okay good afternoon welcome to glendale city council workshop session may 10th 2022 meeting is called order i'm not going to conduct an attendance roll call because everybody's here if you'll take note with that said we're going to go ahead and just go right on into item number one homeless response update homeless response update good afternoon mayor members of the council uh here to provide our first item for today i'll be led by our director of community services gene moreno she's assisted by matthew hess our community revitalization administrator uh deputy city manager st john and we also have a guest presenter in lisa glove who's the chief executive officer of central arizona shelter services so with that gene thank you mr phillips good afternoon mayor and council so the purpose of today's presentation is to provide an informational update on the city of glendale's homeless response that includes staff activities and also our service providers as well as mr phelps mentioned i'm happy to report that we are almost almost nearing a year into our homeless master services agreement which the council had approved last june and we are very excited to report the results of those efforts that have taken place to date led by central arizona shelter services along with our multitude of service providers who participate in that contract so today's presentation we're going to talk a little bit about choosing our lens and strategy the reason for that is i want to this information is really for the public and for members of our viewing audience i know that the council is pretty well versed in the things that the city of glendale is doing as it relates to addressing the homeless issues in our community but i wanted to share a little bit more insight and information for members of the viewing audience in addition we're going to talk about the recent results of the point in time count we're also going to provide some internal program updates and then we'll turn the second half of the presentation over to ms glow to and her colleague mary glennon to talk about the performance of master services agreement so i'd first like to talk a little bit about the lens so you can see here there's a there's some photos here on the screen of people who are clearly experiencing homelessness and when we look at these pictures we need to ask ourselves are we looking at these pictures and seeing people or are we looking at the pictures and seeing a problem the truth is that you can look at those pictures and see both the important point though is that when we're designing solutions to address homelessness we have to make sure that we don't lose sight of the people who are experiencing homelessness which means that we have to pay attention to the types of services and programs that we deliver we have to understand what the gaps and services are and we also have to understand what's going on outside within our neighborhoods within the community in order to really design solutions that will address the overall concerns about homelessness in our community so i'm going to talk a little bit about the cause and effect relationships so homelessness in and of itself just someone has lost their housing they've lost their place to live and it could be for a variety of factors right it could be because they've experienced a significant increase in their housing costs we don't have a enough housing diversity in terms of the stock available in our community could be that they experienced an unexpected expense that has just you know sent them into a tailspin and then they've lost their housing could be that they have a lack of support system they don't have friends or family to rely on you could have medical conditions and so on and so forth there's lots of things that contribute to homelessness when you actually become homeless there are lots of other things that typically people potentially experience they can experience abuse while they're in the homeless system or while they're out on the streets they could have a decline in mental health they could have increased substance abuse they could get involved in criminal activity and obviously when you're homeless there's there's certainly an increase in hopelessness so the reason why i mention these things is because we have to make sure that when we're designing our solutions are we attempting to solve the right problem and every person's situation every person who experiences homelessness their situation is unique and so there's not a one-size-fits-all solution to address these issues you have to have a multitude of partners and service providers that come to the table but i think the most important thing to remember is that as people who care about other people in our community and about improving lives of people in our community we have to remember that it takes a partnership of government service providers residents and people who are experiencing homelessness themselves to truly design solutions that will create an impact on the problem and so i am happy to report that i i feel like the strategy that we've put forward with the homeless master services agreement is doing just that it's providing a significant array of services it's addressed gaps in our service delivery model and we're continuing to progress and get better at what we're doing and with that i will ask mr huss to talk to you and to present information about the point in time count thank you ms moreno before we discuss uh the accomplishments that uh that gene had just referenced um we did want to have a discussion about the point in time count that was completed um earlier this year before that uh we do want to reiterate our gratitude to the 52 volunteers who did participate wake up before the before dawn to come out and actually volunteer their time and their efforts to participate in that they spent all morning the morning of january 25th and were split between 21 different zones on teams and two or more our official count as you're already aware is 406 people and they were that data was collected through two means both observations which is about two-thirds of that number and also through direct engagement interviews now at its heart the point in time is essentially aptly named it's a it's a census it's a count of how many people how many homeless people are in your community there are a number of drawbacks and benefits to this approach just remind you that it is one piece of data there are other pieces of data that we use that are important to keep in mind so why do we do the the pit count we are required to by the u.s department of housing and urban development as part of the continuum of care our participation in the community of care through the maricopa association of governments some of the flaws or i should say weaknesses with using this data it's really difficult to create an accurate count of people in one place at one time especially when they don't have homes so generally people who go home every night they are a lot easier to track you can say that you have a number of people living in this community homeless population is extremely transient and so you may be homeless in glendale one day you may be homeless in phoenix the next and so to rely on a specific date and time is a bit of a slippery slope some of the other issues the quality of the count itself we actually do the point in time count at the same time and date across the country and so people in new york city are doing the pit count at the same time as we are so you have people doing it in the middle of the night in new york and um early in the morning here weather conditions can play into that if it's snowing if it's icy it's harder to reach people a lot of times people do not want to engage with us they are afraid potentially of having a being arrested or they do not want to access services sometimes it's an issue of having the experience of the volunteers one of the big difficulties with observations in particular is that you could have potentially duplicative counts which is something that we had observed this year i believe ms moreno had spoken at an earlier workshop about the quality of the data and how we went through and discussed with mag about how to make sure that the data was was accurately reported and it's also very subjective so you have volunteers out on the street early early in the morning and unless you're actually engaging with someone it's it's their subjective opinion as to whether or not somebody is homeless and so those are some of the reasons that the point in time in and of itself is not necessarily the best indicator of the homelessness solution or excuse me the homelessness situation in the city where's your mic up thank you mayor is it on now just raise your mic up a little bit there you go okay i i have several questions about the point in time count overview um you've provided us a map that identifies the 21 geographic zones of those 406 people that were counted where where were they on these on this zone map were they predominantly in the southern part of the city do you have any data on which zone had how many people mayor council member clark i don't have the specific data run down in front of me but i do know that most of of the folks who were counted were in the southern and the southeastern portions of the city okay could you send that data to us so that we could get a better understanding of where they're located yes mayor councilmember clark i'd be happy to okay and i accept your reasoning with regard to this point in time count i'm not sure why anybody does it to begin with but how do you capture homeless families there are they point a part of this point in time count and if so how do you how do you figure out how many families are homeless not individuals so much so mayor council member clark the the pit count does include a an enumeration of families as well so depending on who you are encountering and who the volunteer is encountering if they indicate that they are family then each of those family members is counted in the account okay so perhaps you could drill down and give us data on you know how many were family units versus individuals as well i think that's also a distinction that needs to be made then my last question is this recognizing that this is very subjective data that may or may not be accurate to begin with how is this data used in determining policy decisions for the city is it relied upon a great deal very little not at all um mayor councilman clark i believe that the next slide will will address that that question thank you so in terms of strengths and and as i said about a third of the respondents did or i should say a third of those counted did actually engage with us and go through the process of being interviewed