 Are we ready? So I'd like to call the November 27th, 2023 Housing Authority regular meeting to order. Members of the public may view and listen to the meeting as noted on the city's website and as noted on the agenda. As a matter of housekeeping, I'd like to remind commissioners to keep their microphones muted unless they are speaking. The city of Santa Rosa is committed to creating a safe and inclusive environment free from disruption. We will not tolerate any hateful speech or actions and our well staff to monitor that everyone is participating respectfully or they will be removed. If necessary, we'll also immediately end the meeting. Clerk, please explain how the public comments will be heard at today's meeting. At each agenda item, after the item is presented, the chair will ask for housing authority commissioner comments. After the commissioner comments, the chair will open the item for public comment. For members of the public attending in person, when the chair calls for public comments after an item is presented, please go to the closest public speaking podium in the upper tier of chambers. Once situated at the podium, the clerk will unmute your microphone and permit your comment to be heard. Public comments will be limited to three minutes per speaker per item. Public comments are limited to one comment per speaker per item. Additionally, there is one public comment period on today's agenda to speak on non-agenda matters. That'll be item six. This is a time when any person may address the housing authority on matters not listed on this agenda, but which are within the subject matter jurisdiction of the housing authority. Thank you. Before I ask the clerk to do a roll call for attendance to assist with the streaming the meeting and capturing commissioners as they are speaking. I wanted to continue to remind commissioners to please ask the chair to be recognized before asking a question or making a comment. This will allow time for the cameras to shift to a new speaker. Now ask for a roll call. Okay. We'll do a roll call for attendance. We will start with Commissioner Newton. Present. Commissioner Conte. Present. Commissioner Smith. Present. Chair Owen. Present. And commissioners Downey and commissioners Freedman are absent today. Commissioner Freedman is here. Commissioner Freedman, I'm so sorry, I didn't see you come in. Commissioner Freedman. Thank you. Okay, let the record reflect that all commissioners are present with the exception of Commissioner Downey. And Vice Chair LePenna is absent. And Vice Chair LePenna. Excuse me, so sorry. I'd like to call item three and ask commissioners or any statements of abstention in today's agenda. Hearing none, we'll move on to item four, which is a staff briefing on housing authority quarter one financial update and Kate Goldfinne will be presenting. Good afternoon, Chair Owen and housing authority commissioners. I am Kate Goldfinne, the administrative services officer for the Housing and Community Services Department here to briefly go over the quarter one financial update with you. So because it is quarter one, it's not of particular interest. There's a few things that I can discuss briefly with you and then I'm happy to answer questions. So all of our expenditures look fine. Administration and overhead has about three quarters of its expense budget remaining, which is what you would expect. All of those other items are based on either sub recipients asking us for funding or us expending loan funds or rental subsidy funds for particular households. So all of those look fine so far this year. Turning over to the funding sources on the bottom of the second page, of particular interest, I would say the housing impact fees we have received 26%, so a quarter of those through the first quarter of the fiscal year and then compliance monitoring fees and loan repayments are at 16 and 15% respectively, which is a little low for one quarter's worth of revenue. So I'm gonna be monitoring those monthly from now on to make sure that we are receiving what we thought we were going to receive. So with that, I'm happy to answer, that concludes my presentation. I'm happy to answer any questions. Commissioner Smith. Can you just go over on state grants that you have almost 31 million approved? And then it says received six, with the 6%, can you explain that a little more? I've read the overview on the next page. I'd be appreciated. Thank you. Yes, absolutely. So state grants, I think I can get this. I may need Nicole to come down, but the infill infrastructure grant, which alone, when we budgeted, was about 21 million. And then we also have the permanent local housing PLHA. So there's two infill infrastructure grants, one for approximately 20 million, and that was awarded in spring of 2023, one for about 8 million that was awarded in 2022. And then we have our permanent local housing allocation fund, which is about a million dollars a year. And I believe we're in the third year of that. We've committed those funds thus far, but have not expended them. So that's why you're seeing in state grants, we have approved funding about 30.8 million, and it is drawn down. So we don't receive the money until we expend it. Well, we're guaranteed the 30 million and everything. So it's in the bank, when we want to spend it, we can spend it. Okay, thank you. Any other questions? Mr. Newton. Yeah, for the percent received, and what was the other percentage? Anyway, the percentage is on here. Since it's first quarter, should these be around 25%? Is that the right way to read that? Some of them are at 80, some are pretty close to zero. So is it, yeah, do you mind just talking about that a little bit? No, not at all. So it depends on which funding source that we're talking about. So all of the federal grants and the state grants are on a reimbursement basis. So the developer or the grantee expends the funds, they submit an invoice to us, and then I draw down the funds or