Anchorage Assembly: Housing and Homelessness Committee

All right, good morning folks. We're gonna go ahead and call this meeting of the Assembly Housing and Homelessness Committee to order. We'll start with introductions in the room with Assembly members.

Anna Brawley. Jared Gerker. Cameron Perez-Rodilla. And on the phone, do we have Ms. Baldwin-Day?

We have been having phone connection issues, so if you are there, just shoot me a text or give me a thumbs up and we'll go ahead and get started. We're going to get started today with a presentation on the enforcement and outcomes associated with AO 2026-74-S2. So if you're here to present on that, why don't you come on up?

And for the record, please introduce yourselves. Begin whenever you're ready, and members, feel free to, uh, wave me down or text me if you'd like to get in the queue.

Good morning, everyone. I'm Thea Agnew-Bemben, Special Assistant to Mayor LaFrance. True to form, we have a multi-presenter presentation for you today. Our main goal is to provide you an update on the implementation of our camping ordinance that was passed a little over a year ago today, or this, you know, this month. But what we'd like to do is give you also information about all of the other things that we're doing around addressing unsheltered homelessness, and then we'll kind of build into the specific data around the camping ordinance.

So I'll get us started. Go to the next slide. So Again, you know, as we say probably every time we're here, we're continuing to implement two strategies that were developed at the beginning of the mayor's term. One is focused on homelessness and health, the other is focused on community safety here in Anchorage, and they have a set of interlocking goals. Today we're primarily interested in talking about our goal around having fewer people sleeping outside.

But that's also, to accomplish that includes the other ones. So we have to have a year-round safety net, better crisis care, better and more appropriate housing. Our public safety workforce needs to be robust. We're trying to reduce crime and increase accountability. And then of course we want our roads and parks and trails to be safe for everyone, which involves having a lot of good partners and funding from other, from other sources and also sharing data back with you all and the community.

Go to the next slide. So one of our main approaches to address unsheltered homelessness and people who would otherwise be sleeping outside and in some of our public spaces is a real effort around coordinated outreach, crisis response, and making real-time connections. Go to the next slide.

Am I now on slide 4? This is still me. Okay, we have updated this graphic that you have seen multiple times, and you now are seeing the updated version that has data that reflects our most recent housing inventory count. That is something that happens at the same time as our Point-in-Time Count, so once a year. So the Point-in-Time Count is a good measure of demand, And then the housing inventory count is a good measure of our supply.

And so we've updated the numbers on this sheet to provide you that information. At the very top here is, again, really our primary point of contact with people who are unsheltered or who are outside. So we have, as you know, really developed a multidisciplinary outreach team around our HOPE team. We still have mobile crisis response, both at the fire department and the police department. And we have added mobile peer outreach.

So that's very exciting. We are making a lot of direct connections into treatment, which is a huge part of our approach. And on the back page, back of this diagram, which I can hand out, sorry, I didn't actually get this printed earlier. You have the full count of our sort of safety net inventory. So I think people aren't always aware of how many beds we have.

And this is across our whole municipality. So this is not just the ones that Municipality funds. It also includes all of our beds of different types that are serving people experiencing homelessness. So about 42% of those are emergency shelter beds, or just over 1,000 beds. About 10% are transitional housing, 235 beds.

Another 260 beds are rapid rehousing, and then the remainder, so about 37%, are permanent supportive housing and other permanent housing. So really, when you look at that, You know, kind of around 40% are for people who are needing something that night and needing a very emergency shelter response. And almost another 40% are for when we hopefully can exit people from that situation into a more type of permanent housing. And then the other diagram on the slide, it's really just showing you our crisis response model, which follows a national model called Crisis Now. Go to the next slide.

This is all of our different types of mobile outreach and crisis response, both for people who are unsheltered and experiencing homelessness, but also just for people who are experiencing crisis wherever they are in the community. So, you know, from some of our other presentations that between 50 and 90— or sorry, 50 and 70% of the people that our mobile teams go to are housed. So that's, that includes the mobile crisis team at the fire department and the mobile intervention team at the police department. Our HOPE team is entirely focused on people who are unsheltered, and we now have about 40, 40, more than 40 partners from the community who are coordinating with the HOPE team. One of the things the HOPE team is working on right now is actually really kind of using a map and identifying quadrants in our community and making sure that our different partners are kind of assigned to those locations.

So for example, Pastor Phil, who does a lot of work in Mountain View, is going to be like the lead for sort of our Mountain View area. So we're, we're getting kind of more strategic and more organized about how we're doing outreach. Our health department still has a really robust clinical outreach team. They are both out in the community, at community locations, but also going to health fairs and other types of places where we're helping people who are both sheltered or unsheltered or housed. And then of course our safety patrol continues and we're making medication-assisted treatment as available as we can through fire department and our health department.

So really trying to get to people on many different, many different ways and with many different tools. I'll hand it over to Chief Case. We can go to the next slide.

We've gone over these numbers once before, but for those of you who weren't at the Public Health and Safety Committee meeting, I'll touch on a couple of points. This slide represents the teamwork between our HOPE team, our Homeless Outreach Prevention Engagement team, with True North Recovery, which is providing peers out in the field. And if you look at the side, you can see there that of the number of contacts that we make, we're offering treatment to just over 70%, and just under 20% of those that are offered treatment are, are taking treatment. Also, just under 80% are new first-time referrals. And what that kind of tells us is that this population is constantly revolving.

It's not, we're not hitting the same person over and over again, that people are coming in and out of homelessness, you know, pretty much on a daily basis. The other thing that's important on this slide is when you look at the number of people that Hope Alone was referring to services, which the slide indicates 15, versus when we add True North Recovery and their peer support, you can see that that number jumps from 15 to 85 clients per month, which means the added work that they're taking on, first of all, they're very successful because they are peers. And they just also, we're also able to hand some of that work off to one of our partner agencies, which helps our HOPE team free up to do other duties. They've got a long list of things that they're involved in. The other thing that's important to note is that roughly a quarter to a third of all those contacts that we have that we're referring to resources there is an opioid addiction or a connection.

So that number continues to stay pretty significant in our community. Next slide. Pre-arrest deflection. We've talked about this at all, so I'll be really quick on it. This is gonna start for us next month.

Just so happens, separate grant, True North Recovery got that grant as well. They'll be the navigating services that will be running our deflection program for us. And what this is gonna allow is patrol division as a whole, this isn't gonna be a specialized team, we're able to push this out all of Patrol Division to offer deflection, uh, in place of arrest for all misdemeanor crimes, with the exception to start off with domestic violence and driving under the influence. All the rest of the misdemeanor crimes will be eligible. And as a reminder, if somebody doesn't want to be deflected, we go through the normal criminal justice system.

Or if they fail in the services that are being provided, we can roll them right back into the traditional criminal justice system. So again, we're starting that next month.

I could just real briefly, um, we were joined in the room at 11:07 by Member Silvers, and then also we were temporarily muted online for those on the phones, uh, but the YouTube audio was working full time, but it's resolved now. Member Pressworthy has a question. Yeah, I just want to go back to the previous slide on pre-arrest deflection. Just a couple of questions for the chief. So next month this starts, and just give us a sense of what this looks like in practice.

So maybe run, run through a scenario for us so we have a sense of what this— why this is different from what we're doing now and what this would look, look like with a real scenario. So let's take a common crime that we're going to see that certainly is of public interest, a vandalism, maybe even a trespassing crime. And when I say lower level, I mean just the penalty for those types of crimes are generally considered lower level. Right now, our officers are going to show up on scene. Generally speaking, that's going to be a site and release offense.

That's not going to be something they go to jail for. There's a couple reasons why they would go to jail today. If they have a long history of those types of crimes or, uh, they're significantly impaired by alcohol, we then could take them to jail and they're going to hold them there until they're sober. Then that runs through the, the process, the prosecution process. That obviously doesn't start the next day.

Uh, that's going to take several months for that, that, that case to get before a judge if we do in fact, uh, decide to prosecute that through the Municipal Prosecutor's Office. What would happen now is at point of arrest, uh, point of contact in the field, the officers would ask this individual— intoxication is a great one— so let's say this individual is intoxicated, our officers will say, hey, are you willing to accept some services, maybe some detox, maybe some counseling treatment? And we've got a script that they'll kind of go over. And, uh, and if the person says yes, we'll contact our contractor. Um, they have to have a maximum of 45-minute response time.

Generally speaking, it's going to be much less than that. Their goal is to be out there within 15 minutes. So, uh, you know, you don't have the officers waiting. They then take control of that individual and they completely pull them out of the process and connect them to services. Our officers do the paperwork, the, uh, the report paperwork, not the arrest paperwork.

And when— and then that gets filed. And now the services that are provided based on the intake that True North does, uh, that's, that's out of our hands. We don't monitor that. True North tells us whether or not that individual successfully completed the program or did not, or quit the program. And if they didn't successfully complete that, we just take that police report, we turn that into an arrest report And then we refer that right over to the prosecutors.

We're right back to where we started before. There's a, there's a couple of real big differences. The first thing is the criminal justice process takes forever. And so getting that person help, let's say on the prosecution end, when it does decide to go to court and a prosecutor says, hey, let's divert this person out of the criminal justice system, that, that's months later. This gives us the opportunity to have immediate impact.

