Senate Budget and Fiscal Review Subcommittee No. 4 on State Administration and General Government

Subcommitee 4 of the Senate Budget and Fiscal Review Committee will come to order. This is the third meeting of the Subcommitee for the 2025-26 legislative session and budget cycle. We're holding our Committee hearing here in the state capitol in room 113. We're expecting Senator Niello in just a few minutes.

We will also be providing opportunities for public comment throughout the agenda today. So if we could call the roll to establish a quorum.

[Roll Call]

All right, a quorum has been established. So our order for today will be taking up our discussion items and at the conclusion of each department's present, we'll take public comment and we'll also provide additional time for public comment, if any, at the end of the agenda for today, prior to our taking our votes.

We'll conduct all of our votes at the end of the hearing and after all the public comment. So the subject of today's hearing is the state's role in addressing homelessness.

And we're going to examine the current State of homelessness in California, get an update on statewide data collection and analysis tools, and then really dive deep into the two largest programs addressing homelessness at hcd, the Homelessness Housing Assistance and Prevention Program, HAPP or HAPP, depending on your pronunciation, and the Encampment Resolution Funding Program.

And so we're going to start with the context for our work today. And to help us provide that background, we've asked Marc Dones, a policy Director at the University of California at San Francisco's Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, to give us a briefing. And so Marc is joining us today via remotely. So welcome. Thank you for joining us. Mark, your comments.

I'm happy to be here with you all today virtually. Thanks for allowing me that. My name is Marc Dones. I'm the policy Director at University of San Francisco's Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative. We focus on evidence based or developing evidence bases to support jurisdictions in adopting evidence based policy solutions for homelessness.

And I am excited to share with you the State of Homelessness today. So if. I think it's happening right now, if I can get the second slide in my presentation.

Are we, I think we're at the, at the second side, Marc.

Oh, we are. So I, I just see a. I don't see it. Okay. So what we know is that California's homelessness increased by 3% compared to 18% nationwide. A lot of the discussion around what is happening with regard to the numbers comes from the point in time count or pit count.

Pit count, Dana should be understand as a bellwether, but not necessarily the reality. And when possible, high quality administrative data provides a much more accurate and comprehensive picture than the point in time count, which really just helps us track those sort of year to year changes. Next slide, please. I'm going to assume that it's there.

So in California, more than 170,000 people experience homelessness daily. And according to findings from the California statewide study of people experiencing homelessness, or CASPEH, conducted by UCSF, 78% of homeless Californians or over 133,000 are unsheltered, meaning they are either living outdoors or in a vehicle. What we also know is that that population is aging.

So the median age of unsheltered adults is now 47. And among unsheltered adults, older adults 50 or above, 39% first experience homelessness after the age of 50. This is a pretty significant departure from what we have previously understood to be the case.

Homelessness has traditionally had more of a concentration in folks sort of in the 20 to 30s. Right. But the population broadly is aging. But I think it's really important for the Subcommitee to hear that again. 39% of folks 50 and over are experiencing homelessness for the first time after the age of 50.

So there's something going on there in terms of our ability to ensure that older adults stay connected to the right economic supports in order to age gracefully in place. That isn't necessarily happening. Given these trends, policy and investment really ought to follow reducing unsheltered homelessness as a primary goal from a behavioral health perspective.

Our next week our team will actually be releasing a comprehensive report on behavioral health and homelessness. Key findings there indicate that approximately half of the population, or 48%, has a significant behavioral health need that's defined as either illicit drug use three times per week or more binge drinking at least one time per week.

Current hallucinations, as defined as having a hallucination within the last 30 days or a recent psychiatric hospitalization, as defined as being hospitalized within the last six months. The data indicates that homelessness and behavioral health are intimately connected, but not necessarily in a straightforward way.

So behavioral health difficulties are a risk for homelessness, but many people did not experience those difficulties until after they became homeless. So 42% of people who regularly use substances begin using after they became homeless. And 38% of folks reported new or worsened mental health symptoms after becoming homeless.

This points to a key, I think, issue, which is that the more we are able to prevent people's experience of homelessness or get folks out of that experience rapidly, the lower the investment in some of these behavioral health responses needs to be. Slide 4, please.

So where we're seeing success is in veteran homelessness, which dropped by 12% compared to 8% nationwide. Youth homelessness dropped by 11% while rising in other states. And when we sort of dig into the why, it's because these groups receive targeted funding for housing and services and that works. Where funding has been sustained, homelessness has decreased.

And we know that some communities have ramped up coordinated strategies to address unsheltered homelessness, specifically, often through the encampment resolution funding and using encampment resolution processes that prioritize bringing people inside through service connections and access to shelter and housing, rather than through displacement. The state investment here has, has been helpful.

We've seen some really interesting stuff happen, particularly in some of our southern counties that have really, really looked at what it takes to bring people inside from these large scale encampments. Next slide.

When we talk about what is needed to reduce unsheltered homelessness, we're really talking about comprehensive community planning that has to that needs to project both shelter and housing needs. It's really important that we be clear that a good system has both housing and shelter in it.

I think oftentimes there's sort of skews where we focus really heavily on shelter or really heavily on housing. Good systems have both. And what we really need to be thinking about is the flow through from shelter into housing, right?

So that shelter stays are not lengthy and that folks are getting into permanent placements that are right for them, that are the right fit for whatever their needs are, whether those needs involve behavioral health supports or not. The behavioral health and case management investments that help keep folks stably housed are often a range, right?

So the some folks are going to need permanent supportive housing. But going back to that stat about behavioral health needs, half of people have significant behavioral health needs, which means about half don't, right? Those folks really just need some light touch, case management and more sort of economic supports in order to get back on their feet.

Sometimes those economic supports need to be ongoing, right? Ongoing rental subsidies. But oftentimes they can be short term while folks stabilize. Thinking about again, subpopulations. Our prevention strategies for older adults are really keeping those older folks over 50 right in the housing that they have.

Making sure that folks are able to age gracefully in place is really important. We also saw a significant number of people entering homelessness from Institutional settings, that's jails, hospitals, prisons, foster care.

And so ensuring that, where possible, we're really preventing folks leaving those institutional settings into homelessness could also substantively reduce the number of folks who we see experiencing both sheltered and unsheltered homelessness. Next slide. So when we talk about what works, we know that permanent supportive housing works.

It's proven effective and helping well over 80% of folks with complex behavioral health issues stay housed.

We do know that a housing first approach that, you know, really looks at, you know, bringing folks into a housing placement and then providing supportive services to ensure that they stay and can stay, you know, can, can move on if necessary, but certainly will stay inside at that placement is really effective.

We know that encampment resolution strategies that connect folks with shelter and housing are effective. And prevention and early intervention. In fact, again, as demonstrated by the behavioral health numbers, prevention and early intervention might significantly reduce the overall investment needed in the behavioral health support that's connected to the homelessness system. What doesn't work is criminalization.

So we know that fines and fees often lengthen people's experience of homelessness because they're not able to pay those. If those then lead to collateral sort of justice system involvement that often complicates people's eligibility for certain voucher programs or frankly, even just to rent an apartment that has some of the sort of run of the mill background checks that we see.

We also know that displacement placement based approaches that just move people from place to place without offering them pathways inside do not do anything to reduce the overall number of folks experiencing unsheltered homelessness in a jurisdiction. As I mentioned, over reliance on shelter does not address the problem.

We do want to make sure that we're seeing temporary beds with pathways to permanent places to live. And we also want to make sure that, you know, the sort of regulatory and funding environment around those services and supports is stable, particularly with what's happening at the federal level right now.

You know, I'm sure you all are hearing it. Many communities are uncertain about sort of what they're going to be able to do in absence of that federal funding. And that is causing a significant amount of concern with regard to what shelters will be able to even stay open, what continuum of care projects will be able to be funded, et cetera. Next slide. So this is all in all a pivotal moment for us, right?

We know that sustained investment in affordable housing solutions is critical to keep progress on track, and that real time data needs to guide our funding and strategy decisions. We also know that we really need to see a scaling of prevention and a scaling of the successful work that brings more folks inside.

As is evident in the data, we do know what works. We do understand what's necessary in order to reduce the experience or the number of people experiencing homelessness in jurisdictions. The question I think in front of the country right now is whether or not we're really going to be able to Fund that work at scale.

And then next slide. So just a little bit more about our work in case folks would like to learn more about this. In 2023, we released our findings from the California Statewide Study, or caspa, which is the largest representative study on homelessness in the US since the 90s.

And a lot of the data that I've been talking about today come from that. We have released reports with policy recommendations and tools focused on older adults, intimate partner violence, racial equity, unsheltered homelessness. And again, we do have a report coming out shortly on behavioral health. And final slide.

This is just contact information if anyone would like to be in touch with us further. And I really just want to end by saying we do know what works and we do know what to expand and really invest in in order to reduce unsheltered homelessness. And I'm thankful for this group and this Committee and their work on that and can answer any questions if that's helpful. Thanks.

Thank you so much for joining us. Let me ask first Finance or LAO, if you have any comments, observations or questions.

Chris Hill, Department of Finance we have no comments.

LAOs not even getting up. Okay. All right. Are there questions from the from Members of the Subcommitee. Senator Smallwood-Cuevas,

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you so much for that comprehensive update. It's always so heavy to hear the numbers, but it seems that we are have made, you know, some incremental progress in some areas. But to hear that statistic about our seniors is very disheartening. And is there more detail in terms of the aging 50 Plus?

Is it just that those who were homeless early on in terms of maybe we weren't tracking at that time and now we are starting to hit that benchmark, or is it really seniors just being priced out of new new populations, new seniors being priced out of shelter and having to end up unhoused.

Thank you for your question. The roughly 40% of that 50 plus population is experiencing homelessness for the first time. So they are being priced out of housing, although many of them were not leaseholders at the place that they report last living.

So some of those dynamics are not fully clear to us based on the data that we have. But we do know that many of those folks, it wasn't that they were homeless in their 20s and 30s and have sort of aged experiencing chronic homelessness outdoors. They are new to the homelessness system.

However, right about 60% of folks have sort of experienced homelessness repeatedly are experiencing that sort of chronic homelessness and aging. And we're not necessarily are really getting them inside. So those the while we look at the sort of older population as a subpopulation, there are actually two different subpopulations in that older group.

One that has the needs of a chronic homeless population and one that has the needs of a newer homeless population. In the instance of the chronic homeless population. We know that a lot of those folks likely need again, permanent supportive housing.

Some of the things that are going to respond to the needs they developed over their experiences with the older folks who are newly homeless.

What we know is that we really want to get them out of the experience of homelessness as quickly as possible before they start to have some of the medical issues that often attend homelessness and they will be particularly vulnerable to given their age.

Thank you for those details. And that does sort of give us some new challenges to explore and to figure out. How do we arrest some of that? Because certainly those will create additional costs on the back end for the purposes of this Committee.

I did have a couple of questions on the overview and and one of the things you mentioned, the encampment work that is happening, and I think in the report it said something about 30%. I think it was around page 65, 30% of unhoused individuals were sent to jail due to encampment removal.

I wonder what services are available for those institution, those folks who are exiting, who are leaving encampment and then are moving into those institutions and then what happens when they leave those institutions? I also heard you say many folks are going right back to being on the street. So I'm just curious, you know, how are we dealing with that cycle and what kind of services are those individuals receiving?

Thank you for that question. So what we have seen is that when folks are subject to criminalization or displacement based strategy, the sort of fines, fees, potential jail time that comes with that can be extremely disruptive of any sort of service connection that they have that was attempting to get them into housing.

So, you know, we talk with folks in here all the time about a number of things where they'll, you know, maybe be connected to outreach or connected to case management, but they'll lose that connection when they are displaced to, you know, another location or if they go into jail. Right. They'll lose that connection.

Similarly, in the case of folks with behavioral health needs, folks often reported losing their medications inside displacements. So if we're concerned about folks staying connected to important behavioral healthcare, again, those displacement based strategies often interrupt that.

And then in terms of the service connections, we did not find that there was a high enough utilization of even existing services and supports that are funded through Calaim. Calaim does have some work focused on folks who are reentering. Right. Like from the justice system.

And that can connect them with behavioral health supports, connect them with rental support and subsidy. We're really recommending that continuums of care work with Calaim, work with, you know, the counties in order to make sure that folks are getting those service connections and that all available resources are being utilized.

I think that what we can also say is, is that when, again, when folks are subject to these kinds of criminalization efforts, they don't necessarily sort of meet the needs of getting folks into shelter. Right. Like folks are, are not.

They are expressing higher levels of concern about some of the shelter options than they are expressing about, you know, getting a ticket or having to make a court appearance.

So certainly I think my question has, or recommendation, I should say, to jurisdictions has been talk with people and figure out what it is about the shelters that folks are responding negatively to to see if you can get that to a yes. Oftentimes those answers are programmatic in nature.

So you'll have a young mother with two teenage boys and the shelter option is a gender specific shelter for women. Right. And she can't do that because she has two kids. Right. So there are ways that we can think through, you know, sort of why people are saying no.

That doesn't lead us down the path of criminalization, but really gets us to retooling things at the program level to make it work for the folks who need it.

No, I appreciate that. I was talking to our sheriff and he was mentioning about this issue of retail theft, that there is a link between homelessness and retail theft and that sort of, you know, cyclical challenge of folks going in and out of prison from the streets. So it was sort of homelessness, mental health, retail theft, a cycle.