two thirds were merely observations so the data from the interviews is what you see here and so because these are first person responses to a standardized instrument that hud provides to us this is data that this is data that we would promote as um being possible for policy to make making decisions mayor uh may i ask a question before we move on from observations um just because i'm not quite sure what that process looks like do you count simply just people you see on the street that appear to have a lot of belongings with them uh what are people living in their cars and i mean i just want to have another better understanding of how the observation piece of this one because it's a big piece of this count how and you did say it's subjective so i just want to know like what kind of criteria or how do you evaluate whether by observing somebody you've determined that they're homeless uh mayor councilmember tomlichoff um you're exactly right that it is subjective so um to your point if you see somebody sleeping on the street and they do have a lot of possessions um but you may you may encounter somebody who you think maybe from a distance could be homeless and that's that's where the the issue is in terms of finding each volunteer although they are they do receive training um prior to actually going out into the field it's still up to the the judgment of that volunteer and so um they would use their training and they would use whatever that lack of a better term their preconceived notions are their notions of what a homeless person looks like on the street um to count them or not count them okay any observations if i may add to that so one of the things that we do when we train our volunteers is we train them to first attempt to engage because that's really where we're going to get the data is by attempting to engage with them and going through the questionnaire if you approach someone and you say you know it looks like you might need some assistance are you experiencing homelessness and they say yes or they say well but i don't want to answer your questions then you mark it as an observations it's in rare cases when you're seeing as an example if you see an encampment right you see a lot of people gathered together you may not have because typically when you're going out you're going out with a partner you may not be able to conduct interviews amongst all of those individuals and so volunteers are asked to do their very best to count them but to matt's point if i'm i'll just use this as an example if i'm engaging with somebody i'm interviewing matt i'm conducting an interview and i see someone who's walking by who's pushing a cart of their belongings i have to make that judgment call of do i count them as an observation even though i'm not going to be able to attempt to engage with them and in those situations i would think it's reasonable to say that if someone's pushing a shopping cart full of their belongings and it's clearly not groceries or things like that that is an acceptable thing to do is to count them as an observation where it becomes tricky is if you see someone who's sitting at a bus shelter as an example maybe they have a backpack and a suitcase they may be homeless or they may be just traveling and taking the bus to get back home it's hard to say so that's what we're saying when it comes to the observations is the observations are a good piece of information but they're not necessarily the best piece of information to use when you're talking about designing programs and services where we're focusing our energy is in those interviews so with the interviews you've spoken to a person you've gone through a questionnaire with them you've learned a little bit more about are they willing to accept services are they have they been in shelter before would they accept shelter if it was offered so by getting into more detail and it's a fairly lengthy questionnaire um you can get more information and that's the information that we're talking about which is actually a strength of the point in time count as the interview data thank you okay i've got a couple questions for you one is is the criteria you're using is it's what the same criteria has been used for the last four or five years yes mayor okay because i think that's critically important that you don't change doing things differently and then try to compare numbers and then secondly uh this is sort of uh a really early request but potentially or possibly a month or so before the next point in time count maybe you'd give this council an opportunity one to be trained and then secondly to participate i think i think all of us if we're willing i think it can be a great eye opener for everybody [Music] thank you mayor a couple of things about the point in time count strength slide so remember i asked about policy and how much does this affect policy toward our homelessness outreach and you said that this would explain it so you're telling me based upon the responses from 138 people we're determining policy for the city that's my first question second question in this list of personal interview data no mentally ill people no handicapped people were outraged that seems to be an anomaly to me because i know that a good percentage of those who are homeless are also mentally ill and yet we didn't seem to find any of those so could you answer both questions please how 138 people determine policy and how can this be valid when there's no mentally ill no handicap identified mayor and council member clark to answer your first question this again it's we have to use this data for what it's worth it's a point in time count it is not going to give us all of the answers it's one piece of information what i can tell you is that in working with our partners through the homeless master services agreement we're collecting better data to truly understand what's going on with the people who are experiencing homelessness in our community and understanding what their needs are and then matching those needs and making sure we don't have gaps so as we mentioned before the point i would not personally rely on the point in time count to drive every single policy decision that we make as an organization we have to have access to other information and data the reason why we're even talking about the point in time count is because there is a lot of questions from the public about well and i'll just let me go back to this slide here so one of the things that's important to understand about the point in time count that's why we were trying to point this out is that there's no consensus consistency year over year there are lots of things that can influence your overall count right and so you can see it went from 170 and 20 20 to 406 and and people look at that information say oh my gosh like what's going on and what is glendale doing and that's my point is that it is a it's a good piece of information it's fairly accurate um when it comes to just understanding the bigger picture it's definitely accurate when you focus exclusively on the interview data it's not so accurate to get down to city level data right it's good to look at at the region right which is the whole reason why we do the point in time count is to understand what's going on in our entire region it's when you get down to the city level it's very difficult to to specifically state that this is our number of homeless people because it's it's probably not accurate um what is accurate though and that i would stand by is the um the interview data and so i'd like to talk a little bit about that because the two biggest pieces of information that we gleaned from this and from the people that were interviewed so yes i agree 130 people out of a population of 250 000 um however of the people that we interviewed 72 of them said that they were willing to accept services so that tells me that if we can reach them and we can provide the services that they need we have the potential for changing their lives so that's one and then the second piece of it which is concerning for us as policy makers is that 64 of those people that were interviewed were first time homeless and so what that tells me is that we're not dealing with the chronically homeless that are very difficult to house and very difficult to help we're dealing with a lot of people who who really want help and need help and to the second piece of your point this was just a highlight of the data that we gleaned from the from the interviews i can follow up and give you more information and when the point in time count actually comes out the report from mag you'll see all of the information about people who are disabled and all of that this was just a snapshot of the high level items that were when i look at it from a data perspective these are the things that are we're paying attention to the people that are willing to accept services and the fact that a lot of those people that were interviewed 64 percent were first-time homeless i i have one if i might hear it's kind of a stupid question maybe but we let's just hypothetically use the point and count number of 400 people okay what what do we throw at homelessness every year a couple million dollars what what's the figure marion councilmember clark that's a tricky question because we've gotten a lot of covert and cures act money um on a regular basis without additional support we get 230-ish thousand dollars a year from hud specifically for homelessness now it's not to say that we don't invest other public services dollars to organizations that are also impacting homelessness now in this particular the last couple of years with the additional cares act funding you are correct it's and it's in the multi-millions so i i guess my question is when we find these people who are homeless and you say 72 are willing to accept services 64 first time homeless wouldn't it just be easier to rent them an apartment for a year and supply them with food and then work with them to to get additional schooling or whatever they need to get work wouldn't that be i mean because we invest a lot of money and it doesn't seem to change anything over time and the point in time homeless count keeps going up each year so it's like we're repeating the same methodology while the number continues to grow so why can't we devise a program where when we find these homeless people we just get them an apartment and food for a year and and then help them to rehabilitate themselves is that a dumb thing to ask mayor and councilman clark no it is certainly not dumb and yes those are things that we're working on doing so you've heard me speak before that we have a problem with housing inventory we have a problem with the lack of affordable units in our community and we have a problem with