Recording in progress. Welcome, everyone, to our, March 10 study session. We have three agenda items today. We are, going to hear from the, RPD on, persons experiencing homeless here in Rochester, then we'll hear a report from our housing advocates as well as the counties on unsheltered homelessness projects prioritization, and then we'll hear from public works on sidewalk gap fill prioritization. So, beautiful sunny day,
warm. I'm hoping to get out of here in maybe two hours. So administrators, Elms, anything to add? Nothing to add. Thank you. Alright. Well, let's, invite our RPD folks up to, give their presentation. House president of Thursday. The balance here. No. No. Get get a little I'll give it green. It's not green. It looks green. Check there. There we go. Good morning, everybody. Good morning, council president, council members, city administrator. Thank you for this opportunity. We were asked by city administrator Zelms to kind of, do an analysis and just kind of presentation on the work that we're doing.
We're working with people experiencing homeless in this community. I'm extremely proud of what the police department is doing. They're doing a tremendous amount of work. I brought some help today, captain John Turt and sergeant Greg Jardoe. I I'm just gonna do a quick introduction here and then let you hear from them, two of the people that are really on the front lines here, actively and daily, working with people experiencing homelessness in this community here. So what are we doing right now? Obviously, we're working with, all the service providers and entities, our partners with the county, any other partners that we want to partner up on solving this very complex issue.
Right now, we are providing, patrolling public spaces, and doing as much outreach as we possibly can. Again, encouraging people, or its resources. Right now, our patrol division is actually walking the skyways, interacting with people experiencing homelessness twice at night, every night, once at 11:00 and once roughly at about five in the morning. I will tell you that as we get into the springtime and our calls for service get a little bit more busy, that that's not a sustainable thing that we're gonna be able to continue to do. But as of right now, we are doing that as much as we can again in that concept of engagement
and encouragement, of people towards resources. And then, what we found today here and and, again, we really did a deep dive into the data to try to analyze what we're dealing with and how we're dealing with it and how much resources it's taking from Rochester PD. And again, we're here to present that data to you. Obviously, we're an organization that values service and compassion, and we're committed to doing that. We're committed to serving this community at the highest possible level. And as police chief, I could not be more proud of the men and women that put on this
uniform and continue to serve this community at the highest possible level, policing with their hearts and doing doing it compassionately, and respectfully with everybody that we deal with out on the street. And with that, I'm gonna turn it over and kinda let them get some details, in front of you. Great. Thank you, chief. Yep. Thanks, chief. Alright. So the next slide. Kind of overall, the the approach that the police department takes, and we've been doing this for kind of a long time, is we call this three e three e approach. So breaking into the three, we have educate, encourage, and enforce. Obviously, enforce being the last thing.
So, the team works really hard for the educational piece. You know, what are the resources available? They've educated themselves. They know the resources that are there so they can, pass that knowledge along to individuals. We have a homeless resource guides, a booklet that they're able to pass out and give to individuals. We incur or, educate those on what the city codes and ordinances are, and Skyway hours are an example, and then the camping ordinance is another thing that's used as kind of an educational tool. Obviously, then it's part of an encouragement as well as we kinda move along and continue
to have contacts with individuals. So, once again, reinforcing those local social services that are available, offering referrals. The officers have built a great deal of contacts within the community to even reach out to providers to even help, move referrals around and and, talk to providers. And that's really primarily the community, action team. Sergeant Joe leads that with the with the team that's, out there on a regular basis. If over the course and you guys are gonna see kinda how we go through the approach in addressing individuals on camps. If we do have to get to an enforcement level of that, it's done after there's been a significant amount of engagement that the officers have done
or attempted referrals and an encouragement over and over, and that's very kind of documented process. So if we reach the point for enforcement, we will be, kind of have a history with the individual that we've really tried to work with them very, very closely. So, if it escalates to the criminal justice system, we can say, you know, these were the opportunities we're kinda giving them. Alright. So just a this is just gonna kinda touch on just kind of the efforts to address concerns. You know, the areas of focus that the that, community action team tends to focus on is camp response, calls for service.
There's also another proactive side as well, which is the patrols that the chief just talked about that happened overnight. And we have a team the community action team starts at 6AM, and they are actually out, doing an additional patrol after 6AM. So, partnering with the the regular close and partners we're working with really out in the field, which we found is the most benefit, is the community outreach specialists, the ones from the county that have been helping us with, people in crisis. The patrol division, as the chief talked about, is an integral part of that response. The community action team really has hours from 6AM to 6PM.
And after that, the patrol division, besides handling other calls for service, will do those patrols twice a night, through the skyways. So there's a time that they dedicate to that. Investigations, of course, is helping us with with other things that might help us interface with individuals. The intelligence unit as well, ends up help preparing, a list of individuals we're having frequent contact with on a regular basis so we know how to focus some of our resources. School resource officers, when they're not on duty, they're providing some additional patrols in the downtown area and others to assist the community
action team as well. But I won't get into we'll go into some details. So this is the camper response process, and sir sergeant Gordeaux can actually speak to it in much much greater detail because he's living it on a on a daily basis. But and this will kinda lead into the next slide as far as the complexity of the time spent as far as we're as we address, camps. So very basic on the left. We received a complaint, comes through multiple sources, through dispatch, through individuals. The officers may be called directly just because of other, relationships they have. With that, it's documented,
and they go out and do a verification between RPD and, park operations. Once we get out there, there is an evaluation process they do on a reported camp. At that point, RPD or parks will do a post for the camp cleanup. They document it, send notifications to providers. You'll see a slide here later on that actually, through the GIS folks has helped us capture, that. With that, once they posted a camp, they do notify service providers in the community that this post or that this camp has been posted, its location, to offer them the opportunities to go out and provide some additional services.
The posting states that specific date and time that the camp needs to be removed. They'll coordinate RPD and ParksNOW has having to work together to, coordinate, potential cleanup, and then they will go out then on that deadline that was set to see what needs to be done as far as, cleanup, whether it's been abandoned or there's some additional kinda work that needs it done on sergeant Trudeau. I don't know if you had anything additional you wanted to share or reference this. No. The main thing to reference here is so this is the process for each camp that comes in. So you think about how long this process is and then multiply that by the number of camps we have per year.
But we're gonna jump to that slide right now, and sergeant Drew Can I can I ask a a clarifying question, captain or, sergeant? When what's the time frame when you, report the camp and when the service providers are contacted? How how short is that time frame? Fairly fairly quickly. So if we go out and we post a camp, say, for example, we post it today on Monday, and we go out and we post it for Wednesday or Thursday cleanup, we would then email and let them know we posted this camp. Here's who's out there if you'd like to make Hours.
Like, a few hours. Yeah. The same day. Okay. We try to do it relatively. So this is our total number of camps just to give you an idea then what we're talking about when it comes to cleaning up the process. So we start keeping track about April 2023. We just needed to feed where we're at. If anybody remembers back, we had camps everywhere, very large in size, a lot of people at each one of them. So we, started keeping track kinda where they were and see kinda how we were moving forward. And then from that year so when we started in April 2023, we ended up with a 39 camps that year from April until the end of
the year. Then we were able the next year, we moved it, and we were able to reduce the entire year of the next year with a 15. That was critical where we got the ordinance that helped us out. What we're able to use, that was a big tool for us. We were able to get people to move along and and to keep the size of the camps reduced. A big struggle we had. If you remember, some of the camps were very large in town. You work with an individual, they try to move the camp, they would literally move the camp across the street and it would take them all day. The ordinance really gave us the the, teeth we needed to help people understand. You you can have the camp.
What we do is then reduce your size, keep mobile, and then that allowed, for one, for what people to move quicker, easier, and they were we were able to get more people to accept resources actually in the end of it. So that was a kind of a critical win for us there. But we also were able to reduce our size because even though we had, as I said, a 15 versus a 39, we had those 39. What we called a camp, we called a camp. Well, a camp then, as you remember, if you saw some of them, there could have been seven tens with 15 people. Well, that counted as a camp.
Now we typically see more of a tent with one or two people, but we didn't we weren't tracking it by tent. So the that number would actually be greater than it was. So it's really come a long way for us, and I think a lot of people that have citizens have talked to me about is have asked how we were able to make a difference. I said that was one of the big things we were able to do. Can can I ask a clarifying question about the previous Go ahead, council member. Yeah. The color coding of the map, can you explain that, the previous slide? Sure. So what this we do is,
this is a map that gives you an idea of where all the camps were located. So with the ones that are grayed out are camps that have have been cleaned up or moved. The ones that are red are active camps. What is yellow is active and asked to move. So our red is active and not asked to move. This is for example, we have somebody. We know they're out there. They keep it very small, very clean, minimal. They're in a spot, and we don't get complaints. So we try to work with them as much as we can. As when we asked for the ordinance, we're not going out there to criminalize and make people don't have a place to
live, make their lives miserable. We're trying to be reasonable with what we do. So that's what we have. That's the different colors. So, yeah, we'd have a lot of them in the gray. So when you understand the gray, many of them parks will be involved. It'll help us clean up. Some are on private property, so then it's on the property owner to pay for any cleanup removal debris. Other times, we'd get cooperation where people actually will remove and move it all themselves. Or if it's a small amount, sometimes we just pick it up ourselves. The police department, we don't call for help. Any other questions at this point?
Council member, go ahead. Just a quick question. I mean, would sorry. Would one way to interpret this map as well-being that people are moving farther and farther out of the core, like, since we we see those colors on the edges of the map? Really, it's it's a variety. They don't we haven't found any moving farther. If you were to actually have a full aerial map, you would see it's pretty much follows, wooded lines, waterways where the what's they hit, and it's really what those pathways. It's, Bear Creek in north to south, and you got the river, Zumbro. That's really where we find a lot of them,
wooded areas. Greg, was there anything specific as far as this slide that you wanted to address? You may have kind of touched on it already. So Yeah. No. That was just, behaviors that were taking place within the downtown area. So we put together we'll kinda touch on it during the summer. And then also during this holiday shopping season, we kinda had a more focused, campaign, working downtown. So high police presence, skyways, parking ramps, the Peace Plaza area, or other locations that we know are frequented. We were providing that, continuous continuous patrol. So during the summer,
which was kind of more of your, like, Memorial Day, Labor Day type period, we were having bee patrols that were, six to seven days a week that were down there. There was twenty two hundred staff hours that were put in doing the patrol line. So it was about $37,000 in overtime for us. Additionally, to help is, the city contracted with a security company to have, security patrols within the parking facilities as well. And so they help supplement and provide more coverage than in the the evenings and
stuff when RPD doesn't have as much time to patrol. Downtown winter safe zone. So this was only just a fourteen day period that was kinda leave leading up to Christmas. This, kinda touches on some of the contacts that we had, as far as 233 contacts with people experiencing homeless. Seventy two trespass warnings were issued. There were 38 citations. 664 staff hours, that is just encompasses the number of hours of staff that were there, not necessarily all contacts with individuals. Calls for service data. Right. So we took a look at,
a couple different months to kinda see where we're at. We, so January through February, we had, 861 incidents of, people experience homelessness. So that's what we dealt with. So that's about as we have some people causing, more disturbances than others. And of that, we found that 223 is the number of contacts with our 10 most contacted. So this total number of 861 incidents incorporated about a total of 200 people is what the total number was. And the top 10 out of 200 were 223% or 223,
which is, as you can figure that out, it's about 25% of our context. So it's quite a few. A 47 instances. Again, just with those those 10 persons. K. So we're gonna gonna go to the Council member Palmer, go ahead. On on the screen, you're telling me that that 10 people have 223 contacts in January. So how do you work with the county with these 10 people? Are they are they with you when you're doing this? Are they encouraging these people to change their behavior? What how's your response with the county on this? That's where, it's usually, for the most part,
it's the officers that are out there right now. We, if we contact them, we can give a call to the county to see if somebody's available to come out. It's not the most effective right now. We get some of it, but it's just, I believe, probably limited staffing. But if a fourth of your calls are done by 10 people and and supposedly the county is helping out, It it seems odd to me that they're not dealing with these 10 people and moving them along or helping them out get services. That we that's really what we need, is somebody to be right there with us.
With those that we have found success, that's where we get success is these difficult persons usually are service resistant. They have mental health. They have other issues where, you you know, they're not gonna come to an office to an appointment. They don't even know what day of the week it is, and for them to keep track or try to attend an appointment is very unlikely. So we do have success is when we do have people that can come with for an example is our DART program. They are the drug alcohol cover team. They've that's been a tremendous winner for us because they have people who are constantly
responding out, getting people, getting them to treatment, getting them help that day right there. That that that's huge. I mean, it's disappointing that that the county's not helping us more with that. And I remember getting calls on on people kicking holes in walls. Is this one of the 10 people kicking holes in walls in the Skyway? Yes. That was one of the person. He was actually on the top 10. Now we actually have done this two months now and found very similar. We did it in December and then January looking at the calls, and we found very similar the top 10 persons, the amount of calls, and the amount of citations or crime that would be committed from them,
to which now we're working closely with the city and county attorney's office and mental health providers and the county to help address those people. Are are you having help with the judges? Are they I mean, I'm assuming some citation has been written at some point? Yes. We're that part, it's hard to determine where we're getting, with the judges how much help. We'll some we've had, I believe, some there, some level of commitments taking place now, which is good, for some persons. And then it's been helpful to really have all of the attorneys in the loop
of what's taking place on a day to day basis. They'll see reports come through, but for us to be able to meet with them and say, this person has done this amount of damage and these reports have been able to really point it out to them. That's been successful. We don't And you mentioned the word commitment. Is is that as a a Olmstead County, attorney, or is that a city or Rochester Attorney doing that commitment? That, I believe, is I would have to be guessing at that. I think it's the county, but, that's is it the county? Council president, I can address that if you want.
Council council member Palmer, council members, members of the public, It is the Olmstead County Attorney's Office that makes decisions, with medical input on commitment matters. And are we committing are they committing people now? Because I my understanding a year ago, they weren't committing people. Well, I would I would imagine it it's certainly more nuanced than that. Certainly, they were doing commitments generally last year. Each case is individual. Of course, you need the medical, documentation and support and, in order to pursue a commitment. Commitment is considered in appropriate circumstances.
At least one of the individuals, referenced, was recently, committed, but that's also, no perfect answer for these situations either. There are huge gaps within the commitment system itself. But certainly to your point, it is one of the, tools, one of the considerations, that needs to be reviewed in these cases where mental health is a significant issue. I've got one more question. So two years ago, we had three people dying in tents and and parks. Last year, do we have anybody dying in parks and tents?
