with our permanent supportive housing or 30% AMI.

And then, of course, in terms of homeownership, what Habitat for Humanity provides.

Sure.

Um I don't have any comments more praise uh to NHSG.

Um, as Councilwoman Corps mentioned, I'm grateful to see that with the current budget, you all are going to be able to maintain, if not increase the amount of home service through uh major home rehab.

But if we could find an additional one million to supplement, uh that would be something district five residents would be really grateful for.

I'm pleased to see with the minor rehab, it now includes funding for lateral connections because this is something uh whether it's in the south side of San Antonio and District 5, uh, many of my residents were struggling to get connected to basic sewage and water.

Uh, and now with this minor home uh rehab inclusion, folks that go through the program now get connected to something that everyone in San Antonio should be connected to.

Yes, um, this was in direct response to your CCR, and we did um brief the council committee this earlier this year.

Um, and with the adoption of the 2026 budget ordinance, we would be approving that partnership with SAWS so that we can have families connect to new laterals, although we were serving them through minor repair already.

Um, this streams the pro tree streamlines the process for the family, and then of course, it allows more money to uh plumbers to people, which can help address really small repairs.

Well, thank you for that.

And then uh I also wanted to just thank our outreach worker Emilio, he was over at the Lone Star Neighborhood Association yesterday giving a great presentation, and along with the outreach team, giving a great presentation uh similar to what was given today, uh just on why and how folks end up in the situation that they're in and how it's our collective responsibility to provide resources, right?

Uh, what I always say, whether it comes from a place of compassion or out of sight or out of mind, the solution is creating some type of shelter for individuals to be uh housed in.

Um, but with that, I'm really grateful for my colleagues on the San Antonio Housing Trust and the work that we've been doing there.

Uh and just last week we approved some planning engagement processes around what permanent and low barrier housing can look like in district five off of Buena Vista.

Uh, and my colleagues and I are doing such great work there and ensuring that we continue to meet those ship goals.

Um, lastly, in terms of with the homeless department, I'll get it down eventually on the full name.

Um, but I wanted to highlight the overlap with municipal courts, right?

Uh, I want to thank Haven for Hope and Judge Guerrero for hosting the community courts because I've seen folks who have gone through the Haven for Hope process and through the court process as well, uh, to to graduate, right, and celebrate their accomplishment of completing their program and then of course getting connected to uh permanent or low barrier housing.

And I know Haven's here as well, so just wanted to thank y'all.

And again, um, you know, oftentimes as Councilman Monguya mentioned, right, there's uh sentiments about all types of programs, whether it's a city or not.

Um, but you know, what I was able to see, thank you so much for inviting me to the graduation to see over 40 participants who have completely and successfully gone through Haven and haven't returned, right?

So there are success stories with our homeless service providers, and what I hear that they need is more support, more beds to ensure that we can connect folks to to those services.

Uh lastly, I do think there's value marked uh in terms of what one of the pieces um to this overall how like crisis that we're facing is that continued coordination with the county.

And what I've shared with you is I've been able to tour the Harris County jail diversion facility, and what they found, and it's similar to here what we're seeing in Bear County, is uh a good percentage of folks going to the Bear County jail as well as what they're seeing in Harris County, uh, where individuals being arrested for violating no trespassing affidavits.

So, what that means is a homeless individual is sleeping uh on a property that doesn't belong to them, but the property owner signed a no trespassing affidavit.

Uh they then get arrested, they have a record, makes it harder for them to qualify for housing services, housing programs, and then it's a cycle over and over again.

With this diversion program, they've been able to connect them to detox beds, mental health services, uh, their version of ready to work, and they rehabilitate individuals depending on uh what the misdemeanor is, right?

They're typically low-level misdemeanors, and they've found success in this program, right?

And I'm saying it's the only solution, the silver bullet, it doesn't exist, but it's part of that overall ecosystem that I think we need to continue uh to invest in, move forward and have conversations about.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Chair Galvan.

Thank you, Mayor.

Uh always love uh following up a mental health diversion piece is something that I'm really proud to be able to uh help work on with the community health committee with uh my colleague Calvin Ricus too.

And I wish I would have taken that binder from that I made for her from her office.

But we're making a new one, it's okay.

We'll still keep working on it.

Um the departments that presented today, uh all incredible work that needs to be done.

And so I'm really happy to talk about this discussion today.

Um I'm gonna start with uh the homeless service and strategy department.

Um I think I'm gonna echo, of course, Councilmember Core's piece about everything I want to say with this is always related to just I wish there was more funding for this.

