Recommendation to authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute an agreement, and all necessary documents including subsequent amendments, including amending the contract amount, with Los Angeles County, to receive and expend up to $5,236,895 of Measure H funding, to implement Homeless Initiative strategies adopted by the County Board of Commissioners to combat homelessness in Los Angeles County, for the estimated period of November 1, 2021 through June 30, 2022, with the option to renew for four additional one-year periods, at the discretion of the City Manager.  (Citywide)
Councilman Allen. Motion is carried. Item 41. Reporter on Health and Human Services recommendation to execute an agreement with Los Angeles County to receive and expend up to 5,236,895 of Measure H funding to implement homeless initiative strategies citywide. Mr. Mark I think the Council wanted maybe a short kind of update on this measure measuring rate. Can we call it? Good evening on a mayor and council members. So this is an annual measure h funding. And what is reflected here is about 2.7 million of new funding coming through measure H in addition to the rollover of approximately 2.6 million. So those two together, this allows for that rollover and to continue to move forward with, uh, with homeless services utilizing the measure h funding. So the measure H funding primarily focuses on homeless prevention, rapid rehousing, outreach, a coordinated entry system as well as case management. And are interim housing considered under the strategies of Measure H the crisis bridge housing. So as you know, the Measure H is one of the many funding sources that we receive and it is the the primary source from the county in addition to other statewide, such as a half or the federal continuum of care and other services . And so this is one of the funding sources that allows us to put together our entire program operating out of the MSI and with our partners with that close representation. Thank you. There's a motion and a second. Please go and have one member of the public. She can be pushing forward. They still proud some of the six. With respect to the 32 page equity toolkit that was presented with this agenda item, there's not a single initiative in that 32 pages that is doing anything to end homelessness. You have a language access policy. There is a homeless encampment on 24 Columbus Boulevard. I take my grandmother there to get her Social Security check. There's not a single person out there. If I brought them to my article. INTERPRETER That will say, at last, I'm ready to no longer be unhoused. I do not know why we are misappropriating county funds to do nothing to end homelessness. The beacon built at Long Beach in Anaheim is 160 affordable housing units at a cost of $530,000 a unit. Operation Homekey, which was utilized by the county to buy the best Western on Atlantic in Anaheim for $21 million. $21.7 million is at a cost of $20,000 per unit. We are grossly misusing this money and it's not doing anything to end homelessness. You have 32 pages. You have direct install gardens, language access policy, the climate adaption plan. These are these are the initiatives that are going to end homelessness. They aren't doing anything. This is affecting either the policies or the people that work on them. Great job. But that's not what this funding needs to be used for. I pay property tax. I pay $32,000 in property tax. I pay for my mother's house, my grandmother's house, and my aunt and uncle's house. I don't mind paying taxes. What I do mind is you guys misappropriating what my property taxes are being used for. It should be used not to pay for. They're all gone now. The poverty pimps, but the eggheads with the student loan debts who come in here and they bring poor people in here and they say, hey, to stay a renter forever. They're not pushing homeownership. Homeownership is how you get rid of and end homelessness. It's not by perpetual rent ship. Until Blackstone and BlackRock bypass apartment buildings, it's become homeowners. So we need to be using this county money to develop homeowners. I don't see in the equity toolkit a first time homebuyer program. I don't see anything that is substantial. It's just developing and furthering the bureaucracy. I'm sorry, I didn't I didn't get a liberal arts degree. You know, I work on my hands. So, you know, I got to go outside and work. And these people, I don't know what they're doing with taxpayers money besides wasting it. We need to see some of this measure h money being used to develop either homeowners or expand in preserving current affordable housing. If you look at the motels there exist in the city, even in sixth district, you can easily buy up 300 units of affordable housing by buying at the motels a.s.a.p that went through. Thank you. Thank you very much for listening. RICHARDSON Thank you. Just so first of all, we're glad that we have our own continuum of care. We continue to get the right funding. And I agree with the last speaker in terms of homeownership, but I do want to highlight that we do have a first time homebuyer program in the works being funded by the recovery plan . And so my understanding from 2.4, that's one of the first programs to roll out of the recovery. So we look forward to sharing more details very soon. Thank you. We have a motion in a second. I just want to