We have I not in a tent though. No. I I believe we did have one that I can think of. I think it was last year. Okay. Thank you. I know, council member Fredericks has a question, but I I just wanted to follow-up on one line of questioning that council member Palmer took. So just to clarify, so with these most contacted individuals, there is some kind of work that the county does or doesn't do. Can you clarify where that's at?
I mean, obviously, that's the first, door that they would go in for help. So are we getting the service that we need from the county? I I think that's part of the message here today is, there's room for improvement. And quite frankly, we we're here kind of from an educational standpoint of just kind of sharing our experience. So I think there's room for improvement on all fronts, including working with county, working with DART and social services, the court systems commitments. I'd be remiss if I didn't say that, there there is room for improvement here. With that said,
you know, the police officers are really good at handling calls for service, whatever it is, trespassing, theft, whatever infraction occurred. And they're gonna handle that in the moment on the street, whether that's issuing a citation or whatnot, or remove the person from the trespass property. And then the county gets the notification, hey. We had contact with so and so again. We just recently started kinda tracking and and saw some of these numbers as we dove down into these numbers. And quite frankly, they are a little bit shocking and disturbing. Again, that's part of our message here today is Rochester Police Department is on the front
lines, and we feel like we're on the front lines ourselves. We want help. We need help, and we need help with the most difficult people, the the hardest to reach. That's who we're dealing with. I'm sure the county is doing wonderful things, and they're working with people and and all that. But what what I'm here to say is is to paint this picture for you you that we're dealing with the most difficult population. And what we're doing is not sustainable, and we need some help. And so we need to make our kind of priorities the community's priorities,
and it's gotta be a community based effort because we can't do it alone. And and add to that that with what the county do, if the command the county had a caseload of persons to address these service resistant people, you would have to greatly reduce that social worker's capacity. Keep that in mind. Difficulty and this intense would greatly reduce the ability they have to do the job they have to do. So right now, if they have a lot of people in our client load, that's probably not even feasible to do. So very difficult. It's time intensive. But that is what it will take to deal with the,
you know, the 10 most frequent or 20, you know, most frequent people is is really kind of a case or case work mentality of that's our client, that's our laser focus, and that's who we're going to help every single day. And these guys have have really dabbled into the social work world, to be quite frank with you, and they've got incredible stories of buying people's shoes so that they can work on construction site. They they've got incredible stories of getting, people jobs. There are success stories out there, and and those success stories are made possible when we're hand in hand with social
workers out there, working side by side together on the street on a frontline basis. That's that's the direction we're we're headed or we wanna get to. And we do have a pilot project that we'll be testing here where we're gonna be hiring back a retired social worker, and she's going to be Rochester PD's kind of service navigator. We're gonna pilot test this. And her sole job is, hey, make our priority a community based priority and help us with this. Kinda get those services working with us alongside us on the front lines.
Council member Friedrich. Were you gentlemen able to get through your whole presentation? Did you have more you wanted to do yet? One more slide. Yeah. Why don't you go ahead and then I'll we kind of rapid fired you there, so I want to let you finish. It's your rights to do. So I'm not going to lie. This slide was absolutely shocking to me as Chief, and it should be shocking to you as Council members. Again, we just started digging into the data. And one of the questions we asked is, well, how much time and effort are we really spending on this? And what does it look like the last couple of years? And if you see that,
and you divide out the hours, in 2024, we spent twenty eight thousand eight hundred and twenty seven hours of time on people experience. That's just on people experience. You divide that out, that's 13 FTEs. You multiply it out by salaries. We're spending about 1.2, 1 point 3 million dollars. We're on on pace next year or this year, excuse me, in 2025 to probably be able to have that $1,500,000 in wages alone, and that's just the cost to Rochester PD. And as I look at this this increase of FTE headcount and these number of
hours that it is taking from the police department, I'm looking at this and going, well, we're still trending upwards here, and this is not sustainable moving forward for us as an organization. The CAT team, the community action team has multiple, multiple jobs other than just dealing with homeless in this community. And quite frankly, I might as well just rename them a homeless outreach team, a hot team, which other PDs have, because that's all they do pertainer is is this, and they've had to focus a lot of their attention. Very proud of them. They've gotten very good at it and still dealing with it very compassionately.
But, as I look at this across the board and the resources that this is taking from the police department, I do have concerns moving forward here. And again, I do believe the answer is this community root cause based analysis, case of work, laser focus, pilot project that we're going to try to assemble and get off the ground here. Thank you, chief. Council member Fredericks. Thank you. First of all, I've had the pleasure of working directly with all of you out in the field, and your team does an amazing job of what they do. We're very fortunate as a community to have the people we have in your positions,
including your force. So I just wanted to say that first of all. Growing up, I experienced homelessness for better than a half year with my family, and I'm sensitive to homelessness. There's there's things that I do that I don't need to go under right now in that community, and I've dealt directly with the community as officer Jerneau Jerdau knows real well. I dealt with him directly, thirteen years ago in this community for a period of three years in in properties that we we own and tried to do some things and made some changes and so on. I don't need to go down that rabbit hole.
But first of all, I I just wanna ask you, how many interactions or how many infractions is really what I wanna say? How many times do does a said person act out before they're arrested? Depends on arrest would be citation. Yes. So if it depends what it is. If it's a a trespass and they've been previously trespassed and we have a complainant who would like the citation issued, they get a ticket. Yep. So it's complaint based. If we're in the parking ramps or the skyways, for the most part, most people are usually going to receive a citation.
The times they may not or we have individuals we'll come across. Maybe they'll come across and we're able to talk to them or get somewhere, and we have a good conversation. You're starting to get them to accept maybe some resources and help, and you actually getting somewhere with them as a person. We're not gonna give them a ticket that day. We're trying to get them help. What we really want is to get people help. Giving people tickets over and over doesn't change their circumstances. So our ultimate goal is to get them help. Sometimes, though, the citations do help because that what is what will get them noticed in the system. How often do you find they wanna receive help?
Varies on the person. It really does. A lot of times because my experience is a lot of, lot of the times that I've really, really tried to help, they're not willing to take it, and your and your and your hands are tied. You guys know that better than anybody. And I just you know, you guys mentioned it's costing you 1,500,000.0 in wages. What's it costing the private citizens? What's it costing the businesses? I know firsthand serious things that had to be done that it cost, you know, $30,000.40000 dollars 50 thousand dollars just to fix problems. So, you know, that's just your cost.
There's a cost, you know. So that just leads to the next thing. What I'm really working up to is what can we do to help you. Again, as I said earlier, really, this is just putting it on record, matter of fact, and saying we can't do it alone. We need some help. I hope that this, this presentation today will spur, that room for improvement as I talked about earlier, bringing people to the table. We we do want and need both city representation and county representation at the table. And, again, support for the pilot project, we'll see how that works. But it it's about communication in this city that this is not just a Rochester
problem. It's not just a Rochester PD problem. This is a community based problem. And we have to problem. We have to attack it from that front. We have to attack it from that front. I agree. Council member Doreen? Yeah. I have a few questions. I'm gonna it's gonna be kind of a a smattershot. I hope you guys don't mind with that. Could you go back one slide for me? Can you, talk a little bit about the varying types of calls for service that you get? So I understand property damage. I understand trespassing. Do you get calls just because someone is uncomfortable because they see a homeless person? We we experience the wide gamut. Sometimes it's people passed out intoxicated Sure.
With syringes, that are passed out in the skyways in the in the walkways. It's it's a wide, gamut. Sometimes it's theft. It's trespassing. Last summer, we experienced, some homeless people just grabbed food off of plates, off of people that were dining on the street. A lady was punched in the face. I mean, it's really hard to quantify, what I mean, I could probably break all those down for you if you want them, but, it's hard to quantify it up here for you. Yeah. What I'm what I'm what I'm wondering is through through my work as well, I have interactions with the homeless community quite often.
I probably can name the 10 individuals who make up the most, who you get most called about. And I wonder how many people, make a call for service because of the stories of the 10. Right? So I am concerned that we are labeling a community who's really struggling, who's really looking for help, who's looking for assistance as just those 10 individuals. And that makes me uncomfortable. You You probably aren't surprised to hear that from me as someone who also stood in opposition to the camping ordinance.
My second question is, I understand the need and and for implementation of the ord ordinance. What happens when you show up and you tell someone to move along and there's literally nowhere in this community for them to go? First question I can probably I'll start with that one is if somebody calls and it's a call about somebody that is just homeless and they're not actively doing anything, our officers aren't gonna create a call. That's good. Yeah. We're not going to. If it if they are not doing it, if there's no read for us no need for us to contact them,
if there's not an actual legitimate law enforcement, we're not at that point, that's just a person being a person. We don't we're not gonna treat it any different. So most of these things would be any kind of call that we get that's usually trespass, theft, damage prop it could be domestic related. It could be a person in Christ. It could be anything that tracks to the call. So it's any type of call. But, typically, it's not a matter of just because somebody sees a homeless person that calls because we're gonna be like, is there a reason for the police to respond to that? And if no, we're not going to. K. Again, where where where do we when we ask people to move on,
where do we expect them to go if we don't have the resources in this community to adequately provide for for those who are experiencing homelessness? I don't have the, the overflow shelter numbers, but I don't believe, that they've turned too many people away very often if at all this winter. So when we ask them to go, part of our job and we work directly with dispatch, and they tell us when the warming shelter is full, and then they go to the overflow, then the overflow opens or whatnot. So when we ask them to move, that's where they go, and they have that place to go. Yeah.
I I appreciate that. I'm just a little confused because in the next presentation, we're going to hear that the the warming center or the overflow center has been at or above capacity numerous times over the past few months. Right? So, again, I'm just concerned about where where folks are going. Just one more question. What I what I and I really appreciate the work that you do. Please I I understand that that you are put in a very difficult situation, and I I appreciate all the efforts that you make. What I heard, and I just wanna make sure I heard you correctly,
is that where we can be most helpful to you is helping to be a part of a coalition who's talking about intervention and prevention. Is that correct? I think, where you could help us most is by, helping us to get the right stakeholders to the table, and then we've gotta work the problem. And the problem's gotta be laser focused case work on on the the the most frequent offenders. Let me let me go back to your previous question because I think this is, a valid point here,
is as I said earlier that we're we're walking the skyways twice a night every single night, and then the officers send command staff a sit rep saying, hey. We had contact with this person, this person, this person in the skyway. They're having contact with maybe five or six people a night, and we're starting to try to track that of who we're having contact with. What I can tell you is on the very, very, very cold nights when it was minus 30 or whatnot, and there were several days of that, our contact rate dropped down to zero. So they went somewhere. I don't I can't tell you where they go,
but they chose to go somewhere else. And they weren't and and I and it was interesting that the SIP reps were zero zero zeros across the board on the coldest nights. So it tells me they went somewhere. And when it's important, they can make that positive choice of going somewhere, rather than kind of being where they shouldn't be. So Could I ask one more question? I just have one more follow-up that popped in my head. And I I appreciate that knowledge too, chief. I'm so demographics of this population, we're gonna see some numbers from, RPS that are quite disturbing in this next presentation as well about,
young people who are at risk to experiencing homelessness. Are you getting many calls about youth who are experiencing homelessness as a police force, or are we talking mostly adults? We are talking mostly adults. We are not getting a lot of youth calls for service. Youth is a is a different, is a different game, and we would work diligently and extra hard for youth that are experiencing homelessness out there. And I and I trust that that was the case. I just thought that was important for for public knowledge as well. Okay. So I have, first, Wahl,
Keane, then Miller. So, council member Wahl, go ahead. Thank you. My, question is on this slide of, those, with whom you have most contact. They get four a hunt about four well, not about 14.7 trespass incidents in a month, which is every other day. How do you fight discouragement, when you know that it's going to be the same people, and and they get 14.7 a month? It is equally discouraging to us as well, sir. Again, I think that's where the room for improvement is.
If there is a continuation of behavior and negative behavior, there does need to be consequences, and that's where I think there's room for improvement in the courts. Thank you. Council member Keane. Yeah. Hey. Thanks. It I should stay right off the top. It's it's sort of bothersome to me that when we're going to have a discussion on people experiencing homelessness, we start out with the police department. It shouldn't be that way, but it probably has to be that way because we're the city and our main touch point for homelessness is with our police force. But the community, the community's perspective and this is much larger.
And I think that's good that we're going to take a different lens in the next presentation and look at housing. But again, just it's just something that we I don't want that to be left with the community that when we want to talk about people experience homeless, we start with our police department because I I don't think that's where we start. And I really appreciate this idea of data driven. And there's a couple of things here that, again, I think you've kind of used the data to kind of put us on these perspectives of this idea of like I've heard other things from the county before, and they're they're actually fairly, really good data where we'd say we'd have a census in one year of 230
people in the streets, and we'd have a similar census a year later, but we'd only have about 20 or 30 of the same people. And and that led me to believe it didn't mean we have less of a problem, but we have a rotating sort of thing. And then we have what I refer to right or wrong as a hardcore contingent. And maybe that's what you're pointing out to me with some of your statistics. We got into them today and talking about them and led right away to can they be committed? But that didn't ring true to me because I have this other view of this. This is, Sergeant Giroux used the term surface resistant.
But it's not that they're they should be committed based on mental health things. It's they want to be where they're at. And I want to see if if if I if I was left with the wrong impression on our discussion on commitment and judge civil commitment and judges or if that's an accurate way of picturing these more hardcore cases that our police are working with. I speak. Okay. As far as the commitment part, that's a very, very small percentage of people that would reach that level. And when you say service resistant, that's where we struggle is these these people are struggling out there.
They have been in their world. We get to know them very well. They'll tell me their life stories. They've been thrown away by everybody to include their own families. They have lost trust in the system. Everybody, they don't believe anybody can help them at this point. That's why it takes the time after time going back to them and back to them. You first thing you have to do is earn their trust that you are actually gonna help them get somewhere. And that's where we have found success is these multiple contacts, learning their stories at our campuses. Well, we like this. Chief said, we we hope try to find them jobs.
We buy a guy a pair of boots to get him to work. We've driven a guy to work. We go out and we check up on them. That's what they need is the intense somebody building that trust back into them. It is that's where we're at. So that's our service resistant because they felt like they've been failed so many times, and they just really need that intensive help to reach them back out of the hole that that they're in. Good. And I again, I just wanna just differentiate because because I think that is a different level. Well, social workers, but we are on the streets and I try and do these. And and I've got really good feedback on your team's work with them.
