 Good morning. For those of you who are watching on YouTube, today is February 4th, Thursday. This is the Vermont House Human Services Committee. And we are hearing testimony, the first part of the morning, from Jeffrey Pippinger, as well as Sarah Phillips from the Agency of Human Services, about their housing initiative or how to address homelessness initiative. And I'm going to turn it over to Sarah and Jeffrey and ask, do you have slides that you want to show us? So Sarah, are you going to be in charge of? So we don't have slides. We did share a budget memo with you, which I can share my screen as we talk through it. I don't know that we need to do that. We'll just let folks know that the budget memo is on our committee page. And you can pull it up if you want to read along or if after the testimony, you want to review it. Great, yeah, I do think we're going to try and walk you through that memo. So if you do want to look at it and we can answer questions about it, I think that would be great. So for the record, I'm Sarah Phillips, the Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity. We're one of six divisions or units within the Department for Children and Family. So I report to Commissioner Sean Brown. Jeffrey, do you want to introduce yourself? And also Deputy Commissioner Trish Tile from Economic Services is here this morning as well. Good morning, my name is Jeffrey Pippinger for the record, I'm the Senior Advisor to Commissioner for the Department for Children and Families. And for the purposes of this conversation, for those of you who may be new, I had previously been the General and Emergency Systems Program Director in Economic Services prior to my role in the Commission's office. It's nice to be here, thank you. Thank you. And we look forward to hearing about the emergency housing proposal. Do you want questions, how can we interrupt with questions or do you want us to hold until you've finished? I think it would be most welcome if there are questions that come up and with your permission, I might say hold that, we'll get to that in a moment, but I think as they come up, we would welcome them. I also know there's some new members to the committee and so to the best of our ability, we'll probably try to just level, set and give some foundational information as well or happy to answer those kinds of questions. It's hard to talk about a new initiative without talking about where we're at right now and then where we're at due to COVID. So I think the conversation may go around a little bit, we're happy to answer questions related to all of that. And I think that's why in part we thought it was important that Deputy Commissioner Tio join us this morning as well. Well, thank you, I think that would be great and as there are new people and they've not necessarily ever formally met you, Sarah, if Representative Whitman and Representative Small would just introduce themselves. Hi there, Dane Whitman representing Bennington District 21, we're hearing from you. Thank you. Good morning, Taylor Small, representing Winooski and Burlington. Pleasure to meet you all. Great, excellent. And I believe we have a follow-up meeting next week as well. So that'll be a great chance to dig in a little deeper with you both. So thank you. So forgive me as I look at my notes and look at you at the same time. I think that can be awkward for Zoom, but I'm gonna try and make sure that I cover a lot of area. Jeffrey Pippinger and I are also probably gonna dance in and out of this presentation together. We have different information to share and so hopefully that won't be too awkward in this format. I'll just kind of go ahead and jump in. And I think one of the key things to just, I wanna start sort of pre-COVID, right? And then where we're at now and where we are proposing that we go. So that is sort of the outline for today's conversation a little bit. So one of the things to know is that the way that we meet Vermonters emergency housing or emergency shelter needs in the state of Vermont is really through a two-part system of care, right? And I also use the terms emergency housing and emergency shelter very interchangeably. So when I say it's a two-part system of care, that means historically we have a community-based system of care where there are projects, facilities that are run by nonprofit organizations that provide emergency shelter, meet the emergency housing needs of Vermonters, of homeless Vermonters. And that's a range of project types. It includes year-round shelters. It includes domestic violence shelters. It includes a lot of emergency apartments actually. We use a lot of apartments. It also includes motel vouchers. In a lot of cases right now it's our domestic violence agencies when their shelters are full, they have a pool of funds through a grant from DCF to place folks in motels, right? We call that motel overflow rather than using the motel voucher program. It also includes host homes for youth. So it's a range of community-based initiatives and projects to meet emergency housing needs. And then we have the general assistance emergency housing program, temp housing motel voucher program. It goes by all of those names, but it all refers to one program, the motel voucher program. And that program is administered by the Department for Children and Families by my colleagues at the Economic Services Division and provides a motel voucher to eligible households who need one to meet their emergency housing needs. This might be a good time for me to remind the committee and for folks who might be new that that motel voucher program system is based on, it's part of the general assistance program. It's over 50 years old. It's based on categorical eligibility, meaning that you have to meet certain categories of housing crisis in order to be eligible for a motel grant for a finite number of days through the state. There are three main doors for that in a usual year. There's adverse weather conditions. There's catastrophic and there's vulnerable population. Vulnerable population is up to 28 days and that includes households with children under the age of six, folks over the age of 65, folks in receipt of disability compensation, pregnant in their third trimester. Catastrophic categories are deal with eviction, deal with loss of housing due to domestic violence, fire, flood, natural disaster. I think it's important to remind ourselves of that, particularly in this moment for the purposes of this presentation and conversation, because that's the historic system. There are 185 pages of rules for that program. You have to meet the categorical eligibility in order to receive housing assistance. That adverse weather door is open under certain weather metrics during the winter in a normal month or a normal year. We had, as a part of the GA Motel Voucher Program, back in 2015, the department issued a memorandum asking for GA alternatives from community partners, meaning these interseqlovisera was just talking about warming shelters, Motel has shelter overflow for domestic violence partners. We've seen increasing success with those over the years. In the several years leading up to the pandemic, we had started an exploration of looking at how we did things in the GA program. And if the answer was that's the way we've always done it, that wasn't good enough to answer. So we started to kind of think how might we modernize that program and how might we make it more trauma-informed, better for our clients, easier to access for our clients and for our partners to administer. So we've done a lot of work around