Nicole's staff draw down the funds. So often there's just a lag there. It can take state and federal agencies days to weeks, two months sometimes to get us our reimbursement. So on those, I don't worry too much about it. The ones that are based on like outside, so like property rentals, we would expect to get, we get paid quarterly, we'd expect to get that each quarter. Housing impact fees, compliance, monitoring fees and loan repayments are all gonna be dependent on like building within the city, or Megan, oh, go ahead if you want to, yeah. I was just gonna interject that housing impact fees are based on permits being issued and buildings being completed. So that really is based on the construction climate with our compliance monitoring fees. We estimate those based on the projects that we have under contract and those that we anticipate leasing up in the fiscal year. So when Kate and staff prepares the budget in the winter of each year, we identify which projects we expect to be completed in the upcoming fiscal year. So some of those are a little slower to complete and lease up. So there's a little lag there. And then the loan repayments, I think we may have touched on this at our last meeting. The loan repayments are always a little bit difficult to pinpoint because it is based on the annual audited statements of our projects. And then when those funds are reimbursed to the housing authority, oftentimes we see big pushes of funding in the spring. So they complete their audits when they come to us in March and then the funds will trickle in based on the other lenders that may be in a project. Does that answer your question? Thank you. Yeah, thanks. Any other questions? Mr. Smith. So overall, you're happy with the numbers after Q1? Overall, I'm okay with the housing impact fee number and I'm cautious about compliance monitoring and loan repayments, although those do tend to come in toward the latter part of the year. So I'm just going to keep an eye on it for now. Thank you. So I have a few questions. We talked about the reimbursements coming for grants from state or federal. Does the developer have to wait for those monies to come in before the city funds? No, we front it. Okay. And then I'm looking at on page one of the presentation, there's some loan activities, expenditures, and there's monies left available for projects that are actually done. So I'm looking at Caritas, Helm's phase two. I believe there's, so there's 1.3 million. Let's see, there's another, there are other projects in here that are complete that it looks like there's still funds available. These aren't home funds that don't go in last, but is there a reason why those funds have not been dispersed yet? I'm guessing that it has to do with the timing of everything and the lag, but it looks like Megan's ready to talk to you. And just for my reference, this is the last paragraph of the first page. So the, go ahead. The projects that are listed on the bottom of page one include Mendocino Avenue phase one, which is Laurel, and this could just be timing of the closeout. So the project may receive its occupancy and lease up, but we're still going through the final closing with all the lenders and reconciling all the expenditures for the project. And then we as the city do have retention. So we have to wait until the project is completed to request the retention from HCD. And that's for state funds under the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery Program. And so that may be a result of the retention funds. And then the other projects that are listed there, Vigil Lights, Parkwood, Stoney Point Flats are in various stages of construction. Birmingham Avenue, this will be in the Executive Director Report, but that will be closing this week. So we will start seeing that project advance. And then Caritas Homes, this is phase two. So this is the second component of that development. Okay, I was just trying to understand the flow of funds on these. Transfer is in because I think it's ARPA funds are paying for housing homeless services at the city level. So the city housing authority is receiving all of those transfer monies? Correct. Okay, and then does that, when does the city see ARPA funds being expended such that the housing authority will not be receiving 100% of those funds? I think it goes up 10% a year. 5% a year. 5% a year, okay. And per city council policy, it goes to housing and homeless services and there's no split or percent that goes either way for that. It just goes to housing and homeless and that's gonna be the upcoming budget cycle. Fiscal year 24, 25, ARPA will be nearly entirely expended for homeless services. So homeless services will begin receiving RPTT again. I think that's all the questions I have. So thank you, there's no vote on this. So I will open it up for public comment and seeing nobody in chambers, we will close public comment. We are no longer doing Zoom and clerk is informed. We have no email questions on any items. So I will close public comment on this item. Thank you very much for the detailed presentation. I will move on to item five, which is a study session for housing choice voucher and director passenger has is presenting. Just give me a moment to get the PowerPoint up. Less clerk, are you pulling it up or do I need to do it from the staff table? Okay, thank you for your patience. Annette Anthony, who is a program specialist in our rental assistance division will be assisting me with this presentation today as the manager is out on leave. So this presentation is in response to housing authority commissioner questions from our last meeting in October of 2023. And there was a request to share information on the housing choice voucher program. And we thought it'd be a good opportunity to provide a general overview of the components of the program. Okay, so the housing authority for some of our newer commissioners was established in 1971. We provide rental assistance through the