 We'll call the meeting to order. And on the agenda is public invited to be heard. Not see anyone, but Erica, do we have anyone that was planning to attend? No, we don't have anybody. The next item we have is. From the temporary 10th meeting. We have a motion to approve those. Okay. And then we need a second. And Karen Phillips seconds. All those in favor of approving the minutes from our February 10th meeting, please raise your hand. Okay. Opposed. And abstentions. Okay. So we have one abstention. I think that's because I didn't attend. I'm not allowed to. Okay. Okay. The next item is review of the 2021 CDBG caper annual performance reports. Hello, thank you. My, I have a two year old visitor. So I'm telling my husband to come and grab please. So I'm Molly O'Donnell. I am going to be, I'm the division director for housing and community investment for the city. I'm going to be giving an update on our CDBG caper. And I'm also going to be giving an update on our annual performance report that we submit to HUD each year for our CDBG and home programs. We will be taking this to city council for review and consideration on March 29th. And so this also we're in the public review period right now. And March 29th will be the public hearing as well for consideration of the caper. So I'm going to be giving an update on that. Overall, I just want to, to start by saying in, in past, maybe not 2020 because that was also an interesting year. In prior years, Kathy presented to you the. CDBG caper and the inclusionary housing snapshot for the prior year. And I'm going to be splitting that up. It's, it's purely capacity related, but the, the caper is, is complete, but our inclusionary housing snapshot. So we're going to be taking this to the city council for review and consideration to present that at next month's meeting. So for our CDBG programs and also we wrap in. Report outs on our affordable housing. Funding program as well since they're so interrelated and tied together. Just to recap, especially because we have some new members here that each and every project undertaken or completed in 2021. We have a full spectrum of affordable housing for all incomes and stages of life. So these projects keep people in their homes. Improves the city's affordable housing stock. And prepares residents for home ownership or improves their financial position. It also can make homes accessible for persons with disabilities. And leveraged. This year, our leverage amount. Just pulling up my attention. Was over $40 million. Because we had a couple of very big ticket items. So that was really. Really great to see. So in our CDBG program, if you refer to the caper performance report attachment that was in your packet, the first page is our CDBG report out. So we assisted 387 total households. 73% of these in our regular CDBG program, where low and moderate income. 14 homes received rehabilitation assistance. Providing improvements to the city's existing housing stock and helping people stay in their homes. One of those was to, well, I should say 14 is much lower. Than a typical year. This is because we only picked up the CDB, the rehab program part way through 2021. Because of COVID restrictions. I hear incanto. So I'm telling my husband, please come. I think Mabel should be a guest star. If you're a parent, you know, she's right here just playing with pens, drawing on my to-do list. You want to say hello? She's your admin assistant. Here she is. Say hi. Hi, Mabel. Okay. Such as life. So, um, are we happy? Yeah. Such as life. So, um, our rehab program only picked up part way through the year. And, um, it was partially, you know, it was slow to start partially because people were hesitant to have people have us in their homes. And also because, um, It's all right, Molly. Just go right on ahead. Okay. So, um, I think our biggest actual constraint right now is the availability of contractors. We really only have a couple that consistently bid on our rehab projects and with pricing and then that how busy contractors are, it really limited the program in 2021. So of that 14, one of the homes received assistance to correct code violations, address health and safety issues, and the other homes were made accessible for persons with disabilities or to allow seniors to age in place. Eight mobile homes were updated by repairing or replacing groups or making heating, plumbing and electrical system repairs. And two households received funding to address emergency situations causing a threat to the health and safety of those residents. Um, overall we had 202. Longmont residents using our housing counseling services. We had 46 residents that used the R center rental assistance. This was COVID assistance. We didn't have expenditures in our, our security deposit program this year because HSBC did have separate funding to cover that. We did provide $150,000 for loan principal reduction at the same time. And we did provide some funding to complete security measures at the suite for the Longmont housing authority. Um, so those are exterior improvements. So generally, if you check out your chart, so you've got the CDBG funds on one page, you have the CDBG CV funds there. Um, we did provide 105,000 and change in assistance to the R center for rental assistance. This was an extension of that COVID related rental assistance. The rest of what is slated for that program is in our fresh start utility billing assistance program that's run here out of the city. Um, we didn't get our first expenditures in 2020. One, but we did open the program at that time. And since then just, we've had good progress. We've got $113,000 spent in the first two months of the year. So that is moving along. You'll see that, um, performance reflected later. So your next chart is the affordable housing, but I'm going to circle back to that in a moment. I'm going to, I'll just do it just to not skip around. So in our affordable housing funding. Um, you'll see that we have several projects that were budgeted for, but have not yet been expended, but they are in progress. So the city owned rehab. That is what we call our Adrian property. That is under in bidding right now. So we should have some costs occurring there soon. So the city of East Rogers road project is, um, in design and development review right now. We did spend a portion of our pre development costs on the sunset element project. This is the permanent supportive housing project that's proposed there next to the suites. That project did submit for 9% tax credits on in February 1st of this year. And we do have an interview set up with Chaffa for later in April. So we're hoping for success. Uh, the cinnamon, Simon Park senior housing that construction is complete. It's leasing up and we did expend all that the funding budgeted for that. The Mustang land purchase. Uh, we did not yet transact this. They just closed on the property recently. So that will be coming forward soon. That's an annual commitment for us for five years. And for Christmas, uh, that should be completed here by May 1st. That is our projected closing date, um, for that project. It's about ready to, to get going on, on construction once we get all of our funding finalized. Um, and our, we've got one project with fee offsets here that's listed. So generally. If you go down to your charts, you can see the unspent funds in the, um, 2021 available committed expense. So we do have an increase in unexpended funds at the end of the year from 2020, just by, uh, just about 75,000. It looks like, um, really it was a challenge to spend funding in 2021. I will say that, um, we did not meet timeliness this year for the first time in a very, very long time. We are one of many jurisdictions that weren't able to meet timeliness this year. We were not very far off though. The timeliness ratio, you have to have less than, you have to have expended more than, um, or not have 1.5 times your, your funding amount in remaining basically by November 2nd. And we were at 1.54. So we were very close. Um, we do project to that with the estimate of 2022 funding, we need to spend about $519,000 by October 31st to make timeliness this year. And, um, with the several projects that we already have in the works, Christmas being one, we don't expect that to be a problem. So we're shooting to, to get that all squared away. We also are looking at, um, how to improve our rehab program, try and do some creative marketing efforts for, um, for contractors trying to look at how to make our bids more attractive to contractors as well. So in total, 94% of our funds were benefited low and moderate income persons. Um, we were at a very low administration percentage, 6% this year where the maximum is 20%. And every CDBG dollars spent leveraged $82.31 and other public or private funding. So I, I'm going to save some of our, uh, report outs on our progress on meeting our affordable housing goals, um, for the next meeting with the inclusionary housing snapshot. So, um, I will open it up for questions or discussion. Anyone have questions for Molly around the, um, CPDG performance report. Molly, I had my mind was, I was going to ask about what the, with the rehab program, but we were looking at, if we were having trouble getting, um, contractors there, it sounds like there's some, some plans there to try to bring in some more contractors and, or make that more attractive. Um, Go ahead. In the short term, we also, we've got a fair amount of development projects on the horizon, especially with the ARPA funding, um, that might be able to use a matching source. And so maybe in 2022, if we haven't yet solved our contractor challenges, we would look to, um, to focus some of the funds there. We'll consider that once we look at the budgets. I present them to you. Graham. Thanks. The, uh, timeliness requirement. Is that, is that merely allocated funds by the due date? Or do you actually have to spend it? Uh, you have to spend enough funding that you don't have 1.5 times your allocation and remaining allocation over the years that you have active funding left in. Um, so it's, it's a little bit of a complicated calculation. And can you, can you just choose it? I want to connect it back to, to Caitlin's question. Can you just choose to increase what you'll, what you'll spend on the projects you're trying to attract contractors to, or is that tightly regulated? Uh, no, it's, it's as long as you spend the CDPG funds anywhere, it can be on any piece of what you have planned. So we're basically look at our projects and, um, look at the readiness to expend the money and try and do. Whatever we can on our side to make sure there are no roadblocks to that. Um, I think that's a good point. And in this case we did do a good final push. Um, but we just came up slightly short because there just wasn't enough out there. Okay. Thanks, Molly. And, and just to clarify that. At a high level that 1.5, you know, basically in 2021 we had