But, again, it's I I wanna make sure we leave here with the, like, the a view that's as complicated as the situation. Is it not a not a simplification? Yeah. In in without sounding like we're oversimplifying, there really are three root cause drivers to to homelessness, drugs, alcohol, and mental illness or some sort of mental crisis. And, again, if we can get to the root cause of what's driving them, then I think we're gonna really make a difference. And, again, we need so, again, yes. What do we need? We need the social service entities out there on the street with us building that
level of trust with this community so that we can get them the help that they need. That's what we really need. Thank you. You made a point of, like, this FTE and when we look at this, but, of course, our community has a bigger, we we have the educate, engage, and then the enforce. So we have these other steps. I think, chief Franklin, I think you've told me that other cities take a very much of, like, don't call the police unless there's police activity there. They don't have a people experience in homelessness lens. They take a view of, like, you call the police when someone's doing something that's against law or trespassing or things
like that. Can you take apart those 13 and say, like, if we had a no cat team and we had just this, do we have double the amount of enforcement or do we have about the same investment or a dramatically less investment? Yeah. So, we we take a very proactive approach, to dealing with, people experiencing homeless. And we do that because we feel it's important, and we do that because we believe that that is what this community wants us to do. Could we wash our hands and say, just call us? Then yes. Then all you're gonna have is you're gonna lose the two v's here,
because then it's just gonna be on a call for service basis enforcement effort, and you're going to lose the front end of encouragement and education. But we feel that that's an important piece. You got to give people options on the front end to make positive choices first. Well, I I it's important for you to say that because, I mean, we are you're right. My perspective is the city has asked you to take that more. And it's a very compassionate view of that, and it's not a law enforcement view. And the feedback I've got is that we are doing that. But I'm trying to ask that if that's a cost or that's really time well
spent that on the overall, we're doing a better job that way. Well, there certainly is a cost to it. And and I think part of the presentation here too is as I look at those numbers and go, holy cow. That that if this keeps going up, then I am going to lose capacity. We're we're already losing capacity, to be honest with you. So, we've already, we've already, dialed back on our safe, summer nights initiatives. We're going from six down to four because that's what, primary activity to get the CAT team. And so, as as these numbers go up, we do lose capacity, and there is a true and real cost,
if I'm answering your question correctly. I'm trying to get You probably are, but let me play it back to you because I I could take a real negative reading of this. It says all the education we're doing, all the enforcement we're doing, it's not helping. We still have all the we still are really have the same we have all this work to do to do the enforcement. Sure. Is that the case or is it not? So, great question. And thank you. So now I understand. Great question. I think it is helping, and I think it is the proper approach. And I think it's helping for this reason. Because, again, we we had 861 contacts.
You know? Only two well, 223 of them were from 10 people alone. But what I think what you're gonna find is there's a lot of people in this community that are doing good, and they're working with people, and they're helping people. And that is good. And the education piece and the encouragement piece is helping some people. It is driving some people. And so it is working. What I would would also say is I need help on the top 10. I need help on the most difficult, the most service resistant. So to me, it's not an either or. It's a both and because it's a very compact complex problem that nobody,
quite frankly, has a good solution for. Okay. And then I did wanna ask I think you're probably familiar, and I'll ask this to chief Franklin, that we're working trying to work with the county and all these other groups are trying to say, is there a better path? And we've searched one and didn't turn out to be it. Now we have this path of this any path home, and there's some parts to it that are teaming and there's parts like organizational. There's parts we would be asked to bring as both a municipality, but also as a a police force, as a park district, as a library. Are there parts of that that you would really encourage,
or are there parts of that that, done incorrectly, would have would worry the police chief of Rochester? And I I don't know all the intricacies of the program here. I'm excited to hear about it myself. What I can say is, again, it is probably helping a segment of the population and is probably part of the solution. But, again, there's multiple layers to this problem. And and because of that, you need multiple solutions and layers to the solution, if that makes sense. It does. And I I appreciate you guys being here today. I think it is a good perspective to start out with and having that kind
of, trying to boil down what the our law enforcement are seeing in the streets, and then we'll see it on the housing stuff. But I do wanna leave with that idea that, we're not all searching for that one silver bullet. I think we're dealing with problems that are multifaceted. And and, and I think, actually, on my six years at the council, I've seen some marked improvement. And I don't mean to say that, good, we're we're past the worst of it because there's new problems coming up and there's housing is much more expensive than it was, and you guys are dealing with the new sort of drug problems.
So there's there's always more to do, but it doesn't mean we're not having an impact. One final comment on that. I said I talked about the three root cause drivers. It's not the only three, but, yes, the primary three. If you just put them in a house without dealing with the root cause, you're not really fixing the problem. So, again, it's gotta be a layered approach with multiple facets. So you're you're spot on. And and if if, if I if I didn't take it right when I you talked about those three root causes, I think of that for the hardcore cases. I think there's a whole other part of this with medical debt and unemployment and
everything else that gets people into homelessness. But they're the ones that you probably don't have to deal with as much. Probably. Council member Miller. Yeah. Thanks for the presentation. I really helpful to see a variety of data. My first question would be, do you have a standardized set of data that would be possible to report to us, whether that's a monthly basis? Because I see different points in times, different geographies, different program attempts, like, unsafe zones. And I just wonder how we measure impact. We see the resource use over time at different points and and that climbing, but how should we be thinking about, like,
the measurable impacts? And I also see, community partners in in the audience today and and wonder what other points of information we should be taking into consideration on a reporting package to be able to say, you know, resource use increased x amount percent FTE compared with last year. Was that effective? Right? Like, did that make an impact? Yeah. Let me give me an opportunity to take that back to the team Okay. And dissect that a little bit. It is a little bit of you know, I guess, maybe you can argue that we started to do it with this slide going back
to 2018. I I think to you are there's a correlation here, between the numbers of people experiencing homelessness community and our workload, obviously. So I'd have to do that, subset of data analysis that I don't have for you today. But And I'm guessing it's pretty labor intensive to produce to go through a a month of calls and or or maybe that's automated. I but I just saw, you know, January 2025 and wondered about, you know, other periods and how that's trending over time and and what we should take of that other than just one month. Yeah. Let me take that back to the second. Just wanted to reiterate council member Keane's point as well.
I know that you guys often deal with people who are experiencing, you know, the additional impacts of homelessness, drug abuse, substance abuse, mental health. The data I've read nationally do tend to point out though that, those are predictors of who will become homeless in a community, but not necessarily the rates of homelessness. Looking really at the the underlying issue, I'm grateful for the the next presentation to talk about access to affordable housing, keeping people in housing so that we prevent, you know, these other points of precarity that people experience. Just wanna level set that too if,
you know, we we have a homelessness is a housing problem. And then once people are living in homelessness, they're add on layers to that. And then I I guess, again, just to the point of I'm really excited to hear about the results of the pilot and would just love something to compare that preview post, how are we understanding the impacts of of the pilot with a social worker coming on. I I was able to walk with the downtown patrol on on a morning, and I immediately was asking questions about what supports. The officers might have access to seeing a a frequent,
you know, everybody being known on a a first name basis, and seemingly, at a mismatch of resource to what tools the officers wish that they had to be able to help people out of that situation. So thanks for your work, and thanks for this presentation. Council member Palmer. Yeah. I'm just kind of been being on the city council for six years and having to tussle with this issue for a long, long period of time. You know, it's it's it's always been our philosophy that it's not against against the law to be homeless. And so, you know, you're reflecting that your your policies are reflecting the community's policies.
We want you to be helpful to people. You know, you're you're telling me we have $1,500,000,000 from you, but we also have ramp security out there. We also have park security out there. We also have them in the library, you know. And and and mister Frederick brought up the fact of of private money and the amount of private money. I know Ontario c at one camp was $5,000 to remove the debris at one camp. And, you know, the camping ordinance is is a tool for you that I think you've been using as we thought you would be using it. But the size of camps, I believe, are are less or smaller.
Isn't that correct? Correct. Okay. And, you know, I talked to the Salvation Army a year ago asking them what they needed, and they said we need more rent to keep rent money to keep people in their, apartments, and they run out of that all the single time. And so, you know, keeping people in their home makes more sense. It seems to be hard for the county to help us with that, but but I think we're gonna move along. I'm just frustrated that we have 10 people here, and and we have all these community members who say they wanna help. It doesn't seem like one of them wanna help. You would think that if you have all these community members out there,
they they could say, I'm gonna take this person, and I'm gonna help them. And that's frustrating that that we have the same 10. They're costing us a lot of time, and and we're not helping the people. And I know if I was an officer, I'd get to the point that I'd just give up. You know? I mean and and I don't want that, and and I don't know how the CAT team does it. I've been to camps. They're not sanitary. They're not clean. Handing somebody a tent and telling them to go sleep in a park is not is not compassion, you know. And and, you know, the other thing that bothers me is is I know that we have certain places
that we send cops to almost every single day. And and how do you how do you resolve that issue? I mean, if we had a bar that was called the police department every single day, would we not want them to have their own private security? That's a question. So the question is if we got called to the place frequently, we would try to work with them as best we can in in dealing with what's the problem and what's causing the daily calls for service. You know, we get we certainly get calls for service at at all of our partners in
this community, our service providers in this community. We get calls for service, at at all of them. And it's because we're dealing with a a very difficult population that is working through some issues. Well, my frustration, I think, is coming out, but my frustration is you call them partners. But I've got 10 people here who's causing us a lot of problems for two months, and I don't see partners stepping up. And and and, you know, when next everybody's here Hopeful that the county is gonna come with some answers, which I don't think they will. But but, yeah, I have a lot of pointed questions for the county coming up that why aren't
they doing what they're supposed to be doing? Yeah. I'll end on this is is that I believe we have people coming from the same county areas. You know? And they don't have have homeless shelters other places, and they're dumping them here in Rochester. Is there a way for us to to to keep that number and and figure out, you know, where are these people coming from? We just started recently tracking at least, like, how many new comers that we're having contact with, every month. And so that's some fresh data that I don't necessarily have for you right off the top of my head here. But, we are seeing kind of a new population.
I think that's where the room for improvement comes in is is working with the community providers, some of these community based providers in here. Well, how how many new people are you seeing and where are they coming from and really studying the problem, studying studying the issue from a data perspective. Why did you come here? And, where did you come from? How did you get here? We've we've found people from all over the country, from Alaska, from Florida, from, and said, well, I came here because there's a lot of services, and there are a lot of services in this town. Well and and to be clear, we have a lot of homegrown people who need help.
It's it's not I mean, these are our brothers and sisters, and I want it want us to remember that. So I appreciate what you do. I know it's a hard job. I've been on camps with with with the officers, and and it's not it's not pleasant work. Administrative results, did you have some I I think you have some I just wanted to touch on a couple of things that came up and why there's two presentations on on, your studies so today that are about the very complex problem of how we work with people experiencing homelessness, our partners, whether that's the county, the other nonprofit partners,
community members, the private sector, etcetera. We have excellent resources who are every day at the front door of the challenges and the complexity of this problem. And, just looking through the presentation, didn't see the law enforcement officers who have perhaps the most contact with folks, whether they are receiving services at any of the partners. They think they can solve this problem for themselves if they're at that stage, etcetera. And so folks that know, you know, yes, there are service providers that know a lot of people by name,
but we have police officers who are regularly interacting. Even if that's just education, a hello looks like you're, you know, doing good today. Like, they are there twenty nine thousand hours of the year working with the population that you're gonna be discussing next, and it seems Thank you. Thank you. Any other questions from my colleagues? I'll just wrap up and say thank you, chief and sergeant and, captain. What the message that I'm hearing is you care about these people. You know them very well.
You know each and every one of their names, and you need help. And, and our next, discussion is about building coalitions, building partnerships, and definitely, you should have a voice on, forming, what comes out of, that coalition. So thank you. So with that, we will call Taryn up and present how are we going to fix this or make it better. Alright. Good afternoon, council members, council president. My name is Taryn Edens. I'm the assistant director of economic growth with with the community development department for the
city of Rochester. I'll be co presenting with Dave Dunn, the housing and planning director for Olmsted County today. Really, the intention is to build off the last presentation. I think it was well said by council member Keane and Administrator Zones, that police really are sort of at the forefront of the city's role in supporting and interacting with this population. So to build off of that presentation, I'd like to give you a little more background on, people experiencing homelessness, PEH use, in our community, as well as building on the city's role. This was a very large part of it. We interact and support this population in a couple other ways.
And as you've heard, the county also provides human services as well in this space. And then we'd like to introduce you to AnyPath home, and discuss, right, one of the many ways to consider, in responding to this complex situation before us. So some quick background. I got some of this information from our service providers and some public data. Some some for you to consider. The warming center and overflow center recently has been reporting they're at capacity pretty regularly. Most recently, they shared that they've seen a 35% increase in guests compared to the same time
last year. We've seen an increased demand for the housing stability team. You'll hear about that. That's one of the county's, resources that they provide, noting an average of 66 intakes monthly. Evictions continue to to occur. We see about 12 weekly, most for nonpayment to rent. I'm gonna Can you stop? Council member Fredericks has a question. Just for clarity. Mhmm. A warming center, I'm familiar right across the street. Overflow overflow, are we talking Salvation Army at night after ten? Mhmm. Okay. So it's the Salvation Army over here after ten at night. In partnering with the warming center. Yep.
Yep. K. K. Single adults point in time count, this is done every year. The use for housing and urban development calls for this. These are very preliminary numbers, but the last point in count time done January estimated a 61 individuals. We consider this probably a low estimate. We don't get final numbers till the end of the year, so just wanted to give you that. We do get data from Rochester Public Schools often, so the conversation is usually around single adults. I wanted to share this because we've shared it in the past. Year to date, three seventy two students have experienced homelessness. You should know their counts and how they,
categorize folks experiencing homelessness is different. It's a lot more flexible in the school district. They're considering families in transition, so folks doubling up, you know, not necessarily chronically homeless as as we would know it. So keep that number in mind. But as you see, in January that involved two zero one different families. So just wanted to give you once again, you heard about a lot of numbers that are very important to take up a lot of time. And this really it's hard to, you know, categorize this into big numbers. I wanted to show you the number of individuals impacted. And to give you a little history of where we've been in working in this space.
We talk about 02/2018 and this as a starting place a lot. So just to give you some quick background on, efforts or impacts in this space since that time. Essentially, that's the time that, it came to our attention that a lot of folks were staying in the Skyways. We had a cold weather shelter only at the time. So only on really cold nights, so it was a shelter open. So the next year, the city responded to Skyways in kind of ways that you've heard. Right? And the city and county supported a seasonal shelter during the winter months. The following year, the pandemic occurred, so a lot of things came out of that. The engagement team developed the housing stability team at the county that you'll hear about.