voucher program. Our allocation of vouchers is up to 1,925. So this is the ceiling of vouchers that we can issue. We have to balance that with the budget we're provided. So on an annual basis HUD provides us with 24 million, a little over 24 million to provide rental assistance. And that's the monthly amount that we pay out to landlords for those vouchers. So because of variety factors, including the cost of rent, we don't get up to the 1,925 because we do need to stay at or under the 24 million. So our participants, and we have touched on this before, participants join the waiting list. We generally open this every other year in the odd year. Recently it was open through the month of June and into early July. And in the odd years we clean up that waiting list. So we reach out to individuals who are on the waiting list to make sure they're still interested. Oftentimes they have received assistance from another housing authority. Their financial circumstances may have changed. So there's a variety of reasons why people may drop off the waiting list. We currently have over 7,200 individuals on our waiting list. And we've been calling about 50 people a month. And when we call people each month that is to provide them with the opportunity to provide us with the documentation we need to proceed with determining if in fact they are still eligible, who is in their household and if they're still interested in receiving assistance. And please, if you have questions as we go along, please interject. Yes, commissioner Friedman. And speak into your microphone. Please turn it on and speak into the microphone. Thank you. A little bit closer. Okay. I know with some housing authorities in the past, there have been preferences given to members of the military or former members of the military and perhaps other preferences. What preferences, if any, are currently given to different statuses with Santa Rosa? We do not have any preferences. We do have a tranche of VASH vouchers. And so this is assistance specifically for veterans. And they need to be working with the U.S. Veterans Affairs Department and be referred through them. And that is approximately 429 vouchers. Harley got the number right. She's already down, she's already down. So we have 429 vouchers specifically for veterans. But otherwise we do not have specific preferences for people on the waiting list. But I would like to add that because of some of our project-based vouchers, people can come through the waiting list because of their different circumstances. So we have project-based vouchers at several senior apartment complexes. And that allows individuals who are seniors to move if they're interested in living at that particular property to kind of come out of order and go to those complexes. And that would be attached to that particular property if it's a senior's property? Yes, and the way that project-based vouchers work is that if you choose, say you chose to be on the waiting list for Laurel at Perennial Park, which is the former journey's end site, you would go there as a project-based voucher recipient. You only have to live there for one year and then you could be portable. So you could take your voucher elsewhere after a year. Thank you. You're welcome. So this slide is to give you an indication of what the income limits are for individuals who receive assistance. So it is based on household size. It's generally 50% of area median income. These are updated annually. Our income limits go into effect in June of each year. It's based on information from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. And of course it can go higher, but we just show up to eight individuals. So as of November 1st, we were assisting over 1,800 households, 1,888 through our programs. And this, we're gonna start to move on to some of the specific questions that the Housing Authority had in October. Excuse me, Megan. So the 1,800 number? Yes. Is that the vouchers as compared to a max of 1,925? Yes. And again, the cap is dollars, not number of vouchers. It is both. So we have to balance. The first cap is dollars, the budget amount. Is that correct? Well, we could go up to 1,925 if we could do it within the 24 million. Okay. So that's why we generally see numbers that are much lower. A little bit lower. Yeah. Okay, thank you. Mr. Smith. Can we go back to the income limits page? Yes. My trusty assistant. No worries. Well, what happens if during the year their income exceeds what they're supposed to? How do you deal with something like that? I mean, and when do you find out? Thank you, Commissioner Smith. My name's Annette Anthony. I'm one of the program specialists under the rental assistance program. So from time to time, well, let's start here. Every year we're required to do what's called an annual recertification for families. And that's HUD telling housing authorities we must recertify families to make sure the income qualify. So typically it's at that point, most of the time that we realize, oh, look at this, you're over income. Per our CFR issued by Coda Federal Regulation, we are required to notify the family that they're over income. And what that looks like, it's when my HAP portion is zero, okay? So we send off a notification on a letter to the family, letting them know congratulations, you are so sufficient. What we do in-house is we then hold the file for 180 days from the point that they over qualify. And we inform the family at any point if your circumstances changes. Now that can look like many of different variables. You can have a household composition change which drops the number of members dropping the income. You can have a job loss with the same members of household members. You can have a rent increase. Any of those factors, if our housing authority then resumes paying at least a dollar on that family's behalf, they come back into the program and remain as part of our program. You're welcome. Thank you. A question on the income limits