 It does seem such a shame to close those blinds on a beautiful, sunny, late winter day, but we've got some, our speakers are all coming in digitally. So we're going to need you to be able to see other than our opening speaker. My name is Kelly Devine. This is the 2024 Burlington Business Association Business Summit. And big surprise, we decided to focus on public safety, right? The big topic of the day. I want to make sure that it's very clear to folks that I want today to be focused on public safety solutions. I've spent more time than I care to tally over the last two, three years, thinking about the public safety problem, talking to folks about the public safety problem, hearing about the safety, public safety problem, reading about the public safety problem. If you're in this room and you don't think we have a public safety problem, I hope you'll still stick around and help us figure out how we can make Burlington better. Because if nothing else, when you spend some time downtown, you'll see a tremendous amount of graffiti. There's trash. We have a lot of needles around. So that in and of itself, I think, really is something that we could absolutely consider improving. So let me tell you what our day is going to look like today. We are going to start with opening remarks from my friend and avid supporter and longtime colleague, Tom Levitt, who's the president of Northfield Savings Bank, our generous presenting sponsor. And then we are going to have our speakers come in via Zoom. We'll have an opportunity to ask them questions. We may, because of the technology, have to repeat the questions and then have them repeated to the speaker. We'll have some with a microphone coming around. And then we will send you into breakouts. Everyone has a little number on their name tag to tell you where to go. You know, it's not mandatory or obligatory, but we hope that you'll go to that room and get involved in that topic. We're asking every breakout session to come back to us with at least two solutions that can be implemented relatively easy by people in this group within the next 30 or 60 days. I know we have a lot of change coming. We have political change coming. Political change is great, but it takes time. And our city needs some love. Our community needs some love right now. Let me make sure to mention the folks that helped make this event possible. We have, of course, Northfield Savings Bank, our presenting sponsor. Main Street Landing Performing Arts Center has hosted the space for us and partners with us on that. So thank you. CCTV who's doing the recording of the event so we can make it available to a broader public. Thank you. We have our platinum members who make all of our programming possible, Primer, Piper, Eggleston and Kramer, M&T Bank, Gasella Waste Management, PC Construction, Parmalo Real Estate, Hula, UVM Medical Center, and Key Bank. We also have some community sponsors, JL Davis Realty, Hotel Vermont, and Courtyard. Now I would like to close with a little bit of my inspiration for being here. I have invested, as folks know, a lot of the last 15 years of my life in the city. And we have created some really beautiful and amazing things over that time. It's been a place that I've called home where I raised my children a place that I love. I see it in trouble. And I can't fix this alone. None of us can. We all need to work on this together. So I'm hoping that I'll inspire you from this quote from Barbara Jordan, one of our early political leaders from the state of Texas. Just remember, the world is not a playground, not a school room. Life is not a holiday, but an education. One eternal lesson for us all. To teach us. I should have put that on the screen. To teach us how we should, how better we should love. And you know what, here's to you, Barbara, because you said that and wrote that so much better than I did, so thank you for your basis with me. I want to welcome up Tom Levitt. Thank you. Thank you, Kelly Devine, and thank you, Oviso Makuku. I can't imagine better partners to have a forum to invite people into this room that certainly have in their heart the same outcome that Oviso and I discussed over lunch many months ago and then Kelly and I got in on the discussion about simply moving outside some of the theater of Burlington and the very real questions that we have around governance and such, and move into a solutions-based conversation around things that we might be able to do and keep the temperature cool as we do it. So hopefully today, maybe you'll get a little warm at some point and that'd be fine. But it's all about kind of keeping the right brain alive and right here, but also shifting over that left brain and doing some engineering and some problem-solving. So a guest essay appeared in the New York Times July 28, 2023, titled The Life and Death of American Cities. It was written by Nicole Jeline as a contributing editor for the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. It featured a profile of Richard Ravich, a real estate developer churned public servant who had died the previous month at age 89. Early in her essay, Ms. Jeline's writes, quote, Mr. Ravich's office is empty now, too. His absence is a stark reminder that New York's post-COVID recovery needs new generations of people who are physically anchored to the city as he was and who understand that urban civics depends on people and business, finance, politics, policy, and media showing up day after day to make a little unglamorous progress, unquote. She goes on to say, quote, New York is hardly alone in this need. Many American cities find themselves without patrons who feel their own worth and purpose tied to their hometown's fortunes. Cities require successful people to have so much at stake, literally, in a particular place that they can't walk away. Mr. Ravich's death was not just the end of an era in New York, it also laid bare the vacuum that America's cities have to fill, unquote. Manhattan Institute is known as a conservative think tank. You can find other pieces addressing America's urban ills from respected institutes of thought across the full political spectrum. We are not here today to engage in politics. We are here simply because we believe that Burlington is the most essential place in Vermont and that its relative health and vitality directly impact the quality of outcomes across a wide swath of the Champlain Valley and Green Mountain State. So it's not just about Burlington when we're talking about this place. I grew up in a modest home at 1888 North Avenue. The neighborhood was a reflection of a working class community of various ethnic heritage with lots of ample-sized families. Burlington grew as the families grew and development sprung up to house them. Opportunity grew as schools, the economy, and institutions grew to make Burlington a 20th century model of small city vibrancy. Many visionaries, our own versions of New York's Richard Ravich, devoted themselves to building Burlington into a destination that beckoned people across to lived experiences and offered a brighter existence for all inhabitants and visitors. Along the way, a plethora of social services and health services expanded to address a more complex range of needs, contributing to Vermont having the highest percentage of nonprofits of any state. Vermont and Burlington were making progress in the latter part of the prior decade, getting an upper hand on the opioid crisis and its devastating impact on those suffering substance use disorder. Then came pandemic and all of its side effects of isolation and suspended functioning of the Intertabendant Network of Interventions and Solutions. And then came fentanyl, an insidious and catastrophic development on the streets of Burlington and beyond. Here we are. You can read the Burlington Police Department publication of reported incidents and their trends and I thank Kelly and Colin for your homework assignment, just giving us a synopsis of some of those. You can and should engage in the debate and preferably some path forward relative to the most elusive objective the state faces. That of finding a way to get a supply to meet demand for safe and dignified housing. I did not use the word affordable. In our current environment, there is no such thing. Someone pays. You can pick a side in election cycles and hope your team has the answers, the resources and the will to sustain progress. But even more helpful, you can grab an ore and keep rowing with fellow citizens, residences and businesses aimed toward better shores. That's what this little bit of time we have together today is about. So I'm gonna turn it back over to Kelly and some people that have made a real difference elsewhere to get us started. Thank you all. Thank you so much, Tom. And Tom has been an amazing person who has from all the different aspects of his both personal and professional life really dedicated himself to Burlington. And one of the first things that Tom and I worked on pretty diligently was the re-imagining of City Hall Park when we wanted a better space for Burlington. Not for seeing where we are today with it, but it has been better. Thank you, Chief Merrad. I also wanna acknowledge Tom's wife, Diane, who for many, many years was a teacher in the Burlington school system, which is another great way to get back to the community. So thank you, Tom. And I understand you attended the University of New Hampshire, but we'll forgive you for that. So next up, we're going to try to use the power of technology. If folks remember, I actually pulled this off one time, I think in 2012 when there was a storm and my speaker was grounded in Washington, D.C., and it seemed to work, but now we've gotten all a lot more used to it. And our first speaker is going to be Brad Siegel. Brad is the president and founder of PUMA, which stands for Not the Sneaker, but Progressive Urban Management Associates. Some of you know and may have met Brad in person because he and his team spent a lot of time in Burlington in over the years, but specifically in 2017-18 when we were working on a project to try to understand the opportunity we could create for the downtown by having a downtown improvement district. Brad has more than 30 years of experience in the national context of downtown's management and community development, both as a practitioner and consultant. A self-proclaimed urban therapist, Brad is one of the nation's leading authorities on downtown trends and issues, reinventing downtown management organizations, forming business improvement districts, and pioneering efforts to create healthy communities. Brad has received numerous awards and is an expert in real estate economics, strategic planning, community development, finance, equitable communities, and leadership facilitation. He has an MBA from Columbia University and a BA from the University of California, Berkeley. And also, Brad is just one heck of a really nice guy, so I'm happy to bring him here, at least digitally. And these guys over here are gonna take care of that for me, I think. Are we good to go out there? All right, yeah. Whoa! All right, good afternoon, Burlington. I assume you can hear me? Keep going, Brad. Keep going, bro. Two, three, four, can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you, Brad. Okay, great. Thanks, Burlington. Thanks, Kelly, for inviting me into your world here for a few minutes. My role today is to put the public safety issue in the greater context of change. It's a period of profound change in cities, particularly coming out of the last several years. So I do have a presentation for you, which, Burlington, you want me to go ahead and put the slides on the screen? Yes, yes. Yes, okay. Please, please. All right, all right. Can you see beautiful downtown Burlington? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay, excellent. So today I'm gonna take you through some highlights of a trends report that we do periodically on downtowns and we look at how shifts in demographics, lifestyles, different disruptive elements in the economy shape cities. And as I mentioned earlier, the intention here is to put the public safety issue in greater context. So this effort, this is almost 20 years we've been doing this back in 2006, 2007. We're based in Denver and we were charged with looking at the future evolution of our city. So we looked at 10 different trends that were shaping cities throughout the country and then brought that back here and it informed our projections for moving forward. And what we found is these trends, these trends resonated everywhere we went. And I believe, Kelly, when we were working at Burlington a few years ago, we talked about these trends as well. So over the last, again, almost 20 years we've been updating this trends report about every three or four years. And we were quite proud of ourselves in the latter half of 2019 when we unveiled our 2020 report and looked at demographics, lifestyles, disruptive elements and of course nowhere in that voluminous report was the word pandemic. So we just compiled and issued our first post pandemic trends report for cities. And Kelly, I can make this available to everyone in the audience. It's available on our website. We can, that's Zoom, I assume the BBA can send you guys a link. But we're looking now in this new world how demographics, lifestyles and again, different disruptive elements are affecting cities. And you'll see public health and safety nested there within the area of disruption. So I will talk about it related back to what you're facing in Burlington. One thing about the pandemic is it was an accelerator of a lot of preexisting trends that were happening in the world. So we looked at how the pandemic itself accelerated changes in demographics and lifestyles, those disruptive elements that I'll talk about in a few minutes. And it really affected some more than others. So in terms of demographics, those are pretty solid, those are pretty set. In terms of lifestyles, really turning things upside down, particularly for many of the larger cities. But the notion of having an office and having to go to an office five days a week, pretty much done. Also housing, of course, housing being a crisis nationally, shortage of housing. And then some markets experiencing extraordinary increases in housing costs during the pandemic itself. So what does this all mean? So in demographics, not so much changed by the pandemic, but these are all preexisting changes in demographics. And our population is becoming increasingly diverse and immigration is fueling growth. A lot of countries, advanced industrial countries, if you will, like the United States are actually declining in population, but we continue to grow. And then importantly for Burlington, younger populations continue to be attracted to urban areas. So whether that be a downtown or an urban neighborhood. In terms of talent and labor, we do expect labor shortages to remain through the decade. And interestingly, the second bullet under talent and labor kind of blows my boomer mind away, but millennials are gonna make up 75% of the workforce in just a few years. So understanding our market, understanding what people under 40, 45, what they need in their daily lives, really important as we move forward. Also, we looked at lifestyle, so future of work. This is a game changer. This is something we didn't talk about in 2020, or at least the first couple of months of 2020. So the pandemic bringing the technology like we're using today to our daily