add, because I think that really spoke to a lot of what I think a lot of us feel some time. And I just want to just reiterate to the team that I do think oftentimes we get stuck in the academics of how to fix stuff and not just focus on kind of the bread and butter issues of actually getting people in the homes buying motel rooms. So I actually agree with a lot of the public comment that was said. But I do have a question. Can we get a report when we get back in January on Project On and where we are in the process? I know of multiple times and Ms.. Tatum has done a great job of working on getting us the current three sites we have. I know we have requested to purchase more. We know we have money coming down the state. I feel like all of our focus should be on purchasing motels and getting more folks to folks house. I also think that we should be less worried about. The ongoing. I know. I know. I know. What stops us from purchasing more is oftentimes kind of staff's concern about the ongoing cost after a few years. And I understand that. But I don't want us to lose sight of taking care of the emergency in front of us because we're worried about what can happen four years from now having to pay for it like that for hopefully mature age kids comes in or the programs from the state. So I just want to put that on the table. I do think, by the way, that staff have done a great job in in the project roomkey project Roomkey space. And so this is not a criticism of that because I think we've done a great job with the three projects, what, 250 units, I think total. But we, you know, if we're not purchasing another in the next few months, you know, one or two of the buildings, then I think we're not spending our homelessness dollars the right way. And so I think that that's got to be our top priority, is actually purchasing all the motels. And it's also fixes blight issues. The Motel six, let's say, over in Council Councilman Price's district. I mean, there's, like, zero impact to tubes. I'm sorry. Cancer, super nodes, district maps. So six. Thank God. I did great job with that project. But that that that project, for example, and I heard directly from from neighbors and friends that, you know, that live nearby who were really worried and everyone is agreement that there was little to no impact. The other two projects that we've done in the city, the county partnership's incredible investments. So I'm just really grateful for the work you've all done. And I'm hoping also that we stick to the bread and butter and homelessness stuff. I think that's that's hopefully the the future. Councilwoman, actually, I may have skipped town. We got that. You have. You were the second. Mayor, you said. Oh, thank you. Councilman Mongo. Thank you. I recently was sent a thread of some communications related to some individuals online, and I read through it. And one of the things that I think is really critical with all of the projects that we're doing is communication. So. Often. A few times we try to throw out my term, my multiple terms on council. We have tried to host homeless forums where community members could come forward and hear from the legal side, the compassion side, the law side, and all the different components and the complexity of it. And I think that they're very beneficial. I'm heartbroken that Sarah Green is no longer in the city attorney's office. She was so articulate in communicating to the community how the system works and what processes are in place on both sides to both protect the homeless community and protect the residents. And then the complexities of the prior legal findings and other opinions that have come out. I want to applaud. I believe Councilwoman Allen had a recent homeless forum with similar components to it. But I really believe that that's the city's job as a whole. Council offices cannot take on the sole responsibility of that communication. And when I read the threads of what the solutions are that community members are bringing forward and their perception that the council doesn't care because we're not implementing it, I think it goes to our our failure as an elected body and quite frankly, as a city in communicating that clearly my council office can continue to do it as long as I'm in office. And the 70 to 150 people that come to it can benefit from it. But we have thousands of community members who want to help solve the problem. And if they're not informed on the legal standards and requirements that are in place, they're not able to triage with us and support and help us find the solutions in those. So I would just like to say that I'd like to see the city take on that responsibility. I don't know if Councilman Allen has any additional input because I know she's done that. And then finally, I'd like to say that when I talked to the Housing and Housing Services Department, one of the questions that I've asked in the past is how many people that are on housing assistance have gotten off housing assistance? What programs do we have in place to do that? To create a voucher to be available for someone else who needs it. We are only adding and contributing to helping those that need it. But what are we doing to get the people who are receiving that help up into the next level of economics so that they then can be a part of the next level of solution? And so I'd really like to see our transparency