Housing and Human Services Advisory Board Meeting – March 10, 2022

https://youtu.be/kLMXHhcro64

Note: The following is the output of transcribing from a video recording. Although the transcription, which was done with software, is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or [software] transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the meeting, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

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Unknown Speaker 0:00
Well, we’ll call the meeting to order them on the agenda is public invited to be heard. not see anyone but Erica, do we have anyone that was planning to attend? No, we don’t have anybody. Um, the next item we have is approval from the February 10.

Unknown Speaker 0:23
Meeting. You have a motion to approve those. Yana, and then we need a second. And Karen Phillips seconds. All those in favor of approving the minutes from our February 10. Meeting please raise your hand.

Unknown Speaker 0:47
Okay, opposed? And abstentions? Okay, so we have one abstention. Erica, I think that’s because I didn’t attend I’m not allowed to Okay.

Unknown Speaker 1:01
All right, they are so approved. And the next item is review of the 2021 CDBG, caper Annual Performance Report.

Unknown Speaker 1:15
Hello, thank you. My I have a two year old visitor. So I’m telling my husband to come and grab, please. So I’m Molly O’Donnell, I am going to be I’m the Division division director for housing and community and investment for the city, I’m going to be giving an update on our CDBG caper. So that’s our our annual performance report that we submit to HUD each year for CDBG and HOME programs. We will be taking this to city council for review and consideration on March 29. And so this also, we’re in the public review period right now. And March 29 will be the public hearing as well for consideration of the caper. So overall, I just want to start by saying in past maybe not 20, because that was also an interesting year, in prior years, Kathy presented to you the CDBG, caper and the inclusionary housing snapshot for the prior year. And I’m going to be splitting that up. It’s it’s purely capacity related, but the caper is is complete, but our inclusionary housing snapshot, we’re still assessing the data and putting it all together. So I will plan to present that at next month’s meeting. So for our CDBG programs, and also we wrap in report outs on our affordable housing funding program as well since they’re so interrelated and tied together. Just to recap, especially because we have some new members here, that each and every project undertaken or completed in 2021. Help the City Address Goal B 1.1. The city council work plan to have a full spectrum of attainable housing for all incomes and stages of life. So these projects keep people in their homes, improves the city’s affordable housing stock and prepares residents for homeownership or improves their financial position also can make homes accessible for persons with disabilities and leveraged. This year, our leverage amount just pulling up my attachment was over $40 million dollars, because we had a couple of very big ticket items. So that was really, really great to see. So in our CDBG program, if you refer to the caper Performance Report attachment that was in your packet, the first page is our CDBG report out. So we assisted 387 Total households. 73% of these in our regular CDBG program were low and moderate income. 14 homes received rehabilitation assistance, providing improvements to the city’s existing housing stock and helping people stay in their homes. One of those was to well I should say 14 Is is much lower than a typical year. This is because we only picked up the CDB the rehab program partway through 21 Because of COVID restrictions. I hear and Konto so I’m telling my husband please come

Unknown Speaker 4:41
if you’re able to be a guest star

Unknown Speaker 4:44
if you’re a parent, you know she’s right here just playing with pens drawing on my to do list. You want to say hello,

Unknown Speaker 4:52
she’s your admin assistant.

Unknown Speaker 4:55
Here she is she Hi Ma Ma Hi Mabel. Okay, such as life. So, um, our rehab program only picked up partway through the year. And it was partially you know, it was slow to start partially because people were hesitant to have people have us in their homes, and also because

Unknown Speaker 5:34
it’s alright Molly just go right on ahead.

Unknown Speaker 5:39
And also, because we our biggest actual constraint right now is the availability of contractors, we really only have a couple that consistently bid on our rehab projects, and with pricing, and then that how busy contractors are, it really limited the program in 2021. So that 14, one of the homes received assistance to correct code violations, address health and safety issues or make energy efficiency improvements. Three homes were made accessible for persons with disabilities or to allow seniors to age in place. At eight mobile homes were updated by repairing or replacing roofs or making heating, plumbing and electrical system repairs. And two households received funding to address emergency situations causing a threat to the health and safety of those residents. Overall, we had 202 ret Longmont residents using our housing counseling services. We had 46 residents that used the our center rental assistance, this was COVID assistance. We didn’t have expenditures in our our security deposit program this year because HSBC did have separate funding to cover that. We did provide $150,000 for loan principal reduction at the Aspen meadow senior apartments to pay for that rehab project that helped offset the cost there. And we did provide some funding to complete security measures at the suites for the London housing authority. So those are exterior improvements. So generally, if you check out your chart, so you’ve got the CDBG funds on one page, you have the CDBG CV funds there. We did provide 105,000 and change in assistance to the our Center for rental assistance. This was an extension of that COVID related rental assistance. The rest of what is slated for that program is in our Fresh Start utility billing assistance program that’s run here out of the city. We didn’t get our first expenditures in 2021. But we did open the program at that time. And since then, just we’ve had good progress we’ve got $113,000 spent in the first two months of the year. So that is moving along. You’ll see that performance reflected later. So your next chart is the affordable housing, but I’m gonna circle back to that in a moment. Let’s I will just do it just to not skip around. So in our affordable housing funding, um, you’ll see that we have several projects that were budgeted for but have not yet been expended, but they are in progress. So the city owned rehab, that is what we call our Adrian property that is under in bidding right now. So we should have some costs occurring there soon. The East rot Rogers road project is in Design and Development Review right now. We did spend a portion of our pre development costs on the sunset element project. This is the permanent supportive housing project that’s proposed there next to the suites. That project did submit for 9% tax credits on in February 1 of this year. And we do have an interview set up with CHAFA for later in April. So we’re hoping for success. The Cinnabon seven Park senior housing that construction is complete, it’s leasing up and we did expend all that funding budgeted for that the Mustang land purchase. We did not yet transact this, they just closed on the property recently. So that will be coming forward soon. That’s an annual commitment for for five years. And for Chrisman that should be completed here by May 1 That is our projected closing date for that project. It’s about ready to to get going on on construction once we get all of our funding finalized. And our we’ve got one project with the offset that’s listed.

Unknown Speaker 10:02
So, generally, if you go down to your charts, you can see the unspent funds in the 2021. Available committed expense. So we do have an increase in unexpended funds at the end of the year from 2020, just by just about 75,000. It looks like really, it was a challenge to spend funding in 2021. I will say that we did not meet timeliness this year for the first time in a very, very long time. We are one of many jurisdictions that weren’t able to meet timeliness this year, we were not very far off though the timeliness ratio, you have to have less than you have to have expended more than or not have 1.5 times your your funding amount in remaining basically, by November 2, and we were at 1.54. So we were very close. We do project that with the estimate of 2022 funding, we need to spend about $519,000 By October 31 to make timeliness this year. And with the several projects that we already have in the works Chrisman being one we we don’t expect that to be a problem. So we’re shooting to to get that all squared away. We also are looking at how to improve our rehab program try and do some creative marketing efforts for for contractors trying to look at how to make our bids more attractive to contractors as well. So in total 94% of our funds were benefited low and moderate income persons. We were at a very low administration percentage 6% this year where the maximum is 20%. And every CDBG. dollars spent leveraged $82.31 and other public or private funding. So either I’m going to save some of our report outs on our progress on meeting our affordable housing goals for the next meeting with the inclusionary housing snapshot. So I will open it up for questions or discussion.

Unknown Speaker 12:25
Anyone have questions for Molly around the CDBG? Performance Report? Molly I had my was I was going to ask about what the it was the rehab program, what we were looking at if we were having trouble getting contractors there, it sounds like there’s some some plans there to try to bring in some more contractors and or make that more attractive. Go ahead.

Unknown Speaker 12:57
In the short term, we also we’ve got a fair amount of development projects on the horizon, especially with the ARPA funding, that might be able to use a matching source. And so maybe in 2022, if we haven’t yet solved our contractor challenges, we would look to to focus some of the funds there. We will consider that once we look at the budgets. I sent them to you,

Unknown Speaker 13:23
Graham, thanks. The timeliness requirement is that is that merely allocated funds by the due date are you actually have to spend it,

Unknown Speaker 13:33
you have to spend enough funding that you don’t have 1.5 times your allocation and remaining allocation over the years that you have active funding left in? So it’s a little bit of a complicated calculation.

Unknown Speaker 13:48
And can you can you just choose? I want to connect it back to Caitlin’s question. Can you just choose to increase? What you’ll you’ll spend on the projects you’re trying to attract contractors to? Or is that tightly regulated?

Unknown Speaker 14:04
No, it’s It’s as long as you spend the CDBG funds anywhere, it can be on any piece of what you have planned. So we’re basically look at our projects and look at the readiness to expend the money and try and do whatever we can on our side to make sure there are no roadblocks to that. And in this case, we did do a good final push. But we just came up slightly short because there just wasn’t enough out there.

Unknown Speaker 14:31
Thanks, Molly. And just to clarify that at a high level that 1.5. You know, basically in 2021, we had a bunch of money leftover from 2020. Right? So that’s why like November, you can’t have more than one and a half times because essentially, you’ve already carried forward from the previous year and they don’t want you to sort of like stack it

Unknown Speaker 14:50
forever like that.