on here. So normally we'll see median income for an area representing a four-person household. So does that mean that a four-person household is, let's see if I can do the math here, about $125,000 for City of Santa Rosa? It's less than that. It doesn't work out to be true percentages based on a variety of factors that HUD has put into the calculation. It's not exactly 50%. No, I wanna say it's like 130. I was gonna look it up really quick. But it's, 50% is actually higher than the true 50% of AMI. Okay, so median income for City of Santa Rosa is about 130. And I apologize for not having that up. That's okay. 128, 100, for a household of four. Good guess. Okay, so it's not quite 50% and it's adjusted annually from HUD? That is correct. And then so as you look for each person with some percentage of that family of four, multiply or if you go over a four-person household. So HUD also includes, in their formula, they do a lot of the calculating by a per-person basis. And then once you exceed eight, there are some factors that you would apply to see how those additional individuals would increase the allowed income. So that's on the income side and on the rent side, there's also utility allowance that's provided? Well, we can, we'll get to that in a couple of slides. I was reading ahead, sorry about that. Any other questions on income before we move on? All right, so now to touch on the households that we serve. So of those 1,888, 37% roughly are seniors. 42% are adults, so these would be people that are between 61, 18 and 61. And then 21, and these can be individuals in the households. And then 21% of the individuals in the households are youth, so under the age of 18. And just to give you some quick percentages on male and female, 56% of our assisted individuals are female, 44 are male. Does that include household? Is that the entire household? Those would be individuals in the household. I think it was of the total program participants. Okay, so a participant is the person receiving the voucher, and then household size would be the people within the household. Let me, I'll circle back on that one. Okay, thank you. For some more demographic information, these are the race that the individuals identify as. So, and we'll touch on this in the next slide as well. You can see that 77% identify as white. We have 6% Asian, 12% black, 4% Indian, and 1% Pacific Islander. Now oftentimes, Hispanic is layered on top of that. So, if you wanna go to the next slide, for the ethnicity, 22% identify as Hispanic, and 78% are non-Hispanic. Can I ask a question? You're going back to the race, and then excuse me if I'm not using the right terms here. Where does Hispanic and Latino fall into this category, or does it not? Generally, we see it as individuals who identify as white, and then within, and Hispanic. And ethnicity is, okay. How does this compare to the overall population of Santa Rosa? I think off the top of my head are the portion of our population that identifies as Hispanic is hovering around 30%, but I don't have that demographic data right in front of me. I was just curious about how this race slide compared with the race of the overall demographics of the city itself. That's a great question that we can follow up on. And then just to go back to your question about the gender. So it's 56% of the total participants. So we have 1,745 female participants, and that turns out to be 56%, and then we have 1,369 male participants. That's members of a household that receive assistance. So a participant is? So if you have a family for it, correct. Okay, thank you. I wasn't sure what the definition was. Yeah, Commissioner Smith. When did they start breaking down on for Hispanics on the ethnicity? I used to do income taxes for low income filers. And I noticed this about five years ago because they used to have, after we did the taxes, they would do, we would ask them to tell us about their background. And all of a sudden, I didn't see under race, Latino, Hispanics, and next thing you know, it's under ethnicity. And when did they do that and why? What's the reason for that? If there is, if they told you the reason, I'm just curious. You know, unfortunately, I don't know why they have separated those two. As long as I've been working for this city, which is about 20 years, we have been collecting and reviewing this data. So I think HUD has been gathering it for quite a while, but I don't know why they have changed them. And you know, they adjust what the categories are every few years or so, depending on I think what they're seeing nationwide. Mr. Freeman. In terms of the racial groups, does it fairly well represent the groupings of the people who live in the count in the city or are some groups overrepresented or underrepresented given the population? Unfortunately, I didn't do that comparison for this presentation, but I certainly will follow up and distribute that to the housing authority. And I apologize for not incorporating that. Okay, and this was one of the questions that came up in October is about the rents for the units. So on this slide, we're identifying what the fair market rents are. That's what FMR is. And this is what HUD identifies as the rent per unit size for, in this case, Santa Rosa. So these are the 2024 rents. And you can see on the second line of the table is the 2023 rents HUD builds into their regulations some allowances. So we have the ability to go up to 110% of the FMRs for units. In the past, we have received a waiver to go up to 120%. But we are seeing rents kind of stabilized locally. So the need for those waivers is not as critical as it was in prior years. But you can see there across efficiency, which is often a studio, one bedroom, two, three, and four. Yeah, quick question. So for example, if we look at the 2024 fair market rent for a one bedroom apartment of a little over $1,800, does that mean that the voucher program, as I understand it, will look at a one bedroom