We know this work's impactful, and I would love to see um I know there's a lot of conversations about studies, um, but I would love to see some kind of public safety.

Some, some.

Um I'll see some kind of studies done uh either internally or externally, uh, related to not only uh the financial benefits but as well as the public safety benefits and economic development benefits uh for investments in housing and health and human services.

Um I always think that you know those get left out of the conversation when it comes to economic development or public safety in terms of the actual material benefits of it.

Um I think it just helps our our case of showing that as a as a city, if we're doing this kind of investment, if we're looking for ways to make sure that we're investing in these pieces, then uh let's make sure we back up the data too for our residents who are saying, well, can we do this somewhere else?

Can we do it somewhere else?

Let me show you the multiplier that this will have actually when we invest in someone's personal life to have a home, uh, to have the services they need, to have the healthcare they need, to have all these other pieces there.

So throwing that out there.

Um but I wanted to ask some questions about uh or for the the department.

Um on the homeless outreach piece, I wanted to just check and see how what are the hours for for homeless outreach workers?

Are they within the regular nine to four, nine to five ish?

Um is it a little earlier?

Do we have second shifts?

Uh normal hours 7.45 to about 4.30 during the business hours.

Yeah.

Um I think that's just always something that we need to keep in mind is that as we're looking to this department, we want to make sure that, especially the Council of Revier Grant's point about siloing, right?

Want to make sure we're not silent these pieces.

I also want to make sure that we're not leaving um anything on the table, right?

I know we're just gonna start with this department, but I want to make sure as we continue as a city where we can, uh, even with the budgets we got to make sure that we're investing these pieces to be beyond the regular working hours.

We know homelessness doesn't stop um at 4 30 p.m.

We know there's not the services are needed sometimes beyond then, of course.

We know sometimes folks go out at night instead rather than uh during the day just because it's less uh focus on them.

Um I think that's something that's important.

The same thing is true for the hotline.

Uh I want to make sure that that's also expanded beyond uh the current schedule as well.

Uh I believe it's not it's only business hours too, correct, for the homeless hotline.

Yes, Councilman, that's correct.

And it does align both outreach and hotline with most of the service providers that we're then connecting and folks into shelters, uh intakes typically are normal hours, things like that.

So there is there is um yeah, more to it than just the uh the hours that we do provide.

I'll also add during extreme cold weather events, the whole operation shifts to 24 hours.

Right.

And so it's definitely a longer conversation, right, about how we can get this as a full continuum, right?

Uh it can't just be on the city to say 24 hour services or anything like that.

It's got to be the full partnerships there.

So absolutely agree with you and excited to have those conversations as we go forward uh and see what we're what ways our city can fund those pieces.

Um the encampment uh abatements piece.

Do we track uh whether accountments uh sprout back up after abatement nearby or at the same location?

We do.

We keep we keep track of all of the events that we've done and keep can total up our recurring events.

We also keep a uh a running list of the frequently recurring, so it's about 32 sites citywide that are we're uh cleaning up every two weeks.

Right.

Um if they do not re-establish, then we would take them off the list.

But that's that's our um approach for those frequently recurring sites, because some do do re-establish.

Got it.

Uh I if we can get that some offline of what that looks like, uh location, of course, timeline as well.

If they do move off the list, right, when do they do that?

Um, or if they don't, uh I think that'd be really helpful to looking at what again those investments are in in abatements versus other pieces as well.

Uh but I wanted to ask two about abatements.

Uh do we have data on the acceptance rate of uh services from outreach workers versus encampment abatements?

Is there a difference there in who how much services are accepted at each other?

There is uh so uh it's a little easier to track at abatements, but there's sort of discrete events um and we can track we do track um the uh acceptance rate of services.

Um it has gone down somewhat as we have increased the number of abatements, but also added our street outreach team.

So they're doing the more proactive engagements.

Uh we have outcomes for how uh effective they are, the number of engagements that they have, and the number of folks they've gotten into shelter and housing.

Um the uptake rate on the abatement when the when it's a part of the abatement is pretty low, it's under 5% typically.

Um but there's some other factors at play, right?

Um, particularly the increase in in outreach that we're providing in addition across the community, both us and our partners.

Right.

Uh I would definitely like to see that debt as well, whether it's our providers or actually both our providers and our outreach services, and then also the abatement pieces where we get those services accepted.

Um, what's the time?

What's the successful successful exit uh for the low barrier shelter?

Is there like a timeline with that?

Is it simply being provided or getting connected to housing?

On uh low barrier shelter, sorry, should we just slide the positive and the negative exits uh which are what's the definition of successful?