And so what I'm hearing is that there are ways that if we looked at this problem of the encampment removal piece, try to do some intensive interventions in terms of housing and mental health, you know, that we can sort of have sort of a multiplier in terms of solutions here.

So I'm thank you for that sort of explanation. And what are some of the gaps that we need to fill. Appreciate it.

Thank you. Senator Niello, any questions or comments?

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I notice on what works and doesn't work, one of the points on one of the pages is short term funding and we're showing some good improvements here. But I think we have to acknowledge those things that got us to the point where we started showing some improvements.

The disastrous time between 2016 and 2023 when the Governor took the lead on homelessness and over that period of time implemented 30 plus individual programs that were specified at the state level to be executed at the county level, but the details were specified as to how they were to implement that there was really only one program that offered flexible funding to counties.

And now we're back to just that one program. And, and that we need to acknowledge that's very important because counties have always been the health and human service providers in the State of California and not historically with the state telling them exactly what to do.

And the benefit of that flexible funding to counties is we have 58 counties that are going to do potentially 58 different things. Some are going to work better than others and the others are going to be able to learn by the sum. We significantly compromised the ability to use that utility.

And we need to acknowledge also that during that time frame, at the beginning of that time, 2015 or 2016, was when the state codified housing first. And during that period of time when we implemented housing first, had these dictated from top down specific programs. That was when our homelessness population exploded.

I think we need to acknowledge that so that we don't repeat what appears to me anyway to be mistakes of the past. Appears we're back to flexible funding by counties, but only one year at a time. And it's very difficult to solve an intractable program like homelessness if we're only going to commit to funding for one year.

I think that's a mistake and I think we need to reassess this approach of housing first. The gentleman mentioned a mother with two kids. Well, there's a program here in Sacramento that caters to families like that. It's called St. John's program for real Change.

And that portion of their program where they work with women with children is ineligible for any government funding because they require sobriety. They have to. They have mothers with kids. And if there's a mother in there that's still using, they use a lot of flexibility with that, though, they don't just kick them out immediately.

They work to get them clean and sober. But the fact is they can't compete, continue to have that sort of housing environment with all of the other mothers and kids that are there. It is way too strict an assessment for where funding ought to be. So we need flexibility.

We need counties to be able to do their job. We need the successful counties, the not so successful counties to learn from the successful counties. And we need to understand that what works in Los Angeles County is not going to necessarily work in Modoc County.

All right, thank you, Senator. Also, I just want to observe Mark Downs uses they, them pronouns. And I had a couple of questions for you as well, Mark, and that is maybe first the, just on the, on the, maybe, maybe an easy one, a non political one, not, not even really a policy one.

To what extent are you, are you and your colleagues or others at your level of research in the field using the data reports, accountability.ca.gov the underlying data that's within it from understanding these issues and best practices and relationship between those practices and outcomes or governance arrangements and outcomes, to what extent outside of HCD and state government are you and your colleagues in the research field using that data?

Where we, where can we, where can we be more helpful in advancing the use of that, of that data and evidence in meaningful ways that point to more causal relationships and less of what we've seen so far, which is mostly here's Tehama County, here's its numbers and here's its programs. Make of it what you will. Can you share with us some insights about the research angle here?

Yeah. So as I mentioned, high quality administrative data is the best. Right. Like the point in time count is really only useful as a bellwether to the extent our team is actually a different part of the team is doing some work right now around HDIs and around, you know, sort of supporting some of the work there.

I think what but our perspective is that the data is very useful and right. The more that we are able to link data sets and the more that we are able to see where the same person is showing up across multiple programs or funding streams. Right.

That's where we can really start, I think to do some high quality both research, but then also support policymakers and folks who are running programs in an operational way in setting their strategy.

That to me, I think is the future and it's really about can we see that John Doe is showing up here inside this homelessness funded program. They're also showing up here inside this, you know, sort of, you know, jail program. They're showing up here with this, you know, economic development program and. Right.

We need to connect all those things and wrap them around this person so that they can be successful rather than, you know, sort of, they, you know, sort of bounce between them.

The other thing that that kind of data connection allows us to do is understand in a more longitudinal way where folks are falling through the cracks, so to speak, how that's happening. Right. And again, to support policymakers in closing those gaps so that folks have a much more Linear pathway towards success.

I look forward to talking more about this both offline and then in future hearings as well, because one of our, because I appreciate the answer and also one of our critical tasks as a Subcommitee of Senate and the Legislature will be over these coming months if we're able to restore some of the funding that the Governor has not proposed, is to tackle this question of accountability head on and research and evidence based.

And we have a very, very rudimentary template from, from the, from the Administration.

But we're going to need some help in understanding how to accomplish some of what Senator Danilo mentioned in terms of what's working and then where do you know, where, where do we direct our investments and what are the right, what's the right level of signals and direction, grace and innovation as we go forward.

So that's too big of a question for right at this moment, but I look forward to thinking about it more together.

The other question I had is around, I mean, what you've described is sort of on the first, on the first set is, you know, maybe it's hard to tell on this topic with one year of data, but maybe we are on the verge of turning a corner perhaps, but we are facing at least two major challenges.

And I wonder if you could just give a quick, a very brief. Because I know Senator Small says a follow up question, but given the, you know, I note that the LA Housing Authority has taken some preliminary action with respect to housing vouchers because of uncertainty from the Federal Government. That's just one example across the board.

And so many of our, many of the approaches that you described are really about, you know, how to, you know, how to connect folks to permanent housing through programs like that that may not exist and at least in the way that, or in the magnitude that we've been thinking of.

And what does that mean then for our approach? If it's mostly about how do we get to a handoff to various permanent forms of housing, some of which are highly dependent on federal resources, either through vouchers or tax credits or other things. So that's number one.

And then second, on sort of our part of that equation, which is without HAPP or some of the other major initiatives, if we basically stop spending new money on homelessness today, with or without those changes at the federal level, what might we expect to see in some of these, in some of these trends and data?

As we, as we might as send you, we might be, we're seeing some improvement.

And if it's those practices that we've been funding that's helping to contribute to that, and we're no longer, and we're no longer funding them at the same, but at the same moment the Federal Government's taking these actions, what might we expect to see in the data next year?

Thank you for the question, Senator. So on the first part, yes, we do know that what is currently under discussion on the Hill would, as a continuing resolution would be tantamount to a cut to some of the particularly voucher programs. Right.

And the way that they are administered, because we do know that housing costs go up and without making sure that the voucher investment at least is scaling with the market, that is tantamount to a cut.

And several housing authorities across the country have begun to take action out of concern that they will not have the money necessary in order to continue to Fund voucher allocation at the rate that they have been up until now. So it is a.

The actions that are currently under discussion at the federal level have created a significant amount of anxiety and instability in the field. Continuums of care are again, not necessarily clear whether or not some of their proposed activities are going to be funded or not. There's just a lot of uncertainty.

Um, if that uncertainty, particularly around to your point that the funding of vouchers and some of the pathways into permanent housing comes to. To be reality, right. Then what we can expect is that without those pathways into permanent housing, our, our shelters, the shelter stays will lengthen, right. People will, will stay there longer.

I know when I was a CoC administrator, you know, some of our shelters that didn't have great pathways wound up having median lengths of stay that were well over two years. That kind of program level behavior is what we can expect to see. And then as a result, right.

The sort of, as folks come into homelessness, it is more likely than right. That they will be unsheltered. So we will continue to see a rise in our unsheltered population. Certainly, you know, one way of responding to that would be to, you know, just sort of expand shelter opportunities.

As I mentioned, to some degree, every system needs the right amount of shelter. That is a number that is knowable based on each jurisdiction's numbers. That's something that you can calculate. However, without the flow through into permanent housing, you wind up just creating a larger and larger shelter ecosystem that is very expensive.

Shelters are often quite expensive and more expensive and in sort of longitudinal ways than housing. On the second part of your question, you know, I think that there's. There is no doubt, again, right.

That like in the absence of some of the funds that we have seen folks deploy in order to bring folks inside again with that federal instability, you know, it doesn't seem like there is a way for folks to continue to run those programs.

You know, our role is really just to think about the research and the data and to, you know, sort of look at the trends there. You know, what we see based on California's data in comparison with the national data is that where California has made specific investment, there has been, things have improved.

While I certainly wouldn't want to be out over my skis, so to speak, and comment necessarily on the specificities of the policy or the specificities of the legislation or frankly, even the specificities of the funding streams themselves, what I can say is that California made decisions to go beyond what was federally available for veterans, made decisions to go beyond what was federally available for youth and young adults.

And we have seen a decrease in those populations as a result.

Thank you, Senator Smallwood Cuevas.

I just wanted to echo. Thank you for that point. And I wanted to echo Senator Niello's point about one year not being enough. I also just wanted to be very clear that not the Governor's and Administration's decision to not invest in hap, but to invest in the encounter encampment removal.

In some instances, it does make the problem worse if we don't have those institutional hands off handoff between our jails and our homelessness services providers. And you know, I want to also speak to the HAPP conversation because I think Senator Niello said something about what caused the exposure explosion of homelessness in La.

We saw sort of two things happening, right? One was the deindustrialization of our corridors and the hundreds of thousands of blue collar jobs that just absolutely disappeared. 1970, number one employer of black men, for example, was heavy in light Manufacturing. In 2000, it was retail, right?

So with that base disappearing and in addition to the 2008 Home Ownership Mortgage crisis where so many, particularly seniors who were housing some of their relatives who were in some of those Low wage jobs lost their homes. We had a situation in one underpass.

There was neighbors who were actually who had lived next to each other and were living in a grandparent home. And when they lost their homes, they ended up on the street.

So I just say the reason why those flexible funds that help us think about the job and career pathways that help us think about those mental health services and trauma that help us think about ways to help folks retain their housing in this economic environment when everything costs so much.

We need those funds to address the homelessness crisis. It can't just be about shelters and it can't just be about building housing. It also has to be that continuum of care.

So I just wanted to say it's far more complex and the way that this budget is set up, you know, I know that you are not telling us, you know, that you know exactly what we will expect. But certainly we are not just going to lose the ground that we've gained. It's going to be so much worse.

So I just wanted to clarify that because I think it's important for us to know how deep and long this problem is and it's going to take a long and deep investment to get out of it.

All right. Thank you. Senator and Mark Dones, thank you so much for joining us from UCSF's Benioff Homelessness Housing Initiative. Great table setting for our hearing today and for our work to come. We're going to proceed to item two, which is our update on homelessness data collection, integration, presentation and analysis. I want to make two observations.

First is we will also we have items later in the hearing on the, on accountability more generally. So this is really focused about the data collection and analysis and presentation issues specifically.

But also to note, we are going to try to we may have to interrupt this panel because we have a the mayor of San Diego and the rest. And that panel needs to begin at 11:15.

So we may interrupt and come back to this panel if we have if our, if our discussion and questions extend beyond that period of time.

So let's invite now to the, to the Subcommitee Megan Marshall, the Executive officer of the California Interagency Council on Homelessness and Sydney Bennet, the Director Bennett, the Director of Research at the Council for update on homelessness data collection. Welcome.

Good morning. Thank you, chair and thank you, Members of the Subcommitee. We're just going to get our slides up here in a quick second. You can go to the first page.

Thank you. Okay, thank you again, Chair. And thank you, Members of the Subcommitee. As chair said. I am Megan Marshall. I'm the Executive officer for the California Interagency Council on Homelessness, also known as Cal ICH. Also joined with me here today is our Director of data and research, Sydney Bennett. If you can go to slide two, please.

I'd like to take a few minutes to orient the Subcommitee to Calich, who is still a relatively new entity by state standards. We serve as California statewide facilitator, coordinator and policy leader to support both state and local efforts to prevent and end homelessness in California. Next slide please. Apologies for the font. There are many mandates for Cal ICH.

We've just highlighted a few here. But this is a snapshot of our statutory mandates which cover a broad range of responsibilities from promoting systems integration to identifying best practices and ensuring accountability in state level homelessness strategies. Next slide please. So equally important to who Cal ICH is, is who we are not.

Cal ICH does not provide direct funding or serve as an oversight body. You will hear from our, as I lovingly refer to as our sister Department of Housing and Community Development, which is both of those things.

But instead we focus on relationship building, policy development, technical assistance and data integration, ensuring that State Department, departments, local governments, tribes and stakeholders are aligned and working towards shared goals. Next slide please. This is just a brief overview of who it is that Calich serves.

We primarily serve our state departments who are Council Member entities, which we'll discuss in a few short slides. Local jurisdictions, including continuums of care, cities, counties and tribal entities, as well as public institutions, including partners in academia and community based organizations. You heard from our great colleague at UCSF from Benioff Institute.

That would be one of the public entities that we serve and support. Next slide please. How we serve those entities. Very brief description here, but I do have a real world example. But through coordination and relationship building policy development, we will focus today specifically on data and research as well as technical assistance.

So the real world example of sort of each of those service components in action is our work supporting the state's housing Task force in response to the devastating fires in Los Angeles.

For coordination and relationship building, Calich facilitated coordination between state agencies, county departments and nonprofit service providers to ensure that emergency shelters and evacuation sites were accessible to persons who were pre disaster unhoused. By leveraging existing relationships, we streamline communication and resource distribution. As far as policy development, this is was a really critical one for me.