a bunch of money left over from 2020. And so that's why like November, you can't have more than one and a half times because essentially you've already carried forward from the previous year and they can't have more than one and a half times. Um, you know, you can't have more than one and a half times. Um, and, and essentially not be using the money when it's allocated to you. Is that, is that roughly. Correct. Definitely. Uh, Stacey and then Karen Roney. Hi, um, Molly, just because I knew, um, I heard you say, and I might have gotten this wrong, but if you could clarify to me and tell me how this works, it'd be great. Um, you said something about for every $1 spent, you know, $2 back to this, could you explain that to me? That sounds great. Sure. I mean, that's, that's higher than typical. And that is in this case because we had a very large project, the Aspen Meadow senior apartments, rehabilitation project. That project in itself was a $15 million project that we contributed to. Um, so basically that was all of the rest of that counts as leveraged funds. So, um, it's like, the, the, the, the, the, the, the project, the project that funding attracts other funders or other ways to fill the gap. Then all of that money altogether results in the leveraging that's. Is the 80 is one to 82. A typical ratio for a year or. Is that, but if, but we have that is pretty high. Um, when we have large development projects coming, For the next several years, it might be high like that. Typically. I was looking at 2019, which was a very typical year, you know, before 2020. The leverage amount was. So every CDB dollars spent CDBG dollars spent leverage. 64 cents in other public or private funding. So. 82 dollars is quite a picture than that. So it's really is based on the projects, what kind of big ones are coming through versus more focused ones. Thank you. I appreciate your explanation. Thanks. Karen. I have a question. Hold on just a second, please. Karen. Robert can go ahead. Okay. Okay. It just has to do with, you know, there was surplus money because of the epidemic. That was carried over. And I'm wondering what effect the inflation will have that we're experiencing right now. On the future. Would you just address that briefly? Sure. So we don't expect it to change our funding amounts, but if our, for example, rehab projects are more expensive per project, then we most likely are able to fund fewer households. We'd have to spend more money for each project. And then we'd have to spend more. We'd have to spend less money for each project. So we're, we're really, really, really high. So we have to play that delicate balance of. Making sure we have the right number of applicants in the hopper. Without over committing. And leaving them waiting for too long. Karen. Thanks. So I, Molly, I don't know whether you mentioned. And if you did, I apologize. I missed it. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. All grantees a pass. I mean, in terms of not meeting their timeliness ratio, because obviously throughout the whole country. It was very difficult for a CDBG grantees to be able to spend. To that, you know, 1.5 or less. So. Right. But we just got a one year pass. I think sometimes what makes this extra challenging is that. And there have been years and for some of the advisory board members who've been on here for a little while, you might recall that in some years we haven't received our CDBG grant funding until like September of that year when we had to meet our timeliness ratio by the end of October 1st of November. So in some cases, sometimes HUD hasn't been our friend in terms of. Of helping us to be successful in making sure we don't exceed our timeliness ratio. So. So just, just a, just a FYI and. And Graham, if you have any ideas, you're kind of in the business, you know, this, this construction business. If you have any ideas about, you know, how we might be creative in recruiting local contractors to help with our rehab projects. I just would plant that seed in any, any ideas that come to mind. Do pass those our way. Yeah, I'll think about that Karen. Thank you. Thank you. I have a follow on to that Graham, something that we've, that we've been thinking about, but haven't fully explored yet is. If we lumped projects together and do more of a, a group bid. We have to be careful, careful on the back end of making sure that our paperwork is still in line with the regs, but would larger projects with more security for the amount of time that contractor could be busy, be attractive. Absolutely. Yeah. That's something I'm thinking about putting together a plan for. One sort of follow up on that. You mentioned that if the projects are more expensive is there is one of the things we might look at. So I know for some of the, some of the housing rehab programs, for example, our grants are up to a $5,000 or a loan up to $10,000 potentially increasing those to essentially allow the same. Amount of work to be done, but understanding that it's, it's more expensive. You know, to do that. Is that something that's on the table or is that something that's limited? We should explore it. Yeah. Well, let's check and see if the regs have any limitations. And if so, if those have been updated at all. Yeah, I'm assuming that takes, you know, it's like a two, three, five, 10 year lag on those getting updated relatively. So. Yeah. Typically at least. Any other questions for Molly related to the CDBG funding? Okay. I don't see any. Thanks so much, Molly. You're welcome. Let's see. I'm next as well. This is kind of the Molly show. She's just going to keep on going. The application cycle. Yes. So. Here is what that status is. So. We did release our funding application in October. We only received one application. It was for $10,000. For an economic development purpose. So that wasn't, we started looking at it and doing eligibility and kind of chatting with, it was for E for all. It's a entrepreneurship for all. We chatted with them about. CDBG eligibility and what really what their needs were to try and. Taylor something that could maybe make more sense. $10,000 is not a lot for the requirements that come with it. So they have submitted that. But with, since now we are so close to. Well, we're supposed to be close to getting our HUD funding amount, but it were at least close to. To preparing our budgets with draft amounts. We. Normally would try and put out another application funding cycle earlier in the first quarter. And then present to you at the April meeting. And I have every, every intention of doing that, but with capacity, it's been so tough. So the funding cycle, we do plan on putting out here in the next couple of weeks. And then most likely I'd be bringing those forward to you in, in the May meeting. I don't want to shorten our application period too much to, to discourage people from applying. And then we thought we'd wrap in that E for all application at the same time. So you can look at the full spectrum. So that is the plan there. It's just a, you know, we are. Doing our best to push through. I do have some assistance in the capacity department coming in. We are about to award a contract for CDG, CDBG and affordable housing support services. Just to fill in while we try and fill our staffing. Gaps are positions that are open. And then help train those once they come on as well. So I should have that extra help here. Within a matter of a couple of weeks. And this will be their top priority. Just wanted to give you a heads up. Molly for the, that application cycle. For folks who can apply for, you know, things like. For the various funding. Can you share a little bit about how we make that information available to the community? To folks who might be eligible. To projects that might benefit from it. Sure. So we do the standard newspaper postings, which is a requirement. It's not necessarily the most. The, you know, the top way that people find out. But we do outreach. We do outreach. We do outreach. We do outreach. We do outreach. We do outreach. We do outreach. We do outreach. We do outreach. The, you know, the top way that people find out. But we do outreach to those that we know have applied in the past. We do know a couple of needs already that, that we anticipate to apply just from in working with our partners. And then we're, I want to look at our engagement efforts actually. And see if there's anything we can. If there's any new ideas, we've got new people up in the area. Like we, let's tap into resources to see if there's anything else we can do. So that's my plan is to, to look at that. And also we'll have a, you know, a CDBG. Consultants that might have ideas as well that we can bring forward. Great. Karen. Yeah, I want, did we, did I miss an introduction of Molly? I don't quite. Oh, sorry. What's your story? So I just thought maybe you would want to tell us. Well, Molly, Molly introduced herself to us at the last meeting. But, but anyhow, but Molly is a, Molly took Kathy Fetler's place. So, you know, Kathy retired the end of January. So, so at the February meeting, Molly did hop on and introduce herself, but, but it was a quick introduction. So. Okay. Well, that's why there you go. So, so, yes. So Molly did. So Molly took Kathy Fetler's place. So she's the division director for housing and for housing community investment. So I apologize. I forgot you were not here with us. So. And Molly has. Molly had been with the city for. A long time. She was on board. During our flood recovery process and, and it helped to manage some of our CDBG disaster recovery projects. And had worked with Kathy for, for that seven year period. So I apologize, Karen. There you go. So, but thanks for asking. