awesome thank you very much i'd like to again welcome those who are tuning in this evening or at a later date we have a couple of great and meaningful presentations before us tonight one deals with coalition  to end hunger in lakewood and the second one is homelessness and certainly important topics i would just reiterate that this is a study session so we do have public input portions not general public comment those are reserved for the second and fourth meetings so if you'd like to speak on either item three or four we just ask that you make your comments part of the discussion this is kind of your opportunity to ask any questions or any suggestions based on the presentations phone number tonight one six nine nine nine zero zero nine one two eight with the webinar i d of nine two eight eight two zero seven  nine nine nine seven i believe that should be flashed up on your screen as well press pound after entering the webinar and then star nine to request to speak in star six to a mute with three minutes so going forward to the first items of presentation update by the coalition and hunger and i'm going to turn it over to mary ruth to introduce our guest and this presentation is on lakewood speaks introduce jane barnes  for joining us and for your wonderful presentation which is online and now we have you live it's your lucky day so thank you i'm glad to be here and see all of you and talk about this really important issue to the city of lakewood so i did record a presentation for you al and sent your point so i'd really just like to have an informal conversation and see what you all are particularly interested in and then maybe i can wrap up with we'd love your help once once we've answered some questions for you so i would just do want to remind you that we have about thirty two different organ installations in lakewood that participate in the coalition to end hunger and when we started this was one of the three coalitions that near all it started in the city you all know there's the faith lakewood faith coalition with that little introduction do you have any questions any thoughts sure i'll kick in just so so folks who may not be familiar and are tuning in haven't seen the presentation this is part of a overall program called lakewood linked that was actually started under mayor murphy and it's the idea of how can we come together in different ways in the community to really address a lot of the issues that we are facing and that did start with the faith coalition they've started to do some incredible work out our title one elementary schools and so we certainly know that there's a lot of food needs in our community and a lot of folks providing food resources and so sometimes you just gotta get them together to the same and to talk to really understand what the needs are so for instance we had food banks that were virtually next door to each other that yu could go a few miles away and there would be no resources so this really was a way to start the dialog in your presentation you talk a lot about equity and trying to figure out where to go there was a small grant i think given to help with some of our to even do more services so our title one elementary schools and there was a grant that you did receive to continue some coordination so that's kind of a quick overview for those folks who may not be too familiar with this and i guess i would my first question  would be you know how can we continue to help support the mission or what are some things that you see as a need right now as we look to address the hunger issues in the city  paul thanks for thanks for the question i think that a number of things that city council can do to support son one of the things we're looking at is there has not a project done out of actually the university of south carolina medical school  and by the academy of nutrition and dietetics so it's an evidence based process communities can go through really to prioritize food security solutions right now that's one of the things that the coalition is looking at we've already done a number together during covered to maximize food distribution in the city so now we're knd o back what's next what are our next steps to do but this this process is really interesting and i think what's great about it it's evidence based and it really kind of lays out what we should be doing and who we should be so i think one of the big things is our group really has been made up mostly of folks who are involved in the food distribution system in lakewood table but we have not had a big response from the health care provider community and that's partly our fault so not we're not blaming anybody here we'd love to have some of the food retailers involved so if you all can help could help us bring together some of those folks as we really are really try to fix this food insecurity issue that we have in lakewood and make people's lives a little a little better and  really working towards sustainability here so the idea is not just feed people for the rest of their lives but to really help them get through the crisis that so many people are finding themselves some of the latest data is showing us that one in three are hungry that's huge right those are not numbers we've seen before and certainly those are in different parts of the state but i think we really need to think about families that are struggling to keep a roof over their head right now they've lost their jobs we're in a really different world than we were eight months and so really trying to figure out how how do we best serve our community now and build an infrastructure that will i answer your question yeah yeah yeah we're both passionate about this topic i know it's fantastic and it's important to note that this is this i really driven by volunteers and you've seen you know there's a couple highlights of the action steps and certainly one of the keys is is to coordinate a web site so people have an idea of where to go are you seeing riht now is there an increase in certain items or certain things that the community is  needed needing or running out of and what's the best way if people want to get involved how how do you get involved and how do you make sure that that is you know being strategic in what you want to do if you want to engage  question i think certainly we we are seeing lots of things you know food drives folks like the action center really who most of their food from community donations a lot of food pantries have gotten their food from community donations are no longer seeing those donations right people weren't going to the grocery store when they did go to the grocery store items were limited we're worried about where their money was going to come from for their groceries so really have started had to start purchasing food jefferson county has done a great thing in pulling together a food pantry network and providing some funds that will pay for food but that goes through the end of december so not sure what's going to happen in january when that funding is not available so food is actually quite expensive i've learned a lot about food in the last six to eight months i can tell you that our organization was really involved in think donating to your local food pantry the one you love is a great thing to do churches are really stepping up to the plate to try to fill in some of the gaps schools are really trying to work with their families without  already and so that's that's moving along these are really highly impacted schools that have not had this kind of access to support from the community so we're pretty excited about so thanks you all for making those help and you know i think we're really trying to figure out what's next i think we all really came together and really did great work through the early days of covered we know those days aren't over yet and develops a lot of great relationships and now it's really our task to think about what's two thousand and twenty one look like how long do we expect it's really difficult situation to la we continue to move forward as we plan for the future so just like you are thinking about what's next for the city i think we're all thinking about how do we plan in this world and what's so that's a big part of the as i just have one final question has to do with anything legislatively and you may not have an answer right now but i know throughout there is a food call every friday morning throughout jefferson county and one of the things that we learned is there were some issues wth food bank of the rockies how they can distribute their food or who they can distribute it to and so it looked like it needed some help from the state level to get that fixed but are there other legislative things that you see and if you don't know right now please you know we are here to try to carry that forward to if there needs to be some fixes to help make sure that we're getting food to hungry people in our community a lot of this work actually happens at the national level as well as the state level  we've just learned that a waivers for children so all children basically in schools will be able to get lunch and meals at no cost to them so we saw that this summer was sort of emergency food funding it's now once again being implemented in the schools so it's not jst kiddos that are on free and reduced lunch but actually all children will be able to get that gets rid of some of the paperwork for folks at this point snap benefits have been increased that's a month by month basis colorado every state has to apply not every state receives that every time but that's made a big difference for our older adults  snap benefits often limited or older adults because of social security income and so they may get sixteen or twenty dollars a month and they've actually received the maximum snacks snap benefits for the last several months so it's gonna be quite a surprise to folks when tat's no longer in effect and two people are probably not going to be very happy but that's been something that the u s d a has has implemented so  a lot of the food stuff is managed by the usda and so that's a really different organization than were often used to with human services work very differently that rules and regulations are very different so it's been great that you know participating in the food banks and the distribution that we see we see those and those are the successes where you know people are getting the support they need and that's great i don't think we see and i don't see at least this is where where the failures are where we're where we're missing the mark i'm pretty sure we are in places and i don't know where those are and so i think for where we're we're missing the mark in what we could do without a lot of creative people between our council and our staff we've got some very creative smart people and they can maybe help with some small way with solving those so we did a fair amount of mapping of where food deserts are those are places that folks may live a mile or more away from a grocery store i think any kind of place where they can buy food we worry a lot about neighborhoods that the only accessible purchase is a a convenience store not exactly the best nutrition and certainly not the best prices for folks although they do take cards which is snap sort of debit card we've also done a lot of work with where the poverty is in the city and how that overlays with where the food pantries are we know are there some pockets where the aren't pantries and there may be need we also know that the need is change in right now and so you know our maps are just as good as the data that we collect for those and you know i think the challenge is figuring out where are and then what we're going to do about those gaps i do want to caution you that in the end these days i think what's we really have to be thinking about is folks may live in a nice house they may drive a nice car but nobody has a job and so food may be the thing that's not happening or parents are working so hard to keep that roof over their head that they're not feeding their child and there are hungry children in every neighborhood so we want to make sure that we remember that that we figure what to do how how to deal with thse issues and really educating ou community is one of the best ways that we can begin to eliminate a lot of these gaps so you all can help us get the word out we really appreciate that and certainly we're also you know i would be happy to and many of any of the folks from the coalition would love to come to some of your town halls and talk about this issue with your constituents when you think  go ahead yeah just as a follow up we're at one things that i've noticed that i think it kind of goes with what you're saying is two things just observations but very interesting one i'm sensing that one of the problems is transportation that people can't get to the food banks or that they don't have they don't have a way to to get up get their supplies we see a lot of that at food bank of the rockies where people are are  getting getting supplies for two three families nt just their own but other families that they're trying to help out you see that a lot the other thing is i've been getting correspondence now for help  actually making distributions within the city for food bank of the rockies where if you could have a vehicle and if you could lift forty pounds can you can you volunteer to come and help us make distributions seniors and people that are shut in so that seems to be a real problem out there is is transportation and of course identifying those that need that transportation and the other thing is you're right i see a lot of it at the food bank you know people coming in with brand new cars i mean very expensive vehicles you know you can see there a little sheepish about it but there the need is there and so it's it's it's people that you know are are have been you know well heeled in the past they're run into some serious problems and you see it all the time so i guess i agree with you my my observations tend to track with what you're saying well thank you for that and there are a couple of programs that started doing just what you talked about which is delivering food from food pantries to families in the city so happy to send the names of those to you all but there's a web site that folks can