Um, the second thing is, is The hope obviously with these programs is that by underlining— addressing the underlying issue, we're gonna reduce recidivism as well.

Thanks. Okay, please continue.

Next slide. I'm Dr. Jennifer Pierce with the Anchorage Fire Department here to talk about our core team. Our core team is made up of a paramedic and a mental health clinician that addresses referrals from our EMS providers about individuals who we identify as frequent users of our EMS. We also do outreach and respond to opioid overdoses. I look at all the opioid overdose calls that we have, and we do cold outreaches to see if they're interested in treatment or getting help.

Then we also identify vulnerable individuals through our EMS through operations, and then we outreach them as well to get them connected to behavioral health needs, medical needs, or any social needs they might have. Our goal is to help people stay housed if they're vulnerable individuals. We do work with people who are housed and unhoused. It doesn't matter what their housing status is. As you see here, for the first 2 quarters, we've had over 545 total contacts with 801 referrals.

When I looked just yesterday, I think we're up to 200 and 15 referrals from our EMS line for people seeking help. And we have 190 unique individuals for the first 2 quarters. Some of those are our opioid outreach, hence why it's more than our referrals. We've connected a lot of people to different resources. We also make sure that they're still connected to their resources.

And for opioid use disorder, we started providing sublingual buprenorphine. Which is Suboxone, in the community. And we've had 10 administrations so far from March to June, and 6 were connected to treatment, and then 5 still actively connected to treatment for that. Overall, we looked at the past 6 months for individuals who we started working with, kind of looking at their before and after for EMS calls. We've seen a range of 83% reduction in calls to 100%.

Reduction in calls after we engage with individuals.

So I won't dwell on this. Oops, sorry. Sorry, this is Thea again. There was a really robust presentation from South Central Foundation at the last Public Health and Safety Committee meeting, but we're very excited to see their crisis stabilization center open. This will be a place where first responders can bring people when they're in crisis.

And right now we actually don't have a place to bring people where they actually can get the type of care that they need. So we take people to emergency departments, we take them to a variety of locations, but they often come right back out. So this will be a real game changer, both this one and then you can go to the next slide. Providence, it sounds like, actually could open earlier than South Central. It was kind of the other way, but South Central's had a little delay, so we might see Providence open sooner.

They'll be a little bit smaller, 12 beds and 12 12 chairs and 12 beds, but also a walk-in behavioral health clinic that'll be available for, to see people who are age 12 and up. So that'll be a really huge resource for people with teens who are in needing some, you know, same-day care. Just popping to the next slide, we're also really working on increasing access to treatment in the community and also treatment that's paired with housing. We do have a map if you're using the digital version of this, you can click on it and see lots of different types of facilities and where they're located in our community. Willow Commons continues to go well.

We're coming up to, let's see, in September will be the 6-month mark. They're reporting to the Health Department every 3 months, so we're hoping to provide a presentation to you in October that will kind of give you a snapshot of this first 6 months of operations there, but they're still full. Haven't had any major problems that we know about at all. So that's going great. We'll also be opening Alder Place at the former Golden Lion for outpatient care also in October.

So that'll be exciting. We did finally award the CDBG funding to True North Recovery. So they're now paired with Access Alaska and starting to, to add staff there for outpatient care. And then the Assembly recently passed the HUD Annual Action Plan that'll have a whole bunch more cool things in it coming soon. So lots of good stuff on the treatment and housing end.

And then really briefly, I wanted to talk a little bit about Good Neighbor Fund. Kathleen and Emily. Real quick, I do have a question from Member Pressford. Yeah. Yeah, just on the treatment side, the— Coordination of treatment in Anchorage.

Can you just tell us a little bit about how that's done? Is there a way that all of these treatment centers are communicating, collaborating? Is there anything like that going on? Great question. That is a huge need and has been for a really long time.

We should hear, maybe this week even, if we are awarded our Rural Health Transformation Program funding. But even just recently in the last couple of weeks, we've learned that there are ways that our teams can sign on to the Health Information Exchange even without that funding. So we're actually already starting to work on that. That's gonna be a real key piece to getting us able to share information appropriately with other healthcare providers. And another big part of rural health transformation is getting behavioral health providers onto the health information exchange, because right now there's been just some, you know, kind of clunkiness and they just haven't, they haven't all onboarded because they're small and et cetera, et cetera.

So I'm hoping that as we get onboarded and some of these other providers do, I mean, we'll be connected to the big ones, like we'll be connected to South Central, Providence, Alaska Regional, North Star. They're all already on. But even like API is not on there right now. So I'm hoping in the next little bit, we're going to see a lot more connectivity because that's a huge need. But we do use our outreach team for that.

So we have a lot of connections. And that's, that's partly why True North is connected with the HOPE team, is to really facilitate. And we've made way more connections than I've ever seen before, really. And Kathleen and Emily do a ton of that. So pass it off to them.

Thank you. Kathleen McLaughlin with Restorative and Reentry Services. And Emily Robinson with Restorative and Reentry Services. Just briefly, we wanted to report out on the Good Neighbor Fund. It was created in October 2025.

To date, our numbers have been updated. We have a total donations of $239,000, and we have expended $105,000. There are 4 people with the power to make decisions. It's the 2-person team on the HOPE team and Emily and I. One of the things that I think I think the Good Neighbor Fund has been able to do is immediate response.

And I wanted to give one example and Emily will give another example. The first example is about 2 and a half weeks ago, Lieutenant Fuchs called me up and said, there's a guy in the field that one of our officers who is with somebody at Office Depot downtown, homeless, kind of wandering around, doesn't know what to do. 2 O'clock in the afternoon. I recommended that they take this person to the Third Avenue Navigation 3 o'clock we had a ticket for him to go home to his sister in Texas, and he flew out that night. That's what this does.

And then from last week, on Wednesday, we had a contact from True North Call, and they had somebody who was supposed to be going to Ketchikan the next day for a flight at 6 AM on Thursday, but he wasn't able to leave because he only had a little bit of stuff and he didn't have anywhere to put it, and he needed only $43 for a storage unit. And so we were able to pay for that $43 storage unit, and he was able to make his flight the next safer treatment in Ketchikan. So think about donating.

Okay, now pop to the next slide. Now we're going to talk a bit, and Shanna is going to lead this section about the— I mean, I feel like very efficient process we now have where the public can make reports online, pops up on our map, and it really drives the work that we're doing both around camp cleaning and addressing camping in public places. So hand it over to Shannon. Next slide, please. So this is what the report looks like.

This does show trash only, shows abandoned vehicles, and it also shows camps. Healthy Spaces uses this every day, so when public reports online, it pops in here. Anything that is A red dot, that is a new report within the last 60 hours. Yellow is where Healthy Spaces has actually gone in and investigated or is interacting with that spot. Orange, kind of hard to see on there, is private property, and when somebody reports and it's on private property, they get an email notified that it's on private property, and then code enforcement is contacted and they kind of investigate.

And then there's little car icons on there that are just abandoned vehicles that APD handles. Our staff has the ability to manually edit after review of a report if it was on private but really is on public. We have the ability to do that. Next slide. One quick question on that.

So that you've got dots in dots, so the— if it's a red with A dot on top of the orange on top of that, that means that it's, it's a camp and then Healthy Spaces has interacted with that camp. Is that what that dot on top is? The yellow circle is where Healthy Spaces is engaged in. And then the orange one, these colors are kind of— there's an orange one with the red. And so that is reported.

That's a new report, but on private property. I see. So the larger dot indicates what kind of site it is, is that whether it's red or orange or yellow? That is the report type, and orange— and maybe Mike Knapp can clarify some of these questions.

So red is the new report. If it's orange, then that means a new report on private property. Got it. And then if it's blue, that's just the public report. And then with the yellow around it, that means Healthy Spaces has engaged in some manner.

Yeah, well, so there's multiple things happening in one location. Yeah, that's why you have colors on top, right? Yeah. Okay, that's—. That's what I want to clear about that.

Thank you. Next slide, please. So in 2025, we removed 1,235 tons of trash, and this year we have only removed 259 tons. Within that 259 tons, there is a little bit over 10,000 tons that were the orange bags from citywide cleanup that we volunteered to help the public pick up those bags. So the public— and that's not all of the citywide cleanup, but I like to compare these numbers to elephants.

So in 2025, it was roughly 206 elephants, and this year is only 43. So I'm, this is really, this is, I'm assuming this is good news, but maybe you can help us to understand what's happening. I think, are we seeing, is this partly the large encampments that we cleaned? What's your general sense of, is there less trash being created? Is this why there's less, or can you go to the next slide, please?

Oh yeah, I'm jumping ahead. Sorry. Yeah, this will help you. So here is showing that we have abated between '23 and '25, 28 camps, which were, you know, last year we had some major multi-year entrenched camps, and that's where a lot of the trash came from. This year, because of the AO, we haven't done any abatements, which shows that as you, you know, as you move, they're unable to accumulate as much trash.

So yeah, does that help answer your question? Yeah, I guess one question. There's less trash. Less trash. Than there was last year, right?

And so that's why we're picking up less trash. Does that free us up to cover more areas, to do more cleanup so that we can assume that maybe our city is becoming cleaner in some ways because there's less trash to clean up, which means we can cover more areas and actually do a better job of of getting our city clean. Yeah, absolutely. So with not having to deal with these abatements, the staff has been able to do more detailed work on that map. People are— the public has the ability just to report trash, and so then our team is dispatched.