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. So then we're on the American rescue plan act, ARPA investment update. Is this also the Molly show? I assume. Yes. Yes, it is. Okay. So we wanted to provide an update through the, through the fall. A group of city staff members. The city council has a plan. A plan to prepare recommendations for city council for how to spend the $12.9 million in American rescue plan act funding that the city has already partially received. And so. I had it up the affordable housing focus group. We came up with a plan for how. If affordable housing was funded with this. Projects could be transformative in the community. We have put together a set of goals. There were eight goals in total. The goals just briefly were rental housing development, new home ownership development, LHA, rental housing preservation, home ownership preservation, housing stabilization for those exiting homelessness, narrowing the digital divide. This is associated with our affordable housing communities, creating crime-free LHA properties, and creating sustainable and resilient affordable housing. To support those eight goals, we came up with a list of 18 projects, totaling $24 million that would be quite transformative. So that was obviously more than, not more than almost double the total funding amount available. So Harold, we proposed those projects to Harold. He worked to narrow them down and proposed to city council a list of projects that totaled about 8.9 million of the 12.9 in ARPA funding leveraged with our existing affordable housing funds. So the projects that were proposed, and I just realized I have to open this second document. I'm sorry, Harold is the city manager, correct? Yes, Cri. Okay. City manager Harold Dominguez. So the 8.9 million that was proposed included funding allocated to the Sunset Heights project being proposed by element. This is 55 units of permanent supportive housing over at the sweets campus. The, some funding towards the Christmas to development, which I mentioned in our affordable housing funds discussion is, is ready to close here at May 1st. Some seed money to look into an affordable assisted living option. Some basically a seed money again to get a development going at the LHA's vacant hover property at 1764. It is on hover 1764 hover. The some funding to contribute to the Mustang property to look at affordable housing there and maybe partnering with a developer that would do attainable as well to have a mixed income neighborhood. This is really to start looking at what, what should be done there, what is best for the area, do some engagement and then have some seed money for starting a development partnership. And Molly, not, we should talk about Mustang. That was a code word. So it really is the Costco. It's part of the Costco development that is out east of the city. So for, for many, many months. The code name was Mustang. So, and it just, it just carried forward. Yeah. We've called it several things. Costco is definitely the most identifiable way. Right. So it was about nine acres that we purchased as part of that development. Thanks, Karen. Thank you. We have some funding proposed to put in place bulk agreements with next slide at housing authority properties. This is so that utilities are generally already included in the rents there, but not cable service or internet service. So if we can work on bulk agreements that can bring the costs down significantly for those residents and also really utilize the resources that are available in this partnership role to provide its best assets to, to benefit the residents of the housing authority. There is some money allocated towards an unhoused option, which is yet to be determined, but this is really targeted towards hard to house individuals. There is money allocated towards the purchase of the former property from the, I think it was the water fund. There was a storm drainage storm drainage. Thank you fund. This is for the purpose of creating a transit oriented development associated with the first and main transit station and steam area. Of town. And then finally some support in, in a development and finance position to actually help implement all of this. So that proposal was accepted by city council. And so we are now gearing up to have a very, very busy couple of years, which some really transformative projects, primarily development. And we already do have a development specialist. Targeted to join us May 1st to help. Really be, have some expertise in that area. We also, we're very busy on capacity growing. We are contracting with the national development council. Who's going to provide subject matter expertise and technical assistance, including access to their, their very high quality. Housing finance training certifications. So that is, we have given them an award and we're just working on the contract. So we're about to have some help there as well to really work on some of these larger projects. For that development specialist that you said, start targeting me first, is that like, there's somebody already there and has a star. She's accepted our offer. And so, and past pre-employment screenings. Awesome. And it's relocating from Montana. So it sets part of the, the time like, yeah. Got it. For the, I mean, obviously this is a lot of funding that is really going, you know, I think you said it was something like eight to nine million of the 12 million is going toward affordable housing and housing support. Pretty significant. I'm curious if you have a sense of how that fits in with, you know, a lot of the, you know, the regional goals around amount of affordable housing, Longmont as a city is in a unique position, maybe relative, you know, Boulder has like priced out tons of people. So like lots of people have moved to Longmont and now Longmont is getting more expensive. I'm curious if you know what, you know, city of Boulder or the county or others in the regional partnership are doing in terms of investing in this type of development and affordable housing? Or is it just like is Longmont leading the pack there? So the city of Boulder is definitely looking at more of a broader approach where they are, they're doing, they're peppering their funds across different aspects more. We are definitely focusing our affordable housing in terms of the percentage of our funding more than Boulder is so far. They're, they're hitting more initiatives and we are more focused on a couple of initiatives. Affordable housing is one, there are others as well. Data in the city using data and doing a whole neighborhoods approach and there's a bunch of initiatives that go along with those. But generally that's what we know about Boulder. Boulder County is in the middle of their community engagement process and the city of Boulder and the city of Longmont are participating in their focus groups on the specifically the affordable housing focus group. So those allocations have not yet been decided, but is actively in the process and they plan to have their decisions made by the early May. Thank you. Other questions for Molly on the ARPA investment? You know, I think the only thing that I would add is that we are in the whole leverage scheme. So we are. Supplementing the ARPA dollars with roughly $3 million, I believe, from our affordable housing funds from the city. So, so that the, the toll investment in the projects that Molly identified is is around is basically around $11 million. So we are, we are basically leveraging those ARPA dollars with our local affordable housing funds too. And I'll add. But I think Longmont really, I think to your question, Caitlin, I think, you know, as, as what we saw in, in the whole flood recovery process, you know, what we were able to do in terms of using those, those disaster dollars that, you know, brought on throughout Boulder County. I think around, if I recall, a thousand new affordable units that we were able to build throughout Boulder County. So, so you don't get these opportunities very often to have, you know, $12 million, almost $13 million in your community. And, and so we just felt, you know, that, that we needed to advocate for really making a dent in that affordable housing investment. And, and I, and the city manager and the council agreed with that approach. So we're really fortunate, I think, in that regard, unless you don't want affordable housing and then you might think differently, but, but it was a way to help move us forward for sure. And in that leveraging vein, the approach really was to use public private partnerships to make the money go further. So this is all the amounts allocated to each or more like seed money, like a local, the local match, if you will. And if you can see how we had one large development project that ended up making our number $84 to $84 to the dollar. If we're looking at anywhere, not even near that where the amount of funding leveraged once we bring in these development partnerships is going to be very large. So that was the idea has used this as seed money to bring in all the other funds to Karen. I just want, was there some slides that we, all the conversation you had that I didn't see in the packet or. I did realize that the, the council communication, we didn't insert in the packet, but we can share that link. And it's, it is on the city website too. Yeah, we will follow up with that as we were talking through it. It's like, yeah, so that, and I think we do have a, we do have the slide, the PowerPoint that, that Harold presented to the, you know, to the housing group. So yes, we will, we will send you the link. So you have that information. And I don't know if this is a question for you, but I was curious on how do people apply in Longmont for affordable housing? You mean residents to live in affordable housing or for the funding side? Oh, to live in the affordable housing. So our website does have resources for affordable properties that residents can get in touch with to inquire about. And then we, through the Longmont housing authority, we do keep information updated on the website about when wait lists for properties are going to be open and then we accept applications there as well. I was curious though, like I applied for a bolder long time ago, and we had to go through a big process of, you know, a couple of classes and we had to sit down with a, do you all do that too for everybody that applies in Longmont? We do for, we definitely have a financial counseling class for those that participate in our down payment assistance program. For the, there are, there are private and nonprofit providers of affordable housing in the town, in the city as well. And so I'd have to check and see exactly what they do. I was just curious. Outside of the city realm. Okay. And I would say, you know, that when, because you know, we're on our second, our second inclusionary housing program. So we did have one earlier on, you know, that ran from the mid 90s into 2010. And, and, and basically households that purchased affordable homes that were created through that process did have to go through, you know, home buyer training and, and, and those kinds, the financial counseling, those kinds of things. So it's, it's, it's not atypical that that's a, that's a requirement, particularly around home purchases through the affordable housing program. And am I correct that Longmont does a lottery for the section eight vouchers that are available for city residents. So I don't know how often that said, I know there was one recently and it's basically, you know, if anyone wants to live, wants to get one of those vouchers, they enter a lottery and then the numbers are drawn based on the number of vouchers that are available. Correct. So we did open that wait list in January 26th. It had not been done for quite a while, but we're, yeah, yeah. But going forward, we plan to do it once every year. So what it was, it was actually 150 wait spot, wait list spots that the lottery was for. So we received 1,100 applicants for 150 wait list slots. The good news is we're already dipping into that wait list to pull some off. And that 150 really is set because that's how many we