apartment at $1,800 a month for rent. The recipient of the housing choice voucher will pay 30% of their income to 18. And then the voucher will pay up to 18 of 1809. If it's over 1809, if they say, look, I found an apartment that's $2,000, what happens at that point? Does that mean that the housing choice voucher recipient pays the difference? Is the 18 and the cap? Thank you, Chairman Owen. So typically, if a family presents to the housing authority rents that exceed our payment standard, there's two checks that are done. One's the rent reasonableness, right? The unit needs to comp for the same jurisdictional area for the like unit, okay? Once that's checked off, we as the housing authority then need to confirm by way of paper that the family can financially afford it. Now, there are some families who have the income to make that happen. There are other families who unfortunately cannot. We call that a gross rents issue. So our course of action at that point is to notify the family, here's where you stand. There's a gap because in the regulation per HUD, families may not pay outside of my program. So when I determine the rents, what the family pays, what the housing authority pays, that's it. There's no side deal that's a violation of the program. So we have to go straight at them and it's an option of either you're gonna go find a more suitable, affordable unit, or we can launch in what's called rent negotiations directly with the landlord. Now oftentimes we'll leave it to the family. Family can negotiate those or we can, typically as you'd imagine. They throw it back to us. We're typically successful. I speak from my own personal experience as a technician and negotiating those. Worst case scenario, if the landlord says if there's a discrepancy of let's say $100 and we need the landlord to drop those rents by that amount. If the landlord says absolutely I enjoy this family, I want them in that unit, we walk away. Okay, we adjust the rents, we generate the hat payments, et cetera. The landlord kind of is pushing back, you know I have 15 people waiting in line. Our only course of action at that time is to say okay, if you allow this family to move in at the reduced amount, we'll allow you to adjust the rents up to your initial requested contract rent amount in 60 days. Now oftentimes when that occurs, right, we let the family know when that bumps up, that's all you and that's 100% your obligation to pay. So as long as all parties agree, we adjust, we'll do an interim to adjust the rents back up in 60 days and we move forward. Does that answer your question? Yeah, thank you very much because it can be very mechanical and it's each situation stands on its own. It does indeed, that's a lot. Thank you. Thank you. So in that scenario where the rent is above the fair market rent, it's based on affordability, whether or not the family can afford to pay that difference, I guess. Correct, but that difference can't be on the side, right? It needs to be through my program and all numbers need to align. Okay. Yes. All right, thanks. You're welcome. Thank you for that. Mr. Smith. Why don't they allow the family to pay the extra $200 if they have it? It's against the HUD regulations to do that, essentially. What I've seen personally when that occurs, which it shouldn't, is it winds up in litigation between landlord and family, right? Because something went wrong. The deal over here was made and although we caution our families at briefings, that's a no, no, that's a violation to the program. You could put your subsidy in jeopardy. Sometimes they feel compelled to do that, but we try and weed them away from that because it typically lands up with family and landlord at each other and what we have to do at that point is refer them to a tenant advocacy group to work that out. And one of the goals of the program is to make sure that the households we are assisting have enough resources for their day-to-day expenses as well, so making sure that their housing cost remains generally 30%, although it can go up to 40, that they have enough money to address their daily needs. I think you may have just answered my question, which was I ported in from another housing authority about, and I started in 2008, and my memory was that 30% was the standard, but if the family wanted a particular apartment, they were allowed to pay the difference up to 40% maximum, is that not, is my memory incorrect or have things changed? No, sir, I've been part of this team for eight years now and I've attended numerous trainings. That is not welcomed, and we consistently deliver that message and our briefings to the families directly. So no, sir, there is a situation where if a family cannot afford a particular unit and there is a reasonable accommodation, speaking to a disability that drives them to this particular unit, if they can create that nexus by way of medical professional testimony, then we can allow what's called a reasonable accommodation payment standard and allows us to exceed that 110 and we go to 100%, 120% in order to allow that family to afford that unit as a reasonable accommodation. So 30% is written in stone, they cannot pay over that other than that 60-day rent bump that you could negotiate. That's the maximum. If you're a new admission, you have to be at that 30%. Once you're a participating family, which means we've leased you up, you can pay anywhere between 30% to 40%, okay? Any other questions? Mr. Newton? What areas of jurisdictions are these rents based on? Is it county, is it city? Do you know how they break these down? These are all based on the city. County has their own payment standards. We have our rent because geographically, when you look at from a county standpoint, you're incorporating Hillsburg, Petaluma, Sebastopol, which have higher rents typically because of the rural area and the property types. City of Santa Rosa is a little bit lower typically than the county with respect to the rents