lives, the erosion of the five day work week, and then offices and downtowns as well, needing to add amenities. If they're gonna draw people to an office to work, there needs to be more there than just a cubicle. There needs to be an experience. There need to be amenity. And this applies not just to buildings, but it applies to downtown areas as well. Consumer behaviors, strong spending trends, we feel will continue through the decade. Also interestingly, non-white communities vastly underserved on retail in virtually every market across the country. So a strong market opportunity for downtown or neighborhood business districts. And then of course, housing. The pandemic really accelerated the national housing shortage and the demand for housing in urban areas. It does remain strong moving forward. So the disruptive trends and how the pandemic in the last several years affected these. And there's several new ones that we feature in this trends report that we did not feature in some of our prior work, which I'll talk about in a moment. So this whole notion of finding community in a polarized age, we're more polarized than ever in terms of politics in this country. Public health and safety, this is really the issue of the day in Burlington. It's also the issue confronting the cities that you'll hear from today. And at least on my Zoom screen, I'm seeing we're being joined by John and Parr and Kate. So you're gonna hear from Berkeley and Reno here in a moment. Climate change continued to be a key issue growing inequality and equity and issue. So these disruptive trends. While there is increased polarization, we actually think downtowns and city centers can really be regional third places where we actually park our politics and go enjoy different aspects of life, whether that be celebrating something or something as mundane as shopping or sitting in a park. Public health and safety, bam. Here you go, center on Burlington and the data that's been distributed, I think to everyone today. So Burlington, not alone in this, you're gonna hear this from the other speakers, but the pandemic certainly accelerated challenges related to mental health, gun violence, opiate epidemic. In fact, the first speaker mentioned these trends in Burlington. And then homelessness is really intertwined with all these health challenges. And then remember those increasing housing costs which continue to push more and more people into desperate situations. Other disruptive trends, climate. Importantly, this is critical, particularly a top three concern of millennials and Gen Z. Again, people under 40, regardless of their politics, number one concern for them. So important for downtowns, urban neighborhoods to provide lifestyles that also reduce carbon footprint and environmental stress. Technology, we're always trying to understand what's next and how it's gonna shape our cities. AI, the next big thing, we jury's out on that. We just don't know how that's going to impact us all, but something to watch over the next couple of years. And then growing inequality and equity before the pandemic, we were, had the most income inequality in the United States since the 1920s. That actually grew during the pandemic. And this is also affecting politics. So back to younger demographics, particularly now Gen Z. So Gen Z are people under 25. Gen Z, more politically, socially active. Interestingly, if you are seeking someone to work in your company, 80% of them won't work for companies that don't share their values, which is unprecedented with any generation that was there before. So what are the conclusions for downtowns? What are the conclusions for Burlington out of all this? The pandemic, as I mentioned in the early comment, really the great accelerator. It accelerated a lot of these trends that are shaping cities that are shaping our lives. Demographics remain favorable for downtowns. And again, younger demographics are attracted to them, but we can't take it for granted, which gets to some of the discussion today. We have to provide an activated space, amenities and a reliably clean and safe space in our communities if we're gonna expect folks to come down. And then all downtown dominant real estate sectors really requiring fresh thinking throughout the country. Burlington is fortunate you're not seeing the stress that some of the larger cities are on office buildings, those types of things. But I would suggest that while your data holds at this point on retail and office, that it's fragile. And you may see some slippage, particularly on the office side as leases continue to be renewed and companies adapt to these remote options. Other conclusions for cities, despite the polarization in our politics, we really think cities continue to be that living room of a city or a region. Many, and the second bullet here, very, very relevant to the theme today and the discussions today, is many of downtown's and city's most pressing challenges will require local and regional collaboration to solve. So whether it's mental health issues or it's homelessness challenges, there's no rescue coming from the federal government. It's totally dysfunctional. No cavalry coming from those guys. So solutions are more and more locally and regionally driven. And I mentioned regional because many of the issues that may be faced in a downtown or in urban neighborhoods have no boundaries and folks move in and out, problems move in and out. So these are really regional areas of concern. And then also encouraging a new generation of leadership in your city and in your downtown. So also a generational shift. We're seeing this across the country. And in my work, I'm becoming a bit of a boomer whisperer and encouraging my fellow boomers to create space and create opportunities for younger folks to come into leadership positions in cities with newer ideas. And then my last set of slides gets into recommendations in this case for downtown organizations, but for cities. And I think many of these recommendations might be good springboards for your breakout groups later today. So what are we advising downtowns and cities? Well, the first one, which is really directed to your topic today, more importantly than ever, the fundamentals are fundamental. And what that means is a downtown, an urban neighborhood, a commercial district, it's gotta be reliably safe, reliably clean or people are not gonna come. And if people feel threatened or if they don't feel safe, also the fragility of some of the economic anchors within your downtown. So the retail, the office, the others, definitely at risk. So again, the fundamentals are fundamental and this is a partnership. This is a partnership of your city, perhaps your county structure, if they're involved in mental health issues, your business community, everybody really needs to be focused on this stuff. More in terms of the bread and butter of a downtown, activating store fronts, important, creating inviting spaces within a city and gosh, with Church Street marketplace, you've got one of the best downtowns in the country really in terms of inviting space, but programming them differently. Most downtowns and our clients throughout the country are moving away from large festivals and events and more to smaller activations, maybe more with a higher frequency. So think about how we program our spaces. Also creating amenities that people wanna live near as there continues to be a strong demand for housing in downtowns and in cities, making sure we're welcoming the diverse cultures of Burlington and of our region, offering both not just social opportunities, but also economic opportunities for folks. And then also more oriented to downtown management, but this is germane. This is what we took a run out in Burlington about four or five years ago and actually we failed to do this there, but to diversify revenue sources that can help address some of these issues within a downtown and within a city, really understanding data and making sure the narrative on crime and safety and other issues is realistic that it's not being overblown or more importantly, similar to the data that was at least sent to us that we're really understanding the nature of the problems because it's nuanced. There's a lot to unpack when we talk about safety and other issues. Collaborative, creative, problem solving with our local government as a partner and this can be challenging. We have worked in a lot and it's interesting you've got Berkeley on the screen today but we have worked in a lot of very progressive cities, including Burlington and there needs to be alignment between the local officials and the business community regardless of ideology that these are key issues that together need to be addressed. And then lastly, building influence to these changes in the world and I suspect that's what this program is all about today that you're sitting through. So the bottom line and this is maybe the bottom line there's a lot of text on this but what we're suggesting out of all these trends while cities are challenged more today than maybe they have been in the last 20 years or so it's not the 1980s and I don't know how many of you have been around since then but back in the 80s there was no real market support for downtowns or urban neighborhoods. Today there still is but we have to be thinking about again, reinventing how we approach a variety of problems that confront our cities. So to guide recovery and resiliency, downtowns can embrace a variety of economic, social and physical changes that diversify them in many dimensions and I think that is the thought I will probably leave you with today. I believe that is my final slide. So Kelly, I will hand it back to you I believe. Thank you so much Brad. You know for me, for someone who thinks about downtowns a lot I think one of the important things that I continue to hear is that there are opportunities for downtowns and one of the things that Brad pointed out that I think is really important is this new idea of activation that it's a community living room and we wanna make sure that we as a community can figure out how to make it a great space for everyone in this community to be able to use it and enjoy it. So we're gonna move on to our next speaker who is John Caner. John is presenting to us from Berkeley, California. John is the CEO of Downtown Berkeley. He brings 30 years of business, nonprofit, community development experience to the Downtown Berkeley Association including building strategic plans, new business development, marketing, finance, project management and general management. Wait, that's all the things that Downtown Organization does like that. And he has served as CEO for over 14 years. John also serves on the board of the California Downtown Association where he is able to bring best practices from around the world to the US and the world to Berkeley. John also chairs policy committees on homelessness and behavioral health for the California Downtown Association and the International Downtown Association where he previously served on the board. John has an MBA from UCLA and an undergraduate degree in government from Harvard. He was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. So I will let the tech geniuses bring us John. All right, John, you're all set. Go ahead and thank you. Great, thank you so much, Kelly. Hello, Burlington, Vermont. So good to see you this morning or this afternoon. I wanna say a particular hello to Brad Siegel, friend and colleague. Good to see you, Brad. And Par and Kate, I can't tell you how much I share what you're doing in Reno, Washout County, repeatedly. I'm talking to a lot of collectives and people who are running for office. You gotta look at the Washout County Reno model. So anyway, let me share my screen and it says host disabled screen participation. Can you guys allow me to share the screen? Yes, John, we definitely can. Sorry for the delay. Okay, that's okay. And just a little bit of background on myself while we're waiting, Kelly shared a lot. I've been in this job, I'm in my 16th year and I've been in high tech, I've been in public policy but this is this job I love. And I live five blocks from my office and three blocks in the downtown. I've lived here for 34 years. So it's a community I love. So let me just pull up the PowerPoint and there we go. Okay, so this is my branding downtown Berkeley place to explore. For those of you who may not know where is Berkeley, we are a town of about 130,000 small town and weren't from the university. We wouldn't be very well known. We are right across the bay from Sanford actually right across the bay from Golden Gate. We've got great views and just to get a little oriented. And our downtown district is just west of the campus. We basically joined the campus. There are second largest property owner after the city and they're a big, big partner in everything that we do. So I think as all of us know, downtowns are still struggling but we've turned a corner. It was particularly painful I think for San Francisco. You've heard a lot about it in the national media and probably the greatest lag as far as recovery. I was there in December and it was lit up. Our friends there have done a wonderful, wonderful light show that has brought a lot of people to downtown and people are beginning to return. So please come to the bay area, work across the bay but we're doing a lot better and we're seeing that in Berkeley which I'll describe to you. So our visitor trends were about up to pre-pandemic levels. So you see we started, this is weekly visits and we've been working with Placer.ai. I don't know if you're familiar with it, with what they do is they track cell phones and extrapolate and we're now about back up to the $300,000, 300,000 visitors per week level. We're a pretty sickle call. Part of it is due to COVID but also due to students as you guys with also the university when the university isn't in session, things slowed down significantly. Let me see. So encampments, we pre-COVID, we started doing, we do bi-weekly homeless counts. I can't tell you how important this has been. I was at a council meeting a couple of months ago and council was asking, well, how often do you do homeless counts? And they said, well, we do a point in time count every two years, every two years. But the Downtown Berkeley Association, they do it every two months. And then during public comment I said, well actually, thank you so much city manager, but we actually do it every two weeks. And we widely distribute this information and to get a handle on things that are going. We've been really trying to work with the city in Alameda County if they need to increase it, not do it every other year, but at least once a year. But anyway, the state has been very helpful. The important thing that happened obviously during COVID is the CDC guidelines, which you weren't allowed to ask people to move. And then we got the homeless outreach team to really work with us. And we have on staff a homeless outreach officer who helps direct people to services. And it was an element of tough love also. So we're actually better than we were beforehand. We're around 40. And it's not perfect, but I do hear from the brokers and from the merchants, things are better. The biggest issue that we frankly deal with is severe mental illness issues. A lot of smash windows, a lot of very antisocial behaviors that is detrimental to our business and arts community. I just added this slide because I was looking through your