 So we've asked Chris and Paul to reflect on these things and they're going to make a couple of presentations and then we hope to have a lot of time for your comments and questions. So I'm going to kick it off with Chris, our neighbor and the five sisters. Thanks from around the corner. Again, Chris Donnelly, I'm with the Champlain Housing Trust. I'm the director of community relations there and I've worked at CHT for almost 20 years. So it's been a little while. So I've seen a lot of changes in the housing market and but also a lot of things that haven't changed. Just to give you a little snapshot if you don't know about Champlain Housing Trust. We serve the three Northwest counties of the state. We're an owner or manager of about 2,500 affordable apartments. We have a home ownership, affordable home ownership program. We steward about 675 homes through that to keep them permanently affordable. We have several loan fund programs that kind of fill the gaps that the market or the regular financial institutions don't fill. We provide a lot of education and counseling for people to buy a home or become more financial literature literate or provide resident services for people in our housing. We own and manage a lot of community facilities such as the old north end community centers some people might be familiar with. We work with Paul, of course, in his properties and we're an active real estate developer. We have five to six hundred homes or apartments in development and we're actively working to build more. We've been around for about 40 years founded under the administration of Mayor Bernie Sanders and we continue to try to fill where the gaps are in the housing spectrum. Anything from homelessness to home ownership. For example, we help manage the pods over on Elwood Avenue. So that's just a brief kind of thumbnail sketch. Tiff asked me in 17 minutes to describe how we got here to a housing crisis. I don't use the word crisis lightly because it could be worse next year and it's crisis seems like the highest level you want to be. I don't want to turn the dial up to 11 but I want to show you at least one chart that gives you an indication of over time how we've been seeing the housing market. I'm not going to do a lot slides or data and so forth but I want to show you at least just this one little graph. So I'll share that. I assume you can all see that okay. So we think about the rental vacancy rates as being a healthy market where there's choice in the market for renters and it moderates the price in the market when it's about 5% and if you see in this chart of less 13, 14, 15 years it hasn't even come close to 5% at the top and just after 2015, 2016 it got to about 3.3%. But what this indicates is just the lack of options for people, lack of housing, the lack of ability for the market to really work in what people think of as a market satisfying the needs of people that are accessing it. And so it's just broken. I'm not sure how we get back up to a 5% level very quickly but this just is an indication of how people are just having a struggle of just finding a decent place to live. So there are a lot of reasons why and I'll stop this. I can share this through Tiff and Gabrielle later. There are a lot of reasons why we got to this point and if I was doing this presentation or if I was talking to you 10 or 15 years ago I would have to really kind of demonstrate that there's a housing crisis but we all feel it. We all know it. That's why we're here. But in the last 20 years or so, 20, 30 years, we've seen the sizes of households getting smaller even as more people are moving to the area. So fewer people living per household but more households trying to access the housing that we have. So we just haven't been building to maintain the fact that their household sizes are shrinking and yet more people are moving here. So that's one indicator. More recently we've seen an increase in short-term rentals and so housing actually coming out of the market. These are the Airbnb and that kind of thing. So housing coming out of the market and I know Burlington has done a little bit to address this. So we've seen that kind of pressure in the market. Over through the pandemic there was what people thought of Vermont as kind of a paradise. We don't have great data on how many people moved to Vermont. I don't think over the last three, four years because of the pandemic but we have seen an influx of people coming out of state into the region. So there's just a variety of factors that complicates why we're in this place where it doesn't seem like anyone can find a place to move to. And Paul will talk about how that impacts people in the lowest incomes but there's just been this whole kind of like the term perfect storm is I think overused but it does feel like there are lots of different forces that are all kind of creating the system that makes it difficult for people. In the last year there's been increasing interest rates. So we went from three and a quarter percent in January 2022 to seven, eight, nine percent whether you're doing commercial lending or not by the end of the year. So even to build new housing is cost more. And so that slows things down. The cost of materials and labor through the last few years we know there's been a labor shortage. Materials have just gone through the roof too and so that's been troubling. I don't know if Tiff said this before but this is probably the depressing part of the conversation. Or maybe Paul has more on this but so there's just a lot of factors it's like we're pushing this rock up the hill. I will say on a positive note though the state and the city have recognized this as a priority and so we're doing things to address it and you know the state has allocated a lot of resources in the last several years to help build more housing and a lot of it being for people with modest means. Most of it between 110 and 140 million dollars. Each of the last three years has been allocated by the state through some federal sources. That's huge investment if we think back six years that the state would have maybe been putting in 15 million. So it's almost 10 times the amount of investment into trying to get ahead and trying to address this kind of shortage of housing. So that's really that money's starting to work through the system statewide so that's great. I know as I mentioned before we're building as much as we can and as quickly as we can. The state is also invested in providing services for people that need them and increase the base funding for the support and services and also funded a program to make sure that there weren't so many people I know we see a lot but so many people living on streets that might be if we weren't funding people for motel rooms. So the state has been actually kind of really