go to and just sign up to have food delivered be action dot org really easy doesn't ask a lot of questions and folks in the faith community are signing up to be drivers for those programs too deliver food to folks in their communities so it's great you know it's a great win win forever everyone folks can't get out to get food for a variety of reasons  of those it's all the especially all the older adult transportation stopped running or covered and to a great extent any of this special trips are no longer going so lakewood rides has been delivering meals to those folks that used to come to the clements center for congregate meals no or lunch layman's dance lunch so you know i think there are there are other things that are happening around around the city actually that have been really innovative and thank you jean would you go back and talk a little bit more about the kids meals i think you said that there was an expansion to children's meals at schools which would should go into that a little bit  more sure i'm probably not the best person to talk to you about that so i want to make sure i get it straight for you all but there's been a waiver by the this is a joint effort with colorado department of education or the u s department of education and and doing several things right now you may have heard of this for the kids that are in school and doing in person learning there's certainly breakfast and lunch at most schools at least i live impacted schools or kids that are on a hybrid schedule on the second try to get this right on their second day of in school programing they take meals home for the other days that they wouldn't be in school at days of lunch and five days of breakfast and then the kids that are all doing remote learning at home there is a time block at each school where families go and pick up lunch and breakfasts so that will be a little easier now because people don't have to a lot the forms helpful happy to do that i think one of the things we'd like to do with a web site with the coalition is able to advertise and recruit for volunteers on a citywide basis that's that's the other thing you all can help i'll send you some information thank you and thank you for this update and for the work that you're doing jane and it's good to see you also you did a great job highlighting the jessica's schools food program which has been a big deal for a lot of families i just had a couple ofother questions if people want to get involved as a volunteer how should they e mail you or what's the best way for that that'd be great they can e mail me and i can send it out to the group you know and we'll try it our next meeting we we meet the first week in november so  the and then struggling to you know look for jobs or look for services or even find out where the food bank is in that's something that you're seeing and hearing no i that's gotten a little bit better since full library but we spend limited it was really tough for folks when the library was libraries weren't open and you may know some of them expanded their service so that folks could sit outside and get access to their internet from outside the building so that's helped a lot certainly you can call two one one which is united way and get forwarded to food banks near you hunger free colorado it's a great resource you can go online and or call hunger free and they continue to keep a list of all the food pantries and try their very best to keep that what food pantries are open and available and jeff company so you know that's that's a way for folks to do it what we find is most people have a phone of some sort a smartphone which is their whole communication right so as long as they have minutes and data they can access information so sometimes with a month are better than others for but i think some of those resources are really good and there are also you know just go into your food pantry much everybody knows most of the other resource is in town the action center a really great resource right here in lakewood all the churches are really helpful you know i think it's been really remarkable to see how that community has really stepped up to support their less sort of less fortunate you okay so i do not see any other hands up for council so i would just again thank you and thank you for all your work and the coalition as well please send in our gratitude it is refres hear so many people interested in trying to help and certainly want to give miss ruth or a shout out to who helps coordinate all of these different groups and does an incredible job on that and really making the lives better of so many in the community so we look forward to continuing to support your miss mission and see you move forward and really know anybody who's out there watching need please connect get in touch with one of us we'll certainly try to make sure that you're connected with some sort of resource this all started because we're far too great of a city anybody go without an we can we can truly make a difference so thank you jane well thanks for your time i appreciate it  doing the work you do ok so this is the public input portion of this so this is your opportunity to weigh in on this discussion about the presentation you just heard do you have any questions or comments about that be great again the phone number is one six nine nine nine zero zero nine one two eight webinar i d nine two eight eight two zero seven nine nine  nine seven you'll press pound and then star nine to request to speak star six two on mute and we'll get your three minutes going if you want to give us your name and address or name and ward and we'll start this portion so madam clerk if you please for a hosting this so graciously tonight i know with your history of gentrification that this is difficult for you to consider giving any resources to the homeless other than helping them to move out of the city so i wanted to just start by thanking you for that  i wanted to ask in today's day and age where beginning to suffer the serious impacts of global climate change and with cove it and the economic downturn i wanted to ask  considering or already engaged in activities to help teach people who are becoming impaired with their food source to preserve food i know that with the with the action center right behind my house i see a lot of people there there is a lot of food that goes to waste because it doesn't get preserved in time we certainly are throwing away a tremendous amount of food and as mister bieda pointed out these are a lot of people come into these debt very recently weren't insecure in their food and now they're becoming insecure so maybe we should be acting as a community and teaching ourselves how to go back to some of these old fashion trends where we were able to take these kinds of food items  preserve them maybe there could be groups with the churches that may already have kitchen resources and we could teach people while we're preserving these foods to make them more available to people that don't have the ability to cook and ok madam clerk anybody else with their hand  and hunger and lakewood also includes local farms so i want to make sure you understand that and i know mister brandt i think your question is a great one about preserving food it seems like we've had some conversations about that i think in this current time that we're in public health really is kind of frowned on us doing the h food as they call it kinds of things which are churches preparing food and distributing prepared food those kinds of things that members do but i think i think it's a great idea actually find someone who is willing to teach and probably one of the churches you're right most of them have commercial kitchens that that would be a great great thing for i i welcome that so thanks thanks for the ideas we'll take it back to the group all right well we appreciate you again thank you very much and we will certainly be in touch and get moved on to our next item tonight which is a presentation discussion update on the city's homeless efforts so i will turn this over to ms ms hodgson who is one of the city managers that was tasked with this as a priority by all the cities in the county and became i think the de facto ringleader of trying to solve this problem throughout the county and i've certainly done an incredible job and look forward to seeing how much that needle has been pushed certainly never enough as we all know this is quite tricky quite challenging so the floor is yours ok thank you good evening city council so this actually came from a request from you from city council to receive an update on the efforts toward homelessness in our community so this is really the intent of this presentation is to provide information and to help educate you on what's been happening to date so i'm really excited because we've got several guest speakers tonight and we're going to conduct this presentation in two different very distinct parts the first one will be around our regional partnerships and we have some folks from our leadership actually from jefferson county who will be given a presentation of kind of the broad view of the collaborations in our county and then we're going to drill down a little and talk specifically about our local efforts here in lakewood and what lakewood response is ben to on to the broader  jeffco efforts and how we're individually individually responding as a city and we really do work in harmony with the county it's a really special relationship where we work really well together and  county human services we're lucky to have mary on deck today also we have kat douglas who's been intimately involved in all of these efforts around the homeless population kat is the director of community and workforce development division in the county and finally kelly barker who's been on board about a year now she was hired by the county she's the regional homeless coordinator so the so you first again you're going to get a presentation from the county to hear the broad efforts by way of the whole county and then i'll introduce our team who will do the second part of the presentation so with that i or kelly or kat kat can you hear me ok cat can there's cat how about kelly can you hear me twenty minute very high level overview of what's happening throughout the county around coordination on homelessness issues and then joining me will jump in to lakewood  started basically in two thousand seven as just a small loose informal group of individuals nonprofit organizations some local government faith based providers what not kind of a group of individuals that came together and wanted to start to address this issue growing issue of homelessness in the county and start to come up with some solutions to address so and then in tw remained the same through the years and that's really to create a systemic response jeff kota prevents and ends homelessness where wherever possible and when it cannot be prevented ensures it's a rare brief and one time experience so we severe weather shelter network which is i know a local mom profit that serves basically the whole county and was developed about nine years ago and it's a faith based nonprofit and tey really came together as a result of the conversations that heading home to say yeah we really need to at least addressing provide a shelter for our residents there on how during severe weather weather nights and so on that solution as the navigation like you mentioned will be fully staffed within a month seven months navigators and navigators provide direct service to individuals in the county or in their respective what's happening and give share information problem solved keyes conference it's a really helpful meeting we also bring on trainings on we also have a collaborative workspace at lutheran hospital that lakewood was instrumental in securing that they donated free of charge to our navigation team fortunately it came online once covered head and so we really haven't been able to utilize that much but we we to sixty to seventy communities throughout the country and it's kind of a systematic way to create goals around reducing homelessness and understand by creating lists of who was actually experiencing homelessness in your community assigning makes making sure each person on that list is has a case manager or a caseworker assigned to them that can navigate them to housing so it's really a sytematic way to make sure no one slips through the cracks and that we understand so we're trying connect with different initiatives going on to get more people into housing and connect more of our residents with navigation we have the five objectives we have a couple of key results one and then by the end of the next phase we'll we'll have made some of the key results very measurable and identified the action steps under each one that will accomplish the folded into the work of the first three as well as they're very much a priority of all the work that i'm doing and so we'll kind of see what the participation looks like and may launch these other later on response system meaning that it's it's a system that's willing and able to serve all persons regardless of the barriers it assesses and prioritizes the most urgent needs and it provides immediately relief and stabilization were needed and then they tried appropriate professionals to work on a long term so it really functions so that it ensures that nobody all sort of cracks which is currently a major problem with our system that a lot of then working with existing programs to help support them to lower their barriers to access that's another we have a lot of programs serving the highest functioning populations and so that's another homelessness fairly more self explanatory and this could be more wide ranging so we're going to really assess what are those exact barriers i think we know that folks there's nowhere for someone to get a shower and jeff if they need to get a shower they want to go to a job interview they want to go to their mental health appointment or whatever people need somewhere to put their stuff in a secure place and maybe get a shower and so just basic simple and hygiene services need to be more accessible for one i think supportive employment opportunities that's another huge opportunity here crowe there's a number of fantastic programs that we can bring here