 The task force has been trying to familiarize the community with the end of the house. This is a tendency to not fully understand the people who've lost their housing or what it's like to be a house. And so we've done three presentations so far and so now it's time to take a look at what are the options that are available. So we've invited Susan and Samantha to tell us what Burlington has done in this regard. So now I'll turn it over to them. Great. Hi everyone, good evening. My name is Samantha Dunn. I work for the City of Burlington in the Community and Economic Development Office. And I work in that office with Sarah Russell who was supposed to be here. You see her name up on the slide. She was not able to attend suddenly for a family reason. She was hired by the City of Burlington a year ago as a special assistant to end homelessness. So that is a new decision at the city. And then with my colleague Sue Cobb who was a project management consultant on this specific project in Burlington. So helped us actually implement the ideas and get it built. So I have a bunch of slides and I'm going to walk through to sort of lay out the process that the city went through to develop a new emergency shelter community. I have a, Sarah was going to talk a little bit more about the shelter has been operating since February 8th. So she's more involved in that in the operations. But I've got the information from her slides and this presentation I can, it is available electronically. I put my email at the end so people can get it and email me questions. You're welcome to interrupt me as I'm going through the slides and ask questions as well. So shout or put your hand up. So what are most people here? Are you familiar with the Elmwood shelter community? Most folks know what it is. This first slide and I'm going to back up the history a little bit. The first slide is kind of showing what the entire community is and you can see this was a city owned parking lot with parking leaders at least parking spaces in a pretty dense neighborhood in the old north end of Burlington. Just a couple of blocks up from the end of the top of Church Street. And the community includes 30 individual shelters. Five of the shelters were manufactured by a local company called Upper Ness. And 25 of them came from pallet shelters, which you've likely heard of in the news. These are shelters that have been developed by a company out on the west coast of Washington that come flat packed and are erected very quickly and they have a lot of shelter communities around the country. In addition to the 30 shelters, we have the bath house. So this was a modular building. It has six full bathrooms in it, two of them fully accessible and with solar panels on the roof. And then a community building that has offices for staff and services, laundry, two additional bathrooms, a kitchen and community gathering spaces where all the food is distributed and services happen. And the two community buildings were constructed offsite by a company called KBS Builders in Paris, Maine and trailed to the site. And the idea in the city of Burlington is this is meant to be a temporary solution. We have permits to operate this on site just for three years. We were really working to put infrastructure just on top and be able to reuse it in other places in the future. Samantha, how many residents occupants do you have? There's 35 occupants, so there's 30 shelters. Five of them accommodate two people at their own choice. The pallet shelters are designed so you can add a second bed. We have had higher demand for those double occupancy than we anticipated. And we've looked into adding more doubles, but it requires opening up our zoning permit, which I'll talk about a little bit, but we're not going to do that. Thank you. Is it going to be at all possible to scale up to the 3,000 plus? This site cannot scale up. This site is at capacity. How about getting your hands on FEMA trailers? Are there any left from Katrina? I haven't been looking at that now. This slide is a 10-point action plan that came out of the mayor's office in December of 2021. A 10-point action plan to ensure housing as a human right in the city of Burlington. And you can see the fifth bullet here was to invest in this kind of new shelter. And a new shelter model based on low barrier public health services on site model. This action plan included creating the position of Sarah Russell, the special assistant to end homelessness, and a wide range of zoning changes that we've also been moving through the city to either create more density that exists or to make it possible to build housing in some places where housing was not allowed previously. So those things are coming along a little bit more slowly. Samantha, on that first bullet, talk about some financial issues. If you go back to the first overview, that 35 occupancy unit, is that a million bucks, two million bucks? I'm going to get to that. I have a detailed budget for you because I know what people want to know about this. This is a timeline. So it starts with that 10-point action plan. I was saying in December that announcement, it actually really starts a month or two before my first week on the job of the city of Burlington where people might have heard the Sears Lane, which was an encampment that was not organized, and have public health services was shut down by the city. It was very controversial because people felt like that was a community that they had in a place. And as that was shutting, it was saying, what is the alternative that we're going to provide? All of the residents of the Sears Lane encampment, because the motel program was still happening and there were lots of resources we were able to get them into shelter, but it was recognized that there was a need for additional shelter within the city of Burlington. So it started a little bit before December. I made my first call to pallet, I think, my second week on the job, just starting to understand what our options were. And then you can see in February our city council approved this $3 million investment to address homelessness, which really went to creating that position and staffing the special assistant to end homelessness. This shelter community and some investments in our continuum of care, infrastructure and staffing, and some money to operate the daytime shelter that operates in Burlington, the community resource center. And then I started the process of, of course, since the city, you have to procure everything. So creating RFPs for modular shelters and figuring out where this was going to be located. I'm going to talk a little bit about that. The city council approved the site, the parking lot in April, and then we started our permitting process. We needed to get a conditional use approval, so go through the city's DRV and we needed to get a state water, wastewater permit. So that whole process, continuing the design, we started site work in August. And you can see, yeah, laid it out of getting all these structures on site and we're able to open in early February. Definitely took longer. I had to go to a lot of city council meetings and hear, like, why isn't it, like, there was a lot of concern. And then once it was underway, like, why isn't it open, which was