HHAND Commission Monthly Meeting October 2025

Everyone else introduce themselves. Hi, my name is Laura Rains. I'm a commissioner. Okay, um, and questions from commissioners for the applicant?

They're going to add how many more units to that micro unit project?

[Speaker] We're still working on that with the contractor. We're hoping to get up to 8 more units. We'll see if we can get it. [Speaker] Anything else?

All right. We'll bump back up to the top of the agenda, and since we have 4 of them now, can I get a motion to approve the order of business?

Move. And a second. Second. Second. Dr. Johnson, any discussion, changes?

We push D back one more month. We will push— everyone agree? Jessica not being here. Yeah, Jessica not being here. Yeah.

So no opposition to that. Anything else? So any opposition to approving the order of business with the change of moving item D to next month?

Seeing and hearing none, go ahead and approve that. And now can I get the motion to approve the minutes from last month, September 3rd? I move. Laura, and a second? Second.

Second. Williams. Take a moment to look them over.

Any changes, updates, or errors we want corrected?

I just had a question. Sure. I see a couple of the commissioners' names in italics. What does that mean? Virtual attendance.

Virtual attendance. Oh, okay. Yeah, never knew that. Sorry.

Oh, virtual attendance. Where you see that at? Uh, right next to A, roll call introductions. It's also—. I see it now.

Okay, it's also in Italian. Um, everyone satisfied with the minutes? Any opposition to approving the minutes as written? Great job, Frankie, as always. Appreciate you.

Okay, seeing and hearing none, minutes are approved. We've gone through E1A, E1B, which is Health Department. You had mentioned that Thea kind of covered everything. Everything I had, she already went over. So any additional update?

Great, that means—. Yeah, so, um, biggest thing for us is emergency rental assistance. The period for Treasury ERA ended yesterday, so all the rental assistance that we were able to roll out through that process is rolled out, we will have to return a small amount of money to the Treasury. We didn't quite get all of it spent, but we really put— and we'll have some— we don't have exact numbers on that yet, but we will have numbers on that in the next couple weeks as we get reporting from the various grantees about how many people they ended up serving and how much money they ended up spending overall. But I think overall we'd say that was a very successful program that we stood up and and got going in a very short period of time.

Um, and, uh, we made the best of a kind of difficult situation with the timing of funding and all those things. Thanks to all our grantees, especially those who are in the room here. Um, and, um, we, uh, appreciate, um, all of everyone's work on that. We expect that the final number of clients is going to be somewhere around 600, which is about what we projected at the beginning. So, um, I think we did kind of meet our goal.

We did add a small amount of additional funding to one of the grantees to provide some continuing rental assistance to high-need clients that need assistance beyond September 30th. That grantee is Henning that has an additional $260,000 for up to a year of additional assistance, although it probably won't last that long. But that's prioritizing people who have come from homelessness into housing and need continued rental support to stay housed. It's not very much compared to the, you know, overall millions that ERA was, but it'll help a little bit. And then we are planning to do a comparable amount of ongoing tenant-based rental assistance with our regular HUD funding as well, about $250,000 in the next year, and we'll probably put out a competitive RFP for, um, uh, and we manage that funding.

The other big thing is a government shutdown. So federal government is shut down. We don't know how long that's going to last. It doesn't actually affect our programs very much because our HUD grants are on a reimbursement basis, and so we have already been kind of floating, basically, as our regular practice of spending funds and then getting reimbursement from HUD. And the system that we use to do our reimbursement draws is still functioning, and HUD's contingency plan for the shutdown indicated that routine draws that don't require extra HUD staff review will go on as usual, and so probably we won't have any major disruptions to our operations from the shutdown itself.

We won't be able to get our next year's funding in place until the government is back open because HUD does need to sign a grant agreement, but we weren't expecting that to happen for a few more weeks anyway, so it doesn't changing nature of the program. We do get a lot of questions about it, so want to make sure everyone is aware that we are open for business even if the federal government is not.