thinking of what might be an alternative to the Motel Voucher Program, which is why we had, about a year ago, we're in the similar situation talking about the emergency hazard initiative and then a global pandemic hit. So we'll pause there, continue on and then we'll talk about how the pandemic might have affected things and why we want to talk about transition data. So just to say the community base, this is where OEO comes in, right? Because we don't at OEO administer the Motel Voucher Program. But what OEO does, for those of you who don't know us, is we administer grant programs to community organizations around the state that are working to address poverty at the local level, right? So that's what we do. And part of that work is administering the core funding for homeless shelter and service providers around the state. So we are the part of this, it is the community-based system of care in terms of administering funding for that system and providing support, training, monitoring, performance management, that's OEO's role. So in a typical year pre-COVID, again, I'm still pre-COVID, sorry, but in a typical year, we might serve about 2,700 households in our community-based emergency housing system, emergency shelter, and about 2,500 in our General Systems Motel Voucher Program, right? So that's just kind of what a typical year looks like. In a typical year, we might, or pre-COVID, we might have about capacity for 560 households on a given night in our emergency, community-based emergency shelter system, again, with some motel overflow in that system. And on a typical night pre-COVID, the General Systems Emergency Housing Program might have in cold weather months upwards of 250 to 300 households a night, right? But not cold weather nights, it would be much, many fewer, it would be not adverse weather conditions might be 100, 150, so statewide, right? So that just kind of gives you a picture of kind of pre-COVID, which I think is helpful to then understand that right now, we have about 1,800 households in motels, of which about 250 are families, right? They are receiving a Motel Voucher Program. And in our shelter, community-based shelter system, we're down in capacity, because a lot of those programs, some of our seasonal shelters didn't open up. And also because some of our shelters have just reduced their normal capacity numbers to be able to meet public health guidelines, and it may changes. And so right now we have about 370 households in our community-based emergency shelter system. And part of that's because the last year, it's hard to believe it was almost a year ago now, but in April or March, really, we made big shifts in recognition of the pandemic we very quickly realized, and I think you all are well aware of this now, that we needed to expand the ability to provide non-congregate shelter to people during the pandemic, right? And so we opened the doors to the Motel Voucher Program wide open to meet a public health need for non-congregate shelter. And we waved a lot of our rules through the emergency rule-making measure. And by we, again, I mean, economic services, so, and Deputy Commissioner Tyle could answer more specific questions about that. But we have opened it wide up and we sort of slowly, at first, it was to de-intensify our shelter populations, and in some cases, some of our shelters closed. And so we needed to sort of quickly open up the Motel Vouchers to serve them. And then we quickly realized we needed to expand the eligibility. And so that is sort of what's gotten us here now. And I think one of the things to recognize is that the unique circumstances of the pandemic are really what have led us to expand the number of people we're serving in emergency housing. And I think everyone would agree that it has revealed the number of households who are truly housing insecure, right? Who may have been able to double up, who may have been able to find other arrangements, but for COVID, they were sort of pushed out of those situations and we can't have you doubled up in our housing, right? So we know that that vulnerable housing population was made more vulnerable by COVID. And I feel really grateful to work in a state that rose to the challenge to meet non-congregate sheltering needs. So that's sort of how we've gotten where we are here. But I think the need to think about, and so in some ways, this pandemic has both reinforced for us the need to think about a transition and it's also added this really complicated layer to the vision and goals that we've had for this transition and how do we even, how do we think about where we're going and how, where do we go from here? Because the reality is that COVID is gonna end, right? And what we're doing is really unsustainable. And when I say that, I don't even mean financially unsustainable, right? It just takes an enormous amount of effort and extra on behalf of our homeless system of care to be able to meet this need in an ongoing way. And it's really unsustainable for families and individuals. Living motels are not good places for people to live, right? They just aren't, like. So I think that's when we say, what we're doing is unsustainable, COVID's gonna end. That kind of brings us to the point today, which is our proposal for where we move on, where we go from here and how do we get to our vision of what we see as the best approach in policy and the future in a way that is really thoughtful and avoids the humanitarian crisis. But we're not gonna keep, we're not gonna have a need for ongoing to house 1,800 households and motels. And we're gonna have to move out of that somehow in a thoughtful way. And what does that transition look like? So that today is what we're presenting is our proposal for that conversation. And we know that you'll hear from lots of community partners and lots of other stakeholders on this, but we wanna kind of walk you through our thinking. So before I kind of go deeper into the proposal itself, maybe that's a good point to pause for a question. Sir, I might add one thing before opening up to questions, which is this just comes back to why we wanted to contextualize what had happened pre COVID is that when the pandemic has subsided, we were out of the public health emergency. Even though we've had the doors wide open and we've been doing this really kind of different way of providing care during this time, six, four and eight times, the program reverts back to that historic categorically eligible system with finite numbers of data just goes back in time. And so we're trying to think proactively and act proactively to shift away from what we had been doing given the things that we had thought would work. And then the pandemic has shown can work in a variety of different ways. Yeah, I guess I should also say today we're very focused on the emergency housing piece of this, but obviously the department feels strongly that we don't end homelessness with emergency housing or emergency shelter. And we're engaged in a lot of collaboration and coordination and work to rehouse households in permanent housing with support services. It's not the focus of today's conversation, but the proposal that we're gonna walk through is with an eye towards being able for our whole system of care to make that shift to focus on housing first, right? And just to say of those households in motels and in shelter right now, we know that 250 of them have housing vouchers and they're actively looking for housing. So there's a lot just for context, there's a lot of effort underway to rehouse people and I don't wanna miss that. Thank you. We