So successful, a positive exit would be permanent, either permanent housing or um uh uh better living situation.

So um 90% are permanent housing, the other 10, 11% are um maybe uh a nursing home, have medical intervention.

Uh Mark was talking about transitional or bridge housing, things like that.

That's the positive outcomes.

Okay.

Um do we keep track uh as well as of the negative ones, right?

That would aren't unsuccessful.

Right.

So most of the negative exits are returning to the street.

So folks uh accessing this shelter have been unsheltered on the street um handful uh to jail.

But uh majority are going back to the street, we'll then look to re-engage with them, and we can track if we do re-engage with them at some point, whether it's street outreach or another or the this shelter or any other shelter.

And does it in that data that tracking, does it show why it was like successful or they were unsuccessful to exit positively or like was there a reasoning behind maybe they weren't able to accept it?

There was other reasons behind it.

What were those reasons?

I guess we're gonna be able to do that.

Yeah, and our system does track case notes essentially, so the the all of the interactions that they have with any uh caseworker, whether it's at the shelter or on the street.

Um so that that information is all captured there in our system for all providers to access.

That's perfect.

That's what I wanted to know because I want to make sure that we're tracking as well as the city and we're as a council we know what things are in the way, right?

What are the barriers that they're facing?

Is it health care?

Is it addiction issues?

Is it uh lack of housing spaces?

Is it whatever the right piece is there?

Uh that way we know where to kind of target our next abasement investments too.

So thank you for that.

I think those are all my questions there, but I also want to just share that uh I think you know we're getting seeing different elements of scrutiny on this department.

I think it's because it's a big topic, of course, that we know is number one for our residents.

Um I am always someone who wants to make sure that we have uh as much support as we can for this department, uh, make sure that we're working together with DHS and the other elements too.

And so my scrutiny comes from a place of let's make sure we you get all the support you need.

Um I'll go quickly for NHS D.

I don't have too many questions.

I actually think only have one.

Um y'all do incredible work as always, and so I wanted to just ask about actually no, it's not a question, I think it's just a comment.

Um I think as we're looking at the housing bond, of course, very supportive of a larger housing bond that can really invest uh deeply in production as well as preservation for both homeownership and rental as well.

Um I would like to have a conversation, maybe this is within PCD so that we can talk about kind of approaches to some of the project delivery pieces.

Y'all do incredible work delivering these uh re rehabilitation or production of housing, but I want to make sure if we're investing in a even larger scale, right?

And that when we look at rental rehab or uh homeownership rehab, um I think sometimes approaches too about is it better to have a free-for-application that's open to everybody, or are we looking at targeted areas that need these places, need this kind of rehab, and what again kind of that uh impact would be to that neighborhood if the whole neighborhood uh receives the services versus one house every five or six years.

Um just some thoughts I think uh for future conversations, but otherwise, keep up the great work.

Um I'll say my other comments for ACS, nothing too crazy, but need more time.

Councilwoman uh Spears.

Um well, thank you, Mayor, and thank you to Mark Carmona and Veronica Garcia and John Gary for your excellent presentations and all the hard work that you're doing.

Um I believe our residents expect our dollars to go where our families really need it, and homelessness and animal care and housing are definitely areas of concern and focus.

Um I think I'm gonna start with animal care services.

Um I just want to echo again what a lot of my council colleagues have said we need to look at collaboration with the county in this space.

Um I think this is something we can never a problem we can never fully solve, but we can definitely reduce redundancy in services and and delegate agency funds and collaborating with the county, and and that makes a lot of sense to me.

Um I wanted to see if you could speak to how ACS is partnering with our local providers on the low-cost spay and neuter services, um, specifically because I think that that is the best way forward and include um campaigns for educating pet owners.

So for spike neuter, we we partner with uh several different uh local nonprofits uh to provide services that we that we fund, some low-cost, some no cost.

Um, and so uh a lot of the uh when you look at this slide, actually, that that that'll demonstrate the um the number of houses or the number of surgeries uh that um that we're doing broken out by if you look at city facilities there um you know the next year we're predicted to do over 7300.

So those city facilities are facilities that are owned by us but contracted to be ran by nonprofits, uh and so we fund them in that way, uh constantly uh working with them to determine how do we um get them to be able to do more.

Uh we did increase funding to uh two of the organizations over the last couple years, and so uh we will continue those partnerships and and honestly, we'll we'll try to pursue more uh if we're able to find other local uh nonprofits that are willing to uh step up in that way.

That's good to hear.

I think that that's a really probably the most impactful thing we can do.

Um thank you for that.

On housing, neighborhood housing.