understandable. That looks quick, actually. Thank you. Congratulations. It's hard once it's underway to know that people are waiting to get shelter and they're not. They can't access it. So this was our budget for Alma-Chelter. These are the sources of funding. So you can see here, the total project cost was 1.8 million. The majority of the project came from the city's designated ARPA funds. We had investment from Burlington Electric Department, V-Lite, specifically from the solar panels on the roof. We have some petroleum cleanup funding because we hit an underground storage tank in that whole process. And we got a grant from the community foundation for some of our placemaking. Any donations? Anything not? Yes, we did receive some donations. We received, Sue and I worked closely with a company called Minitair, which provides mechanical equipment. And we convinced them to donate the heating and cooling ventilation system for Bath House. And then there was a range of smaller things like the paint for the site and doormats and things like that. Maybe even if you added 200 grand on there, you're talking to a million on there. Much less. I would say donations didn't get a little higher than 10 grand. That's much more than back off. Does that include the site cost or is that a... Yes, that includes the site. So I'm going to get into the use, I'm going to get into the uses, these are the sources. When we locked on that site, it was a really poorly maintained batch. Yeah, it was a parking line batch. In some ways the tank helped us. And just for people who are worried, there is going to be a table like this. You're going to see all the costs. This is sort of showing you the big buckets of cost and where they are on the site. So doing all that site work and the utilities work was just under $200,000. Then we had to do the remediation for the underground storage tank that we hit. That hopefully wouldn't be in anyone else's budget. And then you can see for each of the shelters, accessories, security. And then these modular buildings, the six bathrooms came in at just $170,000. Community building at $193,000. Our solar, which was covered by a delay. And then this construction management, just under half a million dollars, this is just sort of a short list of everything that this company had to do to kind of make it all work on the site. But that's kind of combined with the site work of bringing it all together. What's the company? The company that did that is called Second Gen Builders. Okay. So you are essentially the developer who covered your costs and Sue, who covered your costs. Susan here. So if we go to soft costs. So yeah, so my costs are just staff time. The city had to hire someone that had the experience to do this when it wasn't. This was not in my doubt description. Yeah, but it's a real value and in a sense a hidden cost to the project. A hidden cost. It wasn't full, so it was about a year of my time, maybe 75%. And this again is just getting you back exactly to that $1.8 million all of the time. Sorry. So where are you? All of the costs that go into that. So you said that this project is permitted for three years and at that point either it'll be all packed back onto pallets and move somewhere else or whatever. Some of these costs such as the bathrooms and all that are those things also transportable or moveable to? Yes. And that's why I was saying when I started saying we tried to put everything on top of the site. Those modular buildings sit on helical piles so they can be picked up and moved to another location and they were certainly designed with that intention of being able to use them somewhere else in the city. The city would like to convert this site. It is not going to go back to a parking lot. I promise you, not that I'm alive. I think the idea is to convert this site to permanent affordable housing. I think the hope was like we're going to end homelessness. The very lofty goal was to end homelessness in the city of Burlington over these three years. Right now it's certainly worse than it was when we started. We still have two and a half years to go. I'm sure that there are still people who are going to require shelter and I'm kind of waiting to get through the summer before I ask people to start thinking about what comes next. Because it took a lot to get here. Samantha, any of those line items became a surprise to you? Something that you went in low and like wow, you weigh under us to make it a cost of this one? The site. I think the site were combined with the construction, the site with the construction management is higher than I expected. For me, I'm not an expert like you. Construction management sticks out to me like, is that just an AGC or any 490 million? That's what he did. There's a lot of pieces and parts. He built the platforms which this parking lot is so huge. Maybe better wording, at least from looking at it. Sounds like you're paying attention. But she also, any changers that we had in the job came through him. He had to pay for all the mechanicals. There's a lot and I can provide more detail, but quite a lot of work ended up flowing through him, partially to get around procurement as well, because he can just buy things, because I had procured him, but every time we needed something important for the city, I would need to get involved. Just your experience alone is awesome. You have to take on the HVAC contractor and the plumbers and all that. This slide is really just to show that, I think we kind of came out like, oh it's like a pretty civil project. It's going to be on top of the parking lot. There was a lot of people involved, and if you think of looking at that project, the construction management, all of these subcontractors were under him. So I included all of this. This gets to the site selection. As I said, I know it's kind of blurred out, but this is Church Street here. This is City Hall. I don't know if that helped anyone, but it's just very much in the downtown. The site was, we evaluated 10 sites. I worked with city staff, all across departments to kind of score 10 sites based on what do we own that we don't have to buy or lease from someone else. What's the price that we need to transportation and other services and amenities, open space and things like that. So this was the site that was selected and it is within a neighborhood. It was quite controversial. We spent a lot of time having community meetings. We had contentious DRV hearings, and the amount of time required to sort of get the community comfortable enough not to appeal to permit and just make people understand or help people understand what it was going to be like was a very important thing to consider when you're thinking about the site. When Pallet came to install the shelter this is the best site we've ever seen because it's integrated into the community. You're not putting people out on the edge and making them take a bus or get a taxi or something to go do all the things that they need to do. So this end, we haven't had any issues with the neighbors really since it opened up. So there was a lot of fear about what it was going to be and it's working out quite well. And this just again is more of a reminder of what kind of even though we're doing this temporary thing it all