do have a question from Representative McFawn. Thank you. Excuse me. Thank you, Madam Chair. As you move to this new program, my question is this, I asked this when you talked about it before too, have you, how much contact have you had with landlord organizations and with all of the COVID money that was put into housing, how many, what does the housing stock look like that these people would transfer into at this point in time? How are you gonna be able to do it? I guess it's my question. You're talking about permanent housing. I think, yeah, there's a big concern around having adequate permanent housing in the state of Vermont. There's a whole lot of policy conversation around that and how we continue to build and create more capacity. Certainly there was a big push in an investment in CRF funds through the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board to create new housing very quickly for folks who are experiencing homelessness. We worked very closely with them on that initiative. There was also work that happened to provide funding from landlords to rehabilitate units and bring them back online, right? And then re-house households who experiencing homelessness. We worked very closely with the Department of Housing and Community Development on that initiative and are working with them on their sort of 2.0 initiative that's a part of the administration's proposal. So those are two really important ways that we create some new capacity to ultimately re-house families and individuals who are homeless and just, I would say, also our community partners, a lot of them have a lot of strategies that do specifically focus on and staff people sometimes who are wholly devoted to focusing on landlord liaison work, landlord outreach and meeting the needs of landlords. So hopefully that answered your question a little bit. I think you're pointing towards a concern around enough permanent housing and I think that's a big concern, absolutely. And Sarah, you do have, we do have another question and I think it illustrates the fact that the line between emergency housing and permanent housing and moving from emergency housing to permanent housing is a continuum and is not just solely the responsibility of one arm of state government or one silo. And as an example of how we try to work together, we have Representative Kalaki from General Housing and Military Affairs where they know more about bricks and mortar and the landlord tenant stuff, but he's going to be asking a question related to what we are talking about today, which is the plan that you'd like us to explore. Representative Kalaki. Thank you, Chair Pugh. And hello, Jeffrey and Sarah again, and Trisha. It's nice talking to you a lot. I'm learning a great deal. My question is in this reset moment when it's gonna be geographically dispersed with past motel utilization, are those numbers pre-COVID that you're gonna work on in this kind of transition plan or are we talking about these 2,200 people and 400 children now in the motels? But how is that, in this transition, how's that working and in your memo here, it talks about that. John, I'm going to interrupt, which is she hasn't presented the memo to the committee. And so the fact that this is your area of expertise, it's not ours, so please hold your question. No, that's great. I think, yeah, hopefully, but that's great because I don't know that I was gonna answer that question specifically, so I'll try and talk about that, thank you. Yeah, so we'll go ahead and jump in a little bit to the initiative. I mean, I think I'm actually gonna start at the bottom of the memo, which is to say, high level, our proposal is that at some point in the spring, we see making changes to eligibility for the general assistance motel voucher program. Those changes generally will be about allowing folks currently in motels to continue to stay and changing the door, right? Changing the eligibility for new households coming in. And then July 1st, we would see moving back towards our categorical eligibility with everyone sort of starting on, not sort of, but starting on day one of their eligible nights or days on July 1st. And then 10-1, October 1st, shifting to the community-based initiative. All of that very much needs to be tied to the status of the public health pandemic. And so it comes with a big caveat that what we're doing now with non-congregate housing and the use of the GA Motel Voucher Program is absolutely to meet a public health need. And if we keep having the public health need and vaccination implementation hasn't rolled out in the same way in community level transmission attire, then this timeline will need to shift. But we needed to put something out there as a proposal and a starting place on how we see this working and for the purposes of policy and budget making, right? So this is what we're putting out there, but we wanna just recognize that the public health pandemic status of that is gonna impact this timeline, so. So, Sarah, if you could, oh, sorry, Jeffrey, I was gonna say, if you could be a bit more concrete, I'm homeless right now today, and I'm in an emergency, I'm in a motel. What's going to happen to me? You said you wanna switch, assuming the public health emergency, you're going to switch in the spring. So do I get to stay where I am or am I moving? Yes, you would continue to be eligible, right? That's the idea. We will lay out more specifically what those changes will be and when they will happen, and we will communicate that with many weeks in advance to clients and motels to service providers to get that information out. I'm happy to let Jeffrey kinda jump in and walk through more specifically some of the changes, but. I mean, I was thinking, especially as your plan says, going back for a period of time to the categorical eligibility. So at what point are there going to be a group of people who are out on the street? Can I add to your question, Madam Chair? Are you, when you talked about you're the person, you're in a homeless shelter, what happens to you, but which kind of person are you? Are you one of the ones that would have been homeless pre-pandemic and be in this emergency situation if the weather was cold, or are you one of the people who is stuck because you are sort of couch-surfing, whatever that's called, couch-surfing with your children and now you're in a hotel because nobody can be near each other, right? What kind of person are you? Well, I think I was the first. Okay, go ahead, Sarah. Yeah, Jeffery's going to jump in, but I just want to say at no part of our plan involves dumping people onto the streets. That is absolutely what we're working to avoid. So I just want to be clear about that. Yeah, thank you, Sarah, because that's a really, we have not said this explicitly up to this moment this morning, but we are keenly aware that what we do not want to do at this moment in time is create an additional humanitarian crisis by just saying, okay, everybody's out on the streets as of ex-date. So what we've tried really hard to do as we've thought about transition plans is to figure out how can we do that in steps and stages that don't dump 2,000 people onto the streets but rather work to help people exit to permanent housing to find other safe stable housing that may not be an apartment, maybe it's a home share, maybe there's family, so that we can begin to right-size the program again. I know that out there is a, we understand that there are community partners who have done an enormous amount of work, just staggering work during the pandemic. We've asked a lot