not having enough transitional or bridge housing to support people who are experiencing homelessness who need an opportunity to get on their feet receive services it's really kind of a temporary transitional type of housing in order to move them into permanent supportive housing we understand that we have deficits in those areas and we are working on strategies to address some of those things as you know there's some legislation going on down at the state legislature that would provide funding for these types of measures and you know certainly from the staff perspective we would expect to be coming forward to council to talk about policy decisions that you can make that can help with exactly that with providing temporary ways to get people off the streets in a humane fashion while we can provide them with services to help move them into permanent supportive housing but to your point we have a lack of affordable units there are a lot of people in our community that live on the that live in poverty and on the verge of poverty we have a 17 poverty rate in our community that's high all of those people who live in poverty they are one i call it the flat tire rule they're one flat tire away from being destitute and being homeless one experience can mean the difference between them being able to pay their rent and go to work and do all of the things that they need to do to stay housed and that's what the problem that we are trying to solve is making sure that we have a very diverse approach to all of those things that you mentioned so it's affordable housing it's being supportive of housing density it's being supportive of temporary transitional housing all of those things will address homelessness but the biggest thing is it's easier to keep someone housed than it is to re-house them and so that kind of speaks to the next part of my slides if i may before you go on one thing you didn't address that i think a lot of recognize a lot of phases in the audience today is the successes that we've had because at 72 percent willing to receive help if you go back over the last year a lot of those people have received help and a lot of those people have had successes the problem is is it's an endless skate new new homeless keeps happening so it's not like we only have 100 people that we have to fix and 72 of them one it never stops the the challenges actually are getting harder not easier mary you're absolutely correct and that goes back to the the the biggest issue which is we have 17 of our population who lives in poverty every day um and when you live in poverty or on the cusp of poverty you're more susceptible to homelessness um and ms glow is is going to be talking a lot about the success that we have seeing and the people that we have helped we have been able to help a lot of people over this last year through the homeless master services agreement so those are people who are actually already homeless in addition to the people that we've helped keep stay housed through our eviction prevention programs any other questions on this what i do have one question mayor if i could um i just wanted to go back to your slide on um the week the count weakness um because i think if i remember i know you did bring this up um that i think i mean i know weather especially not probably generally here as much as other but i think i remember a conversation about the numbers from 2020 being that it was wet and cold and that we weren't really and so it looks a little bit probably that line was more of a uh you know that that's not an accurate number for 2020. i think i remember us having those conversations is that it's really hard to find people when they're trying to stay dry and warm on a cold wet morning is that correct mayor and councilmember troma chop that's correct and that's why what what we're saying is looking at this data at the city level is it's just not a good thing to do you really need to look at it at the regional level once you get down to the city level you see that the numbers there's just no consistency so it's very difficult to use for trends and projections and that's why you know from our perspective looking at the regional data is important because it can give you some good information and then looking at your city's interview data is important i may or i just thought it was important to make that point because i think the increase in numbers to some and we didn't do account in 2021 for obvious reasons but to some that increase looks really startling but there's a lot of reasons for that and there was probably somewhere between you know um 170 and 400 was what the actual count was um in in 2020 and 2020 and then in 2021 we don't know so there was a stark increase between the last count and this most recent count that i think makes people there we have heard from a few residents who think that glendale's not doing anything and that's probably one of the reasons is because of the stark difference in numbers thank you so i think we pretty much covered this slide in terms of the strengths and the people willing to accept services um so just a few internal program updates so i mentioned previously that keeping people housed is um probably the most effective strategy in homeless prevention because it is much easier to keep someone in their place than it is to re-house them so as an example if someone loses their place to live they get evicted then now you have a new barrier that they have to overcome in trying to find new housing sometimes in those situations they won't be able to provide or to find suitable rentals or they'll have to have the eviction cleared before someone else is willing to take the risk on them and then what can end up happening is then people resort to accepting substandard housing or housing a last resort which isn't safe or healthy sometimes families may have the ability to house with other family members but that can also contribute to overcrowded situations and things like that which can contribute to neighborhood situations and complaints from neighborhood neighbors about well there's five families living in this house all of that is because we have this underlying issue of people living in poverty in our community so with that with our eviction prevention programs that we have been running out of the community action program office i think this number is probably outdated already but a little over close to 2500 we expect to hit 3 000 households before the end of the fiscal year what's important to know because we look at the data this program requires that we look at the um at the income level of the people that we're serving whether or not they're 30 percent uh below the area meeting income between 30 and 80 and i'm sorry between 30 and 50 and then 50 and above and 82 of all of the families that we've served with this program are at less than 30 percent of the area median income that is an extremely low income for families um and so that is a really important important piece with our program we can provide assistance if you are at 80 percent area meeting and come over below but you can see a majority of the families we're serving are less than 30 percent we have as part of that program it's been over you know 14 000 months of rent that have been paid to landlords in our community and that's important to note because landlords have also suffered through this pandemic in terms of of trying to be patient and work with their tenants so it is important to note that the program does serve to help landlords as well and on average about six months of rent per per household has been paid in addition we also have administered rapid rehousing which is um specific to people who are within 14 days of being homeless or are homeless there were 41 unique households served through cap and i just want to make a special note on that that's been since july of 2020 so it does expand more than one fiscal year and then 43 unique households through our public housing programs our housing choice vouchers the emergency housing voucher program so we received 72 vouchers that was our allocation from hud all 72 vouchers were issued 43 households have been able to lease up so what that tells us is that we still have i do the math 20 samad families that are still searching for housing and we check in with them regularly they're having difficulty finding units that they can afford and so that that continues to be a problem not just in glendale it's a problem all across the nation um it's not unique to arizona it's we have a lack of housing stock and what ends up happening is when you don't have housing stock for people that can afford more in rent then they end up you know taking units that cause or that cost less rent and then it just snowballs from there um and then we've also served um 13 unique households with our foster youth to independence program so these are children that have aged out of five care that were it not for this voucher program could ultimately end up being homeless so we we obviously have worked very hard to help keep people housed and we continue to do that one of the other things that's important for us is that the clients that we are helping who have previously experienced homelessness and we have housed them making sure that they have the support of services to keep them housed because we don't want to re-victimize them if they lose their housing again sometimes when a homeless person is re-housed they might need additional help and making sure that they can follow the rules of the lease and different things like that and so making sure that we have supportive programs to do follow up with our clients is very important as well and with that so just just quickly i want to touch on you know really helping to identify solutions to to solve the long-term problem right we have to build our way out of this but that's not going to happen overnight we are working very hard to make sure that we're supportive of developers who are coming in and wanting to serve the the people in our community who need units that they can afford to live in i think everyone is probably aware by now but i will mention it for the public that i'm excited that center line on glendale from gorman and company has been approved for the 2 million in state tax credits 6 million in maricopa county funding that development will bring 368 units council recently adopted the zoning ordinance at the last council meeting that will bring that project to fruition that project's located at 67th avenue in glendale it is one of the largest investments in this area that we've seen in a long time of millions of dollars and we are hoping that that investment will catalyze additional investment in the area as well then the second project has also been awarded 9.5 