Healthy Spaces also has hotspots that they check every day between about 6 and 9 before they actually go towards the dots on the reports that we're that came in. And is there equipment that you use as well? I mean, does this include like sidewalk cleaning kinds of equipment? Anything on public property? Yeah, OK.

I think just having been part of this process over last calendar year and then this year, I mean, last year we went from one abatement to the next, so there really was almost no time. I mean, there was some times where, you know, Healthy Spaces could like zip out and maybe do it like real, you know, if it was real high need. But generally they were fully occupied the whole year. And we didn't have this reporting system. It was a little bit more hodgepodge.

And so, but even if we had have had it, like, we would have had a hard time getting to those spots because they just were always occupied. And that went on the whole year. Our last abatement was right, like, late November, and then it snowed a bunch. And so this year has been really different because we— they have not been occupied. So when those reports come in every day, they're able to just like dispatch out.

So I feel like we have really gotten through a pretty big backlog of stuff that was in our public spaces, and now we're kind of more on top of it. Like at the beginning of the spring, like when all the snow melted, and you could see it in that, if you go back one slide, you can see it in that reporting, you know, where it's like in May, it just like spiked, and we're all just like, ah, and the map was just like ridiculous. And it took us like probably 3 or 4 weeks, I'd say, to kind of, where the team had to just like, just like manage that. And then now I feel like we're back on kind of a much more— feels like we're more on top of it now.

Yeah, I think, you know, as Will and Stefan have said, they've been able to be more proactive than reactive than, you know, we've been so reactive in the past few years and this year they're really on top of it. Well, we've thought of Healthy Spaces as being sort of in some ways health, homeless camp cleanup crew, right? And so I guess partly my question is, has it been able to expand out of only cleaning up homeless camps into, let's go to this park, let's go to, you know, that sort of thing, and just looking at ways to help our city become cleaner generally? Yeah, and that's with the solid waste surcharge. We were able to go from seasonal staff to full-time staff.

So we have 15 in-field staff with one supervisor. So that really helps. The overall progress. We also have 14 seasonals that we— during the summer months, but we've only been averaging 4 or 5, so not the full capacity that we could have more, you know, people out there. But yeah, so the solid waste surcharge really has supported the program to expand beyond just parks.

And then it snowed a bunch is kind of our story of our life. I think you know what I wanted to say. Yeah, yeah, you go ahead. Yeah, I just wanted to follow up on some of that information and tie it back to the original ordinance. That's why we're here.

And the whereas clause is in there, one of them did, you know, there was a theme in there of when the camps become entrenched, the amount of cleanup that's required goes up dramatically. And so just to quote one of them, paraphrase a little bit, quickly clearing camps will reduce the number of camps that become entrenched, thereby increasing public safety for vulnerable individuals as well as the surrounding neighborhoods and reducing the drain on municipal resources. Because there is just less volume accumulating in one place to clean up. So, and is it fair to—. Is it fair to guess then in this next spring we're going to see that we're not going to see that huge jump necessarily right at the start because we don't— we haven't had as many entrenched camps or haven't had any entrenched camps right up to the start of snow so far?

Yeah, I was gonna say, I think you'll always see a spike in early spring just because of what accumulates over the winter and then gets covered and picked up and covered. But again, we'll hope with the full-time staff year-round, hopefully, you know, they can address some of these areas and maybe it'll be less. But I think we'll always see some of course. Of course. Okay.

And just for the record, we're joined in the room at 11:15 by Member Park. Um, any questions, Member Brawley, that you want to jump in now? Yeah, thank you. And I'll note Member Baldwin-Day is also online. Audio is a little tricky, but I'll ask her question first, and I have a couple.

One is she was asking for clarification: are these locations reported by ANC Works or something else?

They are reported through the ANC Works, and then people can also call our 343-GARB number, and if they call that, then staff manually puts puts it into the report. Thanks. And then I know sometimes we get emails, I think, so I know members often forward those as well. So I think there's—. So there's multiple ways into that system.

Uh, okay. And then my two questions, um, they're kind of general, and I think probably maybe the— I guess I can ask it now and then, um, you can tell me if we should answer it later. I'm curious, just characterizing, uh, I know the parallel discussion to camping is people living in vehicles, so I was just curious what the kind of current numbers are with that, if it's increasing, decreasing. And I guess I'm looking more at our outreach folks. Like, we can come back to that question if that's easier.

Um, that's one question is kind of what does it look like with folks living in vehicles. The other one is, um, you know, we know one of the— I don't know if this was explicit at the time last year, but we know that the impact of this law has been people shifting from camping, obviously we just talked about that, to more occupying abandoned buildings. Um, and, and I know that's always been the case that that's been an issue, but it seems like those two things are one trended down, the other one's trending up. So I don't know if that's actually true in the data, but just wondering, you know, how much can we say that the— if it's causal or just, you know, is that kind of the nature of the problem that we're dealing with right now more?

I can maybe start answering that, and maybe Lieutenant Fuchs wants to come up and speak to it. We don't have, like, data to share with you right now around vehicle camping. I think just anecdotally, I don't feel like we've seen a dramatic rise in that. In fact, in some ways we probably have seen a little bit of a, of it go down, partly because there was a lot of vehicles that got impounded. And anyway, Fuchs can speak to that, but I do want to speak briefly to your second part, which was, you know, are we seeing people more in abandoned buildings?

I think we continue to see people going into vacant and abandoned buildings. We are real hot on that topic. So we're working those situations as, you know, as efficiently as we can. I mean, I think just stating the obvious, what we're seeing is more people out in public. So, and I think, you know, you've had folks come and testify to say now people are really just out on the street, and I would say we all can recognize that that's the case.

So part of that is us really doing the work with outreach and getting to people and doing all this connectivity that we're sharing with you. But I think that is the challenge that we're facing right now. Yes, ma'am. So I think as far as the vehicles concerned, I think that has decreased. We, you know, in the— over the last 2 years, we would get a lot of complaints, not only through the community but also from members of the Assembly, in regards to specific areas that were being kind of overrun by campers and vehicles.

I think this is a great representation of this ordinance of AO 2025 that gave us the ability to go in and have contact with folks, and we're definitely seeing less of that through enforcement and also through outreach, providing people a place to go and get into a shelter system. So I think it's gone down quite a bit. Thanks. Yeah, that's helpful to understand kind of what's happening out there. And then I'll just say, yeah, obviously if we have a number of folks who don't have housing for one reason or another, they still exist, and so they're going to be somewhere, right?

And so I know that, that it's not, it's not the measuring success of this is that we don't see, is that we don't see fewer people total. It's really just where are they going and how are they, how are their issues being resolved? Thanks. For the record, we're joining the room at 11:36 by member Scott.

Please continue.

Next slide, please.

All right, just kind of before I get into the slides on the camping ordinance, I think the year-over-year data that we're going to get into in future years— this is our first year of this— it's important to note that it's going to, it's going to tell a story and it's going to all be connected to some of the things that you've already heard. I think right now the point that we're at is it's really helpful to understand that the system is really being held together by various different people and groups that you've seen. Like, this thing isn't welded together yet. Each piece that we've talked about so far is just one layer to this. So the camping ordinance alone is one, one layer.

You know, if Hope doesn't show up for a month, we're in trouble. If Kathleen and Emily don't show up for a month, like, we're in trouble. Like, that's, that's kind of where we're still in that building phase. And so when I talk about the camping ordinance, there's really 4 overall things that we see from this ordinance. Number 1, it's a quicker response.

That's allowed us, the police department, to have a quicker response to not let camps be entrenched, which is also connected to—. What did you say? What, what response? I didn't get the word quicker. Quicker.

Yeah, quick. So we're able to go out and we see a camp starting to build, and we're talking a camp, a couple of people into immediately address that issue. That also helps down the line with what we just heard with Healthy Spaces. They can get activated earlier. It doesn't allow the trash to accumulate.

It allows another avenue for us to connect to resources. And then when they don't voluntarily comply, we can't connect them to resources. There's obviously an arrest piece that's also involved. So all of these, these things are kind of how the camping ordinance is embedded into what we're overall doing as a community. This first slide that you're looking at right here is officer-initiated activity and citizens that call in camping-related offenses.

The hash line in the middle is when the ordinance became live, and prior to that hash line, really the easiest way to sum that up is we kind of didn't care. And I don't mean that tongue-in-cheek. I mean, we didn't have an ordinance to enforce, and when the public would call in, there was not a whole lot we could do, so they just didn't call anymore. And so once the ordinance went live, in fact, you can see just shortly before it goes live, we, we started the municipality as a whole really talking a lot about, a lot more about this. We knew the ordinance was coming.

We knew it was going to go live. We started talking about it even before it went live on how it was going to be enforced. And you could see that the officers became more actively involved because they knew where this was going and the public started calling in. And then you saw a pretty significant jump. And what happened in those first couple of months is there was a lot of enforcement, there was a lot of contact, there was a lot of connecting to services, a lot of getting people to comply.