The day center at at the Mayo Civic Center was developed. We had isolation space developed for COVID. In 2021, we transitioned out of the pandemic. The Landing Bay Center, developed was moved from the Mayo Civic Center to Salvation Army to Silver Lake Fire Station. That was just in 2021. And we supported a year round shelter at that point. Right? The Echo Center was open. You'll hear more about that. In 2022, some additional efforts continue. They purchased the 105 that provides, specific housing units for, housing stability. The Landing opened their permanent location.
Street Medicine launched, which was discussed earlier. And the Shelter Work Group launched, which I'll talk about that. The Shelter Work Group was established and did most of their work in 2023 in response to some shelter capital funding available at the state level. That group included, voices from the city, the county, many service, providers that are here and that will be discussed. And really, that goal was to talk about shelter needs specifically. The HRA purchased the residents at Old Town Hall with the intention of using that, and in the end, that shelter application was denied. So really from that point, you know, we know this complex issue is deleted and we needed to respond to it in
a more holistic way. So thus, a homeless response steering committee was established using a smaller subset of that original group to represent folks interacting with that population, any path home was created. So instead of just focusing on shelter, we're looking at it from a more holistic bigger perspective, considering the resources that we already have versus applying for funding. Once again, RPD is a is a big piece of this conversation. The city does, support this population in a few different ways. So just showed a few departments that interact. Enforcement's our biggest role. Right? That can be community development and private space,
RPD, parks and recreation as they support camp cleanups in public spaces. But just as well, the public library is a great resource for folks too. It's a a place to just be. Just as well, they offer they they they house one of the county social workers, every Thursday afternoon for folks to use. RPU, for example, is another great example of, providing of resources to prevent homelessness. They provide utility support to folks at risk of losing their homes. So we do have a part in many ways. That's not to also include all the ways that we contribute through different funding mechanisms
to our service providers. Right? So we do play a role in a variety of ways. Enforcement is just one of our more visible roles. So we are talking about investment a lot, and it's because we want you to understand, once again, the weight and the impact of, interacting and supporting. Right? And really a call to action and to consider some long term solutions. So examples of resource investments continued includes the library security specialist. So this was piloted in 2024, and now become a full time role. And since that has become full time and having this dedicated position,
the library has reported that they're able to build more consistent relationships with their visitors. Last year, they saw over 30,000 additional visitors compared to the year before. And they found this to be helpful so they have someone specific to handle behavioral incidents when they come up. Ramp Security was also mentioned as another resource that we had to invest in. Right? So specifically doing what we can, for ramp security is another, you know, financial investment we've made in the space. And so you can see the numbers before you, in the amount of time that goes into that as well. Parks and Recreation specifically is another department that does a lot in this space.
You heard a bit about that through our PD, and there's some numbers here to show you, and some were mentioned already as far as one of one costly cleanup that happened in May, and costly cleanup that happened in May, and numbers included for that was $3,425 and that's really not all inclusive of all of the benefits that a staff would get. It's just staff hours, equipment costs, you name it. But really the Parks and Rec team, Park ops play a vital role in facilitating encampment cleanup when it's in a public space. So this just shows you last year's data alone, 47, parks cleaned up, and that's still not all inclusive.
Those are usually the big ones. They have one asked from time to time, and it's estimated two hundred thirty five hours for their their cleanup. So they have a partnership with RPD as well in working through that. So once again, wanna give you the information of the depth of our, investment in this space. So with that, once again, the city plays a role primarily in enforcement and other ways. We do also play a role in affordable housing and affordable living. I like to show this sort of as an affordable housing spectrum or continuum. Trying to really quickly describe area median income to you.
Imagine a bell curve and you pick the middle number and that's the median income earner in our community, right? A lot of our work around housing is primarily supporting workforce rental housing. You'll see that in the 50 and above and affordable home ownership. And that's where our resources are used best. I'm gonna transition to the county to talk more about some of their human services resources. And you'll find that they have more resources to support the bigger spectrum, but especially supportive housing and public housing. So with that, I'll turn it over to Dave Dunn. Thank you, mister Eaton. Welcome,
mister Dunn. Yeah. Good afternoon, council council president. My name is Dave Dunn, Olmsted County Housing and Planning Director. Here to talk about little bit about kind of the county's role when it comes to, our response to unsheltered homelessness and a little bit more about kind of the work that our housing team is doing. Before I get into 90% of what we're gonna talk about today is our housing stability team and our homeless response, but I did wanna just give a plug for a couple of the other things that we work on. The Olmsted County Housing Department has about 300 housing units within the community that we
own and operate. So everywhere from senior housing to public housing and things all the way in between, everywhere from a 39 unit building down to single family homes. So we do have that, component of our organization. The other thing that we do is rental assistance. So we administer about 900 units of rental assistance throughout Olmsted County. The general way that rental assistance works is that the tenant pays 30% of their income in rent, and then the subsidy makes up the difference. So that's one of our primary things.
The one other thing I just mentioned that's not on there, we've done kind of our first, dabble into single family homes as well in homeownership. And so what we're trying to do are have, tools in the tool belt across the housing continuum to really work to make sure that it's more effective in our community. The team we'll talk about today, the rest of the time is our housing stability team. It says they're Olmstead County levy because that is, the funding source for this team. So we have 15 members on our housing stability team. Really encompasses several major initiatives there.
You can see it was created in 2020. And, really, prior to 2020, if you were to ask the county who to call in response to homelessness, we would give you the best bureaucratic answer of, well, it depends what part of homelessness that you want to know about. We had our resources in four different departments. At that time, we decided to consolidate those resources and create the housing department from the Housing and Redevelopment Authority. And really within that, kind of created three different components. One is shelter or extended today's shelter. The second one is permanent supportive housing,
and then the third is program and staffing components. So the first thing I just wanna highlight as part of the work that our housing team is doing is the creek, which is actually a ninety day extended shelter. This is really intended for people who are either first time experiencing homelessness or experiencing homelessness and maybe they're currently employed or about to become employed and need just that little bit of help to make sure that they can get over the hump. And so this particular facility, you can see the address on there. It is down between Willow Creek and Mayo High School.
It's right there. It really does a nice job of providing that kind of one time temporary assistance for people, giving them the bump that they need in order to, thrive. The next thing on here are our permanent supportive housing. And so we have two facilities that fall into this category. The one on my left is what we refer to as the 105 Building, which is at 105 North Broadway. And then the one on or the left and then the one on the right is the Francis. Both of them are 18 units of permanent supportive housing, and what that means is that it is housing with services.
So, at the 105 Building, we have 18 tenants in there. They all do have leases. They were previously experiencing homelessness. The building is staffed, twenty or eighteen hours a day by Catholic Charities of Southern Minnesota. They do, case management services with the tenants along with kind of just overall making sure that things are operating smoothly. And then we also have one Olmstead County social worker at that facility that provides a more intensive case management services. The Francis on the right there is 18 units of permanent supportive housing.
There we have, it's a little bit different structure. The units are a little bit larger. It's probably the next step on the housing continuum, I would think. We do have, a case manager. We have an Olmsted County Social Worker that is assigned to that facility that does work with the 18 tenants there along with, staffing from eight from 6PM to 2AM nightly. So, again, different levels of service on the facilities. And one of the things that is challenging in the industry right now is that, for all of us,
we're blessed at the county. But I just want to highlight that when we talk about housing and services, funding the services is extraordinarily difficult. There's not an easy funding source for those services, whether that's the social worker or whether that is the case management that goes along with it. Now for the HRA, we're blessed that we can use levy dollars. So I'm not suggesting that as an issue here, but but it is one of the more significant issues facing the affordable housing community at a larger level. So I just wanted to highlight it while we were talking about permanent supportive housing.
The next resource I wanted to highlight was our housing stability line or formerly our guiding partners to solution or GPS line. This is a line that is answered by our social work partners, from Family Service Rochester that are embedded within our Olmsted County team. Well, number there is 328, actually, should be 328-7175. Sorry about that. That number is yeah. So that's the number for the housing stability hotline. But, really, it's an opportunity there to connect people directly to those services that are needed.
It's intended to provide that warm handoff to the first place to refer someone if you're not sure where to call and there's a housing related question. And then we also have our housing outreach workers, and these are the people who are really working with day to day people experiencing homelessness in our community. These are the folks that are going in and addressing those individual needs, finding out what are the barriers to housing to each individual, helping them main along the way of that journey. It's a complicated process. And if you know one person's journey, you've heard one person's journey. And everyone is individual,
and people move at different paths and different timelines and have different levels of motivation. And so for our team, it's really about working and building those relationships and connections and proceeding forward. We provide resources to landlords and property managers so we can hopefully promote the programs that we have because rental assistance is only as useful as it is the people that are willing assistance is only as useful as it is the people that are willing to take it. So if a property manager or a landlord is unwilling to take our rental assistance, it doesn't have any it's not effective in the community.
So for us, that landlord engagement and building those relationships is of the utmost importance. And then we are, continuing to build staff for this team right now. So we have, two new openings that we're creating right now to continue to add to this team because we know that the need is there. The need is growing in our community. We know that it is hard to make these connections. Where as we'll talk about a little bit more later, we're shifting our service model to really focus on by name case management, to really focus on the needs of that individual person. Our hope navigators are the team that works within Rochester Public Schools.
We have two and we just actually got a third approved social worker, full time embedded within the school district. And so as you had heard about, the number of RPS families experiencing homelessness, this was really in response to that and our efforts to connect people to those resources and what we find especially for families is that the school is the resource that they generally trust the most. So if we can connect to that, family through the school district, we have the greatest chance of success. You can see a little bit on some of the outcomes that we've had with this work.
One of our ways we do this is to provide hotel vouchers to families. So in '23 and '24, you can see there where we've utilized those hotels and that we've been successful in finding permanent housing options for those families. But, again, it's expensive, it's time consuming, and it's a challenge because there isn't enough affordable housing in the community. The other part of this is emergency assistance as well. And so this is where we enhance our emergency assistance programs at the county for our families and are able to provide some additional assistance each year,
and you can see the households that have been served. I think with that, I'll kinda turn it over back to Taryn to talk more about Any Path Home. Any questions for mister Dunn before we delve into Any Path Home? Okay. Take it away. Alright. We're gonna go back and forth here real quick. So with that, we'd like to provide you an update on Any Path Home specifically. So Any Path Home is a shared purpose. It is a group of partner agencies working together for a common purpose to ensure that everyone has a home. These are the agencies, if you can see it here with the closed captioning. It includes representation from change services,
Catholic Charities Charities of Southern Minnesota, Dorothy Dayhouse, River Valley's Continuum of Care, The Landing Amend, Salvation Army, Three Rivers Community Action, Zumbra Valley Health Center, Olmsted County, and the City Of Rochester. This is a visual to sort of give you an example of what it takes to navigate the existing and current system for one experiencing homelessness. This is a way for me to describe one of the goals of Any Path Home. We already have a number of resources in our community. They're not easy to navigate, and there is an opportunity before us to better connect those resources.
So essentially, this is one way we can work with the existing resources we already have to serve this population. So with that, talking about our current response system, it has its it has its strengths. As mentioned, we I mentioned a number of agencies that's not all inclusive of all those that do work in this community, but they do great work as it is. Agencies excel individually, and there are many individual examples of success. We do have a lot of opportunities within our current system. For example, ours it's not really a great system. It sort of operates in different ways, and it's fractured. Agencies have to compete for resources,
and there are other resources needed as mentioned, one of them being housing. So with that, I'm gonna give it back to Dave, and he's gonna talk about the five pillars of what a revised system would look like as it relates to Any Path Home. Thank you, Taryn. And so as part of this process that we started about this time last year, we really started to to look at our homeless response system. And then Taryn just mentioned in one of her slides that one of the things we found in working collectively is that it was more a series of agencies that were doing great work and maybe less of an actual system.
And so together, what we did is we really mapped out how do we work together to streamline these processes and procedures to connect people to stable housing. And so you can see there the five pillars, as we call them, kind of a system that we're working to create here locally. Oh, there we go. There we go. Oh, too far. Okay. And so you can see the first one there is entry. And one of the things that, was was found as part of our evaluation is that people will enter the system in many different places. It might be they show up to a church. It might be they go to the landing.
They could be at the library. And many times what happens is that we're able to get some of that information from that individual the the first time that we make contact, but not all of it. And we certainly aren't able to put that information into our data management system in a timely manner. And if you think about that, people who become social workers do so to help people, they don't always want to they don't do that to become a data management analyst. And so for us, getting that entry system streamlined, focusing on diversion to start. So if there's any way that we can
make it so that person doesn't have to enter the system. So if there's a family member, if there's a friend, if it's maybe they have resources in another community, if we could help them connect with those resources, it's really about doing that. And then once we do that, get information submitted in a uniform way. So whether the person goes to the landing or the warming center or wherever else they may show up the first time, we have that information in a uniform system in a way that is kind of done in a manner in which we're all aware of the way that the data is entered, what it means,
even things about, you know, spelling. If you spell somebody's name differently, I mean, there's a lot of it when you really think about how we do this work. It only takes a small difference to to really make the data challenging. And so when you're talking about 10 agencies or more doing this work, whether they put Northwest as NW or n period w period, that can make a difference in the system. And so working collectively in order to make sure this entry is seamless and consistent is the first part of our goal. The second part is really that story.
And so every individual has their own story, and honoring the story of the individual is what we need to do. But the way we do that is with data. And that's really where we learn about their history, about their housing barriers, about what is the what are their needs, what are their unique qualities and and characteristics that will help us find a solution. And so for us, it's really about trying to play that matchmaker. In order to do that, we need that data component and we need it in real time. So one of the again, as we talk about the data management systems and everything else,
it doesn't help us to know what we had last week if the person that we're trying to provide assistance to is unable to be found. And so because of the transient nature of the population, getting good real time data is of the utmost importance and is really our number one priority as we are launching this system. Because once we have that information, we feel like everything else can be achievable. Connection. So once we do have that opportunity, we know who are the people in our community that are experiencing homelessness. How do we connect them to the services that are needed? How do we provide them with a case manager to guide them along their journey
and really provide that assistance that's needed to overcome whatever those barriers might be? For some people, it might be as simple as providing resources, and for others, it will take, you know, months, if not longer, of just kind of continuous advocacy with them, walking along side them, and providing them resources as they're able to move forward. Housing. Obviously, we need housing in our community. We continue to need affordable housing in our community. We continue to work through trying to find different housing solutions all across the continuum. But what we need to do is a couple of things. One, we need to make sure that person is ready for housing success.
So if someone moves into a property for the first time, if they haven't if they've been experiencing homelessness for a while, it can be a real shock to the system. And so just things like making sure that they are ready for housing, that they have the basic needs that they might need, whether that is utensils or whether that's toiletries or whether those are other things that happen in a unit in order to make sure that person can have a real chance at thriving. And so making sure that we have that success is something that we are we need to make sure that we're doing in our system.