million from maricopa county and that's mercy housing and that development will be at 4900 west glen does not require any zoning action to move forward but it will be focused on serving seniors and it will be about 144 units and then we do have two other projects that are in the pipeline and various stages of you know the planning and zoning process and obviously we'll continue to provide updates to the council as those move to fruition and with that i will turn the presentation over to mr st john thank you ms moreno this slide represents the hard work of fred sanchez and his team in the right-of-way uh under transportation department a couple of fiscal years ago this council approved funding for an additional truck and an increase in our fte count on the right-of-way to help clean up the camps which are really kind of the the central blighting issue that we deal with when it comes to the the homeless population and so on this slide you can see where a lot of the camps are that we clean up which districts they're in and that we've cleaned 103. has been an ongoing problem up until council adopted the increase in budget that allowed us to put a new truck out there with some some staff to get these cleaned up and in the past the police department would make contact with homeless camps sometimes they were abandoned camps and because of the rules and regulations and how we have to dispose of found property in the police department it was very difficult for us to do much this has really been a proactive solution that this council adopted and it's it's been a huge help and then finally i know 51st and cactus the underpass has been a source of concern and that that's true on all 131 miles of srp canal banks i mean i think in the city of phoenix they're seeing a much bigger problem than we're seeing in the city of glendale although we have seen the problem and have been seeing the problem for at least 12 months at 51st and cactus jim burke our parks director engaged the bor so it's bor regulated uh bureau of record bureau of reclamation regulated so it is an srp canal but the bor they kind of regulate and the enforcement aspects and we engaged bor about 10 months ago asking for them to take action and posting signage that that wouldn't allow people to maintain a presence under that right away so you can pass through but you can't maintain a presence there and then we were trying to figure out the enforcement aspect does phoenix enforce it does glendale enforce it can both agencies enforce it can neither agency enforce it because it's bor land and recently the srp came forward with a letter of support from cities uh to petition the bor to make it a special special use uh yeah a special use area designation which would allow local municipalities to do some enforcement that letter was signed by mr phelps back in april or back in april of this year and we anticipate that there's going to be a movement fairly quickly because as you can imagine the homeless population camping on the canal banks and putting waste in the canals is a health and safety issue and so we we would hope that the br bor would move fairly quickly and we understand that the attorneys for the bor srp and some municipalities including our own are already in conversation to try to resolve this and then kind of the last thing i want to talk about is the misdemeanor repeat offender program we've mentioned it a couple times there are several valley cities that have a misdemeanor repeat offender program we are trying to cater something for the city of glendale that makes sense it's being led by the police department we're talking to all the stakeholders and our hopes is that we'll be able to implement something i'm going to say within the next six months but it's kind of a drawn out process and figure out the the policies and how you want to move people through that system and there are a lot of interested parties so we want to make sure we gather the best information and really build something that's going to work for the city london mr st john um i noticed that a majority of the camps cleared out in the alcatel just in the cactus district um i'm glad to hear and residents are glad to hear that we're being reactive how do we become a proactive without violating the law and maybe explaining why we can't be so proactive but how are we going to prevent these from coming up that our staff has to clear them so vice mayor there's a couple of things that we're doing right now as our as our outreach teams are contacting the homeless population they are encountering a great number of people that that are not willing to accept resources and so we're having the conversation with them that it's not illegal to be homeless but they need to kind of self-regulate and typically in these camps they there are leaders of the camps if you will and if you can convince the leader of that camp for example that it's in their best interest to clean up after themselves and to not stay in one place for too long then we can accomplish at least part of the mission through that being proactive that way on the other side when the police department goes out and contacts people in a camp we notice them that we are going to come back out and clean the camp and so it is somewhat reactive but i would say there's a proactive arm to it because once we identify that there's a camp we are taking the necessary steps to legally do what we can to protect city liability and still clean that camp but there's always the risk that somebody's going to come back and say that we threw something away that was of value so allow me to thank our staff for right for clear clearing these camps because that's that's quite a chore there's a lot of um health reasons that uh prevent others just from volunteering to clean those camps often are you guys doing this that we could start to see a decline in these numbers of camps vice mayor i don't know the exact number that they clean per week but it is a daily basis i'm told that the police department identifies locations daily and it's usually the community action teams that are doing it but occasionally it's the patrol division but they're identifying locations notifying the right-of-way fred sanchez and his team and then building a plan for how they're going to get that camp cleaned up so sometimes it's an abandoned camp and it can happen fairly quickly other times it's still occupied and so we need to go through a little bit of a process to notify give them about give them an opportunity to collect things that are important to them and move on before we come out and clean the you mentioned the truck that the council provided as part of the budget is this the dedicated crew to just this or is it a right-of-way crew that's doing their regular duties and then get dispatched out for camps mayor vice mayor it is dedicated to this dedicated only homelessness encampments around glenn merritt it is dedicated to this they may be doing other things when they're not cleaning camps but it is the purpose of the new truck was to assist the police department and park rangers anybody else that stumbles across a camp and cleaning it so that's their primary function they may be doing some other things on top of that primary function so let me be clear the the vehicle is is dedicated or the staffing as well mayor vice mayor both both can you tell me the staffing on that crew mayor vice mayor it's two persons okay thank you and councilmember clark was absolutely correct is how does policy shape improving or preventing homelessness in glendale so that's that's number one we have to have policies in place um all this is great i commend you all for the work you're doing in partnership with cass and others but it doesn't begin to and i'm not saying that you have a magic wand but it doesn't begin to put a dent in the chronic homelessness this is helping families the one flat tire away families who lose their job or or and become homes but this does very little for the chronic mental health substance abuse type of homeless that our citizens report to us on a regular basis i mean this is every single day and this is in my district it's becoming now going it's going east and now it's going west and now it's even going north so it's everywhere it's it's it's a it's a not a pandemic but it's an epidemic so how are we going to be strategic to to improve those numbers for the chronic type problems because i don't see us putting a dent in that and i don't expect to see a big dent in the next couple weeks or months but how are we being strategic to that marin vice mayor i mentioned previously that one of the gaps and services that we have in our community is that kind of transitional and bridge housing and you know in working with this glow and our service providers we are trying to improve opportunities for that because we do see that that is an issue when we're talking about the people who are disabled or experiencing mental health issues we need to make sure that we are capturing that and that we have services within our toolkit to do that and that's exactly why we have the professionals providing these services through the master services agreement and they are much more eloquent at speaking to those issues than i am but i will tell you from a policy perspective that is exactly why we broadcast to the table that's exactly why we selected them as because they are the experts in homeless services and in understanding not only root causes but the solutions that we can use to address the needs in our community when it comes to a policy perspective those things that i mentioned previously are critical we have to support the affordable development in our community we have to support investments in our service providers that are skilled and equipped to deal with situations where people need mental health or substance abuse counseling and treatment and then we also have to be willing to support the use of of transitional housing in our community and so with that i think this may be a good segue if i've answered your questions um to invite miss glow up to kind of talk about the results that they've seen and the things that they're doing mayor thank you allow me to finish before we do and thank you for uh here so policy shapes how cities do things and how they improve things um there's a big difference and you know this better than i do than than those who become homeless because they lost income they lost a job or they lost transportation those aren't the individuals that are out camping in city property out in people's alleys and trash in the city those are not the families that are doing that now can they get there yeah they can these programs and the initiatives that we have and what you're doing your team are doing are