So I'm really looking at how our investments can stabilize families and seniors in this space.

I I in particular in district nine, I'm focusing on the seniors that do have fixed incomes and how we can protect them and expanding this into district nine in that space.

Um every dollar must have a clear impact here.

Um I had a question about the major repairs, the 183,000 dollars for major repairs.

I just wondered, you know, where do the people go when you're doing these rehabs and who's paying for it?

Sure, for major rehab, we do require the homeowner to move out.

We're usually doing like full rehab of the entire home.

But we do offer a small moving stipend.

Usually it's about 2,500 to help them relocate.

Many of them relocate um with family members.

Um sometimes they rent, and we do have two social workers on our team that can help families identify possible relocation options.

And uh we also provide a storage pot on site and um so that they can help move all their belongings into that.

I I can appreciate that, but I do still think that's probably a a pretty strong barrier for a lot of the people that are the most vulnerable needing this the most.

And that stipend is a little light if you're gone out for a long while and you're from your home.

Um but thank you for that.

Maybe we could get some of our nonprofits to get more engaged in that space.

Um, but I am happy to see that SAS is helping with those lateral connections, those are very expensive.

Um I wanted to know too, which programs produce the highest resident impact per dollar and which ones can be scaled back.

Um that may not be something you can ask today.

I mean, answer today.

And um, if there's any opportunities to shift city programs into the nonprofit or private sector administration without creating any housing instability, and let's see.

And I'd love to see if there's a way that we can encourage the down payment assistance to be leveraged in favor of the industries that support our workforce development programs.

I think that would be helpful, a double whammy kind of doubly helpful.

And um, let's see.

I also would like to know if there's any housing programs that reduce the strain on our core services and could justify more significant city investment in those programs.

Okay.

But thank you for all that you're doing.

Thank you.

And I'll highlight um since it's on the slide, minor repair is one area where we felt could um use that support from nonprofits, and we used to do all 455 homes in-house, meaning we would contract directly with a contractor to do that work for the homeowner.

And as I was saying earlier, um, now we do leverage the nonprofits.

So an example is um maybe a home needs weatherization and fixing a leaky roof.

That whole rehab may cost $20,000, but instead of us spending all $20,000 of city funds by partnering with the nonprofit, we may only cover $5,000 of that, and then they're using their funding to cover all of the other weatherization improvements.

So but we can continue to look for other opportunities.

Good.

That's good.

Um homelessness.

Yes, may I just clarify your question?

It was um how it was the last part of it was reduction, so it doesn't impact core services.

I'm sorry, what was the first part of the question?

Just so it's clear for everybody in case someone else also did missed it.

Um I just wanted to focus more of our funds on the on the programs that don't reduce any strain on core services.

I think permanent supportive housing, reducing the EMS calls.

Okay, um to homelessness.

So I went to State of the Homelessness this year.

It was one of the first things I did, and I did it alongside the mayor, and it was an excellent program.

But I was really shocked and alarmed to hear that 49% of this of the first-time homeless are victims of domestic violence, and that means it's single moms, most likely, and kids.

And that's just it's devastating to think about that.

Um then I also learned there the ID services are a huge piece of the things that we need to really focus on to really impact the homeless population.

But this is a broader challenge because there's a lot of things factors that contribute to homelessness rights, and there's different approach to each of those.

Um, a first-time homeless family.

It's in I think it's imperative we try to intervene as quickly as possible so they don't fall into some of the traps, particularly maybe with drug use or something like that.

That would maybe and so that leads me to kind of a concern with the low barrier um housing.

Since I I would hope that that's not really a lot of families going in there.

I'd like to know who is using the low barrier housing hotel.

Um I too have some concerns.

I mean, I know this was originally ARPA dollars, and those are one-time use funds.

I feel like there are some long-term solutions, and I do agree that we should be looking at the at how we can collaborate with the county, especially when it comes to the domestic violence issues.

I hope that they're going to another safer place.

It seems like that would be terribly dangerous for families, and especially if that's 49% of this number.

Um, it makes me question who we're serving in the low barrier housing and ID is required.

I'm glad to hear that that, but then again, there's a whole slew of people that can't meet that requirement, as we've learned.

So I would assume that they're out on the streets and maybe in some of the encampments.

Um I have concern about the number for the indirect and costs that go along with cleaning up the encampments.

I know that's very important in my district that we you know they're very concerned about the encampments.

But if we're not coming up with permanent solutions for that, it's not really impacting the number, which the charts show, it's not really impacting the number of homeless.

Um I have to question how we're spending our dollars there.