deck and we're doing okay on crime. And I don't know if you've been reading if it's made it out to Burlington and the national news, but Oakland has really been in a really, really tough situation and they are directly south of us. So there's a fair amount of spillover due to myriad of issues. There's a very progressive DA that has been sort of revolving door, particularly with miners. And this was just yesterday, our mayor's there who's running for the Senate. But we obviously as Brad, I caught the last part of Brad's presentation. We need regional approaches. And I think this is a step in a significant direction. Fortunately, the crime in Berkeley and even though, wow, and I looked at your hiring levels, you know, we're all struggling. Who wants to be a cop today? We're doing okay, not great. We have a new chief and a lot of it's community-based policing. We're also working on advancing more security cameras, et cetera, as they are in Oakland and San Francisco. Our vacancies have turned a corner. We, you know, as we know for everybody, COVID was really tough, the encampments were tough and the students disappeared. Not only do we have the University of California, we have Berkeley City College and we have the high school in our district. So there was just nobody here and a lot of closures, really heartbreaking. We're seeing a lot of leasing activity and just found out about another one this morning. And, but the key, but we still have ways to go. We're putting beverage, we're about where we were before, but we're still lagging in the other areas. Part of that's the advent of the internet and the pressure on retail, but we expect to see this hopefully increasing further. And this was from our board meeting last year and has been sort of our whole strategy due to the university and their growth plans and the housing shortage in the Bay Area. We have the most aggressive positive housing growth in the Bay Area and even while capital markets are tricky right now, as you all know. So here we are today at about, you know, we're gonna be four by August when this newest round of housing is gonna come online with about 4,700 units with 12,000 residents. And then we have in the pipeline several more thousand. So, and this is the core of our economic revitalization strategy and supporting this development. So this is an example of some of the buildings. I was involved in what was our downtown plan a number of years ago when I first started out. And after we had, it was twice it went to the voters. And I remember sitting with our mayor and he said, oh my God, this is really working because we were seeing all the applications for new housing. And as I like to say, my job is about gum stains and flower baskets. And the downtown plan working mayor was about land use planning and due to the university. So most of these buildings, a lot of these buildings are construction about to come online. And also because we have a BART station, we're 22 minutes from downtown San Francisco. And we're obviously part of the Bay Area economy. You know, as you know, the core, as I said, gum stains and flower baskets, this is our ambassador team. We have a team about 20, a homeless outreach person. And we do cleaning hospitality, landscaping events, but they're the core of our services. We spend about three quarters of our $2 million budget on these services. And we work with a company called Street Plus and previously worth block by block. And then placemaking, I always say, is sort of the icing on the cake. You can only get so far with gum stains and flower baskets and cleaning up messes, et cetera. And we've invested judiciously in placemaking. We work very closely with BART in the city and the redesign of our plaza. I worked really hard to get the coffee hut in our plaza, bistro tables and chairs. That's our Berkeley live stage in the background. We just put up shade sales this last year, which were very positive because there was a lot of glare. Here's a mural that went in recently. And then if you look at the planters on the lower left-hand side, we found these, first of all, they're earth planters, self-watering planters. I don't know if you haven't been in Burlington. They're not at the water very often, but they've been extremely effective in dealing with encampments. And it's a beautification effort, but we put them where we have clusters of tents and we beautify and also discourage encampments. So that's been quite successful. From our board and, you know, we're small town, we know everybody. So our board has, in our last renewal, said we really wanted to focus on policy and Brad and I, you and I talked about that over the years and so admired what the folks have been doing in Reno, but we recently formed the Berkeley Alliance of Business Organizations, BABO. We're actually sponsoring next week a debate amongst our mayoral candidates, work very closely, obviously, with the Chamber, Visit Berkeley, et cetera. And one thing I started doing, being sort of the gray beard of the group, is building with the precursor of BABO, with Alliance, with all the other districts. And then we also reached out to Oakland and the Oakland Chamber around the DA race and also advocating on county-wide issues. And then I'm also on the board of the California Downtown Association where we've been very active in Sacramento. And I was on the board of IDA where I chaired the homelessness and mental health subcommittee. In California, I think we're particularly proud at the CDA, we work with an extremely good lobbyist in Sacramento, a low-bono contract, very reasonable, affordable, and he knows everybody and he's guided our board and our team and we're about to do a hill day in Sacramento as well as we've done one, our first hill day last year in Washington, D.C. And I think what we were most proud of with the CDA is we brought forward a legislation last year around some clarification about bid regulation and renewal. There was very specific in our industry but we found a sponsor, I've brought it through, was totally unopposed, which was good to cut our teeth on. And then we were part of the coalition with the governor on the care court, which I'll talk about next. So Gavin Newsom is our governor. He used to be mayor of San Francisco and he brought forward about a year and a half, or maybe it was a year ago, that care court around severe mental illness. And as our lobbyist said, this was the first, he's been there what, governor for seven years or something. This is the first time he brought forward an initiative from the governor's office rather than having legislature do it. And initially there was a lot of opposition. The homeless rights activists, which are very different as you know than the homeless services organizations, but they all banded together. There was a letter to the governor and all the leading leaders in the assembly and the Senate opposing vehemently opposing. There must have been 30 plus logos and signatures. The governor worked really well with all of the leading mayors of LA, San Diego, Oakland, San Francisco, Sacramento, and then reaching out, building an additional coalition with the chamber, visit California and the California Downtown Association and it turned the tide. And I think part of it is you guys are facing in Burlington as we're facing in California. We all know seeing these people live and die on our streets is not compassionate care. So it's only being rolled out now in seven counties. It's a little bit fuzzy on what's voluntary versus mandatory. It's not full conservatorship, but that's a path to deal with it if people refuse the care court. And it's also focused initially on schizophrenia, severe mental illness and not drug addiction issues. But as we know, there's often codependency issues around that. So we got to start someplace. We also have major measure one MHSA reform on the March ballot was going to redirect billions of dollars towards severe mental illness. And as you know, there's 3% of the hospital beds for mental illness that there were in 1960 when President Kennedy started their form and then it continued through Carter and Reagan, et cetera. So we need more beds. We need to get people into care. And I think it was courageous of the governor to do this. It's gonna take a while, but we feel it's really important. The other thing during COVID and we're now in a deficit situation at the state, which makes things tricky, but we were in quite a surplus situation. And during COVID with federal dollars and state dollars, the state focused on project room key, which was a win, what I call a win-win in converting motels and some hotels into homeless housing. And here are just some of the statistics of folks that were provided into housing. We have created a little bit of a problem for ourselves in California and I can tell you in Berkeley because the situation is now with a lot of, we have our shelters and then we have our motels and a lot of the street pop are saying, sorry, my friend or this person, they got their own private motel room. I'm not gonna go in our congregate shelter. So, and because of the court situation, we can't force them. So, and we literally just had this big discussion with the mayor and our city manager where they're planning and converting another motel in our district that had just been renovated. And we just raised the bloody house. I said, look guys, you can't do this in the core of our downtown. So they're doing another motel, but we now had eight motels out of like 11 in Berkeley that are homeless. And what happens to our visitor market? We have two brand new, we have two nice hotels, but for the middle visitor market. So I think in general this is good, but we'll talk a little bit about what's happening and we'll hear from Power and Kate what's happening in Reno. So the other thing that's helped, we have a lot of housing coming online as I showed you in Berkeley and partly people been moving out of California because some of the problems and also the tech folks during COVID they moved out. The housing market has softened. So, as we all know, it's not enough. We still, so if we look at, we added 33 rooms with project room key and it's sort of 33,000, but we have over 106, this is just to 2020, 161,000 statewide. So, as I've said, we can't build enough housing, convert enough hotel rooms to make a serious dent on it. I mean, we've made a dent on it, but to address the issue and problem. And I think what's happening, there's a measure being introduced, joint measure being introduced in the legislature last week, bipartisan Republican and Democrat to looking at the San Diego model, which is really similar to like New York, a right to shelter. And a right to shelter is, we're gonna provide you shelter space but you can't be on the streets and California has not been willing to do that yet. So, and of course, we have all the folks that are in homelessness and then as you all know, people continue to follow into homelessness and as an investment point of view, the best investment you can do is somebody who is about to find it and fall into homelessness. But of course the federal dollars are focused on chronically homeless. So, how do you keep people preventing from falling into homelessness or if they've just fallen into homelessness and what I've heard from service providers and you probably know, if you get them in the next first 30 to 90 days, it's a lot easier to get them back on the path to housing and jobs and et cetera. But once they've been on the street for more than three months, it's really, it takes a lot and a lot of work. So, as you may know or have heard, we've really been stymied by the courts. And a couple of years ago in there was the decision, ninth circuit decision, federal court, ninth circuit, Martin versus Boise. And this question, where do we go, is a good one, is an invalid one. I can remember talking to one of our council members who was sort of the swing vote and she's actually become a good friend. She said, you know, we can't tell people they can't be here sleeping on streets. You know, where do they go? Where do they sleep? What's happened with the ninth circuit and the interpretation by the courts is that you can't clear the encampments if you unless you have a bed for every homeless person in San Francisco, Berkeley. And then on top of that, so this is the courthouse news article where they just blocked and I think this is January 11th. And then, and this is Berkeley December 22nd and they had ruled, they just ruled that we couldn't clear the final encampment. The other thing that's happened is the homeless rights activists have been using ADA as a legal argument saying that people deal with such trauma and issues that they aren't able to go into a shelter, congregate shelter, or even a house situation because of their disability, their mental health disability. So as you may know, the Supreme Court has agreed to take up Grants Pass ruling on Martin versus Boise, the Grants Pass case. And we are working right now with the IDA International Downtown Association and yesterday we had a board meeting where we're gonna do work with IDM and amicus brief. And it's kind of ironic that here we are a progressive city and, you know, Burlington's a progressive city and we have a Supreme Court that's quite conservative. But it's quite likely that, I mean, that the good chance the Supreme Court will overturn Martin versus Boise, which doesn't mean we're gonna arrest people, et cetera, but it means it gives a little bit more leverage to doing what Reno has done. And we'll hear from Parr and Caden how they managed that to a little bit of tough love getting people into high quality shelters with the wraparound services. So I can tell you, my friend Alex Donetsky was head of the Reno Downtown Association and he and I talked every month and he goes, you know, what else is going on? I said, we're actually working on this CARES campus. So tell me more about that. And so we actually brought out our West Coast Urban District Forum to Reno in part because of the great work he was doing and also the opportunity to tour the CARES campus. And I just can't tell you how impressed we were and the teamwork that was exhibited by the business community, the city, the county, the business improvement district. And Parr and Caden, I really hope that we can get another delegation from California soon. So with that, I turn it over to our friends in Reno and Wanshaw County. And thank you very much for your attention. Thank you, John. We certainly heard a lot of similarities but absolutely a different scale, so very helpful. So our last group of speakers is, I have affectionately nicknamed Team Reno. They're an incredible team of three different people who have worked together on a solution that I think is interesting, compelling, new, maybe call it cutting edge. So I'll introduce all three of them and then I'll turn it over to them for their presentation. Parr Tolles is the founder and CEO of Tolles Development. He's the owner and founder and CEO of Tolles, a multi-disciplinary development firm that believes thoughtful development creates stronger communities. Founded in 2016, the Tolles portfolio features diverse range of office, retail, industrial and hospitality properties across Nevada. Grant Denton is the executive director of the Karma Box Project. Grant has experienced life on the streets firsthand. Once homeless, a drug addict and in and out of jail, he has learned valuable lessons about life and how to