And then finally, it's not it's community. And so one of the things that we learned in kind of meeting with people is that, that it's not about housing is not the end. In a lot of ways, it's the beginning of continuing to work with somebody to thrive. Once you can stably house someone, it's much easier to work on some of those other underlying issues that maybe were some of those root causes. So finding those peer mentors along the way, finding people who are willing to work and guide alongside that journey, following up our team to make sure that they're able to get the help that
they need or that they get their questions answered. One of the the one of the stories that I tell is that I was with one of our social workers about a year ago, and we we ran into somebody who had been housed for a few months. And, you know, the gentleman came up to our social worker and said, oh, I missed you. I haven't seen you in forever. And, you know, how are you doing? And and that person came to our social worker and said that. And the reason was because, you know, our team, we're so focused on helping people that once we connect them to housing, we move on to the next. And the reality of it is,
is we need to be continuing to reach out to the people that we've been able to house to to make sure that they're stable and thriving. And so, building that community and getting them integrated into the community is vital for our success. So our goal is to take the kind of the the picture that Taryn had there that had a lot of the dots there and then connect those altogether. So as we talk about kind of building that system, we have gotten started here, really with the first thing, and that's hiring kind of that AnyPath home director. I am pleased to, introduce Stephanie Better, who's here today. She She didn't know I was gonna introduce her, but congratulations.
Stephanie is our Any Path home director. She was just, hired last week, so she'll be starting here in the very near future. We are very excited to have her in this role. It'll be a vital leadership role in our community to start to help us as we're building the system work. Along with that, we need to be working to get our data systems streamlined and aligned and then housing resource coordination and enhancing our outreach to property management companies, landlords, figuring out what we can do to create more win win solutions in that area. Reinforcing the system,
we talk about case management or, human services or social work. You know, we need more case managers, obviously. That need is well known, but we need an additional staff. As we talk about, the success of this program, We are piloting it with, several of our social workers and housing stability team. And what we want to really do is prove this concept that case management, by name case management connects people to housing. If we're successful, we'll be looking to the community to find more resources. But really, it's about again, it's about that case management option,
and then we need more housing options. And again, that is not a surprise to anyone here. So these are some of the updates, that we've talked about. So we've, brought Rochester Area Foundation on board as our backbone agency. What we really intend to do is utilize the successful model of the Coalition for Rochester Area Housing and and really utilize that for any path home. The Coalition for Rochester Area Housing has been around since 2016, and I think it's really become a staple in our community. I think that, the last time I looked around the table, only Jen Woodford and myself are only the last two of the originals there and
that tells me that we have created something that is lasting and that it's more than just a group of people who wanna work together. We've institutionalized that collaboration. And I think institutionalizing the collaboration around our response to homelessness is needed as well. So I'm excited about being able to do that in the near future. So I'll turn it back over to Taryn for the last couple of slides. Thanks, Dave. So now that you've heard a bit about AnyPath Home, what our goal is, what are five pillars of a revised system looks like, we have an opportunity to cons to consider being part of the solution.
You heard some of the impacts to the city and our resources today. This is a a starting place, I would say, and an opportunity, for us to consider ways to work within the resources that we already have to navigate, the system. So, the potential for a city role in any PATH home could include a request for staff and an appointment of an elected official to join any PATH home. So there is a vision of an advisory board, essentially. It's a minimum of two hours, monthly participation. That is a minimum, and there is no current financial ask before you. We do anticipate a future ask wouldn't come before 2027,
and if that did, it would come before council for consideration. So at this time, that's the consideration for feedback. And then thereafter, it would be asking council to to agree to a resolution to sign on to a chat or the charter, excuse me, as a member of any path home. So the next slide sort of talks about that, but that would be the future action to come back as a resolution to a city council meeting for your con consideration. Just quick language about the Charter, it's really intended to be a working document. It's really just a governance model. It's not necessarily the action plan, so it's really a starting place.
So with that, we'll pause for comments, questions that you might have. Actually, if I might just say one more thing really quick. There was a lot of commentary about data. Right? And going back to why it would be prudent for us to consider this opportunity, we get to be part of the solution, which means, we can consider collecting data showing the impact to our resources. Right? As mentioned before, you that would seem to be an agreeable trade off, I guess, I would say, among many other things. Right? So I just wanted to point that that point that out that that's an opportunity, to consider, and I'll leave it at that. Okay. I'll pause. Thank you. Thank you. So I have I have a a few questions on the Any Path Home model.
I I totally agree with you that the, the Coalition for Rochester Housing is a excellent model. What I guess, I'd like to hear a little bit more about your your asking the city to join as a charter men member, but and no disrespect to Stephanie, but you already have an executive director. Is this a county project or is it modeled like the coalition in that, it's got partnerships, that, contribute and then they move the agenda?
That's right. It's more similar to the coalition in which it's partnerships creating one group or one doesn't necessarily have, final or or or prioritization in the say. It's different in that it's not a financial, advisory group necessarily. So it's different with the coalition. You're making agreements about contributions. In this case, you're just discussing the work. The contribution has already been made. So it's a little bit different, but it's similar, and there isn't one partner necessarily leading the effort. Okay. Then I have a follow-up to that. I when you talked about the system, which is not a system,
and you had the slide with multiple, multiple players in helping solve the, the issue, a lot of partners. One of one of the aspects to the Coalition for Rochester Housing is that it's a it's a defined group. And so when I see this and I I and all of these organizations are doing amazing work, but when you're trying to move an agenda, you need to have a smaller group.
And so how are you going to manage this big group or make this big group smaller and, more of a team to move an agenda? Yeah. Great question. So the vision is layered similar to the coalition where we have an advisory board, which would have membership from the city, the county, potentially two service providers, and a couple of more seats, and that would be it. Just as well, there would be working groups underneath that. Right? The city doesn't do work in human services. We're not collecting that data. So there would be a subgroup, right, that would be doing the work,
really. This would just, once again, be an opportunity for us to be part of the conversation as we've heard the impact, to us today. Does that answer your question? It gets there. Council member Wall, you had a question? Yes. And I believe my questions are are more for mister Dunn. Last week, five of us on, the council heard Saint Paul Mayor Melvin Carter on in a short address, and he mentioned homelessness. I think that the, statistic he uses, 75% of the homeless in Saint Paul come from outside of,
an origin from Saint Paul. Couple Of Years ago, as I as we reviewed, people in Olmsted County, I think I remember that 80% originated in Olmsted County. Is that still true? That was addressed a little bit in the last presentation. Yeah. Well, I don't know if it's 80% as it was kind of when we did that count and was it 2020 or 2021 when we asked that question? It is the yeah. The majority when we have asked that question are people who are here locally or they're last housed locally within Olmsted County.
So they are people who are from the area or have been living in the region at least and then have fallen on hard times or whatever it may be. So we don't look anything like St. Paul in their statistics? Correct. Okay. How often given the police interaction with some people very often, like every other day, how often would the county come in contact with those same people in the course of a month? Yeah. It's hard to say. I mean, I think one of the things to think about is the it's always the but for.
Right? So those were your top 10. You're always gonna have the top 10, but would it be the top 40 if it wouldn't have been for our partnerships and really trying to connect people? So I think the reality of the situation is we're always there to help. And so those referrals are made, whether it's from the police department or other partner agencies, and we're always working to try to make those connections. Services are voluntary, though, and so people who aren't feeling, willing or wanting to make those changes, that is a challenge. And I think there is a hole in the system when it comes to, people who have significant mental health or substance use challenges
that maybe aren't at a place where they want to, you know, connect with people. But it's, it is a challenge. It's something that we work with, but we are there as partners all along the way. As a regional center, does Rochester have X or Olmsted County have access to more resources, to assist in the way of housing people than a place that would not attract people from out out of town? Absolutely. I mean, I think we have two things here. We're a regional center, and I think we also have to remember that we are blessed every day to
have the best hospital in the world here. And I'll just tell a very quick story, and this has nothing to do with homelessness, but I think you'll see the point at the end. I had a one of my wife's really good friends, her husband had cancer. And before they could even think about what to do, they were just thinking to themselves, if I can just get to the Mayo Clinic, it'll be cured. The reality of it is that wasn't the case, but that's what happens to people from around the world with our community as they know that if they can be here, if they can be, you know, if they can get to the Mayo Clinic, if they can get help. So as we talk about both being a regional center and a worldwide destination
for health care, I think those are things that come into play. Now, the vast majority of the people that we have identified as experiencing homelessness, their last known address was here locally. But as you talk about why maybe would somebody come here for the first time, maybe five years ago, ten years ago, whatever else, it really is all of those things kind of coming together. And, yes, having a system in play, that is able to provide some services does help, help the members of the community who need it. So that does correlate with some of my experience. Sometimes I would interact with people who came here with appointments,
and just ran out of resources. And then what do you do? But other times, I would, interact with people who heard about the mail and would get on a bus and come from Alabama and had no appointments and no plan. So that still is we do attract that. Yes. I mean, we, yes. Okay. Thank you. Other questions? Council Member Keane. Yes. Mr. Gunn, just again, I appreciate you being here with the HRA and that idea of the county's got human services, but this isn't something that one organization should be trying to deal with it.
And I do really appreciate you bringing all this other community efforts into that. That said, I do wanna understand what any path as an organization really is. And, I know you had one chart there where you talked about our current response as these strengths. But then you said, then it's not a system, and this is going to be a system. But when I think of a system, I think of coordination and somebody in charge. I'm worried there really isn't an in charge here. Is this really a system, or is this a case workers that are gonna have individual responsibilities? How how are they going to reach out to city's law enforcement or three rivers?
How is that gonna happen? I'm I'm trying to picture it. What makes this a system where the other was disparate well meaning attentions? Yeah. I'll take do you wanna take a stab at it first, or you would be like, okay. Sure. I sure can. Yeah. Essentially, it's a great question. A couple of ways. Right? That's why we consider we need a collective impact model to better guide this work. Right? So in theory, an ND path director would help us in that. And I mentioned the sub working group. Right? So the sub working group would be a collection of, representation of those organizations and case managers and working through a by name list, which you might have heard before.
So we're identifying folks in need, and discussions we've had already that I wanted to mention is considering the data, not necessarily just the easiest to house, right, which aligns with other conversations. I'm getting off on a tangent there. But to your point, right, from our perspective, it is more of a system when we have the direction of, you know, one person as well as all the groups coming together to have a coordinated effort. I don't know if I'm best answering it. Would you add anything? I think from the county's perspective, this really is about building that system. And so that's why we've asked the that's why Rochester Area Foundation is playing kind
of that backbone agency to bring the partners together. And that's why we've hired, someone to oversee that kind of bringing together and system building efforts because we know that it isn't any just one day. Don, can I who hired? That's what we're trying to that's one of the pieces we're taking today. Rochester Area Foundation Okay. Is as the backbone agency is the fiscal backbone for any PATH home. Okay. Got it. And this veteran will be an employee of the Rochester Area Foundation. And and that's the same model that is used for the Coalition for Rochester Area
Housing. Okay. Sorry, council member. No. That's good. That's because I and I and, again, I wanna I'm I'm still trying to drill down a little bit and understand what this is or what it could be. And I and, again, I do wanna just you know, the HRA did fund this originally, and you guys have put up the money to start to get this started. I participated last summer where we were in a slightly different path that didn't work out with looking at the Milwaukee model and some other things. And one of the things you list as an opportunity with this too is in the old model, agencies compete for resources.
But I haven't heard anything that makes me think that still doesn't happen when we have any path home. Yeah. Agencies are still gonna compete for finite resources. I would agree with you, I think. But the idea is hopefully we're coordinating and working. The agencies themselves are coordinating and working together, understanding what some of those asks are. The first big test for that will be coming up here in the next month or two as the state of Minnesota will go be going through their emergency shelter program for the next shelter program for the next two years. It's the primary funding source for a lot of our shelter and emergency
services. So the idea is to work as a collective around what are those asks, what are those needs, and how do we hopefully work together as a as a group of entities in the community as we make that request. Okay. Again, last fall, I believe it was the landing in Three Rivers combined to kind of bring us together, and we saw a documentary on Milwaukee, and I think it's called Under the Bridge. And one of the things that had an impact on me from there was this idea of we were trying to get away from that agencies competing for resources or agencies better coordinated. But I thought that had to have some sort of authority to it.
I'm not feeling any authority to AnyPath. Do you think there is something that where the AnyPath really does say no, Community action team, this is you don't work. This one, Three Rivers is working this. Or we having that ability in here, or am I missing something, or am I conflating something? Well, yeah, I think no. There that's a challenge, and you have to kinda trace the dollars back to where do they come from and what are the rules regarding each one of those dollars. So the you know, whether it's the landings fundraising that they do in the community, which is the majority of their budget or whether that is a state grant that
maybe is funding some of the warming center or whether it is the county levy that's funding some of our work. The challenge that we face is that, yeah, it it's not we don't get to say that none of us get to say with a state dollar, you can have it or you can't because it's a state dollar and they have their own ways of doing it. And so that is a huge challenge that we have here. And so that's why as we're trying to coordinate this work, it's really important to really work together on that to try to at least understand what we're all doing to maximize that impact.
Now could we get to a point where whether it be the county, the city, anybody would wanna say, here's money for AnyPath Home and you can distribute that amongst your your funding streams or based on your model? Potentially, but we're not there today. No. No. We're not. And I'm again, I'm I'm I I coming into this meeting, again, I like the idea of trying to have some sort of formal coordination with all the different groups working on this. I know the city we we've had some issues with other groups that, you know, back on that didn't collect data or thought, you know, they they had a different way of going about it than the county did.
And so this idea of trying to coordinate really isn't the right place. But I think you're hearing some of my concern here, like, what does it mean to be organized there? Is there really any and I I keep using the word authority to it, or is it really just let let's be talking more and that communication will help us go in the right direction? I I actually worried worried a little bit about that the city would turn over resources to somebody else to direct them, and you're not leaving me any thought that that's part of any path. But I do think that there's got if there really is any sort of, like,
resolving the idea of, like, efficient use of resources, you have to make sure we don't have two or three different people trying to solve the same problem in different methods and sometimes competing with each other. And I think council member Palmer bring it up bring it up earlier is, like, if one group is saying, we don't wanna have camping in the parks, but another group's giving out tents, you don't have a system. You have competing interests. Yeah. And that's the challenge of any type of group of entities working together is that while we all share our desire to end homelessness, the agencies themselves still are autonomous and have their own
rights and responsibilities as agencies to kind of maintain what they feel are the values of their mission. But, certainly, that's what we're trying to do is where we align. Let's focus those efforts. Let's focus those resources. Let's really have an let's make an impact, and let's be able to demonstrate what that impact is Because I think that's we need to be able to do that as well. And and my last point, this is just an observation. I don't think you need to respond to it. I saw the groups involved. I I again, it looks like a good group good groups, and I know they're like anything,
there's some much more involved early on. My observation is I was surprised to see our local school district or the other communities in Olmstead School districts not involved at least from that data and and involved in the, those stories because it is a very different perspective on homelessness than what our our law enforcement or our library would get. I think it is something that's important to keep our eye on. Yeah. Actually, I can answer because the the primary focus Any Path Home as it was originated was really about single adult population. So that's why it did not include Rochester Public Schools.