Unknown Speaker 14:53
And essentially not be using the money when it’s allocated to you. That is that roughly

Unknown Speaker 15:00
Correct. Okay, definitely.

Unknown Speaker 15:02
STACEY And

Unknown Speaker 15:03
then Karen Roni.

Unknown Speaker 15:06
Hi, I’m Molly, just because I knew I heard you say, and I might have gotten this wrong. But if you could clarify to me and tell me how this works would be great. Um, you said something about for every $1 spent it, it resulted in $82. Back to this. Could you explain that? To me? That sounds great.

Unknown Speaker 15:26
Sure. I mean, that’s, that’s higher than typical. And that is, in this case, because we had a very large project, the Aspen meadows, senior apartments rehabilitation project, that project in itself was a $15 million project that we contributed to. So basically, that was all of the rest of that counts is leveraged funds. So if we partially fund the project, that funding attracts other funders or other ways to fill the gap, then all of that money altogether, results in the leveraging, that’s

Unknown Speaker 16:01
is the 80 is one to 80 to a typical ratio for a year or is have

Unknown Speaker 16:07
nine, but if but we have that is pretty high. When we have large development projects coming, which we do anticipate for the next several years, it might be highlight that typically, I was looking at 2019, which was a very typical year, you know, before 2020, the leverage amount was.

Unknown Speaker 16:35
So every CDBG dollars spent CDBG, dollars spent leveraged 64 cents in other public or private funding. So $82 is quite a quite a big effort on that. So it’s really as based on the projects, what kind of big ones are coming through versus more focused ones.

Unknown Speaker 16:53
Thank you. I appreciate your explanation. Thanks, Karen. Robert, question,

Unknown Speaker 17:00
Robert. Hold on. Just a second. Please. Karen. Robert, can go

Unknown Speaker 17:03
ahead. Okay.

Unknown Speaker 17:04
Okay. It just has to do with, you know, there was surplus money because of the epidemic that was carried over. And I’m wondering what effect the inflation will have that we’re experiencing right now. On the future? Would you just address that briefly?

Unknown Speaker 17:22
Sure. So we don’t expect it to change our funding amounts. But if our for example, rehab projects are more expensive per project, then we most likely are able to fund fewer households. We’d have to spend more money for each project if the costs come in really high. So we have to play that delicate balance of making sure we have the right number of applicants in the hopper without over committing and leaving them waiting for too long. Karen,

Unknown Speaker 17:58
thanks. So I, Molly, I don’t know whether you mentioned. And if you did, I apologize. I missed it visit that, that HUD for the for the 2021 year did give all grantees a pass. I mean, in terms of not meeting their timeliness ratio, because obviously, throughout the whole country, it was very difficult for CDBG grantees to be able to spend to that, you know, 1.5 or less so. Right, but we just got a one year pass. So so we have to ramp up. And you know, and I think sometimes what makes this extra challenging is that there have been years and for some of the advisory board members who’ve been on here for a little while, you might recall that, in some years, we haven’t received our CDBG grant funding until like, September of that year when we had to meet our timeliness ratio by the end of October 1 of November. So So in some cases, sometimes HUD hasn’t been our friend and in terms of, of helping us to be successful in making sure we don’t exceed our timeliness ratio. So so just just just a FYI, and, and Graham, if you have any ideas, you’re kind of in the business, you know, this, this construction business. If you have any ideas about, you know how we might be creative in recruiting local contractors to help with our rehab projects. I’ve just would plant that seed and any any ideas that come to mind? Do pass those our way?

Unknown Speaker 19:52
No, I’ll think about that. Karen. Thank you. Thank you.

Unknown Speaker 19:55
I have a follow on to that Graham. Something that we’ve that we’ve been thinking about. but haven’t fully explored yet is if we lumped projects together and do more of a group bid, we have to be careful, careful on the back end of making sure that our paperwork is still in line with the regs. But would larger projects with more security for the amount of time, that contractor could be busy, be attractive?

Unknown Speaker 20:24
Absolutely. Yep.

Unknown Speaker 20:27
That’s something I’m thinking about putting together a plan for.

Unknown Speaker 20:32
One sort of follow up on that you mentioned that if the projects are more expensive, is there is one of the things we might look at. So I know for some of the some of the housing rehab programs, for example, our grants are up to $5,000, or a loan up to 10,000, potentially increasing those to essentially allow the same amount of work to be done. But understanding that it’s, it’s more expensive, you know, to do that. Is that something that’s on the table? Or is that something that’s limited?

Unknown Speaker 21:07
We should explore it? Yeah. Well, let’s check and see if the regs have any limitations. And if so, if that was been updated at all, I doubt it. But we’ll look into that and see when we’re exploring the other couple questions or how we could make it all fit together?

Unknown Speaker 21:25
Yeah, I’m assuming that takes, you know, it’s like a 235 10 year lag on those getting updated relatively. So.

Unknown Speaker 21:33
Yeah. Typically, at least.

Unknown Speaker 21:39
Any other questions for Molly related to the CDBG? Funding? Okay, I don’t see any. Thanks so much, Molly.

Unknown Speaker 21:56
You’re welcome. See, I, um, next as well.

Unknown Speaker 22:04
Molly show, she she’s gonna keep on going.

Unknown Speaker 22:08
funding application cycle.

Unknown Speaker 22:11
Yep. So here is what that status is. So we did release our funding application. In October, we only received one application, it was for $10,000 for an economic development purpose. So that wasn’t we started looking at it and doing eligibility and kind of chatting with it was for you for all its entrepreneurship for all. We chatted with them about CDBG eligibility and what really what their needs were to try and tailor something that could maybe make more sense $10,000 is not a lot for the requirements that come with it. So they have submitted that. But with since now, we are so close to well, we’re supposed to be close to getting our HUD funding amount. But we’re at least close to preparing our budgets with draft amounts, we normally would try and put out another application funding cycle earlier in the first quarter, and then present to you at the April meeting. And I have every intention of doing that. But with capacity, it’s been so tough. And so the funding cycle, we do plan on putting out here in the next couple of weeks. And then most likely, I’d be bringing those forward to you in the main meeting. I don’t want to shorten our application period too much to discourage people from applying. And then we thought we’d wrap in that he for all application at the same time. So you can look at the full spectrum. So that is the plan there. It’s just, you know, we are doing our best to push through, I do have some assistance in the capacity department coming in, we are about to award a contract for CDBG CDBG, and affordable housing support services. Just to fill in while we try and fill our staffing gaps or positions that are open, and then help train those ones they come on as well. So I should have that extra help here within a matter of a couple of weeks. And this will be their top priority. Just wanted to give you a heads up.

Unknown Speaker 24:34
Molly for the that application cycle for folks who can apply for, you know, things like for the various funding. Can you share a little bit about how we make that information available to the community to folks who might be eligible to projects that might benefit from it?

Unknown Speaker 24:55
Sure. So we do the standard newspaper postings. which is a requirement, it’s not necessarily the most, the, you know, the top way that people find out that we do outreach to those that we know have applied in the past. We do know a couple of needs already that that we anticipate to apply just from in working with our partners. And then we’re I want to look at our engagement efforts, actually, and see if there’s anything we can look at to kind of broaden the base. If there’s any new ideas, we got new people in the area, like we let’s tap into resources to see if there’s anything else we can do. So that’s my plan is to to look at that. And also we’ll have, you know, CDBG consultants that might have ideas as well that we can bring forward.

Unknown Speaker 25:52
Great, Karen.

Unknown Speaker 25:56
I went, did we did I miss an introduction of Molly? I don’t quite. Oh, sorry. What’s your story? So I just thought maybe you would want to tell us

Unknown Speaker 26:07
what Molly. Molly introduced herself to us at the last meeting. But, but anyhow, but Molly is monitor Kathy felishj place so you know, Kathy retired the end of January. So. So, at the February meeting, Molly did hop on and introduce herself, but but it was a quick introduction. So

Unknown Speaker 26:30
February meeting, but okay, well,

Unknown Speaker 26:32
that’s why there you go. So, so yes, so Molly did. So Molly took Kathy peddlers place

Unknown Speaker 26:40
to she’s the division director for housing and cohousing

Unknown Speaker 26:42
community investment. So I apologize. I forgot you were not here with us. So and Molly has. Molly had been with a city for six years, seven years. So Molly came on board during our flood recovery process, and and it helped to manage some of our CDBG disaster recovery projects, and had worked with Kathy for for that seven year period. So I apologize, Karen, there you go. So, but thanks for asking.