sits on top of the site, the required approvals that we had to get at the City of Burlington and the permits. And those costs are also included in the softbox. So you said you had no issues with the neighbors. What sort of outreach did you do? You know we had a lot of issues with the neighbors before it was built. But I'm saying the site is and as you've seen some pictures that we can talk about more is designed to be a place that people want to be. I think neighbors were very concerned that it was good people were going to leave it to do some things that weren't allowed on the site or to be noisy. And there have been some issues in the neighborhood but it's never the guests of the site. It's people that maybe who are trying to get in or trying to get on the list or just don't have any other place to go but the folks that are staying there want to be there. Is it near the Unitarian Church? Yes, it is. Very close to the Unitarian Church. They're familiar with that. And we have, I mean, the church area churches have been involved in bringing food. I think one of the church, I don't know if it's Unitarian, someone set up like a barbecue on the parking lot one weekend and that was for the whole neighborhood. And so there's been some great activities. So service providers are coming during business hours during the week? Yes. Is there anybody there in the evening to the weekend? Yes, this site is staffed 24 hours a day. The permit requires two staff on site 24 hours a day. So overnight that's provided by a security company but during the day it's provided by a Shamblin House and Trust staff and CDOEO staff service providers. And there's a wide item in the budget? That gets into the operating budget which is at the very end. This is just the development of the site. I've noticed that there's like a real push towards small free-standing buildings rather than like a duplex or a row house type setup. And I'm just concerned about like utilities and building costs and things like that. What's the advantage to having free-standing rather than, you know, sharing a roof? I think the free-standing when you're thinking about this type of shelter it's really an alternative to congregate shelter to people all being in one room. So building something like row houses or townhouses or, you know, multi-family housing is 10, 50 times more expensive. You know, to build a multi-family housing unit right now is $500,000. No, I'm not talking about multi-family housing units. I just mean like what's the single-president occupancy. Is that what you're talking about? Is that going to be an alternative? Right. No, I just mean what's the advantage to not sharing any walls? I think it's this is a cost-effective way to create new shelter quickly. So I think there have been some motels that have been converted to shelters where certainly people are sharing walls and that works, but this was the city found the most cost-effective and really quick, we were trying to do a rapid response way to be able to create shelter that was not covered at one big room for people. So it's like structural integrity to keep the buildings separate or instead of like a unit? The reason that their space is for fire code, once you have these individual buildings of their space for fire code reasons instead of stacking them all next to each other. Let's keep going and we'll connect if we haven't answered it. I'm just wondering if given that this is not permanent and the idea is to be able to move it, that it's way easier to move those things that something that had to be deconstructed and taken at least by peace. Yep, that's that point. I'm pretty constructed and you just assemble. Yeah, but you have to double-wide and still move it. I think there's this no ground. I think what I'm hearing is is a small When I lived in my car privacy was really important. To be able to have your own space. Yeah, but one of the two things that would drive any sane person batting if not insane is never having privacy. I was never actually aware of it. Sometimes I lived in a woods by choice when I was younger. But yeah, privacy is pretty good. And we've heard a lot, but that's a lot of the feedback to have a space of your own. If you're all packed into one place the proximity is the key to getting along. Yes, which is so important even in a second. Like this. Yeah. So this is a drawing of the site plan that got submitted for our permit and I just wanted to sort of highlight some of the things that went into creating like how are we going to create this community on this specific site. There was an existing chain-link fence around three sides of the site that was left in place. We heard we went to the community resource center to talk with people experiencing homelessness or lived experience to ask them about what are your thoughts? What can we do here? They talked a lot about security, feeling, being able to feel secure when they were on the site. We had this really great comment and this got cut off. But one of the guests said, I think we had shelters. We were showing an example where they were clustered and he said we had shelters and he showed us the community resource center was in the FW when he showed us the stars on the flag. You don't see it as much here, but maybe in another drawing. So that we shifted them all to there. The doors are offset. And zoning requirements required that we put all the utilities underground, all the electrical connections. We had certain setbacks from property lines. This 14 foot, this yellow strip and you see it painted in the photos, we kind of incorporated it into our site, wide mural emergency access lanes so they could get easily, always know they could get an ambulance into the site quickly. And they also required them to be spaced a certain distance from each other. The other big thing that we focused on and how are we going to make this feel like a community and not just a bunch of boxes and we're a harking lot. It was something we called place making and we worked with architects, Devin Wisniewski and an artist to kind of come up with a concept for how we could create community on this site, this weaving concept of how you weave this into the community covering the asphalt both for visual reasons and for heat effect, heat island for direct reasons and making sure we were adding natural materials community gathering space and custom art. So we have, there's an artist that lives in Burlington that's designed these custom murals that are underway right now. She's starting them and then some of the guests at the site are going to help finish them. So there's going to be large panels, art panels that have been created specifically for the site to see the same color palette. Alright, so I'm going to now go through each of the building types and then we'll see a few of the photos. I think a lot of people here are interested in hearing more about the palette shelters. We have 25 of them on site. The reason for this is why 25 and not 30 is like coming in, I was like I want to use this to like what's better, like can we do it better at home, like in trying multiple. So I wanted to work with a local manufacturer to do something that wasn't flat pack that came from Vermont. So that's where we have two different kinds of shelters. Not