preventing that and those numbers are high and i think it's great we need to continue to keep working on that um for that piece of the homelessness and it would be an item of interest and the city manager and i have been discussing this city council needs to do more we need to shape policy on in increasing the inventory for affordable homes in glendale and not just one part of the city the entire city and if we don't be if we don't create policies that increase that then we're not doing our part we need to have more partners the mayor and councilmember turner i'm councilmember tom chuff and i just left an affordable housing ribbon cutting great 108 homes and every one of them are filled build we need a shaped policy that that we have staked in preventing homeless by building out more properties in our vacant properties in our infields so we need to do that that needs to become an item of interest that our city manager can shape but if we don't do that today we're just going to have more homeless people and it's going to cause more work for you not that you don't want to do it but we're just going to be going backwards i don't know what policy shapes ending the chronic homeless but the chronic homeless is the ones that are driving businesses away and driving our residents away from our from our towns in our city and and i do want to hear from cass but we need to do more on shaping policy on on using our our infield vacant properties and and and bringing more partners to the table for more affordable housing that's how we're gonna improve the uh the the families who lose income and become homeless so i'd like to hear more mayor good um before we move on i'd like to ask um mr st john to i'm not sure what misdemeanor repeat offender program is what that means so before i let that go by and then later on say why didn't i ask what that is i wanted liked under just in a nutshell what that means mayor uh council member tom chaff there is a repeat offender program at the felony level that has certain parameters and so there's a questionnaire that officers fill out and if they hit a certain number of points in that questionnaire then they're eligible for the felony repeat offender program misdemeanor repeat offender is similar to that so if you have a certain number of misdemeanor arrests and convictions within a certain period of time then you become eligible for this misdemeanor repeat offender program and really it's it's a different type of sentencing so it's a structured sentencing for the need of that individual that's essentially the program in a nutshell mayor thank you um so to continue on council our vice mayor aldama's comments which were directed specifically i think more at the chronic homelessness certainly concerned about that but also very concerned about the spike in homelessness that we're seeing and the data showing that 64 of those that we dealt with i guess in the point of time count were experiencing homelessness for the first time so we also know that we have and we you address that we have a shortage of housing units we don't necessarily have somewhere to to put somebody who's become homeless um is that something that this council's going to need to address now yes we are adding you know 238 units and 144 units but that takes years to make happen and that by that time won't be enough do we need to do something in the short term temporary type housing that other cities are doing that may just be a place to get them out of the sun and out of the heat and out of the rain and a place they can call home until longer term units are built and then the short-term units wouldn't perhaps even exist in two to three years are we doing anything along those lines and is it something that we're going to need to do to address this issue particularly with the first time homeless that you there's simply nowhere to go there just is no there's no vacancy mayor and council member turner james your question yes we are exploring um what options are available with our service providers and we expect that if there is a an opportunity to be able to support that moving forward i mentioned to you that there's legislation going on right now at the state that would invest about 50 million dollars into providing temporary solutions for people who are experiencing unsheltered homelessness and so yes i do expect to be having future conversations with the council about some of those opportunities thank you all right with that i would like to ask miss glow to continue the presentation and talk about the work that they have been doing and will be available to answer any additional questions good afternoon mayor council members thank you for the opportunity to present today it's been about a year that we um presented to the city to become the glendale master services provider and it's really been an honor and i'm excited to tell you what we've been up to and then answer questions my name is lisa glow i'm the ceo and president of central arizona shelter services i've been in this role for five years now so things have changed in that time for sure so um oh i need to advance there we go so the theme here the glendale homeless solutions alliance is the group that we put together and it's 16 providers working together our theme is collaborating for solutions partners committed to a no no wrong door client-centric system that's what we set out to do we knew from the start of this innovative collaboration we must continually seek common ground have strong communications and build our relationships so we'll hear a little bit about how we go about doing that our common ground of course is our compassion to address the unsheltered the homeless crisis including those who are unsheltered as well as those who are on the brink of homelessness and in native services upstream solutions as part of this as well and here's a visual of the many partners the 16 partners some of them are funded through the partnership some are not but they're still partners some were unable to use the esg or versions of funding and i want to say though the strongest partner and the people who we talk to every two weeks are sitting right here to our right our partners gene moreno and hess and of course rick st john but i want to acknowledge them for their vision in coming up with what this would look like it was very forward-thinking for them to come up with a way of looking at resource allocation through a partnership where the partners are accountable to one another where the lead agency puts together those solutions collectively with them shares resources with the partnership and then holds those partners accountable so we are we're really honored to be chosen for that and we want to help you see how that works some of those partners are here i'd like to ask any of the partners who are here to stand up as well as the cass team who are here today who operate the norton ramsey social justice empowerment center if everyone could stand i'd like to give the partners a round of applause and our team as well [Applause] the art art please stand jennifer and dane if the three of you these are the folks who run the norton ramsey social justice empowerment center they are incredible they are tireless they are strategic they're collaborative alicia another case manager is not here art runs the center jennifer is the program coordinator dane is a case manager in the back there and there are other folks from phoenix rescue mission who are also in the center so i wanted to call them out because i know dane has to go take care of a client so thank you for what you do [Applause] so next slide when we did our presentation to the city this is what we presented the alliance would look like starting with a 24 7 hotline street outreach and navigation increased people doing street outreach services as well as housing navigation and we're going to go into some of this in some of the slides what we've achieved in greater detail in some of these areas we're also going to share some stories with you because the stories do bring to life what has happened through the collaboration so everything from behavioral health to criminal justice diversion pet shelter and transportation employment utility assistance basic necessities housing rapid re-housing family reunification so so some of the key performance indicators i want to go over very briefly and then my colleague mary glennon cass's program director will drill down into that a little bit more so the 24 7 resource line was established in june um or july i forget when it actually went up but we signed our contract on june 22 and we got into action really quickly and the number of calls to that resource line through march in nine months is 671 calls there's been 100 response rate to those service requests within 24 hours and we'll drill down into that in a minute secondly we created something called a by name list and there are 855 people on that list and what that list is it's names of people generated from the various partners people who are in encampments and want services other people seeking services whether it's from us or other shelter partners or other partners people calling the 24 7 line or people who come into our location the norton ramsey social justice empowerment center i think most of you have been there if you haven't we'd love to have you come and see it and we'd also have love to have you come back because a lot has happened since a year ago we are a coordinated entry site for adults currently and that was something we established quickly as well it's the first site-based adult coordinated entry site in the west valley and that's important because we can get people into shelter by doing the assessment and intake that's necessary and we also have in regards to this by name list a weekly case conferencing among partners who can help get people into housing or services so we go through that list and the list is critical because it also keeps people on the broader regional list even if they're not um even if they're in glendale so they're in that broader list so they can get into services and mary could explain that better than me but because she's been doing this work for 11 years that's why she's our program director the third kpi on outreach and encampments i think will be of interest to you because um we know there are a lot of uh people who are increasing numbers in the streets phoenix rescue mission leads the street outreach program along with other partners there were 6 141 duplicated touches to people experiencing homelessness and encampments of those 2 352 engaged meaning they accepted some level of services phoenix rescue mission is working on establishing a more detailed geo map along with our partners at glendale the fourth kpi on