And then we saw the numbers drop off dramatically, and that's a direct result of everything you've heard today along with the ordinance being effective. You see the numbers start to climb at the beginning of, of the spring because we were all in a race against time. We knew there was a lot of trash to pick up towards the end of the year before winter came, and then we got dumped on, and now we're behind, and we couldn't really— can't fix that. So what happened is when the snow melt, uh, you know, people aren't stopping and seeing whether there's a camp there or not. They see what looks like a camp and they call it in.

Uh, and so we also had folks that were in shelter when we had a higher number of shelter beds availability, and now those folks were, were out in the community. So those two things in combination is what we see the uptick. I think what we just learned from Parks and Recs is that today, at this point, we're really ahead of the game for a whole host of reasons. So we're hoping that we won't be behind when the snow dumps on us like last year. And so next year we'll see if that number is, is greatly reduced when the snow melts.

Skip ahead 2 slides. I pretty much covered everything on the next slide. I think we're real familiar with what the ordinance does. Creates 2 classifications. Even, I don't know if you want to cover that.

You want me to do a quick cover on what the ordinance covers? Okay. It really creates a misdemeanor, Class A and a Class B misdemeanor offense between a $250 and a $500 fine that's available. And ultimately what we're trying to protect are trails, waterways, streets. Sideways sidewalks, roads that are high speed, and our schools and areas in and around schools and parks.

Next slide, please.

Most of our contacts here, uh, do not end in arrest. The large yellow number up there, almost 90%, is voluntary compliance, and just over 11% of our contacts result in arrest. This is what we anticipated We didn't want this ordinance to turn into 90% arrest rate. We're using arrest as a primary tool. And the reason why we knew we'd be successful in that is just because the way we integrated this ordinance with some of the other municipal departments and tools that we had available to us.

And, and so I think the numbers are showing kind of what we predicted at the beginning. Gonna jump in real quick, Chief. We have a couple questions. We'll start with Member Silver. So, Member Scott.

I'm just wondering, how has this ordinance helped with the hard-sided structures? I know that was a part of it. So are you seeing a lot less of those, or are you able to address more of those?

All of Lieutenant Fuchs' assets out in the field. Yeah, so the, the actual construction piece hasn't been charged that I know of, that we haven't had an arrest specifically for the construction piece. The interesting thing about the construction piece, which is I think vital to our operations model, is the reason why we feel sufficient to go in and do further investigation, right? So for example, we have an area right now that we're looking at that we're going to go in and make contact with the campers in that area. And one of the discussion is, is this going to be abatement if we get to that, or can we utilize some the ordinance to discuss with the individuals that are in that situation.

And in this particular case, there's a clear structure. So we're able to go in and, and talk to them a little bit more about it. And most of the time, the structures are in conjunction with the violation of the ordinance. That's clearly like a waterway or a bike or a school. And then the officers will lean on that and then they don't charge the additional construction or construction properties.

Going back to the previous slide about the looking at the penalties related to the fines, the $250 and $500, do we have any data on fines collected through enforcement of this AO?

I don't have data on that right now. I will say to date, in terms of cases that have worked their way through the the system and resulted in convictions. That's 6 cases, one is currently on appeal, so I would say the volume, the amount of fines would not be terribly high, but I don't have data on specific fines collected in those pending cases or closed cases that aren't on appeal.

Thanks. Scanning the room, not seeing any further questions. Go ahead.

This slide just indicates as a chart, the more contacts we obviously have, the more that we're going to be able to connect to services, have voluntary compliance. So it's a kind of a simplistic view of more contacts, the more, the more work that we can do and the more people that we can kind of divert throughout the system. I do have a question. Member Perez-Fernandez. Yeah, I think I'm one of the, one of the concerns that's been voiced by some is that we're just moving folks around.

That we're, you know, that folks are in a space they're not supposed to be, and we're saying you can't stay here, and if you stay here, you're gonna get arrested. And so partly what I'm hearing from you, and about how that can be disruptive and challenging for the folks that are being moved around, but partly what I'm hearing from you is that this voluntary compliance essentially means that they're moving on, they're doing what you've asked them to do, but then it creates more more contacts. And so the theory of change here in some ways is that the more opportunities we have to be in contact with these folks, the more times we're like, can we put you in treatment? Can we get you into a shelter? Can we create another op option for you?

So is that part of it? Is that, is it from some people's angle, it's like, you're so annoying because you're making me move over and over and over and over again, but I'm being moved out of the places that I'm not supposed to be or that are dangerous. But your theory, or the theory here, is, is that if we can do it enough times where it can be like, okay, I'm tired of this, great, then let's get you somewhere else. Is that part of the theory here? That's a big part of the theory.

And if you think about it from a clinical perspective, and if we had our outreach people here, Hope, or we had when Emily come back up here and Kathleen, they would tell you that there is there's a trust in relationship that has to be built. You know, if you come in contact with somebody and they're homeless and they're down on their luck and they're intoxicated and they're addicted to opioids and you're like, "I wanna help you," they're gonna go, "You get lost," right? Like, that means nothing to them. The 7th or 8th time when you've had repeated contact with them, you know, you've established that you care, you establish that you're trying to help them out, the more likely they're gonna go, Tell me what you got for me. But, but there's also the arrest that becomes a layer of that too.

There's the annoyance of moving that also motivates the move. The success can't be built even just that we have to look at the success with this camping ordinance does allow the movement of trash, the, the fact that our, our, our count, our annual count was less like there's multiple data points. That says not just the ordinance alone, but the whole system as a whole is integrated together that shows us success. So we have somebody that comes up and says a simple statement of, you know, you're just moving people around. The answer is multi-tiered.

There's a lot of things to really respond to that and say, kind of, but not really. Thanks.

Go ahead and continue. Next slide, please.

This is my slide, and before I start, I want to say I realize there's actually an error in it. The decline, dismissal— this just shows the breakdown of cases in terms of the number received, and so as I go through it, I'll correct an error. So prosecution has received 109— sorry, this goes through early July. Prosecution received 109 cases total referred from APD. Of those, 57 are still pending.

6 Resulted in a conviction. One of those convictions is currently on appeal. And then there were 46 declined or dismissed. And I apologize because this makes the decline/dismissal rate number look the same as the pending number. That should actually be a shorter bar at the top.

So those are the stats. I have a question. Go ahead. So the— this is specifically related to the camping ordinance. So this is— these are, these are people that were arrested because of the camping ordinance and went through a process because of that, or were these other things related?

These— this is based on reporting a report that prosecution pulled looking at individuals charged under specifically this section of code, so specifically charged with prohibited camping. And so the dismissal was the charge based on that? That's based on that, that can't be ordered? Yes, that was a situation where the camping charge was declined or dismissed. And there could have been additional charges that remained against those individuals, but this shows how many of the actual referred camping charges were declined or dismissed.

That's what I was assuming, that there may be other things going on with that person in addition to this, but this just isolated the camping. Camping ordinance. That's correct. Thanks. Member Silvers.

Do we know why some were dismissed and so many were dismissed versus a few were charged? Yes, so this is something we monitor, and just for visibility into the process, because this has been an administration and assembly and just kind of municipal priority, and because this is a new ordinance, the process for camping charges is that prosecutors, of course, have discretion to typically to dismiss or decline cases. For this particular section of code, they do need the municipal prosecutor to approve it as well. And so we do have a good record internally, which we would not share publicly because it is a work product, attorney work product, of why each one is dismissed. And I look at that periodically, so I go over it with Mr. Wheeler.

And the causes of the dismissal or the declines are typically things like, oh, there wasn't adequate evidence to actually support this charge, because there looked like the person was sleeping, but there wasn't evidence that they were really camping. Or this person was recently found incompetent by the court, and so we're dismissing for competency grounds. So they are, from what I've seen, they are typically solid reasons to decline or just dismiss. It's not just, well, this seems unfair, we're gonna toss it out.

Member Brawley.

Thanks. Just a quick, I guess, probably a follow-up, so not to take time today, but I think I've actually fielded multiple questions about this whole issue of determination of competency. And I'm looking at my former employer and remembering when we wrote a whole order on that, you know, maybe 8 years ago, I think. And I know that that's outside of the municipality because it has to do with API, it has to do with the state system, but obviously we are a affected. And so I really think it would be helpful in a future meeting to have a short briefing on some of those issues, because every conversation I've had is, why are people being released?

And, and I mean, we, you all know the answer to that, but I think under— for helping the public understand what that means, and really the gap between the forensic or criminal issues like the competency determination, and then the civil issues that the hold, I mean, that gap is the entire story, I think. And so I think that would be helpful for us to unpack a little more and maybe have a couple folks from the state explain that. But I think it really is, one, it's something that I think we should continue to advocate for at the state level because of the impacts it has. But also, I think it is very legally complicated. And anyway, that's just a request for a future meeting.

But I think that is a really relevant conversation that we need to have. Thanks. Thank you, Chair Brawley. Member Perez Verdia. Yeah, this is, I think, related, whether how are we to interpret this.

Is this a good thing? I guess because initially when I looked at it, I was like, well, great, you know, we didn't convict that many people. But then I'm thinking, wait a minute, if people were arrested for doing something wrong and we didn't convict them, then I'm not sure that that sends a very clear message in terms of the fact that it truly is a violation and they committed a crime of some kind and they were not held accountable for it. So maybe you can help us to interpret what— how would— how should we be interpreting this as it relates to the effectiveness of this ordinance? It's a good, great question.