engaging in this as a priority and both Tiff and Gabriella are involved with that. There have been some policy reforms that have been done that maybe have less impact in Burlington because we already are doing some of those things but in some of the other surrounding communities improving density, ability to do density, you know building duplexes or fourplexes when there may be a single family home on a lot that's really great. Burlington is already doing some of that work. There are some regulations for short term rentals in Burlington that's good progress and the city actually increased its contribution to the trust fund which is paid for when people pay the property taxes. So there's a lot of I think momentum or interest in addressing this issue. I'm hopeful it does feel like a little bit of a pushing the ball up the hill or the rock up the hill but I think we have the right kind of systems in place to help address this. So I'll stop there. I could ramble all night but I'll stop there and let them all jump in. That's great and just one thank you very much Chris. I think that's kind of a perfect overview. You could go into lots of depth but if people have questions what we'd like to do is ask you to put them in the chat so that we can see kind of where what you know as things are going so we don't interrupt either Paul or Chris so we can get them in the chat and then Gabrielle and I'll take a look at them and figure out kind of in what we're to ask them. Thanks. All right Paul Dragon. Okay well thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I will try to share my screen. If I have a presentation I can move through. I think we'll keep us a bit focused if that's okay with everybody. So let me find where it is let me see if this works for you. Folks see my screen? Yeah okay well thanks again everybody for having me and I concur with Chris around the housing stock and you're going to see why as we kind of move through this presentation. Again I'm with CVOEO, Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity. We cover four counties. We also have statewide programs. We have we've taken on two emergency shelters in the last two and a half years. We do have a domestic and sexual violence shelter as well and we operate a daytime shelter in Burlington and we share services with CHT over at the Elmwood pods and we have an outreach team so we're doing a lot of work around homelessness and we also have a very large Head Start program, a weatherization program, a micro business program and several other interconnected programs. We have 10 all together. So I wanted to kind of walk through this because there's some key documents and I think it's important for us to have a historical perspective because when we're talking in the present a lot of work has been done in the past and we had a study that was we had a study that started in 2012. We had a Vermont Council to End Homelessness and there was a report that they issued the Vermont Plan to End Homelessness. That was back in 2012. In 2017 we had the Corporation for Supportive Housing out of Connecticut pretty renowned nationally due to the Vermont Roadmap to End Homelessness and that was issued in January 2017. I encourage everybody to read that. It's going to reinforce some of the things that Chris said and then in 2021 the Corporation came back and they did another report strengthening the housing and service system. So you can kind of see that there's been a lot of key documents, a lot of studies. In fact the Roadmap in 2017 when I was at the Agency of Human Services that used 80 source documents and did a number of interviews around the state to get at that final report. Then and now if you look at the concepts for the report I want to recall that in 2016 for the point in time count that's a one night count Vermont was lauded nationally for having a 20% reduction in the number of homeless people and we had a 25% reduction in chronic homelessness. As you know people are chronically homeless meaning four times in one year or one year at in length in total in total length at least one year. Those are high service users so if you can get your folks who are chronically homeless housed that saves the system a lot of money so we did a really good job back in 2016 and I credit that 2012 report and some of the work that came out of the Vermont Council really helped to move the needle and now you know that right now we have the second highest per capita rate of homelessness in the country just behind California so a lot of things contributed to that certainly the pandemic didn't help certainly fentanyl use has not helped certainly the reasons that Chris gave around housing stock vacancy rate all those things factor into this but we have a very high rate of homelessness in in Vermont right now I do want to acknowledge that during the pandemic the state did a great job at sheltering people who are experiencing homelessness with a 98% shelter rate which was really really high. You can just see kind of leading up to that 2012 report if you look back at 2008 you got about a little over 2,200 people experiencing homelessness that that's again one night during the year and you can see it escalate up to 2012 where it hits uh 2,800 and you can see the something we never want to see as shelter providers the shelter stays rising during that time from 15 to 36 days meaning people aren't able to access housing and they're even higher right now we have people staying at a Samaritan house shelter for um eight nine ten eleven months we had a guy stay there for over a year so the shelters are really stressed in in this state um but you can you see at 2012 and then it starts to go down towards 2016 where again we had a very low rate of homelessness and I say that because there is hope I do think we can get back there a lot of reference just a few strategies here because again we're going back over 10 years and some of these strategies still are needed and I think what I'm trying to show you is a long history of a lot of interventions that we know work but we haven't quite kept up the consistency and the resources needed to continue to bend that curve we got close in 2016 so there's a lot of things we can do here and I would just point out number six addressing the benefit cliff TANF program our reach your program has done a good job a lot more can be done to make sure that people who are getting benefits once they make money through work we honor that so they don't lose their benefits and then become either marginally housed or worse even homeless um so a lot of these strategies are are are still key and still in play then we go to the roadmap to end homelessness it's a great document 2017 and we know it works we have a great partnership um CHD and CBOAO is great example of a housing and