of them and they have superseded people's expectations. And to take 2,000 households and just hand them to community partners and saying, okay, you got it now, is not our intention. That's irresponsible, right? So what we're trying to do is figure out a way to transition that holds folks in need of assistance safe and right-sizes the system out there so that we can transition to this better bigger system of care. That involves, when we talk about the spring, Madam Chair, we're talking about a point at which we need to consistent with the public health emergency when it is safe to do so, to reinstate some of the eligibility criteria and the mechanisms which will decrease the influx of folks into the motels. It's really hard to be exiting people at the same rate that people are coming in currently. As a part of that, we wanna take the folks who are currently housed in motels and find a mechanism for them to stay housed through the spring into the summer as we transition because the transition date is October 1st to the community-based system. The reinstatement of categorical eligibility July 1st is an additional mechanism to try and get a handle on the populations and figure out who has what need and how can we right-size the number of folks seeking assistance in a motel. But if you look at the timeline, categorical eligibility is up to 84 days, sorry, catastrophic eligibility. So that actually bridges from July to October when our community partners would be administering motel as shelter overflow. Does that help respond? Absolutely. We have a question about that or about the plan from Representative McFawn. Thank you, Madam Chair. And let me just ask this question. You keep talking about the spring. As we sit here today, if I'm a landlord and I've got 25 units and 10 of them need to be rehabilitated and the rehabilitation is all done, are you moving people out of the motels into those units or are you kind of banking these units and paying the landlord the rent until you put people in them? What I'm trying to find out are you're moving people now as these units come online? Yeah, absolutely. Many, many households have exited the motel and many, many households have exited emergency shelter. The problem is more people are coming into the program now than are exiting. But many, many households have exited as those new initiatives have come online through the CRF funding that Vermont Housing and Conservation Board had and through the rental rehab program that you're referring to and frankly just folks exiting into other safe housing options, right? I don't want to paint, I think representative of, I think it was Brum said, your point I think was well taken which is which household are you, right? Like I think it's really hard when you look at this as 1800 households because there is so much diversity of need and household types and circumstances and what the housing intervention is or the plan for each of those households is a little bit individualized, right? We know also that 1800 households in Vermont that are in non-congregate shelter right now weren't all going to be on the streets and unsheltered but for this program. And, but we want to be really careful that we can't just exit them to the streets, right? We need to help them figure out what their plan is. That's where our community partners have been doing amazing work that Jeffrey was talking about all along to help folks exit into safe housing. One initiative, the rapid resolution housing initiative, supported over 200 households to exit into safe housing. Some of that was permanent housing but some of that was just other alternatives to return to live with family or friends or transfer, I heard a great story about somebody who got stranded in Vermont and found themselves homeless but really needed to get back to California. We were able to get them back to California, right? Pat was lucky to help do that. So I think absolutely part of our job is gonna be to communicate really clearly when changes around eligibility happen and how that impacts people in the motels. And we need to communicate that clearly to households and motels so that they can know that information and make plans accordingly. We need to communicate that really clearly to our community partners who are working with those households so that they can help them as well. And we need to have tools on our toolbox to help those households exit to safe housing or permanent housing. All of that's a really critical part of what will make this work. Because in the historic GA emergency housing, that's a motel room, right? It's a voucher for a motel room for a finite period of time. And if you were to ask pre-pandemic or even during the pandemic, but when we survey clients and we talk to community partners pre-pandemic, often what folks would say is that that program was abandoned to homelessness because what we have seen during the pandemic is a shift towards what we have been trying to propose which is how we can integrate these supports and services that are all kind of working to transition households experiencing homelessness, housing and security from that crisis to stable safe housing, right? And that has to do with connection, right? It has to do with supports and services. That was absent, not entirely absent, but largely absent in the historic program, rules-based program. What we've seen during that, and I think this gets to both Rep Bromstead and Rep McFawn's point, which is that the ways in which we collaborate across sectors, across the state and communities, across lanes of service within communities, that's really critical because one of the things that we've seen kind of amplified during the pandemic response is the ability for housing navigation services where our community partners are helping clients to identify available housing, working with local landlords, building those connections, being able to support people in a way that we hadn't been doing to that scale prior. And that also goes along with the individual, who are you? Which one of these households are you? Because it is individualized, right? People's experiences are unique. People's traumas are unique. And how we help support people and transition them is critical. And that's part of the moving away from that categorical eligibility, which is traumatizing because you have to explain why you're homeless and justify it. And you have to kind of navigate, you know, direct it in this bucket or that bucket. Moving away from that allows us to reach people in a much more genuine and individualized way. I got up, but I think we're having a great dialogue. I'm gonna try and kind of go back to outline some basics in the proposal for folks who maybe weren't here the first time around as well. So I do think, so that's sort of the high level overview. And we got into the part around the spring, which I think is helpful to understand our thinking around it and happy to come back to this group with more. I think part of what we'll do is the absolute, that communication and clarity around when those changes happen and what they will be will be a part of our work. Part of our work will also this spring and later this month, we intend to work on the community allocation. So I think this is part to represent Kalaki's question, which is, you know, the shift is really that October 1st, the General Assistance Motel Voucher Program ends. But not that we stop using motel vouchers necessarily. We know that we're not gonna make that shift overnight. We know that motels will continue to play an important role in our shelter