So again, the decline dismissal rate should be at 46%. The graph is a little misleading. So we are—. We do still have more cases than have been declined or dismissed. But I will say a year the year marker for this, for the court process, is not a super long time.

So as you see, over half of the cases as of July were still pending. And part of that is the timeline of when, when and how this was rolled out. So it passed in July of 2025. APD did a pretty robust education campaign, right? Giving people in the public time to understand it, know that it was in effect.

It also didn't become officially chargeable through the court system until September because there's a lengthy update process process where you have to go through and get it into the Uniform Offense Citation Table, which is a State Department of Public Safety and court system database in order for it to be entered into the court system. So it became chargeable in September. And so then APD, you know, began charging people after that date. And then for the cases to get charged and work their way through the court system, we're still pretty early in that process. So that's why the number of cases that have been closed are, is pretty low.

So maybe we'll get a better picture of this as we see a full year and so on. Yeah, and also, I mean, court process takes a while, so a full year from when it became, again, enforcement is not going to be— more time is better as it works its way through the system. Just want to note we're joined in the room at 11:55 by Member Baldwin-Day, and that Member Park has a question. Good morning. At Spinard Community Council, the biggest thing that I'm hearing is theft of personal property from, uh, residents up and down the Spinard corridor and drugs.

And I'm wondering, do you have statistics on arrests either for theft or drug activities?

Not immediately available to answer your question, ma'am. But that's something that we can, we can look at for you. I'd like to see that. Thank you.

All right, please continue.

All right, uh, Dean, go ahead. Oh, thank you. Yeah, um, Miss Gardner, I'm curious, the convictions, uh, what are the sentences looking like? Um, fines and imprisonment? I mean, I assume they're low, but But if you can say, I guess there's not many that we can really discern an average from, but what do they usually get?

Again, a great question. I don't have that data handy today. It's not a report that prosecution can easily generate, although they are— I have asked the municipal prosecutor as they upgrade their systems to develop a report that would give us sentencing information as well so we can look at outcomes but also what sentences were received. I think that they are fairly low, and remember that these are all at this point first-time offenders for this offense. And so I would expect that plays into it as well.

Okay, now for real, continue.

Most of the things on this slide we addressed with Member Perez-Verdias's question a minute ago, but what I will add on to the, the idea that compliance holds up when you have more enforcement, keeping in mind that When you have legal reason to contact people, that opens up, you know, the gateway to, to be able to contact them and offer them resources. The other thing is, and this is hard to quantify in a data, and we're kind of really looking through the numbers to see if we can, but when we have no large encampments and when we are getting people to move, we're also having an impact on victimization. You know, what we do know is in the large encampments that those victims very, very, very rarely come forward. To report a crime. And so by making sure that we don't have those large encampments around, we certainly believe that we're reducing the number of victimization.

But exactly quantifying that is difficult because we don't have the number ahead of time. Next slide, please. And this is kind of connected to the last slide. When you have— when you connect people accepting services at 7.5% in the voluntary compliance, you're looking at over 90% And I will kind of go back to one of my earlier slides when we had peer peers out in the field. Remember that number of connecting to services was near 20%.

So we've got a camping ordinance that's connecting to services. We've got peers that are connecting to services. So multiple different layers on how we can get individuals in the community connected to services. Next slide. Real quick, we have a couple questions.

Member Baldwin-Day. Yeah, thank you, Chief. Is this about the, the proportion that you anticipated with respect to folks who accepted services, or how does this compare to what you were hoping for? You know, our goal was around 10%, just based on some of the things that we've done in the past. We certainly had an expectation that the compliance would be increased as we add peers, and we saw that in our, in our Hope and True North data.

It's kind of one of the reasons why you've heard me say so many times that it's not just the municipal resources that we have, it's the partnerships outside the municipality that really make this system work together. The municipal employees really are a gateway to a lot of this, and then we need our partner entities to come in and help kind of on the back end once we have the contact already made. So Have you, have you noticed, or has there been an uptick in the data as we brought on more peer supports that more folks are inclined to accept services versus prior when it was mostly just officer contact? Yeah. So the population that we're talking about with the camping ordinance and the population that HOPE and True North and their peer services, that's the same population.

It's primarily focused on those experiencing homelessness. I meant more so the response from folks who are receiving outreach. Are you noticing that more of those folks are accepting services or more likely to accept services with the peer engagement happening at, you know, there at the same time? Great. At over double the rate.

Over double the rate? Yes, ma'am. Phenomenal. Thank you. Good question for me, Chief, or whoever can answer it.

Has there been anyone that has asked for services that was not able to get services?

Dr. Jennifer Pierce, Anchorage Fire Department. Sometimes it takes time. Right? So sometimes we don't have it immediately available.

We try to make all of our phone calls and try to see what we can do. Usually what we do is we create a plan. We coordinate with each other, with all of our different stakeholders, and try to create a plan to get them into those services as quickly as possible. So it might not be in the moment, but we are working our way that direction. I'm really excited for the stabilization centers to get on board as well.

But they do get services, right? There's not been an instance where where someone's been like, I want, I want help, I need help. And then we're like, okay, well, best luck with all your hopes and dreams. And we never follow up. Like they've, they're always being followed up and getting connected.

Correct. A lot of times we'll say, we'll even use the Anchor Safety Center, right? It's like, we'll take you to Anchor Safety Center. We're gonna follow up with you the next day. We create a plan, we identify how we can work together.

Okay. I, I'd like to follow up on that too, Lieutenant Figgs, because I think it's important. And, and to understand that now that I kind of understand the core of your question here, it's like, Absolutely. Like nobody, we never walk away from a person, right? We always either, like Jen said, make a plan.

And one of the other things we do is we always fall back on Kathleen and Emily in this regard where I'll say, hey, I've got somebody. And she'll say, get them to the Safety Center. I'm like, copy that. So I can tell the officer, I'm like, look, take this person to the Safety Center. The Safety Center is going to know to call Kathleen and Emily.

I brief Kathleen and Emily from the officer, and then the plan is then developed. So We're never walking away from somebody, even our, like the peers that are with us right now, like they establish a plan and they map it out with the individual and then they do everything that they can, especially if that person is homeless, to get them into some kind of stabilization for at least a night or two until they can execute that plan. So we're not walking away from people. Okay, that's really great to hear. 'Cause I remember the commentary around the debate, you know, leading up to this, the passage of this ordinance was, well, there's not even enough resources people, so you'd have people asking for help and being left and not getting any resource, and it sounds like that's not actually been the case at all.

Thank you. Kathleen McLaughlin with RS. I just wanted to say I think everything that's been said is correct. What we do is try to do real-time services on demand, so the answer is never no, it is yes, but let's figure out what that can be. We do use the Safety Center as a default location in in order to triage from there.

So that's our bottom, that's our go-to move if we have no other moves. But the whole idea I think that is working is that we all communicate with each other all the time. Last night I got an APD call because somebody was camping at Spring Hill Elementary and we offered them housing straight away. They didn't accept it, but we offered it. Right, thank you.

We have a couple follow-up questions. Uh, Member Scott and then Member Baldwin-Day. Um, how—. What—. How would you describe the breakdown between our ability to offer people services, supports, housing in real time versus coming up with a plan?

What's the ratio? I can tell you from APD's side and the resources that we provide in our— is that it's just, it's just the availability, right? So we aren't providing crisis stabilization, we're not providing any kind of treatment support. So our peers are connecting to those providers. And generally we get, especially on like on substance use disorder placements, let's say if somebody wants treatment right away, generally speaking, we can get them in almost immediately.

There hasn't been very many cases, but let's say it's 10 o'clock at night or 2 o'clock in the morning, right? Some of those logistics challenges are real. And so we may have to say, well, we'll put you in a hotel for a night, Kathleen and Emily, get, you know, the Good Neighbor Fund to put somebody up, and then we swoop in in the morning, pick them up, and make sure they get to where they need to get. So the logistics for us is somewhat of a challenge, and that's generally the only delay, or a provider that maybe it's a specific provider that they need and there's a waiting list. Now we have to develop a plan if that person has to go to that specific treatment provider.

Okay. So, and like with shelter beds, is it about the same? Would you say it's like 80% of the time when we contact someone, we can get them connected, 70% versus saying, okay, you know, it's 10:00 PM, come to the stabilization center and we'll figure it out. You know, we'll get you there tomorrow.

This is Kathleen McLaughlin. I would say that from our experience, for Emily and I, it's probably about a 75% do it in the moment. But do it in the moment can mean a lot of different things. Yeah. But there is some action or expectation of an action when we are in the moment.

Okay, thank you. Maybe just one thing to add. I mean, Kathleen and Lieutenant Fuchs mentioned the Safety Center. You know, the only time the Safety Center has been at capacity is when it was super duper cold and we added the overflow space last winter. So there is capacity there pretty much all the time.

That doesn't mean that people want to go there all the time. So, you know, that is where, you know, sometimes we can use Good Neighbor funds for different alternatives, but We don't always do that because we don't, we're not going to offer everybody, would you like to go to the Safety Center or a hotel room? Like, we just don't have the money for that. So I think, I guess my just, you know, being on the, just being around this all the time, it feels like we often have an option. That doesn't mean that person wants that option.