housing solutions we measured how many nights of emergency shelter were provided to glendale residents 5646 and you'll see when mary talks that there's expanded places where people are getting shelter it's not any one place but some of it's also right here in your community we serve 36 families through the partnership most of that through family promise taylor's here and then we also diverted 637 individuals were housed or diverted from homelessness that's separate from people who stayed in shelter and we'll go into that too all right utility assistance 28 households received utility assistance many more of course received those services through the cap office but remember we're no wrong door so if someone needs something we refer them to the right place and we count that data employment the data thus far reported although we expect more from st joseph the worker they've provided 129 individuals with job support they held two hiring events resulting in 20 jobs and phoenix rescue mission has their vocational center located inside of the norton ramsey center i'll call it the nrec and they served 147 individuals with vocational development and i expect that will continue to go up this last bullet here i mentioned we're coordinated entry site we did 150 plus intakes through the coordinated entry process and we will be coming become a family coordinated entry site we are super excited about that that's big news i probably have it on another slide but i'm going to steal my my own thunder and tell you cas is in training to become a site-based family coordinated entry site so we can do intakes and to shelter for families so a family promise has a family they can have them come over to the center we can do the intake they can be sheltered with family promise and a new leaf is also going to become a family coordinated entry site i can't emphasize how excited we are about that because we've been seeing a lot of families and i'll give you that number in a minute so going on to some of the services under the key performance indicators we have provided what we call flexible financial assistance to 501 households this is upstream prevention in the sense we help reunify people with family so it might mean they need travel assistance we've provided motel assistance so family reunification 20 households that could be more than one individual but 20 households motel assistance 32 households eviction prevention 80 households most eviction prevention is not done by cass it's through the cap offices in the city but again it's a no wrong door model if that's when someone sees instead of sending them somewhere else we're going to serve them because we have a program to do that we have that program in place we've had it for about six years and then move-in assistance 111 households this means something like one-time rent assistance it's not the rapid rehousing program where people get up to maybe a year of assistance it's someone who just needs their deposit pay so they can get off the streets they've just gotten a job and they need the eviction arrears cleared or something like that and that's the program we've had about six years so both cass and phoenix rescue mission did this flexible financial assistance we are continuing we're going through about thirty four thousand dollars a month in direct assistance to people so we can keep people off the streets help them get quickly back into housing and so we're going to share a few stories with you and i'd like to ask both jennifer and art to come up here and take the podium and just bring this to life a little bit mayor council members what you see on the screen in front of you are clients that have visited the norton and ramsey social justice empowerment center and have gone from house to homeless in the upper left hand corner is someone that was actually assisted with the cap program if you look in the far right corner my right you'll see the holiday family the holiday family first came into contact with us by calling the 24 7 resource line so this is a mom and a 14 year old daughter who were living in their car on the streets of glendale we were able to connect them with family promise they went through the family promise program they were connected with housing services in at the norton ramsey center we were able to help them find appropriate housing and get move-in assistance and so this is a family that went from living in their car to finding permanent stable housing directly underneath that photo another gentleman who was unsheltered on the streets of glendale what we would consider chronically homeless he had significant diabetic issues we were able and he didn't have any of his documents so he wasn't what we considered doc ready he didn't have an id he didn't have a social security card or birth certificate we were able to connect him with circle the city for medical care we were able to connect him with phoenix rescue mission and homeless id project in order to get his documents he was ultimately sheltered temporarily by lutheran social services ihelp program in avondale he was then referred to a new leaf who's administering your tibra funds and he was issued a voucher and is now off the streets um just being a veteran it was uh really important for me to see this one individual he was engaged by uh officer glendale pd officer shoop um anyways he didn't know really where he was at uh he engaged him had a sense that maybe he would be interested in some additional help he said yes and so he came to our uh to our center and we were able to at least assist him there as a result during our waiting for a ride to u.s vets uh he was uh playing around with by juggling he was juggling boxes that he had and expressed appreciation this is what we do we had another time a glendale pd officer had assisted this young lady who was a victim of uh who was who is a victim of sexual attack on her and so victim assistance had reached out to us and we were able to provide a diversion out of state to her family by doing this we have to contact the family make sure that the family supports are in place and we were able to assist with that thank you thank you art and jennifer i brought just one copy but we could also email monthly jennifer puts together the nrec notes and it's stories of success and it's the monthly data as well we have further data that we drill down into but this is a monthly report and we're happy to share these maybe they can be emailed to you if you'd like to see that and it keeps people really motivated in the partnership too it's about recognition and acknowledging one another and i spent time at the nrec last week and it was hopping because they have walk-in hours and people go there and they get a live person to help them and we had a neighbor i'm going off script here but we had a neighbor who initially didn't like that we were there who now loves us some of you know who i'm talking about and he even speaks positively to the media about the center so it's really kind of a big turnaround he even referred one of his clients over to us someone who was in need of housing so that's the good news i'm going to introduce mary glennon to go through the next few slides and mary is our program director and lives in your wonderful city as well so mary hello okay so i wanted to drill down a little bit into our 24 7 resource line it was really important to us to get a jump on this part of our program in particular to be able to connect all of our partners to all of our resources as soon as possible so we actually launched this line a little uh later than a month after we signed the master services agreement so in late july this line went live with the glendale services partners so and then rolled out to the larger community in september of 2021 it is a phone line that is answered live 24 7 365. uh glenn excuse me jennifer and art answer the line between 8 a.m and 10 p.m monday through friday and then it's answered at our downtown single adult shelter by our shelter staff outside of those times and those staff have been trained to direct people to services typically when it's coming on a weekend or overnight it's someone who needs shelter we've been contacted by pd in the middle of the night looking for a shelter placement so we're able to assist with that so as i mentioned it's been 671 calls in that nine month period of those as you can see on the screen about half of them have been single adults another 34 percent were families one of the things that we really learned from quickly is that we needed more family resources so that's when we really set about working with the family housing hub to become a family coordinated entry point in the west valley because we were really overwhelmed with the number of families presenting for homeless services we also receive calls about encampments to this line and we work closely with phoenix rescue mission and their encampment line to dispatch their outreach workers in real time and the types of calls we had again about a third of them were people who were actively seeking services or we're community members and then another half were actually glendale city services staff the police department the fire department the libraries the cap office people looking to connect people they were encountering with our services so this is just a further drill down in that of the 671 total calls 367 reference a unique identifiable person which means that we had a first and last name for the person in need of service and 92 percent of those calls resulted in a direct service connection or an offer of service so really high level of being able to provide people services to end or prevent their homelessness in real time 16 of these calls resulted in an emergency shelter placement so that represents people that are no longer on the streets of glendale and another 16 resulted in housing so people permanently off the streets of glendale so this is our norton ramsey social justice empowerment center just down the street here this program was really designed to be a regional multi-agency collaborative model to prevent and end homelessness we have a lot of regular contact with all of our partners to provide mutual support do case conferencing so in a weekly basis there's a case conferencing call for the direct service providers and that's where they can case conference the clients that are on the buy name list so having that name of the person you're working with and being able to talk to your peers and find solutions you know i need a resource for this okay i have that send them over to me making those real-time connections we have a monthly meeting for program leadership to go over partnership updates general announcements sharing successes and sharing our challenges to just get support