to jeffco and and a lot of folks have employment history who've been out for a while for whatever reason usually health reasons and need some support to be to go back into the system and so we can bring those and then there's a lot of also  just recently actually probably tomorrow should be signed the ija with denver and so that basically will have a five room block through the end of the year for jeff residents to use the denver they call it activated after that point it's hard to predict again we're going to have to reassess what the need is at that point and then we're also in the process of drafting an idea with boulder they also have a different kind of setup but a similar program ho in both denver boulder as executed for ten or fifteen individuals so we hope that we won't have more than fifteen individuals with cobra that need housing through the end of the year that should be that should be knock sufficient have come a long way toward a coordinated response it's never been this planned and coordinated which really helps everyone in the long run so now we're gonna focus more in our own neighborhood look at our city and some of those efforts that are in partnership with the county so for the presentation this evening we have marked our reza he is one of the sergeants one of the cat who is a principal planner and she is the lead supervisor of the cvg program so this is i am i i'm really proud of the work that these folks have done it's an interesting partnership between the police department and our planning department and it works really well so with that we're gonna have a little transition from one powerpoint to another and as i've indicated i think last week we've got a couple of videos that we're department has done to address some of the homelessness issues and then we'll john and amy will be able to fill in some of the gaps and get a little more detailed in some of that john you wanna slide for direct resources at dealing with some of these issues specifically homelessness and mental health issues in the city and importantly city council was also involved in that and supportive of that for providing the financial backing for forming anyone missing the sound yeah there's no sound ok should we have a sound yeah we should john can you do something with the audio for some reason we're not getting any sound yeah i tried to pay someone give me subtitles but they didn't make it happen so i guess i would say we had you for like a second and then it went away yeah but here we go sure computer sound that might do the trick all right hold on now you might want to start over yeah well yeah you have to see more of me though so all right here we go me i'm one of the two sergeants for the community action team and i'm responsible with my partner sergeant for ensuring that all of our cat team members including our nine police agents and our six soon to be six civilian members have what they need to take care of you out there the cat team or a community action team is a group of police agents civilians and sergeants dedicated to finding innovative solutions to the problems that affect our community and their quality of life and that includes all members our community we want to improve the quality of life of our residents those who come to work here come directly out here and even those who ar homeless and are currently trying to find a place to survive in our city a cat person can be found under underpasses talking to the homeless they can be at the local hotel that's been having problems with crime rates working with the manager to try and find solutions to the problems they can be working between two neighbors who are struggling to get along or work together to remain peaceful with each other cat team members can be found on operator working with other units we've been working across the county previously doing homeless counts engaging in activities with other specialized units and generally working in any way where we can again going back to that quality of life these find a way to improve quality of life for everyone we're going to be there doing it homelessness is a big part of what we do but we also focus heavily on mental health we focus heavily on problem solving crime prevention we do a lot of work with our community as far as outreach efforts you'll find us we're the ones who are in charge of national night out every year we engage in working with our fire department when they do fire muster we attend a i overdose campaigns we work with our needle exchange programs othr things like that so we're you know we're really the swiss army knife of policing if yo want to think of it that way i think one thing that's neat about lakewood is that lakewood is a large area you know forty five square miles and every neighborhood in lakewood a little bit different and has different needs but what's needed about us being that swiss army knife of policing units is that we can help every neighborhood we can help every ward throughout the city up on colfax and maybe working with the high crime rates and the heavy homeless population that's affecting quality of life not only for the homeless people but all the other people that live in the city and use the parks out on green mountain it may be working with people on extensive car break ins and crime prevention efforts to reduce that it's working with our business partners and our business areas along the union corridor or the alameda corridor and down in south like what so i would tell each of our wards we're here for you when you need us we're here for what you need and if we don't have the answer we'll find out who will and we'll take care of much much more convincing was sound john thank you for taking care of that for us so let's give yu a little bit of a snapshot as far as our community action team again there there's a lot different things we do but but homelessness is certainly a focus we're obviously not the only  as well but really we recognized in the city as well as in the county that it's as much as we wanted to be able to solve all those problems and have our cat agents take care of those things we really needed some people to the could specialize in that and help them then get those resources that they need take advantage of those the things that are already out there and be able to successfully navigate that system so this coincided with the city and county leaders coming together and kind settling shortly one of the things that we participated in with some other agencies in the county was trying to get a better idea of the population that we're dealing with what's the what's the real scope of the of the issue as far as homelessness in the county and so by partnering with with other agencies in the county two thousand and nineteen was the first regional homeless count that we were able to participate in really get a good accurate picture of the extent of the problem in the region and again picture and then finally that's that kind of brings us up to where we are now really i think what we pride ourselves on here in lakewood is that it really has become a partnership working with the other departments within the city we work with the planning with public works  all seen that in the county and i know we've talked about some of the things we've done with the folks in the county but it also involves community organizations and other stakeholders throughout the community and really trying to involve them in coming  solutions for these things so with that i'll pass this on to john and let him talk a little bit more about some of these in  detail yeah hi john allen shared other sergeant of the community action team it's good to see everyone again we're going to begin with a navigator video that some of you may have seen but it's really good to see the navigators out in the field working alongside our our agents and the police agents that marc and i are fortunate enough to supervise so we'll go ahead and show that and then i'll kind of dip in to how we got to where we are and why it all matters t today so give me a second  resources knowledge connections and things like that that i can make in real time to help people what else can we help you with today homelessness is a community issue homelessness affects everybody and when we see people who are experiencing homelessness it s the community that kind of also bears an imprint on that and so when we can help people expensing homelessness we're also helping support the community as well is there one thing that we can help with this situation here  learn what they have to say because we know everyone has a story and then we go from there and how we can be a better resource how we can help those who are experiencing homelessness what will be more helpful for them to a lot of our homeless throughout the city for a number of years now so they're starting to get to know us but there's still you police across their chests and when you bring someone who's a civilian just comes you know a little softer and it's just it's just a nice approach for them to feel more comfortable and on top of that it just shows that we're willing to step out of those and some of those enforcement roles to really educate and really bring forth resources and you know try to be ahead of the curve curve and bring the bring those those better resources to i think it's important to know that the homeless police officers who are dedicated to helping the entire community but especially our homeless population and they don't have all the tools they need to do it successfully whereas our specialized civilians who have the training who have the experience between our two homeless navigators we have almost two decades  experience working directly with the homeless and providing services and when we can bing that in combination with the energy the drive to help that our agents have we can really make a difference so it sounds like a plan all right good to see  at all right so i can i can tell that video has been pretty well received and passed probably because we have amazing people who work here i mean i could tell you how proud marc and  the things that they've been able to do you know we're very fortunate to have them probably the most professional police officers you could ever encounter and to add a group that's just dedicated but brings a different approach is just so wonderful to this team that we built so i know many of you i presented the navigation model to you and we funded it but we thought we'd go over again a little bit more of how it came to be because i think came together and they really had that goal of identifying strategies to help those experiencing homelessness right we really sat down with the goal of let's move the needle in a positive way let's not talk about homelessness let's not just you  know pay respects to the situation let's really try to make a difference and so we were empowered and amy and i came together and we're very frtunate to work for an organization that really empowers its low level staff to go out there and make a difference and so we came we came together you know a very odd relationship right i've mentioned this before a city planner and a police sergeant working together and we spent many many days in a small conference room on the planning side just trying to figure out what to do and i remember amy and i had a conversation with boulder county's homeless navigator and she talked about not navigating i'm sure the coordinator and she talked about all the things she was  doing and we got off the call and we agreed we're like wait a minute we don't need we don't need more policy makers policy advisers we really need people boots on the ground we need to be down at the line level getting we need civilians  go with our cat agents and bring all the resources they know about right down the street level and so that's what we proposed and you know jefferson county actually i guess good work she is was the navigator under that seaway lc that we talked about earlier some of her funding came from that to work with families well what we know is in lakewood it's not just families right we have lots of homeless singles and and they work in partnership as kelly discussed with that larger group let's talk about the encouraging start we've said so keep in mind as we're talking about this francis was hired in march and then matt started in september so really we had one navigator for five of the six months we're discussing and now we have two so you can only imagine how this is going to improve we've had fourteen people stabilized with motel vouchers that the money for those vouchers is is in great part  actually getting into a lease and getting housed and that's huge that's that's transformative change that's something that we can really now see a difference for these families who now can raise their kids in a stable environment and maybe the kids will go to school and stay in school because they know that they know where they're coming home to every day they're not getting pushed around in a car from place to place that's people who now maybe will be able to get the alcohol treatment they need because they're stable and they're not living under a bridge huge and we're proud of it which really are because that special we had to reunited with supportive services and family in another state you know when we started this one thing we really tried to do is you know there's a history of cities if you remember salt lake during the olympics pushing their homeless out right that's not the way we work we only will help someone get to another place if we know we're putting them in a better place so we will talk about some success stories with that we just had another one tonight while we were waiting while kelly was presenting i had princess came back with gender parity they had just taken another gentleman who if you've ever met him he was the homeless joe me with the beard who was kind of in the area between i hop and like the runners are hysteria we got we're getting him back to iowa with family and we just get him on the bus tonight to iowa so that's what we're doing there that reunification with family three shelter placements three assisted with obtaining a housing vouchers so now that they have that voucher we can work on getting that long term yearly national homeless counterpoint time survey