One other thing, when we mentioned the SCF project, even though their stabilization center is a little bit delayed, their detox, they're doubling their detox. Beds. So they've already moved their folks from the old building into the new building, and then over the next like 6 weeks they'll be adding detox beds. And that's really the first step. Usually if someone's going to go to treatment, they usually have to go to detox first, and then the treatment providers can connect with them when they're in detox.

So that will be, I think, a big addition for us this winter to get people in even more quickly.

Thank you.

Yeah, I think my question was similar to member Scouts. So I'm hearing that logistics is sometimes the barrier. It's 3 o'clock in the morning and, you know, nothing opens until 9 or whatever. I'm also curious if there are consistently, you know, services or options that people are asking for that we just don't have online, or we don't have online in sufficient quantity. So I think I'm hearing that, that, you know, that initial step of, you know, crisis stabilization or detox, there's sometimes an availability gap there.

Are there other things where we have an availability gap? Yeah, we don't have enough shelter. So, I mean, am I speaking out of turn here? No, great. I mean, right now, 300 beds that we control, you know, I mean, we fund other beds, but we updated that diagram, but like, you know, right now in the summer, excuse me, we have 300 beds.

That's not enough. So, and we've talked about this before, and I, you know, we've tried to estimate what that would look like to have enough. So I think for sure, if we can say to somebody like, hey, you're sleeping here on the street in Midtown, we really want you somewhere else, we have a shelter bed for you. I mean, what would you say, Kathleen? Would people go?

I think it depends on if they're steeped in addiction or not. You know, when people are steeped in addiction, that controls their decision-making to the point that sometimes it is extraordinarily difficult to have services. I also wanted to say, when you ask about a gap, what we are seeing is an uptick in large families who are wanting family shelter. We had one that was a group of 8 about 3 days ago or 4 days ago that was looking for emergency shelter. So we're seeing a lot of that.

So that is a gap. Thank you. And Ms. Agnew-Berman, returning to your comment, we don't have enough shelter. What is that threshold that we really need to be sitting at in order to have adequate shelter on a year-round basis? Is that like, are we looking, are we talking about 400 beds?

Like where, where's, where do we think that sweet spot is? I mean, I think what we hear, and again, we don't have a great way of deduplicating the turnaways, but, and the turnaways do go up and down. Like earlier in the summer, there wasn't that many. I think they were having like between, I want to say like between 8 and 15 a night. But just recently we had an uptick where they were getting more like, you know, around 20, 25 a night.

So I don't think the delta is huge. And the other piece, of course, is we're always trying to work with the shelter providers to move people out of shelter, right? I don't mean back to the street, but like to something positive to make those beds available for someone else. And I think we're getting— we're, we're doing pretty good with that. But when the shelter beds are more scarce, turnover decreases because people hang on to it, right?

So I don't think we're hugely off, but I do think we, we're a little too skippy right now. Okay, thank you, that's helpful. So just a quick timekeeping issue in the audience, who's wanting to participate, offer comments? 1, 2, 3. Okay, so we have another presentation after this one, we have a couple more people in the queue, so I would either beg that your questions move with a bit of alacrity, or maybe hold your questions to the end or follow up, or beg your indulgences and we extend the committee meeting by about 10-15 minutes.

Okay, seeing some nods for that. Extend. Move to extend. Okay, we'll go ahead and move to extend this. Okay, members, Silvers.

I think I've asked this question before, but I'm not sure I ever really got it answered, and that is So we don't have enough, you say about 8 to 20 turnaways per night. If, how long does it take for those people to get into shelter? And so, you know, 9 o'clock at night they come and the shelter's full and they're turned away. What are the chances are that they will be able to get into shelter the next day, or does it take 3 days, or does it take a week?

If they are motivated to be in shelter, what our protocol right now is, they go to the Safety Center, they spend the night, and then we fold them in the next morning. To some of them, sometimes we use non-MUNI shelters as well. The Hope Center has been a vital partner for women's beds, and the Anchorage Gospel Rescue Mission has been vital for men's beds. So we do fold people in if they are motivated to do so. When we talk about turnaways, the difficulty that I have with that particular number is that there is somebody who could just call, just speed dial call, and the protocol is they're supposed to get there by 8:00 or 8:15 to get a bed.

That call is logged by every single shelter as a turnaway. So when we say 20, that doesn't mean there were 20 people, that was 20 people that had been, there's 20 requests. So, but generally speaking, if people want one, want a shelter bed, we can usually fold them in the following day. So when you're saying that we don't have enough shelter, what you're actually saying is we don't have enough shelter to always get somebody in immediately But we do have enough shelter that we can usually get people sheltered within 24 hours. Is that what you're saying there?

I think one of the, like, an example happened maybe a week and a half ago where we had a group of folks and they had been sleeping at that intersection of Northern Lights and, and New Seward, and we had been doing outreach trying to get them to move. And then finally, I think Emily and Kathleen went with APD and And we were able right then to say, hey, we have shelter beds and we got 4 people to go in. That's the kind of thing where when we have a little capacity, we can do that type of outreach more robustly. Like maybe like last week, we had a lot of people in Midtown. And in my perfect world, we would have been able to go from person to person and say, I have a bed for you.

Do you want to go right now? But there isn't we are not going to do that when we know we don't have room to bring those folks in. So I think that's more what I'm talking about, is being able to be kind of real-time. Also, I think we don't have good data, so, for the duplicate, for the turnaways and deduplicating, and that's again why we're trying to do the whole health information exchange thingy. Yeah.

Member Park. Thank you. I guess, Thea or Kathleen, for the longer term, when you have individuals who are both unhoused and need substance use disorder treatment, are they qualified to receive Medicaid? And is that a factor into getting them into a longer-term situation?

Many, many people are eligible for Medicaid. Many people are already enrolled. And then that's also part of once outreach connects somebody either with shelter or with the Third Avenue Navigation Center or with any detox treatment provider, they're doing that Medicaid enrollment. Our health department does Medicaid enrollment. We can take people to Providence and do presumptive eligibility too.

So there's a variety of people we get people enrolled. Okay. And just quickly, how long does that take? Well, usually the enrollment process might take a little bit of time, but then you can backfill. So it doesn't mean that the provider goes 2 months serving somebody that they never get paid for.

They might just have to wait for payment. Yeah. Okay, Member Skow.

Um, I've heard that people lose their access to Medicaid when they're arrested. Is that true, or is that impacting folks' ability to access healthcare? So when someone's incarcerated, when they're in under DOC supervision, they cannot be— you cannot charge those health services to Medicaid. So the state has to pay for healthcare while someone's incarcerated. If they are— so for example, say somebody gets really hurt inside a correctional facility and then they get taken to Providence, for example, for like, you know, surgery or something, if they're out for more than 24 hours, then Medicaid can kick back in.

Okay. The problem that happens for people is if they are incarcerated for a while, they lose their, they lose their enrollment. They need to be re-enrolled. And so again, in kind of a perfect world, that would be part of the re-entry process. And I think for many people it is, but because our correctional system is, we have one system for the whole state, So someone might be going in and out because they're being held pretrial or they're on a very minor offense.

And when that happens, that's not going to— they're not going to get disenrolled because of that. Okay. What is the timeline that you'd lose enrollment? You said if they were held long enough, they would lose. Well, once they're actually like under Department of Corrections, they're under— they're on paper, they're, they're in their supervision, then they— they're— I don't know how long they have to be in to lose their enrollment.

Does anybody know that? Yeah, I just know that while they're under DOC supervision, they— their health services can't be billed to Medicaid. Right, but bouncing in and out, more, more or less kind of like what's happening under this ordinance, that wouldn't really—. I don't think so. Yeah.

Okay, anything else? Okay.

I shall be quick. I got to go. Focus back on this is camping, so these numbers may look, may look a little bit small. This doesn't include all the connecting resources that AFD does, or the HOPE with the peer impact team, the Title 8. This is just for our contacts that we have for camping.

You can see that the safety center is, we've kind of turned that into the place where we're going to drop folks and then pick them up the next day, uh, you know, in the future. So next year when we do this presentation for you, crisis stabilization will be added on here as well. Not that that's going to replace any one of these, but certainly will be added to what we already have on the list. Last slide, please.

And this slide just indicates that on top of the charges that we're doing for camping, we're also having contact with people that have other arrestable offenses. Generally, those are going to be outstanding warrants. And I think we've always kind of talked about whether it's a large encampment or just, you know, contact with members that are in and out of the homeless population, we always try to figure out what other offenses are happening in there, what are the charges. Well, the camping ordinance has allowed us to kind of give you a number. And when we're in and around and using this ordinance to have contact with people, we're seeing other offenses that can be arrestable offenses outside of the numbers that we've already shared.

I think we've covered these.

Any final questions before we move on to the next one?

Yeah, Member Scott. I believe I asked this in AIM back and forth, um, at the meeting before last, but I would, I would love additional data on what the outstanding warrants are for. I think there's a wide range of why there would be a warrant for someone's arrest, and that would be interesting for me personally.

I'll work on that for you. Alrighty, thank you so much, guys. Appreciate everything you're doing. Next up, we'll have the Health Department to talk about changes to AMC 16-120.

When you're settled, just introduce yourself and get started whenever you're ready. Thank you. Kimberly Rash, Anchorage Health Department. So today I am going to give you a short update on upcoming AO change to AMC 16.120, which is the emergency shelter plan for homeless persons. And just to give a little bit of context before I go into the presentation, last year was the first year that the Health Department executed licenses, homeless and shelter licenses.