sure if I would do that again. There's a lot of work now on the site that's like they're not all the same and that creates the best difficulties. Yeah, we're learning a lot. This is a learning experience. So I think most people know about palette shelter for the shelter including transportation and their crew coming to erect them on the site was just under $12,000 for shelter. That includes like we're in the super cold climate package or whatever extreme cold weather package and it comes with heat and everything else that you need in it. We're adding window AC units and as I mentioned at the beginning we ordered five of them to accommodate two people. You could do that with all of them if you wanted. The site was laid out exactly where they were to go in there. The bases we added for two reasons. One, because the parking lot wasn't flat and we didn't want to mess with, we needed the water to continue to flow to the existing stormwater. Secondly, we heard from folks in Wisconsin that were the first people to have these in a winter climate that the people were complaining that the floor was cold. So these have insulation and they get the shelters off the ground. Yes. What's the cost differential between a single and a double unit? Just like getting an extra floor down bunk which is like the two out bunk. Right. Because most of the population we're serving this shelter is for chronically unhoused folks that are currently on shelter. Usually you think of as individuals. People who want to be in their own space. The point being use 30 for individuals and 5 for couples that have that flexibility. You can move them around. You can move it around. So easy to convert. We only have a permit to shelter 35 people on the site. Which yes, in hindsight I probably would have increased that but it was a little dicey to get to them. Yes. That's an amazingly cheap price. Yeah. I agree. What's the amount of insulation and type of insulation used in the palace shelters? Yes. Is that also part of sound proofing? Yes. So everything is in these panels. I don't have the exact values with me. It's like astonishingly low and you would be like ah and I had several conversations with them where they finally said to me the person I work with doing something is better than doing nothing. That's been kind of a mantra that as someone that came from building super highly efficient multifamily housing I was having this R value heart attack and he was like that's people are unsheltered. Something is better than nothing. It was a really important moment to keep it moving forward and we did what we could. We worked with efficiency Vermont building these floors had a big influence. You saw one of our sources of funding was Wellington Electric Department they invested in every energy efficiency upgrade we made above and beyond sort of what the building was. So yeah these panels have the insulation in them and I like this in a truck we were required to have a forklift the specific forklift on the site that their folks flew in and they unpacked them on these pallets and they set them up in a day and a half and all have you know from trucks to them leaving the site. As part of the 11 8. Yes as part of the 11 8. Do they have water? No there's no water in these buildings they have heat and electricity we have put a mini refrigerator in every unit so that people can store medicine or we have food that they have we they're not you're not allowed to have a microwave inside the unit for fire hazard reasons that's a decision that we have made and that's why we have the community buildings. You first with the bed or shelves It comes with it comes with beds. Part of the 11 8 is a bed? Yes yes it's attached to the wall and it folds up. Does the community building provide bottled water? It does provide bottled water and there's actually a water bottle that were there so when they arrive and they're sort of as part of their checking process they get a set of clear bins for their belongings that will fit under the beds and they get a water reusable water bottle and things like that There's a lot of things on you're doing that Any other pallet questions? It says the owner supplied window AZ units. Yes. How's that working out? Are people able to do that? Are they able to provide that? Oh we provide yeah we included it in our budget so we're just getting those installed now. I misunderstood I thought it meant the person living there. No no no sorry they're not supplied by pallet but there's you can see this here that's designed specifically to take any supplies. So that's not in the budget? It is in my big picture budget it's not in the 11th it's in the 1-8 but not. Samantha are you going to talk about the community buildings and bathrooms and shelves and stuff? I am. Any other pallet questions? So the other five shelters that are on the site were constructed by a company called Up in This they're based in Morris in Vermont now but they started at the generator in Burlington as a start-up company building modular buildings and they worked with us to custom design a shelter and I think they're marketing them on their it's a unit you can buy on their website now not for emergency shelter and these sort of we worked with Efficiency Vermont and Up in This so these are highly efficient and they include heat pump for heating and cooling because they're efficient they also require to have a ventilation system and they're made of much more durable materials and you know it's a very different product you can see it's twice as expensive and I resident the feedback that we've heard is they're tall they're the same footprint on the inside so they're not bigger but they look bigger because they're taller and I think in the beginning there was a little bit of like I want one of those some people then said oh I don't let you know there's been some moving around and we worked really hard to design this covered entry which we were hoping to be able to add to all of the units in some way but I think it's a really important component so I think if you're doing a smaller project I mean it's it's a money thing these are more durable I think the pallet shelters are they say they're warranty for 10 years they're not they're not made of plywood you know they're a panel these I can imagine easily you pick them up and like I don't know what we're going to do with them but they'll be used for a long time they could be used for shelter or for something else for a small business on the waterfront or some other use because they all have windows that end up what's the size of these units 64 square feet of all the units okay so community buildings as we said there's no running water in those individual shelters so we added two community buildings this is the first one a bath house as I was saying has six full baths so toilet shower two of them ADA and includes the mechanical room for that and a utility space and as I said they were designed or built by KBS builders and they came on a truck it was designed specifically like in Vermont if you're I forget the inch like we were shaving inches off to make sure we could bring it to the site the police escort in Vermont so that's good to know these plans I'm happy to share for anyone that wants to repeat and some of the work