it relly lacks that comprehensive lens that we need one it's held in january and what do we know about homeless in january in lakewood there's a lot less of them there and there's a july right so that's one thing that was going against count for us two accounts one day a one day snapshot you're not going to see everyone who's homeless lakewood in one day right additionally it is only the literal homeless so if someone is couch surfing or they're paying their way in a motel and but they don't have more than a few days to pay they don't get counted as homeless but we know that a lot of our motels are housing homeless people who are literally scraping by on what they make either a day job day labor way we can we're no we're not going to be perfect but let's try to do better so we did that thirty day service provider survey that included hospitals schools mental health facilities the action center all these different and capture as many people w can that use services and that's important because one thing we learn is that there's a lot of people who don't live in lakewood who come to lakewood for services so we have to keep that in mind and then we did that week long street count right lakewood staff created planned and supported the count the amount of coolers we carried if you if you say the word cooler around amy or some of the others the amount of water we transported it because this was in the middle of  the summer i know amy's laughing right now i can't see her on the screen i guarantee you she's laughing so we supported the count over that week we had two hundred volunteers we went all the way frm what i like to tell my partners in westminster  the canteen was the lead law enforcement organization and we had an average of twenty eight officers from all major municipalities in am principal planner in the comprehensive planning and research division and then i also manage the community development block grant program for the city as well so as john said we've been working closely on all of these efforts for a number of years now and in order to be effective along with the navigators and and the strong partnerships that we have we also need to be able to respond to folks that are at risk of homelessness or experiencing homelessness through funding and resources so over the past couple of years we've worked really hard to leverage the available federal funding that we have and lcal partnerships a much as possible  in the amount of funds that we can actually allocate to specific services direct homeless services so we'll continue to allocate as much as we can while we pursue other funding sources to meet those needs earlier this year we also obtained a grant from the colorado health foundation the one hundred and seventy eight thousand six hundred thirty two dollars are helping to pay for our two homeless navigator positions as well as some needed equipment for that program as well that was a great award and then our cares act funds have done a lot of work a lot of great things over the last just a couple of months we have allocated just under four hundred and ninety thousand dollars for rent and utility assistance to the action center  just since may we continued to see rent as the biggest need in the community so far it's it's not going away rent assistance is absolutely crucial and it's truly keeping people housed and preventing eviction and homelessness so we will continue to do what we can to assist assist that need jeff go human services as kelly talked a little bit about lakewood partnered with them to help with the overall cost to manage and how is those partnership there we also directed funds to metro west housing solutions to assist their residents directly with rescue rent assistance and the thought there was that we wanted to provide those households with a with a streamlined and easy process to work directly with their property management company metro west housing solutions and really to reduce that large volume unprecedented volume that the action center is sensing right now with rent assistance so we're trying to be strategic in how we were allocating those funds and getting them to folks as quickly as possible i think i'm ready for the next sli and then we've also developed some really wonderful in kind partnerships for instance as sergeant alloush described earlier we were working with the county other municipalities and other local service providers last fall sergeant eleni kind of threw our hats in the ring and presented in front of lutheran hospital staff and a mini shark tank event that they were providing to grant an award of twenty thousand dollars to address homelessness they said bring us your homeless ideas and we'll see if we can find something for you up to twenty thousand dollars so we presented ridge medical campus for the navigators to use as a centralized workspace there they can work together coordinate regularly regularly cornett resources and organize trainings altogether to really again make this a regional model it's effective and efficient and unfortunately as kelly said coburn kind of threw a wrench in our plans to get them all together but someday they will be together and they will have a place to meet and then also once we were granted that office space the city golden stepped in and donated all of the furniture needed to house up to ten navigators we desks chairs it was it was amazing they were as kelly mentioned the city did join other municipal partners county nonprofit and housing developers to form a team for the permanent supportive housing toolkit program this is actually a really great oportunity and program that is funded through the division of housing it provides a series of six monthly to day very technical assistance and pure learning sessions that helps these teams develop and figure out how to develop and foster permanent supportive housing in their communities so we've been really working diligently in with with that team and the actual tool kit is over at this point but we are taking our ideas forward we're actively engaging with an architect to take a look permanent supportive housing site in jefferson county and we do plan to keep that team kind of close together and continue to work on those opportunities for lakewood and the county in general slide homelessness has been identified as a priority and funding has been approved for the navigator program so i won't go through the impressive list of accomplishments that sergeant ellis already presented i will touch on it though when i'm  with with this one slide just in the data that i have collected back again since may we have forty seven people that are forty seven households that have been provided rent assistan continue to work with those partners and really start to look at it opportunities where we can get that needed housing both permanent supportive housing as well as  entire gamut of housing that's needed transitional emergency and permanent supportive housing those are all needed in this community and then i just wanted to kind of finish this this piece by saying that every dollar that we have matters more now than it probably ever has and we know that homelessness is expensive it's estimated that it costs the community an average of forty thousand dollars per year per homeless person  i think it's really important to understand that in just in just six months that's six households have been housed and the city is already seen going from that forty thousand dollar figure with six households housed we have already seen a very strong return of investment on the funding that we are that we have put into these to these programs and to sergeant alicia's point we need to create policies programs that serve all of our citizens and again now more than ever we need to be investing in smart efficient and effective strategies that will not only benefit perhaps for generations a family experiencing homelessness so i think yeah let's talk about challenges and barriers because obviously we know homelessness is an issue and we know that we've seen an increase in the visible homeless and we know we've seen an increase in these homeless hoarders and this chronic homelessness that gets a lot of calls across each of your desks and it gets a lot of service requests to our desk and it gets a lot of tough conversations at your word meetings and at events and so it's important that we're honest and authentic about what we're facing and i think that that's key to this whole discussion tonight and we'll go over some barriers and we'll go over some successes and then we really do want to open up to a good discussion on this because we believe that's really key so we're all on the same page talk about challenges and barriers one thing lakewood police the cat team the whole city prides itself on is that quality of life for all right but it's a critical balance we have to remember that the homeless are human beings with an innate rights and work right i mean they're people and oftentimes we work with with the situation sometimes that that element can be forgotten or it can be pushed aside but we can't forget it and that's one thing on our team we really tried to do is remember who were serving here at the same time the needs and concerns of our larger community can't be overlooked one thing i like to say when we did our homeless survey we found out that about four hundred and sixty ih homeless people live in lakewood as of the time survey that's point three percent of lakewood population so one thing i like to mention is as we work on these issues we can't forget the ninety nine point seven percent of lakewood citizens who want to use their park safely who want to walk down the street who all these things so it's that balance right and how do we achieve that hard balance that each of you are expected to do as representatives right and so we'll we'll talk about that well first of all there's no simple solutions there is a simple solution you would be listening to me tonight we'd just be all copying it and we'd be going to bed early they really are and there's these legal limitations  recent court rulings when i started here fifteen years ago we had a really good set of panhandling ordinances you couldn't panhandle in a private parking lot you couldn't panhandle by an a t m you couldn't panhandle by an rtd stop and you could have panhandle in a way that impeded traffic right all really great ordinances well there was a court case that knocked them all out it was ours very similarly mirrored grand junction grand junction ordinance got unconstitutional and ours went with it other court rulings surrounding counties right i mean we have to look at no further than denver one thing we were getting ready to do an alliance staff we've been working on a collective set of recommended ordinance these issues and then denver's camping ban which had been upheld by the voters was swiftly challenged by one judge so now we're even dealing with things like what is the definition of camping and that's going through the courts right now we're watching it so these court rulings these the legalities of this continue to to mire us in kind of a struggle as we move forward and i know i've had conversations with you or you've had conversations with marker or any of us as we discuss this one thing we've seen more of lately move into lakewood a little bit is a defiance and a disregard for authority we've we've noticed that some of the homeless and i'm not characterizing all of them you remember some of them have really taken this kind of  difficult attitude with us where they say no i'm not going to do what you're asking or no i'm not going to i do not care about the people who are living in that house so that's something we've started to deal with it's changed in the last few years and we're trying to find way  now what i can tell you is home those who experience homelessness especially the chronic homeless classically it takes eight to nine outreach efforts before they'll consider even working with someone who offers them services so and then we've seen that with some something people working team members of marks an eye going out with madd princess aain and again and again we're actually out there daily i'm sure we'll talk about more spark tonight we're out more spark every day talking to them lack of resources you know shelters we still we don't have any specific emergency shelter right that's why we have that presentation of the severe weather shelter network there's nowhere in lakewood that i as a cat agent can say i'm taking you hre because you have nowhere to stay and you might freeze except for the hotel system that spits it out there's no brick and mortar that i walk up to housing this is everything from transitional housing to affordable housing i remember last time i presented  we got to listen and we had that discussion councilor goodwin was talking about affordable housing and what are we doing to to bring that forward but also permanent supportive housing you know amy sings permits affordable housing from the rooftops and and you know i'm it's so key because what it's saying is we know we can't just give someone an apartment and assume they're going to be ok we need to provide them with those wraparound services the counseling the addiction treatment all those things that's going to make them successful and that's why we're doing that too storage storage considers continues to be an issue storage is a difficult one though because we know some of our homeless hoarders who have storage units you would you wouldn't necessarily believe it but they have ten we one who has a ten foot by thirty foot storage unit just filled with more stuff the other stuff that you see on the street so balancing this and you know answers are complicated that comes to fact that no simple solutions mental and physical health we oftentimes we will find that we need to take someone on a mental health hold and that's a very high barrier that's when they're at literally in imminent danger to themselves or others and we've seen them get out in one to two hours hospital we had a case where we did that we took  health we were still on the scene when they got out and so that some of the difficulties the mental and physical health system we need to address substance addiction that's why i'm so excited for that lead program we