Unknown Speaker 27:23
All right. Any other questions around the affordable around the CDBG application cycle? Okay, um, so then we’re on the American rescue plan act, ARPA investment update. Is this also the MOLLE show? I assume? Yes,

Unknown Speaker 27:45
it is. Okay, so we wanted to provide an update through the through the fall, a group of city staff members, well, a large group of city staff members developed focus groups to prepare recommendations for city council for how to spend the $12.9 million in American rescue plan Act funding that the city has already partially received. And so I headed up the affordable housing focus group, we came up with a plan for how if affordable housing was funded with this large influx of you know, special funds, essentially, how our projects could be transformative in the community. We have put together a set of goals. There were eight goals in total. The goals just briefly were rental housing development, new homeownership development, LH, a rental housing preservation, homeownership preservation, housing stabilization for those exiting homelessness, narrowing the digital divide. This is associated with our affordable housing communities, creating crime free la che properties and creating sustainable and resilient affordable housing. To support those eight goals. We came up with a list of 18 projects totaling $24 million, that would be quite transformative. So that was obviously more than not more than almost double the total funding amount available. So Harold, we proposed those projects to Harold, he worked to narrow them down and propose to city council, a list of projects that totaled about 8.9 million of the 12.9 in ARPA funding leveraged with our existing affordable housing funds. So the projects that were proposed, I just realized I have to open this second document sorry,

Unknown Speaker 30:08
Harold is the city manager Correct?

Unknown Speaker 30:11
Yes, correct. City Manager Harold Dominguez. So the 8.9 million that was proposed included funding allocated to the sunset heights project being proposed by element. This is 55 units of permanent supportive housing over at the suites campus. The some funding towards the Chrisman to development, which I mentioned in our affordable housing funds discussion is is ready to close here at May 1. Some seed money to look into an affordable Assisted Living Option. Some basically a seed money again to get a development going at the lhhs vacant over property at 617 64. Is on hover 1764 over the some funding to contribute to the the Mustang property to look at affordable housing there and maybe partnering with a developer that would do attainable as well to have a mixed income neighborhood. This is really to start looking at what what should be done there was best for the area, do some engagement, and then have some seed money for starting a development partnership.

Unknown Speaker 31:37
And Molly not we should talk about Mustang. That was a code word. So it really is the Costco it’s part of the Costco development that is out east of the of the city. So for for many, many months. The code name was Mustang, so and it just, it just carried forward.

Unknown Speaker 31:59
Yeah, we’ve called it several things. Costco was definitely the most identifiable way.

Unknown Speaker 32:05
Right. So is about nine acres that we purchased as part of that development.

Unknown Speaker 32:10
Thanks, Karen. We have some funding proposed to put in place bulk agreements with next slide at Housing Authority properties. This is so that utilities are generally already included in the rents there but not cable service or internet service. So if we can work on bulk agreements that can bring the cost down significantly for those residents and also really utilize the city in in this partnership role to provide its best assets to to benefit the residents of the housing authority. There is some money allocated towards an unhoused option, which is yet to be determined. But this is really targeted towards hard to house individuals. There is money allocated towards the purchase of the the former royal mobile home park remnant property from the I think it was the water fund.

Unknown Speaker 33:12
There was a storm drainage, storm drainage Thank

Unknown Speaker 33:14
you funds. This is for the purpose of creating a transit oriented development associated with the first and main transit station and steam area of town. And then finally some support in in a development and finance position to actually help implement all of this. So that proposal was accepted by city council. And so we are now gearing up to have a very, very busy couple of years, which some really transformative projects, primarily development. And we already do have a development specialist targeted to join us may 1 to help really be have some expertise in that area. We also were very busy and capacity growing. We are contracting with the National Development Council who’s going to provide subject matter expertise and technical assistance, including access to their their very high quality housing finance training certifications. So that is we have given them an award and we’re just working on the contract. So we’re about to have some help there as well to really work on some of these larger projects.

Unknown Speaker 34:42
For that development specialists that you said start targeting may 1 Is that like there’s somebody already there and has a start date have accepted

Unknown Speaker 34:49
our offer. And so, and past pre employment screenings, awesome

Unknown Speaker 34:58
and is relocating from Montana Hana. Right? So it’s that’s part of the the time lag.

Unknown Speaker 35:03
Yeah. Got it. For the mean, obviously, this is a lot of funding that is really going, you know, I think you said it was something like eight to 9 million of the 12 million is going toward affordable housing and housing support. Pretty significant. I’m curious if you have a sense of how that fits in with, you know, so we have like these regional goals around amount of affordable housing, Longmont, as a city is in a unique position, maybe relative, you know, Boulder has like priced out tons of people. So like, lots of people have moved along a lot. And now Longmire is getting more expensive. I’m curious if you know where what, you know, City of Boulder or the county or others in the regional partnership are doing in terms of investing in this type of development and affordable housing, or is it just like is long leading the pack there.

Unknown Speaker 36:03
So the City of Boulder is definitely looking at more of a, a broader approach where they are they’re doing their peppering their funds across different aspects more, we are definitely focusing on affordable housing in terms of the percentage of our funding more than boulders so far. They’re they’re hitting more initiatives, and we are more focused on a couple of initiatives, affordable housing is one there are others as well. Data in the city using data and doing a whole neighborhoods approach. And there’s a bunch of initiatives that go along with those. But generally, that’s what we know about boulder. Boulder County is in the middle of their community engagement process. And the city of Boulder and the city of Longmont are participating in their focus groups on the specifically the affordable housing focus group. So those allocations have not yet been decided, but is actively in the process, and they plan to have their decisions made by the early May. Thank you.

Unknown Speaker 37:15
Other questions for Molly on the ARPA investment?

Unknown Speaker 37:22
You know, I think the only thing that I would add is that in the whole leverage scheme. So we are supplementing the ARPA dollars with roughly $3 million, I believe, from our, our affordable housing funds from the city. So so that the the total investments in the projects that Molly identified is, is around is basically around $11 million. So we are we are basically leveraging those ARPA dollars with our local affordable housing funds to

Unknown Speaker 38:03
an aisle. Yeah, but I

Unknown Speaker 38:05
but I think long lat really, I think, to your question, Caitlin, I think, you know, as as what we saw in in the whole flood recovery process, you know, what we were able to do in terms of using those, those disaster dollars that, you know, brought on throughout Boulder County, I think around if I recall 1000 new affordable units that we were able to build throughout Boulder County so so you don’t get these opportunities very often, to have, you know, $12 million, so almost $13 million in your community and and so we just felt, you know, that that we needed advocate for really making a dent in that affordable housing investment. And and in the city manager and the council agreed with that approach. So we’re really fortunate, I think, in that regard, unless you don’t want affordable housing and then you might think differently, but but it was a way to help move us forward for sure.

Unknown Speaker 39:12
And in that leveraging vein, the approach really was to use public private partnerships to make the money go further. So this is all the the amounts allocated to each are more like seed money like a local the local match, if you will, and if you can see how we had one large development project that ended up making our number $84 to $84 to the dollar if we’re looking at any were not even near that were filled the amount of funding leveraged once we bring in these development partnerships is going to be

Unknown Speaker 39:51
very large.

Unknown Speaker 39:53
So that was the idea has use this as seed money to bring in all the other funds to.

Unknown Speaker 40:04
Karen,

Unknown Speaker 40:05
I just want Was there some slides that we all the conversation you had that I didn’t see in the packet or?

Unknown Speaker 40:13
I did realize that the the council communication, we didn’t insert in the packet, but we can share that link. And it’s it is on the city website, too.

Unknown Speaker 40:23
Yeah, we will follow up with that. As we were talking through, it’s like, yeah, so that and I think we do have, we do have the slide, the PowerPoint that that Harold presented to the, you know, to the housing group. So yes, we will, we will send you the link. So you have that information.

Unknown Speaker 40:39
Okay. And I don’t know, this is a question for you. But I was curious on how do people apply in Longmont for affordable housing.

Unknown Speaker 40:50
You mean, residents to live in affordable housing or for the funding

Unknown Speaker 40:54
side, oh, to live in portable housing.

Unknown Speaker 40:57
So our website does have resources for affordable properties that residents can get in touch with to inquire about, and then we through the Longmont housing authority we do keep information updated on the website about when waitlists for properties are going to be open. And then we accept applications there as well.

Unknown Speaker 41:21
I was curious, though, like I applied for a boulder long time ago, and we had to go through a big process of, you know, a couple of classes and we had to sit down with do you all do that too, for everybody that applies in Longmont?

Unknown Speaker 41:36
We do for we we definitely have an in financial counseling class for those that participate in our downpayment assistance program. For the it, there are private and nonprofit providers of affordable housing in the town in the city as well. And so I’d have to check and see exactly what they do. I was just curious if it’s outside of the city realm.

Unknown Speaker 42:00
Okay. And and I would say, you know that when, because, you know, we’re on our second, our second inclusionary housing program. So we did have one earlier on, you know, that ran from the mid 90s into 2010. And, and, and basically, households that purchased affordable homes that were created through that process did have to go through, you know, homebuyer training and those kinds of financial counseling, those kinds of things. So it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s not a typical that that’s a that’s a requirement, particularly around home purchases through the Affordable Housing Program.

Unknown Speaker 42:48
And am I correct that Longmont does a lottery for the section eight vouchers that are available for city residents. So I don’t know how often that’s done. I know there was one recently and it’s basically, you know, if anyone wants to live wants to get one of those vouchers, they enter a lottery and then the numbers are drawn based on the number of vouchers that are available.