anticipate we could tap into in that year period. Great. All right. Any other questions? Okay. Thank you, Molly. Thank you very much. She's number seven. Conflict of interest policy for CDB home. One more. One more Molly. We'll keep going. Okay. So this item, we have drafted up a conflict of interest policy. It was in your packet. And this is for the CDBG and home programs. We. Some guidance started coming out amongst our CDBG user groups that. That a lot of communities are starting to formalize their conflict of interest requirements. And include. Training. And certifications for conflict of interest. Both on the procurement side, which is, is, is relatively standard. Although there's. They're certifying it might not be as standard. And then for us also for the staff that work on. CDBG programs, our electorate officials that make decisions on CDBG and home programs. And then also our sub recipients. So we plan on implementing this policy. And then we would, in effect, we would have training sessions that we would do with staff and with sub recipients. We would collect certifications for conflict of interest at time of award of CDBG funds. And then we would just have involvement with our city clerk because the city council does do conflict of interest trainings. And so we would basically document that we've got that going and. That would be included on a yearly basis. So. If there's any questions or comments. This is a draft. We have not yet finalized this policy. So we're looking for your input. If you have any. Questions or thoughts from anyone on the board. Or anyone else. Any. So, so Molly, I have a clarification is. So I realized this is in draft form. or does it have to be adopted by the council or both? I am not aware that it needs to be adopted. We want the input from the advisory board, but like some other policies that we have, it's more that we'll finalize it internally and then start implementing internally. But if you have any other, if there is a formal adoption process, I couldn't find any examples of that being done for something similar. Graham. I admit I haven't read this very closely, but I'm curious if habitat for humanity recipients might be negatively impacted. Because I think in some cases, they partially own the property and then I assume hotter CBG funds might go to those sorts of projects and then they would be living in a project funded by the fund. Does that question make any sense? So you mean that eventually, you mean if they apply for other assistance or other assistance going into the development? Yeah, if habitat for humanity applies for funding for development. So oftentimes that's associated with a resident who has to perform work on it and the sort of part owner in it and thereby a recipient of those funds and then they're living in a home. And so you're funding somebody who's living in a home, which I assume is what the stock human or policy is meant to prevent, but we wouldn't want to prevent that, right? Correct, we would not want to prevent that. So I'll do a read through and make sure we don't have anything that seems to preclude that. So just one quick verification, they're not part owners, they are actually owners of the home. Diana. I had a random question about the conflict of interest training and maybe I'm reading this too broadly, but it says that it's currently required for city elected officials and it will also be required for various people, including entities that participate or work on the CDBG and home programs. Like, does that include our board? Do you think perhaps? If we're working on these? OK, yes. So what I would plan on doing is do a brief training session once a year to this board, maybe add it to the work playing calendar. OK, thank you. On that note, Molly, in this draft that we received, I think there's a when it said it says it's for subgrantees or pass through entities, I think there's a typo there that says pass with a T instead of an S. OK, let me look for that. And am I correct? Like, the gist of this is really to prevent, you know, like, you know, if you work for the city and you were married to someone who was a contractor who was applying for funds, like you making a decision on them getting that contract would potentially be a conflict of interest. Correct. Correct. Like, if someone here on the board, you know, we obviously welcome and want like experience around like building affordable housing or things related to the work we do. But if you were applying for, you know, some of that funding, you should not be involved in any deliberations or, you know, recommendations about whether your organization gets that funding. Correct. OK. Other questions or comments on the conflict of interest? OK, I don't see any. So I think I think, Molly, that concludes your your agenda items for this evening. Wonderful. Thanks so much, everyone. Have a nice night. Thank you. Next item is the 2023 human services funding process. I am guessing this is an Alibarito show. Correct. And I apologize. I know that the PDFs are small. And so I am going to share my screen and I want to share the the spreadsheets. But as I'm doing that, I'm also going to also have new board members who may look at this and maybe perplex me. May be perplexed by these gigantic spreadsheets. So I will take a few minutes to explain them, and then we'll go into the conversation. Does that make that sound OK? All right, I'm going to share my screen. These are the same spreadsheets that you saw. Oh, hold on. OK, well, can you see? Can you see my spreadsheets? You see a spreadsheet? OK. Matrix two, concept two. Oh, I've got to go back to matrix one, concept one. OK. Really. So for Robert and Stacy, this is our allocation matrix spreadsheet. Starting from left to right, we have the agency, the program name, the city of Longmont impact area. And these are impact areas that have been decided upon by the board. You know, and then what's new for our board members who have been around, I've never included a budget size, but this is based on the PowerPoint that I shared in February. And I can always go back and get that as well if needed. But that is what that is based on. Then the next column says priority area. That was just to determine that the programs that were being proposed is in the priority area. If it's a no, then it is automatically disqualified, which is why there's all yeses. And Karen and I read the proposals and we make that judgment. Now, what I did in the request only of this first matrix is this is matrix is and for some reason on matrix two, all right. Sorry, my bad. I don't know why I went back to matrix two. And this one doesn't have the budgets yet. Sorry. But it has what they received in 2021. It has what they if they have requested the ceiling, what is the ceiling based on that priority area? And then there is the column says board average. All of the board members are given the opportunity to score all of the proposed projects. And at some point, I will go over the evaluation. We are working on changing to found it. And so that's going to work on that. And then in the board has their own questions that they answer on the evaluation, which you will get trained on. Then the staff, which. Yeah, the staff has our own evaluation sheet as well, and we score it. And then we take the average of staff average board and you get a total and that total is put up against a formula. I'm going to show the formula real quick. I'm not going to spend a lot of time with just so you see it. If you this is the the ranges on the top on the right. This time we're right to left. And these are the individuals or the staff ranges and the board ranges and then the percentage of what you can get. So just so you know, this ranges and these are actual scores from the twenty twenty two fun round that we just completed in twenty twenty one. So nothing changed there. I just copied that over from what it was. So those are exact scores that the board scored and the staff scored and what they ended up. The only thing that's different is I went back and I applied. And I did this because they're the assumption is that if they know that we have ceilings, everybody's applying for the ceiling. Right. That's that's the assumption that I went by. Is that the truth? Is that what's going to happen? Well, that is to be determined. So but I went by that if they know that we have ceilings, that's what they're going to apply for. And so you see that this is what the score said they would get depending on the score, either 100 percent or 90 percent. And we scroll down and it goes that way. A way forward did not get the last four high enough to be funded. So they still did not get any funding. And then, like I said, I just went by what they scored and what the ceilings were and what would their percentage be based on their score. And I think the important piece of senior housing option, again, did not score high enough to be funded. We would have spent two point eight million dollars using this method. If everybody applied for the ceilings as a as a reminder, we had one point two million dollars. So we are over by about one point six million dollars. If we if if we assume that everybody applies at the ceilings, if we maintain these ceilings that are in this little text box and if we kept the same allocation formula, I just wanted to show you that was one of the concepts that Karen and I shared. So I'm not sure there was any questions or we want to move on to the next concept. I do not see any questions, but if folks have them, please feel free to. Yeah, I think I would move on to the next concept. All right, I'm just reminded for the board, you know, we did talk about this process in February and and the board says, you know, bring back some real live examples of how that would work based on what we just completed. So that's the real world example. So go ahead, Eliberto. So concept two, remember, that was based on budget size, not priority area, right? That was a difference in concept to it. We said, well, we're not going to we're not going to change. Concept, we're going to we're going to look at budget to determine how how much someone can. Can receive or can be allocated. And so it was if you had a million dollars or more, you were up to 100,000 and it just went down from that. What I found interesting is, I mean, I saw these with you all when we all read them, but I've never compiled the data is how many of our nonprofits have over a million dollar agency budgets. I was pretty amazed at that. Yes, we've had conversations about supporting smaller nonprofits in this group, but the reality is that most of the applications that we get, a vast majority of them. Our agencies that have budgets over a million dollars and some are pretty, you know, pretty big budgets. And so with this concept, again, not touching percentages, not touching scores, just changing ceilings and assuming that everybody's applying for the ceiling