I can tell you that the by name case management that we've talked about is currently going on with our families that are experiencing homelessness. So we're already doing that work. Yep. Council member, Palmer. Thank you. I'm gonna start with with miss Iden Iden's first. Just a second. How much actual money from the state does the city of Rochester receive from the state for homelessness? None to my knowledge. None. Okay. Mister Dunham, I got some questions for you. Emergency, rental assistance, is it true you've run out, you won't have any till July? For single adults,
that is true. K. And the warming shelter that we have, that the city of Rochester, with CDBG money has given money to that, to my understanding and and glad the Catholic Charities is here and they're getting grants to do that. But the actual money the county doesn't put any money into the warming shelters. Isn't that correct? The county's role in the warming center has been to provide the facility. Yes. Just the facility, but we pay rent they pay rent to the county for that. They do not they pay common area maintenance, which is about 1,400 a month. K. But the county actually doesn't put money into it.
Correct. Okay. I just want to make sure we're we're on that. And we're lucky to have the Catholic charities here to do that and also working with the Salvation Army. I just want to make sure we we got that one. So about a year ago, we all met. We also had a big table at Mayo Civic Auditorium. You had this great idea. I think it was zero homelessness. At that time, it's frustrating to hear that this management information system wasn't working, but we're gonna get it to work. Now a year later, I'm I'm hearing you still are having problems with that. Now I'm not computer savvy, but I do know how to enter information. Why a year later do we not have any action on this,
and why are we not working together? I didn't say that we we didn't we are having action. We are working together. There was a software change. We're still working through getting some of that done. The challenge is it's not ourselves. It's a statewide system. And so anytime you're working with a statewide system, you have some challenges outside of your control. So I think we're continuing to work through that. We are getting the by name list work done. We're proceeding in that. We also haven't necessarily been able to, you know, I think that's part of why we are providing resources in this area is because
all of us as agencies are doing the work that we're doing every day. And frankly, a lot of times, again, the data suffers because the agencies that are sitting behind me are trying to serve people, and they're not always trying to put data into the computer system or maybe they don't even have the right software equipment to do so. So that was one of the things that we've collectively learned is because it's not any one entity that does that work. So if you show up to, you know, if you go to Salvation Army, they're the ones that are putting that in the system. K. So so I'm trying to understand.
I'm not I'm not trying to be argumentative about it yet. And so I appreciate the honesty. I really do. Thank you. So so my name is Sean. It's spelled with a u. I go to Salvation Army. I say my name is Sean, and they go, oh, it's s e a n. I would think that'd be pretty simple for me to say, no. Or Or I have a driver's license or I have municipal ID or I have something written down that says, this is my my name. And so for me to to to maybe I'm making this too simple, but for me to say and I go down to another one, the Catholic Charities at night, and they go, what's your name? I say Sean, and they go,
oh, oh, with a w. So so to me, it it I have problem with that, but I'm gonna go on the next question. So I have the police chief here, and and and I'm hearing from my my people that there's 10 people for the last two months who are a fourth of our calls. And it sounds like there's nobody from the county even talking to these people. Am I am I interpreting this? I think so. I really do. Number one, we hadn't really heard that information from the chief, so it's hard for us to respond. We are going to I asked the chief to give us a give me a call tomorrow.
I wanna talk about kinda what are those individuals and their stories and their situations. The reality is though, is that you're always going to have a top 10 because even if it was, you know, maybe it would be more if we weren't providing those services. And the other part of it is we never wanna say that if somebody is conducting criminal activity, that it should be okay because of their housing status. If If somebody is conducting criminal activity and their behavior is such that that should be something that we always address because that's that's what our our community has standards and norms and people have to be able to adhere to those.
So we're always willing to, and I think we've worked with the city in this area since the inception of Our work really in 2019, we've stood side by side with our city partners. So I really am proud of that partnership that we have with the city. I'm and I think we'll continue to do that. So so I guess in my cartoon bubble, if if I wanted to help out homeless people and I hear that there's 10 people who are having trouble and we've known this since Wednesday, at 6AM, I probably would show up and say, well, let me go talk to, a Johnny Johnny or and and find out, Johnny, how can I help you?
I mean, it just seems kinda simple, but but it seemed like like we'd be able to do that. But what do you think that Johnny is gonna say? I would think I'd be glad to have a friend or somebody who's I mean, I think that's the challenge. Right? Is that might be what you would do, but that might not be what someone else would would do. And so the reality of the situation is that we do our best to always connect with people. It is hard. People have had a lot of trauma in their life, and trust is a significant challenge. And I think you heard that even from, the police presentations. Building that trust is the number one challenge that all of us face.
And and I and I understand that. So so you're you're putting in $300,000. You've already hired a director. You're kind of asking the city to join, but we don't get any word and geez, who the director would be or where you're going to go with this. And then we see that in the next budget year, you want, I think, a hundred and $75,000. That's almost two police people that we could hire or two other people we could hire. So the the what we've already contributed to the City of Rochester, I've got $1,500,000 in the in the fire or the police department.
We've got a library at $85,000. I got a ramp at a hundred $81,000. We've got almost $3,000,000 spent on homelessness, and you're you're asking you know, you're putting 300,000 in. I mean, it's I mean, you're standing there kinda saying, well, the Rochester's done. Do we need anything? I'm gonna take this one because the first point was the city being involved in hiring and any past director. So as mentioned, Rausch Sturri Foundation did it. I, as part of the ci city, was involved in the discussion on the hiring process in general. So we had some role in it before we got to council,
though. Fair point. I would remind you that there's no financial ask before the city today. We anticipate an ask in two years. That ask that I put up there wouldn't necessarily all fall to the city. So I would just assert that any financial ask would come back to you. Nothing today to consider. K? Council member, are you are you done? I mean, how about how about the two the the $2,000,000 that the city is already spending on homelessness? People say we're not spending any money. We're not doing anything. I I'm not seeing that. Sure. I think it's a fair point that we wanted to present to you intentionally.
Right? Once again, for you to understand the amount of resources that are already being spent in this space, for a number of reasons. One, to consider, the value in considering a long term solution versus short term solutions. Right? An appointment I made earlier is wanting to match our investments to see are we having an impact in those places. Right? Are we seeing a reduction in resources spent? That would be an outcome we should discuss and consider as part of this. K. And you're standing here and and and you're a resource for us. Mhmm. We have money as a resource, but the city council didn't say, yes. We wanna join this. So I'm to me,
it's frustrating when we when I ask for something, they go, oh, there's resources and you don't have time for it. But but you were assigned to that, and I know you have people who tell you what to do. But it's it's more frustrating to me when when it's not the city council saying that. Sure. And I would say this came back to you, right, as mentioned a year ago, joint presentation with the city and the county. And was the last time we got, you know, essentially, affirmation to move forward forward here today with any path home. So fair point. And now is the time for the city to consider, being a part of this or not,
to your point. About a year ago when we had our meeting, we were gonna meet in August, and then it got delayed. And and I don't know if today's that that that meeting to have a presentation or not. Right. Is that what that Correct. Thank you. Other questions, council members? Council member Doreen? Mister Dunn, can you give me a estimate on the budget for from the county for combating homelessness? I, I'm sure that there's staff cost associated with that. I'm sure that there's housing costs associated with that. So could you give me a dollar number?
The housing department budget's about $25,000,000. That encompasses state, local, and federal sources. The HRA levy is $5,100,000 which is the primary source. The county is spending probably between 2 and 3 of general levy dollars along with all of the funding and resources that go along with our properties and everything else. So it's a big it's a conglomeration of about 25 different budgets that really make up our budget, and it's a little bit of a accounting nightmare, but there's different pieces to it that definitely it is complicated.
Other questions? Well, I I oh, oh, I'm sorry. Council member Miller, I didn't see you. Go ahead. That's wasn't it. It was kind of a last minute question. I'm just thinking about the presentation earlier from RPD. In this Any Path Home system, should it be adopted and move forward? Is the tool for a downtown walking patrol or downtown safe zone officer to say you need to go to one of these 10 service providers to get into the system? Like, is is that the tool that would be offered under the system in coordination with
RPD, or how should we be thinking about that in the two presentations? Yeah. Great great question. You know, conversations were had with our PD in preparing for today recently, right, admittedly. And so some conversations have since ensued to your point of work, and we have overlap in that intake point as they're often working with folks that are, maybe a little more, you know, less trusting of a system approach. Right? So I would say we I don't have a concrete answer for you today, except that that's a point of we need to find a lay a liaison between those two efforts, and that discussion is being had. Okay. Thank you.
And just the the comment that I would really love to see these data points come together about what impacts we can measure and what the resource input from RPD from other city, from county, I think that'd be a hugely helpful tool. Yeah. I was excited to see the data points that, were presented earlier because I do think you're right. It's a start of an opportunity to learn how do we collaborate together more effectively. And I think that's what we're really trying to do here is we're trying to work collectively as a community to solve a complicated issue. And we appreciate the partnership that we've had with the city from day one on
this because it isn't any one entity that has to do this. It's all of us. And, frankly, none of us care where the taxpayer dollars that helps us. We just want to live in a community that thrives. Council member Keane, did you have a oh, okay. Council member Fredericks, go ahead. Thanks for getting up and taking the hot seat today and answering all of our questions, both of you. Appreciate it. Council member Doran, go ahead. I I have one more question I wrote down and I forgot to ask it. Is there any way that we can get some metrics about the housing stability line, how often that is being utilized, number of calls, all that kind of stuff?
Yes. We do keep those, and I can get that information over to you. So to your specific ask here, well, I mean, one thing that I would really encourage is I I see a request for staff and elected official that we make sure that, the, RPD is involved in this very closely. I look at the partners. I think they're all very strong partners, but I think having that law enforcement voice there, they know, the people and they know the situation at the ground level.
I think that's really important to be a part of it. And then just from my perspective, you set the bar high because you talk about the, the, Coalition for Rochester, Housing. I'm glad that it's at, the Rochester Area Foundation. That's that's a high bar. So I expect a really strong set of objectives. I didn't see it here today. I think hopefully with the partnership and congratulations, your new hire, that we're really going to see a little bit more teeth on what the the objectives are and how you how you're gonna get there.
And so with that, if, there's nothing more, thank you very much, and I think we'll take a five minute break. Recording stopped. Recording in progress. She didn't care. It's happening. That's life. Alright. And now we have, our, the sidewalk gap fill prioritization update with Amy, key Krejovsky and Tyler Spice. Thank you, council president, members of the city council. We're excited to be here this afternoon and talk about sidewalk gaps. I am Amy Krioski. I'm the assistant city engineer.
I'm here with Tyler. Last year, we developed a sidewalk prioritization system. Hard to say. It is a very hard word, and we're gonna say a lot today, so we're gonna get some practice. So we have some new faces to counsel because, we did provide an update last year. But we wanted to take an opportunity to help you understand, how we prioritize filling sidewalk gaps. So here's what we're gonna cover today. We're gonna give you some statistics on sidewalk in Rochester. We're gonna briefly touch on how sidewalks are maintained and constructed, how we in public works define a gap,
a high level overview of the system itself, and then what we plan to do here in 2025. K. Alright. So in Rochester, there's approximately 600 miles of sidewalk. To To put that in perspective, we have about 525 roadway centerline miles. So, you know, typically, there's sidewalk on both side of the street, so more than half or more than excuse me. It's more than our roadway miles because we typically have sidewalk on both sides of the street. Talking with Tyler today, we do not think that number includes,
shared use paths. So that's strictly sidewalk. You're looking at five foot sections. So the existing sidewalk is maintained under our sidewalk improvement districts. You guys are pretty well versed in that. It's on a twenty year rotation. Except for the downtown, we do improvements every five years. And then Rochester is a growing city. So our sidewalk network continues to grow. These sidewalks are built out with new development and redevelopment. So, we can tell you that it's a requirement to build when it's redevelopment, but we don't know exactly when in time this requirement, came forth.
There's a lot of, subdivisions from different eras, where sidewalk does not exist today. So now that we know, excuse me. Now that we know exactly how much sidewalk we have in Rochester, we wanna take a dive into what we mean by sidewalk gaps. It's important to understand that, the definition of a sidewalk gap in our network, is not all missing segments of sidewalk in Rochester. So what is a sidewalk gap? A gap is generally defined as an area under 600 feet. That's about two blocks. And when constructed, it will provide connectivity between existing pedestrian facilities.
These are pretty easy to construct. No formal engineering really required. So if you look on the photo on the slide there, this is a great example of a gap. There's sidewalk in the foreground and the background. So when this segment is constructed, it will provide connectivity. Also, you can see not a ton of grade challenges, so easily constructible. So missing sidewalk by the numbers here. So the city, maintains a GIS dataset, and that enables us to get a picture of our sidewalk networks, and where missing sidewalk segments exist. So there are 2,140
missing segments of sidewalk. I do wanna make the plug that we we break segments by blocks. So if block by block. And so if, you know, they're continuous, they are still separate segments within that seg within that stretch. So 2,147 A a gap is can only be up to 600 feet, which is two blocks. Right? Is that Nope. Okay. So they can a gap cannot be more than 600 feet. Generally, less than four. Or generally less than 600. Okay. So Got it. Tyler will do a dive into that a little bit.
She'll show you an example later. So, of these missing segments where we don't have sidewalk, 1,320 of them meet the definition, of a gap. So less than 600 feet, generally, easily constructible. Right? So, just to equate that, that's approximately 75 miles that are we do not have sidewalk within Rochester that meet just the gap definition. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Tyler, and she's gonna talk about how those sidewalk gaps are prioritized. Hello. So I'll just do a quick overview of the system.
As Amy said, we developed this program last year, and we did this so we can rank all the gaps against each other and figure out what our priorities are for constructing sidewalk. As part of this process, we also consider things like constructability, property acquisitions, things that make it a little bit more challenging, and kinda put us out of that definition of a gap. So just a quick overview of how we assign points. We have a map based system that goes through and gives points to each gap for their proximity to heavy foot traffic areas. These would be things like schools, parks, medical facilities, or transit stops.