Questions? Commissioner, can I ask a question? Um, sure. Okay, so, uh, I believe during one of the presentations They mentioned reporting for ERA, and even though the funds are exhausted, there's supposed to be a certain amount of reporting for what time period, I guess. And so they report whether or not the individual is still housed at that point in time, or if they have collected any federal credit.

Yeah, there is, um, I don't know offhand how long there's like continued follow-up reporting, but I can look into that and see. Mostly the reporting is, is just, you know, the reporting for the period during which the assistance was being provided. And so, you know, that was through the end of September, but it'll take a little while.

As I remember, maybe I'm misquoting, 275 people were taken outside of homeless system essentially.

At the point we report that, yes. Yes, and so maybe there are more now. Probably. But yeah, that was the concern, is that people, you know, that typically have a bunch of trauma, you know, they haven't self-resolved, and they're at very high risk.

Yeah, and that's right. That's where we're trying to put some money towards getting into systems.

Any other comments or questions? I understand what you're saying. It has to, um, during the grant process, because I think that kind of data is very important, and I understand that once the grant ends, it ends. Has there ever been any consideration to at least provide some type of administrative assistance to that information is available? Because it'll never be available if you don't— yeah, make it a priority, make it part of the grant.

Yeah, I, um, with the ERA, there's not a lot of provision for that. That was kind of like emergency sort of thing that came together quickly, so there's not a lot of provisions for ongoing monitoring and reporting. Um, for, uh, for other grant funds generally there's more of a long-term kind of model system in place to do that kind of monitoring.

I think it's just if there's another grant that probably, you know, that somebody can have to.

Because that type of data is what's needed to move forward in knowing if you're—. Yeah, it definitely is—. Doing a good job or not. Yeah, we're definitely interested in, you know, collecting whatever data we can to judge the efficacy of kind of different approaches to providing assistance, just for our own, like, program management purpose of, like, deciding how best to deploy our funds. Um, and so we did, we did do an analysis of, um, like, tenant-based rental assistance in general as a, as a new prevention.

And we were actually required to do that by HUD. And, um, you know, that was what led us to put funding for that in our action plan for 2025. So, um, we'll be following up with our, you know, even, even if there's not like a formal reporting structure in place for the ERA We'll be following up with the grantees just, you know, so that we have a sense of what, um, what kind of outcomes they have so that we can determine like how best to, to deploy that funding. And, you know, that would go through, go through a process of evaluation and so forth and outcomes from past programs and, you know, the ability of grantees to spend funds and to at the cost efficiency of how many people were able to assist with how much money, things like that would kind of go into that evaluation process and deciding to award more funds. I don't remember which one of the— it's a report that came out of HUD.

I don't remember, it's been about a year since I read this and I don't remember exactly where, but basically the like follow-up training is if somebody can stay in housing for about 2 years after exiting homelessness, your likelihood of re-entering homelessness drops significantly. But that research nationwide is hard to do because there's not a lot of, like, permanency navigation, I guess, is the term that, like, Covenant House uses. But there's not a lot of roles for that, and especially with the current funding climate, that's harder to come by, sadly, at this time. But that, again, that's about a year old since I read that, and who knows how much more data there has been since. I think the data is available though, that you can get to that, because 9 times out of 10, those persons seek assistance again.

And so you can kind of analyze, wait a minute, we're providing services, and now, you know, you can— there's data available. But you need somebody to conduct that data, so AKHMIS should have it.

Okay, um, moving on to new business, um, our committee member Ron Leva has asked to postpone for next month.

Next, under new business, review the Indian Commission rules and procedures, which you all should have copy. Um, and Jed, was this something that you were—. Um, who was leading? This was something that was brought up like quite a few months ago, just as a— it could be a best practice to revisit these because these are written in 2018. Um, we largely have not been using them, so it could also just be a decision been by the commission to put these by the wayside.