on those numbers through our dashboard. I've asked for dashboards in the past, and there was always all these complexities. The pandemic came and dashboards are amazing that we're doing such a great job with them on the pandemic. I would love to see a dashboard on assistance programs on homelessness. It is a crisis and we need to be transparent. Thank you. Thank you, Councilman Ciro. But I thought we spoke already. That is in addition again. Yeah. Okay. Bye. Richardson. I just, you know, since it came up, I would say I want to make I want to. I like the project calling to the room key. I want to make sure that we go back to prior to that, we looked at hotels, the nuisance motels. Since we've done that, I don't know that we've crossed the two, but if we're in a position to sort of free two birds in one key, I know that there have been challenges in terms of the rules on a state funding. Maybe we look at relaxing those rules, particularly, I know of five nuisance motels from Long Beach Boulevard, North Long Beach that are great potential sites for one of these. And after it serves in that temporary capacity, it could turn into supportive housing or something that's a bit more stable for that neighborhood. And although that used to be the neighborhood I represent and it's no longer I think it's still a issue of of great importance to the broader north, obviously, I think city wide. So let's use this tool. We've seen that project HOMEKEY works. And we also know that we do have corridors that have nuisance motels and need to be addressed. I thought that needs to be raised. Thank you. I'll second that and happy to carry the mantle. Councilwoman Sarno. Thank you, Mayor. I really want to reiterate and add to Councilmember Mango's comment about communication, because, you know, I think that when you talk about homelessness funding, you see this big number like it's always in the millions or thousands and it's really hard to grasp where does that money go? Right. And I think that that is where a lot of my resident ask, because they see the same issues occurring no matter what they've been advised to do, no matter how much activities they try to figure out to do and how much ideas they get. And so I think that we really need to invest some type type of time, staff, time or energy or expertize that can really communicate the work. Because I know staff is doing amazing work, a lot of work, a lot of ideas, and I just don't know where what is being done even on just it's hard for me to even grass so that I can communicate this with residents on where the investment is going into and how we're working towards our short term, mid-term and long term solutions. You know, when we talk about housing, that is supposed to be a longer term, but what is it intermediary like? You know, we know that we provide assistance, but it's really unclear in between and how many staff is needed to do that, all of that. Right. So I think it would be helpful to have some kind of not just dashboard but like some kind of annual report or something that can be, you know, that we can utilize so that we don't have to create them individually in our office. And the thing is that often gets to me is I hear from residents, oh, it's happening here in nine, 813, because we are the lower, you know, resource area, lower invested area. But I think we need to paint a bigger picture that it is not just a city, but a national pandemic. And I think we need to speak to examples that, you know, what are we doing all collectively to locally, right. So I just want more communication materials so that we can point to it as a city and and also within certain parts of how we are really addressing it. So thank you. Councilman Preston, that I'm going to have to make some comments. Soraya and I wasn't planning on queuing up to speak on this, but the public comment, I mean, if I could have. Decently shouted Hallelujah in the middle. I would have. Because, I mean, we just get asked all the time about where the dollars are going. And it's it's very difficult for us, at least for me. I'll speak for myself to explain because there's just so many nuances in that space that it's hard for residents to understand why we can't just directly fund certain things to solve the problems. I do I do want to recognize, you know, the mayor mentioned the project, Homekey project in my current district and I worked really hard on that project and I want to thank Theresa Chandler and Tracey Colombo or were partners in that with me of course Kelly as well. But we worked really directly and. I. Feel like we we manage the whole we proactively message and Tom and Linda were part of that conversation. We knew it was happening and we proactively messaged it in a way that signaled my early support for the project. So we were able to kind of, you know, address the concerns before it was even really announced. And we worked together really well, I feel like with messaging with our county partners. Then we had a community meeting, it was super positive and the facility actually opened up two weeks before it was supposed to and my staff said , You want to do an announcement on this? I said, No, let's let it open. And then we can tell people it's been open for two weeks or maybe even a month, and then they'll see that what we were saying about the facility was accurate, that there were no impacts, nobody even