overflow. We know that in some cases, some households would be better served in a motel, frankly, even then in the shelter that's available to them. And a community-based system of care lets us move that direction to meeting more of the individualized needs of emergency housing needs of people. And so our shift would be to move that money to community partners. And we would do that initially by making some allocations for each district based on historical utilization. We'll publish what our proposal is for those allocations, you know, in a few weeks. Need to crunch some more numbers. I think it's not, we will look historically for sure. We will also look at the current moment, which feels really important as well. And we will also need to take into account those areas that have the domestic violence shelter provider is already doing the motel overflow piece. So it's not sort of a easy back of the envelope map, but we'll put that out there for communities to have something concrete to represent a few points. Concrete is really important in these conversations to have something concrete to work with and understand and start to think and plan about. And we also intend to put out some tools for communities. We really wanna shift towards thinking, you know, community-wide, those local homeless continuums of care to have a community-wide plan around emergency shelter that's coordinated. In some communities, there's really only one or two providers doing this work. In some communities, there's more. And whoever, whichever agency is gonna move forward with a pool of funds to be able to provide motel vouchers, right? Cause that is what we see initially still being the primary shift, right? Hopefully eventually to move away from motel vouchers towards other kinds of initiatives. But initially in October, right? They'll be still administering motel vouchers. But they'll be doing that locally at the front door through a community agency. And it will just be really critical that that be well-coordinated. So part of our job we see as our job is to provide tools and help facilitate those conversations and work with the local continuums of care on that planning. So that will be sort of a lot of our focus this spring. Part of the budget memo also I just wanna point out does kind of show how this money shifts. And I think it shows where the money's come from. It also demonstrates that the administration is putting an additional 2.4 million general fund into the base for this work in an ongoing way. So I don't want that to be lost. That's higher for those of you who were here in 1.0. That's higher than the initiative last time around. And so breaking that out on community allocations will be important for our partners to be able to respond to this proposal. But just kind of a breakdown. Right now we already invest funds from the general assistance temp housing program in community-based initiatives. For many years we have been trying to make that shift. And we've done a lot of it has been in seasonal shelters. So if we know that we can do something less expensive than the Motel Voucher program, we've been able to make that investment into seasonal shelters knowing that we were gonna spend less on temp housing and Motel vouchers. We're stewards of public funds and we have to make those decisions wisely. So you'll see on page three of the budget memo just to kind of point out, you'll see that part of where the 8.6 million for this initiative goes is to renew some of those ongoing community investments. And part of it will be to support this new community-based infrastructure. If we're gonna ask our community partners to do more, we need to fund them to do more, right? That takes staffing and people. Part of that will be to provide some ongoing funding for housing navigation services, right? If they're gonna be placing folks in Motels and supporting them, they need caseworkers, they need housing support staff who can work with those households to help them on their housing plans, right? So we don't wanna just, again, the point is to not just place folks in Motels and walk away. We've learned where we've been able to add services during the pandemic. It's been amazing to be able to add services right on site at Motels or Motel Outreach Services to help folks with their planning. And we don't wanna, we see that as critical in this initiative. And so that's gonna be an important part of this. And then we also see ongoing funds for Motel, what we call Motel pools for shelter overflow. And I think, oh, there's a date that's wrong in this proposal, sorry, it should say 10-1. I'll fix that and get you a revised version. But this proposal, obviously, where, how much funds we spend on each, how much of the 8.6 million we spend in each of these buckets will be based on proposals from our community partners. But this is sort of just our methodology and thinking about how those funds will go out the door. We have a question from Representative Small. Thank you, Madam Chair. And thank you for the presentation so far. Something that I'm curious about is hearing that there's already work happening within the communities and with community partners and a recognition that we should not just be giving vouchers without support services and case management along with that. So my question is, why is that not happening now? Is it because of lack of funding or lack of resources? And why do we think by transferring this to community partners that these services would increase if they're not being given already? Yeah, I think those are great questions. Wow, I really like those questions. Okay, so I think, and this part of this is just building off. So COVID has really forced a lot of us to lean into this work, right? And in some ways we've been laying the groundwork for what will work in the future, like what we know works, right? In some communities we are funding and we do have funding available for surge services, I'll call them, right? Like extra services, like our homeless shelter service provider system of care didn't and doesn't have the capacity in an average year to absorb 1,400 extra households in emergency housing, right? It's just not there, that's like double who they might typically be working with. So we have funded additional services. That looks different in different parts of the state in some cases, like at the Holiday Inn in South Burlington, we have TVOEO that's onsite providing 24 seven services onsite essentially shelter services, right? Some of it's housing case management or housing navigation services and some of it's just having people onsite to support the health and safety and security at the Holiday Inn. We have other models like that, GroundWorks in Brattleboro at the Quality and also has 24 seven staffing. We don't have that at most motels, let me be very clear. We're working with 70 plus motels and hotels across the state. We don't have a service provider onsite at every motel providing services. There is a requirement in the program that folks participate in what we call coordinated entry which means that they participate in getting connected to housing help and a housing navigator and somebody who's gonna work with them on their housing plan. And we have funded additional housing services, support services across the state to be able to absorb some of that need. I don't see the level of what we're doing again because what we're doing is tied to the public health need being sort of the ongoing level of our emergency shelter system of care. But historically, so that's great news, we are doing some of