Calich intends to expand our homeless Emergency readiness toolkit or Hart resource to include an orientation framework for Red Cross volunteers who are working directly with survivors to ensure that they have a baseline understanding of housing and homelessness in communities that they are supporting the LA homelessness pre existing homelessness crisis and housing crisis was a very big shock to the generous volunteers who came to us from the Midwest and required a fair amount of level setting to ensure that they understood the magnitude and the uniqueness that existed specifically for LA County.

To Senator Neillo's point, this orientation for volunteers would look very very different for for LA County than it would for Placer County. For example, where I served as a Director of Public health during the 49 fire, we too struggled orienting those volunteers to ensuring that they understood the uniqueness of Placer County.

As far as technical assistance goes, we provided state funded program guidance and best practices to partners in federal disaster relief to limit the the risk of duplication of benefits and services. And lastly, the topic of today's conversation again data and research.

We used a Homeless Data Integration System or HDIS Insights to help Los Angeles County, specifically the Continuum of Care, identify high risk areas where unsheltered populations were most vulnerable or directly impacted by the fires. And this data informed targeted outreach efforts by emergency responders and service providers. Next slide please.

Calines 19 state departments and two legislative appointees to break down silos and create coordinated, effective strategies. Those departments are listed there, but through these partnerships we help reduce administrative burdens, align resources and facilitate shared applications for services, capital and operating funding.

I'll highlight that we are co chaired by our Business Consumer Services and Housing Agency Secretary Tamika Moss and the California Health and Human Services Agency Secretary Kim Johnson. So we have 19 secretary and Department directors represented across our council, as well, as I mentioned, two community experts appointed by the Legislature. The Senate appointee is Dr. Margot Cuchel, who is also from UCSF. Next slide please. All right, before I transition the presentation to Sydney, I'd like to give a brief overview of the key data sources Calich uses to inform the collective work of the state. So a preamble of sorts before we get there.

While the key data sources identified on the next few slides provide valuable quantitative measures of homelessness and program performance, it is important to acknowledge numbers alone do not tell the full story.

Each of the data sets offers a structured but incomplete snapshot of homelessness, and none fully captures the realities of a person experiencing homelessness, especially those who do not or cannot, for, you know, personal reasons or mental health capacity, engage with formal services.

Calich and its Member departments are committed to pairing structured data with qualitative Insights from persons with Lived experience of homelessness. Which is why we've established Cal ICH's Lived Experience Advisory Board. That or LEAB. We love a good acronym. The LEAB currently is comprised of 11 persons with either current or former experience of homelessness.

And that body represents nine counties across California. And by ensuring the LEAVE is actively informing the work of our council, we're developing a more holistic, responsive, an effective system, and one that reflects both the numbers and nuanced realities behind them. Next slide, please.

And again, I'll apologize for the font, but I'll give a sort of an orientation of the layout here. We've identified 6 key sources, 3 on this slide, 3 on the next, of data that we incorporate into our policy recommendations to each of our Council Member departments.

We identify who that system is maintained by, the type of data that's captured in that system, how CAL ICH uses that data, the frequency of the updates to that data source, and lastly where you can access it. So I'll start first. And this is in no priority order. It is alphabetical.

It's the Homeless Management Information System, otherwise known as HMIS. Those systems are maintained by California's 44 continuums of care with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development Oversight. The data captured there is individual level data on people accessing homeless services, including demographics, service usage and outcomes.

I would humbly assume that our colleague Mark Downs, when he referred to that high quality administrative data, when done correctly, that that would be coming from hmis. Which brings me to how we use that data. We incorporate rather the next system that I'll discuss.

The Homeless Data Integration System, or hdis, is a statewide warehouse that funnels up all of the 44 continuums of care data sets so that we have a statewide system of outcomes for each of those 44 continuums of care that is maintained by Calich.

In fact, it is the only one of the six key sources of data that CAL ICH maintains. I won't say control, because HDIS is built from HMIs, so we are unable to expand it or add additional fields to capture. It is from the framework of HMIs. That limitation acknowledged, I will say that it captures.

It's an aggregate data form of the CoC's HMIS. It provides a comprehensive picture of service use, utilization and outcomes. We use HDIS to monitor statewide trends, evaluate outcomes across our state departments. And this is exciting and very new.

It also provides baseline data to measure progress goals for our statewide Action Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness, which Sydney will talk about sort of towards the end of that presentation. It also provides outcome information for our system performance measures which is used by our hap, our HAPP grantees.

The frequency of those updates is quarterly plus three months. And that plus three months is really important. That is the time that the data and research team takes to validate and to clean, quote, unquote, the data to ensure that what we are uploading is as true and correct as is possible.

Lastly, for this slide, the Housing Elements Annual Progress Report or APR dashboard, which is maintained by hcd. The data captured there is an aggregate on jurisdictions, housing development and progress towards meeting regional housing needs. How CAL ICH uses this data Specifically, it provides the baseline data to measure progress towards school number five, which again, Sydney will talk about.

And the frequency of that update is annually. Next slide, please. The last three data sources are captured here. Two of them are fairly critical and I think one in particular has been discussed at length. We'll take just a few more seconds on that one.

But the housing inventory count, or hic is maintained by HUD via the local continuums of kids care. The data captured there is an. It's an annual inventory of beds and housing units dedicated to people experiencing homelessness by HUD's definition.

And how we use the data is to assess capacity of the homeless system overall and to track resource growth or decline. Frequency of those updates is annually. Next, of course, is the point in time count, or pit, which is also a HUD mandate, but done via the local continuums of care.

And that is an estimated number of people experiencing homelessness on a single night. It's required every two years, although I will say most counties in California conduct an annual count, which also has its own challenges with that. There's more frequency of data for some and not for others. But we use this data to assess trends over time.

It is used to inform resource allocation for the HAPP program currently and to track progress on homelessness goals. Again, that is required every two years. But most counties in California conduct an annual count. And last but certainly not least is state program data from individual state departments and grantees.

We, you know, have been moving towards a system in which HDIS provides the bulk of reporting information. But as I mentioned, HDIS is limited to what is an hmis. HMIS does not capture any fiscal information on programs.

And so we rely on these reports from state departments and individual grantees to capture fiscal and some program participation data for some programs that are listed there. So this is a comparison person served and administrative data across populations and program types.

And that's received quarterly plus three Months again to ensure the data quality where you see the where to access tbd, recently enacted legislation, which I believe is a little bit later in this agenda. But AB 799 is an opportunity for Calich to develop a more sophisticated way of making these things publicly available. All right. Apologies. All right.

So as we continue to work to address homelessness in California, it's essential to recognize both the value and the limitations of data that we rely on. So while the tools that we've discussed, like HDIs, provide critical insights into trends, service utilization, funding impact, no single data set can fully capture the complex and dynamic nature of homelessness.

I believe our colleague Marc Downs echoed that sentiment that reliance on one system is sort of will result in a system failure. But for example, the point in time count offers a useful snapshot. I think he referred to it as a bellwether.

But only reflect a single point in time and often undercount individuals who are unsheltered or living in vehicles. I will reference Alpine County, very small county, believe populations a little bit less than 1300. They do not receive a HAPP allocation because their point in time count every January is zero.

It is uninhabitable for to be in sheltered in Alpine County in January. HUD will not allow for for an alternative month for counties like Alpine. So similarly, HMIS provides detailed service data, but does not account for those who don't engage with formal systems. So acknowledging the limitations is not about diminishing or dismissing the importance of the data.

It's about ensuring that we interpret it responsibly and use it in combination with other sources, including qualitative insights from persons with lived experience and others. So with that, I'd like to introduce the Committee again to CAL ICH's Director of data and research, Sydney Bennett. Next slide, please.

Thank you to the chair and the Members of the Committee for the Opportunity to present today. As Executive Officer Megan Marshall mentioned, I'm Sydney Bennett and I'm the Director of Research here at Cal ich. Cal ICH is responsible for managing hdis, which is the first statewide system of its kind in California and across the nation.

Our data comes from each continuum of care, and through our process of compiling, validating and processing that data, we create the most comprehensive and accurate homelessness data set in the state.

Not only does CAL ICH provide the data from HDS to our state partners and to Members of the public and researchers, Calich also provides this data back to our local continuums of care in the form of interactive dashboards and performance metrics to ensure not only the state, but also our local partners can use this data to drive their local policies.

Next slide. HCS is massive. There's over 300 data fields in our system that that are being collected by our local partners. So it's extremely comprehensive and detailed, but at a high level. We have data on the projects serving people experiencing homelessness in California.

So this would be the types of services those projects are providing, whether it's rapid rehousing services, shelter, housing, and so on. And then we also have information on the federal or state funding sources of those projects. We also have data about the individuals and households who access services.

So that includes demographic data that helps us understand their housing needs, whether someone in that household has a disability, or the composition. If there's children or veterans in the household, that helps determine eligibility for services. And then we have data on a person's enrollment.

So each enrollment in services, over all of the years we've been collecting data, including the types of services provided, but also the time period of participation where someone moved when exiting the program, which allows us to track things like if someone's returning to the homelessness services system. Next slide.

So there's a wide range of ways we can use this data and I'll be providing a few examples throughout this presentation, but just wanted to provide an overview before we start getting into some specific specifics.

First is that Calich uses the data from HDS to measure the statewide and local impact of our programs and strategies so that we can make continuous improvements based on the data and evidence. And I will provide two examples of different performance measures later in this presentation.

HGIS also allows the state to take a data informed and intersectional approach to understand and address disparities in who is experiencing homelessness in California. We can disaggregate the data for subpopulations such as youth, older adults, veterans and families in order to design programs that address the unique needs of these different groups.

Third, HCIS aggregates data on clients served by 14 of our state's homelessness programs so that we can ensure targeted and efficient allocation of resources and identify potential service gaps. Next slide. The next several slides will highlight three examples of how the state is using HCIS to drive policy and program improvement. Next slide.

HCIS enables us to analyze program effectiveness, ensuring state funded programs are delivering meaningful outcomes, including placements into permanent housing for the communities we intend to serve.

Under AB 977, which was passed in 2021, California now has standardized reporting across our state homelessness program, which allows us to track consistent, comparable metrics across these 14 state funded programs, Calich has created dashboards for our partner Department so that they have access to this HDS data in a way that's analyzable and usable.

So you see a screenshot from one of the pages of the dashboard here, but there's several more and tons of data that these departments can download, analyze and export for further analysis. This data also allows us to track a person's engagement with the Homelessness Response System across all of their service access.

So before or after engaging with a state program, so that we have a more detailed understanding of these populations than we would if we just looked at a single program at a time. The dashboards provide actionable insights to state departments and improve transparency and help guide resource allocation. Next slide.

Can you give us an example of an actionable insight upon which action was then taken?

I can give examples of the insights from the dashboard, but I can't speak for the actions other departments are taking.

Thank you Chair Megan Marshall from Cal ICH. Again, but these are relatively new dashboards. We have not had the full release which will be by the end of spring of 2025. So these dashboards, all of the Member departments have received an orientation to their respective Department dashboards and like how to interpret the data, how to incorporate the data.

We're not yet at the point where Cal ICH has offered those departments policy recommendations to influence or to augment the existing programs.

And the types of data shown in this dashboard. The overview tab just kind of had totals of clients served by funding program. But there's also information on where clients are exiting to where clients were living before entering that state program on the different demographic factors of people served.

So a lot to understand who is using services, who might be missing from services and where someone is going when they're leaving services. The second example today is the California System performance measures which are listed on the slide and I'll provide data for on the next slide.

But these are a series of metrics which help assess how the state and local jurisdictions are advancing towards preventing, reducing and ending homelessness. The California SPMs were established as part originally as part of the HAPP program. Although they've become so much more and they build upon HUD's performance measures and the existing reporting through HDIS.

Calics shares data for these measures on the state's open data portal so that the public has access to see the progress we're making and to improve accountability and transparency. And then we also provide extremely detailed data to our local partners.

So each of these measures over many, many years and then also that data disaggregated for different demographic groups in order to drive solutions that work for each local community in California. Next slide. So this is the.

First two, I think which was their measures of access to services.

Are, is that in the, in the performance measures or in the data that utilize them? Are those, are the services disaggregated themselves? I mean can you use this, these, these measure in the data to, to do regression analysis, for example, that, that looks at individual services and programs and exiting home, exiting from homelessness and length of time and the other performance measures? Or is it just that sort of aggregated accessed services in a more generic way?

Yes.

So each project type is set up in HMIS in a way that we can distinguish between those services. So you know, Megan Marshall perhaps has access, former foster youth program, perhaps a sober living program, perhaps, you know, a multitude of others. So there, there is a way to identify the types of service an individual engages with. And I know Sydney will talk about it towards the end of exciting things to come.

But we are working with our Council Member departments currently with, specifically with Department of Social Services and Department of Healthcare Services to begin merging data from hmis, which is, you know, demographic information that for the demographic portion of the questions and fields in HMIS are self reported. We're now matching that with systems such as calsas.

Forgive me, I don't remember what the acronym stands for, but that is California's sort of welfare data system. So being able to validate in a way what a person self reports they are receiving or other systems of care that they're engaging with.

And the data that we're generally using for analysis is at that project typology which is defined by HUD in the system. But we do have data for each individual project. So when we collaborate with someone like an academic partner, like then we can kind of do that like ACS would enable that type of deeper regression analysis.

But that's not part of the system performance measures because the goal is really to look at how our systems are functioning as a whole. So when you put together all of the programs that comprise a continuums of care homelessness system, are, are we seeing improvement across, across the board?