knew it had opened. And the key was the kind of operator we had and that was really, really good. So I think the operator I mean, I go by there all the time and drop off cookies and things for the workers there because they do a really good job respecting the space that they're in. And you would never know what that that uses there. And so I feel like we should be supporting more and more projects like that. I also think I to Councilwoman Mungo's point, I think we are very inefficient with how we disseminate the information because every council office is independently responding to emails, individual emails every day about the legal legal hurdles in the space of homelessness. And one, we probably shouldn't be giving legal summaries because it's it's very it's just so nuanced. And to, you know, even I, I feel like I understand it better than most. I mean, I read the legal opinions and even I have had missteps before where something I said wasn't completely accurate. And I think that's it's really important. So I feel like I wonder if there are some funds available for us to have a communications officer in the area of homelessness, someone who's like, and I hate to say this, I really do. I can't even believe I'm going to say this out loud. But I am. Next sure to. Come the question 100% of the questions, 99% of the questions are about homelessness. And I have a very good friend who's on the Newport Beach City Council. Same thing. It's not like it's unique to Long Beach. It's the number one concerns. They get there too. Obviously different scope, but we should have somebody who's accurately paying get paid a lot of money to respond and and to put the actual legal what we can and can't do as a city on these social media sites because it's a put it on the burden. To put that burden on the council offices is a tremendously inefficient responsibility and a hugely inconsistent. Because each of us communicates very. Differently and the message doesn't come out as clearly as it should. So I don't know exactly how to do that, but I feel like in the social media space, we should be using some resources to educate people. You know, we're I'm I tell everyone all the time, I'm happy to debate with you all day long. Trust me, I actually enjoy it. But I want to operate from the same fact sheet, right? Like if you're just making stuff up about what the options are for the city and I know those options are illegal, then we're debating. It's an efficient debate, right? We're not debating reality. So I feel like if we had a communicate, if we dedicated some of our homeless money to communication about homelessness and dissemination of that information and engagement, I think it would be a money really well spent. Has the perception of the public is that we have a lot of solutions that for whatever reason we're choosing not to implement. We have a lot of money and we have a lot of solutions. That's just not that's not reasonable. So who communicates that from a collective voice? Thank you. Thank you. I personally agree with everything that's been said so far. I want to add a few things. I think one is I think what you're sensing from the council is the frustration. Also, I think I think the Council on numerous occasions has asked our team to focus on communicating, on bringing in team members, to get information out, because we're doing actually really amazing work. And I think what's happened is I know for a fact that if a resident wants to get information about homelessness, their best bet is to call a city council office. It's not the call. The AC or to call the health department and try to find who the right person is. They're getting direct information from members of the Council of Staff. I believe that to be true. I've heard that from numerous members, numerous, numerous residents. And I think that also has to shift, because the burden of responding to homelessness has been put on everybody at the status and we spend on the team spend a significant amount of time answering questions that should be answered by the team and Health and Human Services Department. Not to say that they're not answering questions because they're answering a lot of questions as well. But there is, I believe, no strategic effort to communicate, one, what we're doing, but to to help people understand how they can actually help us and assist and then what's not actually possible. One thing that's always been frustrating is when we came up with the Everyone Home Plan, which I thought is a it's a great, very simple to understand set of of initiatives. We, we stopped communicating it after a while. We don't continue to bring it back up and communicate what we're doing. Definitely, we're not actually implementing what's in the plan or doesn't mean that we're not focused on trying to solve those issues, but we certainly aren't communicating it. And so I just want to just kind of reiterate what Councilwoman Pryce said, that I would like to see resources actually spent on serious, proactive community engagement so that people understand what can and can't be done and what actually how they can actually help in a way that's productive. So I totally support that. And I also ask these funds, the 5.2, it's going to the CFC. Has this been line item doubt as to where it's going to be spent? Or does the S.O.S. decide how does that work? I'm just curious about that. This