on those on a quarterly basis we have been meeting a high level meeting with the partners to review finances performance metrics and try to troubleshoot any issues obviously with the way the economy has been there's been a lot of of hiring updates and and challenges getting people housed so just providing support and trying to troubleshoot issues with our partners on a bi-weekly basis as lisa mentioned we got our big supporters here we have a regular meeting with them to do the same thing talk about what's working what's not working what adjustments we need to make to be more effective there's also a monthly street outreach meeting led by phoenix rescue mission with partner participation so cass community bridges native american connections u.s vets resilient health and others all participate in going into the community and doing outreach and we've also hosted faith outreach events so connecting our faith groups who also provide community support to glendale residents in need lisa introduced our team a little bit already so in addition to art jennifer dana and alicia phoenix rescue mission has a staff person on site event moore who is in charge of their vocational program they have a computer lab at the nrec with stations where people can apply for jobs work on education requirements so she is on site full time as well we also have our other partners at schedule time in the center new leaf is there native american connections has been out there for does all of our scheduling for the center as well anytime someone wants to actually be on site to meet with clients so we know that street outreach is a really important part of any homeless services continuum you have to actually get the people from the street into the services and to the shelters and then ultimately housing really meeting people where they are so as a result of this master services agreement we were able to double the amount of outreach workers on the streets of glendale and that was both through community bridges and through phoenix rescue mission phoenix rescue mission was also able to extend their outreach hours to be seven days a week and coverage until 11 pm five days a week so that started in january u.s vets and cbi as i said also do outreach and this resulted in over 6 000 duplicated engagements so an engagement can be just going to say hi handing out a water bottle anything just try to establish that relationship phoenix rescue mission is able to provide us real-time updates about what they're seeing in the community so this is just what they shared at our last partner meeting you know the encampment at 59th and glendale they've seen a lot of new faces people they haven't seen before at 58th and bethany home behind des there's a appears to be a younger crowd than they've seen before with a lot of drug activity involved and then the canals at 51st and cactus as well as 43rd and peoria quite a lot of people around there that have been relatively service resistant but they continue to go out and try to engage and then as i said they added the three to eleven shift and he um is primarily trying to uh set appointments for the daytime so he's he's out there he's dealing with the hotline calls and then trying to get them into service appointments the following day so we as a result of this partnership created new opportunities for shelter for glendale residents so our single adult shelter downtown phoenix prioritizes glendale residents for a bed those can be people that call in through the hotline number or people that we engage while we're going about helping and we also prioritize families to get into our vista colina family shelter which is in sunny slope and again that was one of the changes that we made really early on seeing that we had a greater number of families than we anticipated calling in for services phoenix rescue mission off also offers their recovery programs lutheran social services which has been sending people to their ihelp locations throughout this partnership is expected to open the glendale eye health shelter this month with 12 beds to start and they are hopefully going to be able to increase that as time goes on u.s vets has a unit of transitional housing family promise opened a new location at the glendale mission and ministry center where they see families and they also have two units of transitional housing for families available and maggie's place for pregnant single women and so actually again you know we had a call with them a couple weeks ago they said hey we have openings and cass was able to push that out to our networks to say if you have any single pregnant women this is where they can go and again that resulted in over 500 nights of shelter provided through our expanded options thank you mary so employment is also part of the partnership the two key partners here are phoenix rescue mission st joseph the worker all of the services listed up there the glendale works program that you've had around for a long time and that is now being replicated as phoenix works with phoenix rescue missions so mayor wires congratulations i know that was really in a priority for you and that vision is now being duplicated in phoenix there's job skills development from both of these agencies ged and high school diploma assistants out of the nrec resume writing assistance job search and placement pre-employment cost assistance st joseph the worker has a pool of resources for uniforms boots tools etc we're getting close here so part of this was to um drill down into special population services i personally have been on a mission for getting seniors off the streets and i'll mention something that's coming soon on that but equally important is how do we go upstream and keep seniors in their home so one of the partners a unique partner and i think someone from the y is here today is the ywca who's been in your community for a long time they provide meals and delivery to seniors and they're going to be opening their congregate eating again soon and so with this partnership we um they started asking seniors their drivers are asking seniors when they're delivering some questions to identify if they're at risk of homelessness similar to what gene was talking about we want to keep people in their homes upstream as much as possible and we expect we'll be doing more with them in the future and then on the youth side homeless youth connection has been doing the prevention and connecting to services in the schools focused on the youth population native american connections has had someone on site from time to time but they also have their home base youth program and someone who came through glendale last week is now over there staying at the home base program and it's through having the communication and the relationships that this happens i actually personally was involved in helping that youth get over there it just was the more you know the more you can help i guess and then homebound we hope to do more in the future with them but we do refer to their child care program and families over there they're not a funded partner but we're hoping to do more with them in the future lessons impacts challenges what next just a couple slides here the biggest lessons we can move faster and more effectively together and the no wrong door policy is key to our collective mission and how it all works challenges we've mentioned 34 percent of the people we've seen are families seniors there's such a high vulnerability with seniors that a number is going up across the nation of people becoming homeless a lot of them first time um the by name list it's a big list and the unsheltered point in time count doesn't reflect really people who are coming forward for services there's no way to get all of that information so someone sleeping on a couch or in their car even though people in their cars are counted but you might not be able to find them and then of course we all know the lack of housing next steps for us we're going to become a family coordinated entry site which i mentioned we're increasing the number of shelter beds i'll tell you about that on the next slide but what what is equally important is throughout maricopa county there are more shelter beds and housing opening up i think you've shown tremendous leadership as a council and with the support of a great team you're moving to increase housing and shelter and housing options but that's happening across the region too so that's part of the good news improved access to mental health services needs to happen vice mayor odama you mentioned that we are going to get a license as an outpatient clinic by august at cass we're a medicaid provider but we've been going through the process to get everything we need and then we hope to get the license so we can do those services out out of the nrec that was something we hoped we could get accomplished last year we didn't so not everything happened we were hoping for but that's a big one and that's still on our agenda and then criminal diversion this is something phoenix rescue mission is working on um and i don't have a a report right at the moment on that the cass expansion of shelter beds our 470 bed shelter downtown will have 600 beds by june and then we're doing further renovations the bathrooms and then the rest of the shelter we now own a hotel for seniors that's going to be renovated 170 beds at that hotel that's off of the it's in phoenix the old phoenix inn um i-17 north of northern and that will be just for the 55 and older population and then we were just awarded a contract from access along with copa health to open a 50 to 70 bed shelter for the seriously mentally ill that would be built on the grounds of the arizona state hospital and that to me is a really important model for the future because cass will operate the shelter side it's not a institution that's a lock-up institution you go into a whole nother service realm but next door copa health will operate the outpatient clinic and by the time we open it we'll be able to bill for those access services so this might be a model for communities this might be a first and then other communities because the mental health challenges are very real this would be for the smi population and then the last thing i want to say is we're really proud of this partnership and i want to share something that i was contemplating before this we we set fourth principles of partnership um when we started this process and we revisit those i'm just going to share them really quickly with you but it's important for our collaboration shared leadership communication i've mentioned ongoing evaluations to make course corrections and we do that a lot with glendale where we can move resources where they're needed shared recent resources pivoting