a service partnership but we have a lot of that throughout the state I think we're really lucky there and we have a very good relationship with our state partners and we were acknowledged in 2017 for being on the leading edge of ending homelessness in the country the strengths of our current system is noted then um you know the ability to focus on key populations remember we drove chronic homelessness down by 25 percent those are folks that are hitting the emergency rooms the court systems high service utilizers very expensive if you can focus on that population it drives your cost down really really key for the future we lost our focus there our partnerships very important supportive housing is is incredibly key especially now where we're seeing so many people using substances so many people with co-occurring mental health and substance use conditions and I will say and I can cite examples all through our shelter system we have a high rate of people with intellectual disabilities developmental disabilities with chronic medical conditions when we operated the holiday in two years ago we had five people in their 80s and up our staff were changing diapers for senior vermonters these folks should either be in higher levels of care which I can talk about or they need really dramatic uh so intensive supportive housing when they do get homes and we need to continue to focus on new innovative programs uh shout out a couple family supportive housing which is a state program where we have providers focusing on uh housing families who are experiencing homelessness with children and providing wraparound supports we leverage federal Medicaid so that means our costs were only about half and we were able to draw down federal Medicaid to expand that program more can be done there very very important so uh you can see this from this report a lot of these things still hold right supportive housing is key because we are seeing so many people with high needs once we get them housed we want to keep them housed we need affordable housing we need more housing rapid rehousing is a great tactic we have a home program now at uh CVOEL where we're rapidly rehousing families who are experiencing homelessness we have 200 rapid rehousing vouchers even with the bottleneck that chris talked about the 1 vacancy rate we've already housed 57 families statewide that feels really good and we'll get to 200 we need to make sure that the the vouchers continue as the housing stock comes on and again homeless prevention getting people services right now for a year two years whatever it takes to make sure they don't come back into homelessness because we do not have a just cause eviction right people can be evicted for pretty much any reason i'm not saying it's easy but they can be evicted for um for any reason it doesn't doesn't have to be cited so we do we are seeing a lot of people coming back into homelessness um talked about some things moving forward uh people may not know about the coordinated entry system it was in its nascent stages then in 2017 it's pretty robust now uh we i think you should all know that the balance of state has one continuum chitin county has the other we get together monthly to coordinate services as best we can and we try to be data oriented we can do better with the data because data is the key to this but i do want folks to know we have a system in place that can always be improved but partners are connecting around this this work um the uh financial investments were massive out of that 2017 plan and you can see 33 uh 331 million then and then an ongoing uh operating and service costs uh so again the question for us as Vermonters and for legislators and others is you know how do we want to utilize our money is this a worthy investment if we don't do this are we willing to see so many people out on the street so many people in the emergency room so many people with chronic health conditions that we're paying so much money for or do we go upstream take a public health approach get more housing more support housing online these are cost avoidance strategies they save the public so much money we're never able to get beyond like oh this is the health care systems fund this is the designated agencies and the mental health agencies fund we're never able to get beyond that we've got to get to a place if we really want to start to solve uh homelessness where these systems of care are all in and they're connected and they're working together otherwise we're going to continue to spend our wills recommendations you can see uh addressing the workforce needs like I said you know our staff at the holiday end paid pretty darn good there's 26 shelters in this state some of the shelter workers are making 15 to 20 an hour I can go to Burlington bagel and make $25 an hour meanwhile 30 of their population is a chronic medical condition or a mental health or substance use condition they're doing work that should be done by licensed clinical social workers nurses and higher levels of care that can't continue we got to have a cross sector collaboration as I said and it means the Department of Mental Health disabilities aging and independent living in our area on aging and our substance use aid app which is part of the Vermont Department of Health all need to come together to make this work let's create an innovation hub right let's let's get the best people in the room this is a long-term commitment there will be no short-term fix to this many people homeless right now this will take ongoing commitment that's why I showed you the history there however we can do some innovation so let's get some people together meeting regularly and start to innovate and do the best we can so some recommendations we need more mental health and nursing supports integrated into our current homeless shelters the problem we have now Chris is right we don't have enough capacity so we have so many people out on the street you see it in Burlington 275 people unsheltered right so when we do have our shelters we need to make sure that we are having mental health and nursing supports in our shelters in our emergency shelters we have a healthcare equity project up in the Samaritan house where NCSS brings a mental health worker over once a week that's worked well we need more of that let's expand our CRT program which is for people with severe and persistent mental illness through our designated agencies however we do know that not everybody wants to sign up for a designated agency so there's a wonderful federal program called the PATH program it's through SAMHSA it's for outreach it's no strings attached it's for mental health workers to reach out on the street bring people in provide them support and they don't have to sign up for the mental health agency because not everybody