overall. Does that answer your question? Yeah, so each city, like HUD is gonna put out for each city a fair market rent, basically. So generally it's for the, yeah, what they consider the metropolitan statistical area. One additional aspect is that HUD has introduced, I think they're called small area, essentially they relate to zip codes to allow housing authorities and larger jurisdictions and they've mandated in some areas that they use the small area FMR. So if you're in LA or jurisdiction that has a lot of variation throughout your housing authorities boundaries, you have a little bit more flexibility in what the rents are in certain areas. And we are monitoring that to see if it makes sense in Santa Rosa. So far we have not seen the benefits program-wide to implementing that. So certainly one of the questions that came up last month was about the assistance that is provided to households. So as you can see in the chart, the majority of the units we're assisting are one-bedroom units. We have an average monthly payment per household of 1,286 and then the average households contributing almost $450. I'm now going back to Chair Owen's question about utility allowances. If the tenant is required to provide any of the utilities at the site, we have a utility allowance that is based on the unit size and then the type of utility. So are they, is it gas, heating, is it electric heating? So there are different standards that are set or amounts that are set based on the type of utility and the bedroom size for the unit. And those are updated annually by an outside consultant who specializes in utility allowances. And so what happens is that then the household is given essentially a credit to pay the utilities themselves. But some properties will include all utilities or include various aspects like trash, water, depending on where, you know, how the project was set up. Commissioner Freeman. Because of the very high cost of housing in this area, do you have any or many families that are fairly large families, renting smaller housing, you know, less bedrooms because of the costs of the housing or are they required to have more bedrooms given the number of people in their household? Thank you, Commissioner Freeman. So how that typically works is our HUD mandate is that a family size can represent as long as there's no overcrowding, which is determined by what HUD says is two heartbeats per room. California then dictates one in the living room. Okay, there are other states, HUD will say it's two-bed heartbeats per bedroom, including the living room. But for California, we're only allowed one. So if you have a four-bedroom, you're entitled up to two, four, six, eight, nine people in the house before we deem it overcrowded. Now that can as easy as somebody has a baby. And our role in that is we notify them, we issue an update of voucher and inform them your house is deemed overcrowded and welcome them to relocate. Commissioner Smith. I take it a zero-bedroom as a studio. Correct. Any other questions? Let's see, any other questions? I will congratulate all of you for doing such a wonderful job. There was an article a week or two ago in the San Francisco Chronicle about how your similar organization in San Francisco Outsources, their housing choice voucher program, and it is not going well. So I just want to commend you all for doing such a great work in keeping it in-house and doing a fabulous job of managing this very complex and arduous task of knowing the families and negotiating the rents and finding tents for finding apartments for these people. I do have one question. We have a lot of projects coming online that Director Ambassador will be going through later that are 9% tax credit deals or some other funding source. If the rents for those are obviously less, can a tenant go into one of those units and layer on the housing choice voucher, thus reducing their cost? Yes, they can. The only exception to that is if a project is assisted with home funds, we cannot put a housing choice voucher tenant in a home-funded unit because that is considered a duplication of resources. But we have many voucher recipients that live in 9% tax credit properties. Okay, so they're not paying anywhere close. Again, I'll use the web bedroom. It's just as easy as roughly $1,800 a month because their rent was restricted due to the tax credit of the project. It should be based on the funding sources that are in the project is how they would calculate the maximum rents. Okay, great. Commissioner Smith? What is home-funded? Home funds are one of the funding sources that do come before the Housing Authority. It's allocated to the city and the Housing Authority from HUD and home doesn't stand for anything. But it is one of our funding sources you'll see with CDBG. So we use it for affordable housing development. Any other questions? Commissioner Newton? Going back to the VASH vouchers, back to the beginning. Those in the project-based vouchers, they don't come from the $240 million budget from HUD. I think the VASH come from a straight from the VA and don't affect this budget. Is that right? No, they are included in the budget and in the allocation. With the VASH vouchers, it's the referral process that is different. We have to work with the VA to receive those clients and lease them up, but that is included in our allocation and in our budget. And then with the project-based vouchers, that's definitely included in the budget and the allocation. And those individuals need to come from the primary waiting list and then the project-based voucher sites have kind of a secondary waiting list. So what we'll do is often canvas the waiting list that had the 7,000 plus individuals and send out messages. Are you interested in living in this particular complex and do you meet whatever the requirement is? Are you a senior? And then those people would make the waiting list for that particular site. Okay, so I guess with the VASH then that