survive. And his experiences inform the projects he helps to create for unsheltered people. Now sober, employed and a father, he is on a mission to help others get off the streets and back to a better life. Finally, Kate Thomas is the assistant county manager of Washoe County, Nevada. Kate was appointed assistant county manager for Washoe County in July 2017. Prior to that, Kate served as the assistant city manager for Reno from 2015 to 2017. She began her 20 plus year career in government overseeing environmental programs for the city of Thousand Oaks in Ventura County, California in 1996. Kate and her husband moved to Nevada in 2004 when she was hired as the assistant city manager for Reno. So I'm gonna welcome our team from Reno, Nevada. Thanks. Well, good afternoon, everybody. My name's Bartolz. We'll do a quick introduction here. I know she just did, but to stay with our football analogies, I'm kind of the color commentator. Wow, my head is really big on that story. I'm gonna share this story real quickly on my presentation. So I'm the color commentator. Kate, kind of our play-by-play, she's gonna take you through a lot of the data and then the good-looking guy on the right there is our on-side line reporter. There's also a slight resemblance to Travis Kelsey and we can maybe make Kate our Taylor Swiftie, too, but. Anyway, we're happy to share our experience. It's kind of been a journey for all of us in different ways. I'm the business guy and represent the private side and I would say Brad, I don't know if you're still there, but you kind of got me into this. I didn't understand the population or city redevelopment in a way that I did after I spent time with Brad and I think I drank his Kool-Aid and give me the thumbs up. And yeah, you were a huge inspiration to me and I appreciate it. And John, way to go with everything you have good happening at Berkeley, too, it's pretty exciting to see. So I'm gonna, we're gonna try to all do this in 15 minutes each and we're gonna cruise through the best we can. I'll take you through my portion first. So I'm gonna quickly just take you through the history of Reno and how I think we got here from my perspective. Again, I'm a real estate developer and I've worked downtown and I ignored what I saw for a long time. And if you have a heart and it doesn't eventually break with what you see with this population then something else is wrong. And so I eventually got out of my multi-story office and got down on the streets a little bit more and started to think about how a guy like me in the business community could affect change. And let me take you through Reno real quick. So where are we? We're actually closer to John and we are to Las Vegas. I think most of you probably think that Reno is close to Las Vegas like most people do but we're kind of a satellite city to the Bay Area. We're 35 minutes from beautiful Lake Tahoe, 35 miles from beautiful Lake Tahoe, 130 miles from Sacramento. So a two hour drive to the capital of California and then roughly 200 miles to Napa in San Francisco and 440 miles to Las Vegas. So we do a lot of business with our friends to the West. I would say during COVID they rediscovered us. We have a lot of immigration from California, to Reno, but we are, yeah, we're very close to California and like a lot about it and get frustrated with some of it too. So we'll talk a little bit more about that as we go. So let's start with some good news. We were listed as one of the happiest places to live in America. And you'll see we came a long way from the recession where we were pronounced almost dead. So we were pretty happy to see that. We've had some cities start to look at what we've accomplished. I think we're at halftime. Nobody's spiking the ball yet. So we've made some strides and we have an article that saw Lake City there on the right. And then Taylor Swift there is, I think you all found out about us through the Wall Street Journal. And Kate and I spent a day and a half with a reporter and crossed our fingers that what he saw would be positive and the article ended up being pretty positive. So we were happy to get some good publicity. But so you know where we came from, we have kind of a little bit of a sort of little history. We were, I think, since city before since city was cool, but in 1931 we became the gambling capital of the United States and we were kind of hit with the Rat Pack. So we have lots of pictures with Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe and we were a wonderful place to be entertained. Lake Tahoe and Reno became a great entertainment and gambling area for mainly all of California. To double down on that, we were able to, we were the first ones to speed up divorces. So now we had gaming, we had entertainment and you can get divorced really quick. And then we kind of accommodated that with a bunch of hotels that were built in the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. And so Reno continued to spring up and had a vibrant, a really vibrant entertainment downtown. Lastly, we legalized prostitution, not something we're super proud of, but still alive and well today, if you can believe it. And so we were, yeah, we were kind of, what phase Reno, what happens to Reno phase Reno before they came along. And so that was kind of the bulk of our economy along with some warehouses, but this is where Reno really kind of made a name for itself. And then we saw trouble ahead in the seven. So Los Angeles got very busy, Hollywood got very popular and Vegas was born. And so a lot of what we had coming our way in Reno started going to Las Vegas. And then in the early 2000s, Indian gaming was legalized in California. And we saw our economy take a real switch. And in some ways it was good. We have a little bit of a Darwin effect in that a lot of the blighted casinos and senior areas kind of went away, but in our good entertainment venue stayed. But this had a huge impact on the economy. And this led us into the GFC where we had a really, really rough six to eight years. We were the poster child for the housing issues. And we were even on the front of our paper here. You can see we were called the Detroit of the West. And I would say a lot of us, I'm originally from the Bay Area. And I think a lot of it's thought about leaving. Fortunately, a good core of us didn't. And we started really trying to adjust and diversify our economy, which we did through advanced logistics, skill manufacturing. And we'll talk a little bit about Tesla's Gigafactory coming into Carina, which really changed the direction and perception of what Reno was. In my business, I travel a lot throughout the West and went to Portland, Seattle, San Francisco and LA, spent a fair amount of time there and saw a really rapid evolution into some of these disturbing pictures. And I saw Reno going the same way. And I don't know, I remember coming back from a trip to Portland saying to our team that if we don't really get a hold of this, we're two steps ahead right now, but if we don't get an action plan in place, we're gonna quickly devolve into what's happening to our Western neighbors. I don't know if Seattle, if these cities get their downtown back. I know the name are working hard, but it's gonna be a long road. And so we, a group of us went into action and started really looking for solutions very quickly on how we could stymie the growth of our unhoused. This is just another statistical slide. I think it goes on to what I just said. We were ninth and we had moved to ninth in the United States for the homeless population. And again, this is what kind of led a fire up under us to start making some strides in the right direction. So this is what Reno, what I go down, this is what I go to work in every day downtown. We have lots of casinos, lots of big parking garages, a small business community, but unfortunately this is a backdrop and it's almost like a movie screen. We have these big white walls in downtown and there's not a lot of business people walking through our entertainment districts, but it frames a lot of this. And so again, this is kind of what we saw growing quicker than we wanted to around the downtown. And started looking for ways to start diversifying and changing. So again, I mentioned, we've got all these great attributes in Reno. We've got Lake Tahoe, which is 30 minutes away. We've got a great budding university, not even budding, it's becoming a really vibrant institution that we're really proud of. We had this California immigration that was really looking for a higher quality development. I'll shamelessly plug our development down there at the bottom, which is kind of a bougie retail development that has been successful. And we saw a demand for this type. And then Tesla came in, which is with the Gigapactory in a joint venture with Panasonic where they developed the drive shaft and the batteries for the Tesla. They also are developing their first electric truck semi in a building that we built right next door to this. And this rebranded us in the technology world and we've seen a great influx of data centers and skilled manufacturing come in, which has moved us away from gaming, which has been really positive. We also have Burning Man, which is a alternative art festival, which you can read about on Google if you so choose, but it's had the exhaust of Burning Man has been great for our community. And so we're just this really interesting quilt. Reno is its own thing. It's not like a Pearl district in Portland. It's not like Austin, Texas. It's its own quilt of these dynamic different interests. And we don't wanna try to control it too much, we wanna continue to let it evolve, but we wanna hopefully be a model for the West and how we can passionately, but firmly deal with the unhoused. So let's get to how we have started along that journey. So between the downtown Reno partnership, the village at St. Street Catholic Charities, you can read these and we'll read them all off and I'm gonna touch on each of these and but focus on three of them and then Kate's gonna take you to the Cares campus. But where I met Brad and where we really started to see changes when we formed our ambassador program, the downtown Reno partnership. We have a hundred block area, we assess ourselves and we fund 15 that's now gone to 20 ambassadors around Reno and we saw a 50% drop in misdemeanor calls to the police within the first 12 months that we instituted this program. And when I saw that as the business private guy, I thought, okay, I didn't know if I can make a difference but I really helped form this. And if I can dip my toe in here and see immediate change like that, then maybe I had to lean in a little bit more. So I got on a small task force to say, hey, what can we do about more affordable housing or transitional housing? And I had a guy call me out of the blue and say, hey, I hear what you guys are trying to do. I've got this man camp or my friend has a man camp in nowhere Wyoming that's on BLM land, the oil fields just closed and we need to move this man camp out in the next six months, which you can look at it. And we just had a general attitude of we were just going to say yes to everything. If somebody asked us to come tour a facility, we'd say yes. If somebody had a crazy idea, we would say yes. And so this guy said, you're going to have to get in a small little private plane and fly out to the oil fields of Wyoming. And we said yes. And we got out there. We got the whole city in a room. We faith timed the city planning department. We walked through these dormitories and they said, wow, this actually could work structurally. It could work. If we think this meat code, you're going to have to put sprinklers in it. But if you can somehow get these dorms out to Reno, we'll give you four acres and we will do everything we can in our power to help you get this set up. So 54 truckloads later, we and the art community dove in. We had volunteers from the contracting world from the engineering world. We painted this, we landscaped it. And this has now become a ULI case study for transitional housing called the Village of State Street. So we charge $500 a month. People get an 80 square foot room with bunk bed, a desk, a closet, a TV. And hopefully you're there for six to nine months. We help you provide wraparound services. And when you get, we get you into a permanent housing situation within that, within the first year. And so far it's worked really well. The volunteers in America runs it, which is kind of a salvation army program. I hope you haven't heard about it. And again, would be happy to talk to you more about the village as you guys evaluate what's gonna work in your community. So out of the blue, we had this four acres that the city gave us and we realized that we were right across the freeway from our place, which is an emergency housing provider for women and children. We thought, wow, this is kind of interesting. We're close to this. We had a little couple of acres next to us and a federally qualified health center decided to build 30 tiny homes and run a sober living program out of this, which has also been a huge success. So now we had Sage Street next to the tiny homes across the freeway from the women's and children's shelter. And then COVID hit. And like Manna from Heaven, we had $70 million we had to spend in six months. And we set on a path to raise $6 million or we sort of have to raise $8 million. We raised six and a half along with the money that we got from ARPA. And we had to use it or lose it. So we built the plane while we were applying it and we built one of the larger homeless shelters in the country along with the safe camp. And I'm not gonna steal Kate and Grant's thunder, they'll walk you through this. But this ended up being right across the street from Sage Street. So just to give you an aerial map here, we ended up, we call this the little cul-de-sac of care or the corridor of hope. But I started right here with these dormitories. If you can see my cursor, where is the village on Sage Street and Hope Springs built their three tiny homes. Then we got the 15 acres from the state and we were able to build the campus that we're gonna talk about. We had Catholic Charities down the street, which has a big commercial kitchen. It serves 900 meals a day to the Cares campus. Food is not a problem in Reno. You will not go hungry Reno if you want to. The future, I'm sorry, our place is across the freeway here. And then right now, we are building right next to the Cares campus that's federally qualified health center or FQHC is building a 50,000 square foot clinic. So it is just amazing how this organically just kind of happened. And I felt like I was in this twilight zone of everything the gondolas just kept, when the more we said yes, the more we responded to what the need was, the more things kept happening. And it was, it continues to be just this phenomenal journey. The two more I'll mention and then I'll wrap up Karma Box, a much better picture of Grant than you'll see on the video. But Karma Box wins the faith camp, which is these Mod Pods hard tents that, and I'll let Grant talk about that, but those are actually right adjacent to the Cares campus. And then we've also leaned heavily into the mental health port, which I think John talked about in Berkeley a little bit. And this is a whole nother program that was really inspired by Judge Lyceman in Miami and is really, really impactful in the way that we deal with the mentally ill that we don't