recognizes themselves as needing a mental health agency let's create a quasi-state program because there's not enough federal PATH funds for Vermont we have no long-term substance use rehabilitation facilities three weeks is the longest here you can go to uh New Hampshire and get six months we need long-term substance use facilities you know that you know the high rate of overdoses now in Vermont it's one of the highest in the country um we we need places for people to go and stay and we know from the research that it takes a long time to rehab in three weeks is not enough we need to increase medical respite beds uvm and chchcb the community health center going to have a small program let's do more of that uh we operate the community resource center we're TIF by the way volunteers uh regulated provide meals outside of the center we have six to eight people every day using i talk to our team like what are we doing oh we go check on them when the overdose we knock in them meanwhile we have a head start program a huge head start program right across the street with kids and families so i can't have our staff move those folks off of our community resource center property i don't want them to go across the street i don't want them to go anywhere else in our community they're safer there that's not the answer that's not what a community does we need an overdose prevention center the governor vetoed it last year let's at least do a pilot let's get one in burlington let's staff it that way our staff can point to a place and say you can't do it here but my gosh you can get really good care over there and you can do this safely and we can check your drugs and make sure they're they're they're the best they can be we need access to higher care beds we just did a report i was part of it community care homes nursing homes have vacant beds all over the state and they're independent so they don't they screen people out and this report that was done showed well maybe we can get 40 40 bed statewide we need to do better than that right we we can't have this disparity with people experiencing homelessness with chronic medical conditions and elderly people 70s 80s living in shelters around the streets when we have empty beds and community care homes and nursing homes that's not right we should we should immediately be asking right away for four regional higher level of care emergency shelters we run to i would love the designated agencies medical facilities there should be four established at least regionally it could be done fairly quick they can do medication management they can have psychiatry on site um they can get reimbursed for a lot of this and they can take 30 people off our hands that really deserve and need higher level of care we can do more immediately this year more capital investments and emergency shelters we can rapidly purchase a hotel or two at least get that innovation hub together some realtors some lawyers do it purchase them get people safe and then once we get the housing stock on turn them into permanent housing we need safe camping and parking sites super controversial i don't i don't i don't i kind of don't get it because we've got people in burlington at the congregational church right now 20 25 30 people camping up right around there and we see what happens and then they get scattered all over the place so at least if we know we're not moving people from site to site we can find them we can provide services let's think about mobile homes as affordable housing um and let's think about mobile home parks as resident owned again we got to keep up with the rapid rehousing we've got to really along with chronic homelessness i think uh focus should be on uh really solving child homelessness because we know from the research if you're homeless as a child you're more likely to be homeless as adult so let's move upstream we've got about 450 families statewide who are homeless we can solve family homelessness and make sure we're preventing future homelessness so that is my that's it i'm gonna stop this year you are so fast i breathe all of that thank you so much um i christ do you have anything that you want to add in terms of um policy recommendations um or or recommendations for action um uh i would never contradict anything paul says paul is just he's very comprehensive and in terms of what he said you know there was um there was an article i mean i just thinking something simple um you know there was an article um yesterday before and then new york times that talked about a woman in washington state who was earning seventy five thousand dollars and living in her car and she was um staying in a parking lot that was authorized parking lot and you know a number of people were staying in and a number of people a number of states have or areas have have done this to authorize here's a place that you can come and be in safe and that was one of the things that paul had in his recommendation um it's it's a it's a stopgap i don't even want to call it a band aid you know it's it's less than that but you know there are ways in which we can at least pull people together in one place um and provide some services for them and you know we're trying to do that at the the emergency shelter elmwood avenue but i also think that we should start thinking about parking lots in places that we should build housing and that's going to take a lot of people thinking about what their communities want to look like realizing that there's density that will help build more housing more quickly and serve a range of needs and services but we may lose a view of the lake and that may be something that we need to think about in terms of our own our own values but you know do you want people sleeping in their cars in a parking lot or do you want some housing housing there so um um um you know immediate things that people can do is is um you know advocate with their uh not your local legislators are fine don't bother them um but uh you're a city council and and the mayor's office that you're there to um to say you want more housing but you want more permanent housing but in the meantime we need to do some of these other things and then one last thing i'll talk a lot about um substance use and some of the things that we see very visibly in our in our community and um he he talked about this too and it's really we need um i think a health response a health system response first it's not a housing problem for a lot of these folks we can't put we can't create housing and then all of a sudden put these uh this folks need into them we need to have a health response that goes along with it and so we all can't take that on my shop can't take take on those needs we need to have other types of services involved um so that's the other thing that i really think