is a case where a veteran sort of jumps the line a little bit because they can go through the VA, get a referral into the Santa Rosa jurisdiction and grab one of those vouchers. Yes, okay. And that I, I wasn't here for the inception of that program, but that was the idea was to help address veterans homelessness and provide the VA with a resource to assist their clients. Yeah, great. Thanks. And just to follow up on that, the housing choice vouchers are for rent, but VASH is for rent and services that they receive. They receive the participants in the VASH program receive case management from the VA social workers. So they have staff at the VA who work with our staff here at the housing authority to navigate through the program and those individuals are then provided on case management services. So in addition, the VASH vouchers is not just rent, although the housing authority just sees the rent piece. They're receiving the recipient of those vouchers also received services from- From the VA. From the VA. Wonderful. Thank you, Mr. Friedman. Thank you. And currently about how long are people on the waiting list before they are able to get into the program and have assistance? So of our current waiting list, which isn't again in excess of 7,000 individuals, we're seeing about a seven year wait. And so what happens is we reopen the waiting list. We have been doing that every two years and those individuals, it's randomized and then they're added to the overall list. So we are serving, currently calling names that applied about seven years ago. Any other questions? Okay, I'll open it up for public comment, seeing none. Also, we have no email comments, so I will close the public comment on this issue. Thank you very much for the presentation. Really appreciate it. It's very helpful in terms of understanding this complicated program. We will move on to item six, which is public comments. There are no members of the public in chambers, so we will close public comment because we don't have any public comment on email as well. Item seven is approval of minutes. Does any of the commissioners have comments on the minutes? None, this is not a voting item, so we'll go ahead and approve the minutes and item seven. Item eight is chairperson or commissioner reports. Are there any reports from any of the commissioners? Seeing none, I, as chair, don't have any reports. Again, opening this up for public comment and with nobody in chambers, we will close public comment and again, close public comment on email because there are no people on email. Committee reports, are there any questions? We don't have any, let's see, we don't have any committee reports this time either. We're moving right through this, so we will close public comment on both in-person and email and we will move on to item 10, which is director Bassinger's report. Thank you, Chair Owen. So attached to the agenda, as is our monthly process, is the pipeline. So I'm happy to answer any questions you may have on the pipeline. You'll see we continue to advance some of these projects through completion. As you may recall, we've had a record number of projects under construction in the last couple of years and we're finally starting to see these come to fruition and start leasing up, which has been a great undertaking by our housing choice voucher staff and then the staff of the trust. And we're excited to see some projects start construction in the very near future. So first I'll field any questions on the pipeline if you have any. Mr. Smith. Can you explain how the density bonus works? There's a couple of them that reference that the one being the residents at Taylor Mountain where only 19 out of 93 units are affordable and then Casa Rosalind only looks like 28 or is that 28 out of 75? And it says that the income units are based on the density bonus. Can you explain how that works? Certainly. So density bonus is a provision of state law and it allows developers the opportunity to construct additional units if they set some aside for low and very low income households. So in the case of the residences at Taylor Mountain this is generally a market rate project and they received a density bonus which required them to set those units aside for rental to very low and low income households. And then those units similar to what we see with projects that we have loans on have a recorded affordability restriction on them. So for 55 years staff from the trust will monitor the income and rent levels for those units. And in the case of Casa Rosalind that is in fact a 100% affordable complex. The housing authority does not have any funds in that project. So we are just showing the units under the density bonus because we do have a density bonus on the site. I know recently there was a controversy with potential new project by Schultz Museum. It was in the paper and I guess it went to the city council and they were back, are you familiar with that? Yes, that project did go to city council on appeal. I don't believe there were any affordability covenants on that particular site. So it's a market rate project. And I think that the appeal centered around parking and potential parking impacts to the neighborhood. Any other questions? Is that the only component of a density bonus or is there other parameters they need to meet? Is it just setting aside a certain amount of affordable units with the rest being market rate? Is there something in terms of how many units in a certain area or something like that? You don't have to give me the details. I'm assuming there's more than just that, right? Yeah, so it's a percentage of the units. It's based on the project size. And then depending on what level of the unit, what affordability level you want to identify depends on how many units you are required to set aside. So if you were to say you want to put in very low income, which is the 50% going back to the previous presentation, you would have to do fewer of those because