wanna clog up our jail. So there's another alternative for them to get help, to get medication and have some sort of accountability that's not in handcuffs. So in summary, for me, all, here's my, here's my recommendation for you business guys and girls that are in the private side. Use whatever you do as a platform to get involved. For me, it was real estate development. I got to meet a lot of city council people, a lot of planners, and just again, started saying yes. I have found that nonprofits are dying for leadership in their respective boards. So join a board or join two or three and get involved and help use your skill set to help on these different nonprofit organizations. I've also found that cities, counties, faith communities and nonprofits are used to operating in silos. Help them see the whole playing field. Help them see the whole chess board and help everybody pull on the rope together because we're all trying to solve the same problem and they need help understanding that. Many of you are attached to the foundation, fundraising community, you speak their language and they will respect you when you decide to give your time to this type of involvement. Learn to be an authentic storyteller. I've got so many stories now that I present with and it moves people, right? I mean, when you, when the greedy business guy, real estate developer like I'm framed so much actually has a heart and is moved by what you see every day and you're able to tell that to people, it moves them and it calls them to action. And then lastly, get your hug on. People hug each other a lot more in this community than they do in my world. So I've learned to be a good hugger. So anyway, that's my color commentary. Really proud of you guys, Burlington for all of you that are there that are actually taking time to lean into this. And with that, I'll turn over to Kate. All right. Hopefully everyone can hear me okay. Here's my giant hat. I have nothing like Taylor Swift, I wish I were. Thank you again for being here today. Kate Thomas with Washoe County in Nevada, flatten that vowel. Wanting to tell you a little bit about the governmental side of the story. Much like Par said, we do this because we care. You're all in the room from civic to local leaders because you care about your communities. We are the same. And so when the pandemic hit, I'll share my screen, we were faced with needing to, here we go, whoops. We were faced with needing to put folks somewhere as well. We have a quarter of hope as Par mentioned and we're fortunate enough to have an option to 15 acres. I'm zooming out from where, let's see here, I just got a message. Hopefully they'll hear me. I'm getting a message that Zoom quit unexpectedly. Hopefully you can still, we're still with me. We're still with you, you may have lost you. Hopefully I'm back. I got a message that Zoom quit unexpectedly. Can you hear me okay? Okay, great. Let's try sharing again, see if that works. Gotta love technology. Okay, so if you missed that, we zoomed out from where Par was showing the quarter of hope. You appear where the Cares Campus sits in our crook of downtown Reno. We've got a freeway running north and south, east and west and in the southwestern quadrant, we have our Cares Campus and the quarter of hope. What's going on here? We keep crashing. Let me cut my video, that's a good idea, I heard that. Okay, hopefully you can still hear me and see my screen. We've got now a picture of the Cares Campus with its 15 acres and the different phases where we have various components. We have the emergency shelter that we set up. It's 46,000 square foot of tent structure. It's the blue in the top right-hand corner of your screen. Par, can you let me know if you can hear me okay? And see my screen. You guys can hear me? Okay. Yeah, you're good. Keep rolling. Okay, thank you. All right, we're gonna roll on. So the 46,000 square foot structure at the top of your screen in blue was our first attempt to socially distance individuals and answer the question that you heard earlier with the Martin versus Boise case, where do we go? So when we're looking to potentially displace an encampment, we didn't wanna face that question of, well, you can't be here and folks say to us, where should we go? We've got a place now. At the time it was 604 beds. It was a structure really remedial with a bunch of bunk beds in it and some portable bathrooms that we brought in during the pandemic. We quickly learned those bathrooms weren't sufficient and sprung into action to develop the plan that you see here, learning and adjusting as we go. So we've got the tent, we've got supportive housing on site that's eventually going to be built. We have our safe camp, which you'll hear a little bit more about and an intake and resource center. So I'll go through some renderings of what you'll see as we zoom in on the campus, but I wanted to give you an idea of the 15 acre structure and where it sits in town. So in our CARES campus, we have, like I mentioned, the shelter, which offers the basics of emergency shelter with a bed, meals. We have property storage, which is important. Showers, laundry, you're able to have your pet on campus. We learned after the pandemic that closing that campus with a fence was really important. We didn't have control of that at first. Of course, we have case management. We brought in behavioral health services. We ended up bringing in a medical contract because we were having calls for service that were very high from our local ambulance provider. Everything from changing cloths, bags to doing wound care. You really need someone on site at a shelter like this. Employment support. Of course, when you're in there, you have to focus on housing. This is not where you're going to live. This is a stopping point. And then we want to continue to reduce any barriers that we have so we don't have individuals that can make that case that they don't want to come into a congregate shelter. So as we contemplated just that level of having 603 of your best friends next to you as you're sleeping, we decided instead of tearing it down and doing individual shelters around town, which seems to be national best practice, we would break our 46,000-sprung structure into components where we would have a variety of congregate beds. We would have little cubbies, as you'll see in some of these pictures, that are super successful as an incentive for individuals who go, how do I get into that cubby? It's like sitting in first class versus sitting in coach, where you go, I want to get to that next point. And so if you're willing to engage in some case management, we will move you forward into one of the cubbies, which is a little bit more privacy. It has a little locker in it and a plug to charge your phone. So again, we're providing those incentives without being heavy-handed within the sprung structure. What you can see also on the exterior was we didn't want to take up any shelter space. So we built exterior bathroom shower laundry units that you'll see a little bit. I have some pictures of those coming for, but that overview is sort of what we set up during the pandemic and answering that where do we go question. We built it to a point where it could handle the level of service that's needed by this population very hard on these facilities. So we have the laundry units, showers, and restrooms that I mentioned. Our big welcome center is about 20,000 square foot. This is your entrance on the campus. It's not complete now. It's under construction. It's all framed in. We've got a roof. We're starting to do the interior improvements, but basically you walk in. There's, as you can see in the rendering, a metal detector, we're pretty heavy in security these days. We want the clients to be safe. We want our staff to be safe. So you've got a dining hall that connects to the large sprung structure and staff offices. We have an upstairs where staff can go to sort of get away from the difficulties of working on a campus where you're faced with a lot of people going through some pretty heavy stuff every day. So I wanted to put a lot of thought into how we built this facility going forward. You heard a little bit earlier from some of our speakers about people not wanting to come into a congregate shelter. They'd rather have those motel rooms in California. Our answer to that was individuals that didn't want to come into congregate care. We tried out a safe camp. We did this right as the pandemic was wrapping up or finishing that first year. When we opened the large sprung structure, we also had 50 tents at the time where people could come in to a secure area with property storage and bathrooms. But they wouldn't be in a large congregate setting. They had their individual living space. These were individuals that were on the river under tarps or encampments. And we were willing to have them in a safer space so we could reduce some of those barriers for them. While we had them in tents, the Nevada winners just like Vermont are no joke. So there was a product that came online that we flew up to Portland to see it's called a Mod Pod. So what you're seeing here is the current state of our 50 Mod Pod safe camp that's enclosed by a fence, has a gathering space in the middle. You'll see areas for walking your dog. There's a little dining computer lab off to the west of this picture that you can't see, but really took that safe camp model to the next level so that individuals that can't be in a congregate setting. And we've got folks who come in here and actually will sit in their Mod Pod. And Grant will tell you a little bit about this for a few days just to kind of process it all before they are willing to come out. But super successful program for us. The message here being that one size does not fit all. So one of the reasons that this campus is successful, we had a lot of space, we have a variety of shelter. You saw the congregate setting, you saw the cubbies, you saw the Mod Pods. But really as a local jurisdiction, we can't do this all. It really takes a village. And so what we committed to putting in place was contracts and memorandums of agreement for folks to come on to campus to provide services that they're already providing in our community. So you've got our list here of partners, everything from the FQHC that Par mentioned to provide some medical stuff. You've got the dental services, the food bank, rehabilitation, our mobile outreach and services team, animal services, super cuts, giving haircuts. I mean, anybody you can think of, you should have an agreement to come on and do the work. The county can't do all the work, the city can't do all the work, the operator can't do all the work. It really takes intensive partnership and support of those nonprofits and other organizations that are in your community to be successful. I mentioned a little bit about the on-site medical care. We found that having this many people in a jurisdiction in one area of town, all of those things, were pretty intensive on resources. We had a lot of law enforcement coming to the campus. We had a lot of trips from our ambulance provider. And so by putting some measures in place with on-site security and a medical provider, we were able to reduce the times that those resources were drawn out of our community and onto this campus. It saves the community a lot of money to do that. To make those investments, you're saving, having people in detention, you're having savings around ambulance trips and hospital bed days. So making an investment in the services on campus, I would argue is a really good investment for the community. Is it working? I would think so. We've got now over 800 individuals that we have placed out of that campus since May of 2021 into permanent housing. And the way we define and HUD defines permanent housing is that that is a lease so that they have tenant rights. And so you can see here, the trajectory is positive replacing about one person a day into housing, which we call a win. You're all probably thinking, okay, well, how many people are coming back out? We track that too. We're very data centric. And so when we first opened, it was a bit high. It's been going down consistently. We're seeing a trend. People are staying housed. We're starting to put resources around having individuals touching back to people. Once you house them in the community, don't just forget about them and wait to see whether they come back, but making sure that those individuals have the resources they need to say how successful in the community. We also have, I mentioned data. Rather than waiting for a point in time count, we have adopted a built for zero model. It's a national model where about 100 cities and counties around the country have taken a data-driven approach to knowing people by name that are in your community so that you can best target them with services. We now keep a monthly dashboard of the yellow number, which is sheltered and the blue number sheltered as well in transitional, as well as the unsheltered folks in our community. So we have a monthly snapshot. So we're constantly looking at data to see how we're performing, where we need to apply resources. I put the link to our dashboard below this image for those that are interested. And then I'll leave you all with some key takeaways. I mentioned regional agreement. Others have as well. You heard Brad mentioned local regional solutions is the only answer. When we early on took the lead in homelessness as the county, which had been a city function for so long, we said, okay, we'll take this on, but you guys, the two cities in our region have to be laser focused on housing so that everybody knows who's doing what and we all know that those efforts are complimentary. And so it really helped us kind of stay in our lane. Now we all know that elected officials, city and county policymakers and so forth can constrain and hear new programs and want to venture out of that, but really keeping everybody going in the same direction is where we're going to see success nationally. I mentioned that we are data driven. That's hard to argue with when you come forward for needs of resources or to show successes. That's that built for zero model that I encourage you to look into. Our relationships with operators, our operators on site from grant who you'll hear about next who is our operator of the safe camp. You have to have a partnership. It's not a county telling you what to do scenario. It's working together and being adaptive to understand the needs and helping those operators satisfy those needs to best help our individuals. You heard from Par who is hugely invested from the private side of our community. We raised six and a half million dollars to show a private investment so that it wasn't just a government responsibility. That has been completely transformative from our standpoint as far as what we're doing right. As staff to see that your business community is stepping up and putting in private and dollars into this is huge for accountability for us as a local jurisdiction and for the staff that do this work. I mentioned it takes a village. We've also got robust outreach teams. We've got law enforcement that is constantly out touching base with people that are still in encampments encouraging them into housing and placing them straight from the streets in the housing which is another successful model. And then lastly, if you don't have the housing all of us grinds to a halt to really making sure that while you're