presented on couple of weeks because much like the navigator program has changed the way we work with our homeless and opened up new doors that lead program should get there but we know that it's still an issue and we're not going to substance abuse overnight to give you an idea of kind of what you have seen and you know to be true in stats is so when we this is public homeless camps posted for cleanup by the city so what this is is when you call the cat team about a camp at worst park or  sixth and wards or th it was you name it we go out there and we post it for cleanup so that's where we take whatever our little yellow cards and post it we say you have seventy two hours to clean this if you don't we're going to come in and clean it up right thirteen when we first started posting we posted eight in that year thirty five in two thousand and fourteen now come down to the last couple of years one hundred and ten camps and twenty nineteen and year to date one hundred and six so we're definitely going to surpass the one and public camp postings so this is another good thing to bring up so we didn't generally track private postings and i'll go over those in a minute so here's a two month snapshot from august th to october fourteen and that time we posted thirty three camps for cleanup on public property what's important to note here is we've started tracking private property because private property we don't we don't responsibility for cleaning it up but one thing is cat we did a couple of years ago as we realized we need to try and help our private property owners try and help solve some of these these problems before they get to entrenched so what we do now is we have a green card tonight that green paperwork says instead of the yellow one that says you have seventy two hours you're on public property on the green one it says you're hereby notified you're on private property and that the private property can clean up your camp at any time and you're hereby requested to move within twenty four hours we've done nineteen of those postings  two months what makes private property more difficult is you have to find the property owner so on public property when a citizen says hey someone can't there's a big camp in the park we can go out and say we know that that's  lawful to be there after hours we're going to post it with private property we have to find out if it's if the private property owner knows and if they're willing to prosecute et cetera et cetera so there's a longer delay there all of this to say we'll and we'll get the questions there's definitely some challenges but i think what i want to end on for my piece is because i never believe to be that kind of a debbie downer is this we have been we have been gifted and  and i and amy we all feel blessed that we have an organization that supports this and is willing to let us do what we need to do to make things happen and were when i said failure is not an option that's really what i believe so even though we talk about all these barriers we ae still going out to morse park every day and talking to these folks we are still champing at a homeless person has in inherent worth and we cannot forget that that we're serving people and that we really need to raise up everyone and we still are not forgetting that our community relies on the police department the city to make sure they have a safe place to go and take their family and we're not giving up on that and we we can't it's just that's what we're here for so talking about why we're he what we're doing i mean i turn it back over to marc and he's going to discuss some of the hard fought successes we've had recently and we'll go through those here if you look the map on the left hand side of the screen you'll see some of the places where they would they would set up camp and they would occupy no one is up aviation park these were the folks on the right people familiar with the area probably saw there their camp at some point it was a petty large encampment kind of on the eastern side of the park and you get constant calls for service to to address the issues with the camp there finally got them move there then they moved down to the the underpass at about wadsworth where basically the entire the entire tunnel was taken up with all of their stuff and then eventually they they got cleared out of there and moved up to the the old subway at nineteen wadsworth and they were basically camped out next the old the dumpster enclosure that was there and by continually making contact with them by trying to establish relationship with them and then working with our homeless navigators we eventually figured out that  had friends and family in texas and what they really needed to do is to get back into that support network and get down there but it was gonna be a struggle because they had so much stuff and so many things that they were holding on to and then they also had other issues like there's a restraining what you see them carrying and get them under the bus after we you know after we contacted friends make sure it had a place to stay after me made sure that the services were gonna be in place for them when they got there it's not just simply a bus ticket and send them on their way it's to make sure that they're that they're to find that better quality of life when they get there we need to have the things in place to try and help help ensure that this is one that we felt really proud of because we'd been we've been dealing with them so consistently and over such a long period of time it was nice to see nice to see them turn things around and get to the position that they're able to to make that transition and get to a place where they're going to be more successful so this was one from a human standpoint it's nice to see that from a culture service standpoint that takes a lot resources from us obviously to a lot of a lot of time refocus to be dealing with those those constant calls you're getting about these very high profile camps when in reality it's it's two people and if we're able to identify and address those core issues for those two people then hopefully hopefully can keep them out of out of that position again and move forward so that they can they can be successful and we don't have to deal with this with these folks again we can redirect our resources for somebody else so this is one that we're  real proud of with these folks here are experiencing homelessness that are occupying the pavilions and i this case they were they basically set up tents and the two primary folks that were involved here who've been here for over a month and we're getting calls daily from the neighbors and we're trying to reach out to these folks and try and get them the help they need excuse me john and stacy will call me by name only here or first name only turns out they both have a pretty significant health issues and we're able to but again they're working with them we're able to eventually get them to to up to the hospital to be seen and eventually able to get them to let go of a lot of the stuff that they that they've been storing there constant nagging reminder of the problems in the park there again it's for us we recognize the frustration for the neighbors but at same time we're it's a long game for us it's something we need to focus on how can we just push him out of the park on the sidewalk related to solve that problem of it takes a little bit longer to get that get those things taken care of this was a good example of making some good progress on that things that he values we've been working with him very consistently over the lists probably last three four months and by working diligently with with our cat agents  with our homeless navigators we've got him down to i think we're down to about eight carts he started with twenty to twenty five somewhere in there so again just helping him to get rid some of those things to make sure that we can get that to happen but we've been seeing progress with that so again it's not it hasn't problem hasn't been solved but we're definitely seeing some progress being made so if you look at the picture of the pickup truck and it's one of three or four loads that's our one of our cat figure it's our services they need again this is one guy but we get multiple calls on him every day we have to you know we have to address those calls or service because it's concerning folks but again i think we're we're we're seeing some progress of some of these folks that we're willing to see that the city and the department really have taken a very serious stands on this and we really do see the value in devoting these kind of resources to deal with these sorts of problems so on that again thanks for  and letting us talk with you folks and again we like open up for discussion and try and address any questions concerns issues that you guys would like to raise thank you so much powerful presentation and certainly makes me proud in fact a citizen sent a text message just now to talk about how proud they are of everybody and what they're doing for someone council this is a little bit of a repeat you know we for the community so they know  we engage every quarter with all the cities in the county and in kind of go over these different things so i want to thank kelly and kat also and i hope you can stay around for some questions kind of struck me right off the bat fran kelly said the key barrier insufficient housing and service resources locally right certainly a challenge but stuff that we are working on and you know whether it's job training job programs affor housing it sounds like you've really covered all of that tonight and are really starting to make some serious inroads so i'm super excited about that no option there is not an option to give up and that certainly is meaningful but the compassion shown is is what lakewood is all about and i'll just close with this from my comments i stumbled on to brett on oak street and i thought that was an encampment of five or six individuals and that was all brett and i had a chance to have a nice conversation with them and the agents were on the phone with his mom while we were there and brett isn't from anywhere else brett grew up in north denver a has a story has the family had a life and this is now his life and so i just give you so muh credit for really digging in there and as many know it may not be fast enough and when we might be able to get to mood we may have five more come in and had a gal the other day say well you know i want him out of here ok know we'll certainly you know working with them and i got word that one of those camps were going to move and she swore they're going to go so they're just going to go to another part of the community i mean we don't necessarily have a place and we don't warehouse people to just say you're going here so those are my comments but our board is lit up so we're gonna have some some good conversation and questions and i'll start with  and down colfax primarily at the wal mart you know you know where they're at so first of all i really appreciate what you've done whenever i've called you have immediately called me back told me what you were doing about the situation and how you were working on it i very much appreciate the fact that you said you have to pay attention to the ninety seven point three percent whatever that was because because that's the pushback that i this in the limited capacity and i get disturbed just on a personal basis when i get a call saying i used to take the kids to moores park i don't anymore i now go to another park because they don't feel safe i do have some specific questions for this severe weather shelter what i was familiar with on that before because there was a place where  congregated in our area and i mean that in a good way where they knew it was a certain temperature and they went there and then they were there before the churches etc could pick them up and take them to where they where they go church so this year they will be just like in years past though plan on using the severe weather shelter network resources they need to register in advance and that's a one time only registration that one of a number of different providers one of them being an action center and then on the days that severe weather is activated so the temperatures thirty two degrees or putting all those folks on colfax because those those families they do not need to be on some of those hotels on colfax at all so i'm really grateful for that i noticed that archway housing was not  in any of these items and that got funding is that because it's not specifically i lakewood because i know they have services for homeless and we have a couple of them in our ward but i'm not sure which do you mean they're not in any of the items that got funded well you talk specific about metro west getting funding and you talked about some other places getting funding but i didn't see archway anywhere in there so for the strategically basically archway funding residents would probably go through the action center we knew that metro west has a pretty substantial amount of residents that are being housed in their properties so we felt like that was it made more sense to provide direct funding to them so that they wouldn't need to refer their their residents to the action center and again kind of reduce the volume that they were seeing for the action cent thank you and my last question because i know everybody's got a lot has this been as a navigator program has anybody else reached out to you to possibly replicate this i know i've talked to people in denver about it and say it's a great program but i don't know if we're a model so i did not know if you know if anybody else has reached out behind it i think i'm i predict that would happen sure one reason kelly is so vital and this is kind of the next step is we're going to kelly is going to be talking to various public groups right so if we have a chance to talk at the state level about this that's what we'll talk about that kind of thing so hopefully it's still the best kept secret around and eventually we'll get the flooded requests that was a very profound presentation and john you know you're one of my heroes staying thank you for what you're doing actually you're making miracles in people's lives i have a couple questions what is an