that we need to hear more voices calling for it's like community safety it's community response um but it's really it's it's really making sure people are healthy okay thank you here we are you've laid it out there are a whole lot of questions i don't know gabrielle does something kind of jump out to you as a starting point for for the questions well uh thank you chris for answering some of the questions uh directly um i think that i think the one uh the one's that comes up is okay so we understand the need for um you know the mental health as well as the housing and and the fact that we need to really work within the existing systems and and build upon them and really working with partnerships and then it's not just about housing it's about services um but i think one of the questions that kind of builds off of that is um uh so what do we do right now um you know some of the some of the immediate solutions in particular paul that you were describing um what i was interpreting was so legislature keep putting money to it um but you know nancy had asked so what do we have to do to get moving on these immediate solutions that are being described um you know how do we it took us a long time to get here um it's been decades that we have not been investing in you know middle range housing um and also affordable housing uh let alone the social services uh mental health um and uh drug use issues so those are all there but it's also taken us decades to get to where we are in terms of just not having enough stock how do we address that given that a lot of those pieces take time and she wrote it while you were talking paul so i'm gonna i'm gonna tag you you what are the immediate solutions yeah i um i i do want to reinforce um that this isn't an impossible situation it is going to take a few years of dedicated effort and i'm going to point to the vermont council of homelessness that was a governor appointed and then went away and they were able to keep the pressure on in the data and we have better data than we've ever had right now so i would i would and we also did away with the child poverty council so i think those two things coming back where people can hold the short term work the medium term work and the long long term work is going to be really important because you've got to understand the data people do understand when you say um you've spent x millions of dollars on emergency room visits for people who have been chronically homelessness what are we doing people get that so i think for me um right right now we're falling very far behind the curve so you know for me it's like asking the state well we did um it's unpalatable but we did shelter 98% of unsheltered people just recently and we did it with federal dollars so i think we're going to have to figure out how we can at least get back to something close to that because we have too many people living outside unsheltered so i would call for the rapid building or repurposing of buildings or hotels for at least nighttime shelters and some daytime services the place where we need to get with our shelter system is to make them look more like housing because people will not recuperate and move out of them quick enough if they're in mass shelters that don't look good and that's part of the problem with the hotels but right now what we have to do is look at how we can best shelter people and i think take the highest care needs people and look at those four regional shelters for this year only 30 beds each i say only i know it's a lot of work and ask for other systems of care to get involved why can't they they're serving these people anyway they can get reimbursed our shelter system can't be reimbursed for anything we have to fight for every grant most of our fundings one time even we just took on the Champlain Inn i was told this is one year funding you know how hard it is to hire somebody for a year and you got to tell people so i would say we get moving on that sooner rather than later and we start looking at other ways to get some rooms going for the so many people that that july 1st exit really hurt really and you can see it in burlington if any of you walked around in burlington can i ask two of you to comment on nancy harkin says you know like um it sounds like we have capacity um in terms of supportive care um do you agree with that i mean i i see yeah this comes in the hotels it's it's almost no capacity for service you know supported housing services um because i think that there is i mean everybody um yeah everybody recognizes the need for supportive services and yet what is the capacity to provide them so if you can't tell i'm from providence by my accent i go back to providence and i see around the country a lot of municipalities stepping up they they run shelters and they hire people so i know for cb oeo we just took on two um two shelters we're not a capacity we're not able to take on any more i'm not sure the other providers around the state i suspect you would get some other providers that have a little bit more capacity but why won't some some of the municipalities step up and do some of this work this is a community problem it needs an all-in state town city provider federal solution so i do wonder why some of that isn't happening and i do wonder why um developmental disability organizations why the mental health system why the substance use system in the medical system i'm doing more quite honestly so that's where you can find your compare some of it i think you alluded to before you can make 25 bucks an hour making a bagel sandwich and um you know there are um there have been investments made to the state-funded social services programs over the past few years to the tune of eight nine percent a year for the last couple of years but it's still not enough and so until we pay people to do the work that we care about and i don't know if you want to talk about teachers or nurses or whatever the people that are caring for our communities need to get paid for the work that we value and um you know we get on the soapbox here but um uh so that's that's one of those the shortcomings in the system the other thing that's happening and i don't want to lose it i've spent gone in and out of my head twice now is that we need to also invest in those uh those programs that prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place and those are cheaper you know those are things that we can do their background programs on the side of his shop or other organizations can do this they just help people get over the hump of my car broke down and i can't get to work and it's a month or two or what have you they're not really systemic problems they're just poverty and um if we can help people there then we then we can focus on the people that are more chronically in need um