working on congregate different types of shelter that there's housing to place those individuals into I think are really the critical takeaways. So I'll leave you with that. I'll thank you for your attention. And obviously, if you have additional questions you know how to get a hold of us. So I'll stop sharing and turn it over to Grant. Do I just go? Okay. I'm like, I'm waiting. I'm like, what's gonna happen? Hi everybody. I'm Grant Denton on the founder and executive director of the Karma Box project. And we do outreach. We do transitional housing. We do the safe camp. We do prison and street reentry programs. And I'm a unique situation to where my rap sheet ends up being my resume. I spent nine years on the streets in Vegas. I was a heroin meth addict and I was homeless and I was in and out of the system. And of course, this is childhood drama. This is a maladaptive response to the world. It's caused by many things. I remember when I was a kid and I was growing up there was this commercial with a guy. You guys remember that commercial and he had an egg and he cracked it and he put it on a frying pan. And he was like, this is your brain. This is your brain on drugs and you fried and it scared you. You're like, no drugs. Don't ever do drugs. And there was this campaign that just say no campaign and it made sense, right? It seemed logical. Just say no. It seems really easy. But when I was 14, I had come from a broken home. I was looking for a place to belong and when somebody offered me drugs I wasn't saying no to the drug. I was saying no to the group or the connection. And I wanted a connection. I wanted to be part of something. So I didn't do meth because I couldn't wait to do meth. I did drugs because I wanted to be a part of something, right? And that's one of the biggest issues that we have right now working with addicts is that when it comes to somebody that's homeless and addicted you're not like, you have inconsistent housing, you have inconsistent employment, you have inconsistent relationships and the only thing that really shows up for you is drugs, right? Every time I use I get high and every time I drink I get drunk and is that an excuse? Not really, but it's why we have such a problem. And so anyways, I spent years on the streets in and out of the system. I couldn't figure it out, right? And there was one time, right? I ended up getting locked up for I was facing a few years, five to seven years in prison for burglaries and other drug related crimes, right? If you got $150 a day habit and you don't have any source of income you might break the law, you might steal some stuff. And so, plus it's violent out there. And so I was facing five to seven years in prison and I was offered a drug court program similar to mental health court or these community courts where it's giving you an alternative that's not punitive but that's corrective, right? You can be punitive and you can be corrective with two different things. And this one gave me an opportunity to go to rehab. And I took it and while I was in jail I had a paradigm shift, right? I realized that I was 34 years old at the time and I hadn't done much with my life. I had kids that I didn't father and I wanted to change. I wanted to do something different. I wanted to be a different me. So, one thing's really cool about losing everything is you got nothing to lose. And so I really committed to reinventing myself. And when I got out, I was just, I just wanted it. I wanted to help people. I wanted to help folks like me. I had a situation that happened where I asked my mentor, you know, what could I, what, you know what you thought that I should do to, you know I would see people in these programs, they would fail over and over and over again, right? When the program was over and I was concerned that when my program was finished, my probation was finished that I would fail as well. And she told me that there's three kinds of motivation, right? There's fear motivation, you're in fear right now because, you know, if you mess up, you're gonna go back to prison. Fear motivation is the strongest but it only lasts as long as the threat. And she said, talked about growth motivation and how you have to be motivated to stay clean and to grow by something that's bigger than you, something that's bigger than yourself. And I found that with my, with my mom telling me her version of my story. And I don't know if, and I'm, I don't know for sure but I'm pretty convinced that there are folks out there right now that have people in their families that are struggling with drug addiction or you know somebody that's struggling from drug addiction. And I asked my mom her version of my story. And when she told me, it totally floored me. My version, she told me her version of my overdose. I overdosed a few times, but one of her versions or one of the times from my perspective, I'm at a friend's house, I shoot up, I overdose and I wake up in the hospital four days later. I call my mom to see if she can come pick me up or give me some money. And she doesn't answer the phone and on her voicemail I tell her what a terrible person she is for not being there for me when I need her. And when she, her version of the story is she gets a call from my friend saying that I overdosed and I'm not doing well and that I might not make it. And my mom shows up to the hospital and sits there at the foot of the bed watching her son die for four days and she didn't leave until she knew that I would be okay. And then she gets that call from me. Now, when she told me that story, you know, they say it's hard to see the picture when you're in the frame and that really knocked me out of the frame. It made me understand the, the damage that I did when I was on the streets. And so from then I decided that my growth motivation was that I'm gonna help people like me. So I got into working in Silver Living. I was actually in Silver Living at the time. I worked my way up to assistant manager, manager, moved out to Reno, started doing Silver Living out here, started working in at a methadone clinic where we started the actual Karma Box project. We would do these little food pantries and we'd place them all over the city and you put non-perishable food hygiene items. It's a reciprocal gig where people that can give, put in them and people that can take, just take out. It's just a free pantry model. And after I did that, I went and worked at the shelter. Now the shelter is an interesting, was an interesting place back then. It was what we, it was kind of considered the Wild West. You know, I am a subject matter expert at homelessness and addiction, but just my homelessness and addiction and nobody else's. And when I went there, I got a chance to see all varieties of homelessness and addiction and seeing like the different types. And it's very complex. And so I had this feel for, I wanted to work in the homeless and I went and worked at the downtown Reno partnership for a little bit. I was doing the ambassador program, but around COVID, and I'm sure you guys experienced there was the shelter in place mandate from the CDC where you couldn't move any of these tents. And at that time, the downtown was shut down and there were no businesses and the homeless had been moved, the homeless population had been moved to the event centers. You got 280 homeless folks that during the day had to go outside while they disinfect the beds and they're milling about downtown. It was just this post-apocalyptic scene we had this bridge by the river where there were anywhere from 350 to 400 campers just on one side. It was about the length of a few football fields. And it was just, it was an interesting thing to be a part of. And so I left the downtown Reno partnership and started my own nonprofit doing outreach in that area. And we learned a lot from being in there. So when you say outreach, people are like, what do you do when you do outreach to a homeless encampment? You're not gonna walk up to somebody's tent and be like, hey man, you wanna change your life? And they'd be like, yeah, let me just grab my stuff. It doesn't happen like that. It's never happened, zero percent of the time does that ever happen? You have to build rapport and develop a relationship with these folks. And how do you do it? Well, the best way to build a relationship with someone is to help them solve a problem. And in the camps, two of their biggest problems are behavioral and environmental. Now the behavioral problem, I don't know if I was gonna be able to help them with all the behavioral stuff at that point. But I can help you with environment. I can help you clean up trash. And so what I would do is I would grab trash bags and I would just help folks clean up their area. I would clean up their area, I'd get to know them. And from that program, we developed a, from doing that, we developed a program called the River Stewards where I would give guys gift cards to help me clean up trash along the river next to the camp. And from that, we started housing people. We started putting people in treatment. We started moving folks to the next phase. And right about this time, the shelter's opening and it falls on us to get people into the shelter. Well, the interesting thing with homelessness is we realize that there's four constants when you're living on the streets. These things will happen no matter what. You're subject to the elements. Your things are gonna get stolen. You're gonna have to, you're gonna be subject to violence. You're gonna have to physically defend yourself some day because that's conflict resolution. And you're always on someone else's property. And because of these things, we realized that it's difficult to get folks into a place number one because they're used to being on the streets. And it's difficult to house people from the streets because there's two things you can't do at once, right? You can't protect yourself and grow. And so when people don't feel, aren't in a place where they feel relatively safe, they're difficult to work with. And so Kate and I had a conversation and we pitched a safe camp tour and she was all in and she was like, let's go. And so we moved on this safe camp. And on the way, when she was like, let's get it going, I did homework on other safe camps. And I went to a safe camp out in Portland and it was called Dignity Village. And because everybody said this was the safe camp that we're gonna, this is the best safe camp. We should model this. And when I went out there, not so much. It was a perfect example of what not to do. When the guy that was giving me the tour, he was pointing a few things out and I asked him, I'm like, hey man, how long have you been here? And he told me, he was like, man, I don't know about 12 years, I've been here 12, Carol's been here eight, Johnny's been here nine. I was taken back because that's exactly what you don't wanna do. We didn't solve this homeless problem, we just packaged it in a different place. You don't, if the model is harm reduction, you meet people where they're at, but you don't leave them there. And that's exactly what they did. So we knew that our, in order for us to be successful, it was to get people to the next phase. And what does that look like? And that's success for us would be permanently housed with stable income, permanent housing stable income. And how do you do that? And so we started the safe camp and we started building policies around those two things. And you get in and you start to work with folks and we also identified this. We identified that it's not just, when you look at homelessness, the word homeless, if you're gonna solve that problem, you just put somebody in a home. It's a terrible idea. I can look at your tent and tell you what your apartment's gonna look like. Some people are not prepared for a home. Some people shouldn't go straight to a home. That is all. Some people will never live by themselves. And we were finding this out by working with people in the context of their living, which was the safe camp. And we identified that there's four different types of people, right? There's two kinds of homelessness. There's situational, which is the rent was raised. Your partner left the house and you can't cover the rent by yourself. Something happened, you lost your job, whatever. And it's a situational homelessness which could be remedied usually in about 90 days. Usually folks have to wear with all the navigator system and get it back. And then there's behavioral. And within the behavioral bubble, there's a few different things, right? There's a few different types of folks we identified. We identified that you're willing and able. Those guys are situational. They'll get right off real quick. You have your willing, but unable. Now this is physical disabilities or mental disabilities. You have your unwilling, but able. Those are the guys we call the separatists, the guys that are doing this, you know, it's romanticized, right? They like living on the streets. There are the few in the population that actually want to be there for now, right? They usually transition back to the other side, but for now. And then you have your unwilling and unable and that's the severely mentally ill that I believe, and I think they were talking about it earlier about being able to put folks in a secured psychiatric facility where they can be safe and be stable because some people will just, some folks on the streets will just never make it. There are a few things that we identified when we're working with folks too is some of the easiest people to house or folks that have an income, you know, because of subsidized housing or wherever they're at on the list of the vulnerabilities go. But some of the most difficult and what we're working on right now are people that are employable, people that should be able to be employed because they're lacking five things. They're lacking work ethic, work etiquette, conflict resolution skills, communication skills and time management skills. And so what we try to do while they're with us is create a system that models the one we want them to live in. So if they're somebody that could be employed, we work with them in that way to where we try to teach folks without them knowing they're being taught. And that's by putting systems in place, like policies that are pressing them to be responsible, get up on time. And that's actually my timer for 15 minutes because if you let me, I would just talk all day. And so anyways, we do have a successful model. I would go ahead and say that the safe camp is absolutely necessary in any city because you can help, you can help be able to identify the individual a little bit better. So because it's not a one, everybody knows it's not a one size fits all. And when you do create a one size fit all model, you're doing a disservice to the other sizes. And we know that you need to create flow. We know that we need an ecosystem of tiered mobility to where we properly assess people when they come live with us, right? It's what people tell you, it's what they say and it's what you see. So sometimes people have been telling stories their whole time on the streets, that they'll tell you and it's difficult to work with folks if you don't know the truth. So there has to be a setting where you can watch folks and identify what the real issue is. But I truly believe that Reno right now, and I've been in nine different cities, I've seen a lot of stuff. I believe that Reno right now, using this model that we have with the