But why, why would that be the only thing that we care about? I mean if this, if the data system has the capability to give us insights about what of the things that we're doing or the CoCs are doing, which of them work under which conditions, in which combinations, why wouldn't that be our focus more than sort of the scoreboard .

It's certainly not the only thing we care about. But the system performance measures are statutory. So the name of each measure you see here and how it's measured, that's one of Cal ICH's statutory requirements to publish these measures. And they were created as part of the HAPP program. So this is one project that we work on, but certainly not the only.

No, I understand, but you said that we make it available and research. Other people might look at this, but our focus is just on this. But there's these SPMs.

But the law also lays out what eight statutory objectives for the council in the first place for which this question of what do we do that works, what works best, what works in combination and in what context is a central part of that as part. Central part of your strategic plan.

So it seems that either directly or through the affirmative initiated partnerships of the council, not just providing data to researchers who ask that this would be a central. This would be a central question for you as well.

And so I believe there's a total of three examples. The spot is but one. And then in the, in the grand finale of sorts, the things to come for HDIS is using it to help us measure baseline goals for SB 914, which is the unaccompanied women and survivors of domestic violence. There was also a companion legislation for youth.

And so through an extensive stakeholder process, goals were developed for that. Then using what is available in HDIs, how can we maximize that data tool to help us measure progress in accomplishing those goals as well, as well as the goals in the action plan that again, Sydney will get to in just a second.

This grand finale is really building. I hope it delivers. Thanks.

I can do jazz hands. So back. Back her up if it need be.

But yeah, I think also the SPMS are one way to identify jurisdictions that are making the progress we want to see to prevent and end homelessness. And that's like the first step, right? And then digging in deeper of within those continuums of care, what programs are working, what are they doing? That's. That's different.

And so this kind of starts the system performance measures start to orient us to that and then we can start seeing, okay, something is working here, what is it? And ask those questions and start digging deeper.

So on the next, the next slide has the data for the last two years and you can see there's some areas where we're seeing progress and others where the metrics are either more stagnant or getting worse. This is the statewide numbers. The local numbers are variable, what we're seeing in different communities.

So the area that we're seeing kind of the most changes in the number of people successfully placed from street outreach, so from unsheltered homelessness into shelter or housing. And I think a lot of that can be attributed to the ERF program, which we'll hear about more later today, which is really focused on that metric.

We see some growth in the number of people accessing services while experiencing homelessness, which we generally think of as a good thing, because that means our service system is reaching more people who need some kind of support. But in other areas, we're seeing the length of time someone is accessing services before exiting.

Homelessness is increasing, and we're seeing increases in returns to homelessness. So it's, I would say, a mixed bag in terms of progress over these past two years. And so in kind of the months and years ahead, we're. We've been really focused on improving data quality after our conversation here last year.

And so for the next year, we're really looking forward to building a deeper understanding of what's driving these changes, what's working and what's not. But the first and most important step was to make sure we had accurate information, because if we were using inaccurate data, we'd be making false conclusions.

And so feel like we're in a really good place to keep digging into this and to work with our academic partners like Benioff, like our friends at the Turner center at UC Berkeley, and so on. Next slide.

What Just one definition. What does successfully placed from street outreach mean?

It means being in a sheltered setting. So either being moved from unsheltered homelessness into shelter or transitional housing or permanent housing. And then the measure that looks at the number of people exiting to permanent housing, that doesn't include shelter, that only includes people who have moved into permanent housing.

This number only includes people moving to permanent housing.

The. The last measure on the screen, successfully placed, includes shelter, transitional housing, and permanent housing.

Any of them?

Yes. Yeah. From unsheltered homelessness.

Right. Is there also monitoring of people that leave that state and go back to the streets?

We can only see if they re enter homelessness services. So the gap, the data is only looking at service utilization. But yes, the returns to homelessness would include someone who went from shelter to or from unsheltered homelessness to shelter and then was back in an encampment, let's say, and was accessing some kind of case management service.

Then we would count that as someone who returned homelessness. And we are, as was mentioned earlier, we are working to integrate with other state departments data so that we would have more opportunities to know if someone is returning to homelessness but may not access services again.

So whether that's knowing data on if someone's showing up in the emergency room or, you know, in other benefits programs. So expanding our view beyond just homeless business services.

Next slide. So the next set of goals is the action plan goals that were mentioned earlier. So those goals are to help more people leave unsheltered homelessness, to help more people move into housing, to ensure people do not experience homelessness again, to prevent more people from experiencing homelessness and to create more housing.

So these are part of the action plan that was adopted by the Interagency Council. And this is the first time time that we've had goals where we've actually set numerical metrics, we've created the baseline data and we will publicly report on progress towards these goals each year.

And the idea is to really have a clear framework that we hold ourselves and our partners accountable towards making progress. We know where we want to go, which is preventing and ending homelessness in California. And this is helping us measure if we're getting there. So these are just adopted.

But over the next few years of the plan, we will track the improvements that we will hopefully be making. And I really wanted to focus today on the prevention goal. So to prevent more people from experiencing homelessness.

There's never been a statewide effort to really measure this kind of thing at the state level because it can't be done with just any one data set. It can't be done with HCS data because when someone's accessing homelessness services, we haven't prevented their homelessness. Right. They've already, they're already in need of those services.

So we are currently in the process of working with our other Council Member departments to identify and integrate data sets that can expand our understanding of homelessness beyond just the services data. We are first focused on populations that are accessing other state institutions where there's data for.

So this will include looking at transition age youth exiting the foster care system and ensuring that that exit from foster care is, is not resulting in homelessness. We will also be looking at the reentry population with our partners at CDCR to ensure those leaving institutional settings like jails and state prisons are not entering into homelessness.

And then also looking at state hospital data because we know often people are ending up in the ER. And so that's another source of data with. And so those are the action plan goals which you'll hear much more about in the upcoming years as we begin to track and report towards those next slide.

And then this is our what's new? And there's much more than I could fit on this slide. But with the innovations in hds, California is moving towards real time data driven decision making so that we can identify emerging trends we're not waiting for pit count data to see what's happening.

We can pinpoint gaps in services and we can support evidence based policies, policy recommendations to the Legislature. So just in this past year, since we, since we spoke last time, we now have a data sharing agreement with our partners with the Health and Human Services Agency departments and we're creating an integrated health and homelessness data set.

So we're excited to have findings from that to better understand the connections between social services, healthcare, housing and homelessness programs. We've also taken significant efforts to improve HC data quality, which has been a big area of focus.

We have a tool now that our local partners upload their data to before they even submit it to hdis, where we highlight any errors we're finding in the data and have the local continuums of care correct that data before it even starts being processed into our system.

We've also launched a Ta webinar series which is the first for California, and begun one on one technical assistance. So proactively identifying potential issues in the data and sharing those back with our local partners. And then we've also created the, the goals that I mentioned before and then upcoming.

We have a lot of work in the the year ahead. The first is that this spring we're releasing new AB977 dashboards to support compliance. So for all of our state partners, they're overseeing their grantees reporting this Data pursuant to AB977.

And so we're launching a tool to help them identify if grantees aren't complying with data submission requirements or are submitting Low quality or incomplete data. We are also developing a dashboard to support our implementation of SB 914, which will measure the state's progress towards ending homelessness for survivors of domestic violence and their children and unaccompanied women.

This will be our first deep dive of this site into specific target population. So that's really exciting. And we are also exploring additional data sharing agreements with other Council Member departments so we can continue to understand, better understand the homelessness landscape in California.

And this is just a subset of the great work that the HCS and research teams have been working on.

But we're processing this data four times a year from end to end to ensure we have accurate and up to date data and maintaining the suite of data tools for a range of partners, from the public to other state departments to our local partners. So it's been a busy and exciting year.

And before concluding, just let me ask.

So if the audit that we received last year were to come back next year, Would we. Is the Mickey Mouse test participant Superwoman data? Those are those. Can we. Are you, are you. Can we be assured that those, those kinds of data issues. I used to run a data system there. You can't be 100% all the time.

But is that. Does the data quality tool and the other process that you described, are we confident that the data is at the level of accuracy that the audit called for?

We've communicated to all of the local partners about removing any test records from their systems. Their system should never have been set up to submit fake records to Calich. And so through the webinars and the local actions I've mentioned, that's how we're addressing that.

We don't have a way to, you know, verify every single name in the system. Every name could be the name of someone in California. So we can't do a name by name check, although hopefully through this data integration we might identify areas.

But we have worked with all of our local partners to remove these test records from their systems.

And if I can also offer. So we're doing the, you know, the front end cleanup. But if there are, I will just say, like frequent offenders.

If we are aware that there is a particular COC who continues to submit faulty data or inaccurate data records, it is then for the funding Department to provide additional oversight and potential consequences. There is the requirement to be compliant and that includes accurate Data compliance through 977.

And so we offer technical assistance, you know, ensure that folks are aware that there is an issue. Many of our particularly smaller COCs have tremendous transition in staffing.

So it is always our intention to lead with service and to come alongside those CoCs to ensure that they're aware that there is an issue, provide technical assistance to try to mitigate that.

If it continues, we will confer with our Council Member Department who's the funding entity, for them to take potential action through their standard agreement with the COC or the county.

The challenge is, even more so than the audit revealed is the Administration is proposing much more robust accountability and funding reallocations based on both PIT data and this data. And so it's very meaningful and consequential.

And we've seen in other data systems, I know in the community college world where maybe 3040% of the applicants are not real people. I mean these have real world consequences. And so simply relying on COC peer pressure and if you do it too much, then we'll come after you. It seems inadequate to validate.

If we're Going to build a whole set of. It's one thing for a data system that's just providing us insights. It's a different thing if that data system is then being used to reallocate funds, funding and prioritize awards.

I believe you'll hear from my colleague Megan Kirkby from HCD on a recently released dashboard that was supported through Calich efforts as well that highlights the type of error that exists in HMIs and therefore HDIs by CoC, by award type that is now a publicly available dashboard. The CoCs all and the grant.

I'm sorry, the grantees rather, have received instructions that detail how to interpret that information and the next steps that they need to take to come into compliance. And so that is also something that's updated on a quarterly basis, which is as real time as we're able to sustain.

Senator Shmolo Cuevas I was just going.

To say the data from HMAS has been used for HUD reporting for quite a long time. So for these continuums of care, you know, the data accuracy being tied to grant funding is nothing new. It's new for the State of California, I think, to look at our grants in connection to HDS this way.

But this is not a new way to use HMIS data, and that's why there's been quality standards implemented from the federal level. But the Federal Government doesn't have the same level of detailed data we have, so we're able to catch more errors.

We're able to help Continuums of Care work with their vendors to fix errors they couldn't even see. Right. Because it was like a systems error. So we're able to really expand on data quality improvement in a way that hasn't been done before.

Thank you for that. So that brings me to a question. And you were talking about how serious it is for this data to be accurate. The federal funding and looking at their responsibilities for data collection and also knowing the recent sort of rash firings that are happening at the federal level across a number of departments.

What are the implications of that and how does that skew what we need to track accurately? And it looks like we're doubling down on the California data and the dashboard and trying to get really streamlined with that. But I'm just curious, does that create more of a challenge? That's one question.

My other question has to do with the. I'll come back to it because it just went right out of my head. But I'll come back to it. Once you answer that question, come back.

To that one for us it makes our technical assistance more important than ever before because the Federal Government has traditionally had a wide range of HMIs technical assistance. And a lot of those opportunities are changing or ending or on pause.

And so we're really stepping up our work with continuums of care to fill in that gap for our California CoCs. But right now, as far as the data coming in, the HMIS systems that are maintained by the vendors, there haven't been changes to those. HUD changes the data standards for these systems every other year.

That's just kind of a standard process. So that's when you would traditionally see changes to any data fields or reporting. And then at that point it tends to be a lot busier time for HUD. So I think that might be a point where we might see the staffing changes impact more.

But right now for our team, it's really about stepping up technical assistance, knowing California may be the main resource that CoCs have right now.

Got it. Okay. Whenever I think about the federal level, it takes me in a different place. So I didn't have room to come up with my question. But my question was about the goals. Was that part of AB977 or how did the those come about? I mean, I shocked that we didn't have these goals already.

And how quickly given that we now have these goals, will we see some analysis of how. Of our progress and then how often will there. I really like this slide where you have the four points. How often will we see in the dashboard some analysis of how well we're doing?

I can speak to the, the action plan goals. This is, I believe it's March 24th, will be my, my second anniversary in this appointment. I too was shocked, Senator, that we did not have action plan goals embedded. It was more or less a collection of a listing out of sorts of the state's investments, but.

But not an opportunity to gauge how those investments were fairing. Cal is also mandated to provide these, you know, reports and recommendations to the Legislature based on this. That analysis that, that had historically been missed. And so we too are excited. Our Council Member departments are excited.

But I will say it has been through the, the incredible leadership of our co chairs again, Secretary Moss and Secretary Johnson, both who are, are still within the first year of their appointments as well, but have incredible backgrounds and deep passions and commitment to this work.

So truly inspired leadership with our co chairs and um, you know, the sense of urgency and not, you know, waiting for another year to pass before we do an annual progress report, but getting as real time to These things as possible apologize so and by and preface real time with accurate data is not often available in real time because there is the, the commitment to quality, which is why we see, we see the quarterly plus three months because that three months is our opportunity.

So the reports that come in from COCS reflects the previous quarter information and you add three months to that before it's publicly posted.