is an raised funds. So these funds are line item. There are very specific strategies. So Measure H has I can't remember something like 20 strategies of which we get a set of those strategies and the rest are provided by the county or other providers. So these strategies, the is hunger prevention, rapid rehousing, outreach, coordinated entry and crisis in bridge housing. That is the only thing that we're allowed to use the measure h funding for. And so I did want to, you know, share that. I think, you know, we're certainly happy to bring forward more information on sort of the chunks of funding and how they're utilized. You know, when almost all of the work is grant funded, they have very specific outcomes we're allowed to use it for. And so that is something that I want to share. And we'll I'm happy to bring forward and share more of that measure. H money not allowed to be used for communication. It is not so. But we have we we have carved out communications funds through one of our other grant sources and we are actually meeting tomorrow to start a communications strategy, meeting around homeless services. So it will be coming back with more information on that. We were moving forward and then COVID hit and as the health department and all of the things basically take over all other communications, and I do apologize for that. We know it's very important and we are looking forward to bringing forth a strategy back to you. Because I think we're also hearing is we're actually really proud of what you guys are doing. Like everyone loves like the work and knows how hard it is, but I think there's a disconnect. I don't certainly feel that we're communicating that. And I don't think and the public certainly is not receiving the information and the communication needs to be proactive, not passive. And and this is something that we've talked even more broadly about the city, and I know that that's being worked on right now, but I think that we keep coming back to this question, how we're communicating with the public, and they have a right to know what we're doing. And that's not an area that I think we are doing very well as a city. So I'm hoping that we can have some more conversations about how this is going to get fixed as our budget moves forward and as we talk specifically about what is the biggest crisis in the city, certainly post-COVID, and that is when it was before COVID. And that's, you know, our in-house population, how we how we get them housing. Councilman Mongeau. Thank you. I've attended some of the major meetings I get around all of my c all the agendas. Not only can you not use it on communication, you also can't use it to move people who are receiving aid out of the need to receive aid, which I think is a weakness of the strategies. But the strategies were created with community groups and community organizations. And while I did see some Long Beach staff members attending on our behalf and advocating for certain things, the number of people advocating and the types of things they were advocating for were different three years ago when this passed to where we are today. And I think that that's something else we need to consider and at. Except for I think that right now, at this point in time where we're days away from switching large areas of our city and what councilmember is the main communicator to those individuals? We're at a point where there's going to be a huge shift in gap. Even with the amount of information and meetings that I've been to, both at the county level, the regional level and the local level related to certain areas of my district that have sometimes three and four agencies at play. And the amount of work that my office has singlehandedly done in bringing together and having community meetings where the state senator, the representative of the supervisor of district, a representative from the City of Los Angeles and my self in my office are all in one meeting in a community because there's actual areas that have homeless encampments that in an area the size of this room, there are four jurisdictions at play for. And that is very frustrating to the residents. And those areas are now the primary contact will become councilmember supervisor. And what I'm concerned about is the six years it took to get to where we are and the communication that it would take. It has to be a citywide process. We can't be in this position again. And so I go to these meetings and then individuals say, this area has not been cleaned up in three years and my office can state this area was cleaned up on this day. It was a rollback on this day it was cleaned up again. On this day it was a rollback on this day. We've offered services 76 times. There are 34 people in the encampment. Of the 34 people in the encampment. 