It seems like you've been operating pretty smoothly. Meaning we haven't been following them or haven't been referring? I just don't think we've touched them. Yeah. And what's the process for changing any rules if we wanted to?

Is this something that goes in front of the assembly if we want to make a change to the rules, or is this an internal document? Not currently, but we had that presentation during the last meeting that there's going to be a potential Assembly ordinance where they will have to in the new year, but at least up till now it is just a decision of a majority of your body here what you want these rules to be. So perhaps the discussion now is whether or not you want to pursue that, or if you just want to follow whatever the assembly comes up with. Yeah, um, so in looking through these, does anyone else— does anyone see any gaps —any rules? When was the last time someone went to an assembly meeting on behalf of an organization?

Great question. I just saw that in the very first paragraph. I don't think I've ever seen it. I don't know if you showed the guys.

We also do not have a secretary.

Um, I'm of the mind, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I think it would be a good idea then, as the statement we were wondering, how long did you wait for an assembly person? I mean, for a commission, because if you're running late And you know you'll be on that time, no sense in coming. You know what I'm saying? If you can't make it by a designated time, don't— know not to show up.

Should have a provision that it depends on the month. July. Some commissions, I think, do take breaks during the summer. Yeah.

A tape recording shall be made of each regular commission meeting. And I think that's still the standard language in almost all of them, is that that's like municipal language has tape recordings, and it's just known to mean that that can also mean a digital recording. Yeah. There's an awful lot of tape recorders still floating around.

One thing, just a reminder, is that it refers to the Health Department as DHHS, whereas we're now bigger team.

So we probably do need to change it. Yeah, I mean, right, no, but I'm saying there's enough comments that we probably should. The room still looks—. Yeah, um, is there anyone that's especially passionate about going through this document, um, and essentially redlining it and presenting changes to the commission?

Today? No, no, for the next meeting or for some undefined meetings in the future. I mean, I think we talk about it a lot, but I think to make changes, someone would have to say these are the specific changes that we would like to make, and then as a body, we would, we would either vote on them all at once or go through them individually. And say yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. But someone would have to put pen to paper.

I'll do that. All right. And people can send each other. Okay. So if commissioners have suggestions for changes, email them over to And to be safe, maybe just email them to me and I'll do something.

Yeah, email them to Frankie. Yeah. Um, and, um, you'll, um, compile them. Yeah, I'll track change the document. Yeah.

Are you thinking for November, December, January? What's your timeline? I can do it for November. I mean, if people give me the changes. I can bring it to the November meeting.

Yeah, maybe an initial draft. Great. Does that sound cool?

And anything else? I was about to volunteer myself with a very like strict— this cannot happen until December. Thank you. Okay, cool. Thank you.

Um, anything else on Commissioner rules or procedure.

That brings us to general public comments.

Jamie in the room. We also have Kenny and Sharon. Are you two here for public comment?

Good afternoon. I'm here to stand in. Go ahead, Chair. Why don't you go first? Are you here to provide public comment?

No, thank you. I'm here to stand in, um, to assist someone that's out of the office today. Thank you. Well, thank you for joining us. And Mr.

Peterson, what about you? Oh man, thanks for letting me join you guys. This is— I appreciate it a lot. I just wanted to announce something that's been passionate for me for a long time, 13 years, is that we finally got established with the Anchorage Community Foundation, what we call the Good Neighbor Fund. Maybe you've heard of that already in some of your other meetings, but we're pretty excited.

It's a way that we can help support our outreach workers from the city, and in particular, we've been working with RRS for a few years ever since we stood down the Sullivan, I helped create a flexible fund that they could use to help provide transportation, temporary housing, gas, car repairs, that kind of thing. And we've been, over the last 2 and a half years, been using that to take care of some immediate needs. And we found that we've used that for the HOPE team as well.