Um then with low barrier housing, they're staying 132 days.

Um I just feel like there is a better long-term solution.

This is a huge number, it's just a huge number to be spending annually.

What do we know what that number would be in 2027 if we continue?

The number of the annual cost for the lease, council member.

I mean, I'm assuming that part would stay the same, but the wraparound services and everything.

So councilwoman.

I'm sorry, go ahead.

No go ahead.

So we did not, and I shared with the presentation last week, and a number of you have said it uh this afternoon.

The the low barrier shelter situation we have right now is not sustainable long term.

4.8 million dollars a year for a lease while Mark has explained uh the the critical nature of of how that fits part of our outreach and and and housing capabilities for those that are looking for it.

That is not a long-term solution.

The the long-term solution that that you and many others have talked about is a is a broader plan to incorporate um mental health, substance abuse, the county hospital systems, and and and frankly at the end of the day, um you know I've asked Mark to come back next year with recommendations on what we do going forward.

We are not in the two-year balance budget, we did not set aside funding in fiscal year 27.

I don't know what that'll look like a year from now.

Um, but I know that long term um five million dollars for that facility does not work, much like councilwoman Castile talked about that that focus needs to be at the council level.

Um, what is permanent supportive housing?

What is transitional housing look like?

How do partners pay for it?

And frankly, at the end of the day, you all are gonna have to prioritize that because that's gonna mean an additional investment from the city, whether that is future bond programs or operating dollars, but the current state is not sustainable really.

It it the um and and so we did not assume it was going past fiscal year 27.

Okay.

Did I have any timeline or did we stop it?

I think I used your the last 30 seconds, sorry.

I just had one more quick question.

This pertains to town twin village.

I I know that there was a 9.9 bond million dollar bond allocation, and I wondered how much was remaining, if any, and the occupancy there.

Anyone know the answer there?

Because that would be one of the kind of sorts of solutions we're looking at.

We're getting how much of that 9.9 million has been expended.

Um, but they have uh finished opening the next phase, and the next phase that will be coming up, I guess phase three would be the apartments, which is about 80.

Um, that's under construction now.

It is under construction in the occupancy right now.

Oh, um told uh all of our nine million dollar in Town Twin Village has been fully expended.

Okay.

Okay.

Councilwoman, um, if you'd like to additional comments in your second round, that'd be great.

Okay, Chairman Gia, please.

Question for HSD.

The eviction prevention, relocation, rental assistance.

Is that uh has that funding changed from last year to this year?

Uh relocation and rental assistance is a constant budget.

It's the same as last year.

Relocation, I'm sorry, and what'd you say?

And rental assistance is uh 5.7 million.

Okay, great.

Uh extremely important.

There's um you have probably gotten emails from Johanny on my team.

She's a rock star when it comes to constituent services.

Um these programs are just incredibly critical.

And as far as I know, we're the only government entity that provides these types of services, rental assistance.

Does anybody else do that?

Um we're not aware of any others that do it, certainly not to this level.

Yeah, and I saw close to home here earlier, and I remember one time they said, you know, that is one of the greatest tools we have for uh homeless prevention, right?

And and several years ago when I went to Haven, there were several families staying there with children uh with parents who had jobs.

Yeah, uh, but because of the cost of housing, that's where they were.

Um and you know, we in our district and I'm in every other council district, we uh at times have to rebuild people's lives with these programs.

We had a resident who was a caretaker, single mother, 10-year-old daughter, caretaker of her father.

Her father died, so she lost that caretaker job.

And then the same week our landlord said she wanted they wanted to sell the house, and they had 30 days to vacate.

Uh so within a week she lost her father, her job, and she had 30 days to find another place.

So luckily, with our help and y'all's help and and the county and ready to work, she has a job and she's able to work from home, pick up her kid from school, and and that life has been really turned around, and it's just because of these programs that we have available, and that's all the work that you do all the time.

Uh so uh you know, during the pandemic, we did mortgage assistance.

Have we looked into looking at that again, or if there's a possibility for that in the future?

Sure.

Um we do have just have mortgage counselors on our team right now.

We don't provide mortgage assistance, it's all focused on rental assistance.

The state at one time had a pretty large mortgage assistance fund, but that was all funded through uh COVID dollars.

Yeah, okay.

So we'll just kind of look at that as a long-term thing.

And there's a lot of folks who have mortgages that um for some reason or not they're suffering, and there's no help at that point for them.

So thank you for that.

And just to go really quickly to ACS, um, extremely critical um work that you're doing.

Um, I know we're we're making a lot of great strides on the critical calls, which very, very important.