Just a couple examples. The road classification, so anything from local streets to major collectors. Obviously, major collector, we're gonna give some more points to keep people off the street, then if it's been identified in the active transportation plan or if there's been a history of pedestrian involved crashes. So that all takes place as a map based, and it's all based on the proximity. We have a system that's able to just spit out those points for us. Following that, we do a manual effort to deduct points for certain things. The deductions are, sorry. If they have sidewalk on the opposite side of the street,
if boulevard tree removal is required, if they'd have to build a retaining wall to construct the sidewalk, or if it's on a dead end street or cul de sac and doesn't provide any connectivity. We took the top 250 gaps on our map based ranking and did the deductions on those. And with that, we come up with scores ranging from 16 to 84 out of a hundred. And, again, that's a manual effort, which is why we haven't gone through all 1,300. It's gonna take us a while to get through that. You you can see that map there. That's all the gaps in our system with just the map based ranking. The darker colors are scored higher, and that equates to the 75 miles that Amy mentioned earlier.
But even though 75 miles exist, funding is our limiting factor in executing these gap fills. The gap fill construction is funded 100% by assessment just for the actual concrete that goes on the ground. And then public works receives $15,000 annually as part of the tax levy to administer gap fill projects. If we have a 600 foot gap, we estimate that'd be about $45,000 in just construction with with an additional $15,000 in project administration and contingencies. As I said, we get 15,000. We can fill 600 feet. That obviously limits the number of gaps we can fill each year.
Average residential lot is a hundred and five foot of frontage, and we estimate that would be about $7,800 for strictly the sidewalk construction, and that properties would be solely unbooked for that. But we'll go through our top five gaps today, and you'll see that those range anywhere from $3,000 to $24,000 per property. And that's just depending on the parcel length and whether they're residential or commercial properties. So we'll go through those five, talk about the scores, and about how much we expect it to cost for each, gap construction. So going from the fifth one, this is Fourteenth Street Northwest.
That building is actually Colonial Lanes. That score is 69 out of a hundred in our program after we do our deductions. That gap is 265 feet, and we expect that would be about $24,000 in construction to this single property. The next one you have here on the left is First Avenue Southeast. This is just south of the Fairgrounds. This is another one that would be on one property. It's a 10 feet, and it would be about a $10,000 assessment. It's an apartment building, so we would hold it to that commercial's construction standards, which drives that cost up a little bit higher than the 7,800. And then on the right,
you'll see kind of what Amy was talking about with how we break the gaps at intersections. Our third rank gap is actually the red line on the right of that map, and that scores a 77. But if we constructed that without constructing the orange line on the left, we wouldn't be providing that connectivity. So we would construct both of those together, and that orange line score is 52, so right in the middle of our pack. So the red line on the right is 395 feet across three properties for an average of a $10,000 assessment per property. But the it's kinda hard to see the parcel boundary.
But the, easternmost property is a commercial property, and we'd expect that to be about $18,000. And then the two residential properties would be $6,000. And then the orange one is also 395 feet, but that spans seven properties. And we expect that would be about a $4,000 assessment per property. Tyler, can you stop for a minute? Council member go ahead. Are you picking on me? I do live there. No. The one in the left, my wife. Sorry. I think you're picking up. So our second rent gap, first thing I'm gonna this is Fourteenth Avenue Southeast, just north of Fourth Street.
I'm gonna know what you're gonna see, some unusual geometry there. That's because our gaps just follow our parcel boundaries on the map that we made. This is not how we would construct it. It would just be a straight shot from one corner to the other. So this is a 215 foot gap across two properties, and we would expect it to be about $8,500 per property. And then a really similar gap in scope, and our top rank gap on our system is Sixth Avenue Northwest, just north of Seventh Street. That is 210 across two properties, and we expect about an $8,000 assessment for each.
You might know that so 210, I told you the average is a hundred and five foot of frontage, and that'd be $7,800. This is a little more expensive. Once we get into driveway sections, we're putting in thicker concrete, and that's driving those costs up a little bit. So that's our top five gaps that are eligible under cons or eligible for construction under our program, but we do make some engineering considerations. Our actual highest rank gap is that little red line at the southeast corner of Sixteenth Street and Third Avenue Southeast. And that score is an 84 in our system. But you have a series of gaps extending from Sixteenth Street all the way down
to Twentieth Street with small sections of sidewalk in between. And that actually ends up being about 1,900 feet if you put them all together, exceeding able to do with this program. And on top of that, there's some pretty significant utility locate relocations that would be required. There's a transmission line that runs in the boulevard through there. But you'll notice the green line on the right, and that is actually our CP Rail Trail that we're gonna be constructing this year. So we are actually providing the connectivity through that means that we wouldn't have been able to otherwise with the gap fill program here. Now that we've gone over some examples of gaps, can you Okay.
Council member, go ahead. I I apologize if I missed this. For these property owners and such, obviously, it's gonna be a little bit of a shocker to some of them that this is gonna happen because they're they they don't get informed until they they they do get informed, but they don't pay attention till they get a bill. But, anyway, how long will the assessment be spread over? How many years? Five. Five. Thank you. Yep. Council member Palmer, go ahead. Can you go back two slides for me? Absolutely. And a question for you is is are you giving them the opportunity to build it themselves? Yep. I'll touch on that a little bit, but, yeah, we would notify them that So the one on Seventh Street here,
the one on the right Yep. You got a red line there. Why not on the other side? So they ranked I wanna say the one on the right ranked just a little bit higher. And then on the west side of the street, it they would it would have lost points for the other one being constructed. Do you know what I'm like? If I had the the left side or the right side, I'd rather see the left side because that's where Washington School is up the street. So there's a it's a dead end as you hit up Sixth Avenue there. This is Northwest. And the other thing was there's pet facilities on the South Side of Eighth Street there. So building up the West Side wouldn't actually connect to anything.
We would have to add some either some pet ramps to get across the street. The actual connectivity would be to build it on that East Side. Okay. Thank you. Council member Fredericks, you have another question? Yeah. Correct me if I'm wrong too. In order to for a contractor to construct a sidewalk in the city limits of Rochester, they have to actually be on your list, so to speak. They have to be have the proper credentials. It can't be just any contractor coming and do that. Correct? Yes. So if, an owner elected to have somebody private hired, they would have to be licensed with the city of Rochester and pull a permit
and do that work. If it's on our project, we would go out for bid. Like, we and those aren't considered licensed, but they go through the process of having a contract with us. Perfect. Council member Miller. Thanks. Just a quick question. Could you go forward one slide? Absolutely. So in this highest rank gap Mhmm. Once the green line is constructed, what happens to that highest rank gap? Does it just continually use manually downranked? It won't change the scoring on that. I mean, it's scored just because of its proximity to everything. I think that this one might have actually had a pedestrian involved collision, which drove up the score a little bit.
So just because the other facilities exist won't change that, but it doesn't make it it still doesn't make it constructible under this program. Okay. Actually yeah. Just to clarify, it's essentially eliminated from the gap fill program itself. It would have to be filled by other means. Thanks. So you're removing it saying this fills the gap. It doesn't remove the need. Say it's redeveloped, it would require sidewalk. It would require sidewalk then. So it would still remain a gap because, the sidewalk segment doesn't exist, but it just seemed to be constructed under different means.
Mister Tyler, go ahead. Thank thank other Tyler. I wanna add that, I I don't want to leave the impression that we completely take it out of the scoring because, you know, things could change in the future on third, that would actually make that a more feasible project, and that gap obviously is still a need. But as things stand today, minus any other redevelopment or construction or more sidewalk, those the infeasibility remains. Okay. So it's just continually reviewed until conditions change. That's correct. Alright. So we'll touch a little bit on what 2024 looked like and what we have
to look forward to in 2025. As we've noted a couple times, we just, developed the system last year, and that was to make sure that the gaps we're selecting for construction have the greatest impact on the community, and we're not just picking anything off. So through the system, we've been able to identify our top gaps, but we still received inquiries on other gaps around the community that don't score that high. When this happens, the first thing that we do is what is always confirm whether or not there's, plans to build this by other means, which is often a development agreement. Might be CIP or an active transportation. Last year through this, we were able to identify four different gaps that were obligated under develop development agreement
and construct 1,700 feet of sidewalk through that. And coming forward in 2025, our plan is to bring the top two gaps forward. If you remember, that was Sixth Avenue from Seventh Street to Eighth Street and then Fourteenth Avenue Southeast, from Third Street to Fourth Street. And, like, we touched on this. It would include a homeowner notification. They get a letter and say, you know, we're initiating a gap fill here. You have sixty days to sixty days is our policy, but we could give them more depending on our construction timing. But, you have sixty days to hire somebody to do it yourself. If you don't, we'll come in and do it,
and you'll be assessed for that following the assessment process that you guys are pretty familiar with. So with that, you might notice that our definition of a gap is fairly limited, but there are other ways that sidewalk construction can occur. So the first of them is CIP. I'm gonna go across over a couple examples of projects that we they're done in the past or we have upcoming. Anything more extensive than that 600 feet or requires more engineering, we would, hope to do with the CIP project. First one is 30 First Avenue Northwest and 40 Eighth Street. This is kind of by MnDOT or the Mazda dealer up there.
That was two gaps for a total of 1,600 feet. It involved pretty significant grading and storm sewer work. It was previously a ditch section that we had to fill in and then sell some storm. The two projects together were about a hundred thousand dollars in design cost and $300,000 in construction. So as you can see, it greatly exceeds the 15,000 we have to administer projects. And then 30 Seventh Street Northwest, this one might seem familiar to you guys. That's from Eighteenth Avenue to West River, and you approved ad for bid on that project last week. So, that is 3,800 feet of missing sidewalk.
To date, we have $50,000 in design cost, and we estimate it to be about a $500,000 project. These are funded through tax levy or active transportation grants, and, again, they greatly exceed the scope of a gap fill project. We touched on development agreements that we were able to fill some gaps on last year. So gaps that exist within recent development are typically obligated under their development agreement to connect, to construct their pedestrian facilities along all frontage, when the lots are built out. And if that doesn't happen, it's usually outlined within a set term, five years or ten years that we can then initiate the gap fill.
And then in the event that a gap exists that doesn't fall into any of these categories, council can always bring forward a council initiated action, but we would need to identify a funding source for that, and we've not commonly seen this occur, with sidewalk construction at least. I have outlined three different gaps that have come to us on, various platforms and don't fall within our gap, and just kind of why that is like that. They're usually large in scope, and they score pretty low compared to other gaps that we have in the system and will require significant engineering.
Just for context, so Amy mentioned there's 2,100 gap or 2,100 areas of missing sidewalk. 1,300 of those are considered a gap. So we have about 800 that would fall outside that range, and 340 of those 800 are at least as big as the three we're gonna talk about. So about 41%. Council member Palmer. This one here, I have problems with. K. And and the up by College View Road Mhmm. There's some trees there, and that's gonna be developed. And and as the city policy, we're gonna make them put a sidewalk down to about 20 feet from Bridgeview Drive.
Okay. Now there are no houses there. What I would prefer to see is a is a asphalt trail that runs the entire length of that area to hit the softball field to the left. The other problem with this is is that it's it's a high speed, cut through for people. Mhmm. So that's why that sidewalk would be necessary. But to get across 30 Sixth Avenue, if you look detailed on all the houses there, there's easements for sidewalk could be able to go from one sidewalk to the other all the way to the park. Is that on your list or or or I mean,
there's two questions there. Yes. One is is is are you willing to say yes, let's put an asphalt trail on 30 Sixth Avenue, which to me makes more sense. And number two, how do we get these easements that have sidewalk availability in between houses to get to the park on the east of this. They're they're looking over here, council president. So I would say willingness isn't really the struggle with something like this. It's not that there's not a need for pedestrian facilities. Right? We have limited funding sources, to construct these.
And the point of the prioritization system was to pick out the highest priority ones that we can apply that limited, those are limited resources towards. This one doesn't score well as you can see on your slide here because it doesn't fall in close proximity to any of the attractions, schools in town that would give it a higher ranking. So, yes, we could construct a trail out there. It's technically feasible. However, that would be a project that would fall into more of a CIP scale. As well as going through the easements you referenced,
that's probably a CIP scale project, that potentially has land acquisition involved in it and all kinds of stuff depending on how grading shake shook out. So as far as the gap fill, neither one of those that you bring up would fall under this program, and we'd have to talk about programming a a full scale project if we wanted to do that. So I'm I'm listening to to what you're saying. And so 30 Sixth Avenue has the softball fields to the south, and then just to the west of this is RCC, RCTC, I guess, that has sidewalk and stuff along Highway 14.
So you're telling me that that the best way to do this is have put in the CIP budget for what, next year, the year after that? We could talk about timing and how we scrap together the funding for something like that. But, yes, if we wanted to construct a project, it would have to show up in the CIP or through council action. So on Highway 14 along our RCTC, we have a a trail that that runs all the way out there. How did that get funded? I don't know that off the top of my head. Okay. Dylan might. I think he's listening in. Okay. And that's our first.
And then number two is that these easements between these old neighborhoods, from a construction perspective, I'm going to make the assumption that's already graded from house to house with that easement there. We did that in Northeast Rochester around 800 block eight eight hundred block that we had those in the old days that they just eased it, and they didn't put anything in there for future. You you know what I'm talking about? Sorry. I got distracted by a text from Dylan saying that the other one was constructive of federal transportation alternative funds.
Okay. So I would say, yes, that some of those easements are probably graded for trails. But I would also caution that things happen between, the initial lot grading and now depending on how old those, neighborhoods are and also how well some of those contractors were following their grading plan. Okay. We got one more. Two more. One more. Jefferson School, fifteenth Avenue in Tenth Street. I have a school, within a quarter mile, and I don't have sidewalks either side. I've got kids walking in the middle of the street.