Unknown Speaker 43:12
Correct. So we did open that waitlist in January 2016. It had not been done for quite a while. But we’re Yeah, yeah. But going forward, we plan to do it once every year. So what it was it was actually 150 Wait, Spot waitlist spots that the lottery was for. So we received 1100 applicants for 150 waitlist slots. The good news is we’re already dipping into that waitlist to pull some off. And that 150 really is set because that’s how many we anticipate we could tap into in that year period. Great. All right. Um, any

Unknown Speaker 44:02
other questions?

Unknown Speaker 44:07
Okay, thank you, Molly.

Unknown Speaker 44:12
She, she’s number seven,

Unknown Speaker 44:15
conflict of interest policy for CDB.

Unknown Speaker 44:17
Yeah. Why Molly? Keep going. Okay. So, this item, we have drafted up a conflict of interest policy, it was in your packet, this is for the CDBG and HOME programs. And we the some guidance started coming out amongst our CDBG user groups that that a lot of communities are starting to formalize their conflict of interest requirements and include training and certifications for conflict of interest, both on the procurement side which is is relatively Standard, although there’s there, if certifying, it might not be as standard. And then for us, also for the staff that work on CDBG programs, our elected officials that make decisions on CDBG, and home programs, and then also our sub recipients. So we plan on implementing this policy, which would in effect, we would have training sessions that we would do with staff and with sub recipients, we would collect certifications for conflict of interest at time of award of CDBG funds. And then we would just have involvement with our city clerk because the city council does do conflict of interest trainings. And so we would basically document that we’ve got that going and have that updated on a yearly basis. So if there’s any questions or comments, this is a draft, we have not yet finalized this policy. So we’re looking for your input, if you have any.

Unknown Speaker 46:10
questions or thoughts from anyone on the board, or anyone else? And

Unknown Speaker 46:19
so So Molly, I have a clarification is, so I realized this is in draft form, will this come back to the advisory board for adoption? Or does it have to be adopted by the council or both?

Unknown Speaker 46:35
I am not aware that it needs to be adopted, we want the input from the advisory board. But like some other policies that we have, it’s more that we’ll finalize it internally, and then start implementing internally. But if you have any other if there is a formal adoption process, I couldn’t find any examples of that being done for something similar.

Unknown Speaker 47:05
Graham,

Unknown Speaker 47:07
I admit I haven’t read this very closely. But I’m curious if Habitat for Humanity recipients might be negatively impacted, you know, because I think in some cases, they partially own the property, and then I assume HUD or CDBG, funds might go to those sorts of projects, and then they would be living in a project funded by the fund. That question make any sense?

Unknown Speaker 47:37
So So you mean, that eventually, if they mean, if they apply for other assistance or other assistance going into the development?

Unknown Speaker 47:50
Yeah, if Habitat for Humanity, you know, applies for funding for development. So oftentimes, that’s associated with a resident who has to perform work on it, and in this sort of park owner in it, and thereby, you know, a recipient of those, those funds, and then they’re living in the home. And so you’re funding somebody who’s living in the home, which I assume is what this document or policies meant to prevent. But we wouldn’t want to prevent that, right?

Unknown Speaker 48:17
Correct. We would not want to prevent that. So I’ll do a read through and make sure we don’t have anything that seems to preclude that.

Unknown Speaker 48:30
So just one quick clarification about part owners, they are actually owners of the home.

Unknown Speaker 48:42
Deana

Unknown Speaker 48:45
I had a random question about the conflict of interest training, and maybe I’m reading this too broadly. But it says that it’s currently required for city elected officials, and it will also be required for various people, including entities that participate or work on the CDBG and HOME programs, like Does that include our board? Do you think perhaps, if we’re working on these, okay, yes.

Unknown Speaker 49:09
So what I would plan on doing is do a brief training session once a year to to this board, maybe add it to the workplane calendar.

Unknown Speaker 49:18
Okay, thank you. Um,

Unknown Speaker 49:22
on that note, Molly, in this draft that we received, I think there’s a when it says it says it’s for sub grantees or pass through entities. I think there’s a typo there that says I pass with a T instead of an S.

Unknown Speaker 49:36
Okay, let me look for that.

Unknown Speaker 49:40
And am I correct? Like, the gist of this is really to prevent, you know, like, you know, if you work for the city, and you were married to someone who was a contractor who was applying for funds, like you making a decision on them getting that contract would tends to be a conflict of interest, correct? Like, if someone here on the board, you know, we obviously welcome and want like experience around like building affordable housing or things related to the work we do. But if you were applying for, you know, some of that funding, you should not be involved in any deliberations or, you know, recommendations about whether your organization gets that funding. Correct. Other questions? Or comments on the the conflict of interest? Okay, I don’t see any. So I think, I think Molly, that concludes your, your agenda items for this evening.

Unknown Speaker 50:54
Wonderful. Thanks so much, everyone. Have a nice night.

Unknown Speaker 50:59
Thank you. All right. Next item is the 2023 human services funding process. I am guessing this is an Ellie Barito show.

Unknown Speaker 51:16
Right. And I apologize, I know that the PDFs are small. And so I am going to share my screen and I’m going to share the the spreadsheet. But as I’m doing that, I’m also good. I know we also have new board members who may look at this in may be perplexed by these gigantic spreadsheets, so I will take a few minutes to explain them. And then we’ll go into the conversation that make that okay. All right. I’m going to share my screen these are the same spreadsheets that you saw.

Unknown Speaker 52:08
Okay, well, can you see? Can you see my spreadsheets? You see a spreadsheet? Alright,

Unknown Speaker 52:17
matrix two. Concept two, is you have

Unknown Speaker 52:21
to go back to matrix one concept one. Okay, getting. So for Robert and Stacy. This is our allocation matrix spreadsheet. Starting from left to right, we have the agency, the program name, the city of Longmont impact area, and these are impact areas that have been decided upon by the board. You know, and then what’s new for our board members who have been around, I’ve never included a budget size, but this is based on the PowerPoint that I shared in February. And I can always go back and get that as well if needed. But that is what that is based on. Then the next column says priority area that was just to determine that the programs that was being proposed is in the priority area. If it’s a no then it is automatically disqualified, which is why these are all yeses. And Karen and I read the proposals and we make that judgment. Now, what I did in the request only of this first matrix is this is matrix is infrarenal some matrix to Alright, sorry, my bad. I don’t know why I went back to the interest rate. And this one doesn’t have the budgets yet sorry. But it has what they received point 21 It has what the if they have requested the ceiling, what is the ceiling based on that priority area. And then there is a common says board average, all of the board members are given the opportunity to score all of the proposed projects. And at some point I will go over the evaluation. We are working on changing to found it. And so that’s going to we’re going to work on that. And then and the board has their own questions that they answer on the evaluation which you will get trained on then the staff which Yeah, the staff has our own evaluation sheet as well. And we score it and then we take the average of Staff average board and you get a total. And that total is put up against a formula, I’m going to show the formula real quick, I’m going to spend lot of time just so you see it. If you this is the the ranges on the top on the right, it’s the same one right to left. And these are the individuals or the staff ranges, and the board ranges, and then the percentage of what you can get. So just so you know, this ranges, and these are actual scores from the 2022, fun round that we just completed in 2021. So nothing changed there. I just copied that over from what it was. So those are exact scores that the board scored and the staff scored. And what they ended up the only thing that’s different is I went back and I applied. And I did this because there the assumption is that is they know that we have ceilings, everybody’s applying for the ceiling. Right? That’s that’s the assumption that I went by, is that the truth that was going to happen? Well, that is to be determined. So but I went by the, if they know that we have ceilings, that’s what they’re going to apply for. And so you see that this is what the scores said they would get depending on their score, either 100% or 90%. And we scroll down, and it goes that way. A way forward, did not get that score high enough to be funded. So they still did not get any funding. And then like I said, I just went by what they scored and what the ceilings were, and what would their percentage be based on their score. And I think the important piece, senior housing options, again, did not score high enough to be funded, we would have spent $2.8 million using this method, if everybody applied for the ceilings. As a as a reminder, we had $1.2 million. So we are over by about $1.6 million. If we if if we assume that everybody applies at the ceilings, if we maintain these ceilings that are in this little text box. And if we kept the same allocation formula, I just wanted to show you because that was one of the concepts that Karen and I shared so mashers any questions, or you want to move on to next concept. I do not see

Unknown Speaker 57:53
any questions, but if folks have them, please feel free to

Unknown Speaker 57:57
Yeah, I think I would move on to the next concept. All right, I’ll just to remind for the board, you know, we did talk about this process in February. And, and the board has, you know, bring back some real life examples of how that would work based on what we just completed. So that’s the real world example. So go ahead and Alberto.