Those are sometimes life and death situations.

Uh but you know, we we still have a lot way more to go on the non-critical, and I know this is not the year to continue to add greater capacity, which I wish we could.

Um, but you know, uh I had a meeting at Palo Alto community one time, got there early, drove around all the streets off Palo Alto, Spats, uh waiting right, found 12, 13 stray dogs just in one neighborhood.

Uh and so that is a huge quality of life issue, right, in some of these places that have a lot of calls.

So, you know, it's difficult.

I know the situation y'all have now, but uh when people see that they they think that we're not making any straight at all.

So we've got to continue to push the line on that.

Um very excited about the pet care connect.

Thank you for not forgetting district four.

I I hope to walk with you all when we do that also.

I think that's gonna be a very beneficial program.

And you know, I have to give a shout out to Aaron on my team and Rita because they do that ambassador spay and neuter program at Pearsall Park.

So we don't really have a spay neuter shelter nearby, so maybe we can work in with districts four, three, five, or six.

Um, because what's happens is they'll make an appointment, go to Pearsall Park in the morning, drop off the dog, same day, pick up the dog at Pearsall Park.

Uh so we're getting a lot of D4 residents.

The numbers have been really good.

Uh, when it's been slow, Rita's been out there block walking with us to get folks.

And so that's been an extremely beneficial program.

So Aaron gets there at like 6 30 in the morning.

So I have yet to visit with him on those sites.

Uh, but it is going really, really well with that.

So thank you for that work and um appreciate your work and a lot more to do.

Thanks.

Councilman Castillo Angiano.

Thank you, Mayor.

Um Councilman Galivan kind of touched on this a little bit.

Was it 32 reoccurring abatements every two weeks?

Yes, that's correct.

Uh yeah.

Um I yeah, I just want us to kind of consider whether this is a good investment because every time we abate, we're making it harder for our outreach workers to build that trust and accept services.

Um, and oftentimes it's mutual aid groups who go out every Sunday and kind of you know, find that folks come to um the mutual aid um uh areas where they meet up to kind of figure out why the abatement happened, how they can help get um documents and everything like that.

So um that was just the only um feedback that I had.

Thank you, Mayor.

Uh Councilwoman Castillo.

Thank you, Mayor.

Uh I just wanted to stress the point that a couple of folks have brought up in terms of the salary for our outreach workers uh and how we could potentially adjust that to ensure that we are retaining those employees.

Um we it's been said over and over again, right?

And we see it within the budget surveys, and I see it within our constituent cause uh data, that homelessness continues to be the top priority for district five residents and residents throughout the city of San Antonio, and we're having one individual essentially carry uh a lot of weight in terms of providing resolution uh to not just the folks that are calling in, but to the the unhoused individual themselves.

So I think if there's uh opportunity for us to evaluate what compensation can look like, uh I understand an analysis was done to potentially bring them up, but I think we need to look at it uh uh as a whole, how we can just move those brackets up because it is a lot of work.

Um folks are exposed to um just a wide range of just things, uh, whether it's uh just just different uh bodily fluids uh and or needles or whatever the case may be, and we need to make sure we're taking care of our employees.

Uh and if that looks like hazard pay, that's something that I would be supportive of.

Um lastly, just again wanted to emphasize in terms of the remaining bond dollars.

Um I know we have a briefing set up with Veronica to talk about what that could look like, um, but just really excited to move forward with land banking components, but also how we can continue to support um our low barrier and uh permit supportive housing folks to ensure that we have somewhere to um connect folks to um because I know councilman courage would always ask if we had every homeless individual say yes to services and housing, was would there be a unit?

And the answer is no.

Uh and I think we just need to work towards whether it's detox beds uh and or um whatever the case may be.

Uh that's what I'd like us to see uh move forward with.

Those are my comments.

Thank you, Mayor.

Chair Galvan.

Thank you, Mayor.

Um I definitely want to echo just the pieces about hazard pay for our homeless outreach workers as well as finding ways, even if you know it's not this budget and the future budget, or if there's ways that we can scale it at some point, uh, make sure it's not just one outreach worker per district.

Uh I think we of course saw the number or the with the pit count um where the what districts need to support the most, and I think one individual helping with that is just almost impossible uh to manage all those cases.

And I know there's more that goes into it than just that one individual, but I think it's worth uh having a partner and getting those things done because it's a lot.

Um animal care services.

Um I didn't realize I think Pit Care Connect is what it was called at the time when district five was doing the block walking.

I'm really proud to be part of the team and we're able to go out and do that in the Lima Park area.