For meeting needs. And so with the support of the community members and others, that we've been able to formalize this into a Good Neighbor Fund being held by the Community Foundation. So we hope that we can make some formal announcements about this in the future with a little bit more, um, uh, explanation and examples of usage and so on. But just want to make you aware of a Good Neighbor Fund for helping out our outreach in ways that is unrestricted and community supported. And so, uh, we'll share more about that, but, uh, look, look forward to Good Neighbor Fund.

Thank you, Kenny.

Public comment? Uh, yeah, I guess so. Uh, I should stop talking. Um, yeah, so pretty much I prepared remarks. Um, and, uh, so, um, so You know, it's sort of beating its own course to a certain extent, but winter is coming, it is getting cold, and you know, I go out pretty much almost every single day and I'm coming across people outside of whatever, you know, the city is hosting, and it's, it's not a good thing out there.

And so 232 less beds than last year, obviously you can add 50 capacity to the facilities up here.

Oh, sorry. Whoops. Okay, I guess I start over. So where's the mic? It's all the way back there.

Okay, okay. Loud enough? Can you guys hear me? You can also say closer if you prefer. Okay, so anyways, Jamie Lopez, obviously.

I go out and I do outreach and go out almost every single day. And so anyways, the main The main thing is I have seen the plans that have been presented by you, and I wish I could say I have faith in some of them. I think on the shelter side, you know, once you're dealing with people inside that facility, I think there's an effort. But the problem is what do you do outside with the hundreds that are outside? And they need support, they need food, they need water, they need electricity, and I'm not seeing any plan for that.

So there are ways you can work problems and sort of provide support and services and then sort of work the bad sides of the problem. But where you used to have centralization, now it's decentralization. And so people are spread out into so many different areas where providers cannot get to them. And then they're being endlessly displaced to the point where they can't get things. And so the largest My main concern when that happens is there's going to be a large loss of life and also, you know, people are getting burns on fingers, toes, or energy centers.

So I don't know what can be done to resolve this, but it is a bit of a— excuse me— it's a bit of a slow-motion train wreck where you see it's coming down the line. How do you stop the conductor? I don't know. So that is my main concern. Is trying to have the best possible outcome out of bad outcomes.

And I don't know what can be done by people in this room to try and help, but again, that's kind of what I was going to talk about. Also, um, actually, I'll save it for another time if it's okay. So I think that's pretty much it.

I had a quick question. Sure. How many do you estimate are displaced? Well, I cannot reliably say the amount for right now because I used to get to so many places and I don't right now. But what I can tell you is when I get out of the car and I was taking food to people, I was feeding approximately 350.

And there were endless stories of time where I couldn't help themselves, like right around May. Last year, uh, there were approximately 170 at Davis Park, and then it got larger to 200. But, uh, you know, basically on— I was doing Monday, Wednesday, Thursday Davis Park, 170 meals there. Tuesday, Friday I was hitting the camp in Northwood. Then I was hitting essentially Roosevelt Park and the base fresh in Jack Hill.

Then go back, I get more food, and then hit the camp at the 36 in Moosewood. Then I'd hit Fairbank Street, which is growing massively. And then I'd get potentially to Campbell Creek and they'd run out of food usually by Fairbank Street. So a lot of the people that were Fairbank Street, 36, and that area were displaced from Cutty. But still could not get to the south side.

There were camps there in a couple different places I knew about. Could not get to the west side. Could not get to areas of downtown. Could not get to Muldoon. And, you know, these fluctuating people sort of shift depending on what's happening.

And when you get to Spice and what they did, it shifts around. But then there's people falling into illnesses every single day. There's people getting out of jail. They tend not to interact with providers. And then there's a permanency of population, shadow population of people that have been— have bad experiences, they check out, and they're out there and they don't interact with people.