Unknown Speaker 58:22
So concept to remember that was based on budget size, not priority area, right? That was a difference in concept to say, well, we’re not gonna we’re not going to change. Concept, we’re gonna we’re gonna look at budget to determine how much someone can can receive or can be allocated. And so it was if you had a million dollars or more, you were up to 100,000. And it just went down from that. What I found interesting is, I mean, I saw these with you all when we all read them. But I’ve never compiled the data is how many of our nonprofits have over a million dollar agency budgets? I was pretty amazed at that. Yes, we’ve we’ve had conversations about supporting smaller nonprofits in this group. But the reality is that most of the applications that we get a vast majority of them are agencies that have budgets over a million dollars, and some are pretty, you know, pretty big budgets. And so with this concept, again, not touching percentages, not touching spores, just changing ceilings, and and assuming that everybody’s applying for the ceiling and they know the abbot. Then we spent $3.4 million which is 2.1 million over what we had. Okay, That is his concept too. This is a little trickier. This is this, I played around with this one. This one is I’m going to read this to make sure is the we have ceilings, but they’re also going to be impacted by budgets. So this is tricky. Because we use both. And it was hard to explain to Karen so much to you all. I think I took the mercy, see the foundation shillings will be based. So the first ceiling is priority. However, seedings will also be affected by budget size. In other words, if you are in a sick, let’s take, let’s take motherhouse, who has a smaller budget than the rest of the housing stability. Right. So other agencies have a million or more motherhouse has 500,000 to a billion dollars. So their ceiling now is impacted by their budget, and they get 75% of that ceiling because of their size of their budget. So mother house’s new ceiling would be 75,000. So depending on your budget, your base ceiling is a priority ceiling. But your budget can impact that. Does that make sense?

Unknown Speaker 1:01:51
Think so,

Unknown Speaker 1:01:52
okay. So all said and done. We ended up spending 2.5 million on this route. Which is again, about 1.3 million over what we had available to us.

Unknown Speaker 1:02:11
And, and Liberto on on all three of these that you’ve presented. So far. This is assuming that we use the same score ranges, and the same percentages that we allocate to them. It doesn’t account for like adjusting those to say, Okay, well, we actually only have $1.3 million. And so we actually need to make this four ranges smaller, and or, you know, actually get a little more granular with where we’re giving it

Unknown Speaker 1:02:40
that that is exactly correct.

Unknown Speaker 1:02:45
Right, right.

Unknown Speaker 1:02:46
And yes, because I Yeah, we would that can be part of future discussions, whether you want to tighten up our score ranges, you know, that, yes, we can, we could potentially lower ceilings, you know, then, you know, when you when you look at, when you look at historical funding, when you lower ceilings, the folks you impact are typically or larger agencies that have been applying for more funding for quite some time. So that’s also possibility. Okay. The last one that I did. On this one, we we have both floors and ceilings, because what I did was I took their actual request. So if an agency requested less than the floor, and again, those are in your packet from February, and I can, I can look, I can bring them back up if needed. But these are the floors that we created for our priority I did. I left the budget column in there, but it’s not being used for this just, I just, that’s it. If they applied less than the floor, I moved them up to the floor, or if they applied above the ceiling, I moved them back to the ceiling. Okay. So if they if they asked for less, I moved the floor if they asked more than ceiling, I lowered their their request. If the request was in the range of floor and ceiling, I left it alone. Okay, so it was the actual request and what they actually got. Okay. So, if you go down so, for example, while Blum asked for 100,000 but the education ceiling that we had is 80,000. So I lowered them down to 80,000. In reality they got I think, this year they were awarded 90,000, because there’s four, put them in the 90% range. Right. So they would lose funding. If you know if there was a pie again, if we kept the ceiling They applied. Whereas right above it, the Art Center, their actual request was 15,000. And so that is less than the floor. So I moved them up to the floor, which is 40,000. And they scored very well. And they would have received 100% of their request. Okay. So you can scroll down, there’s a few changes here and there, but overall, so for example, you know, say shelter, their ceiling is 100,000. And they asked for 100,000. And they got in, that’s what they actually got with 90,000. You know, where as in the same thing for immigrant Legal Center, that was the floor. No, that’s not the floor. That’s that’s the, that’s in between floor and ceiling. So that’s what they kept the same, whereas, versus justice, the floors 10,000, they only apply for five, Dan would have gotten an increase to their funding. So those are just a few examples, Kimberly.

Unknown Speaker 1:06:16
I just, I’m looking through this, it really seems like those high requests are the outliers. And so for totally skewing the funding picture towards the outliers, I feel on the upper end, when looking at the average of the actual request, it’s quite a bit lower. And so I’m wondering how to factor that in so that it’s not distorting the whole funding process.

Unknown Speaker 1:06:43
That’s, that’s an excellent point. And that’s, that’s why we actually started this whole conversation is that we carry and I’ve noticed that we just have some outliers that, you know, have been increasingly getting larger and larger portions. And so one way to do that is to say, it might cause some pain, is to say, we’re gonna just lower the ceilings for everyone. And so, you know, we’re going to try and align. That’s one way of doing it. And I think I don’t have an answer. Other answers. I think this is why bringing it to the board and appreciate your thoughts. And we deliberate together and how to get there. And I’m sure Karen has any thoughts as well. But yes, that’s, that’s definitely a reality and a challenge that we face. So on this one, we get closer, we overspent by 400,000. going this route, assuming that folks, you know, will ask for what they actually need, and not, you know, rush this rush to the ceiling. I don’t know. I mean, there are some assumptions that we’ve made on these. And of course, to get this one, we haven’t changed, score ranges and percentages of what people get allocated. So that is my presentation, or that’s those are the ones I created, I can go back and read more, I can look at lowering ceilings i or other ideas that the Board may have. And

Unknown Speaker 1:08:35
the first thing that comes to

Unknown Speaker 1:08:35
mind is set like in some, in some ways we set these ceilings before we ever get, like the requests, which, you know, we’ve talked about wanting to to be clear with folks, but also have it not be a black box. But I also wonder if like, you know, something that’s a little more flexible based on like, what the needs are that are being expressed? Might I don’t really know, I think you know, what, we’ve obviously we’ve got some outliers, we have a lot of organizations that have fairly large budgets. To me that like points to the fact that like, either small organizations like the issue may not be actually our process so much just like smaller organization or our funding allocation, but it may be that smaller organizations just don’t have the time the money, the resources to be applying for it. Or they’ve been told no in the past because they haven’t had high enough scores and so then it’s not worth it or that sort of thing. And and maybe it’s less about it being a black box, I don’t know.

Unknown Speaker 1:09:44
But I am curious

Unknown Speaker 1:09:45
what other folks think or if there’s other Stacey

Unknown Speaker 1:09:49
Stacy. One of my take home from this also is I mean obviously we have to we can’t go over but I’m assuming we cannot go over budget. That’s My that we have a budget and it’s not okay to say, Oh, well, sorry, we gave away too much. Um, another thing that I was also noticing is, so what I remember from was I can’t remember was January, February when we must have in January when we talked about this maybe one of the reasons we we were doing this, in addition to the outlier, liars was because we said that we felt like the smaller organizations were underfunded. I don’t think we have that many smaller organizations. So I think that that objective is maybe not really appropriate here. I mean, there’s so many over a million. I mean, if we’re calling a $250,000 budget, a smaller organization, you know, that’s it. Yes, it’s smaller than million, but a million smaller than 5 million. So I’m not, I don’t think that was exactly what we were talking about when we met smaller organization. Then the other piece of that also is I’m looking at our scores. And it’s obvious that these big organizations like the YMCA and our center have grant writers that know how to write these to meet, write their proposals to meet our goals, and they’re getting more money, because they’re not their scores are higher. So if you truly I feel like if you exactly like you were just saying, Caitlin, if you have a smaller organization that doesn’t have the same staff that has a volunteer that’s writing this without experience, and you know, is doing it because she’s the feet on the street, and she knows most about it, she’s not going to be able to compete with the our senator or other major organizations like this. So I do think that that is also that’s something I’m seeing from the numbers that I am. I don’t know, I don’t know for sure, obviously. But the numbers seem to point in that direction.

Unknown Speaker 1:11:49
Liberto,

Unknown Speaker 1:11:50
I should just look at that, and just throw it out there. So I sit on the board of the Longmont Finney foundation, I have sat on the board or the boulder Foundation. And I’m wondering, to this point that we’re having this conversation, I’m wondering if you know, they have a lot more flexibility with their funding than we do. They’re a very private foundation or community foundation that provides a foundation. But their their funding is a lot more flexible than ours. And so to Stacy’s point that we don’t have a lot of smaller, and by smaller, I mean under there, I think there’s only one I’m trying to see here. There was only

Unknown Speaker 1:12:50
two

Unknown Speaker 1:12:52
agencies under $250,000. And one of them didn’t get funded because of spores. Right. Right. And the other one only asked for 220 $500. So I guess I guess the question for us or for you all to consider is is it appropriate? Or is it in the purview of this advisory board? To be thinking about funding the smaller organ? Are we looking at funding startups or small organizations? Or are we to focus on those organizations that have the capacity to deliver the services that that Longmont residents need? I guess that’s the question.

Unknown Speaker 1:13:46
That’s a really good hit pull just to add a little bit of context as well, I pulled up the like PDF RFP that boulder shared last year city of Boulder for theirs, and they had a minimum request amount of $10,000. But they also specifically said that at least 8000 of that 10,000 needed to be for the program itself and not just funding staff. So a maximum and I don’t know if the percentage, I don’t know, I was trying to see if they actually have

Unknown Speaker 1:14:30
if it’s a

Unknown Speaker 1:14:33
Yeah, so at least 1000 and eligible program expenses, including programs specific staff pay and benefits. And basically things to carry out that that specific program but not they’re not interested in funding like an organization as a whole. It needed to be something that actually addresses the needs. So just for context, that’s what city of Boulder did last year. I don’t see a maximum listed in there, but

Unknown Speaker 1:15:00
Right. And they I’ve seen their contracts, and we’ve worked together. And we don’t Bagua doesn’t do this, but they actually make the agencies, right. When they do their contracts they make they make the agencies list the percentage of their funding going to staff. I, we don’t do that, but but they do. I’ve seen those contracts.