84% of them have received more than ten contacts. We can do that because we have great relationships with homeless services. But that can't be on a council office. It really needs to be on the city staff. And it's also an equitable the number of calls we get across council offices. It's just unreasonable for certain offices to receive thousands of calls a year and others to receive hundreds. And we all have the same budget and the same staffing, and that doesn't leave an equitable response rate for constituents. And that's not fair. But I will say thank you to my staff who were crazy hours and make sure that everyone gets a response despite the fact that we get 12,000 calls a year. Just one more thing. One last question also. Did we I know that we've talked about this and it's check chicken, for example, have we funded Mr. Givens and his project that he's been trying to get funded in all the amount of kind of trash and homeless services that provides is that that we were and were able to do. I know I think many of us have been asking for for him to get support for like a year. I believe we were able to get him the vehicle that he was looking for. The truth. Can add that I yeah. So we've been working very closely with Mr. Gibbons to get him to apply to the mayor's fund. And so, as you know, there's a process for application and we've been trying to support him in that process and his board who do the application. So we were able to get him away or the truck so that he can start doing the pickups. So that was a donation from the city, but we're still working on the application process for funding. And it just seems like there's just a lot of process to get through an application process to just give I mean, the amount of work that he's doing on his own with his volunteers, it should we should be like throwing resources at him and not not going through an elaborate application process that my $0.02. So what I'd like to ask is what's the what's the timing on this money. So if these resources we approved tonight are. They what I want to see in January and I'd like to have this conversation back on the council agenda, if I can ask the the Vice Mayor to amend the motion just to have a discussion about resources around homeless services and how we're going to invest in communications. I'd like to see that on the agenda. January, if we're just in, is willing to amend the motion. Absolutely. Okay. Do we have public comment on this item? But it also will prove the money that's on the. That's the. Idea. That's right. That's right. Okay. So we'll have that conversation in January, one of the last week of January. And with that. Well, Mr. Mayor, I'd like to make a few comments, please, if I may. Sure. So as we carry loud and clear, I. Think a lot of you brought up some very good points. In fact, just about a month ago, three weeks ago, we brought together all of our department heads to really talk about what's working, what's not. Where are areas of improvement? And that strategic management retreat really talked about a lot of these same issues, though. We recognize the challenges. We recognize. Communications is probably the top thing that every of our departments talked about. I do want to provide some context. Our health department is grant funded and they've gotten huge amounts of resources through grants and almost none of it paid for. A lot of the things that we wanted to pay for the administrative staff, the the customer service staff, the communication staff, and so over the years, we've actually had to build some of that through some other types of methods. For example, they've never had a POW ever for, you know, decades. And about two years ago we found a way to invest in that and with our own money, with SFP and did some really creative things. So they can at least have one position that's done that. And that person got rerouted completely to coronavirus this year. So we understand the need for it. I really want to do better with communications. I think we have an amazing story to tell and that is an area that we just are lacking some of the funding. A lot of our funding is incredibly inflexible. When we did the measure H, one of our big requests of the city was don't chop it up into little tiny bits and give us little pieces because we want a direct allocation to us because we know how we can spend it the best. And that was not approved by the county. We spent time in all of those different committees and they wanted their very specific grant funded approaches and then they only gave us little pieces of that. And so you'll see when we had a chance to talk to the management team, where's the money going? Where is it coming from? Where's it going? And you'd be surprised that almost all of it or a vast majority of it is required to go for housing people and only for housing people. And so we'll be able to show you a lot of that. I think it will help you understand some of the challenges, including like when you buy a motel, you have to then operate it and there is no money to operate it. And so that is like for each hotel, it's in that 2 to $3 million range structurally every single year and there's no money coming to operate those . And so we took some risks in the last two years to add those things, even though we didn't have the plans to fund it. And now we're trying to figure that out and then we've got to figure out how to go further. So I do want to I do think it'll be healthy to have a discussion about, you know, what are some of the opportunities we have and then what are some of the challenges. And as Kelly said, Collins is one that we're very much focused on and that those discussions are underway. And we'll report back to you in January with hopefully some solutions. Thank you. That's really great. That's a that's a that was a great update. So thank you very much. There is a there's a motion in a second and will, including a report towards the end of January, please submit. Emotion is scary.