and they know they have it, then we spend 3.4 million dollars. Which is 2.1 million over what we had. OK. That is is concept to this is a little trickier. This is this I played around with this one. This one is and I'm going to read this is to make sure is. We have ceilings, but they're also going to be impacted by. Budgets. This is tricky. Because we use both. And it was hard to explain to Karen. So I'm not sure if I can still explain it to you all. I think I took. Let me see. The ceiling is foundational. Sheetings will be based. So the first ceiling is priority. However, ceilings will also be affected by budget size. In other words, if you are in, let's say, let's take. Let's take motherhouse. Who has a smaller budget than the rest of the housing stability. Right. So other agencies have a million or more. Motherhouse has five hundred thousands of dollars. So their ceiling now is impacted by their budget and they get seventy five percent of that ceiling because of their size of their budget. So motherhouse's new ceiling would be seventy five thousand. So depending on your budget, your base ceiling is a priority ceiling, but your budget can impact that. Does that make sense? Think so. OK. So all said and done, we end up spending two point five million on this route. Which is again about one point three million over what we had. Available to us. And and Elieberto on on all three of these that you've presented so far, this is assuming that we use the same score ranges and the same percentages that we allocate to them. It doesn't account for like adjusting those to say, OK, well, we actually only have one point three million dollars. And so we actually need to make the score ranges smaller or, you know, actually get a little more granular with where we're giving it. That is exactly correct. Right. Right. And yes, because I yeah, we that can be part of future discussions, whether we want to tighten up our score ranges, you know, that guess we can we could potentially lower ceilings. You know, and, you know, when you when you look at when you look at historical funding, when you lower ceilings, the folks you impact are typically are larger agencies that have been applying for more funding for rights and time. So that's that's also a possibility. OK. The last one that I did. On this one, we we have both floors and ceilings because what I did was I took their actual request. So if an agency. Requested less than the floor. And again, those are in your packet from February. And I can I can look I can bring them back up if needed. But these are the floors that we created for our priority. I didn't I left the budget column in there, but it's not being used for this. Just I just left it. If they apply less than the floor, I moved them up to the floor. Or if they applied above the ceiling, I moved them back to the ceiling. OK. So if they if they ask for less, I moved to the floor. If they ask for the ceiling, I lowered their request. If their request was in the range of floor and ceiling, I left it alone. OK, so it was the actual request and what they actually got. OK. So if you go down. So, for example, while plum asked for 100,000. But the education ceiling that we had is 80,000. So I lowered them down to 80,000. In reality, they got I think this year they were awarded 90,000 because their score put them in the 90 percent range. Right. So they would lose funding if if, you know, if they were to apply again, if we kept the ceilings and they applied. Whereas right above it, the center, their actual request was 15,000. And so that is less than the floor. So I moved them up to the floor, excuse me, which is 40,000 and they scored very well and they would have received 100 percent of their request. OK, so you can we can scroll down. There's a few changes here and there. But overall, so, for example, you know, safe shelter, their ceiling is 100,000 and they asked for 100,000 and they got and that's what they actually got with 90,000. You know, whereas in the same thing for immigrant legal center, that was the floor. Oh, no, that's not the floor. That's that's the that's in between floor and ceiling. So that's what they they kept the same whereas risk adjusted. The floor is 10,000. They only apply for five. They would have gotten an increase to their funding. And those are just a few examples. Kimberly, I just I'm looking through this. It really seems like those high requests are the outliers. And so for we're totally skewing the funding picture towards the outliers, I feel, on the upper end, when looking at the average of the actual request, it's quite a bit lower. So I'm wondering how to factor that in so that it's not distorting the whole funding process. That's that's an excellent point. And that's that's why we actually started this whole conversation, is that Karen and I have noticed that we just have some outliers that, you know, have been increasingly getting larger and larger portions. And so one way to do that is to say and it might cause some pain is to say, we're going to just lower the ceiling to everyone. And so, you know, we're going to try and and and align. That's one way of doing it. And I think I don't have an answer. Other answers, I think this is why bringing it to the board and and appreciate your thoughts and as we deliberate together on how to get there. And I'm sure Karen has any thoughts as well. But yes, that's that's definitely a reality and a challenge that we face. So on this one, we get closer. We overspent by four hundred thousand going this round, assuming that folks, you know, will ask for what they actually need and not, you know, rush this rush to the ceiling. I don't know. I mean, there are some assumptions that we've made on these. And of course, to Kate, this point, we haven't changed we haven't changed score ranges and percentages of what people get out of it. So that is my presentation. Or that's those are the ones I created. I can go back and create more. I can look at lowering ceilings or other ideas that the board may have. The first thing that comes to mind is that, like, in some in some ways, we set these ceilings before we ever get like the requests, which, you know, we've talked about wanting to to be clear with folks, but also have it not be a black box. But I also wonder if, like, you know, something that's a little more flexible based on like what the needs are that are being expressed might I don't really know. I think, you know, when we've obviously we've got some outliers, we have a lot of organizations that have fairly large budgets. To me, that, like, points to the fact that, like, either small organization, like the issue may not be actually our process so much just like smaller organization or our funding allocation. But it may be that smaller organizations just don't have the time, the money, the resources to be applying for it. Or they've been told no in the past because they haven't had high enough scores. And so then it's not worth it or that sort of thing. And maybe it's less about it being a black box, I don't know. But I'm curious what other folks think or if there is other. Stacy, one of my take homes from this also is, I mean, obviously, we have to we can't go over, but I'm assuming we cannot go over budget. That's my that we have a budget and it's not OK to say, oh, well, sorry, we gave away too much. And another thing that I was also noticing is so what I remember from was I can't remember if it was January, February, when it must have been January when we talked about this, maybe one of the reasons we we were doing this in addition to the outliers was because we said that we felt like the smaller organizations were underfunded. I don't think we have that many smaller organizations. So I think that that's objective is maybe not really appropriate here. I mean, there's so many over a million. I mean, if we're calling a two hundred and fifty thousand dollar budget, a smaller organization, you know, that's it. Yes, it's smaller than a million, but a million smaller than five million. So I'm not I don't think that was exactly what we were talking about when we met smaller organization. Then the other piece of that also is I'm looking at our scores and it's obvious that these big organizations like the YMCA and our center have grant writers that know how to write these to meet write their proposals to meet our goals and they're getting more money because they're not their scores are higher. So if you truly I feel like if you exactly like you were just saying, Caitlin, if you have a smaller organization that doesn't have the same staff that has a volunteer that's writing this without experience and, you know, is doing it because she's the feet on the street and she knows most about it, she's not going to be able to compete with the our center or other major organizations like this. So I do think that that is also that that's something I'm seeing from the numbers that I am, I don't know, I don't know for sure, obviously, but the numbers seem to point in that direction. Elie Berto, I just got thought and I'm going to throw it out there. So I sit on the board of the Longwood Community Foundation. I have sat on the board of the Boulder Community Foundation. And I'm wondering to this point that we're having this conversation. I'm wondering if, you know, they have a lot more flexibility with their funding than we do. They're a private foundation, they're a community foundation, not private foundation, they're a community foundation. But their funding is a lot more flexible than ours. And so to Stacy's point that we don't have a lot of smaller and by smaller, I mean under there, I think there's only one. I'm trying to see here. There was only two agencies under $250,000. And one of them didn't get funded because of scores. Right. Right. And the other one only asked for. Two. $2,500. So I guess I guess the question for us or for you all to consider is, is it appropriate or is it in the purview of this? Advisory board to be thinking about funding the smaller organ. I mean, are we looking at funding startup or small organ or are we to focus on those organizations that have the capacity deliver the services that that Longmont residents need? I guess that's the question. That's a really good. I had pulled just to add a little bit of context as well. I pulled up the like PDF RFP that Boulder shared last year, city of Boulder for theirs. And they had a minimum request amount of $10,000. But they also specifically said that at least 8,000 of that 10,000 needed to be for the program itself and not just funding staff. So a maximum. And I don't know if the percentage, I don't know. I was trying to see if they actually have if it's a. Yeah, so at least 8,000 and eligible program expenses, including programs, specific staff pay and benefits. And basically things to carry out that that specific program, but not they're not interested in funding like an organization as a