Unknown Speaker 1:15:25
Kim.

Unknown Speaker 1:15:27
So interesting. How do they have accountability in that process? Are they actually checking to see if that is being funded as a as a stated? Or is it just kind of a paper exercise?

Unknown Speaker 1:15:44
I don’t know. I mean, we get we get fine. We get your end report that you’re in Financials, do they dig into them? I? I mean, they have more staff? I will tell you that I don’t. I look at them, but there’s always so much going on. That’s a lot of work to follow up on. Yeah, I’ve gotten most of all of that. And I still haven’t put together all I’m still working on trying to get all the year end reports. And there’s a lot of data. Dig into.

Unknown Speaker 1:16:17
Stacey,

Unknown Speaker 1:16:18
so, um, to that last comment, Kimberly, I would also wonder if if mandating that it not go to staff payroll is is that really our objective? Because some of these organizations, especially the smaller ones, again, if we’re trying to target them, that’s, that’s what they have his feet on the street. Um, you know, they’re not, they’re not putting big dollars into NASA, necessarily into programs, they, they might just be doing case work. So that might just be something to think about, too, that might bias something like that against the smaller organizations that we’re trying to serve. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 1:17:02
I, one thing I liked about it, as I think we talked about this with some of the applications last year is that like, they were applying for a program, so I’ll give the example of salud, who has applied, you know, they get funding. And often they’re like, Okay, we want to fund this, this program for, you know, increasing access to I think one of them was like, trying to get more folks in for like dental care, or something like that, or doing like, I know, they did a mental health evaluation. But then the staffing that they did was basically paying for essentially, medical assistants, that would just be in every single appointment. So you know, that was sort of a like, he Yes. And this is like this much of your like this much of what the medical assistant is doing. Like we’re functionally you’re, you’re talking about something that we care about, which is mental health, but is what we’re funding actually, like contributing to that longer, that longer term, or that bigger picture of actually addressing major mental health issues within our community? Maybe not, because what what what you’re really doing is supplementing your staff and being able to hire a few more medical assistants, you know, but putting it under a program name that, you know, matches what we’re looking for. So I think that was one of the ones that that example, but that’s not the only one, uh, you know, there may be others. But flipside is that like EFA their entire you know, all of their service really is like a program that supports some of our, our goals. And so like, general stuff for them caseworkers for that. There’s a lot more connected right then than that. And so we we may have to get a little more granular in our like, scoring and evaluation of that. And that’s less of like putting the parameters around it and more about us being, you know, kind of discerning that from their applications. Councilman Yarborough Hello.

Unknown Speaker 1:19:20
I’m listening to you, Ollie brings up some really, really, really good points. I think we need to be careful about the staff. Only because without staff, you can’t perform those programs. And when you don’t have the programs, you can’t provide service. So um, so, you know, I just think that an organization know which port um, I don’t know if we really want to micromanage everything within those applications in those organizations. I think that’s a lot of work. Um, I think we just need to what are the outcomes? What are we looking for, right? And how can we measure it? And that’s it. I think I mean, everything that you all are saying is good, I guess, because I work for nonprofits. And I know that if I don’t have help, I can’t, I can’t perform, I’m not effective with my programs. So. So that means if I need an assistant to help me within my programs, then that’s what I need in order for me to perform and be effective within my programs. So I just think we need to be very mindful of the organization’s know what they need, their needs are. And so and it’s up to us to look at the past, of course, we know the last couple of years, the situation’s have been totally different. But what was it in 2019? What were their outcome? Well, how did they measure their success of the program, so whatever, although the programs are probably, you know, have changed quite a bit. But just look at, you know, making sure they’re moving toward the goals that we’re asking them to and what they’re doing. That’s all I just think that we got to be very careful with what we keep asking for and what we keep changing. And I think that we’ll be pulling weeds all day long, trying to get rid of the weeds. And guess what, so let’s pull that one up. So I’m now gonna come up, so just be very mindful. That’s all.

Unknown Speaker 1:21:20
I’m Karen Phillips, and then Ellie Berto. Yeah, I

Unknown Speaker 1:21:23
mean, when they apply for this money, they specifically say what they want the money for. I mean, that’s what we’re, and maybe I’m not understanding something here. But there should be no issue about, you know, we give them money because they requested for like a certain program or for a certain thing. So I’m kind of confused, what you’re all talking about was staff, because, you know, that’s what they ask they need another, you know, they need another employee, then they’ll ask for that money. And this one, providing so I mean, I’m kind of don’t understand your

Unknown Speaker 1:21:57
so like, what I was saying is like city of Boulder says that, like they won’t find general staff, they’ll only find it if it’s actually related to the program. And one of the things we did last year was actually evaluate whether the programs we’re delivering against, like, the human needs assess, like the program areas. So like, for example, we had, there was somebody who applied like two years ago where like, overall, they provided like health care or something like that to a population, but they were addressing something like it was addressing obesity in kids, which was not at all, like anywhere in the human needs assessment as something that needed to be addressed in the community. And so that program didn’t really fit was what we wanted to fund at all. And so the question of, you know, making, you know, just because they tell us they need, it doesn’t necessarily mean we should fund it. And so that’s part of our evaluation is making sure that like, they actually are providing a program or something that is meeting the specific needs of the community.

Unknown Speaker 1:23:05
So do we get like a receipt from them saying, you know, you gave you this money? This is what we use it for? We ask them for that kind of thing.

Unknown Speaker 1:23:13
That’s part of the contracting process. Right? If

Unknown Speaker 1:23:16
this was we’re providing a financial report at the end of the year. I haven’t I, we made due February 11. Because we were all behind, and I have not actually gone through them all. Okay. But yes, we do ask for a financial update and a financial report. And most of them, you know, all them do give it to us. Sometimes got it, I pull it out of them.

Unknown Speaker 1:23:41
Okay, thank you.

Unknown Speaker 1:23:46
So, um, I’m not throw out this idea. Again. I did it a couple months ago, is still shaky this point. And it is a little bit. There is a there is some challenge that we may maybe be accused of micromanagement. But we chose a key point about outcomes. We could say, here’s the outcome we want. Put an RFP out there, like Boulder doesn’t say we can get those outcomes for us. But that means that we’d have to think about what our outcomes are in our priority areas. So that’s just a thought that I shared a couple of times. We don’t have to go there. But that’s what I think about. Graham

Unknown Speaker 1:24:37
thanks DiLiberto for putting those together. I appreciate that. I’d really hoped it would bring a lot of clarity and I’m sorry to say it’s not for me anyway. But if I recall, the main problem was was we kept running into unallocated funds at the end of the year. Right. And that we were also a little concerned that we weren’t able to fully fund it. priority areas because of some of the ways some of the rules we had inserted. And so we thought, Oh, well, if we think of a different way, we can maybe distribute the funds better. But it sounds like these other ways, whether budget size or, or, you know, ceiling for priorities. They, they’re not they’re not quite doing it, they’re overspending. So, you know, I think my my a choice here would be to leave the formula as is and then deal with, have an extra at the end of the year and go through an RFP process or, or allocate based on the priorities of the year or be the budget size qualifier like Mile High United Way, I think that was that was who that was modeled off of if I remember. So anyway, that’s my input.

Unknown Speaker 1:25:49
Karen Roni?

Unknown Speaker 1:25:55
Yeah, so I think, I think the problem we were trying to solve is, is certainly what Graham talked about, you know, number number one was that, because we ended up having, you know, more money to allocate than we had anticipated, our current formula made it hard to allocate everything, and obviously, we had 100k, that was still in the hopper. I think the other thing, you know, that we at least initially we tried to address was, was, you know, setting some expectations about what, you know, kind of addressed the ceiling issue. So, with new agencies coming in, and they, you know, they could apply for $150,000. And our, our formula would end up that they would get a large portion, possibly of what they had requested. And it just was some disparity in terms of, of how much entities were asking for. So part of what we were trying to attempt to, to look at is, if we set some expectations up front about here’s, you know, here’s the ceiling, you know, here’s the floor, whatever this is the range of funding that you could expect. So that’s, you know, that’s what we were trying to, to examine. So. So we didn’t necessarily hit the mark in We also, as I think, as Alberto mentioned, is that we also didn’t adjust anything with the formula. So I mean, there’s more, there’s more adjustments that we could make, I think what we just wanted to try to do is if we set some expectations, in terms of what agencies the amount that they apply for, where might that take us? Sounds like we’re still working on it.