that that construction manager did is this came I got sat on helical piles we had to build the deck and the ramps on site to actually access each of the bathrooms but it's connected to municipal water and sewer I'm curious if you look at other options for bath services like I am surprised to see each of them as a full unit so I'm thinking like what's in a stadium you have a bunch of urinals a bunch of toilets not everyone's going to need a shower at the same time but if someone's in the shower they're occupying the sink in the toilet and a lot of people are like come on so that's where I was thinking have shower facilities separate from toiletries facilities as an option yeah I think we wanted to this was the most efficient layout we could get to we wanted to be able to provide six showers and we didn't spend a lot of time yeah you gotta plug and play there are two additional bathrooms in the community building that are built in bathrooms I haven't heard that it's been an issue with people waiting I think it's more in the winter you have to travel to it but it's a little more like home to be in a bathroom it's a very residential scale bathroom and then in the community building as I said there's two offices this waiting room is where people come into the building and check in with staff the kitchen is labeled as break room for COVID reasons there's two bathrooms laundry two sets of washers and dryers that are very heavily utilized the mechanical room and then this large open space that I have a picture of y'all see where people are there's a pass through from the kitchen so people are served food there's a lot of space to hang out one of the sides of the washer and dryer and are they industrial? they're not they're commercial but not industrial and we have we have one stackable like heat source the site is all electric there's no no fossil fuels on the site we have one set that's a stackable like heat pump washer and dryer it's a standard ADA accessible but commercial washer and dryer is there like a oven, stove, hot plate anything where people can cook? just microwaves the kitchen is a full kitchen partially because I imagine that in the future this might actually become a home it becomes someone's home but there's several they can heat up food in a microwave so people aren't allowed to use them? not to use the kitchen people can't use the kitchen at all? no, not the guests they can heat up food so who uses the kitchen? the staff does passes out food being able to have guests use the kitchen besides how you maintain cleanliness and things like that we would have had to have a whole fire a really expensive fire suppression system that just we couldn't it didn't make sense in the budget I think operationally given the community so is the kitchen sufficient that congregate meals can be served? all the food actually comes from feeding chicken, delivers meals that are ready to be heated up so they're not cooking on site it's not actually a functioning kitchen it's like meals on wheels but it's not actually a functioning commercial kitchen it's not a commercial kitchen exactly because we could not afford a commercial kitchen so all the guests are here? yes okay, two minutes are you know, are my feeds outdoors possible? or what? I know we I'm working up massive fire marshal fire marshal that not right now I know another way or maybe still has a functioning kitchen for over 21 years for unhoused people are the coats just different for Washington County than Washington? it's possible that it was grandfathered and I think this project had so much scrutiny and yeah so I think it was probably a combination of things so that's great and like don't tell the cooks guests are allowed to cook in our shelters we have two kitchens welcome center in Berlin there are two kitchens yes another way has two kitchens one is a commercial and one is for the residents people use that I think as I mentioned previously in terms of trying to keep the community engaged and it was really about providing information and helping address fear a lot of the community meetings we had before the shelter was opened we also the city maintained a website to keep information up to date translated the facts into the top 10 languages we had community days where we invited folks onto the site to help paint the site wide mural and there's ongoing monthly meetings that are a community group that is comprised of service providers guests and members of the neighboring community to talk about opportunities, challenges things like that are families able to to live in these boxes? not under 18 I think that it's not we determined that it was really not suitable this kind of shelter 64 square feet looking at an overview of the first timeline I showed you was from conception to opening this was the actual construction this is just my angst those buildings from KBS they didn't come when we thought they were going to so that delayed us in here it doesn't look like such a big deal it was a long eight weeks you can see from the second week of August to the first week of February is what it took to do all that work including hitting an underground tank and having to rebate soil and we had to re-endow so the underground tank was a sub-president how you get it? on our last day there was a lot of oil this was my highlights of lessons learned so if you want to add anything to this I mean lessons learned was just having it all the credit goes to Samantha because she had the vision to stand up there and talk in front of communities who really were against it it's a lot it's just some of the lessons for us was thinking working on the builder we ended up working KBS so there might be some other local options might have been quicker we should have just been quicker thinking about how to do that how do you think it's actually quite when someone lets you know our value it's about ten dollars a day to run an electric resistance heater that's per shelter so it's an electric heater it works I think my biggest fear was is it going to work in we're certainly the coldest climate that these have been installed in I had the chance to go to Wisconsin where we're living through the floor is cold it's warm enough it works so just reiterating we had very cold weather while these were operating the heater works as pallet claims yeah the temperature inside 50 degrees? no yes your body cuts off heat I think pallet says they can keep it 90 degrees above the coldest temperature it was warm it was warm even below zero did you have the figures for the five operating costs I don't we're working actually I just met Efficiency Vermont on site this week to put some e-gages on the electrical panel to dig down into our usage information I have this number because one of our panels just has pallet shelters on it it's very easy to do the math but the up end this ones are mixed in but we will have that information well not for the winter not for another year you think cool will be an issue too yes exactly running those air conditions I'm just on site say please I'm sure you don't have your sheet and your air conditioner on so is the heater built into the it is built into the pallet shelter so it's not a little box or something no it is the same concept but it's part of the building