Um I'm excited uh to continue seeing that work be done.

I do want to say, you know, may not all district six needs that kind of investment, but I definitely know there's parts of district six that do, and I don't want to stop at the district five borderline, district four borderline uh to go into some of these neighborhoods in the you know 7227 zip code of the 78237 uh zip codes that are they're already qualified for the free spay and neuter services, and so I wanted to make sure that uh those zip codes are still addressed and those parts of the neighborhoods are still addressed with some of that uh proactive outreach.

Um yeah, I mean there's just it's definitely needed in those areas.

Um I wanted to ask on the uh minimum fines uh for bites and repeat offenses.

Uh I thought we saw this number somewhere, but I just wanted to make sure.

What was the city's uh revenue impact from those increased fines?

I I don't have that with me today.

I I'd have to get that from municipal courts, but we can we can look at that.

Okay, thank you.

Um is for missile court then.

Um but I wanted to mention or echo what Councilman Mungia mentioned on non-critical calls, of course, those are still very important uh to us.

I know it's gonna take some more work to continue doing uh you know better response times for all that, make sure that we're closing those cases out uh more effectively.

What I hear a lot from residents is that you know they'll see a stray dog in the area, they'll make the call and the case is closed almost immediately.

Uh so they want to definitely just make sure that we're preventing uh these cases from becoming dangerous cases or more critical calls later on.

Um so if possible, and no easier said than done, figuring out ways that we can part work with our partners to maybe address some of those uh non-critical calls to assist with that.

Um I think would be one effective way to do it, uh, just so that we are making sure that we're still reaching out or adjusting those calls that are being made about roaming dogs or uh that don't seem dangerous at first, but could be.

Um my dream is of course one day that we can have uh proactive outreach pretty frequently like code enforcement are safe.

Of course, understanding the budgetary impacts would be immense for that.

Um but I think it's something that uh should be a long-term goal, ideally.

So we have those proactive work being done uh by ACS as well.

I think those are all my comments.

Thank you, Mayor.

Chair View Gran.

Thank you.

Um Eric and Justina probably also I think we we I heard some asks today financially, and I heard some asks yesterday financially, and then you know, we've made ourselves clear at the initial or I I attempted to in terms of what I'd like to see for civilian employees.

If we could please get that in follow-up about how much exactly we are looking in overage, if we were to do what some of them uh what will we would some of us have asked for, uh, you know, getting the one million back here, because I think if as we go into more workshops, I would like a running tab of of kind of how much this is gonna cost because I don't think it's gonna be we can do this and that.

We are going to have to do it is going to be this or this.

And I want I want us to have that as we go into every workshop session about where we are going to prioritize, especially for those I've I have had my town hall meeting, they have been clear on what they want.

Uh, but as my council colleagues go into their town hall meetings, it would be helpful if we had that.

So I know three million for you know, 3.1 million for pay increase versus 2.1 million for more officers.

I like I need to see that comparison numbers.

And then what we hear heard today about one million for uh housing, reinstating that one million for housing, where would that come from?

You know, so I I'd like that to see those numbers.

Thank you.

That's it.

Thank you there.

Chair Viewan, um, thank you for that.

We're uh we're actually on the same page.

One of the things I was gonna ask for is exactly that.

How do we um that 2.1 mil 2.1 million for for the additional officers if we wanted to help us understand, you know, how many more folks would that not just the money where it would go, but what is the impact, right?

When you talk about how what is that's X number of more lateral connections, that's X number of um uh number of um folks that we could help be prevented um from eviction, right?

Like the actual impact of that, I think is is what I would want to make sure that we are looking at I want to um put a finer point on um and let me just say, you know, as as a as a kid that spent time and and utilized at one point in time a Section 8 voucher, I can empathize with folks that um that need affordable housing, need a little bit of help, and ultimately what that means for one, that individual, the family, but also the community if we if we think about it in that way.

I understand some folks have different lived experiences that shape not only their language um but also their approach toward the unhoused, um, which is why I think it's important that we try to tell as full of a story as possible, and I think we can help ourselves by doing by explaining what is in fact a a positive exit.

I think for some that somebody not being um no longer being it unhoused is is not sufficient, right?

They need to see how and how can we help them understand that and how can we help ourselves say, okay, six months from now, right?

Not only were they housed, six months from now those folks were gainfully employed, right?

Help us understand, help us tell that story so we can better help um our community understand what the investment actually gets us.

I'd also like uh to understand um to the extent uh yeah, I get the average stay is 132, but again, help us understand who we're talking about here.

If if if the person is a victim of domestic violence, actually their stay is two weeks average.