Unknown Speaker 1:28:03
I wonder, I wonder to that point, if, you know, one of the things we we could do is, you know, we’ve said, we’ve sort of internally set a ceiling based on like, 50% of the total amount, we’ve said, like, no one agency can get more than that. We’ve also talked about that around particularly like affordable housing and some of the things that like, that obviously does cut off of our, you know, some of the organizations that are delivering some of the most impactful work in those areas. Um, you know, I, we had a handful that just like, hit that ceiling, because they requested more, and they had no idea that we set that ceiling. And so, you know, whereas if we had said that, and they had thought about it, they may have broken it down into, we have actually three different programs that fall within this, and they’re all, you know, smaller things, but addressing more specific. I wonder if even just saying like, hey, we ended up getting $1.5 million, with a rough breakdown of like, 20% to housing stability, you know, even if we gave just like rough idea of the totals to give folks an idea of you know, what, where we want to spend that money. We have historically had a lot more on the skill building, and a lot less on affordable housing. But if we told people Hey, 25% of this funding is affordable housing, things that might change how people are thinking about it, even if we’re not telling them you specifically would be limited. I have no idea if that like addresses kind of what we were, I mean like, but it may be encourages folks to apply for more if they’re hitting some of those priority areas and understanding like, actually this is our top priority is affordable housing by We also want to find these other things. Alberto,

Unknown Speaker 1:30:05
I think that’s a great idea. I think part of the challenge is we don’t know what the final number is for the budget until way after we’ve launched, the DAB being said, I don’t see why we couldn’t say historically, or we couldn’t say, you know, in 2022, we had 1.2 5 million, and this is how we wanted to spend it. And we, we, the board to decide if we do decide later on this year that we have the right priorities, and we have the right percentages. Why couldn’t we do that? We could put it in to say, hey, we spent 1.28 5 million. This is how we want to spend this fun, we want 25% to go to house to, you know, activities that promote affordable housing or that maintain people house, they want to spend 20% on education, and let them do the math. I mean, that might be a good idea. It might still have us overspending, but you know, we, you know, that’s, that’s even with just the priorities, putting budget, putting the budget parties out there. You know, even if they knew that not only 50%, I guarantee you, everybody caught 50%, potentially. So

Unknown Speaker 1:31:29
that’s something to think about. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 1:31:35
And then at least conveys what those priorities are. Right? Like we we’ve we’ve listed out, listed them out, but we haven’t ever really been specific about like, you know, housing is, you know, one of the biggest, and that sort of thing.

Unknown Speaker 1:31:53
And maybe, maybe,

Unknown Speaker 1:31:54
to Graham’s point of like, wanting to we underspend last year, we were trying to, you know, figure out the right balance to make sure that, you know, folks were asking for things that actually supported the programs. Well, let’s be clear about what we want to support. And maybe that is actually sufficient to help drive in that direction. Without and I think maybe two, maybe Kim or Deanna, I can’t remember which, but without getting too complex with like, here’s a limit based on your budget, or here’s a limit based on your priority area. Like maybe that’s just getting too complicated. To really be effective. Stacy,

Unknown Speaker 1:32:42
what I do like about that idea, is you every year then without reinventing this wheel, you meet your budget, because you’re sending percentages, and and then and we’re not administrating, we’re not over administrating. So it keeps it keeps the formula simple. It incense people to do projects in areas that that we deem that the city needs. And yeah, I mean, I like it.

Unknown Speaker 1:33:26
Deana

Unknown Speaker 1:33:27
I guess I’m just wondering, for elevator, Alberto. And Karen, do you feel like that sort of compromise is sufficient to address some of the concerns that we were trying to address? I mean, I think one of the concerns on this I’m misunderstanding is that we have these a few outlier agencies that are just asking for more and more and more money. And I’m not sure that setting that information about historical budgets and priority areas necessarily addresses our concern of maybe reining in those outliers. But I’m also I mean, as as Graham said, I was hoping that those examples would really illuminate this. And it definitely illuminated that just doing those new scenarios is going to cause a big problem for us in terms of budgets. So I don’t know, if you think that it’s sufficient to do a historical analysis or if we need to think about some sort of compromise to try and rein in those outliers.

Unknown Speaker 1:34:26
You know, I think that we can I think we can look at other, you know, other scenarios, I think we can look at some of the we can look at the formulas, you know, you know, and we also need, we had talked about this, Alberto and I did is that is that, and this was an option we looked at a few years ago. I don’t know whether any of the board members, I don’t think any of the board member current board members are part of that process, but we just kind of said at some point in time, you know, we’d go down to it x, and then the the money is spent in that particular bucket. And we, you know, cut it off. And then we go to the, you know, to the next buckets. And again, the higher scoring agencies get get funded, you know, so there’s more entities, more agencies, they get no funding. But that was painful. So, so we really never, you know, examined that. So I think we do need to look at some expectation about, you know, what’s what’s, what’s the amount really to, you know, to apply for, or God to apply over X X amount, just so we have a, we just level that, and we set some expectations about this is what this is what you can expect, we also talked about, then do we might we add back, you know, based on, you know, performance or high scoring agencies, this isn’t easy. So yeah, and I know, it didn’t, it was, it was a good suggestion to, okay, apply these ideas, apply these scenarios to what happened last year, and, and we see where it got us. So I just think we need to continue to work a little bit more maybe working in terms of the formulas. But come up with some expectation about, you know, what to apply for, or at least a ceiling around that.

Unknown Speaker 1:36:45
I mean, to that point, we could, I mean, I, I wonder if even just disclosing that in the past we’ve set, you know, a maximum that any any program or agency can receive is 50% of the total funding for the for the particular focus area. It doesn’t necessarily give folks $1 amount, but it at least sets the expectation that we are going to put a ceiling on it. And, you know, I don’t know if that’s sufficient to, you know, and to say like, okay, in, you know, 2020 Choose funding round, it was, you know, a max of $110,000, in housing stability, or whatever it was, you know, because we won’t get the the budget amounts until later. We don’t we may not want to put that. But maybe we just give that expectation of like, that’s the most you could expect. Because and I think fundamentally, that’s because we don’t want to have a single agency delivering one of our focus schools. You know, that we don’t want to put all of our eggs into one basket, so to speak for any one of those priority areas. Deana, I see you reraised.

Unknown Speaker 1:38:05
So I guess it was just going to follow up on that and say that, if we’re thinking about either transmitting that information directly about this as our floor and our ceiling was specific numbers or saying historically, here’s the information on what the floor and ceiling were and letting them sort of figure out those numbers themselves, we probably still need to figure out how to adjust this so that we’re not blowing our budget wide open. Right? So then, is it appropriate to ask staff to do a little more work in terms of how we adjust the percentage formulas, I can’t think of any other way to bring the budget back down without adjusting the percentage formulas unless we change the caps. And I guess I would have to think about how that impacts all these organizations, historically what they’ve asked for. But I mean, maybe staff could explore how we how it gets impacted by changing the percentage formulas or something so that we can move this forward to get where we want to go.

Unknown Speaker 1:39:01
So one of just to add on that one of the things that I’ve seen done, not in our, like nonprofit one, but was basically once applications are received and scored. Before you actually see what the scores are across them, you see sort of like what the median and what the spread of them is, and determine what the the funding is based on essentially, essentially, instead of being like, Okay, we have a six point spread or 13 point spread or whatever, you kind of adjusted so that, you know, how would you how would you actually allocate those percentages such that, you know, you’re you’re essentially funding everything above the median at the least. So there’s some different ways to do that. Once you get the information in. We just don’t know like beforehand, like how well our agency is going to score and how much are they going to ask for like that’s not something we can predict. And so sometimes setting the formula before we know that information It feels like it’s sort of putting it ahead of like actually getting the data of what people request. Kim, I really feel like we need a math major to figure this out. And I’m trying to think about ranking and and figuring out a pot of money for each area, and then ranking all of the requests for that specific area, and then creating that equation. So that it’s it’s set like you’re, you know, you’re going to hit that dollar amount, and you’ve ranked it just within within that that subject matter. So it’s, it’s very defined. But I think that equation is what I need help figuring out. But I don’t know if that makes sense. Like it’s a ranking system specific to the topic rather than scoring it and random scores, but actually looking at who’s most deserving in that specific area? Liberto

Unknown Speaker 1:41:12
Oh, give him a follow up question. Because as soon as he said that, my brain started thinking as well. Does that mean? So? If we had 500 grand for, you know, I’m just saying string number 500. Grand for housing, right. And we had to, we typically don’t have tons of applicants for let’s say, we have five, right? The way I heard you, and again, to correct this is what I’m saying, correct me if I’m wrong, the way I heard you is that we would rank it, you know, based on what whatever criteria that we’re going to set for it. And then we would fund according to rank, so we wouldn’t care, or it wouldn’t matter what they asked for. It would be, we have 500 grand, we want to spend it on housing. This is how we ranked your, your application. We’ve divided it based on that rank, this is what you’re getting. So EFA, who always asked for 16,000 Even though I told them that there’s no limit on what they can ask for. You know, they could score super high and get 150,000. Right? Is that the way you’re thinking of it? Or is there a difference? Or am I missing something?

Unknown Speaker 1:42:33
Yeah, I guess I mean, that’s, that’s kind of the scary part is because you don’t know what the demand will be. And it could be a huge amount of money that’s going to fewer agencies, but if we truly are prioritizing certain areas, and wanting to fund accordingly, it seems like that’s, that makes the most sense. But I can see a lot of potential problems, but just looking at it big picture, that would be, you know, funding to our priorities system. And making people compete with others within that that system instead of across the board.

