Welcome to the August 11th, 2025 Tewalleton City Council work session.

First time on our agenda tonight is a safe parking programs overview for Washington County led by Megan Cohen.

Welcome, Megan.

Come on up.

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There we go.

Okay.

Can you all hear me?

Yep.

Okay.

Good evening, Mayor, City Council.

Late afternoon, summer evening.

I'm Megan Cohen.

I am the City County homelessness liaison for Tiger Twalton and Sherwood.

And I'm here this evening just to provide an overall overview to you all about safe parking programs in Washington County and what they bring to the communities that they're in.

So with that, we'll get started.

Next slide.

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All right.

So I know that I was with you all and with our outreach team a few months ago to provide kind of an overview of the homeless services that we have and what homelessness in Towalton looks like.

I just wanted to provide some additional information this evening because as we see different funding cuts due to different policy decisions and available funding across the board.

We are seeing the situation become much more dire on a day-to-day basis.

So I'll just start by saying that we are seeing a lot of families that are facing uh rent increases and eviction without resources.

The state did not they actually reduce the amount of eviction prevention dollars that are being provided, and community action has put their eviction prevention program on indefinite hold after not having enough resources to be able to continue providing that.

Most of those eviction prevention dollars were going to families to keep them housed.

We're also in a situation where a lot of like our rapid rehousing programs, um DV programs, they run on sort of a two-year basis, and so uh those funds have also expired for families.

I have um have interfaced with several Tewalton families just in the last two, three weeks.

Um we have a family who uh is mom, two kids, um, they have been stably housed for the last two years.

Um they had some uh rapid rehousing dollars that had helped um and were running a uh daycare business out of their home.

Um those dollars uh went away.

Um, and due to other situations, um, like needing to go to DV court.

Um they weren't able to continue bringing in the same income and were facing eviction um from their uh landlord and were in the process of trying to negotiate that.

Um we also just recently had a situation where police were called to a motel six in Tualleton.

There was an older woman, older than 65 with disabilities, um, who uh was unable to uh pay for her overnight stay, so she was being asked to leave.

Um we worked with Tualeton police to get her uh an e-bed, an emergency bed at the Tiger shelter, um, and Tualton police uh transported her there, which is great.

While police was there, they had a family approach them and say that they were also being asked to leave the hotel.

Um, mom, dad, two young kids under the age of six, um, and they had no other resources.

Um we connected them with an outreach worker.

Family shelters are 100% full, adult shelters are 100% full.

There are month-long waiting lists on both of these.

Um, and so Just Compassion used some additional funding they had to put the family up as they worked with them on what next steps might look like.

Um, so we're lucky we have really great service providers that are trying to help us find options.

Um, but we're really seeing this huge gap between people being asked to leave and when they're able to get into the services and finding that bridge is something that I think we'll talk a little bit more with safe parking.

But I would say about twice a week, I'm hearing from families.

And I know that obviously our service providers and other community liaisons like the schools are going to be hearing from them a lot more than that.

As I mentioned, we have few local resources to offset the costs or help with resource navigation, specifically here in Tewalleton.

There just aren't those connection points for people other than having our outreach workers come down, which they're happy to do.

But we don't have sort of centralized navigation and sort of a place for people to start other than going to the library, getting some info about resources there.

So that also is where we can find some difficulties and getting people connected to those services.

Which again, we're very lucky to be in a place where we have local dollars providing supportive housing services.

And those services are now completely full.

And as we are all experiencing right now, it's very hot outside, not hot enough to hit the thresholds for severe weather.

And so we're seeing a lot of people experience heat illness, heat sickness, because there really aren't those shelters, those shelter beds for them to stay on, stay in in the meantime.

We continue to see cuts to SSI, SSDI, a lot of folks really struggling with low-wage jobs.

We're even hearing that people who are in affordable housing are having a hard time maintaining that.

If you're making minimum wage at $15 an hour, you're generally maybe bringing in $2,000 and affordable rents at like 60, 80% AMI, you're paying over 50% of your rent on that affordable housing.

So that is continuing to make things difficult.