congregate shelters, with the collaboration of the jurisdictions, with the private sector collaborating with government and with nonprofits being supported by PAR and CATE and empowering people to be able to try new things and to be able to move the needle a little bit more. So I truly believe that Reno's on a path that other folks will go on a model. Yeah. Thank you for talking to you, Grant. Oh. Thank you very much. Grant telling it like it is. So I think it's an interesting story. We have a government, a private person from the private sector and a nonprofit working together in this model and everything that I've read about it, it's really inspirational. Also appreciated John and Brad. And I know John had to leave, he's interviewing a new DPW director for the city of Berkeley. But the rest of our folks are here if people want to ask questions of them before we go to breakout, we certainly can do that. Yep, we just need, Colin, can you walk around with the microphone? We have two microphones here and I might have to repeat your question just because of the realities of the Zoom. Over here, over here. Hang with us for a sec, folks. We're getting the mic set up here locally in Burlington and we're gonna change the views of the folks in the room and see you. Can you put a part space there, Marta? Hello. Hello. Thank you for the presentation. Billy with Northfield Savings Bank. The question I have, I think it's probably for Par and Grant and Kate, we've seen it in Burlington when we are trying to create. All right, how much pushback did you get from the community, from other community members that did not want such facilities around them and how did you overcome that? Because I can imagine some people may have said, we don't want homeless people, we don't want homeless and can't make it on us. How did you overcome that? So I'll say the question again in case you didn't hear it. So I think it's basically a NIMBY question. We get a lot of that and one of the things we have in Burlington is we have a lot of social services but they're spread out and so you're talking about aggregating things in one location and the question was, did you get pushback from the community when you went to create this sort of neighborhood and how did you deal with it? For this Reno team? Yeah, I'll take that one. We were fortunate that during the pandemic, we moved quickly. We didn't have a bunch of meetings with the local community, the businesses around it. Knowing that, oh, I will tell you, we do a lot of work now with the businesses that are impacted around this location. I will also caution that our services seem to be in one spot. We are real careful to make sure that we don't create an untenable situation in that area of town as well. We're looking at putting in some permanent supportive housing units but we don't wanna create such a condensed situation that it's sort of a blighted area of town eater. So I would caution you that there's a happy medium and I don't see a scenario where we would go out and try to say, oh, let's do this 15 acres, somewhere in town that didn't have the luxury of two freeways as 50% of its border. So it really matters where you put it and that you communicate with your businesses in this surrounding area. Can you communicate on just some public transportation and Grant, you go ahead? Sure, so yeah, the corner where it is was the former Lincoln Highway, it's four street. It's a well-established route with public transportation. It's walkable to downtown, that's also key. You can't banish it out in the hinterland either, right? Because people need to be able to walk to work if they don't have transportation options. We have bans to help people but I really caution you to give a lot of thought about the location. Yeah, and no matter where you put something, there's gonna be output. People are gonna be in and out and some of the people aren't the best behaved and so it falls on us and what we do as non-profit, as providers and the county supports us in this is that we have good neighbor policies. We know that we've brought the population so some of the management of the population falls on us. So we'll manage those streets and when the business is called, we're swept. When the business is called and they got someone camp in there or there's some issue that they're dealing with, we're very swift with outreach and we manage our streets well. It's a good neighbor policy. Some neighbors didn't ask for this and so it falls on us to a certain degree to be able to manage the population that we bring. Great. All the questions raise your hand. Hi, can you hear me? They might, Alba might have to stay in the question. I can hear you. I can hear you. In the role of everybody, there would be many boundaries as far as the sense of accountability. How does accountability fall into the low barrier shelter and how do we hold people accountable for the behaviors that they participated in in such an environment and for going to self-regulate such an environment? Yeah, so that's a great question and we talked to the Reno team about it. How we, I don't think that all of their facilities are a low barrier. A lot of the ones in Burlington are starting out that way. Can you talk about how you create accountability and a path to success for the people that you're getting into this group and whether your facilities are low barrier or your zero tolerance kind of for substance use? So we're low barrier and I think it's very important they have low barrier because a lot of these folks won't come in for that. So, and you can't work on them if you don't have them. We need them, right? And so when they come in though, what really works is that the county and we're gonna do what we decided to do was make the one thing that you, like the one requirement is that you work on a housing plan. And it sounds silly, but what does that look like? So it's different things for different folks. And I want like you, so just know like we create a system here that models the one that we want them to survive in. And so you look at like are the rules that we have in place. The rules that we have in place, they start with the pod. And this is a way of teaching them how to kind of adhere to social norms. So when they come in, this pod carries a lot of value, right? It's inside it, you know, it has heating, air, electricity, all the things, there's a lot of value in this pod. So they're willing to exchange some behavioral traits for the pod, right? And so there's this basic economics that takes place. I'll give you this if you give me this. And part of them staying there requires that they stay within the guidelines. You will only have this many things. You will stack it up here. The emergency exit will be clear. And that's just in their area. There are rules when they come into the, you know, into our group area, into our community area. There's rules everywhere. And these rules without these people knowing it are teaching them to adhere to social norms. There's also, so when it comes to like, when it comes to working on a housing plan, let's just say that a person, they can't have drugs in there. Does it mean that they don't bring drugs? Ow, people bring drugs, but we're not the drug police. We pay attention to behavior. So if somebody's acting a specific way and we know them and we live with them, then we know that something's up and that's when we identify that it's time to dig a little bit deeper and usually we'll find something and then they'll be asked to leave and they come back. But the point is, is that if a person's number one, their housing plan involves them getting a job and they can't keep a job because they're using, we require them to go to 12 set meetings. We require them to start addressing the thing that prevents them from getting a job, that prevents them from sticking to the housing plan. So there's things that you can do that challenge your population to be, to create this culture of accountability that we want. It's creating a culture of accountability and we've found it very successfully. There's a dance that you do, right? You lead and they lead and you lead and they lead and there's a, you'll find out quickly whether you're part of the solution or part of the hustle. But the gig is that there is a way to create a culture of accountability and it's by these little guidelines that we've set in place and it's the negotiating with the individual. I think it's important to note too that this campus of care is a really powerful model in that it's not just putting people into concrete shelter but in the way that it offers a range of services to them to help them move up. But also, as Grant said, we have different types of people in your population of folks that are unhoused and they've been, you've been successful in housing, what about half your population through this model? And so I do think that it's important to be realistic that we can't reach everybody, would you agree? Of course, but the thing is, in the process, right, they are learning things. You don't forget stuff. So they're gonna come in and we do exit folks if it's not time, but we don't exit them for long. We have sitout periods where it's long enough for them to remember but short enough for them to come back and be able to be educated on why they got set out. So it's also a behavioral health model, but you're not gonna get all the folks, not now, maybe next time, you know, and we keep it open for that. Other questions? Other questions? Hi, I might be in the darkness. Hi, as you don't want us to, yeah. One on the back at the same time. Sorry, John. You go first. Hold on to it though. See if you go first. Okay, fine, thank you. I might be in the darkness, but Sarah from Commandiero and a retail store in the downtown. I have so many questions. Thank you so much for all of your time, but I will pick just one. And I guess it's mostly if you guys were tasked with doing it again, like where would you start and like what recommendations would you have for our community as like we have a ton of business owners in this community with people that have, you know, money they wanna donate, action they wanna make, like where would you start? So I'll just state that best again. Thank you, Sarah. Local business owner asking a question. We have, she's reiterating that we have willing participants from our business community. Our city certainly seems engaged in solving the problem as to our social service agency. So if you had to remake your airplane now, is there anything that you would do different or what might you recommend for a community like Burleigh Tinnif, if we wanted to get started moving this forward? Okay, you wanna start? You want me to start? We were fortunate with the political gumption to take a big step, not only to establish where this campus would be, and it was a near unanimous vote of three different governing bodies, but they also allocated the funding and the staff. And you have to put the whole package together. You can't fly a plane with one wing. And so if the community agrees that they will make the physical commitment of the space, the programmatic commitment, putting the right staff to client ratios in place, which means investing in staff, you can move the needle. Our commitment was we would front load it with all of those things, knowing that as we drive down the number of people experiencing homelessness, as those staff left, we wouldn't fill those positions, we would attrition them out. We're not there yet, but it doesn't stay this big behemoth thing forever, you can solve this. It's proven through the built for zero model. And then you transition to something that looks more like housing versus homelessness. Built for zero, you get to a functional zero model where somebody enters into the homeless space in your community and they're triaged very quickly with resources and you move on. So you don't need these 600 person shelters. You don't need a 20 person shelter at that point. So how do you set it up intensely at the beginning? And then how do you set it up so that you can adapt and scale it as necessary? Not up, right? You realize that it has to be a certain size that you can move people through this program. We could build five CARES campuses here. The point wasn't to do that, it was to build the right size so we could move people through that trajectory into housing and keep them housed. So you don't need this massive thing, you just need to have the programming and staff behind it to move the individuals into housing. I would say from my standpoint on the private side, I would listen to Brad. I think he sees lots of communities and I'm gonna say that a little bit cute but he sees lots of communities and can triage your community very quickly to know where you can have momentum quickly. And then from my side, I would get a small group together for coffee that you know are civically minded. Hopefully it includes one or two business people and it includes somebody from the government and maybe somebody from a nonprofit who knows active and just start having conversations. And all those different slides I had up there between the mental health, we have two judges that are super active. They want a mental health court like, we went to Miami with them and they led the charge. So they can lean into that. If they're gonna put in the time and they're excited about it then you wanna help them go that direction. And then it can go from the business improvement district. I think the business improvement district for me is like the perfect training wheel starting point. It gets things in motion. It gets a lot of people involved and you can see action very quickly. And Brad you can tell me if there's other starting points that you would suggest that or that but at least for a Reno standpoint that's where the momentum started. Well, in Burlington went down this path. I mean, five years ago we proposed essentially a business improvement district but because of quarks in Vermont law or maybe just quarks in Vermont it required a city-wide vote. So imagine taking a downtown improvement district to a city-wide vote. It was crazy. So it didn't pass but I guess what I would add to what Parr said is I wrote down while you were talking I think a community has to have two things. They have to have trust. There has to be trust between the government, the private sector, the nonprofit sector, all of that. And then secondly, there needs to be an appetite for change that we're gonna do things differently. And I think Reno is an exceptional case study of having both of that and enabled you all to move quickly. And honestly, five years ago in Burlington that wasn't there. So maybe things are changed. I hope they have. And sometimes a problem needs to reach a certain point and then it can bring people together to collaborate differently. I'll just leave it there. Great points. Great points. Chief. Chief. Yeah, two questions with regard to the idea of getting people to move through this process in this wonderful facility. The first is have you experienced the sense that people are coming to Reno for this wonderful facility? And two, what is the overall housing market in Reno that allows you to have places to put people once they are able to move out of the facility? Could you guys hear that? Can you guys hear that? Yeah, I'll take that one. We have been asked millions of times if you build it, will they come? I go back to the data. We interact and interview the people through the HMIS or the Homeless