whether it's health or housing or what have you and so we we we have an opportunity to think about that now because there's so much of a focus on it but there's so much focus on the on the crisis that we're not looking at some of the easier um apples to pick off your treat you know so yeah i uh with regards to poverty um i just finished reading the book poverty by america and he does a back of the envelope calculation but you know if you google how much the one percent evades and taxes it's 163 billion annually which is more than enough um if if the policy decision was to take all of that money to lift everyone up and above the poverty line that would have to be a policy decision but there you know if we simply um required law that is currently required in terms of taxes we would have the funds for that um but yeah yeah this is to provide those services and it's much easier to go make a a big hole for sure if we had asked folks to put questions um in the chat but we have a raised hand i don't know if there's hi if you don't mind that was just going to um step in for one second um paul and i go back a long ways i i worked for many many years in the developmental disability system and i've been doing training since i retired from the state um and this past year i actually trained staff at the howard center um i trained about 150 staff who provide developmental disability services a large portion of those people were new just since newly hired since the pandemic and um one thing that was really remarkable to me talking to many of those folks howard centers the designated agency for chitlin county is that i would say a good half of those people working there can't afford to actually live in chitlin county um i talk to people who live they're up in saint august now they're up in fairfield in belvedere and i mean it's just crazy um because they're working and you know and they are making a little they're making more than minimum wage and they're making a little bit um you know more than they were a few years ago but they still they cannot afford to live in the community um that they that they work in i mean it we're just so out of lack in terms of wages and the affordability of um of living uh being able to live in your community thanks for me um i'm i'm going to bring up another question there there's a question here that says uh i heard that there are open mental health beds that aren't filled is that true i asked that because i've heard that there aren't and yet paul i thought you said earlier that there were 40 beds um available through a separate care system well amy would know this too there's a community care home system throughout vermont and nursing homes and nursing homes are the highest level and what we had asked was that the state kind of look at where there are empty beds and there are and a report was just issued and they said well we could probably get maybe 40 bed statewide out of this and i thought that was not it's better but it's i think there's more opportunities there i think what you know i think mag makes a great point and we should ask the association uh that runs the 12 mental health agencies how many beds there are because i don't know but i have heard there are empty beds and i suspect some of it is um again people have to apply and it's not easy to go through the application process to sign up out of designated agency especially if you're somebody who might be paranoid it's schizophrenic or have law enforcement issues so how do we remove those barriers and make sure that's why i mentioned the path program and make sure people can get into these beds um maybe without signing up and then being engaged but it would be it's a great question and i think we should all find out you know i'm wondering um and i i i invite anybody to respond to this but i am wondering if uh the legislature or policy makers city you know municipal or state um have blind spots that um we that need to be made very explicit are there things that we refuse to see that that you need us to see what are we most resistant to um well you can think on that i think um what's never been cracked is the idea that all these different systems and albeit they have data different data systems different funding sources are not able to come together around homelessness and we rely on a very underfunded shelter system and a staff that's underpaid yet seeing extremely high levels of need in their population i am not sure why that's happening and why there isn't more uh force or push to bring those systems together i was i was in the agency i was the deputy secretary i'm not saying i had any you know i was able to do it either it's just it would take legislative action to really make this happen and i am i just want to channel maybe this is a this is a much larger conversation but i want to channel a former ward five um constituent richard kemp who they've done on flint avenue and uh he used to always say there's plenty of resources out there to do all the things we need to do it's just about how we need to redistribute them and so thinking about the tax structure of the state you know there's more we can do federally i'm sure but you know there was another article in the times today that talked about the the net worth of people going up 37 percent over the last three years in the pandemic i think there are plenty of resources in this country to address this really kind of big issue that we're facing i think it's just going to take some um some courage up and down the the power structures that be to make it happen but that's my that big picture there's a question in here um about um well actually um marissa would you like to to to tell us a little bit about your experience and um and what you would like to see happen you you wrote something in the chat about mental health and substance use crises yeah sure so um i actually worked for Howard center developmental services for six years and now i work for burlington housing authority um retention department um i specifically support the folks who live in our properties but we have a sector that helps bha voucher holders um and if i think i actually saw you at a housing conference and i wouldn't stop talking because that when you told me you were a rep i was like these are all my thoughts um so i feel like we have uh maybe cross paths um but yeah so i have helped um actually ds clients who are struggling with um mental health crises who also have comorbid um substance use issues and um they are not able to get into our treatment facilities because they will kind of point to the opposite issue saying we can't serve this person because they have mental health um disorders that are causing this behavior not the substance use and then you go to the substance use facility and they say the exact opposite so