And so through those conversations that we had, we understood that we really needed to update code because code was written and then we implemented it and we said, hey, there's some changes that need to be made. In part of that conversation, we had conversation about 16.120. And so I'm here today to just talk about 120. 125, Which is shelter licensing, will come later on. But this AO will be introduced on September 1st.

And then we do have another housing and homelessness meeting in September. So if we want to discuss more, we can do that as well. Next slide. And next slide. And so some of the background for this change was that we had extreme weather conditions in December of 2025.

Which demonstrated to the Anchorage Health Department that we needed to increase need for shelter capacity. Within code, there was a provision that said that Health Department could only go up to 150 beds at any shelter, and anything above 150, I would have to come in front of the assembly to receive approval. One of the changes that we have made with this current administration is that we have year-round shelter. And it continues to obviously reduce barriers. We continue to reduce barriers to shelter.

We had an emergency special meeting on December 12th, 2025, in which there was a lot of discussion in regards to putting that change in front of the body in such a quick manner. And so I'm trying to get ahead of that this year and putting through this ordinance change in which some of the changes will go over here in a second. But during that session, it was recommended to the Health Department to review AMC.16.120. So what are the changes? And there are not very many.

It is a very small section of code. So we are updating language throughout code to address the plan for shelter. One of the things we have historically heard is that there is an emergency cold weather shelter plan. That term actually does not exist in code. It was just a term coined by people throughout the community.

It's an emergency cold weather shelter plan, and the health depa— the health department has to come up with this plan every year before it gets cold. And so now that we have a year-round shelter system, we are kind of changing the terminology in that we're classifying emergency, which modifies the plan, rather than the shelter. Since the shelter runs year-round. We are just clarifying that there's an emergency plan, not that there's emergency shelter, because there's shelter all year round. In the past, there was the bring shelter on, cut shelter off, bring shelter on, cut shelter off, and it was just, it was a lot of burden within the community, the people receiving assistance through the sheltering system, and then also it was an administrative burden as well for the Health Department.

And then we are updating the circumstances in which the emergency shelter is activated and deactivated. Next slide. We are requesting that we update capacity from 150 to 200 clients at a single location, which means after 200 individuals, let's say the Health Department wanted to request 250 individuals, I would have to come in front of you and request that approval and state the reason why I am requesting that we go above the 200 capacity at any single location. This was enacted to ensure that we don't have any large capacity homeless shelters within communities, and we have found out that 200 is really a healthy capacity. It's a, a good capacity for management to oversee, and so we are kindly requesting that we move that 150 to 200.

We are updating a term from database to list because it says that the health department will have a database of locations. We don't have a database, we have a list. And so a database really would cost the health department to, you know, purchase a database. So we have a list instead. And then there's a small repealing in here of Section C. So we'll go into more depth here.

So what are the goals of amending this? We're trying to, again, reduce barriers, not only to clients trying to receive shelter when it is cold outside, reduce barriers to us having to come in front of you to request these at very, you know, spur-of-the-moment emergency shelter meetings in which you all are requested to come on very short notice to sit here while I explain to you why I need to go up to 200. It aligns code with current practices and it still maintains the health and safety of homeless persons that are currently within our shelter system.

And that is the quick and dirty of 16.120. Again, it will come in front of you for introduction on the 1st, and then If you all agree to that, it would be then public hearing at the end of September at that second meeting. Thank you, Director Ash. I do have a question from Chair Brawley. Thank you.

And I know we can save detailed discussion about this with the ordinance, but I was just curious if there's discussion about— so I know there's this part of code regarding emergency shelter designation, things like that. Some of it's left over from when churches were We're the only ones doing that. So I know part of that piece of it has to do with our suspending some aspects of zoning code and fire code, I believe. So I just wondered, not that you— I'm not asking you to get involved in zoning, but I'm just wondering, do any of the changes involve those kind of other aspects, or is it more about kind of the process for determining an emergency, or those—. Like, is it Muni only, or will it affect those other entities?

So these changes in 16.120 really just talk to capacity and changing some language. We still will have issues with zoning because not all the shelters are within the two zones that are designated within code under conditional use, and so that is a process we are still working through, and that falls more into the licensing side of that piece.

Thanks, and I'll just briefly observe Anchorage continues to have issues with Zoning is an understatement.

Second. Member Baldwin-Day. Thank you, Chair. This is, this is totally semantics, but I think it's interesting to me that we're still using the word emergency at all because we live in Alaska. And cold weather is a reality.

And so I recognize that at one point, right, when we didn't have a year-round system, this idea that we would need emergent shelter, that totally made sense. I'm just thinking more broadly if maybe it's time for an update to that language, that we're, we're not dealing in emergencies, we're dealing with very normal cold weather events that happen in the winter. And if maybe we we could capture that differently because I, I mean, we live in a northern climate and these things, these should be things that we anticipate and plan for, not things that we wave the emergency flag about. And again, semantics, but maybe something that we ought to consider as part of this update. Yeah, that's a great question because there are some examples other than cold weather.

So we do have, when we had a windstorm, We had to figure out how to get individuals within, you know, into the shelter very quickly. If there is volcanic ash, that would then be requiring that we activate a more emergent basis to try to get our unsheltered population into some sort of sheltering, if that means activating another location very quickly, pulling people inside. So those are type of emergencies that I think of when I'm thinking of in this context is if there is some sort of natural or man-made disaster, how do we assist the people that are still outside to get inside, which would be as part of this piece of code. Thank you. That is a helpful reframe.

I was thinking more in terms of just the wintertime and cold weather, and that shouldn't be an emergency. So thank you. It's good to think about those other lenses. Member Esparilla. Yeah, I'm going to build on that a little bit because I think that my understanding is part of the rationale is the temperature drops below a certain degrees and what it does is it activates a system of partners.

That was my understanding is the original was the faith-based community was involved, the nonprofits were were involved. So it, it sort of kicked into gear a community that said, okay, something's happening, we all need to sort of step into this right now and, and help out, right? As opposed to the city's just going to do it by itself. And I think one of the things that worries me about our new system is that we have taken as a city on so much of the responsibility, the financial responsibility, the in, in, in, in infrastructure, and I don't know what the long-term sustainability of that is. There was a time when, when we did not have— we did not invest nearly this amount of money, and there were a lot more organizations that took on this responsibility.

And I think we're doing a good job now of engaging those partners, that sort of thing. But I just—. I would just say that I think part of the idea there is when in times of emergency, the community steps up, and we all kind of step up to take care of that. And I wouldn't want to lose that idea, especially as we're trying to figure out how to sustain this over a long term, and as we move into a time where our funding looks like it's going to be tighter. So that would be my only sort of piece for that.

Thanks. Yeah, no, that's a, that's a great assessment, because that is the reality in which we are in. I would say, and I wasn't here before the pandemic, pandemic, but I do know that that's how the emergency activation worked. There was 3 different types of activation. If it got below the 45 degrees, then the faith-based community, everyone would come together to address the individuals, and then the pandemic happened, flipped everything over, and then we've been slowly trying to get out of that and creating a system that really is more integrated, but Yes, the costs have gone up from that.

Can I just add to that? So I just want to make sure it's clear that we're not changing the parts of this chapter that allow for partners to provide shelter during emergency locations or emergency events or just anytime really, and we've actually really tried to reduce the barriers for that. So the Health Department now has a really simple process, like for example, if a faith community wanted to do vehicle camping in the summer, like it's literally a 2-page online form for them to do that, and then, and then we would kick that into gear. We've also been meeting with faith communities, we bring them together probably every 3 months, and that's been a big pitch to them is like, please, you know, you could do winter sheltering, you know, you could choose, you know, just take women, just take, I don't know, whoever you want, take 5 people, like we would love that. So we are really still very encouraging of that and will continue to encourage that.

And then I guess I just also want to point out that before, you know, sort of go back 2018, 2019, I think we're going to hear maybe from Ron Oliva, like we certainly had a real issue in certain parts of town where we were not meeting the need for shelter. We also didn't have the alcohol tax then, and the alcohol tax really was passed by the voters not only to address homelessness but to address the kind of constellation of issues that we're talking about today. So, and, you know, when you look at how our funding has been allocated, we really, you know, in 20, the first 2 years that the mayor's put a budget forward, we haven't, you know, we have about $9 million of general government, you know, we've allocated the alcohol tax, and then we are using other funding for the rest of it. So we haven't, like, spiked up in what we're doing. But I think we're doing more with that money.

So just wanted to like—. Yeah, okay. Well, thank you very much, Director Ash. Sorry, I had one other thing I just remembered I probably should mention on the record is that 16.125 will be coming before year-end. And so we are still working on that, but we wanted to get this out first so that it addresses is the need as that one is coming quite quickly as we're at the end of August now.

So that one's still coming on its way. Thank you. All right, thank you very much, Travis. We get the folks set up for public comment. I'm sorry, Dean, sorry, sorry.

I just wanted to add one other historical perspective of this Chapter 16-120. It was first written in 2010 by an IC attorney from the 7th floor and with the homelessness coordinator at the time. But in 2010 the original iteration said that it would be activated 15 degrees and below, so that's changed a lot, you know, we've been upping temperature to accommodate more. The AEM at the time also noted that in 2009-2010 faith-based shelters were turning away, they were at capacity for most of the winter. We had a lot of deaths outdoors of persons, homeless persons, freezing to death, and so I think that At that time, cold weather shelter made sense, you know, but it doesn't anymore.