And so, yeah, it's, uh, you can't sort of do projections, but you have to have enough outreach out there to interact with people on a daily basis. And right now what the police are doing is they're essentially requesting IDs from individuals all the time, and they're sort of not supposed to do that unless, you know, it's a crime. But I think that's a way to sort of get around the HMIS issue, but it's also similar to issue. And so yeah, the numbers are high. I could go on for— yeah, Thea also wanted an opportunity to respond.

Sure. Yeah, Thea, why don't you jump in? Oh, I just wanted to clarify one. It's a little hard to hear you, Jamie, but I think I heard you say that we have fewer beds this time than last year, and we actually have 100 more beds that the municipality is operating right now than we did this time last year. So last year at this time we had 200 beds.

This year we have 300. And we are planning right now, the Health Department and I are working on getting funding to, to do surge beds as well. So I just wanted to clarify that. And then I, I also just wanted to, to say again that I am 100% motivated by the exact same things that you're describing. I 100% want to see fewer people dying outside than we've had in the last 2 years.

That's I think about that every single day. So I would love to hear, you know, I know you're talking about food and water and kind of meeting people's basic needs. You know, I know that from some of our recent kind of community meetings, we were gathering all the different, you know, community efforts that do things like— oh, excuse me, sorry— that do things like supply food and do food pantries and distributions. So I guess I just wanted to ask you, you know, what do you think, what would you like to see that you're not seeing? Like, what are the things that you wish were happening that aren't?

And just kind of hear a little bit more of your, like, proposed solutions to the problem, because I 100% agree with the problem that you're describing. Okay, I'll touch on two different things. I'll try to keep it short. Obviously, you guys want to hear it. Um, so yeah, last year you go back to 2 years ago, and so you essentially had Sullivan, you know, approximately 200, and you had 374 beds, 274 at Aviator, you know, uh, that block depends on years if I remember correctly, 138 rooms, and then you had 100 at Alex Hotel, total 574.

Uh, last year, which he had right around even before this time, is he only had, uh, let's see, uh, I'm trying to remember, I think it was around 200 SWS, but, uh, the 200 beds for Hennington get approved until the October 25th meeting. And so it was like sort of a victory lap tour, and I'm like, oh boy, this is not good. And so originally it was supposed to be 500 beds, down to 400, down to 200 at that December meeting. It was like, there's going to be collateral damage, guys, just approve. And then the extra 132 for MASH got approved just before Thanksgiving.

And so a guy, a really nice guy named made, he ended up losing his toes. We got him to Henry House too, I will too late. And so that's one of the reasons why I take this so seriously, because I've seen it for a number of people. Yeah, there's way more people out there than most know, and some just don't interact at all. But as far as the issue of survival, so the problem is, is that you're in an unforgiving environment.

And the weather does not discriminate. It will go at everybody. And so typically what you have during the winters is, you know, certain people, they interact with the system and try to get into shelter. Some have had such a bad experience at the hotels with the rules or the staff that they just check out and don't come back. And so what happens is then you have people outside, you have people in tents running propane, and the tents and the RVs are packed like a crown.

Farm camps essentially, because people are trying to stay warm and not die or lose fingers and toes. And so when you strip that ability of people, then, and you endlessly displace them, there's no place to go. And so the question is, can I— yeah, yeah, back to talking about what's the solution. So obviously the point is When you get to the acceptance stage of the stages of grief and you understand that not everybody is coming back to society, you know, based on PTSD or anything else, you have—.

A number of options available to you. Some have been discussed here, not— I'm not going to get into this topic, but the main thing is there do need to be essentially sanctioned camps because, uh, you— and I know the liability aspects of why the union is deciding to sort of nix this and not even allow the discussion. And then if it passes the assembly, then the union attorneys will probably not pursue it. But the point is why you need these means is because the alternative is you put everybody in jail or you put somebody into a psych ward or, you know, any number of other options that are around, but that's not a good outcome for those people as well. And so when you have centralized places for people to go, the providers can provide services and target those areas, and you can self-contain certain things to those areas and really ways to work this problem.