i i supported before i left i was supporting someone for over a year and a half who was chronically homeless and i couldn't even get him into treatment centers when i could get him open to accepting this i couldn't even get him into places because they would point fingers at the other um facility saying he has to go here first and then he wouldn't be admitted um it's just really it's it's as a service provider it's really discouraging when you work day in and day out terrified that you're going to get a phone call that this person has passed away because they're homeless and not receiving the support they need and then when they finally agree to go somewhere and get the help that they so desperately need the doors are closed and locked um and and it we shouldn't have to have people need service providers screaming at these agencies to let these people get help it should be an open door policy and say hey we're here and ready to help you when you're ready to get help but that is not the case in my experience and paul does that square with your um experience uh i was just thinking of what marissa said in 2008 we had a two-year SAMHSA grant from the federal government to work with all the designated agencies on co-occurring treatment and we'd go in and monitor them and train and how to be competent for co-occurring care so that very thing that marissa said does not happen because a lot of the da's are broken out into mental health and substance use so we worked hard to bring them together as best we could and it sounds like that's still not really working that's really unfortunate we percent of the people with a mental health issue have a co-occurring substance use condition well and you know the the mobile crisis the expansion of mobile crisis teams throughout the state is at least designed to address co-occurring issues and so people will be cross-trained and they're you know i that's funded through a bunch of federal money and a bunch of money from the general fund that we put in this last year to start that up i think what oh sorry i think marissa she can clarify she might have been referring to like inpatient and outpatient programs as well though mm-hmm yeah that's correct yeah okay and chris i this is a as a policy maker this is housing is not my expertise but i do often look to other states with similar populations uh to get a sense of you know what might be working there um that we could lift for here are you seeing other states with similar demographics and size and sort of rural makeup like vermont um that are doing anything uniquely um imaginative and creative that we could emulate i will start this but i may punt to tiff because she's had conversations with people in maine that have established some ongoing funding sources for social social services for people in housing and investing in a housing first model as well but she may have more i think well what i learned from maine i'm working with the chairs of appropriations um house general and human services and the speaker on a housing bill trying to shape the contours of the housing bill and i used to serve on house general which which handles at least the physical infrastructure of housing um and its development um and so the the biggest difference i think between our state and maine is that this year they committed a portion of the property transfer tax to funding services so organizations like paul's don't have one-year contracts they know that there is a consistent funding source that will support the kind of um services that that have to be provided to many people who are in supportive housing and um that's a big commitment and one of the things i've heard over and over again from service providers with whom i'm spoken is we you know you can't give me a one-year contract and expect me to be able to hire people who are going to want to stay for any length of time this is very hard work and they need a little more security than that and um and you know we can't live year to year in not knowing kind of to what degree housing services will be funded um and so um so it it i think there is some real receptivity to that idea and um next week or week the week after we'll be talking with the head of ways and means about the ideas that she has to develop funding that can support not just construction but also the service side of things um i i think that main has committed itself to a a state and um uh kind of local um mix of housing supports um housing navigators at the state level that are not fun you know not temporary but full-time and um really have a sense of where everybody is and what they may be missing out on so that they can support the agencies that are providing the day-to-day support so um i think that's probably one of the most important pieces of work that we could do i think just to say i'm because it's i know um uh time there are probably going to be three different types of housing bills one is going to relate to zoning and a number of you have brought that up and gabrielle serves on the committee um that would be reviewing um proposals and um and did last year when they made some some changes um in um zoning and permitting second will be kind of housing construction and then third will be uh the emergency services um and emergency housing um for folks who are unhoused um and i i i have a feeling that those will be in three different bills that will all show up in the budget um uh or parts of them will show up in the budget but they're um i there so there are different people who are working on different aspects of of the issue and i i would really welcome your thoughts further thoughts about um um a number of you have already shown that you have uh not just an interest but expertise in certain areas um that and and that could be very helpful to our group um and i would welcome a conversation with you or an email from you um with your further thoughts um yeah um we had scheduled this to 745 um we also recognize it's a one day night and um you know if folks wanted to end earlier we could uh so you guys could populate i i also don't want to cut off the conversation if if folks are wanting to stay on so feel free to type into the chat if you'd like to go till 745 i i did want to ask chris there was a specific question about now that braver and apartments in south burlington is renovated and set up is there another similar project for cht and chitin county and thoughts on replicating the pods model in other parts of the county and the state yeah thanks and i know i just saw paul put in that origan had um during the pandemic had rapidly purchased a bunch of motels and used for temporary then permanent and that's similar to what we've done in vermont we did a lot of this in vermont um so when people were talking about the origan model of doing this