We have— we didn't have the alcohol tax, we didn't have the HOPE team, MIT, ACT. We have a lot more funding going to homeless shelters. So a lot has changed. This is great evolution to have that chapter match today's circumstances. Absolutely.

Thank you, Dean. Okay. All right. Thank you. All right, uh, public comment.

Please state your name, what part of town you're from. You'll have 3 minutes. Please start when you're ready. Okay, good morning or good afternoon. My name is Ron Oliva.

I have my business next to Brother Francis Shelter, Grub Steak Guy, a resident of Rogers Park, but I'm represented by all of you. I'm here today, I gave you 3 handouts. It's about Bindle Stick Park. It's a project that kind of begins with my history being 46 years next to the shelter, MLNP was gonna buy my property and they put away, Bill Starr and Bill Evans put away $1.2 million and they borrowed from that capital account and did not purchase my property. But they promised me that after the first of the year, they were gonna send over additional funds to the capital account and buy the remainder of my property, which was 3 other parcels.

That did not happen. I was first in line to be funded. COVID came in, it threw a curve in things, and you ended up spending $280 million, and I'm still waiting for my land to be purchased, but more importantly, get the difference you shorted me, $350,000. And that was my good friend Mr. Gates' doing. Because he had to go back and have the MLLP board reallocate that additional $350,000.

But I'm not here— I presented Bindle Stick Park, its mission is in recycling. We've done a pilot for 3 months under the radar very successful. Didn't ask for any money. We recycle copper, aluminum, and other items. And I received people, homeless, from everywhere, from Covenant House to Linda's to the shelter, from Beans.

And we put them to work. We—. I pay them to go to counseling, AA, very successful. True North came down, and basically what I'm offering is employment, job training, and then every day when I pay them— and what I'm trying to do is get on the radar— you can pay an individual $600 cash. They don't have to report it, or it's up to them to do it, but I always give them one-on-one counseling that here is the Resource Navigation Center.

Here's a list of anything you need from bus passes, ID, if you need needles, where to go to get them. So it's interesting. And I feel because of its location to the Navigation Center, this is a construction camp that has self-contained Bathroom, showers, kitchen, counseling, medic, chapel. And it's all here. Yeah, thank you for your comment, Mr.

So you're welcome to come down, take a tour. And of course, your time is expired. Thank you. I would also—. Thank you, Mr. Lee.

Your time is expired. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Thank you for your public comment.

Yeah, go ahead. Sorry, Mr. Leavitt, there's a follow-up question for you. I have a question, Mr. Leib, if you don't mind. Um, how many people do you have participating in this pilot right now? Say that again.

How many people do you have participating in the pilot? Oh no, we— well, we had up to 12, but normally the pilot program was trying to maintain at least 6, and it worked out. Thank you.

Anyone else?

Thank you, ma'am. Please state your name, what part of town you're from. You may begin whenever you're ready. You have 3 minutes.

Good morning. My name is Chris Stoner. I'm president of Midtown Community Council. The last couple of weeks, we're seeing some changes in people. We're seeing more aggression.

We're seeing a lack of, a lack of responsibility to the community outside of individuals thinking they can do what they want. And I'll give you one example. I got a phone call on Sunday. One of our residents came home and there were people camping out in his backyard. In his backyard.

He went out and told them they had to move. They were argumentative. They finally did leave. But that, that's pushing. That's pushing the envelope.

Two weeks ago Friday, my husband and I were taking a trip from from point A to point B here in Anchorage on A Street. We saw 6 people down. When I mean down, they're laying on the ground, they're passed out, whatever. We stopped, we worked with each individual. No one wanted help.

They just wanted to be able to do what they wanted to do with no repercussions. We're seeing more and more people on the Southwest side of Walmart today, if you drive through, we've been seeing bikes being worked on. We have a small chop shop going on. Nothing's happening. Nobody's saying you can't do this.

When we see people taking over an area, it hurts business, it hurts the residents. It's not fair to the people who are trying to make a living and do well.

I think the thing that really got me in here, I think it was on Monday, Thea, Monday I contacted you. Cutty Park, there is an old trailer, all the windows are broken in it now, they weren't broken the first day I was there, but they're broken now. There is a work truck that was full of pallets, and I saw a woman, so I went over and talked to her, she started crying. I asked her if she wanted help. No, she didn't want help.

So I told her I was going to take pictures of the vehicles and turn it in. She started hollering. That was apparently her partner. I'm not sure. He was asleep on the ground.

He didn't help her. I was taking the pictures, and all of a sudden, a very small child, probably about that high, that 3 years old, 2 years old, ran out. It was outside. It was raining. He was barefoot.

There's needles out there. There's all kinds of things out there. I'm being told no one can do anything for this child. The city has rules that they have to follow when it comes to children. Apparently, the mother of this child is a fentanyl addict, and so is the father.

The woman apparently camps out. It's not illegal to have a child camping. I'm asking, can't I do anything? Well, I could call OCS, but since I don't have their name, OCS can't do anything. The last time something like this happened, I contacted the mayor and she contacted the director of OCS, and I was allowed to make a complaint.

Now there's more, but I'm out of time. If you allow me to hang tight after the meeting, I'd like to talk to you after.

I'm hearing deficit, so he needs to know. Yeah, were you, were you speaking on behalf of yourself or the community? Council. I— can you answer yes or no if I can have a couple extra seconds? Because there's some things I'm going to ask the city to do, and I'll make them very quick.

Okay, I have a question for the testifier. What I encourage you to do is, uh, is one, email it, put it all in, and I will email to the assembly. Great. And by the way, Thea, Lieutenant Fuchs, that whole group, everybody that's working with this, these guys are amazing. Yes, ma'am.

Yes, they are. If you'll hang tight for a few minutes afterwards, I'd love to follow up with you. Thanks. I'd like to move to extend by 2 minutes, and I'd like to be in the queue to ask the testifier a question. So it's a committee.

We don't necessarily need to move to extend the meeting. I guess what I would encourage you to do is let's go through the public comment, and maybe we can follow up, you and I, offline with the individual. Is that all right? Okay. I'll take a seat.

I prefer not being in electric podium. Is that okay? That's fine.

All right, so here we go. Uh, Jamie Lopez, formerly Coalition for the Homeless. So, um, this part of the presentation the Honey in the Pour presentation, also known as the NIMBY presentation. And more or less, this is more theater. I wouldn't say everybody is tone deaf and blind, but people are selling something, and no matter what, they want us to succeed.

The numbers do not show it's succeeding. You're shifting people all over, all over this town. You're driving them like cattle. In October 2024, I'll never forget it, Ron Levin was right here. And he basically said, my first college class, uh, how to lie with statistics.

And he did not believe the data that was being presented by somebody who was up here, former assembly member, uh, when they said that there were only 450 homeless people in town. And more or less, it's kind of along the same lines right now, is when you drive people endlessly, you don't know how many are there. You used to have people in tents, in parks, some in snow dumps, uh, they had stability. You could bring them things. And then when you remove that layer of stability and you drive people like cattle, uh, they get less access to food, they get less access to water, they get less access to services.

And not only that, they stop talking to people because they think, more or less, that people are going to induce more cycles of trauma. Uh, it's like Stockholm syndrome. If you have somebody who abuses somebody, uh, should they also be providing services? No, they're not going to trust person. And it's the same with the police up here.

You know, Lieutenant Fuchs, uh, the battle captain of the 761st Military Police Battalion in Guantanamo Bay watching terrorists— that is the guy who's in charge of the HOPE team. And while, you know, basically Theo over here says, oh, it's just one police officer, they weren't getting the results that they wanted. So more or less they created this other organization, AMDOT, where they looped in all the providers. And more or less there was a steering committee, and Fuchs is on that committee and so it's a crowdsourced intel op and nobody is really blind to this outside. They just basically are not giving their locations anymore.

They're apprehensive to talk to people. So, all that said, women are less safe now. They're isolated. When you have groups of people together, if somebody screams out, there's somebody else there who will stop something bad from happening. Now, they don't have that luxury and I know people because they've told me this.

Aside from that, the telephone response model. Um, I once had a discussion with Jennifer Pierce about this. I was like, most of the homeless outside, phones lost, broken, stolen, not charged, assuming they can phone the phone service at all. Luckily, TrueConnect has that thing now, uh, where it's just billed entirely. But, uh, more or less she said, oh well, they can go to the Circle K. Uh, that's about as tone deaf as you can get.

And so you don't walk away or leave people hanging. Well, I know of at least 5 off the top of my head in the past couple couple months where I basically solved problems where people were left hanging. There were 50-plus people in a, in a building on Price Street that got pushed right out onto the street and they did not get help. So I came down, I testified in a meeting. Some of those people went up to Irwin, then there were people that got pushed out there, and what ended up happening was they were left on the street, then they went in an abandoned building, then they got charged with a felony as a result of basically code enforcement pushing people out, an officer traumatizing people.

And then I saw that. Thanks, Jamie. You don't have problem money to solve problems. Thank you for coming. Thank you.

Thank you, sir. All right, we're gonna go ahead and adjourn this meeting at 12:48.