Unknown Speaker 1:43:24
Karen Roni,

Unknown Speaker 1:43:26
so I’m just checking in, have we expended most of our brain cells? Or are there any other ideas? Because it sounds like we need to, we need to continue to work it. There have been some suggestions for us to explore. And so we can continue on. It’s really quite fine. But I just wanted to check in and see if there’s any other great idea that that we should go back and and and flesh out

Unknown Speaker 1:44:06
I don’t think so. I think we think we need to continue this discussion. There’s a lot of ideas here. Maybe folks can marinate on it a bit and

Unknown Speaker 1:44:13
yeah, we appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 1:44:19
Okay, uh, next item is site visits. Um, we’ll start with together. And I think, Robert, was that your did you do that one? Okay. Roberto, did you have anything you wanted to share from the desk on it on that?

Unknown Speaker 1:44:46
Ah, yeah, so I think it ended up being just me, which is fine. That happened in the past. And no, I I didn’t have a lot to talk, despite it was, was pretty good. You know, usually what people what people tend to forget is their grievance process. And what I found interesting is a couple of days, they have a grievance process for each of their programs. And they send it to me afterwards. Right, so the source has a grievance process, their outreach has a different grievance process, which I thought was, was interesting. It is not one, one single, reverse process. So, um, but you know, so I really don’t know, together, I’ll talk a little bit about it. So together is a homeless service writer that primarily focuses on youth, youth that are experiencing homelessness, we talk a lot about, you know, the challenges they face typically, a lot of a lot of kids that are aging out of foster care, struggle, we talked a lot about the kind of services they provide, you know, just a place to connect a lot of a lot of life skill type case management. That’s talked about I also have because I work a lot with them. We talked about their elder program as well. And you know, the work that’s happening there in street outreach here in Longmont, where they are working diligently to connect people to both us and non us to our coordinated entry system. You know, I on Yes, I also have their year end report. And I also can tell you that they didn’t serve as many folks as they thought they were going to serve, a lot of that was because they had to shut down the source, which is the drop in centers, I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t give you that detail. The sources are dropping senator from from Boulder that, that youth can can access long line youth can access. And they, you know, they had they had intended to serve, I think 15 or 20. And I think they only served seven youth from Longmont in 2021. And allow that habit to be because they had to shut down a bunch of times. And so people couldn’t access the source. But overall, I felt that they you know, they force their over million dollar budget agency, they got their act together as far as having all their, their their documents, their documentation, the personnel policies, all of that is good. And they really built built in there. They’re what they call Jedi. And I think that that is justice, equity diversion and inclusion. And they and they and they have really weave that in into their, into their personnel policies into their board manual. They’ve been doing a lot of work on that. And if I remember right, I think they had 20% of their board was people of color. So which is is, you know, we’d love to have more, of course, but that’s a good start. So yeah, that was my, if any questions about together I’d be happy to answer but I felt that they are a strong agency that are doing good work and have really committed to their equity work, and they’re trying to make sure that it is it is embedded in all of their foundational documents. So

Unknown Speaker 1:48:26
awesome. And and they were formerly known as attention homes. Is that correct?

Unknown Speaker 1:48:32
Okay. Yeah, yeah. I talked to Eric was ever been they already started your lawn lawn care. And they had or they had a house your loved one. And long time ago, maybe even before? Yeah, they have because they have a house it trickles out. But they have a endowment with the long lottery foundation. Yeah. What’s so interesting, they have some local roots, too. I just bought them but you along with some?

Unknown Speaker 1:49:05
Thanks, Liberto. And then the second one that we had was for Boulder County AIDS Project. He kept right. Liberto Do you want to talk about the desk got it. And then I can talk about our meeting and discussion with them.

Unknown Speaker 1:49:28
Yeah. Again, another superb agency with a lot of great staff that have their act together. When it comes to in part of so part of the thing with saluting a few others. When you when they get federal funding, there’s just a lot of requirements. So they tend to those those agencies that get off they get federal funding, tend to have all of the required documents that we asked for and and more because the Feds just put so much Many regulations on them. So they tend to, I usually never have any issues with agencies that receive federal funding, just having their documentation, they’re all on their policies and stuff, because it’s not just us, it’s what the Fed requires. So, so yeah, I didn’t find anything. And that’s

Unknown Speaker 1:50:20
awesome. Um, I think the one of the biggest takeaways I had was that, you know, with the pandemic, in particular, they had to adjust a lot of their service model to do things more remotely. And in many cases that resulted in, you know, less delivery of service, because a lot of a lot of the success for BCAP really relies on relationship building. So they, they do work with other agencies they have, you know, they do street outreach, in particular, as well as case management. And so one of the stories they shared that I thought was particularly interesting was that, you know, they have, they do things like, they try to address like, harm reduction, as well as getting folks into, you know, supportive housing or things like that. And so, but often, it starts with that relationship. And so, you know, being able to come in and talk to someone, you know, to seek out, for example, like, clean needles, or like disposing of them, and to have someone who’s like, not judgmental about that, is the opening, it’s the opening dance of the services they provide. And they can, you know, they’ve had folks who have, you know, started at that, and built a relationship with someone in the program, and then eventually, you know, gotten on to, you know, gotten testing, and gotten someone else to get testing, but like, they didn’t come in looking for testing, and they weren’t going to do it, like that was not at all. And so, you know, while that is part of the primary, you know, sort of where outcomes happen, that is not where sort of like the intake happens. And so I think the other thing is BCAP works, really, it seems like they work really collaboratively with a lot of other organizations. So they team up, I think, with some of their street outreach for with, you know, folks who are addressing unhoused issues, and that sort of thing. And so it’s not, they’re trying to address it holistically, because you know, somebody, even if they can get access to antivirals, and retrovirals. And, you know, stay up to date with that, it doesn’t really make a whole lot of difference if that person is on the street, and can’t afford, you know, housing. So yeah, it’s super, it seems like, you know, just really well established organization that seems really tapped into what the needs of the community they serve is, and recognizing that, like, they can’t just address like, they’re not there just to address, you know, basically folks living with HIV and AIDS, like they, there’s, they also work with folks who have hepatitis C, and other and so, but they recognize that, like, there’s this whole continuum of care, and they don’t necessarily provide that, but they help get folks connected to the other organizations in the community. And sort of, I’d say, they’re kind of like the ideal, one of the ideals in terms of how well they coordinate across that and try to try to address those without like taking it all on themselves.

Unknown Speaker 1:54:05
Any any questions or anything from other folks on the board? All right, the last item on our agenda is announcements and other business. Do we have any announcements or other business? Seeing a Liberto I saw you come off mute. And Karen,

Unknown Speaker 1:54:28
Aaron has an announcement.

Unknown Speaker 1:54:31
Why? Well, I just wanted you know, this is my last meeting. And I retire I’m retiring at the end of March so so I just wanted to wish you and Ellie better luck and figuring out this formula saying

Unknown Speaker 1:54:53
not my problem anymore.

Unknown Speaker 1:54:58
So anyhow, so I just Why don’t you wish you all well, thank you for the opportunity to, you know, to support the incredible work that you do in the community to, you know, really be really be mindful about how to best invest these, these dollars in and helping folks in our in our community so, so I just find them, say goodbye, and wish you well, you will still have Alberto and Molly, they will still be here and carrying things forward. So

Unknown Speaker 1:55:38
thanks for your service.

Unknown Speaker 1:55:39
You’re You’re welcome.

Unknown Speaker 1:55:41
What are you going to do?

Unknown Speaker 1:55:44
You now I’m going to figure that out. I’m going to take a little I’m gonna take a break. I’ve been here for 32 years. Oh, no. So I think for for a while I’m just gonna, you know, not do a lot of anything. And then and then I’ll figure it out.

Unknown Speaker 1:56:02
You’ll love it. You’ll love it. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 1:56:07
You know, and Kathy fetlar has come back to work for the city. So she’s working part time she started last week. So hopefully, because it is we’re having a hard time hiring staff. So. So yeah, she’s coming back to help out.

Unknown Speaker 1:56:25
Deana.

Unknown Speaker 1:56:27
So I was hoping that the subject would just never come up. And then maybe the rumors of your retirement would just be forever delayed. But I really just want to thank you, Karen, for being so fabulous and guiding all of us volunteers on this board. And just really appreciate and recognize how valuable your service has been to the community and to all of us. And what a big hole you’re going to be leaving here formula or not. It’s across the board for sure. We will miss you more than words can say and value everything that you’ve done for all of us and for the city very, very much. So thank you so

Unknown Speaker 1:57:04
very much for your kind words. Thank you very much.

Unknown Speaker 1:57:07
Well, you deserve more than those kind words anymore. So that’s what you get.

Unknown Speaker 1:57:12
I appreciate that.

Unknown Speaker 1:57:18
Aaron, any other announcements or other business? All right, seeing none. I will entertain a motion to adjourn. All right. Karen Phillips is moving for us to adjourn. Do we have a second? Cam Alright, see you all in about a month.

Unknown Speaker 1:57:43
About ah I carry by

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