can people control the heat yes that's great I can't do that in my apartment I know there are pets which I didn't get to so this was the part that Sarah Russell I do not have a background in homelessness or social work or services so definitely not my area of expertise but I'm going to do my best she and I sit very close to each other I know pretty much everything was happening this is the inside of the community this photos is from the inside of the community building sort of looking out from the kitchen out into the open space so you can see there's lots there's always food available you can see the microwaves over in the corner for heating up meals there's always coffee available and this space is open from 8 a.m. till 10 p.m. and then it does when it's just security on site and not staff this space is not open but they there's like a microwave that gets set up in the waiting room so you keep track of how many people are in there or they can only have a certain amount no everyone can there's enough space for everyone to be in here at the same time yes it's pretty big space so you have a buzz in to get into the site the site is a fully secured site so we didn't talk a lot about that but at the beginning I said there was already secured three sides and then across the front I don't want to go all the way back but we can there's a new Cedar fence that was put up that creates privacy within the site and it has gates for emergency access and then it has a pedestrian gate that's locked and so you ever get with a camera on it so anytime someone enters the site they you have to hit a doorbell and the staff looks to see who it is and that's for the security of the staff it's for security of guests on site and they're keeping track and you have to hit a doorbell to leave as well so they are keeping track for safety reasons also to know who's on the site and only guests are allowed inside the site they can have the guests can have guests in the community space but not inside the site and that's for the security of other guests so the operations team, the city hired Shifling Housing Trust to have lots of experience who are very lucky to operate the site and community service coordinators come through from Shifling Valley Office of Economic Opportunity so social workers, case workers on site every day, seven days a week and then through memorandums of understanding these are the other service providers that are on the site on a regular basis during the week and we've heard a lot when we were designing this and sort of moving towards this that a lot of this population is service resistant there's not a requirement to accept services or work with service providers but we heard from folks who have been offering similar style shelter communities that after seeing the same people for two to three maybe four weeks and feelings realizing that you were safe people started to be open to connecting with service providers and that has certainly started to happen here Is the V&A in there at all? We don't have the V&A, we have the community health services of Burlington comes on site does somebody get sick? Do they just leave? It depends we have nursing staff that comes on site from community health services of Burlington community health center or people couldn't go to the doctor so this is the animal operating budget that we just submitted to the state the majority I don't have the majority of the operating funds do come from state, HOP I don't even know what HOP stands for because this is an opportunity program Thank you this has not been funded yet we do have in that original three million dollars of ARFA that the city designated some of that is to help support the operations of the site it's much more expensive than we were anticipating because when Champlain Housing Trust got involved we needed more robust staff than you were anticipating so it is costing just about 1.3 million dollars a year to operate this site I mean utilities that includes utilities yes yeah so I'm looking at the number for staffing and I see the number of people that's broken out and then I'm looking at security and we're seeing two positions is that does that represent just a hugely different rate for those people or is it the number of hours it's a combination of things so the security is overnight I think they start at is that a private firm yes and Champlain Housing Trust did not want to provide overnight staff so it's contracted with a private firm they're the only ones that are on site overnight yes there's no other staff no the staff from Champlain Housing there is always a staff person on call and yeah that they get called how has that been working for the people who live there that's a good question I have not had a chance to ask the folks who live there the site has been operating pretty smoothly so I think it's working I think the city's preference would be that there was overnight staff but our preference was also to have Champlain Housing Trust operate the site so this was a good intake so the operating costs for the FTE it's all outsourced there's no city there's this is no city staff here yes so these are this is actually the custodial support is someone that was hired the parks department that manages all the facilities at the city but all of these positions our Champlain Housing Trust staff yeah so looking at the budget the security is probably two shifts plus weekends right yeah it's seven days a week but so are the security the only staff there all day and night on the weekends no it's just overnight there's always CHT staff there in the day the 30 thousand for cleaning that's not for staffing for a cleaner what does that cover this is not my budget so I don't know the details I think a lot of cleaning now trash is its online item I think what this includes that hasn't happened yet is cleaning to happen on the weekend because this staff person so this is our budget this is our FY24 budget is to be able to pay someone to come in on the weekend because the bathrooms right now don't get cleaned on the weekend and just all of the toilet paper and soap dispensers and paper all of the kind of materials that are used it's a good question though it's a high number what is the managing partner Champlain Housing Trust so that's their overhead administrative cost the 87 thousand oh sorry no that's us that's the city that's our overhead cost we have two staff people Sarah Russell and Marcel again another person who are sort of managing all of these pieces and all of this money has to flow through our office I'm just noticing in the background like the raised bed there is that just for landscaping or is there like actually some kind of community garden there's community gardens yes they're happening I know I'm going to buy the plants from yes they are filled now they have to in them I know it's been a process are people excited to do that you know what the site manager she put up a sign she said no one came so when I was on site I went on site and I had to line all these things with fabric and we moved the dirt I think people will be we just need to get the stuff there I'm sorry that just brings up another question how long is there a time limit for people to be able to stay so our zoning requirements for emergency shelter