average age of the homeless that are single and also are you finding many children on the street that whose parents are homeless and they're living on the street and my last question was recently i went to a meeting and one gentleman a meeting told me that denver police are instructed to send people w sure so in answer to your first question from our from the comprehensive count that we did this is where it's so nice to have this because it gives us more that data that we've so needed for so long so bieda the most overwhelming age for lakewood people experiencing homelessness is twenty five to sixty four so that's that would be considered just adults and that's sixty seven percent young adults so eighteen to twenty four is  seven percent and then children under eighteen is sixteen percent and then and then over that seniors as five percent so so again children sixteen percent young adults seven percent adults sixty seven percent seniors five percent one thing to keep in mind what we're what with children what we would be really concerned about is those households with only children so you're like fifteen year olds your twelve year olds together with no parents we surveyed none in lakewood zero percent so that's good news households with children was was eighty six percent but also unfortunately that child that age is hard to get to come in survey just because they're generally not connected with services your best luck is like a school if they have any area with school so to answer your question about denver you know that we don't have we collaborate better we can't just silo ourselves between denver and the suburbs anymore we have to we have to realize that people are moving back and forth i can tell you that from talking to the homeless directly a lot of them have moved out to the suburbs especially with covid going on and a lot of the civil unrest because they feel safer out here they've said denver's gotten weird as one guy put it and so and they feel they receive a better level of service out here from there you know from the police department and from others so you know everything that brings someone to want to live in our city is also what brings some homeless to stay in our city but no nothing specific we were denver sport has that as a policy currently by any stretch thank you q miss johnson would you do me a favor and take your hand down to you when you're you to all the presenters i know that we've already said thank you i just also want to thank you and i just i wish that every lakewood resident could watch th presentation because i feel like they would just be blown way way just the level care and respect and humanity and compassion and innovation and it's just really incredible i guess the first question is just i'm really glad to hear about everything planned for the emergency shelter network this winter just hearing how the program would work just i wonder  if there's any way that people could be given vouchers almost an advance that could be activated just during the weather network just because are you worried about people being able to get  to main street ministries in time or or is that not really  concern yeah i mean it's the severe weather shelter network is leading that so they designed this model i believe there thinking i mean i guess we know we're registering everyone up registering they are registering everyone in the once but not everyone that registers will request the voucher that evening there has to be some way for them to present and request and voucher i think they've toyed with the idea of doing so electronically or virtually but it's it's a little different difficult to do it all virtually i think the demand would first exceed the supply of motel rooms that way so and they also  they should test positive they're doing a rapid testing if they should test positive so if you're with a shelter network has a small number of medical vouchers set aside to house those folks and they'll be put in a spot in a designated motel probably get in a few out looking forward and addressing some of the barriers and kind of long term issues that we having in lakewood and in and jeff cohen that the first question is just e i guess just voicing a concern i'm just i'm worried about once the rental assistance kind of dries up and what you know once that funding dries up kind of what we're going to be able to do and i was wondering how much funding is left right now or if it's all used up and what i mean by that i know it's already been allocated out to the different agencies action center but has it all already been used and then kind of i and maybe no one this is probably the question everyone's working on is like what are we going to do was provided through the the impact grant that was with the i guess it was the county cares funds and then some of that rent assistance was also provided through   they are continuing to continuing to spend the additional funding that they have received from lakewood as well as all of the other that they have a longer period in which they can be used so that we're encouraging organizations that have different funding sources to use those at the end of this year so they're spending down a little bit slower the last thing i will say in terms of looking into the future we are watching very carefully there has there was actually  little over seven hundred thousand dollars in cdc funds and we are kind of holding onto that to see exactly what those needs are rent assistance is absolutely expected to be something that we will be responding to and once we once we kind of move forward with that process and and decide how those funds will be allocated we will be needing to bring that towards towards council because that will require another planning amendment like we did in may so more to come on on those funds great well that's really great to hear and you know i know that you all are looking ahead and planning and i just i don't know as much as you do about what's going on so i really appreciate that insight and it's also helpful for us i think because one of the main goals that we set as a council when covered head was just advocacy and trying to kind of lobby for dollars that we can get and leverage all of our relationship that we have to to work to get any additional funding okay my my last question right now is another kind of broad topic but i'm trying to learn and understand what the best practice is are is is having a homeless shelter an emergency a homeless shelter still one of the best practices and still one of the goals and if so is it in some of the plans that you mentioned and i i read a number of studies but i didn't actually read the one the draft that you mentioned and then just the support of service housing place for somebody to get out of the elements and feel safe that you know you really need to feel safe to be able to achieve any kind of goal or work you have to be in a feeling of safety i know and every answer is really complicated and it's like a puzzle and you have to have all the pieces to the puzzle and you know and then we've know affordable housing that's a major issue that we're dealing with and that jeff cote to open up a shelter but i know that that's not really a question for you as much as for my colleagues in all of the county commissioners and other cities but i just wanted to make sure that is still kind of what what shooting towards so that was really helpful thank you all aain so much for this incredible presentation and for the work that you do day in and day out amazing thank you bieda there thank you for your presentations tonight so i i'm an attorney and i did some training for covid to  represent people in arraignments in denver county for the denver municipal public defender and as you can imagine a lot of those people were homeless had mental health issues some of them couldn't even afford a five dollar bon had nobody to call if they needed help trying to get out of jail so one of my questions for you kind of revolves around how that works in lakewood how many arrests of homeless occur and whether whether people keep getting churned through the talked about mental health holds and that that sometimes they would only last a couple hours and sometimes you determine people are a danger to themselves or others and so i'd like you to address your protocol for determining when that's the case and if this is something  where you call paramedics every time how it could be that people are only on hold for a couple of hours and whether they get then charged with things protocol is also along those lines if there's any referrals for treatment and mental health treatment and then fin my understanding is that with the lakewood police department there there is some kind of incentive for advancement with regard to the number of arrests you make in a certain area and so i was wondering about if arrests homeless people count toward those quota for absolutely so i'm kind of going a little backwards since you as far as incentives for arrest there's no advancement procedure when i was promoted to sergeant there was no how many people have you arrested as part of that process what we do look at is is what kind of effect are we making in the community as far as if we have a high crime area are we helping address that and whether that be through arrests of people who are breaking into cars absolutely but homelessness is not one of those areas where we focus on arrest stats i can tell you that our chief is fully behind the cat team and he reviewed this this presentation and that presentation includes criminalizing homelessness does not solve homelessness fully believes that and agrees with that arresting we can't arrest our way out of the homeless problem that's not going to solve for anyone so i can tell you that first let's talk about the mental health piece that you just brought up so the the standard is is law enforcement officers are one of a very select group who can determine if someone is a danger to themselves or others place them on a mental health road the only other groups that can are practicing clinical social worker psychiatrist or people who work for j c base for example or doctors themselves but that's vested with us and the majority of those cases where we would do that are cases where someone has attempted to commit suicide or has threatened to commit suicide or made homicidal statements saying i feel like the voices in my head are telling me to go hurt someone in that kind of difficult cases that we deal with especially on the cat team are those cases where it's someone who's so mentally ill they're disconnected from reality but there's no real answer to the problem right it's like ok so they lierally  disconnected from reality and usually what ends up happening council woman is that they make it to the point where they're walking in traffic or they're there talking to people that aren't there and we end up taking them on a mental health road because they're mental illness has made themselves a danger to themselves simply because they cannot care for themselves in a meaningful fashion or they are paranoid to the point where they believe their neighbor is gassing their house and they're taking actions against that they're they're putting up  released and then going bak to your first question you might just touching that on that again the first piece of what you were oh the defense and five dollar bonds and what are we doing about this that's one area where i'm most proud and we're doing it differently so tourism mentioned how there was a restraining order with kansas and perry that's a very unique case because they they had a restraining order that was based on a domestic violence for a long time prior  they and every time they would be seen together they would get rearrested but that wasn't helping anything and so we actually went to the city attorneys and we talked to them about it they agreed can we get this restraining order modified to allow contact so they're not getting rearrested with new charges all the time for conduct that we know they're going to do anyway and they agreed and we were able to get them modified we will often deal with the fact as i'm sure you saw when you were doing these bond hearings you have people who experience homelessness who have fifteen twenty pending cases against them that's a huge barrier to getting housing right if you can't make it through your fifteen criminal cases how are you supposed to get anywhere you need to be so our team is really dedicated to dealing with those barriers we will go and that's where we can have such great input as we can go meet with the d a his office and say hey i know they have these ten cases but they've really started to show improvement finally would you be willing to compartmentalize those into one misdemeanor case and if and if they agree to some some terms with their we can give them the help would that be helpful that's what we're really trying to do now and that's why we're trying to be smarter about enforcement too because we know adding one more charge for being in the park after hours are open container doesn't help them move their way towards finding stable housing so really work we're kind we're recognizing there's times and places for enforcement as we talked about we're not going to forego public safety to the benefit of one person but there's times where kind of like we're doing it that lead program where we can forego the open container ticket if they're willing to work with us and we can forego some of these charges does that answer most your questions or is there anything else i can add well could you go into a little further specifically the protocol for determining that somebody is a mental health hold that they're a danger to themselves or other what is what is the protocol for determining that what's in the policy sure and i think that's something that if we need to discuss further that gets into a whole nother avenue of mental health work that's probably outside the scope of this study session  but i can at least give you the basics and always get back to you on what our policy is so suffice it to say in summary when we engage with someone who is exhibiting mental health system symptoms we are looking to see if they're an imminent danger to themselves or others and we look at a bunch different criteria