whole, it needed to be something that actually addresses the needs. So just for context, that's what city of Boulder did last year. I don't see a maximum listed in theirs, but. Right. And they, I've seen their contracts that we've worked together. And we don't, don't do this, but they actually make the agencies right. When they do their contracts, they make, they make the agencies list the percentage. Of their funding going to staff. We don't do that. But, but they do. I've seen those contracts. Kim. That's so interesting. How do they have accountability in that process? Are they actually checking to see if that. Is being funded as, as, as stated, or is it just kind of a paper exercise? I don't know. I mean, we get, we get fine. We get your end reports and you're in financials. Do they dig into them? I, I mean, they have more staff. I will tell you that I don't. I mean, I look at them, but there's always so much going on. That's a lot of work to follow up on that. Yeah, I've gotten most of all of that. And I still haven't put together all, I'm still working on trying to get all the year end reports. And there's a lot of data. Dig into. Stacey. So, to that last comment, Kimberly, I would also wonder if, if mandating that it not go to staff payroll is, is that really our objective? Because some of these organizations, especially the smaller ones, again, if we're trying to target them, that's, that's what they have is feet on the street. You know, they're not, they're not putting big dollars into necessarily, necessarily into programs. They, they might just be doing case work. So that might just be something to think about too. That might bias something like that against the smaller organizations that we're trying to serve. Yeah. I, one thing I liked about it is, I think we talked about this with some of the applications last year is that like. They were applying for a program. So I'll give the example of. Salud. Who has applied. You know, they, they get funding. They get funding. And often they're like, okay, we want to fund this. This program for, you know, increasing access to, I think one of them was like. Trying to get more folks in for like dental care. Or something like that. Or doing like, I know they did a mental health evaluation. But then the staffing that they did was basically paying for. Essentially medical assistance. That would just be in every single appointment. So, you know, that was sort of a like. Yes. And this is like this much of your, like this much of what the medical assistant is doing. Like we're, we're functional. You're, you're, you're talking about something that we care about, which is mental health. But then the staffing that they did was basically paying for. Essentially medical assistants. That would just be in every single appointment. So, you know, that was sort of a like. What we care about, which is mental health, but is what we're funding actually like contributing to that longer. That longer term or that bigger picture of actually addressing major mental health issues within our community. Maybe not because what, what you're really doing is supplementing your staff and being able to hire a few more medical assistants. You know, but putting it under a program name that, you know, matches what we're looking for. So I think that was one of the ones that, that example, but that's not the only one, you know, there may be others. But flip side is that like. Effa. Their entire, you know, all of their service really is like a program that supports some of our, our goals. And so like general staff for them case workers for that. There's a lot more connected, right? And so we, we may have to get a little more granular in our, like scoring and evaluation of that. And that's less of like putting the parameters around it and more about us being, you know, kind of discerning that from their applications. Council in your bro. Hello. I'm listening to you all and bring up some really, really, really good points. I think we need to be careful about the staff. Only because without staff, you can't perform those programs. And when you don't have the program, she can't provide service. So, so, you know, I just think that an organization know where they need that support. I don't know if we really want to micromanage everything within those applications and those organizations. I think that's a lot of work. I think we just need to. What are the outcomes? What are we looking for? Right. And how can we measure it? And that's it. I think, I mean, everything that you all are saying is good. I guess because I work for a nonprofit. And I know that if I don't have help. I can't. I can't perform. I'm not effective with my programs. So, so that means if I need an assistant, to help me within my programs, then that's what I need in order to, for me to perform and be effective within my programs. So I just think we need to be very mindful of the organizations know what they need, their needs are. And so, and it's up to us to look at the past. Of course, we know the last couple of years, the situations have been totally different. But what was it in 2019? What were their outcome? Well, how did they measure their success? Of the programs or whatever? Although the programs are probably, you know, have changed quite a bit. But just look at, you know, making sure they're moving toward the goals that we're asking them to and what they're doing. That's all. I just think that we got to be very careful with what we keep asking for and what we keep changing. And I think that we'll be pulling weeds all day long. Trying to get rid of the weeds. And guess what? As soon as you pull that one up, something else don't come up. So just be very mindful. That's all. Karen Phillips. And then. Yeah, I mean. When they apply for this money, they specifically say what they want the money for. I mean, that's what we're. And maybe I'm not understanding something here, but there should be no issue about, you know, we give them money because they requested it for like a certain program or for a certain thing. So I'm kind of confused what you're all. Talking about with staff because. You know, if that's what they asked, they need another, you know, they need another employee, then they'll ask for that money. And that's what we're providing. So I mean, I'm kind of. Don't understand. So like what I was saying is like city of Boulder says that like, they won't fund general staff. They'll only fund it if it's actually related to the program. And one of the things we did last year was actually evaluate whether the programs were delivering. Against like the human needs assess like the program area. So like, for example, we had. There was somebody who applied like two years ago where like, overall they provided like healthcare or something like that to a population, but they were addressing something like. It was sleuth addressing obesity in kids, which was not at all like anywhere in the human needs assessment as something that needed to be addressed in the community. And so that program didn't really fit with what we wanted to fund. At all. And so the, the question of, you know, making, you know, just because they tell us they need it doesn't necessarily need it. And so that's part of our evaluation is making sure that like, they actually are providing a program or something that is meeting the specific needs of the community. So do we get like a receipt from them saying, you know, you gave you this money. This is what we use it for. Do we ask them for that kind of thing? That's part of that. That's part of the contracting process. Right. This was provided a financial report at the end of the year. We made them do February 11th because we're all behind. And I have not actually gone through them all. Okay. But yes, we do ask for a financial update and a financial report and more to them, you know, all of them do give it to us. Sometimes it's got, I just got to pull it out of them. Okay. Thank you. So, um, I'm up throughout this idea again. I did it a couple of months ago. Is to the Shakita's point. And it is a little bit. There is it. There is. Some challenge that we may, we may be accused of micromancing. But we, so Shakita's point about outcomes, we could say, here's the outcome we want. Put an RFP out there. Like Boulder doesn't say who can get those outcomes for us. But that means that we'd have to think about what our outcomes. Are in our priority areas. So that's just a thought. That I've shared a couple of times. We don't have to go over there, but that's, that's what you think about. Uh, Graham. Thanks. Oh, for putting those together. I appreciate that. I had really hoped it would bring a lot of clarity and. Sorry to say it to not for me anyway. Um, but if I recall, the main problem was, was we kept running into unallocated. Funds at the end of the year, right? And that's, uh, we were also a little concerned that we, we weren't able to fully fund. High priority areas because of some of the ways. Some of the rules we had inserted. And so we thought, oh, well, if we think of a different way. Um, we can maybe distribute the funds better, but it sounds like these other ways, whether budget size or. Or, um, You know, set ceiling for priorities. They, um, they're not, they're not quite doing it. They're overspending. So, uh, you know, I think my, my A choice here would be to leave the formula as is and then deal with. Have an extra at the end of the year and go through an RFP process or. For allocate based on the priorities of the year or B. Uh, uh, Add the budget size qualifier, like mile high United way. I think that was a good idea. That was modeled off of, if I remember. So maybe that's my input. Karen. Yeah. So I think, um, I think the problem we were trying to solve is, uh, is, is, is certainly what Graham talked about, you know, number, number one was that, uh, because we, uh, ended up having, you know, more money to allocate than we had anticipated our current formula made it hard to allocate everything. And, and, and obviously we had a hundred K that was still in, in the hopper. I think the other thing, you know, that we, at least initially we, we tried to address was, um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, As we tried to address was, um, Was, you know, setting some expectations about what, um, You know, kind of address the ceiling issue. So with new agencies coming in and they, you know, they could apply for $150,000 and our, our formula would. End up that they would get a large portion, what they had requested. And just with some disparity in terms of how much entities were asking for. So part of what we were trying to attempt to look at is if we set some expectations upfront about here's, here's the ceiling, here's the floor, whatever this is the range of funding that you could expect. So that's, you know, that's what we were trying to examine. So we didn't necessarily hit the mark in, we also as I