limit a stay to 180 days with an option to extend for 90 days we think because these are all individual shelters just moving maybe from one shelter to another if someone needs to stay longer this is the only thing yeah no one's watching sorry have you had turnover have you had people move on I'm getting that there were other questions I wanted before off the budget yes so I just figured and that comes out to about $27,000 per person well it's not per person maybe per shelter well if you have 30 shelters we have 25 shelters 30 shelters I can tell you it's basically equivalent to a motel night the cost per person is equivalent to a motel night but it includes all of these services on site and all the food and things like that cost equivalent for a motel night for what the state paid the state yes the state the $150 up to $8,000 a month not that number well it's about $150 a night I think again this is not my outside my expertise so I think it's about $150 a night and this is pretty close yes I'm just learning about this so if it's not like the short stay 180 days with the possibility I don't know I'm not going to massive like that yes they're doing the work I think it would be great I would say if it's possible for the people to stay there to become part of the cleaning group of the bathroom today on the weekend where that question is being considered I think it's been a huge deal to get it open the biggest thing that people are focused on is safety of staff and of guests and like those kinds of things are evolving yeah was there another budget question so this is very early data the data we have is just for the first quarter of the year so just through March 31 so the first 51 days the shelter operated the total number of people that were sheltered in that 51 days was 37 it was a staggered start so CHT the first week they welcomed five guests at a time because that staff literally they couldn't get in because we were still painting and stuff and then once we could it was February we needed to start letting people shelter so they did a staggered start of five people every two to three days so 37 people were there in those 51 days you can see 28 of those folks chose to connect with case management there were two referrals to specific mental health services two referrals to substance use disorder treatment one referral to the Vermont chronic care initiative referral to legal services and three referrals for employment education and training so those are people that's what those folks were once they connected with the case manager those were the kinds of services that they were looking to be connected with first 51 days we had two people exit department in housing which is amazing this is chronically homeless population people who have been living outside so that was really exciting one person exited to substance abuse treatment facility three people just left because the environment didn't work for them and then there were eight involuntary exits so this is a low barrier shelter which we're going to get to on the next slide talk a little bit more about that but there are some rules again about that safety issue so if there's violence then you have an involuntary exit and then that wait list this was the wait list yesterday 136 people actively trying to access the shelter what's your turn rate roughly well you can see here in the first 51 days people exited I don't know 10 people immediately filled up oh yeah there's a wait list I might just not be understanding that but if 10 people left and there's well I was at only 37 it was that staggered start so I think because this is just the super hopefully the second quarter data will be like it started at 30 there were 35 people there when it started and 35 people won't end it but because it's like so the first week there was only five people there and the second week there were 10 so that's good catch another question for all the people Burlington residents they are people from out of the city out of the state I think so the referral team I'm hoping it's on these slides I haven't even looked at these because Sarah was going to do them but there's a referral team made up of service providers and street outreach workers and Sarah and so yeah it's all people who are currently within sheltering within city limits or not on shelter within city limits so there's not people on the wait list from Montpelier it's all folks that are in Burlington okay so these are Sarah's lessons learned I think really important the low barrier model to ensure like why even with the motel system open and all these other things why are people still on sheltered so assessing why they haven't accessed emergency shelter and figuring out how to make it work for them allowing couples to stay in one shelter has been important 24-7 access you get your shelter, you get a key you put your stuff in there and you come and go whenever you want that's very unusual in a lot of the shelter setups there are pets allowed on site there's a few small dogs they don't there's not like a bag check services are encouraged but not required person center approach to behavioral guidelines and challenges addressing a restorative approach this staff works very closely with the community justice center in Burlington to use a restorative approach when possible and prioritizing access for folks who are currently on shelter she had a second one and this first bullet is what I was referring to that there's a community based referral team so from the continue of care and the homeless alliance those folks are all working together to create the list of and prioritization we have continuous communication many many times a day with on-site management being ready to change this was true in the development process and it's true in the operations we are fearing it we're building the airplane as we're flying no one has done this before the people that are working on it is really important engaging people with lived experience and the neighborhood in planning discussions and then formalizing the partnerships with all the services and resources that are available on-site and making sure people can get what they need on-site so they don't have to leave did you have people lived experience involved at every step in the process in terms of design policy making and decision yes yeah and developing the operations policy absolutely no but I'm talking about the whole process I would say not until certainly in our site design we did and then in all the operation policies seems like it's pretty critical to have somebody who's focused 100% on this at the city level I think different communities have done different things I think as I said it was a little bit of luck that I was hired I didn't my workload had been determined and I had development experience in terms of getting it set up I think you could hire a consultant but someone has to be someone's really got to drive it it's not going to build itself and continuing to have a point person at the city if you're using especially if you're using city read for us city resources when we as an employee of the city every citizen of the Brawlington is my boss and I am required to answer any question that they ask really and that's part of I'm a public servant so when you're