that. Historically, we weren't doing nearly enough of that and I think one of the major challenges is that you come in the door into the Motel Voucher program through over here at Economic Services, the community partners over here and the connection there is just not as strong. And although we've done a lot to strengthen it by actually placing staff onsite, that's not the case everywhere, as I said. And I think we know historically that when, for instance, through the work that we've done with our domestic violence agencies that the service delivery model is just much stronger when the agency providing your services is the agency that's providing your Motel Voucher or you're meeting your emergency housing needs that there's just a really a much tighter and stronger service delivery program than having like multiple doors, right? We need that kind of integration work so much better. And at the Holiday Inn and the Quality Inn in those very unique projects where they have 24-7 staffing, the level of coordination that they have is really amazing in terms of folks coming in the door. But I think right now it takes extra effort to do that kind of coordination because we still have two separate doors into the system of care. And what we're trying to do in this proposal is create one door at the community level. Because if I can just add that historically, the G&A program is kind of a set aside to, I mean, it's kind of separate from the work being done to assist folks with their individual needs and situations. And because of the complex rules that go along with that, it had often, in my personal opinion, often been more of a hindrance at times other than providing the literal group. I was just gonna, you can keep talking. I wanna, there are two people who have questions. I wanna let them know that they, we know that in the minute, Jeffrey stops, Theresa, Representative Wood, you go and then Representative Redmond. Sorry, go ahead. I can stop for now. I'll come back to my other points at the end if you do. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. So, Sarah and Jeffrey, you've sort of continually referred to the public health emergency and the, obviously what we see is increased numbers in these, receiving these services. I guess what is in the back of my head, and I don't know if it's accurate or not, is if whether we are, whether we're really seeing increased utilization or if we're really just seeing people coming to you that have already been chronically homeless. And so I'm just wondering about whether there will be the kind of decrease as the public health emergency, hopefully fades into our memories. So do you really feel like there's going to be a decrease in people needing to access emergency housing? Yes, absolutely. The vast majority of folks in the emergency housing program have never been in that program before. So I think it's a fair statement to say that the folks in the emergency housing program are not chronically homeless households, although you and I might be slightly different things by that so we can tease out what we're talking about. But chronically homeless household is a household that's been homeless over a year or more than four times in the past number of years and also has a disability that's long-term and affects their ability to live independently. That's chronically homeless households. That is not generally who's in the emergency motel bathroom program now, with one caveat that those who have been in the program almost a year now would technically qualify as chronically homeless very soon, right? Because they've been in this program and literally homeless for that long. But I think that's again, that's unique to the circumstances of the pandemic. You know, typically the program wouldn't be operating that way and households may have moved on. So I don't, I think, I just want to be really clear the vast majority of households and Deputy Commissioner Natal can speak to this perhaps more but the vast majority of households in the emergency housing program right now have not been in that program previously and would not be necessarily considered eligible under the categorical rules. So I understand what you're saying. I guess what I'm trying to get at is they may not have been eligible for the program under the categorical eligibility, but they may have been at in a high risk, I guess I would say in a high risk situation or having not sought out the assistance previously and they are now because of the public health emergency. So, but I appreciate your answer. Thank you. And Trisha, I don't know if you wanted to go first, but if you want to respond to that and then I'll just add on a thought. Thank you, Representative Wood, I would add to that. What operationally what we're intending to do fairly quickly here in the next few weeks is to start looking at individual people that as we reauthorize them for housing so that we have the numbers and know who would fit those categorical eligibility, historical numbers and who of those people are at risk of not being eligible as we move through these phases from April 1st into July 1st. So our hope is by restricting the entrances here that we can then have a list of people who we're talking about that are at risk and being able to hand that over to the community agencies and then they will be able to focus on the people that we're talking about that are most at need and will not be swamped as you will right now by the continued influx of people who were not eligible in the past. Does that help? Yeah, I mean, yes, I understand what you're saying. I guess I probably might not agree with the conclusion. That's all, thank you. Yeah, I would say, I just wanna say at least anecdotally, it's really hard to get data on 1800 health as we have some information through coordinated entry but anecdotally at least we know that there are a lot of folks in this program who Trish can tell you that broke up with their significant other and came into this program when they left that household. That's just the thing that happens. And in non-COVID days, that person might go stay with friends or family. And in these days, in COVID days, staying with friends or family is not an option. So there is a big chunk of household who have come into the program through situations like that. Are some of that because they didn't have other, like in a non-COVID time safe options? Maybe, yes, is some of that just really just because of COVID, yes. And I think we need to be honest about that. And I think we need to be thoughtful, right? I think this is your point and maybe you disagree with my point entirely and that's totally fine. I wanna understand your point better. But I think we wanna be thoughtful in changes around eligibility. I think this is what Trish was getting at so that we understand the impact of those changes that we make on the rules and that we have tools in place to help households. But ultimately, a rules-driven program, rules-driven eligibility has winners and losers, right? And that is why the department has always wanted to move away from this categorical eligibility where sometimes, if you have a child who is under six, you get in. If you have a kid who's over six, you don't. And those restrictions are, sometimes, it just doesn't work well. And so we have historically wanted to move away from that. We know that who we traditionally have served in this program isn't necessarily the same households that our community partners are gonna serve as they do those individualized assessments to meet emergency housing needs. So I think there's a