have they made statements in support of that have they engage in activity in support of that like i said have they been walking in traffic or have they posted on their social media i won't see another day you know and  they're their mother calls in and says i read this i'm really nervous because my daughter's depressed how do we need to handle this do we look at the immediacy of and ultimately what we're trying to do is say ok is this the media that if we take no action they or another person will get hurt or could get hurt and tat's what we make that decision to hold with that understanding we're trying to get smarter about it that's why we have our correspondent right holds aren't always the answer sometimes it's out our co responder and one of our cat agents weekly and had our long sessions with her trying to get to a solution right because we know a hold isn't going to change anything so it's trying to do that so in answer to your question counselor as you said i think it's there's criteria we follow it's actually written in the statute what we can ad can't do we are very careful about when we use those holds because we treat them to the same level the standards of arrest because we're taking someone against their will so we're very careful that we do that in a way that we can support it through documentation but that's not always the answer and that's what our teams tried to change and say wait a minute can we do it differently because we know this cycle doesn't work can we get the mental health professionals into the field with us to start doing some field outreach in some field therapy sometimes you can't even get them in the door of a mental health facility so what can we do to kind of move that forward is that is that good for for now at least all i can say is wow you guys are doing such a great job and i really want to thank you for all you do it really makes a big difference and i would also echo what a lot of other counselors have said you've been very good about responding very quickly and letting us know what's going on you know in our wards so thank you thank you thank you there's just one thing i wish we could figure out how to do and i don't know vincent talked about a lot of families don't want their children around in parks where the homeless are because they're worried about the safety and like you said a lot of these people are just probably people down on their luck and are just as safe as grandma and grandpa that have the kids at the park but that's one thing i wish there was a magic wand that where we could put a sign on their face that says i'm safe come come say hi i know that said that's not possible but i think that's really the big concern is we don't know their status we don't know  they're violent or are they just big teddy bears and i wish there was a way we could do that so whenever you get a magic wand that's the thing i want you to do the other thing i would ask is what are you expecting in terms of when the cold weather arrives do you see a decrease in homelessness because i'm thinking maybe the i'll call them volunteer campers would that be the way to describe it might we we will we will be it will be interesting to see what happens this year though because i fear that cove and like i said sme of those realities in downtown may have changed that also we have to remember to co located sheltering is difficult right now to back it up so this year may be different than others i think what will be interesting to see is well two things one is what's what's the make p of who's remaining here how will that have changed and what do we do to support them and i can tell you for the first time in years well frankly ever the beautiful thing about this collaboration we've developed is we're part of the conversation now we're very fortunate to have cat and kelly call us and say can you talk about this with us because then we're part of that conversation we're able to tell input you know when you mentioned sheltering the families and stuff we had input on where they should look at the hotels you know that we never did so with this new group and where we're going i think to answer we will see we will see what the changes compared to years past we're fortunate to have the shelter system and then we're fortunate to have a good group because cat and i actually we will never forget this night when the bomb cyclone happened team ended up with a van and cat was on the phone and we were working until or eleven zero at night finding finding housing and getting people downtown so you have that same ingenuity that same safety net is there years past i just don't know what we're going to see in all honesty we'll definitely see a decrease as we always do but i don't know how substantial that increase will be thank you and then my third question would be with the covert influence on shelters i'm thinking a true shelter where people would be having rooms together kind of like is probably an improbability for this year at all working for an individual hotel rooms than they are than they would be necessarily in a in a group of people because you never know who has it and who doesn't so  city and county and state governments and federal governments it's certainly a challenge for elected officials too i think it's hard to have a good sense of what the needs are what resources are needed  and who to ask for and which will lead into some of my sort of comments but one question i have is i'm just wondering what kind of data we're tracking i know we got a little taste of that i think  and i'm kind curious i think because i think it's going to lead to my ultimate observation which is what i think council needs a little marching orders i think we need a sense what we need to be asking for what we need to be lobbying for for example i mean i i sat down with senator gardner earlier in the year and had an opportunity to talk to hm about ctg funds and we know that there are some restrictions on the way we utilize funds that's something that you know had i had that information at the time that might be something we could start having those conversations about and obviously lobbying i think is one element you know we have a representative  obviously you know that all i think is helpful so the kind of things that came to my mind is why you were talking was this sort of things like you know are we getting people signed up for food stamps with the county know are we getting well obviously there's lists for directly through our police department or are we i know the county operates a voucher system so we just supplementing their stuff or how does that work so what we've tried to do it's a delicate balance because the local police department is not a social so we have to find that balance right so we that's why our navigators are kind of the perfect angle for that so to your first point our navigators are the ones who know all about medicaid funding we're having our navigators help right so if we have a case we're working over we'll do it for the long term vouching for the severe weather shelter network battering that's still occurring through the county and through service agency partners because we need to make sure that they're plugged in and they have a role we don't want the police department or the city like with to try and take over or be in place of the action center or the jefferson county human services these groups because you know in the case of the action center and all these other agencies there's been good funding dollars that have gone to them to support just that so we have to make sure that we're not we're not subverting undercutting that so  answer to that is we what we did and what amy and this group and staff allowed us to do was say let's take our city bieda dollars let's show that we can address things quickly and be that first like two weeks if we need to and then let's see where we can turn it over from there now we've got longer than that especially bieda and luckily we can do that with kerry's dollars but we really kind of take as they come but we make sure that for the public face of it it still goes to those service agencies as it should because we don't think john what i would add is that as a county and as other city partners through this coordination one of the things i think we've really enhanced over the last couple of years is that coordination to make sure that we are leveraging the funds from the various sources appropriately including housing vouchers and motel vouchers so i think we're doing a much better job of that in earlier there was a sense along with the food calls that happen every week there's also a rental assistance call that happens every week that is an effort to coordinate all this and make sure that we're aligning everything properly and serving the community the best way we can thank you all for that and then i guess my last comment is sort of on the data thing but it's a little beyond once we have the data i think we need you know targets as a city but also the surrounding cities i think if we sort of have a  nato approach to this war we're all sort of sharing resources and i think if we all kind of know what that is and how we can be supportive of us and surrounding cities in the county and we have some sort target you know that's obviously something we can we can push for as a council but we can also work with our our our colleagues in other cities like our bad or wheat or or whatever to to help increase their resources we can all work together to  get get some dollars and one place so he can do some good and i know you know i don't know how i know i've seen other cities like fort collins i know they have an annual appropriation for example spending that helps support homelessness so that's the sort of thing that i'm looking at for lakewood i think would be helpful as making sure that we have some sort of set resources to help out with funding for vouchers or other supportive services that we can help with and be good to get a sense of how some of the other cities that are similarly designed similar plight how they might be doing things so we can learn from their experiences but appreciate all this there's a lot to chew on and i think certainly i think council i think will need to dig in more and learn more about this to really see how we can be helpful but if we can get any any more information on what our role could be to be better advocates for our community that would be mister abel then miss fred thank you mayor sergeant i don't have many questions and i don't have a whole lot to add except for one thing and that is that you and your team have taken the notion of service and protect your whole new level you've taken police work to a whole new level i can see and hear the pride in your voices in the pride in your imagine having to deal with it year after year after year so you're you're strong people and you deserve our our total respect not one of my concerns goes to that issue though the hidden homeless every time i talk to a principal in one of our high schools especially the alternate schools i hear about kids who are sixteen are we reaching out to principals and other school district officials to identify these folks and give them a hand up oh and there was a young man who my son was in high school he spent an awful lot of time staying overnight or two or three nights sometimes a week house and his father wouldn't let him love it live at home every time he would be found out after not after in the middle of the night some worry he shouldn't be sleeping between a couple of buildings they would take him home and it never did any good it made things worse so what do we do to identify those kids and how do they get help if they're along i can certainly just start and then others can chime in i will say that i think the navigators in the county overall work very closely with the jefferson county school district and the homeland the homeless please on program we're very well coordinated connected with them to identify exactly those kids services are tricky the school district could speak better to exactly the regulations that they have t follow but there are many programs that can help support those families and those students in finding the services that are most appropriate i will say this is a case that in denver we tend to find more resources and it's not that there aren't a lot of people here in jefferson county trying it's just that it is tricky serving those underage students that are do not  have older people that are taking care of them we do in the county we run programs that are around that employment and training piece so we can get kids that are experiencing homelessness and get them either reconnected to school or get them into training and housing programs that will support them kelly mentioned briefly the foster care program that is a partnership with foothills housing formerly jeffco housing and the casa program and human services and that's exactly what that is the kids who are emancipating out but are still under eighteen how do we support them with more permanent housing and training and education programs that will help them with employment so there's more that goes into it but i think you're accurate in that there  gap there and there's a lot of entities trying to resolve that and make sure that we don't lose hold of those kids and still give them a pathway to opportunity i will add operationally one of the hardest things is to track and count them we worked very hard with a comprehensive count to engage with the with the school district to count kids that were homeless but the problem is is the school district is a whole nother animal and they were very supportive of the idea but they had just gone through a database change and there's tons of privacy protection acts associated with kids especially kids under age and so navigating those that world is difficult if we do the count again i think we'll be more successful in getting engaged because like i said a lot of it was timing they went through an update on their system and it totally messed up with our count i think to cass point what i'm trying to say though that's why it's so important have a good safety net and that's why it's good that we have these navigators now and this group to kind of catch those kids as they come through our juvenile