How does that rate on your scale? Off the top of my head, I don't know without pulling up the ranking and seeing where We could get back to you on that. Would you get back to me? Yep. And then we did some of these sidewalk, connections in the old days, we had a stairway that we had to repair that didn't meet ADA. How did how do you get around this with the ADA requirements that when we go back to to do some of these? Is there an accommodation? So exceptions can be made, by the city engineer, and, basically, that has to be on record that we made a conscious decision to make an
exception. Extreme grades and things of that nature can be qualifiers for that. So that stairway, like we had discussed standing on-site out there, is one of those exceptions. And the feasibility of constructing something that would be ADA compliant is Impossible. For sure in question there. So, what we've done with that one specifically is decided to get it to a point where it's usable, for most people, post it as a potential safety concern, and then try to address it down the line as the SID project rotates to
that area. And if we can find a feasible way to reconstruct that, we will. Thank you. Council member Keane. I I just wanna make sure I understand where we're at here. I'm sorry. I'm bouncing around somewhere else. We're not talking about doing this project. You're showing us some examples that we're not doing. I just wanna make sure I'm following up on council member Palmer's act like he was trying to come up with other alternatives, but you're not showing this as something that we're doing. You're showing this as example of what we're not doing. Yep. Just, examples of things that have landed on our desks and we can't construct under the side under the gap fill prioritization program.
Thank you. Mhmm. Council member, Wall. The costs are assessed, to the property owners? Yep. So then when you talk about funding available for this program, what what are those funds for? So the $15,000 that we get annually, is to administer the program. So whether that's design, if it's required, just our time, in the program. We also I expect we'll only assess the so we'll send a estimate to put these people on notice for their assessment, and it's this much and it's not to exceed that. There's contingencies in construction.
I assume we'd pick that up, and, I anticipate we would likely pick up a lot of the, like, grading and restoration work rather than Tyler. Tyler, you wanna add? Yeah. I was just gonna add that, that $15,000 would have to add, also cover any of the construction complications that aren't directly attributable to the physical construction of the sidewalk because that's the only part that's assessable. So when you talk about properties being eligible for the program, that's where the benefit is. But if they, to kind of get to council member Frederick's comment,
I don't want to be eligible for the program. I'm really happy without a sidewalk and a $7,800 or $10,000 cost. What is that? I mean, understood that nobody wants to pay that rate, but we do prioritize having a walk able community here. And that's I mean, we've been tasked to create this program or the systems by you guys or the council before you. So, yeah, it's hard. Nobody wants that, but everyone does need to pay for their side initial sidewalk construction, when their homes are built.
Oh, if you wanna add Tyler wants to add more. Go ahead, Tyler. Thank you. That's what I was gonna say as we, came through council with a series of conversations about sidewalk improvement district program. That was one of the decisions that was made through that those conversations with council is that we would, stick with the initial sidewalk construction being a property owner's obligation. Once it is constructed, maintenance of it would fall under the SID program. So people that have a gap essentially haven't ever that property, regardless of who owns it, hasn't ever contributed to the initial construction of the sidewalk,
and that's why they see the assessment. And then they would annually well, through the rotation, see the sidewalk improvement district maintain that sidewalk. And I just would add, they also haven't contributed to any maintenance of the sidewalk in front of them in the former non SID program. And, we're still exempting, cul de sacs, other exemptions? They're not exempt. It just reduces their score a little bit because it doesn't provide any connectivity, but, it would have to be less than 600 feet. Again, I mean, once you get around the whole bubble of cul de sac, we're not seeing a lot of that. Council member Miller.
So this ranking is is pretty stable. We wouldn't expect new gaps to come up probably because we're requiring sidewalks now for new develop redevelopment. So is this map available to us, to the public, to see where their sidewalks rank? I mean, to this question of other than receiving a notice that you're in our top two this year. Yeah. Surprise. I I mean Yeah. Theoretically, we could notify people that they're in the top 15 or 25 or in a five year outlook. Yeah. We've not made it public to date. I'd when we sent it out last year,
council did have access to it for a handful of months, but we pulled that back at some point. Correct. I don't think there's any re I mean, I'd let you speak to that, I guess, if you think there's any reason to list our top five, fifteen, 20. I I I could see an argument for some communication on that. Like, you know, if you fell in our top 25, just know that at some point in the relatively near future, we may be approaching you for sidewalk construction. The Just to clarify, the top five that we addressed today, those owners know No. So they could be watching now.
They know now. Yeah. The city of Fredericks are finding out. And got it. Got it. I'm sorry. Council member Miller, you continue. And I guess where I'm going with that is because there are other considerations, obviously, about constructability. I live on a street with no sidewalk that has a gap and I know my neighbors would have a heart attack, should that need to I also think there's some difficult constructible elements. There's great change, etcetera. I I would think it would be helpful and a good benefit to our community. We set already, you know, five year,
ten year plans for construction just to allow people to engage a little bit ahead of time, make a plan, know that this might be coming. And I don't know where my colleagues would fall, but I I would prefer we not just notify people and say sixty days or else. Yeah. I think our sidewalk policy is that or is that we have to provide sixty days, but there's no reason we couldn't provide more. Council member Palmer, go ahead. Couple quick ones. Top 25, I think, would be nice to have only because if I'm gonna buy a piece of property and if I would have known it,
I could have negotiated it. So that would be just something useful to have. A couple of years ago, when we didn't have the districts, it was very difficult to sit here with people saying I owe $3,000 I owe $5,000 I don't have that much money. That was very difficult for us. And from a history perspective, in the nineties is when we decided when you build a new home, you're going to get a sidewalk because if you want to see some really, really ugly meetings, you'd have 75% of the neighbors sign in for a sidewalk. You'd have the other 25% we don't need it. And it was they just drag out, knock out,
and the city council just said, no. We're done with this. Now there's other cities in the southern part that they do it through the whole subdivision, and you build a new home, you drive your trucks over, you break it up, and they say, we don't care. But I'm not in favor of that. That's kind of a backwards community. So thank you. Yeah. Other question? Council member Miller. Just a comment, maybe a question. Obviously, the other opportunity to close sidewalks would be to require it be filled if it's scores x, you know, some threshold score above and the property is sold. Has that ever been considered as as far as alternatives?
Not as part of this program. I don't think that, historically, we've ever considered that. Other questions? I I would also reiterate, council member Miller, council member Palmer's thoughts that we should give folks time early heads up on on when they're when when they're on the top five, but also kind of letting them know that, they may be further down the list, just so for personal planning purposes. Yeah. Absolutely. Are you done with your presentation? Or I was gonna go over a couple of just examples we have with things
that don't fall within the gaps if you guys wanna hear about them quick. Go ahead. So we've touched on 30 Sixth Avenue a little bit. This is 3000 feet, so that's five times the definition of our gap. And depending where you fall on there, it's between eighteen and twenty one. So pretty low on our scoring system. And then I also wanna note that if we constructed this, it creates what we would consider a sidewalk island. You can see there's no sidewalk along Highway 14 there or along College View Road, so it'd have to be constructed with some other ped facilities to actually provide that connectivity, which is another reason it doesn't qualify for this program.
And then it's a rural section right now, so you see some of the construction like you I mentioned up by Carlos O'Kelly's or Mazda that we're filling in ditches, and it's a little bit more, intense than a inspector designing it in the field with a contractor. Two more. Eleventh Avenue Southeast from Pinewood Road to 20 Fourth Street. This is right across from Willow Creek Middle School and was actually identified in the twenty twenty two middle school safe routes to school plan or recommendations. This was a 36 in our system and just over 1,100 feet, so almost twice our limit.
Again, a rural section. You can see the culverts in the background. It's gonna take some significant work here to get pet facilities through here. And then Sixteenth Street, Southwest from Third Avenue to Sixth Avenue, this would be between the Fairgrounds and, Highway 52. That south side of the road there, we've gotten some interest in having sidewalks installed there. You can kinda see they go it's going uphill there, so opposite of our other challenges. But we also several of these properties actually touch the back of the curb there, so we'd be acquiring some property. And you can see the whole line of trees there,
that we'd be taking down significant trees. So with that, we've provided some background on our gap fill prioritization system, how we define a gap, and discuss other means for constructing missing sidewalk that don't fall within our definition. And we're happy to take any other questions you might have. Questions from council members. Very Yep. Oh, Patrick he said Patrick. Council member Keane, go ahead. Thanks. And, again, I I I really do appreciate that you guys brought this forward. I can see you've done a lot of work of trying to do the scoring. I do recall the scoring, but I guess I'm trying to recall when we we had the the gaps and
the the problem we had, just little history lesson here is we had other people looking and saying, oh, now that you have these districts, you can use that to put in my new sidewalk because I don't have one. And that's the problem we were trying to get around. We didn't wanna use up all the money doing that. Mhmm. And I remember talking about going says, okay. We need a a system to address these gaps. I don't remember the specifics of did we put aside 30 k a year or how how did you come up with the idea that we can do two of these this year versus six or versus one? Sure. One, just like our capacity to run the projects is part of it.
And then that $15,000 that we get in tax levy because we expect to see about 30%, project administration and contingencies on any construction. If we do 600 feet, we have $15,000 in project administration and contingencies. Okay. So that's why you worked yourself back into it, and that has been funded. It's not it's not in the CIP. It's a funded as a separate like, just an operational initiative within public works. It's in the CIP. Oh, Tyler, she took care of it. It is aligned in the CIP. It is a it is considered an investment versus an operational thing of filling the
gaps. Yeah. It there's a specific line called gap fill that receives $15,000 worth of tax levy every year. And so, for example, if you didn't if you had the perfect gap fill project that came in exactly as bid and what you assumed was gonna be the assessments, it would carry over to the future year. Correct. Mhmm. Ander. One of the, I don't wanna get into all the different things. Some of the examples you use are actually on county roads. Can we build sidewalks on county roads? We I think we can. I mean, we have to get permits from them, but we can. Yeah. So just go through that with me a little bit when you say we can
get permits. It's do they they have the same sort of right of we'd have to build it within the right of way. We're not talking about, you know, buying prop private property. Correct. Do you wanna speak to that? I mean, as from design Tyler, were you gonna speak to Tyler? I was gonna add that, you know, the county does not have a complete streets policy. So in most cases, when we're constructing pedestrian facilities in their right of way, we take on the maintenance obligations of those as well. So, just wanted to add that piece in there. Amy may have more to add, but Nothing nothing else. Alright. So you had met talked about doing two of these.
These other ones you talked about, like, with the scoring, the non gaps, this idea of, like, there's something that council member Palmer talked about near Jefferson or out of 30 Sixth Avenue. How do those get, like, assessed over time? And that's a that's just a that's just a normal CIP thing that that somebody needs either to champion it or they just don't make the the the list of things to think about. Maybe I could start off by how much funding you have in the CIP that they're talking about, which is the tax levy funded CIP where all tax levy funded projects outside of
the parks referendum compete. It's about 8 and a half million dollars a year. And so when you think about that sidewalk project and all the other needs that come forward and so far in the budget process, I think we got double that request Yep. For one year. That's your main challenge. And I Oh, I understand. And believe they're I don't know that they're assessable. So some of the projects are not assessable. Right? So, you know, they end up being, like, a back lot or, you know That that's what I the ones I knew about would would be city expense. Yep. And last thing, I just just to comment on this. I heard this talk about,
like, make people aware, but I I I wanna make sure we we do this, like, intentional. Are we making the existing owners aware? Are we making this public data? Have a real strong opinion. But whatever we do, make sure we know what we said we wanted to do and as opposed to because if if somebody says I want this because I wanna know what I'm buying, that's different than selling it sending it to the owners. It's also something if you send the next 20 the top 25 that sort of says you're sending people stuff about something that might happen twelve years from now. So I I I I don't wanna dwell dwell into it,
but I want it to be make sure we know what we're doing. Good point. Council member Wahl. This is not intended to be a snarky question, but but it will come off as that. If if we do two a year, we expect to be done in June? No. I would say there's other means for constructing sidewalks. So when we go through and do a complete street reconstruction, you know, we're looking at sidewalks on those streets, active transportation. We're we're filling in some of those larger gaps, safe routes to school, those sorts of things. So, yes, it is going to take a long time to knock off this list at the
pace of the gap fill, but there are other means for construction. Maybe another way of saying that is if you only had this program, yes. However, there are many other different ways that sidewalks get built here, thankfully. I'll also add that some many of our gaps also have sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. So it's not complete lack of facilities either in all cases. Okay. Any further? Council member Miller, go ahead. I know this program was decided last year, but I guess I just think about the equitably cost sharing. Like, you know, does somebody have a sidewalk gap that's not quite in the highest priority, and then it gets safe routes to school grant funding?
And, like, how should we be thinking about that over time too in the equity will cost sharing of whose rises at the top and they get it, like, fully assessed versus they happen to have other conditions that it's not constructible, so they never get assessed. Maybe that's just not considered by the current ranking system. I I would say that's exactly why we developed a a ranking system because prior to that, you know, it everything was open to interpretation. This is system is an attempt to make sure that we're approaching all of them the same way. And, unfortunately, some people have specific circumstances with their property based on where they live and what
they purchased that either help them in this case or hurt them financially, if they need to contribute, to a gap fill. So I'll just add Go ahead. If I can, that for special assessments, we do have assessment deferrals. You have to qualify for that, and that doesn't completely solve the problem for everyone because there is a point at which that is collected, which is the transfer of the title, you know, for whatever reason might happen. And so, I mean, we do have that as outlined in state statute, 65 years of age or older. So it it's based on income,
permanently disabled, and then it could be income and or disability. And then a member of the Minnesota National Guard or other military reserves, ordered into active military service, and that was the definition, that make it a hardship. So it's not all encompassing, but there are options for people in for this or other assessments that they're assessed. Alright. Well, I had just one more question and and maybe speak to Amy since you're the closest to the program. Are you do you feel that the ranking system that you've used and really know
so well that it it does match with what our needs are as far as when you look at the properties? Yeah. I think so. I mean, we it was very intentional the way we set it up, you know, that people are using or should be walking in these areas. Again, I guess, I don't know. Do you have anything to add? I would just say, you know, that map that we kinda outlined earlier where Tyler had pointed out, like, the darker segments. I mean, you can see those are, you know, corresponding to those pedestrian, attractions, closer to the downtown core, those sorts of things.
So yes. Great. Great. Well, thank you very much. Great program, and keep up the good work. Thank you. Anything else for today? Administrator Zelms. Council president, council members, the only other thing that I would share is that, at the end of your packet, you have the, upcoming study session list. And so if you look, to March 24, we are still working on a location. You may likely be up at RPU again. But that is strategic planning, and I apologize. It doesn't appear this got updated, probably because we had this meeting on Friday.
But we also are intending to add a a second item. I don't believe this will take the entire hundred and eighty minutes, and that item is somewhat related and likely be good to be in the strategic planning mindset. That is a opportunity to talk about our with our partners at, destination medical center about their update to their, Destination Medical Center about their update to their, next five year plan. Some of those things may overlap, but also just to get a sense of how that all works. We've had a couple of questions over the last, well, first few meetings of 2025, so it seemed like a good opportunity to pair those two things. So, just don't wanna surprise you with that item.
Alright. Thank you. Any anything, council members? We are adjourned. Recording stopped.