All right. And you have one more slide. Is that. No. Okay. Okay. That was it. All right. Thank you very much. Any further questions from Members of the Subcommitee? All right. Appreciate that. We're going to take up item 3, which is Implementation of Recently enacted legislation because it, it deals with the council. Let me just ask.

We I've insisted that we take each of these implementation items up for discussion in case there are questions just in part to signal to our part, our friends in the Administration, the Executive branch, that we take oversight of the administration's work to implement laws that have been signed by the Governor and have been chaptered and are the law of the land and required and are constitutionally required to be implemented.

Even if opinions change, they are the law. And so they we, we have each of these items on our agenda. But this item matches what what was in the Appropriations Committee analysis when the Legislature considered the legislation and the staff's raised no other questions.

Are there any questions or discussion on the item we can proceed without a presentation on item three? Yes. If not, then we'll, we will, we will take that up as approved as budgeted vote later in the hearing. All right. I think we're going to move next to our panel then.

So we're going to skip item four at the moment and go directly to end item five and go directly to our panel for HAPP program recipient's perspective. And so ask our our panel to come forward.

And also we are I'm pleased to welcome my friend Mayor Todd Gloria from the City of San Diego representing the the big city mayors as well. And so we're taking this step out of order. So we haven't yet heard the presentation from the actual agencies or Department.

So keeping that keeping that in mind, we're looking forward to hearing your perspectives on on, on on hap, both its success, its challenges, its improvements, what it looks like on the ground and what we should be thinking about as we take the issue up over the next few weeks and months for the 2526 budget.

And so I'd like to start with Mayor Gloria. Thank you for joining us remotely from beautiful San Diego. Hopefully it's not raining as hard There as it is here.

The Chamber Commerce requires me to tell you that it's beautiful here today, but don't check your weather app. Mr. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity and thank you for taking us out of orders so that I can participate.

I really appreciate the chance to share a bit, not just from the City of San Diego, but on behalf of, as you mentioned, the California Big City mayors coalition, representing 13 largest cities in California, a bipartisan group that collectively represents 11 million Californians.

I want to share with the Committee, and again, thank you for having us here at the table. The number one issue, the number one priority of our mayor's group is homelessness, which is why we pushed hard and worked well with the Legislature and the Administration to create HAPP several years ago.

I'll speak today both from the macro level of our mayor's group as well as give you some information from the city.

I will share with the Committee that thanks to HAPP, between January 2023 and June 2024, so those 18 months, our cities, the 13 of us or communities actually across California, served more than 225,000 Californians through housing, shelter and supportive services and resulted in over 50,000 of those Californians finding their way off the streets and into permanent housing.

I will tell you that that's state. In the City of San Diego, we have made remarkable progress on our homelessness challenge thanks to the funding that you all provide us. Specifically, we use HAPP Fund traditional shelters as well as our Family Unification Program, safe parking, youth homeless programs and a multitude of other offerings.

Over the past four years in my city, using HAPP, we have served more than 13,000 unsheltered San Diegans. We provided 3,200 of them with a safe place to live in their cars. Many, as you all know, Senators, these folks have cars, but not homes. 3,3200 people in our safe parking lot program, 13,000 in our city shelter system.

We've reunited 1900 individuals through our Family Unification Program and reduced tent encampments in downtown San Diego by over 1200. We have more than doubled the number of offerings in our city, from traditional shelters to safe sleeping sites to safe parking lots and our Family unification programs utilizing HAPP.

So when I became there in December 2020, to fast forward today, we went from about a thousand shelter beds to more than 2000, and we' be closer to 2500 or well over 2500 probably by July 1st. Again, this is all things to have.

I will share with you again, the flexibility you all have given us has allowed us to innovate. You can talk to any of my mayor colleagues. They'll tell you how they've used it to tailor the situation in their community.

In our city, we've been able to do things for the first time ever like our safe sleeping program, which has been a total success story. Mr. Chairman, I would tell you that of the over 700 people that are our two safe sleeping sites today, more than 80% of them have never entered the shelter system before.

This is an innovation that they're willing to say yes to. We all hear the stories about unsheltered individuals who won't accept shelter services. This has not been the case with with our safe sleeping sites, and it's had is why we've been able to reduce the number of tents in downtown by 1200.

I'm here today to just express our group's appreciation for this funding and to say if there's anything that you can do beyond maintaining the program as it is is to make it a permanent funding source.

I will tell you that you and your colleagues could get a better bang for your buck if mayors like me could actually rely on this funding year to year and get better deals on these shelters to say, for example, some of our shelters that we're leasing, we have to do them on a monthly basis because we don't have a knowledge about whether or not this money will be here for the long term.

Unsurprisingly, real estate folks will obviously give you a better deal if you can do longer term. And that's something that all the mayors sort of share is the desire to see this funding become more permanent. Appreciate Senator Smallwood. Smallwood Qu.

As mentioned of that earlier, let me just conclude with this, because there's always a question about accountability, and I want this to be absolutely clear on the record. Mayors like me fully expect and welcome any level of transparency and any accountability measure you want to put on us. It's your money.

You can count on us to spend it. Right? And we will prove to you in any way that you want us to that we will prove that we'll spend it correctly.

This is where I have to tell you that my city is on track to fully expend perhaps rounds one through four by the end of this fiscal year. So just a couple months from now, and we'll have allocated and spent down all of our fiscal 26 funding.

I'm sorry, all of our round five funding by the end of fiscal year 26. So I know there are some concerns about whether or not folks are utilizing these dollars. Well, what you have created has worked well for my city and that shows by our ability to allocate these dollars.

Just on the flip side of that coin, if Round seven is not funded, coupled with the Federal Government's can seemingly red and commitment in this space, or at least footprint in this space, I foresee a tremendous challenge for cities all across California, frankly the nation for our ability to continue these services.

All those expansions I described to you will not be sustainable with the reduction in federal support, with any loss of state support. This that I will show you. Of those 2,000 plus beds that I have, 40% of them are HAPP funded, Right.

So that's the kind of what we're facing if the Legislature doesn't do as it's done the last number of years, which is to provide this funding to us. To say catastrophic think would be putting it mildly in terms of the number of people who exit the shelter system, go back to the streets.

Finally, I just want to leave you with a vignette, you know, media stats, I can give you numbers and all the time, but I want to give you a quick story of a woman named Keaton who had her and her two sons were at one of our city's HAPP funded Safe Sleeping site I'm Safe Parking Lots.

She had been homeless for quite a period of time, had real challenges finding employment, housing and the ability to get her kids into school regularly. After finding her way to our Safe Sleep Safe Parking Lot, she shared that she could finally breathe. That's her quote.

And that while she's always been strong in her recovery, being at our Safe Parking Lot allowed her to have even stronger basis to continue on her path of recovery. During her brief time in our Safe Parking Lot program, volunteers helped her and her children gain access to food.

They actually hosted birthday parties for the kids which helped make them feel human for the first time in a long time, according to Keaton. I'm happy to tell Members of this Committee, Senators she is now permanently housed, her and her children and they're in their own home today.

I will tell you not possible without your investment in my city. And I'm here on today on behalf of 13 other mayors from all across California saying we have thousands of other stories like Keaton's and her sons and we appreciate your partnership in making more stories like that possible going forward.

Happy to answer any questions that the Committee may have this after this morning.

Mayor, thanks so much. Really appreciate you joining us and giving us some insight into the really profound real work that's happening in communities across the state. San Diego, obviously the best. But really it's inspiring to see the work and the progress and also the frankness with which you're tackling some of the enduring challenges. So really appreciate that.

Senator Smallwood-Cuevas, did you have a question?

I just wanted to say those stories, the humanity of it is always so powerful and, you know, to be in a safe parking lot and to find your humanity with birthday parties, it's just, you know, how far we have to go and how important these dollars are in California.

A safe parking lot should not be a highlight in a bright spot. We need people to be in their permanent housing and have a real opportunity to thrive. So thank you, Ms. Mr. Mayor, for that and sharing that information with us.

And I understand, Mayor, you're gonna, you're gonna stick with us for a little bit, which is great because I, we, there's some, I, I do have some questions and some observations that I would like to share, but I want to, I want to give the rest of our panel as well and engage with everyone. So.

Tanya Torno is the Director of the Riverside County Continuum of Care. Welcome. Thanks for joining us today.

Good morning, Senators, and thank you, Chair Cabaldon, for the opportunity to testify today. As mentioned, my name is Tanya Torno and I represent both Riverside County and the Riverside County Continuum of Care.

We serve as the COC lead agency in that region and I am also part of a steering Committee coalition called CalCUB, which unites COCs across the state with a common goal of educating our policymakers about the ins and outs of homeless service delivery.

Riverside County, in alongside the other continuums of care across the state and truly across the nation, are designated by HUD. So we are essentially a program that was developed by the US Housing of Urban Development to collect and administer data which, as you've learned, is tracked in our Homeless Management Information System system.

And as you have heard, this system feeds upward to the state system, which the group earlier, Michelle Marshall, was talking about, how these systems feed upward to the state system HDIs and are used to report out data statewide.

And I really wanted to share that Continuums of are working closely with their jurisdictions to use this same system to produce local reports that are able to tell cities and counties and COCs what the impact of homelessness looks like in their region.

And to answer that question of what best practices are working, I can share with you that the numbers from the mayor do not surprise me.

They very much align with what other CoCs and what we are seeing on the ground in that for our region, for our CoC, over 18,000 people are being assisted across our homeless system of care. And too often when people consider the homeless problem, they point to the point in time count, which again is not a perfect measure.

It's a good tool that we use to indicate trends. But the HMIS system really tells us what the need is across our local communities. And so you can imagine that it is a valuable tool not only for COCs but for cities to really understand what the full measure of need is.

Additionally, CoCs are mandated by HUD to administer a coordinated entry process. And this is really the glue that ties our system of care together.

Through coordinated entry, we are able to create transparency, we are able to create equity and accountability so that community Members in any region, in any COC know where and how to access help either for themselves or for their neighbor.

And I will tell you that HAPP resources have gone a very long way to get us to a point where we can truly operate as a no wrong door approach and that we have the needed resources to meet and connect with the over 18,000 people that I shared earlier.

Most importantly, and what has been valuable with HAPP is certainly the role of regional planning, which was also highlighted earlier. Earlier and is why I'm able to in my presentation.

It's hard for me just to stick into my lane of, you know, speaking on the impact to the CoC, because we are really sitting together alongside county and city partners and nonprofit and the faith based community.

We have over 200 Members within our network and our local continuum of care that meet monthly to determine how HAPP resources and other resources are going to be organized, are going to be leveraged to, you know, to implement services across our five supervisorial districts.

And again, I know that other CoCs are doing it, I call it mass leveraging.

But truly the investment that has come from hap, I'll share the example of, you know, we receive about $10 million between our county and our CoC, but when you look at our budget and the resources that we're streamlining, it's over $130 million that are being coordinated together in this way.

So as was mentioned earlier, HAPP resources are critical because they really allow us to address the large problem and which is that again, most continuums of care are seen six times.

Oftentimes the number of people that are identified in their point in time count actually come in through their system when you look at it over a 12 month period. But we also need to remember that while we are continuing to see rising levels of homelessness across the state.

That in large part has to do with the inflow of homelessness. And when we did a local assessment of our data and there was a question asked earlier about sustainability, right. Of people that are assisted, are we seeing returns to homelessness?

I will tell you that In Riverside County CoC, we did a three year assessment and found that 86% of people that we connected to housing, to permanent housing using HAPP resources and other resources that we leverage maintain that housing three years later. So only 14% return back to homelessness across the state.

Across our COCs, over 57,000 people have been permanently housed using HAPP resources. So all that to say that HAPP is essential to CoCs. It really has been the glue that brings all the different entities together. As the mayor said earlier, the sustainability piece is critical because we have been able to create really good programs using HAPP resources.

And I'll share the example of an effort that began and was invested using HAPP resources, where we use dollars to invest in street medicine.

And then we were able to identify and find alternative resources to keep that program going so that now they're no longer reliant on HAPP and they just add to the amount of people that were able to help with housing each year, which again, in our region is in 5,000 in Los Angeles, HAPP has in some way contributed to 10,000 placements a year.

And again, this number has just continued to grow. And I also want to speak to the importance of emergency shelter, because HAPP has certainly been critical in making sure that even communities like Sutter Yuba CoC have been able to provide shelter to 400 people using HAPP resources.

In Sonoma County CoC, over 1,000 people were sheltered by HAPP just last year. So with that, I will echo the words that we want accountability. And to that end, it's the reason that we're using systems like hmis. It's reasons that we're engaging in regional planning with all of our partners.

And we recognize that there are a lot of questions on why homelessness continues to grow. And I will echo the words of the people that have spoken before me to say homelessness is a complex problem.

And the resources that we have are certainly have done a great deal to help us with those that are experiencing homelessness on the street.

And so part of this next effort is really going to be working together with other systems of care, which in many ways we are doing, such as our foster care systems, our behavioral health systems, our hospitals, to look at how we can prevent the inflow.

And so with that, I will go ahead and pause and end and open it up to any questions. Thank you.

All right, thank you. We're going to take questions at the end and so I think next up we have Siobhan Kothari from the County of Sacramento. Welcome.

Thank you. Chair Members of the Committee, I appreciate this opportunity to speak to you today. I'm Siobhan Katari. I'm Deputy County Executive for Health and Human Services in Sacramento county and I want to first express my deep appreciation for the state's commitment for addressing homelessness, specifically in regards to HAPP funding.