Management Information System when we encounter someone, we log who that person is, how long have they been in town? Where are they coming from? So that if the event that Burlington and Vermont starts shipping all their homeless people to Reno, Nevada, we have an early sense for it. And as a local officials, we can reach out and have a conversation. We haven't seen it yet. We were nervous once that Wall Street Journal article hit. We were nervous that we would see people coming here because we were successful. That was part one. So no, we're not seeing that yet. The housing market here is tough. Par mentioned that we've got significant business and tech business coming here, especially from the Bay Area. It is tight. We are getting close to being at capacity. We have, you know, we still have affordable units that have vouchers and that we're working with local jurisdictions and the housing authorities and so on and so forth. But unless the cities continue to laserly focus on affordable housing and workforce housing and projects like the village at Sage Street, we are going to run out of that housing. We're not there yet, but we're keeping a close eye on it. That was that everybody know what they're doing. Counties taking the lead on homelessness and shelter. Cities you need to get going on the housing piece or the whole thing goes back to where it was. I think we got some applause on that. I think it's also important to note that Rina Nevada has something that we don't really have here which is strong county government that gets actively involved in solving issues on a county-wide basis. That doesn't mean that we can't in an effort to explore solutions, work with some of our surrounding communities. And I definitely think there's more willingness today to do that than it has been passed. Other questions? Yeah, one back here and one up here. Yeah. Hi, my name is Patricia Pomerla. And this question is for Par. You talked about sort of creating this new vision that was more representative of the needs of the future. There was a group in Burlington back in the 60s and 70s that got together and created a vision for the beautiful downtown that we have today. There was incredible vision way before any other city in the country had even considered something like that. Now we're at the point where we have immediate, serious problems that you can see every day with drugs and homelessness and our businesses struggling in downtown. Is there a model that you can get us focused on where a town has come together and not only addressing their homeless and behavioral and drug problems but also pulling together a vision of the future so that five years from now we may have done something with housing, hopefully, but that now we have a city that no one's coming to anymore because it doesn't have what it needs. Is there a model that has pulled together the immigrant population, the business population, the Gen Z, the millennials to create a model for a new and vibrant downtown building on the strengths, the incredible strengths that we have here in Burlington. Did you hear that part? I did. I'll lean on Brad a little bit for the two because you've seen models that more than I have. I just, from my standpoint, look at the playing field and whatever is the most significant issue I will gather a few people around that and start talking about how we can solve the issue and I just keep moving one step in front of the other. And the first thing I saw was downtown needed more police support or security and that led me to the Business Improvement District and then we had a housing problem and so we found the man camp and then we knew we needed another shelter that was larger and away from downtown and et cetera, et cetera. I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all at all when it comes to how you're going to solve your specific issues but I do know that I also like to ask for forgiveness later and I like to just keep going. And so I think you need to have the fire in your belly enough with a few friends to pick one issue and start down that road where meeting with your city council, your board of supervisors, whatever that is, whatever you're, whatever it is, you need to start going down that road. Appropriate Brad or? No, I think that's a great response and I mean, there are dozens and dozens and dozens of communities that are mobilizing around us. So, and I reflect back on Reno, my first interaction with these guys I think was in 16 or 17, we updated the downtown plan and then we redid the downtown improvement district. And interesting like Burlington, it was more of a publicly oriented thing and we, don't freak out, we made it a public-private partnership. That was freak out worthy in Burlington five years ago. So there's tons of models and I think the planning and the vision is something a community can get repped around. I think the challenge is the implementation and the delivery system. We can come up with these great ideas. This is what we want Burlington to be in the future. But how are we going to get the private sector, the public sector, the nonprofit sector together in an enduring way to implement these ideas? And we've got to get beyond sort of parochial politics and understand the greater concern. And I hear you, I agree with whoever asked the question. Burlington was a pioneer in a walkable downtown, church street was masterful and these all have cycles, cities have cycles. So if we don't keep it fresh, if we don't update what's new and I would argue it's not even so much the physical part but it's the, how do we manage it? How do we maintain it? How do we come together to deliver the services like you heard from Reno and Berkeley today? So, I mean, to give you hope, this has done routinely in cities all over the country and honestly, you guys should be able to do it too. Yeah, and just for information sake, great grad, in most cities it's run as a private nonprofit, these downtown organizations. Yeah, I would say that I would add to what I just heard and to address your comment is back in the 60s and 70s when we had this period of inspiration there were, things were, downtowns were dying and there was that inspiration to hold on to something we had and I don't want us to let the opportunity we have today and the challenges we have today which is an opportunity for us to come together and re-envision our city both in the short term and the long term because all of these challenges are forcing us to come together, have conversations and think about how we can make Burlington the place we need to be for its next act. Hi, I'm Debbie Ingram, a former state senator and executive director of a nonprofit. I wonder if you could say something about the relationship with the state. You've talked about the city and the county. Are there examples of states that are more helpful than others or are there challenges that can be put up? Yeah, if you could just talk about that a little bit. Oh, I'll start that. As I understood the question, are some states more helpful than others? And yeah, the quick answers, yes. However, the types of problems we're talking about today are almost never solved. Certainly not by federal and rarely by state and we've worked in a lot of states where the state just makes it worse because of their policies. So for example, the states of Washington and Oregon are completely backtracking on decriminalization of drug abuse that they all voted for four or five years ago and has been horrifically, horrific results in cities like Portland and Spokane and Seattle. So states sometimes can actually be really, really hurtful in many of these things with their policies. As I mentioned in my global presentation, the global trans presentation, the answer is local and regional. You may have some influence with state. You may get some supportive policies from state. And I realize Vermont, again, you guys are unusual where your state is relatively small and I think you can have some impact on a state level in Vermont that some of these other places could never dream of. But I wouldn't wait for it and I wouldn't count on it. I would look at local and regional response as the way to go, certainly the next five plus years. I will say we have some success in lobbying. We meet every, our legislature meets every two years and Carson City is our capital, which is 25 minutes away. And we founded the pavement during the session that with the governor met with a number of decision makers to write money to the time I was down there for the hopes clinic and we were successful doing that. So, finding sympathetic years that are in office that understand when you know, when you understand the pockets of money that are available within the state and help educate them on what those pockets of money are that I think you can find some success there. Kate, you probably have a comment or two. No, but I do wanna speak to something a little earlier. I mean, states it's tough. It's so different in every jurisdiction. But learn from what we've done, right? When we did this, we were sort of pioneering and we were lucky to have some things lined up. What we are now doing is, and Grant is really great at is looking at other jurisdictions and cherry picking the things that worked for them. When all else fails, one of the strategies that seems to work with elected officials and we did this with the safe champ was not to go all in. We said, let us do a pilot program. And if it doesn't work, we will pull the plug. And lo and behold, we did the work, we collected the data to show that it was working and they were like, ah, okay. So you don't have to go full shebang. I mean, never let a good pilot go to waste. If you wanna just sort of stick your toe in the water, that's what I would recommend if it's tough, regionally or politically to get through something like that. And that's it across the board. Like what Kate said, when we met with Kate, when I met with Kate, Kate was like, let's go, let's give it a shot. And then anything that PAR does, when PAR's got a grade, we just go. It's a let's go gig and yeah, I think that's brilliant. Probably have time for one more. Anyone? Anyone? Have a question? Any question? One in the back of the back there. Yeah, how you doing? I'm Chris from City Market downtown. I was just wondering if you can comment a little bit about what it actually looks like as far as security on campus. So you mentioned the less police calls in town. I was just wondering if you could just comment a little bit on how it really looks on campus as far as security and enforcement of the rules. You guys hear that? You guys hear that? As you get a question around security, what that looks like on campus? Yeah, so the assumption is that having this campus of care would reduce the burden on local police, but you also have probably a need for security to enforce the rules on the campus. So can you tell us a little bit about what that looks like? Sure, I'll start and Grant, you can jump in too. We learned very quickly that we needed to ramp up security. And I mentioned not just for the staff that worked there, but for the clients. I mean, we had some violent instances early on because you've got a lot of mental illness. You've heard we've got co-occurring substance use and mental health issues. And the security officers, we use a company called Allies International. It really matters how those officers are trained in de-escalation, in conflict resolution, in building relationships with the clients. And now it's this really synergistic thing where, yes, we have to go through your bag. Yes, you have to go through a metal detector because we want to keep everybody safe. But if people understand that, they're going to come into shelter. We had issues initially with encampments where we would go visit them and talk to people and they would say, I'm not going to the care's campus, that place is not safe. And so we needed to change that narrative so that people would come into shelter. We couldn't get staff. It wasn't safe. So security isn't a critical element. And I think you're going to get some pushback, I think, from we did, from people saying that you can't have law enforcement and people don't want to be around, people in shelter don't want to be around law enforcement. But Grant, you probably have more to add. Yeah. So in our security is different. Of course, security sounds like yes or no people, right? But where our security isn't like that and our staff isn't like that. We put a lot of attention on the staff to client ratio to where it's balanced, it makes sense. We put a lot of focus on retaining our staff. It takes about two to six months for an individual to build rapport with one client, right? And so if there's a high turnover rate, we're not going to have rapport with them. They're just going to be the no people. We have folks that engage our security and gauges. We work well together. We have trainings together. We have part of being compliant with our contracts is that we do our training, that we're up to date on our training. And so there's this overarching gig where we all agree that it's a great idea and security isn't just kick them out, folks. Security, of course they're there when they have to ask somebody to leave, but it's not what you think. These guys are trained great and our staff is trained great and they work really, really well together. I mean, we don't just, we're not just corrective either. We identify why people are behaving that way. If you can identify why someone behaves that way, then it's a lot easier to manage it. And so we've, we're really trained really well. And we, yeah, I think it's absolutely necessary. You ought to comment on your three different levels of staffing or four different levels of staffing at the campus between VOA, county employees, karma and security. Could that little recipe works? Yeah, and let me tell you all, we did not get this right out of the gate. I mean, you can read articles about how unsafe the campus was and it was the bathrooms were falling apart and all of it. So, you know, we're really here to tell you we went through the trenches for y'all. So when you get ready to do it, it'll be a little bit more smooth sailing. So, you know, we have those mixes of staff. We didn't at first. I mean, I had to reach out to the state at one point. We had 600 people in intent and I am not gonna tell you the single digit number that we had that night overseeing that amount of people. It was terrifying. And we knew we were just one instance away from the whole thing coming down to bear. And so learn from what we did. Again, we're happy to continue to engage with you on what the staffing ratios look like, national best practice, what worked for us, what didn't. So, you know, be glad that we went first because it was not an easy fight to fight. I think it's important to restate that. What Kate had said earlier is that the goal is to move people out of this cycle. Some of these people out of this, what seems to be a can be for some people a long term cycle of being on house and having either mental health issues with substance use disorder or whatever challenges they may have you guys feel that you're successfully moving people out of that cycle. Yeah, the data backs it up. And again, they're moving out 800 to this point just from the CARES campus, not from the other programs with a 23% recidivism rate. That's pretty darn good. Great, thank you. Can we get around to the applause for our team? We know.