If they're a homeless veteran, actually their stay is 45 days, right?

Because we are able to connect them with federal or state resources that might be available.

If they are, you know, however, an LGBTQ youth, because there are so few resources that are there for them, they are in fact um um staying there a little bit longer.

And yeah, I can't um you know reiterate enough us understanding just how many children are impacted by this.

I mean, one of the the factors that increases somebody's being um likelihood of being homeless is having a kid.

Um so you know, when we look at some of the changes at the at the federal level and the state level around reproductive access to reproductive health care, um we can't not think about what that may mean in our own community on this issue.

Um the on slide 10.

This is the um inner city incentive, the 1.5 million.

Um much of that is normally used.

Um it varies year to year.

All of it has to go to city council for approval.

I think most recently we utilized it to help lave them market square tenants last year, um, and that was about 700,000.

We can double check that number for rent abatements.

Umly due to all of the construction work around them.

So it can support not just affordable housing, but also economic development efforts.

So that's what we did most recently with it.

Uh the year before that, we utilized it to help um a mobile home park in district three um become a collective home ownership.

I see.

Okay.

Um well, Eric, one of the things I'd like to understand is is I mean, it's not a large chunk of money, but it looks like you know, some of the places where we could put additional money, that the ROI on that would be quite high, whether it be you know, connections, lateral connections, or helping with eviction or whatnot.

Um so if there is some additional leeway in where those resources could go, um, I'd like to to better understand that.

Um because what is the wait list of those that are uh the 100,000 uh dollars helped 330 folks stay in their um in their homes?

Is that right?

The eviction?

Um what is the wait list?

How many more folks could we have helped, or how many folks were on the list requesting help that we did not serve?

Sure.

So for uh rental and relocation assistance this year we've received about 10,000 applications, and we've approved a total of uh 1,129.

That's just year to date.

Okay.

Um so it's about a 12% approval rating.

Okay.

Um so where's definitely a lot more demand than dollars we have, and um it is definitely connected to eviction work because most of those families are two, three months behind on rent, and we do prioritize those who have already received a notice to vacate or already in the eviction court process.

Okay.

And I understand the recent change in legislation that makes it somewhat easier actually to remove folks from the from their homes.

Yeah, okay.

One of the things um that would be helpful, Eric, for the um intergovernmental relations team is to help us.

I think we all again anticipate this very difficult economic environment that we're about to go into.

If there is, if there are um, you know, additional special sessions, uh, legislation for emergency resources and particularly to to house communities for which there may be bipartisan support, uh, looking at seniors, looking at veterans, it'd be helpful just to have that legislation kind of ready to offer our colleagues uh in the case there is an appetite in Austin to do so.

Okay, great.

When you were talking about the inner city um fund, were were you talking about possibly creating additional categories of spend because the three categories are the ones that exist now, but but you mentioned laterals.

Are you looking for well what it says here is incentivizes economic development and creation of affordable housing in alignment with ship.

My understanding in a briefing is that not all that money is used for that necessarily.

And so when Ms.

Garcia spoke, she mentioned that it had been used for something other than affordable housing.

So I think all of us would I would like for us to understand other ways in which we might be able to use that money in light of some of the needs that have already been addressed, and I'm sure additional ones that will be identified.

So maybe what we'll do is in the follow-up memo, we'll give you give you and the council uh a look back at the last three or four years of how it's been used, because Veronica rattled off a couple of them and they've they're kind of different, but I think it'll give you all some context on on potentially what leeway is there with the funding.

Great.

Thank you.

And mayor, I will also just add on to what Eric was saying.

It is it is a a set-aside funding, and as we have projects that come up that maybe don't fit into other, maybe doesn't meet the criteria for funding for federal funds.

Um we bring those recommendations to council for that one half.

And so the project may be $500,000.

It may be um next week's agenda is or maybe tomorrow's agenda is um $250,000 to help people build casitas in their backyard.

So we bring individual recommendations for that funding, um, not necessarily the entire pot at one time.

Yeah, understood.

That's that's very helpful.

Um I think the recommendations the recommendations are also helpful.

I think other than um maybe a different approach also is like, hey, here's the four things you might consider.

We I think some folks here based on what has been expressed would have been, hey, can it actually just do this?

Which may not be on the on your list, right?

Uh they're very specific asked given their um uh given the needs in their districts.

Okay.

Okay.

Again, um thank you uh very much to the entire staff for all the hard work, appreciate the uh the due diligence and um look forward to the follow-ups.

Thank you.

The time is now 454 on Wednesday, August 20th, and this meeting is adjourned.