you'll be able to charge less rent. So it's more of a financial impact on the project versus a low income unit, which can go up to 80% of area meeting income. So you would be required to provide more low income units than very low income units. But there are also provisions in the state law for childcare. If you were to provide a childcare center on site, you could receive a density bonus as well. Density I think of packing more units into a smaller space, like maybe going up or smaller units or something like that. But that's why I'm just curious if there's that aspect of it. And that's certainly how we see it. So it could be you could have a taller building or if your site only without the bonus would have 50 units, maybe you can put in 60. So that's generally on a very simplistic level, how it would work out. Yeah, thanks. I do have a question on the projects that are completed and the notes are leasing up. Do we know how leased those projects are? In terms of are there any availability in any of those projects or units? Hi, good afternoon. Off the top of my head, the Caritas phase one and Laurel are both roughly halfway leased up. And we can follow up with further information for the specifics. For those projects being halfway leased up, is that just the timing of getting people in or the demand is not as high as we thought? So a lot of these projects. I would think it would be the former. Yeah, right. And those two projects specifically have a large number of project-based voucher units in them as well, which adds a layer of complexity and time to getting those leased up. And these are both burbank projects. So they have staff working on both of those simultaneously for lease up. So it's more of a processing time it takes to qualify and get people actually moved in so it has nothing to do with demand. Correct, that's not what we're saying. And in Caritas, I just add on to that. Caritas also has no place like home funding, which is a state funding source for homeless individuals. So there do need to be some additional components and I believe they need to be vetted through a county agency that provides health services. So there's some more complexities. Thank you. We will open and immediately close public comment on this item. And I believe... Chair, and if I may just give you some quick additional information through the director's report. First, I am very pleased to introduce our newest employee, Sarah Huntz. Sarah joined us today as a housing and community services technician. She'll be in the trust providing unit compliance. So she'll be one of the individuals who is verifying that our tenants meet the income requirements and that their rents are compliant with the regulatory agreements. So we are very pleased to have her joining us. Welcome. Second, I am thrilled to tell you that the housing authority has been identified as a high performing agency. So on an annual basis, we are required to submit the section eight management assessment plan. And we did that in August and received notification a couple of weeks ago that we are identified as high performing, which means we received more than 90% of the points for that process. So this is the first time we've received that designation since 2018. And again, it goes back to our fantastic staff who are diligently working on the program and making sure that we're meeting the requirements of HUD. Congratulations. Well deserved. Thank you. Mr. Newman. I'm wondering what areas have we improved in? That's wonderful. So areas where we have certainly improved is through lease up. We saw our leasing go down as a result of COVID and we had a lot of rent increases. So there were a lot of variables during that particular point in time that led to a reduction in our lease up. So that has certainly come back up. We've also improved our waiting list management and shifted to an electronic system which has made it much easier to administer. So that is where we're seeing some of our areas of improvement. Super. Mr. Smith. Do you have any other needs whether you're gonna add more people? The city, did the city budget more people for you since this seems to be a very important group? We are very flexible individuals. We have to operate within the budget that we're provided. So we are currently working at our capacity budgetarily and we ask a lot of our staff and fortunately they continue to deliver. So we will not be seeing additional staff but we will hopefully continue to be providing a high level of service. And then also as I alluded to earlier in the housing choice voucher presentation we will be closing on Burbank Avenue in the coming weeks. And so this is the fifth and final community development block grant project which we've also layered project based vouchers on and it will provide 62 or 64, 64 additional units for our residents. So very excited to see this one close and begin construction. And that ends my report and I'd be happy to answer any additional questions. Any questions from commissioners? It's good to see that the projects that are opening up are well dispersed within the city between Caritas, Central and Burbanks in Southwest and you've got Laurel in what we consider Northwest and then Pepp Housing's project off Calistoga. So they're well dispersed throughout the city which is a very good thing to see. Yeah, in the last couple of years we've certainly seen a lot more diversity in our geographic locations. But again, we rely on developers to bring us projects so it's based on where they're able to find land. Exactly. So we'll see where our future projects land. Great, thank you. Any questions? I will quickly open and close public comment on this and we will go through the next two items which are Consent 11 and Reporting 12 which there are no consent items or report items and move to Item 13 which is adjournment. Thank you everyone and thank you for your wonderful presentations and congratulations on your award we'll deserve.