Sacramento county is home to nearly 1.6 million people and we've made homelessness our board's top priority for the past three years. In 202324 the county contributed $211 million to address homelessness through our federal, state and local resources. These investments are making a measurable impact.

Since 2022, our countywide homeless population has dropped 29% with a 41% reduction in unsheltered homelessness, representing a drop from just under 9,300 to just over 6,600 individuals.

Based on our point in time counts, HAPP has been a critical tool in achieving this progress across Sacramento county region, including our City of Sacramento and our CoC, 70% of the $173 million that we received across rounds one through five have been invested in sheltering and rehousing efforts.

While representing a relatively small portion of the county, County's overall investment, HAPPS flexibility allows us to leverage other more restrictive funding sources effectively in the county. Specifically, during the last months of last six months of 2024, the County Homeless Outreach Teams provided over 25,000 services to 810 unduplicated individuals and we transitioned 184 people out of unsheltered homelessness.

Additionally, 1,137 households were enrolled in our county funded shelter programs and 52% of those exited to temporary or permanent housing. And these numbers don't reflect our entire region's positive outcomes, only the county's outcome outcomes statewide. As you've heard, HAPP has helped to place over 57,000 people into permanent housing since early 2023.

We also want to recognize that homelessness does transcend jurisdictional lines. Sacramento county collaborates closely with our neighboring cities and community organizations and we align resources and avoid duplication. Sustained HAPP funding is essential to maintaining and expanding expanding these regional efforts. We fully support transparency and accountability.

Sacramento publishes a monthly dashboard and provides an annual report on homelessness related funding. The state's new accountability measures including regional planning and joint applications align with what counties have been advocating for in the at home plan and we welcome collaborative this collaborative approach. However, we urge the state to allow for multi year planning for hap.

Accountability should not come at the cost of efficiency and the current annual application process is resource intensive and ever changing. A multi year model would enable us to be more strategic with our investments and have better long term outcomes. One of our biggest concerns is HAPP funding stability.

Addressing homelessness requires a sustained multi year effort, not fluctuating one time allocations. While we understand prioritizing areas of greatest need, cuts to counties like Sacramento that have demonstrated success threaten our progress reducing shelter capacity and delaying permanent housing projects.

Currently, HAPP funds critical programs like scattered site shelters, family shelters and our north A shelter which was a navigation site and with HAPP funding we were able to turn it into a 24,7 operation which has improved outcomes. HAPP also helps providers pay competitive wages, increasing their ability to hire and maintain critical staff.

Multi year funding would reduce administrative burden and direct more money into services. Unlike mandated safety net programs like MEDI Cal and CalFresh, homelessness services are not guaranteed as local budgets tighten. Counties cannot sustain these programs alone and we need ongoing HAPP funding shifting from annual allocations to stable multi year model to create lasting solutions.

We recognize the state's fiscal challenges, but homelessness must remain a top priority for all of us. The long term costs of inaction far outweigh the investments needed now and we urge the Legislature to approve HAPP Round 7 with at least $1.0 billion in ongoing funding.

Without it, counties like Sacramento are forced to scale back shelters and rehousing programs putting thousands of people at risk of returning to homelessness. HAPP is working and we sustain and we must sustain these investments to maintain this progress. I appreciate your time today.

Thank you. And then finally for panel, Mariah McGill, the Deputy Director of the Northern Circle Indian Housing Authority. Welcome.

Hi. Hi. My name is Mariah McGill and I work as the Deputy Director with Northern. Circle Indian Housing Authority. Yes, sisters. We're a tribally designated housing entity and. We work on behalf of eight federally. Recognized tribes to do affordable housing, community. Development and social services. Next slide.

So as a TDHE, we are not directly eligible to receive funds through tribal hap. However, as a tribally designated housing entity that works on behalf of our federally recognized tribes through established MOUs, we're able to administer $2.9 million on behalf of five of the eight federally recognized tribes. And we utilize our program in a really creative way.

We utilize funding for our standard programs such as the Rapid Re Housing and Interim shelter, but we also find creative ways to incorporate culture and meaningfulness and really to do so that respects the traditions of the tribe and honors how homelessness looks in tribal communities. Still utilizing the client centered approach.

But we also offer a holistic or an indigenized approach in a way that we honor the tribes and where they are. We honor the fact that historical trauma still exists and it turns into generational trauma. And we utilize these tribal HAPP dollars as leveraging resources to maximize benefit.

In my presentation today, I wanted to provide pictures because although we hear the wonderful stories, once we see the pictures and we're able to see what happens within our communities and how our dollars are spent, it really offers impact.

And I hope that with your presentations, when you go home, you consider reaching out to these tribal communities and viewing how the dollar's being spent. So in this picture we have the Giddyville Rancheria's Home Key Transitional Unit Project. It is made possible through home key 2.0.

But without the tribal HAPP dollars utilized as leverage, this project would not exist. Of the five tribal Members who are building this project, two will be residents as they will return unemployed and unhoused once the project's completed. And this picture was taken in February of 2025. Next slide.

Some creative examples that we have within tribal HAPP include the Maidu Mountain Lion Housing Development. This is a 22 unit project that includes $6.9 million through the Home Key 3.0 project program. Excuse me, $5 million through the Indian Housing Block Grant Competitive grant funds through the U.S.

Department of Housing and Urban Development and is made possible by tribal HAPP through the pre development sources so that we can ensure that 12 Berry Creek tribal Members are able to move into the Home Key project and five elders that are experiencing substandard conditions due to overcrowded. And 22 families will be moving in hopefully next summer.

Another example we have is with the Palobana Mission Indians and they've initiated a driving school and career development program as a prevention and shelter diversion project. Many of you may know that tribal lands are usually outside of public transportation and have limited access to amenities employment and services.

So with this driving school, we're able to prevent homelessness by ensuring that our tribal Members have access to go to town, to seek employment, to get groceries, to have health care, to pay their rent, to go to school. So this driving school is preventing homelessness and doing shelter diversion. We also have incorporated wellness centers.

We've seen that with the Big Lagoon tribe and the Caudo tribe of the Laytonville Rancheria, where this wellness center not only offers culture, language preservation, but also houses case managers, housing navigators, and it's a place where our tribal Members can come together and receive holistic, indigenized approach to services. Next slide, please.

I wanted to include some of the keys to success because although my partners here that are presenting have been receiving seven rounds of funds, many of our tribes are now getting their very first allocation, which the maximum is 750,000.

For this most recent round round, we had 37 tribes that received funds, and some of them are just now receiving those funds in their accounts. But some of the success that we have really pays homage to the administrative oversight of our tribes and tribally designated housing entities, as we're required to braid many sources of funds.

Federal funds, state funds, local funds. We're used to the administrative oversight of files and compliance and policies and procedures, and ensuring that our staff understands the difference between each of the funding sources. We also have excellent technical assistance providers. And even today, I learned a lot from the three folks that presented before me.

So it's expanding those networks, learning from our partners, ensuring that we can be better together. There's a lot of discussion today about the pit count.

And although the pit count does do a wonderful job in counting some of our most chronic homeless folks, it really leaves out tribes because how often do the providers go out into tribal lands and ensure that they're counting individuals who are living in storage containers, who are living in garages, who are living in cars.

So these last two years, Northern Circle, led by our empowerment and supportive services manager, Priest Martinez, he conducted in partnership with the County of Mendocino the first tribal pit count. And those numbers were drastically. It was just astonishing how. How poorly the data was collected of our indigenous populations.

And really, in seeing how this can be done, utilizing travel HAPP funds to encourage volunteers to go into tribal communities and to get an accurate count. Another key to success is networking and partnerships. I discussed a little bit the pit count with Mendocino County. That's a partnership we did not have before hap.

That was a partnership that we did not have before the California Department of Social Services in 2020 offered its very first tribal set aside.

These are partnerships in which we're able to have a streamlined connection where the waiting list may be Shorter for permanent housing with the tribe rather than waiting for months or years for Section 8 vouchers. I want to share these pictures. There are two listening sessions that we did in partnership with HCD for the Homekey Plus.

And we also talked about the upcoming NOFA for HAPP4 for Tribes.

Mariah, I just want to do a quick. Just a quick time check because we'd allocated five minutes and I know you're just under halfway through with your slides.

I can go quick.

Don't miss any of the content, but just keep an eye on the clock.

Thanks. So some of the HAPP outcomes are for tribes specifically, increase access to resources and support to increase affordable housing access to alleviate some of the Department and service inconsistencies.

Because what we're seeing when our tribal Members are going to local continuum of cares or to our county partners is they get lost in the shuffle and they're unable to receive services or simply just give up. So we're able to leverage resources to maximize benefit and increase access to interim shelter.

Northern Circle Indian Housing Authority strives to be the catalyst in creating security and ending homelessness for all Native people through hope, healing and housing. That is a sentiment that many of our tribal partners have as well. I do want to. Oh, sorry. Can you go to the next slide? Thank you.

We have the Berry Creek Rancheria, Maidu Mountain Lion Housing Development, the 22 units that I spoke about earlier utilizing home key 3.0 and the HUD IHPG competitive. And I wanted to share some of the pictures of the youth at the Paula Band of Mission Indians.

In that day, they were able to do a food class and they had a professional chef come in and talk about what it means to have a career as a professional chef and empower youth to the point where they even created their own aprons to support or to celebrate that day. Next slide, please. Really quick.

So of all the five rounds I shared, a tribal HAPP has only received 3. 3 rounds. A total of 60 million, which is 1.81% of the budget. I will say that tribes are just now receiving their tribal HAPP five to you all, but three to us.

And we're very, very grateful that once this next NOFA is released, we'll have 30 million available for 110 federally recognized tribes. Is that enough? Absolutely not. But hearing from my partners here today, the budget is not Enough and it needs to continue. Next slide. Uncertainty of impact. The historical trauma.

A lot of tribes face the historical trauma of unratified treaties and of termination. The give and take of land and resources. And I fear that with now that we're just getting off the ground and utilizing tribal hap and really seeing the benefit for our communities, it's going to go away. And I would hate for that to happen.

It also prohibits our strategic planning efforts. It's hard to look ahead when you don't know if the money's going to happen. Staff retention and burnout, same thing. It's hard to keep good staff when they're worried that they're going to lose their job at the end of the year. It also creates resource scarcity.

Us and them, we can't share our funds because we don't have enough. And that's not how we should partner. That's not how we should work together. And it also hinders our relationships with our clients. Yeah, we can help you for six weeks or six months, but if the program ends, we can't help you anymore. Right.

So wanting to ensure that we're not hindering those relationships with our partners or our clients. Next slide. In closing, I just would like for you all respectfully to please consider increasing tribal hap. Increasing hap in General and ensuring that it continues.

Look at tribes for good practices, best practices, and to our partners here talking about the wonderful work that they are doing as well, continue that technical assistance and that guidance. You may have to hold our hand today, but you will watch us run tomorrow. And to be sure that you are conducting meaningful consultation.

When I thought about equitable tribal HAPPs set aside, it was not equitable of me to say what that dollar amount is. But instead utilizing meaningful consultation will ensure that the 110 federally recognized tribes equitably can say what that dollar amount could mean. And lastly, I'm Mariah McGill.

I serve as the Deputy Director of Northern Circle Indian Housing Authority. Please, please reach out to the tribes within your jurisdictions, reach out to the tribes within the state. We're better together and we can really make an impact. So thank you. Please continue to fund.

Great. Thank you so much and thanks to our entire panel. So finance, LAO, did you have any comments or observations? Then let's turn it to Members of the Subcommitee. Any questions or comments, Senator or Vice Chair Niello?

We use the term permanent housing and I'm wondering exactly what that means. Does it mean that the person is fully self supporting or still under assistance? I have a yes and I Have a no.

Yeah. So it is a blend. So permanent. When we talk about permanent housing, in many cases, it does mean that individuals will receive subsidies, financial assistance towards security deposit and rental subsidies for a short period of time and then graduate to self sufficiency where they no longer need assistance.

However, it can also mean, and especially for individuals who are disabled, or you think about our seniors who are on a fixed income, that they will be or receive similar assistance to that of like a housing choice voucher, they will continue receiving ongoing subsidy, usually 30% of their income, combined with supportive services to maintain that housing.

I'll just add permanent supportive housing. As was relayed today, about 50% of our folks who are unhoused do talk about having a chronic serious mental illness. And so in Sacramento county specifically, we've braided funding together Mental Health Services act funding to create over 660 permanent supportive housing units.

So this comes with mental health dollars that we leverage in braid with some of our other homeless dollars to ensure that we can permanently house people who may never be able to sustain on their own. In addition to what you've heard.

Yeah. I realize that in some cases self sufficiency can never be achieved and continuing assistance is required. But this term self sufficiency, which I'm throwing out, you've mentioned it. I hardly ever hear it here. In fact, when I first started two years ago, I never heard it.

I would say it myself and every once in a while in a private meeting, people would make the reference to self sufficiency. But at least in my humble opinion, I think the ultimate goal of any social services program has to be self sufficiency. And we don't say that. So I would suggest that the.

We talk about continuum of care. Well, we have continuing continuum of outcomes and the ultimate outcome is self sufficiency. And we should articulate that. And I just want to encourage that. Were you going to say something?

I was. Thank you, Senator Niello.