shift there that I think is important and hopefully speaks to some of your point. We wanna meet needs on that. Before, I'm going to, this is a time check for the six questions that people have and the one that maybe has not been answered yet, which is from John, Representative Kalaki. We have 15 minutes. So if Sarah and Jeffrey, if you have not gone through what in fact the proposal is, I'm going to stop the questions because we need to know the basics. If you have gone through what you wanted to in the presentation, then we will go back to questions. And I apologize, committee. I know you wanna talk about this and I know that this is hard to stay focused on what this is and not to move to other parts of addressing the seeing that Vermonters are housed. But this is the, so okay. So are you, where are you, Sarah and Jeffrey in the presentation itself? I think we can shift to just two questions. I just, I think we've walked through the high points and it's our perspective that without this shift, just really clearly that emergency housing would go back to being the standalone system that's disconnected from our homeless system of care and eligibility rules and requirements and without the connection to services that households need. And we think there's some momentum to continue to build on that and hopefully this proposal does that. But I wanna answer your question, so I'll stop talking. I would like to add one last thing if I may, Madam Chair. In part in response to our representative Wood and in part just I wanna make sure that one point gets out there before we dive into more questions. I just wanna, it's worth reminding ourselves that what we're talking about in this proposal in the emergency housing initiative is the rule-based general and emergency assistance hotel voucher program. We're not attempting to, that is a critical, that should be a critical component of the homeless system of care, right? But in terms of homelessness at large and how we address that and the challenges and the multiple facets of that, that's a broader piece, right? Because the statutory authority behind the GA program is to provide for the necessities of life in the event that the department cannot do that. So we're really talking about how do we change the crisis system from something that's punitive and categorical to something supportive and connected. The one thing that I want to make was that, we haven't talked about is that in some regards what we have done during the pandemic response is an oversized diversion of what we had proposed, because as a part of the response to this tragedy and this traumatic event, communities have come together and collaborated in ways that they had, in new ways that they haven't and in old ways that they had fallen away from. And I think what we've seen is the ability for communities to understand what the need and what the systems are that they need in their communities to help address the housing crisis. And throughout that, we've, the state, I know that in the last year, one of the concerns was that the state was abdicating its responsibility by shifting away from the motel voucher program to a community-based system. I might argue that what Sarah's shop and what Trisha's shop had done during the pandemic have reiterated that even in a community-based system there's a role for the state in terms of support and resources and technical assistance. I would encourage folks if they are interested to go to the department's YouTube channel to see a recording of the statewide summit that we held in November where their community partners have lessons learned so far at that point. There's a lot of talk there about collaboration and what, how we might think about the system of care going forward. And Jeffrey, what would be very helpful is if you would send the link to Julie? I'd be happy to. Okay, so we have, before Representative Kalaki, I stopped you from asking a question before. So I wanted to get back to you as to whether or not your question got answered or is still out there in terms of the emergency housing proposal. I think with Jeffrey and Sarah and Trisha, I can ask them to get clarification and I'll understand it. But another question, if I may, that's pertinent to this committee is Sarah, in the COVID relief funds, there was $15 million put aside for wraparound services in this housing component, I believe in the initial allocation. I know it kept changing all the time, but in this budget thing, when Representative Small asked, like how much money is it only the $8 million here? How do I compare how you supported all of these community-based groups with wraparound services during the pandemic and in this new model? Yeah, that's probably worthy of a longer discussion where we could present to what we have funded to date, how that has shifted what we are funding in an ongoing way. And probably through that, you could understand how that connects to this proposal. I can certainly, in the meantime, share with you, we have published reports of what we have funded and that's on OEO's website and I can share that with you. And just briefly say that currently we have from December to June made awards of about $2.9 million for non-congregate shelter services. So that's what's currently out there. But again, that's supporting things, a broad range of motel-based outreach and services, including very large projects like the Holiday Inn or a project which is 24-7 staffing for 130 households. So. Thank you. Thank you for all the work, too. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Representative Redmond. Thank you, Madam Chair. And yeah, I wanna echo Representative Kalaki's gratitude and thanks to OEO and DCF for the Herculean work that you've done over the last number of months. It has just been incredible. I am asking my question from the perspective of the community providers who are, you know, the boots on the ground doing the hard and heavy work in the trenches. And their concerns about timing. I think it's an incredibly thoughtful plan and you've obviously really spent a lot of time in all of the details of this and it sounds, I love the idea of the community provider where the relationship is being the one entry point. I think that's very, very wise. That said, we're in a pandemic, we're still under a state of emergency. They're still socially distancing people in their facilities, not up to full capacity. I'm just curious, why now? Why not wait, let them get their feedback on the ground, let them get back to some kind of normal way of operating and then introduce something like this? And I think, I think, you know, the timeline very well may shift based on the pandemic, right? I think vaccine implementation, I think has been a roller coaster ride for those involved in that and who knows what that will look like over the next few months, kudos to our leadership for keeping us, you know, steered in the right direction there. So I do think the timeline could shift based on that, right? I also think we need to be looking to our federal partners, right? If they're telling us that FEMA funding for non-congregate shelter is gonna end at a certain date, we need to be responsive to that and responsible in our planning and understanding the impact of that. What we're doing now costs a lot of money and it is reimbursed by the federal government. So let's just be real about that. Now, I think we all wanna make policy shifts that make sense for people and Vermonters, but we also need to recognize that there's financial implications for these decisions and I don't know that we