think as Ellie Berto mentioned is that we also didn't adjust anything with the formula. So I mean, there's more adjustments that we could make. I think what we just wanted to try to do is if we set some expectations in terms of what agencies, the amount that they apply for, where might that take us? So it sounds like we're still working it. I wonder to that point if, you know, one of the things we could do is, you know, we've said, we've sort of internally set a ceiling based on like 50% of the total amount. We've said like no one agency can get more than that. We've also talked about that around particularly like affordable housing and some of the things that like, that obviously does cut off some of our, you know, some of the organizations that are delivering some of the most impactful work in those areas. You know, we had a handful that just like hit that ceiling because they requested more and they had no idea that we set that ceiling. And so, you know, whereas if we had said that and they had thought about it, they may have broken it down into, we have actually three different programs that fall within this and they're all, you know, smaller things but addressing more specific. I wonder if you've been just saying like, hey, we ended up getting $1.5 million with a rough breakdown of like 20% to housing stability. You know, even if we gave just like rough idea of the totals to give folks an idea of, you know, where we want to spend that money. We have historically had a lot more on the skill building and a lot less on affordable housing. But if we told people, hey, 25% of this funding is affordable housing things, that might change how people are thinking about it. Even if we're not telling them you specifically would be limited. I have no idea if that like addresses kind of what we were, I mean, but it maybe encourages folks to apply for more if they're hitting some of those priority areas and understanding like, actually, this is our top priority is affordable housing but we also want to fund these other things. Eliberto. Actually, I think that's a great idea. I think part of the challenge is that we don't know what the final number is for the budget until way after we've launched the debt being said, I don't see why we couldn't say historically or we couldn't say, you know, in 2022, we had 1.25 million and this is how we wanted to spend it. And the board has decided that if we do decide later on this year that we have the great priorities and we have the right percentages, why couldn't we do that? We could put it in the say, hey, we spent 1.285 million. This is how we want to spend this fund. We want 25% to go to housing activities that promote affordable housing or that maintain people house. We want to spend 20% on education and let them do the math. I mean, that might be a good, it might still have us overspending, but, you know, that's even with just the priorities, putting the budget parties out there, you know, even if they knew that only 50%, I guarantee you that everybody core 50% potentially. So that's what I'm gonna think about. Yeah, and it at least conveys what those priorities are. Like we've listed them out, but we haven't ever really been specific about like, you know, housing is, you know, one of the biggest. And that sort of thing. And maybe to Graham's point of like wanting to, we underspent last year, we were trying to, you know, figure out the right balance to make sure that, you know, folks were asking for things that actually supported the programs. Well, let's be clear about what we want to support. And maybe that is actually sufficient to help drive in that direction without, and I think maybe to, maybe Kim or Deanna, I can't remember which, but without getting too complex with like, here's a limit based on your budget or here's a limit based on your priority area, like maybe that's just getting too complicated to really be effective. Stacey. What I do like about that idea is you, every year then without reinventing this wheel, you meet your budget because you're setting percentages. And then, and we're not administrating, we're not over-administrating. So it keeps the formula simple. It incents people to do projects in areas that we deem that the city needs. And yeah, I mean, I like it. Deanna. Yes, I'm just wondering for Elliberto and Karen, do you feel like that sort of compromise is sufficient to address some of the concerns that we were trying to address? I mean, I think one of the concerns, unless I'm misunderstanding, is that we have these a few outlier agencies that are just asking for more and more and more money. And I'm not sure that setting that information about historical budgets and priority areas necessarily addresses our concern of maybe reining in those outliers. But I'm also, I mean, as Graham said, I was hoping that those examples would really illuminate this and it definitely illuminated that just doing those new scenarios is gonna cause a big problem for us in terms of budget. So I don't know if you think that it's sufficient to do a historical analysis or if we need to think about some sort of compromise to try and rein in those outliers. You know, I think that we can, I think we can look at other scenarios. I think we can look at some of the, we can look at the formulas, you know, and we also, I mean, we had talked about this, Ellie Bertrand and I did, is that, and this was an option we looked at a few years ago. I don't know whether any of the board members, I don't think any of the current board members were part of that process, but we just kind of said at some point in time, you know, we'd go down to X and then the money is spent in that particular bucket and we, you know, cut it off. Then we go to the, you know, to the next buckets and again, the higher scoring agencies get funded it, you know, so there's more entities, more agencies that get no funding, but that was painful. So we really never, you know, examined that. So I think we do need to look at some expectation about, you know, what's the amount really to, you know, to apply for or not to apply over X amount, just so we have us, we just level that and we set some expectations about, this is what you can expect. We also talked about, then do we, might we add back, you know, based on, you know, performance or high scoring agencies. This isn't easy. So yeah, and I know it didn't, it was the good suggestion to, okay, apply these ideas, apply these scenarios to what happened last year and we see where it got us. So I just think we need to continue to work it a little bit more, maybe work it in terms of the formulas, but come up with some expectation about, you know, what to apply for or at least a ceiling around that. I mean, to that point, we could, I mean, I wonder if even just disclosing that in the past, we've set, you know, a maximum that any program or agency can receive is 50% of the total funding for the particular focus area. It doesn't necessarily give folks a dollar amount, but it at least sets the expectation that we are gonna put a ceiling on it. And, you know, I don't know if that's sufficient to, you know and to say like, okay, in, you know, 2022's funding round, it was, you know, a max of $110,000 in housing. Or whatever it was, you know, because we won't get the budget amounts until later, we may not wanna put that, but maybe we just give that expectation of like that's the most you could expect. Cause, and I think fundamentally that's because we don't wanna have a single agency delivering one of our focus goals, you know, that we don't wanna put all of our eggs into one basket, so to speak for any one of those priority areas. Deanna, I see you re-raised. So I guess I was just gonna follow up on that and say that if we're thinking about either transmitting that information directly about this is our floor and our ceiling with specific numbers or saying historically, here's the information on what the floor and ceiling were and letting them sort of figure out those numbers themselves. We probably still need to figure out how to adjust this so that we're not blowing our budget wide open, right? So then is it appropriate to ask staff to do a little more work in terms of how we adjust the percentage formulas? I can't think of any other way to bring the budget back down without adjusting the percentage formulas unless we change the caps. And I guess I would have to think about how that impacts all of these organizations historically what they've asked for, but I mean, maybe staff could explore how it gets impacted by changing the percentage formulas or something so that we can move this forward to get where we wanna go. One of, just to add on that, one of the things that I've seen done not in our like nonprofit one, but was basically once applications are received and scored, before you actually see what the scores are across them, you see sort of like what the median and what the spread of them is and determine what the funding is based on. Essentially, instead of being like, okay, we have a six point spread or a 13 point spread or whatever, you kind of adjust it so that how would you actually allocate those percentages such that you're essentially funding everything above the median at the least. So there's some different ways to do that once you get the information in. We just don't know like beforehand like how well are agencies gonna score and how much are they gonna ask for? Like that's not something we can predict. And so sometimes setting the formula before we know that information feels like it's sort of putting it ahead of like actually getting the data of what people request. Kim. I really feel like we need a math major to figure this out. And I'm trying to think about ranking and figuring out a pot of money for each area and then ranking all of the requests for that specific area and then creating that equation so that it's set. Like you know you're going to hit that dollar amount and you've ranked it just within that subject matter. So it's very defined. But I think that equation is what I need help figuring out. But I don't know if that makes sense. Like it's a ranking system specific to the topic rather than scoring it and random scores. But actually looking at who's most deserving in that specific area. Eliberto. So Kim I have a follow up question because as soon as you said that my brain started thinking as well, does that mean? So if we had 500 grand for you know I'm just saying I'm throwing out a number 500 grand for housing, right? And we had, so we typically don't have tons of applicants for it. Let's say we had five, right? The way I heard you and again so correct this is what I'm saying correctly from wrong. The way I heard you is that we would rank it based on whatever criteria that we're gonna set for it. And then we would fund according to rank. So we wouldn't care or it wouldn't matter what they asked for. It would be we have 500 grand. We wanna spend