But that is how you do it because the alternative is decentralization, and decentralization civilization on every street corner, you do not have communities where people look out after each other, and then you can't provide services to so many different places you may get to. So you're advocating for some sort of sanctioned camping or some sort of more centralized— Well, there need exists, those places, because from even the provider aspect, couldn't go all over town. Time management, your resources, the funding costs involved. It just becomes very, very difficult to do it. And so, yeah, but there are ways you can minimize the harms and the costs.

And so my— I wouldn't call it a pitch— is that, you know, you can reduce physical harms, economic harms, social harms if you do this, but then you also have to separate the outreach component from police. And, you know, instead of doing 8 $80,000 to $150,000 to essentially destabilize people endlessly. You try to do that and build the relationships and trust with people to the point where maybe they want to come back to society. Maybe they want to take that step, and if you build the relationships, you can do it. You can convince people to do it, but they have to know that the person in front of them cares and isn't going to harm them or arrest them.

And that's, that's the problem is Some people, they just won't accept the services otherwise. Yeah, all right, anything else from you?

No, thank you, I'm just listening. Thank you. Okay, um, moving on to Commissioner's comments.

I just have a general comment. I started working at the web this week, this Monday, so I'm the new interim executive director. Oh, congratulations. Yeah, thank you. Just more insight because I've learned to hear.

It's the web? Yeah, like the worldwide web.

Uh, yeah, yeah, okay. Anybody else?

I think in one of the other meetings we talked about, and I don't remember what happened, we talked about the, um, output of the task. Was there any more discussion on that? We were going to look at the what came out of those homeless tasks. Meetings and whether the task force— right, and there was a question of whether— what— how the administration was dealing with those recommendations from the task force. So whatever happened with that, I do not— I, I know we had some discussion of, um, how the sanctioned camp Task Force has informed— well, not— not while we don't have sanctioned camping.

Some of the recommendations of the Sanctioned Camp Task Force was one of the things that helped to inform the RFPs for the authorized parking. Looks like the DF hand up if she can respond to that.

Go ahead, Thea. Um, sure. So yes, we've been certainly taking the recommendations for— there were two task forces. One was sanctioned camping, one was complex behavioral health. And so the recommendations from both task forces informed the mayor's strategy that we've been implementing, and in particular The micro units project that we're building at Tudor and Elmore, that really comes directly from both task forces.

So the sanctioned camping one identified a number of different locations and a number of different building types. And so we started with that list and, and those recommended building types, and that's how we got to, um, eventually to the location that we have and to the type of unit. And then in the Complex Behavioral Health Task Force, that was also the top priority from that group, was to provide a form of low barrier transitional living that was more appropriate and acceptable for people who, you know, either kind of the folks that Jamie's talking about, like, aren't going to go to congregate shelter, like, that's not going to work for them. So having these micro units was recommended by this, the Complex Behavioral Health Task Force also, and to make it easy for people to get into treatment, especially peer-supported treatment, which is kind of like, uh, the gentleman that was just speaking about the Consumer Web, like that type of peer support. So that really informed the RFP that's out right now for the operator for those units, and that will be able to provide services out of the Golden Lion too.

So yeah, we've taken both those task forces pretty seriously.

And thank you, Thea. I think that's, that's good to hear. Um, and I think it would be really good if the task force members knew that the work they put in and the hours they put in are being— was beneficial. That was one of the things— the task force just ended and nobody knew what happened to the data. So it's good to hear that this administration is using that, and that might be, um, something that you— someone takes up to say at the end, this is what happened to the work that you put in, that we are using that information.

I'm glad I, I get a chance to hear it. I think it would be beneficial for those other people that served on the task force to also hear it, to know that the hours and time that was put in wasn't in vain. So I, I appreciate the update.

Any other comments from commissioners? With that, I entertain a motion to adjourn.

Uh, motion. Second. Any opposition? Okay, we're adjourned. Thanks, everybody.

Thank you. Thank you.