crimes team and our juvenile crime sergeant is very connected and is not afraid to call kat  who needs help and so that's been so good whether it's a kid that does have a parent we've had them come down and say hey dad's not great but he's all this kid's got but they're homeless can you help but also these kids and so i think that's the importance of having this group together so that we can say we because we often know that cops are the ones who find people after hours right they're the ones who get the call of the kids sitting on the stoop at in the morning no one knows why he's there so just having that avenue now where our agents can leave a voicemail for us because it's not child abuse right that's the problem is it's not criminal but they can at least leave a message and say hey i ran to this kid seemed like a good kid he was sleeping alone can you see if you can do anything that that's the setup that we've made so it's a very good thing to have it's so embedded in our emergency services because that's who usually finds them and so that that will bode well for us in the future franks thanks meeropol certainly most of the questions have been asked before and i think actually all of them have i just wanted to certainly think everybody who presented all the information and also w to thank the city manager who is always good at reminding us when the quarterly meetings are because much of the information that was covered tonight was covered in that last meeting so it gave me the opportunity to read all the reports and to be really compassion i have family members who suffer from hoarding and how respectfully that you treat those who those possessions may not seem valuable to some of us but they're very valuable to them i just want to thank you for treating everybody so respectfully and so kindly as you help them also shed some of those things that are keeping them from moving forward and finally had a lot of outreach from the community about how they can help many people don't feel comfortable volunteering and just wanted to remind people that in december early december colorado gives day a lot o our you know agencies like the action center of financial donations are very welcome if you've got an employer who does employee matching we know there's a huge need out in the community last time i campaigned in the first time i campaigned when you knock on doors and someone opens it you often can see the poverty that exists behind the door and so i think it's just important if you're of have financial means maybe find a way to to contribute to one of these agencies who could put those dollars to good use and i so mostly all just comments but thank you all for your time all right ok well that was very very great good questions comments good dialog there are two things i wanted to touch on real quick and one is this is also not only is this a jefferson county approach but the metro mayors have also taken this on in conjunction with the denver foundation and you mentioned the metro denver homeless initiative which there is a flex fund which i think we've got almost every city in metro mayors put something into that and that provides some rental assistance kind of a small gap that might be keeping somebody from being out on the street and so that is certainly available in this is this is a priority and prior to covid the governor actually hosted a roundtable on how the state could better engage so i think these conversations are going to continue to evolve and hopefully move forward and that's where us as policy makers can really work with our commissioners our state delegation and even the governor to say how can we all work together because this problem is in grand junction it's in brush it's in lakewood it's denver it's everywhere and so we need to continue to work that out i know coburn has been challenging for showers for folks and i also know that some cities have looked at locker programs or things where people can keep their stuff and keep it safe and secure and dry and i don't know you know we don't you know it's getting late we don't have to go completely into that but i know those are things that i hear from the community in bethlehem lutheran how to beautiful shower trailer and i think they've probably struggled with well probably not the best answer yet but i will say that the county and the cities have been working really hard on that i think what our emergency teams in the county have identified is that there is really only one shower truck for the entire metro denver area available and so the reality of carrying that is very slim and so what we've been exploring and kelly's been a little bit involved in this is looking at possibly recreation centers that would contract with us to basically lease out their shower space that i think we'll take a little bit more support from leadership throughout the cities and the county to make that possible there have been some rec centers that have expressed some interest but i think then they also have some other concerns right now we do have carried back dollars that we can use and we're ready to deploy but at this point we don't have a specific rec center that has said yes we're definitely in but we they understand that they're their neighbors but they get concerned about all the stuff that comes with being neighbors on the street and how can we better manage some married think that's something we've been having discussions we have that discussion i'm going back to mount air park where we have the community garden they were asking hey can we put some storage units on the side of our guarded and then i start to talk to the base what what's the plan if you have a bourbon outbreak associated with it right extra guard and what's the plan if you have needles there and quickly the gravity and the weight of that discussion kind of showed through right so we're trying to be smart about this we've been throwing around some ideas about one thing and again this is very kind of initial discussion but one thing we've liked about the severe weather shelter network is the way they were kind of mobile and how they did it make homeless service occupy one area because then you avoid detrimentally impacting that area so one thing we were considering is mobile storage where would it be that you could throw your backpack in there but but maybe you could throw a few things in and say can you say keep the safety for free for two weeks while i go to x or i do y i can keep the backpack on me but i want someone to store my valuables that's one thing we're discussing is like a mobile storage option where it wouldn't have an address so you avoid some of those those issues with congregating around or the you know the nimbyism associated with well i'm fine with that as long as it's not within two miles of my house kind of mentality so so that's really some of the stuff we're looking at right now i thank you and we do have a public input portion and so it looks like we have a couple folks in the queue so let's go ahead and do that madam clerk and for our folks who are going to speak please just give us your name address or ward and i'll start your three minutes and then i'll let you know when you have thirty seconds left first one is eric bran there can you hear me now yes sir hi first of all i have quite a number of people watching my re stream of your meeting and there were a number of people that wanted to speak the last time and you said that there was nobody in the queue and i know for a fact that people are dialing in and so maybe if the mayor would remind these people that they have to press star nine to raise their hand to speak maybe they didn't know to do that and if they get picked to speak that they have to press star six on mute themselves if you'd please remind people of that i would just like to recognize a woman in your community by the name of janet mattson janet mattson lives near esther street in colfax and out of her tiny little she feeds fifty to one hundred homeless people every single sunday and she has done it in that tiny little kitchen on the th street mall since two thousand and twelve every single week so i think you need to encourage and recognize these people in your community they're doing this because janet's kitchen has been feeding those people for eight years and she deserves that recognition i think you guys are doing perhaps better than some areas in our community but i don't want you to quote as you said pas yourselves on the back too much it was a very profound presentation and i like how you recognized that we need to pay attention to the ninety seven percent because what this really is about fundamentally is a band aid until we can move them out of somewhere else you spent a million and a half dollars to provide rental assistance to forty seven families and move three people out of the state brilliant you talk about the kids are scared no sweetheart the kids aren't scared that's called bad parenting the kids aren't scared they think it's novel they think it's fun bad parenting fix parents not your kids move along to where was a good question where are you moving alng to while you're moving them long to iowa to texas apparently we know from the homeless surveys that have been done now two times in a row by the denver university students law students the number one factor to ending homelessness happens to be stable housing i know that would seem obvious the number one factor to combating addiction stable housing thirty six the number one factor to long term mental health stability is stable housing why are you spending millions of dollars on bandaids do we have over one billion dollars in tax revenue on marijuana alone you could give every single homeless person in the state two thousand dollars a month out of the tax revenue for marijuana maybe we need to focus less effort on bandaids at a local level and more money on effort on redirecting marijuana revenue to combat homelessness that's your time thank you very much all right madam clerk and just to reiterate you phone number ended in three seven five one all right good evening three seven five one of you give us your name and address or name and word we'll get your three minutes started it looks like your muted so you'll have to mute yourself with star six madam clerk what were the last four digits i am here i'm here all right there you go good evening use your name and address reward and we'll get you started well i don't really have a name everyone calls in by  on the street there i don't really have an address i have no idea what ward i'm in but i'm sure i'm going to be moved to another ward soon i was you know i was just suggesting instead of spending all that money on all this  know navigation i call it i was thinking why don't you guys just put some gold gold wheels on my cardboard home and then i can just wheel down the street you'll never hear me again and i'll use those gold wheels probably to build a down pat i really appreciate you guys trying to solve this homeless problem but don't don't really help me unless it's gold and wheels from my all right color three four three seven you are up if you press star six to mute yourself give us your name and address or name and ward we'll get you started my name is frank sergio and i'd like to first start out with a lot of opportunity the lost food for food insecure people there's some there's got to be a way that you can have food insecure people get you get that food or or or  the last i heard was research i had read was that they had less than a fifty percent of approval rate of people that qualified so that needs to be looked in jeff bell is still not up to standards and denying people that were are approved that should be approved near point in time study you had one spot in the whole city where you had a point in time study last year ad that makes it as much as six miles for people to get for homeless people to go to and that's not happened you have a drastic undercount of homeless people in the city and i  having multiple places throughout i mean the whitlock center reparations center was the further south that jeffco had a point in time study that happens in late january so you can say you have an accurate count that that's that's just not true you have done if not thousands homeless not being counted one hundred at least hundreds and lakewood alone thank you very much well i appreciate again everybody's time and information and willingness to come together on this tough tough tough topic and look forward to continuing to  ok so we will start this evening at ward five and work our way down toward  one i would say hats off to dana for all the work that she did we had a mental health workshop this last week and lots of really good information and i'm really sorry that more people didn't attend but we had a great thing so hats off to dana for making that happen i guess the only thing i wanted to mention is that we had discussed the investigation that i had requested last week and i had stated  that the investigator who was chosen was chosen against the policies and procedures and apparently i've been told that that investigation is proceeding any way and thanks nothing sure okay ward one i'd like to say to call the presenters as well been a good discussion thank you you i would just like to remind everybody to please vote and to make sure that your ballot gets there just take it to the ballot box yourself thank you great thank you and to build off that there are i think six locations six or seven spread out throughout lakewood now to make it easy for you to drop those off a special shout out to two great longtime residents  celebrated big milestone birthdays last week mister gardner who's been active in the two creeks neighborhood for years turned ninety five years old and then a landmark body of the chicago hot dog stand on west col x turned ninety on friday we did a nice proclamation for her to honor that big day so want to give a shout out to them and next week will be our final reading on the budget so as you continue to have questions please get those in so we can make sure that we get you good solid answers and lend sell fr a good conversation going forward so that is all that i have miss hudson do you have anything ok all right well we are done now at ten twenty p m appreciate it we'll see you next week