i breasted a little bit because i think we've done a lot of it too um we don't have another motel um lined up to do this type of thing we're always open because as um as we've learned we've done we've purchased 10 motels for a variety of purposes um it's cheaper it's faster and it gets people housed um much smoother away so we're always open to that so i know we have um we always take the calls from our brokers and people looking for that um and then the pods i haven't heard from a couple other places around the state that are wondering how it's going it's still early so i think we're still assessing i'm not sure there's a plan to replicate that but the city of brillington really stepped forward and said they wanted this to happen and put forth their their resources for it and so i think it's it's working relatively smoothly and but the people are staying there longer than we anticipated because there's no place for them to move to um so really the answer is finding permanent housing um you know we need to do these stop gaps in the meantime but um uh the the answer is really trying to to find a real um a real place for them to live somebody asked in the in the chat about um our Gabrielle's and my support um for the um uh safe um uh safe use facilities i'm lost the name um but it's it's basically there's a bill in that's currently pending in my committee it just didn't um get out um before the end of the session um that would have supported um safe injection sites and that is something that i personally support um and i believe that our committee is going to take it up um pretty immediately um and get it out so that um that process can begin um and we'll we'll see where the governor is on that um i i think we kind of know um and so that may that may be require another override um and i'm i'm going to say that i have not looked at the bill that uh tiff is referencing so i would want to look at it because i typically look at the bills before i uh comment um one you know i i i don't know a ton about um the pros and cons of uh overdose prevention centers um the when i've asked people uh who know more about it the the primary con or one of the ones that was raised was more so when they're located in um not places like burlington but more rural areas uh and what it means for uh transportation for people to get to them to get back from them um so how how those centers are designed statewide but specific to uh you know each community um is thing that as as an area that needs fleshing out i am here real life this is a good way maybe to and this is what can we as vermont residents do aside from voting to support um all these efforts um i i think for one thing i think that paul needs volunteers so uh you know uh volunteer um uh where and if you can i also think and i'm going to be political here but i believe that the administration needs to hear from vermont more vermonters that that what we are doing isn't enough because we met a lot of resistance from the administration last year to extend the motel program to invest in permanently affordable housing um and and unless the administration feels pressure it's all on the legislature to try to respond um and you know we can't do this alone um and we i think could be probably very um i think we could be uh uh better at asking for help um uh in the coming months because we're going to need it and and and i i think too it's really important if you hear about an interesting model if you know uh communicate those share those with not just us but paul chris others that you know in the community who are involved in this because it it is we all share responsibility for the solution and um and for committing our energies and resources to addressing it yeah and for a very near term action um tiff i don't you know feel free to call or email the governor and say could you know could you please support getting the opiate funds out the door because they're not out the door yet right nope they're not yet i think i think we appropriated that like when well i think some of them i mean it's it's been there are some um rfps that are gonna come online pretty soon what whether they needed an rfp or not is unclear but it is i do think some of the money we're going to see um i think that um frankly i think that our state agencies and departments have been cut to the bone and their ability to turn money around really fast has been really compromised by successive administrations that have made critical cuts to especially the agency of human services and so when we talk about raising the Medicaid reimbursement rate when we talk about state workers um and you know i i expect a lot of people who work for the state because you know people trust us to do the right thing and to work as hard as we can and i know a lot of people are working as hard as they can um in in these various agencies and departments and we're expecting too much so so that's another way to push back at a governor who said to all departments three percent raise is tops you know in your budget proposals i don't want to see anything more than three percent um increase um um so um i i just think that i don't believe that the governor hears that much from people um and i think we've got to get better at communicating as citizens with the administration and and i also just think there is a sense that um um uh the governor did a good job um through covid and uh he is you know a generally reasonable um individual um personally i am really seeking more vision uh and more of a proactive view of you can see from Vermont um if it's for housing or for its mental health supports or opiate treatment and i i also just think this is this is not uh related to the to our current governor but um fundamentally there is you know a different viewpoint in terms of what the role of government should be um and how big it should be and uh right now we have a general manager and a CEO who um you know does not necessarily feel like uh government is as needed as perhaps i do i i really do feel like government is needed for for the things that the for-profit world won't address so but enough for being political um you know in our little zoom cafes in future months we'll keep you and and through front sports forum we will um keep you abreast of what's happening um the conversations that are happening um i uh i i really can't thank paul or chris enough for the work that they do um thank you it's critical and you are you know kind of two of my heroes so and i really appreciate your coming tonight and some of you who work in this area it is hard work so thank you well thanks everybody um we'll put a link to the recording um uh for everybody who wasn't able to come but um we really appreciate your coming tonight great to see everybody thank you all thank you thanks everybody