I wanted to mention that part of the success, I think, of our regional planning efforts have been bringing other partners to the table and so bringing our Sacramento Employment and Training Authority to the table, where we're really looking at braiding in the workforce investments and trying to get people back on their feet.

We have seen more successful outcomes to your point, when we can get folks jobs, when we can do training and internships. And so we are ramping those efforts up across the state. And I think the regional planning has really enabled and promoted that. So that is a success from my perspective.

I'll just jump in and say to that we do break out and look at, you know, individuals who receive ongoing assistance versus those who truly graduate onto a self sufficiency path.

And for the Riverside County COC, it's about 40% of the population that we serve is on some type of permanent supportive housing subsidy where they're going to receive those rent coupled with intensive supportive services. And similarly we partner with our county behavioral health and other departments, even our adult services division, to coordinate that care.

And about 60% of the people that we help, and a lot of those are through HAPP, are individuals who just need that one time assistance for a shorter period of time. That might be up to a year. In some cases it's up to 18 months, 24 months, but then they become self sufficient.

All right. Mayor Gloria. Mayor Thank you Mr. Chairman. And just in response to the Senator's question, I so appreciate that focus. I share your concern about making sure that we have a sustainable system and that we're using market based solutions where possible.

I just want to share with you, within the California Big City Mayor's Coalition, all of us are laser focused on trying to produce additional housing capacity at subsidized and non subsidized levels. Just share with you the reforms that we've been able to pass with the help of state partners.

Like many legislators, we've been able to double the number of new home production permits in our city in San Diego, coastal California. A lot of those units are priced for affordable and moderate income service level.

So people like Keaton can leave our HAPP funded program, go to a unit where she may be receiving some level of subsidy, but we're trying to work to get off of that. Obviously the sustainability of these programs are a key concern. There is some segment of the population that will always need assistance.

But Senator, I share your focus on making sure that self sufficiency is one of the goal outcomes of this program. And that's exactly what the flexibility you all have provided us with HAPP is allowing us to do.

Senator, if I may add, yes, through Northern Circle we're able to take our clients from homelessness all the way through to home ownership without leaving the office. And that's really utilizing the framework set forth in the Residence Opportunity and Self Sufficiency program that is established through HUD.

So we offer our clients, again in a client centered way, the opportunity to do financial literacy classes, to do budget management, to also offer credit, care and credit report. Again, our ESS Department Empowerment and Supportive Services does our homelessness programs and our first time home Buyer Workshops.

So that idea of self sufficiency with offering career development, offering those financial literacy classes really supports that whole person holistic care.

This hearkens back to me to welfare reform of the mid-90s. I went on the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors in beginning of 1999, which was right after Sacramento county had implemented welfare reform. And it was a mandated five year review. So that happened in 2004, just as I was going off the board.

The guidelines of that program were to identify why the person was on welfare and address those issues with the focus toward an eventual requirement of getting a job. With regard to welfare programs, we have loosened that so significantly it doesn't mean anything anymore. And I think that's an absolute shame.

But with regard to addressing homelessness, the ethic is really the same. And just to illustrate, at the beginning, Sacramento county had welfare rolls of somewhere around 40,000 people. When we were reviewing it in 2004, it was down to somewhere between 25 and 28,000. And I asked the question, Penny Clark was the Director at the time.

I asked the question, how many people are on welfare now that were on Welfare in 1998? And I asked people that question frequently I ask them to guess and they are so wrong. It amazes me. It was less than 1,000 people of the 25 to 30 and absolutely remarkable progress in human success.

And I just fear that with regard to welfare programs anymore, we're not guided by that effort and we're doomed not to achieve that kind of result. Again, Mr. Chair.

I apologize for digressing so much, but I just think it's so important that we need to identify why people are homeless, address those issues and have our ultimate goal, not be permanent, not be supportive housing, permanent housing, but be self sufficient. Again, acknowledging that some will continue to need assistance, but self sufficiency.

The other thing I want to comment on is this notion of rewarding success by giving the money to somebody else who, who isn't succeeding so much.

I think you addressed that in your comment and somehow we need to get over this, that if we need to put as much money as possible to people that are struggling as opposed to continuing to fund those that are having success because if they have success at a certain level of funding, to yank that funding is going to compromise their ability to continue to have that success.

And I would emphasize that the existence of success provides an example for those that are struggling a little bit as to maybe a little bit different approach. So this notion of reducing funding because they're succeeding and give it to others who, quote, need it is somewhat, I think that's a little dysfunctional.

Thanks, Senator. Senator Smallwood-Cuevas.

Appreciate it, the presentation and the success. And I just, I'm curious, I hear a lot in LA county about the flexibility of HAPP versus other funding streams.

If you could talk a little bit about, if you know the 2025 budget does not include a seventh or third round of funding, what will be the impacts on homelessness in your communities, but also just what is the uniqueness of HAPP funds compared to the other funding sources?

I'll speak briefly to that, Senator, to say that prior to HAPP funding, our main and probably only source of homeless funding was through the HUD Continuum of Care Program. And that program, program is used to Fund continuums of care and provide permanent supportive housing and mainly rapid rehousing options.

I will tell you that in large part, 70% of that funding is committed to individuals who are disabled and chronically homeless. At least that's the configuration in Riverside.

About 30% of that funding either goes to rapid rehousing or to fund our coordinated entry system, which I talked about, and the importance of making sure that we have a centralized access point.

So if HAPP funding were to go away, it would significantly reduce and I would say eliminate our ability to serve new people, to serve new people who are entering homelessness. Because the funding that we have from HUD, again in large part is going towards permanent supportive housing because it is more continuous.

In regards to the questions about HAPP flexibility, it is that it very much allows us to take a whatever it takes approach to be able to solve homelessness for the person that is there in front of us. Where HUD continuum of care funds, as an example, cannot be used to support emergency shelter, HAPP funds can.

And if an emergency shelter bed is full, someone spoke to the example which happens all too often in continuums of care where even our public safety teams who are first responders on the scene and have a family in front of them and who want to do something with that family and are just as moved as any of us social workers here are, are often challenged with calling centers, calling shelters and being notified that those beds are full, that they are not available.

With HAPP funding, the miracle is that we can quickly coordinate a bed at a local hotel for that family. So that's an example of the flexibility that exists. And I'll open it up to see if any of my other colleagues here.

Have additional yeah, and let's also I want to just for time, not sometimes everything has been said, but not everyone has said it. We don't need all. We don't need four answers to every single question, but this might be one of them.

So I know Mayor Gloria also has his hand up and we'll come back to the table as well to the extent that we need that. That you have more to add. Mayor Gloria.

Very quickly, Mr. Chairman, for the City of San Diego. Senator, 40% of our homeless spend is half. So you'd see basically a reduction in half of what we do here. And so that means closing shelters, closing safe parking lots, putting folks literally back on the street without the state funding.

To your point about flexibility, you all have allowed us to innovate. You can talk to any mayor in this state. We're going to use these dollars slightly differently to match the circumstances in our community, the different populations that we may see in our cities.

It allowed us to do things that are innovative, like our safe sleeping site never done before in the city. But you all gave us the flexibility, and we found an intervention that not only do people like, but, but is extremely cost effective. So the flexibility is fantastic.

That is compared to some of the federal dollars that were mentioned a moment ago that literally can only be spent in certain geographic areas on behalf of certain populations with extreme strings attached. And lots of other things that come with it make it very difficult.

Conversely, because we have flexibility, what I can do is take your money, match it to those federal dollars that are less flexible but can leverage them, and then I put in some of my own. That's how I have more than doubled the number of shelter beds in my city in just four years.

We're going to be well over that shortly. So the money is powerful. Shelters will close without it. And again, we are in an environment where I don't think we can count on those federal dollars any further. So I think it's hard to really encapsulate how difficult we would be without this money.

But I will conclude with saying thank you very much. None of this is promised. We understand we have to make our case for it. But what you have done is transformative. It is bad as the problem is now, it would be infinitely worse without HAPP assistance to cities like mine.

Mayor, can I just have a second? Thank you. The one thing that I did not hear mentioned today was the, the no utilization of income limits with this funding source.

And that's one thing that we're seeing is that our tribal Members who are employed, who are experiencing homelessness, who are facing security deposits and first month's rent that are upwards of five to $8,000. We're able to utilize these funds to support them, get them housed and get them back to work.

Thank you very much, Mayor.

We're going to have a conversation a bit about accountability and I'm curious if you I'm hearing you knowing the experience of several of the other mayors of some of the counties as well, around, around sort of folks at the, at the leading edge of innovation, but also performance and achieving outcomes not 100% of the time, if you're but enough of the time that this is a solid performer that knows at least as much as we do about what to do on the ground.

And a lot of our systems are designed to make sure folks don't do bad things, that they don't fail. But they're not as good at understanding accountability systems at understanding who are the high talent, high capacity, high achieving jurisdictions in this space.

Can you give us any insight given that you're from one of how we might be able to better see places like San Diego or my colleagues under Errageen from Berkeley, I know they've had a 45% reduction in there in unsheltered homelessness or even my own mind centered, we had 54% reduction and then sustained that over 10 years.

How do we identify those places that, that are better at it than our second guessing would be and give and unleash them while simultaneously making sure that the jurisdictions that aren't performing are being held to account?

Great question. And again, I'll repeat, mayors are fully welcoming of any transparency and accountability that the Legislature or the Governor wants to put on us. We'll take whatever it is and we'll make it work. To your question, I think the top line metric is probably the exiting homelessness and entering first time. It's a ratio in my city.

It's 10 folks exiting, 13 folks become homeless. And that's why a lot of our constituents will say it's not getting better despite all of our efforts. And that's true. But that's that ratio piece. It's not that we're not highly effective in getting thousands of people off the streets.

It's just more folks are becoming more homeless as we deal with addiction issues, mental illness, inflation, et cetera.

But I think when you can use that as a metric to understand how effective is the system that we're building and getting people off the streets and at whatever point it inverts and we had two months last year where we were able to invert that, where we're getting more people off than we're entering shows that we're having some success.

Mr. Chairman, I would say the other thing that really stands out and mind you this a little self interested, is the ability to spend. I sit here telling you that we're going to spend all four rounds by the end of this fiscal year and their fifth round by the next one. We're on track. We're utilizing these dollars.

I know that that's not necessarily the case for other cities, certainly not for the counties and definitely not for the COCs. And I think that all of you, when you make these investments, expect us to use those dollars. Not on just any old thing. Obviously the outcomes have to be there.

But I do wonder about jurisdictions that are not having success in spending those dollars and what the Legislature can do to have accountability. You know, I personally would think that you should claw it back. If I can't use those dollars you've given me, you have every right to ask for them back.

Now again I say that as someone who's using utilizing it successfully. But in the midst of this crisis, there should be no reason why you can't open a safe parking lot, why you can't open a safe sleeping site, why you can't assist and expand existing shelter capacity.

Last thing, Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the new website that has been created, but I think that I would partnership in trying to improve it. The information is provided on a county level and what it does is it masks the cities that are not providing assistance. So in my County we have 18 cities, San Diego is one of them.

We have the lion's share of the beds, but the county only represents the full. The website only shows the full number. I think it'd be to your benefit to ask what are each individual city contributing to that countywide aggregate number? I think it should show the spend amounts. It should also include the COCs.

Right now with the county, what the website has is six city performance and some county performance, but not the COCs. Probably tribal should be included as well. And I think that there needs to be more granular. And last thing would be that it only says whether or not a county has implemented care court or SB 43.

It just says that they said yes, we'll do that, but doesn't have any metrics. Okay, well how many mental health beds did you create? So on and so forth. So I think there's a lot of room for improvement on transparency and accountability. But I think that ratio number is the top thing.

I think the spend is the other and there should be real consequences for those who are not utilizing the funds efficiently and effectively.

Senator Smallwood-Cuevas.

I just wanted to. Senator Niello raised an issue about welfare reform and it just made me I just wanted to go back and stress that, you know, this is a very complex issue and a lot of that reform really slashed so many families, folks with mental health, folks with disabilities, by creating a system that was predicated on work.

And, you know, those communities, we see the over representation of some of those communities in the work that you all are doing. And at the same time, we also know that, you know, we see the job creation mostly happening in low wage sectors. So yes, we have folks employed.

We are such a productive state in terms of our workforce and our unemployment numbers, but the jobs just simply are not meeting the need of what things cost. So, you know, welfare reform, from my view, not a good thing. It helped to exacerbate a problem that we are continuing to fight today.

And, and you know, this is a part of it. So we're, you know, we are not investing in a safety net that we once did and now we're investing in homelessness and spending far more to do it and, you know, always playing catch up.

So I just want to go on the record to say welfare reform was not the answer. I think it was a part of the problem and continues to be what we're fighting and trying to fix today.

All right, thank you. Thank you, Senator. Like both Senators, thanks to very much to the panel. Mayor Gloria Great to see you.

You've all made it a compelling, a very compelling case, even prior to what we're experiencing this year in our relationships with with HUD and the and the Federal Government and the congressional appropriation and the, the results that we're seeing in in PL in individual places with individual populations are encouraging and they are the result of these investments that we have been making that local communities have been matching and accelerating and force multiplying.

And there couldn't be a worse time to step back from those investments or in the strategies. And so we will be obviously spending a good amount of our energy and time over the next coming weeks.

But I know there's widespread support in the Legislature again for these investments, taking seriously the governor's call for additional accountability and data, which we will be covering later in this hearing as well.