using city resources it requires a different level of engagement if you're not using city resources I would say you wouldn't you don't have to do that yeah so have you mentioned in the front about the temperature of this and throughout the program you're saying about how we could repurpose these later on so what's the life span of this project that you did so this project has a right now has a three-year lifespan and I don't I don't know yet does that mean it's funded for three years and it gets up for the operating funding is available so I mean so the three years are determined based on what? it was based on the mayor's desire to end homelessness in three years and it was part of a permitting strategy quite honestly so it was based on it was political I think you said you're thrilled to get the permit and three years was about it well that I mean I don't I don't know that I think I don't know if the temporary is had anything to do with it but just like how much work we had to do and this is a temporary facility where this is that yeah I'll come back next year and I'll tell you what's going to happen I want to go in the back for us because you're being nice and quiet has there ever been any effort for any private funding given not to ask well it's a huge amount right now a million dollars is chunking to some people let's face it that's true we haven't had to do that yet I mean I think we you know we have used ARPA funding and the state has shelter funding available and that's working right now yeah what's the total square footage of the of the site I'm going to go all the way back about half a level over half an acre yes someone was barely paying attention 0.5 yeah 0.54 acres in feet for those of us who about 100 I think it's like 100 by 250 or something like a really big basketball court and this is Elm Street Elmwood Avenue you're sort of standing on Elmwood Avenue yeah given the the crisis I guess I can use that word that you know with the end of the hotel program do you think that there's any interest will or possibility of creating more sites like this within Chapman County or haven't heard any the Bryantons proposal is sort of on the request of the state is for shelter for individuals and there's a different plan for the vulnerable population but not more of this today I have a comment related to your question we operate three shelters one of our shelters is they're doubles they're larger than these units and they are connected like there being one building two buildings and there are refrigerators there's a common kitchen the state is paying us while our operating costs ten minutes it's sixty dollars a night and our shelters range between about sixty and seventy per bed per night and they are pushing back on us push back on them while we're trying to I think this is great I think this is fantastic but I look at and they should be giving this project that much money but I wonder if there is enough commitment to do this at this level in other locations because our experience is they're not even giving us enough money to run it as it is I think some of us honestly I don't know if people were following it but the city had a very challenging time trying to get someone to operate the site and there was a very uncomfortable meeting between the city and the state and Shantlin has interest in other providers in Shending County that there was a lot of pressure put on Shantlin has interest to step into this role and they have kind of said this is what it costs for us to do it and they're doing a phenomenal job this is what it costs for them this is sort of what it costs for them to do it so I think it's it's a very specific situation the state really wanted to see how does this model work and this public health model with all the services like is it working and unfortunately I didn't have like there's been a lot of successes that didn't show up in that data even in the last couple of months St. John'sburg I think looked at this way for now and Upper Valley will ultimately be looking at this on the road so I know we now have 8 minutes we need to let the library close I want to go back to this last slide so people can write down my email I got it I got it S. Dunn S. Dunn at BurlingtonDT.gov did it shut is it because the library is closing they can close that out oh my gosh so what was it S. Dunn S. D. U. N. N. at Burlington VT.gov and I am happy to answer questions over email if you email me I can send you this presentation as a PDF um Sue and I put a lot into figuring this out and would want to make sure that we share share any information that we can and help other people uh try it it's worth it you did a great job but um being on the site um just that I'm often on the site just you know dealing with some things not working with efficiency from on or the burden bed still but to get to be there with people who really have been un-cheltered for very many for a very long time to see them this is their place they're there with their dogs they see them they're knocking on they're walking across and knocking on the front door and it's creating community and security and dignity that everyone so it's it's absolutely important all the hard work one of them one of the guys I just my neighbor he was walking to the site he said I sound like the enemy and he went crazy I mean it's just like I just realized do you have an idea when the next round of data will be available because I would imagine that's going to be quite revealing yeah it's it's quarterly data so June at the end of June so maybe July probably yeah we'll have it available I first learned about this company about 2019 and I did write the governor about it at some point and also a good thing about this company is of the palette I don't know about the other one because I think in the at the Washington factory they have a lot of people who are homeless and it's part of their it's integral to what they're doing and I really believe in this and I've been trying to know what it means around here and I'm not going to be interested in any follow-ups it comes down from people who have been there how they feel about it and I think it's a great thing because for what you're getting with all that services it's not going to be it's not going to be a success story for everyone that goes in there but there's a lot of success and to me if you've a one person is able to get if they need it's worth it we're seeing that over and over someone just left for their first job they got hired while they were at the shelter while the employer was picking them up and then they got enough money and they got an apartment they're actually living in Montelia where their child is living they just needed stability and the three years that gets you out of the door that you can show that it's being successful it's not like you absolutely have to be out in three years that's good I get up and move it to a new location do they have a mailing address they do have a mailing address we have a lot of parking lots available here in Montpelier so if you're looking for a parking lot I'm not looking for anything there are a lot of parking lots in Montpelier but most of them are not available they're two different issues let's not go there I really appreciate every time you guys have