it on housing. This is how we ranked your application. We've divided it based on that rank. This is what you're getting. So FAF who always asked for 16,000 even though I've told them that there's no limit on what they can ask for, you know they can score super high and get 150,000, right? Is that the way you're thinking of it? Or am I missing something? Yeah, I guess I mean that's kind of the scary part is because you don't know what the demand will be and it could be a huge amount of money that's going to fewer agencies but if we truly are prioritizing certain areas and wanting to fund accordingly it seems like that makes the most sense. But I can see a lot of potential problems but just looking at it big picture that would be funding to our priority system and making people compete with others within that system instead of across the board. Karen Roney. So I'm just checking in. Have we expended most of our brain cells? Are there any other ideas? Cause it sounds like we need to continue to work it. There have been some suggestions for us to explore and so we can continue on. It's really quite fine but I just wanted to check in and see if there's any other great idea that we should go back and flesh out. I don't think so. I think we need to continue the discussion. There's a lot of ideas here. Maybe folks can marinate on it a bit and- Yeah, we appreciate that. Yeah. Okay. Next item is site visits. We'll start with Together. And I think, Robert, was that your- Did you do that one? Or Ellie Berto, did you have anything you wanted to share from the desk audit on that? Yeah, so I think it ended up being just me which is fine. That happened in the past. And no, I didn't have a lot to talk. The desk audit was pretty good. Usually what people tend to forget is their grievance process and what I found interesting is a couple of things. They have a grievance process for each of their programs and they send it to me afterwards, right? So the source has a grievance process. Their outreach has a different grievance process which I thought was interesting. That is not one single grievance process. So, but you know, so really don't know together, I'll talk a little bit about it. So Together is a homeless service provider that primarily focuses on youth, youth that are experiencing homelessness. We talk a lot about, you know, the challenges they face to be a lot of kids that are aging out of foster care, struggle. We talk a lot about the kind of services they provide, just a place to connect, a lot of life-skilled type case management. We also talked about, I also, because I work a lot with them, we talked about their elder program as well and the work that's happening there in street outreach here in Longmont where they are working diligently to connect people to both youth and non-youth to our coordinated entry system. You know, on the other side, I also have their year-end report and I also can tell you that they didn't serve as many folks as they thought they were gonna serve and a lot of that was because they had to shut down the source which is their drop-in center. Sorry, I shouldn't give you that detail. The sources are dropping center from Boulder that youth can access, Longmont youth can access and they had intended to serve, I think 15 or 20 and I think they only served seven. Youth from Longmont in 2021 and a lot of that happened to be because they had to shut down a bunch of times. And so people couldn't access the source. But overall, I felt that they, you know, they, of course, they're a over a million dollar budget agency. They got their act together as far as having all their documents, their documentation, their personnel policies, all of that is good. And they really built in their, what they call Jedi. And I think that that is justice, equity, diversion and inclusion and they have really weaved that in into their personnel policies, into their board manual. They've been doing a lot of work on that. And if I remember right, I think they had 20% of their board was people of color. So, which is, you know, we'd love to have more, of course, but that's a good start. So, yeah, that was my any questions about together and be happy to answer. But I felt that they are a strong agency that are doing good work and have really committed to their equity work and they're trying to make sure that it is embedded in all of their foundational documents. So. Awesome. And they were formerly known as attention homes, is that correct? Okay. Yeah, yeah. I talked to Eric Ozempe, Karen started here in Longmont, Karen. They had, or they had a house here in Longmont and long time ago, maybe even before, yeah, they have, because they have outside at Eric Ozempe, they have an endowment with the Longmont Community Foundation. Oh. Yeah, long time ago. So. Interesting. They have some local routes too, not just Boulder, but your Longmont. Awesome. Thanks, Eliberto. And then the second one that we had was for Boulder County AIDS Project, B-CAP, right? Eliberto, do you wanna talk about the desk audit and then I can talk about our meeting and discussion with them? Yeah, again, another superb agency with a lot of great staff that have their act together when it comes to, and part of, so part of the same thing with Salud and a few others, when they get federal funding, there's just a lot of requirements. So they tend to, those agencies that get federal funding tend to have all of the required documents that we asked for and more because the feds just put so many regulations on them. So they tend to, I usually never have any issues with agencies that receive federal funding, just having their documentation, their, all of their policies and stuff because it's not just us, it's what the fed requires. So yeah, I didn't find anything in a desk audit. Awesome. I think that one of the biggest takeaways I had was that, with the pandemic in particular, they had to adjust a lot of their service model to do things more remotely and in many cases that resulted in, less delivery of service because a lot of the success for BCAP really relies on relationship building. So they do work with other agencies. They have, they do street outreach in particular, as well as case management. And so one of the stories they shared that I thought was particularly interesting was that, they have, they do things like, they try to address like harm reduction as well as getting folks into, supportive housing or things like that. And so, but often it starts with that relationship. And so, being able to come in and talk to someone, to seek out, for example, clean needles or disposing of them and to have someone who is not judgmental about that is the opening, it's the opening dance of the services they provide. And they can, they've had folks who have started at that and built a relationship with someone in the program and then eventually gotten on to, gotten testing and gotten someone else to get testing. But like they didn't come in looking for testing and they weren't gonna do it. Like that was not at all. And so, while that is part of the primary, sort of where outcomes happen, that is not where sort of like the intake happens. And so, I think the other thing is BCAP works really, it seems like they work really collaboratively with a lot of other organizations. So they team up, I think with some of their street outreach for with folks who are addressing unhoused issues and that sort of thing. And so it's not, they're trying to address it holistically because somebody, even if they can get access to antivirals and retrovirals and stay up to date with that doesn't really make a whole lot of difference if that person is on the street and can't afford housing. So, yeah, it's super, it seems like, just really well-established organization that seems really tapped into what the needs of the community they serve is and recognizing that like they can't just address, like they're not, they're just to address, basically folks living with HIV and AIDS. Like they also work with folks who have hepatitis C and other, and so, but they recognize that like there's this whole continuum of care and they don't necessarily provide that but they help get folks connected to the other organizations in the community and sort of, I'd say they're kind of like the ideal, one of the ideals in terms of how well they coordinate across that and try to address those without like taking it all on themselves. Any questions or anything from other folks on the board? All right, the last item on our agenda is announcements on other business. Do we have any announcements or other business seeing Ellie Bertol? I saw you come off mute and Karen? Karen has an announcement. Okay. Well, I just want to, you know, this is my last meeting. I retire, I'm retiring at the end of March. So I just wanted to wish you and Ellie Bertol luck in figuring out this formula thing. She's like, peace out, not my problem anymore. So anyhow, so I just wanted to wish you all well. Thank you for the opportunity to, you know, to support the incredible work that you do in the community to really be mindful about how to best invest these dollars in helping folks in our community. So I just wanted to say goodbye and wish you well. You will still have Ellie Bertol and Molly, they will still be here and carrying things forward. Thanks for your service. You're welcome. What are you gonna do? You know, I'm gonna figure that out. I'm gonna take a little, I'm gonna take a break. So I've been here for 32 years. So I think for a while I'm just gonna, you know, not do a lot of anything. And then I'll figure it out. You'll love it, you'll love it. Yeah. You know, and Kathy Fedler has come back to work for the city. So she's working part-time. She started last week. So hopefully because it is, we're having a hard time hiring staff. So yeah, she's coming back to help out. Deanna. So I was hoping that this subject would just never come up and that maybe the rumors of your retirement would just be forever delayed. But I really just wanna thank you, Karen, for being so fabulous and guiding all of us volunteers on this board and just really appreciate and recognize how valuable your service has been to the community and to all of us. And what a big hole you're gonna be leaving here. Formula or not, it's across the board for sure. We will miss you more than words can say and value everything that you have done for all of us and for the city. Very, very much. So thank you so much for all of your work. Thank you very much for those kind words. Thank you very much. Well, you deserve more than those kind words. I don't think you need any more. So that's what you get. I appreciate that. Thank you. Karen, any other announcements or other business? All right, seeing none, I will entertain a motion to adjourn. All right, Karen Phillips is moving for us to adjourn. Do we have a second? Kim, all right, see you all in about a month. Bye-bye. Bye, Karen. Bye.