But you've made the case extraordinarily well and both for the dollars, for the continuing dollars so that the real investments can be can be made and real and smart and efficient and for the kind of program reforms and appropriate flexibility and accountability that are necessary to achieve success. So really appreciate the panel. Thank you so much.

Thanks for joining us remotely. Mayor Gloria and thanks to each of you. We're going to proceed next then, to our item number four, which is our status report on hap. And so we'd invite Megan Kirkeby from the Director of Housing and Community Development to join us at the at the table for that update. Sorry.

Computer in up there.

To do the presentation. Yes, I can email it to you. I was going to show them items from the website, but.

And are you planning Ms. Kirkeby to take up items 4 and 5 in tandem? Okay. All right. With a heavy emphasis on the accountability part. Okay, great. Thanks. Welcome.

Yeah, they're so linked, I can't really comment. I was gonna. Oh, I'm sorry. So it's. I think it'll be fine. I was gonna plug into my computer so I could walk you through some of the dashboards, but I don't think we have that capability today, so don't worry about that. They're easy to find. And I can brief any of you individually if you'd like that walkthrough.

So I'll just cover, cover, cover the update. So today you've. I'm Megan Kirkby. I'm our Deputy Director for Housing policy at hcd. And we are very lucky to be the current stewards of the Homeless Housing Assistance and Prevention Program.

I'm very happy you got to hear so much from the grantees today about the things they're proud of, the things they're working on. So the recipients of HAPP are large cities, those with over a population of over 300,000 counties, and continuums of care, and they form regions and apply jointly for HAPP funds.

And those regions must develop a regional action plan and a memorandum of understanding to work together to improve their homelessness outcomes. They need to demonstrate how their HAPP funds will directly impact homelessness metrics.

They need to strategically pair those HAPP funds with other local, state, and federal funds, such as Home Key Proposition 1, Behavioral Health Services act funding, other HCD funding, including the permanent local housing allocation, which is funding that's available to every city and county in California annually.

So this year, this fiscal year of HAPP funding is a total of $1.0 billion for fiscal year 24-25. We recently released the NOFA for that HAPP 6 regional allocation portion of that, which is $760 million. As you also heard today, there's roughly 30 million for tribal HAPP.

We have a NOFA forthcoming on that, but are doing additional outreach with our tribal communities in the development of that NOFA. And then there is funding for a HAPP supplemental home key piece.

So the Home Key plus program that's been out for several months now has an infusion of HAPP supplemental funding in that from the fiscal year 2023-24 funding, as well as the 24-25 funding, and that goes into the Tribal Homekey plus program as well as the Non Veterans Homekey plus program. And that's available for HAPP grantees.

One of the things I want to talk to you today about getting to that accountability piece is the accountability evolutions we've been through on HAPP. So a big piece of that is we have now codified the HARP Oversight, the HCD Housing and Homelessness Accountability Results and Partnership Unit.

So we are actively monitoring all HAPP grantee expenditures and tracking outcomes. We're supporting underperforming grantees with corrective action plans. We're enforcing compliance to ensure effective Fund usage, as well as blending this with our work you've known as our Account Housing Accountability Unit.

So we make sure that all the laws that are on the books that you all pass actually get implemented. And so a lot of that shows up in some of our technical assistance letters to cities and counties reminding them of obligations around supportive housing, transitional housing, and some of that has made it to the courts as well.

We have, we have two big case wins regarding denial of a transitional housing for women, as well as a denial of a large supportive housing project. And we were able to be successful in both of those cases.

In terms of the HAPP funding, a big part of the evolution is at the very beginning there are stronger conditions for that initial disbursement. For that award of funding for this round, to receive that first 50% of HAPP6 funds, awardees need to show us that they have fully obligated their HAPP rounds one through three funds.

They need to have expended all their HAPP Round one funds. They need to have expended at least half and have obligated 75% of that first half of HAPP4 funding. And then they need to be in good standing on all reporting requirements.

And this is new for this round, including the HMIS reporting, all the data you heard about this morning is only as good as the submissions. And the quality of that data. We're able to track very closely where there are data issues where grantees are not reporting correctly.

And we are working proactively with all the grantees to to get everybody swimming in the right direction there and working with their continuum of care leads, their HMIS leads, to make sure that data is uploaded to our friends at Calich so that HDIS information is accurate and as robust as possible.

This round also has stronger conditions on that second disbursement. So grantees must have obligated no less than 75% and expended no less than 50% of their initial round six allocation to get their second disbursement, they need to do that no later than June 30, 2027.

They also need to have a compliant housing element if the grantee is a city or a county in order to get that second disbursement. And I could go on about this for days, but that is extremely long time to be. Long Runway to be giving grantees to come into compliance.

And we are going to work with them on the initial disbursement as well, making sure if they are not in compliance today, that we have a concrete timeline to get them into compliance. If that. That housing element sets the stage for housing supply and housing production. That is our biggest prevention tool to homelessness.

And so it is exp. Extremely critical this round. We will also be continuing our mid award updates and working with grantees that are underperforming, whether that's on the fiscal side of things or whether that's on the outcome side of things.

If they're not meeting the commitments that they said they were going to do, if they we are not seeing progress on improving homelessness, that does not mean that they are an automatic non recipient.

What that means is that they need to come work with us and possibly adjust their plan to move into more impactful uses or work with us on direct assistance to address whatever their particular struggle is. And if they're able to work through that corrective action plan, then they're going to get access to that second disbursement. But.

But we do have the ability to hold back funds if that isn't what we're seeing happen. Regions also have to include an encampment response plan. This go around that requires that they identify, simply identify the number of encampments within their region and what their plans are to address those encampments.

You know, HAPP is a funding source, but it is also a homelessness action plan for the region.

We are putting a large amount of money on the table and that is not just to fund specific things, but it is also to make sure that our regional partners are working together, that they have a dedicated plan to address homelessness in their region. When we are approving a HAPP award, we are also approving that plan.

And so this is our moment to work with those regions to make sure that the regional partnerships are set up correctly, that the regional partners that are best situated to do what they do are working, and that they are talking about how they are using funding outside of the HAPP system to address the overall picture of homelessness in their community.

We make sure they have a plan. And that includes, as I talked about, the emphasis on the housing element extends in the application. They talk to us about the roles and responsibilities for city and county regional partners. Those housing supply and affordability actions are critical in preventing and reducing homelessness.

And so the city and county regional partners provide us status updates and concrete timelines with regard to housing element and annual progress report compliance. If they are seeking pro housing designations.

Those are, those are where you put in place pro housing policies go above and beyond the law, but are evidence based policies that result in additional critical supply of affordable housing and we ensure that they have no active housing law violations, that they're not standing in the way of housing and homelessness actions in their community and that they are complying with their requirements around surplus land.

Local surplus land has requirements around making that, as you make that land available for sale or what's called disposition, that you are prioritizing affordable housing as a potential use in that land where, where it makes sense and is legally allowable.

An important piece of the evolution has also been about the sustainability of the portfolio really being part of what these regional, regional plans are offering. The regions have to have a plan to sustain the interim housing that they have through their grant term.

They need to be talking about if they plan to use non housing funding or use HAPP funding for non housing uses. They also need to have a plan that shows that they have that they can sustain all the existing and planned permanent housing within the region through the grant term. Where there is a gap that exists.

Regions need to be showing how they will dedicate funds to sustain those investments, including bringing local and regional funding to the table, including using their Mental Health Services act and Behavioral Health Services act funds to the table.

That and how, how they will be if, how they will be using their HAPP funds to get to that sustainable place. And you know, for a lot of our regional partners I talked about, we heard a lot about this multi, multi year predictability.

The grant term in HAPP is fairly long and does allow for all the grantees to effectively phase out how they want to use these funds. You know, that's why we care a lot about this kind of wonky term obligation like how much of your funding is obligated.

And that can can involve involve things like capitalized operating reserves where you instead of having to do things over and over and over again that you're making certain funds available that can sustain particular investments over a long specific time period.

So since we talked to, since we took over stewardship in July, we've continued a really deep partnership with the Calach HDIS data team, who you heard a lot from today. And then we also added a lot of transparency and accountability of our own.

So all of you have access to, to a fiscal dashboard that shows where every HAPP grantee is at in the budget. Last year that moved to monthly reporting for grantees. We'll talk about an item related to that a little later.

We also worked with Calich to have them prepare for us our own dashboard that we can include on our website that shows the HAPP specific investments in HDIS and what the data is that we're getting there.

We have our HMIS compliance spreadsheet so you can see who's reporting into HMIS properly and who's not, as well as the specific data coming out of that.

And then we at the regional level, and I think to the mayor's point, yes, like a lot of the information you heard from my colleagues at Cal ACH is at that regional level. And so sometimes that is, you know, you, that is a little bit of a group project. You are seeing a whole region's activity.

We have ways of drilling down, but the system performance measures are shown at that COC level. But for each region, for each continuum of care region, you are able to see where everybody is at on their progress in terms of all of those metrics you heard about today.

And that's available anytime for any of you all to look through. So that is, that is a big piece of where we're at today. I will say, you know, we feel really grateful to have this stewardship. We're really proud of what the grantees are, are achieving. The achievements are varied. Right.

I think you all are going to ask me about the success of the program. And I would say a lot of the reason you hear us talk about accountability so much is we do have, you know, for example, in HAPP round four, we have 75 recipients of funding.

You know, regions can, can regional partners can decide that they want one of the regional partners to take over sort of the Administration of the funding. So ultimately we have 75 administrative entities covering the HAPP4 funding. They are supposed to be ready for their second disbursement of funding of HAPP4. Right.

We have, we, we just put out HAPP6 notice of funding availability. But in terms of the HAPP4 funding that they've had in hand for some time, by the end of May, we are supposed to see all of our grantees having obligated all of that first half disbursement and have spent down 75% of that first first disbursement.

We still have 41 out of 75 that are not fiscally ready to receive their second half of HAPP4 disbursement. So we are not in a place where every grantee is operating the same expediency right now. And that might be okay.

Part of the reason we're doing these regional partnerships is to figure out which regional partners are best situated to take on things and be impactful, which uses are gonna be produce the greatest level of outcomes.

And so when you talk about why it's so important that we have accountability, that we don't just give out that second round disbursement because it's time we give out that second round disbursement when we see outcomes in the right place, when we see that grantees are fiscally ready to receive that second disbursement.

And it's important that we have measures in place to adjust course if some grantees are going to be in a better position to do so than their other regional partners. And so, you know, that's, that's part of, of where this HAPP round is going. But I will say doing those adjustments is never our first choice.

A big piece of where we're taking on in HAPP is very, is the transparency is for all of you, but it's also for us so that we can target technical assistance in the right way. Some grantees are going to be very strong and high performing in certain areas, be struggling in others.

We have peer to peer networks that we're building where we have a whole team dedicated to outreach to our grantees to provide technical assistance.

We'll be doing regional convenings where we bring together grantees that are having different experiences and can talk to each other about why some of them are able to contract more quickly, why some of them are able to see greater impacts and be able to create some sharing venues there.

So that's accountability for HCD, always is from a assistance and support perspective first and then accountability that feels like, you know, holding back funds is, is our second choice to that. But it's important that we have it so that we make sure that as a state we're seeing this, this funding have the greatest impact possible.

So thank you all and happy to answer any questions.

All right, thanks. I do have quite a few, but let's first go to Finance and LAO for comments or. Mr. Steenhausen.

Good afternoon. Paul Steenhausen with the Legislative Analyst Office. Just wanted to make A couple of points here on HAPP as you can see.

The first is as you can see in your agenda on page seven, there's a year plus lag between there has been a year plus lag between when the Legislature has been appropriating funding for HAPP and when the HAPP funds are actually awarded and dispersed. So just wanted to make that point.

You can see that on the on the table on page seven, but did want to highlight that. So you have the 2023-24 round five money wasn't actually distributed dispersed to the grantees until this current year until just a few months ago, in fact. And so grantees are just starting to spend that money right now.

Now the 2024-25 appropriation. So from June 30, 2024 that's round six that actually is not going to be awarded until the beginning of the budget year 2025-26. So spending won't start occurring until summer and fall next year.

So just wanted to mention that because even if the Legislature doesn't appropriate more funding for hap in the 25-26 budget, cities, counties, continuums of care will still have the full amount of funding from round six, again from the June 30, 2024 appropriation, and then they'll have partial amounts from most of those prior rounds.

So so the Legislature can take this information into account when deciding on the need to provide more funding for the program and of course weigh that against other legislative spending priorities and of course within the context of the overall budget situation for the state.

Just wanted to mention one other thing, and this is actually linked to item two, and it linked in a way to item five on page 11 of the agenda. Just wanted to point this out. It shows that 43% of people exiting HAPP projects left those services for an unknown destination.

It's unclear if the data were just not collected by the locals, the recipients of these HAPP funds, or if there were some other reasons involved. Regardless, this ambiguous data does make it difficult for the Legislature to assess the effectiveness and cost effectiveness of HAPP and then compare it to the effectiveness of other programs.

Now, the State Auditor flagged this same issue in its April 2024 report, and the Auditor actually recommended that whichever entity administers HAPP establish more specific parameters for the data that the program recipients are required to collect so the state can do a better job of assessing the effectiveness of the program. So just wanted to make those points.

I have another point I'll make, but it's more if you're Mr. Chair, if you're going to talk specifically and go to item five, I can speak to that then. Thank you.