would be doing what we're doing without federal funding. So I just think everybody should have that very clear awareness. So that will be one driver of our timeline as well in total honesty. Now, thankfully, we have good partners in the federal government. FEMA's been a good partner in this work in recognition of the need for non-congregate housing during a pandemic, right? So that's good. So that's a part of our thinking as well. I mean, COVID will end and we will need to transition and that is just a reality and that's gonna be hard and it's gonna be hard for our partners and the timing of that and how we do that. I'm fully committed to supporting them in whatever timeline that looks like. And Representative Redmond, if I can add on to that and just say that I'm going to reiterate because I think Sarah and I will be reiterating this over the days and weeks and months to come that the timeline can shift, right? Based on the pandemic and based on the health needs that we see. I also think that it's much easier to shift dates and deadlines than it is to start planning for a massive systems change and that by offering a date and by offering a date that is a little farther out that perhaps, you know, this gives us a framework for starting the work and starting the conversation so that we don't start that conversation at the 11th hour. And I think, and I realize that for all of us everyone in this room, everyone in our community partners rooms and everyone in motel rooms, that this has been a deeply traumatizing and just the unknown, right? The ambiguity of it all has been really challenging. Everyone's tired, right? Everyone's tired of being in a motel room. You're tired of dealing with astronomical numbers and social service needs, all of this. And yet, this is exactly the time, I hate to say it, that we need to be thinking about what happens next because I guarantee people are gonna be more tired down the road just when we need to be thinking about that transition. And so I mean, that's part of what we're trying to do is hold some space and be intentional and thoughtful about how we do this. Because there's an enormous opportunity here. Thank you. Representative McFawn, you had your hand up. Yeah, Madam Chair, thank you. I'm not gonna get into a long question. I see the bridge being built. I wanna see, I'm gonna sit back for a while and watch the people go across the bridge. And my questions are dealing with after they cross the bridge. That's where I'm worried about. That's the area that I'm worried about. How we're gonna sustain what we're doing. All this cares money, et cetera. It's a great bridge. And I think they're doing a wonderful job doing that. And I wanna see what's gonna happen. My questions will be about that. And we're gonna have plenty of time for that. So thank you, Madam Chair. Representative Whitman. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Sarah and Jeffrey. This question might be just sort of reiterating something, but in the report you talk about rightsizing a local shelter capacity and moving more towards permanent housing. And we kind of have a question as far as how many people are in motels just because of the pandemic? How many would have been if they had access before? And I know that our current way of sort of our sort of census for our homeless community members is sort of this one night of the year sort of headcount. And I just wanna make sure that part of this process is really getting to know everybody's circumstances and situation while they are in motels. So that they don't transition out and then sort of fall through the cracks again. So is that the question clear? Yes, I think so. I think, and I alluded to it earlier, although again I would welcome the opportunity come back and speak with the committee about the broader range of homeless assistance work that's happening, not just emergency housing and also just I'm happy to follow up with new committee members on as well as information on sort of some basic information around how that crisis response system works, right? So one of the things I alluded to was coordinated entry. Coordinated entry is the uniform way that we assess individuals, housing needs and resources and we coordinate as a community to get them connected to housing help and we refer them to housing intervention. So that is the way that community partners work together and through that process, we actually have a lot of information. Every community has a list. They call it the master list for lack of a better word but a master list of everyone in our community who's experiencing homelessness, people's names are only on that list when they've given permission for it to be shared with others just to be very clear and that list really helps identify if this is someone who needs sort of a short-term assistance to get back on their feet more one to two years of rental assistance and support services or are they chronically homeless and they need long-term support services? It also identifies families versus children or folks who need other specialized assistance and so that level of information is held at the community level and I think it's really critical at the community level to have that information to be able to plan and understand what are our gaps and what are our needs because it's not the same in every community, it's just not and so that right-sizing shelter capacity is about understanding where our gaps are in the shelter system but I think more broadly is in the broader how we're rehousing people because it's one thing to say we just need more housing but we know that I said it, we just need more housing, right? I was like, we end homelessness with housing but what kind of housing do we need? Where do we need that housing? What kind of services need to go along with it? What kind of rental assistance? How much of each kind? That level of information and planning belongs at the community level and coordinate entry helps us do that. It is 1015 and I apologize to those committee members who still have questions but we need to sort of wrap up and I think it goes without saying that this is an area of immense interest of if not two, three committees and just as sometimes the communication or interaction between OEO and economic services and the community partners on the one hand the desire is to work together and with a coordinated entry that is our intention here and we were able to do that last year with some of the emergency COVID money but so you may be needing, we're trying but it may not work, you may be needing to do some of this kind of communication and explanation to more than one group and for that I appreciate your willingness and that in terms of all of that. Clearly we have questions, some of which is timing some of which might be have to do with goals and those kinds of things and you have a plan and our job is to assess that plan and to provide you with feedback and let's all work together in doing that. So thank you very much. So you will be interacting with lots of us and lots of House General and Housing and Military Affairs as well as people from appropriations. I think that's all from the House side. I won't even begin to talk about community partners and the Senate. So thank you very much. So committee we have a short break before we totally switch topics and Representative Commissioner Hut will be coming to talk about the budget, the Dale budget and I believe that that it will be at 10.30. Julie, I'll be at 10.30. So we have about a 10, 12 minute break pause committee. So Julie, if you could put our pause.