when needed and that's often with reallocation of resources minimizing duplication of efforts no wrong door expanded points of entry working together to fill gaps and services for glendale residents being agile adaptive disruptive of the status quo and then database decision making so those are the principles that we we remind ourselves about as we go forward and that is the conclusion of my presentation i'm happy to take questions miss clark thank you mayor um in your last segment disruptive of the status quo what does that entail well um this whole mayor councilwoman clark um the gmsa is disruptive in itself because it's a different way of putting a provider and it was a through competitive process in charge of doing things differently so under a traditional process people would have been awarded things going their separate way as opposed to being required to collaborate together and sharing resources i think that's a disruptive model i think we need to continue to disrupt things you heard ms moreno talk about legislation that's making its way right now with the leadership of senator david livingston bipartisan leadership he's providing that if the 50 million dollar bill passes that would provide opportunities for cities to get funding to build tiny homes or spring structures things they can do quickly to get people off the streets i think that's another disruptive we just remain open to new ways of doing things let me follow up i think i heard you say that that being collaborative was a requirement of the funding is that correct um yes councilwoman clark it was how we saw it i mean we knew that it was important to glendale that this was a partnership that was clear from when they put the rfp out and you know for us collaboration and doing it in a way that you really are supporting and sharing resources equally with partners is part of it so it's something i'm passionate about so yes it was a requirement from the start as we saw it one last question mayor how do you identify or acquire these collaborative partners well in uh councilwoman clark um i've been in this community a long time i was a consultant prior to this job and i worked actually with many of these partners consulting advising them so we cast a broad net and uh in putting this grant together talking to people and said here's what where we want to do what do you bring to the table what kind of contributions what kind of funding would you need and so we reached out to a lot of people and then we heard from people as well because working with the city of glendale and when they set this rp up we had to find out and we asked them who are our partners in your community who we want to make sure are part of this maggie's place for instance we didn't have a relationship with maggie's place before um the local st vincent de paul and while they're not a funded partner because the government funding didn't work for them the relationship had to be there so it's really through listening and we also have art morales who is glendale resident been around a long time so the person we hired to lead the program also knows the community and it's a commitment um to building faith partners and others it's i think it will continue to grow and it really impacts service as mary was saying and i was listening to her you know it's it's knowing how to um work with each other and get people to the right place mayor if i could one more question so under this master agreement i assume you get a certain amount of funding and then is it your [Music] responsibility to award portions of that funding to your partners how does that work yes mayor councilwoman clark so when we submitted our proposal we had a detailed budget and we we did a lot of leg work to get that grant together and we knew what the partners would need and then contracts where subcontracts were signed with all of the partners we signed a contract with the city the subcontract template was identical and of course run through the city and we signed that with the partners with the amount of the awards and through ongoing monthly meetings we have our budget person and our data person we're the administrators in a sense and we're looking at what those partners are spending their invoices come to cass we pay those invoices and get reimbursed through the city but the city's already you know seen the contracts and all of that some partners didn't scale up as quickly some haven't spent all their funding so then we make adjustments in the funding recently we moved some funding into that direct financial assistance because that's where the need is that's one of the beauties of the partnership being able to reallocate resources so no decisions are made on changing funding without our meetings with the city of glendale okay thank you very much good information thank you councilmember tomichoff thank you mayor um i i'm this is i mean i think this is a really great model um uh and i i'm sure it's going to be duplicated um interestingly enough i know i'm not the only one that was receiving outreach from churches from st joseph the worker from a lot of people were saying we want to help how do we engage how do we you you've got you can't have everybody going in a different direction so this model i think is really holistically kind of moving the needle because everybody's collaborating working together um but i do have a couple questions um the first question i have is um you you brought that out and i don't know the number how how accurate it is because it was the point of time number but i think we're all well aware that substance abuse is a big part of the problem um and so i i want to understand how sobriety plays a part in ongoing availability and what the expectations are in some of these programs of somebody getting to us because uh you know limited resources i mean there's it's a big problem and our resources are limited so what role does sobriety and the expectation of sobriety play and availability of services mayor councilwoman tom chav um i'm going to do my best to tell you what i do know but i also think we need to ask that critical question among the partners because at the monthly meeting last week phoenix rescue mission did report in the encampments there's they're seeing more drug use as you heard from mary so what are some of the strategies to address that at our shelter as an emergency shelter people do not have to be clean and sober to come into shelter they can't bring weapons or drugs with them we need i think by having more outreach workers you can get people into services if they want them phoenix rescue mission has substance abuse treatment services but people have to want to get clean and sober and i i believe the continued engagement and art could probably share some stories on this the continued engagement with people who are abusing substances you're more likely to get them off the streets i think that's the best thing is continued engagement because there are programs for people to go into phoenix rescue mission i think opened a 300 or 350 bed men's substance abuse treatment facility six months ago or so and they still have places for people it's getting people to want to come off the streets i also think if senate bill 1581 passes and the um it's the title is changing uh the bill it was called structured camping but i think the title is changing but having places for people to go even if they are not clean and sober but they can't use their may incentivize them to go into safe places it's tricky we need to have much more dialogue around this i don't have the solution um if i don't expect an actual answer today no i know but but but i guess my point is and i understand the the emergency shelter and getting people connected to services but once you get somebody into the system and you're saying we're providing a year of rental assistance or something like that to somebody is there for a year of rental i mean there's a fine line between being an enabler and and actually helping somebody and there's so many people that need help so that's what my question is is how do we do we have an expectation that if we're going to help somebody with a year of rent to get on their feet that the expectation is that you are sober that we're not enabling you to use other money to go and buy drugs or drink or whatever it is that what the issue is is it you're going to end up you're going to end up back at square one again because this is this is not a sustainable situation mayor councilwoman tomachoff and mary want to may want to come up here but we're a housing first provider and we get people into housing quickly but there are i'm here to tell you there are not sufficient services to keep people clean and sober when they're in that housing and the whole philosophy of housing first is being debated because it does not require that sobriety it's get people off the streets then wrap services around them but there aren't sufficient services to wrap around them at this time okay mayor i do have one follow-up question too and i and i know the city you know we we we're kind of a pass-through i mean we we had a huge you know part of how this this what makes this whole thing go but for some of these services especially for addiction and you spoke about the gentleman with the um diabetes situation do we get these people connected to access to help fund some of this other service so that we're not funding things where we can find another some other resource to fund some of this mayor councilwoman tomachoff absolutely that's part of what we do is we help people get on access services i i don't know art could probably speak more to that or jennifer but we also when we opened the center we asked the department of economic security to put in one of their um i forget what they're called but they bring people and they have on-site enrollment so that's still a missing piece we'd like to have them there at the site helping people but we also help people get their benefits but i know as we take a critical look at the last year we're going to see what else is needed we have a planning session in june i don't know if we invited you yet but we want to do our planning session with our partners to figure out what else needs to be added based on the point in time count based on the data based on your questions substance abuse and enrollment and access is really important and now that we're actually an access provider although we aren't billing yet we're getting people trained i think we'll be able to do more of that too and that'll extend the resources even further one last question mayor if i could um there's been i think quite an influx of refugees into the community and i just and i know i know this isn't going to be intended to be an all-day conversation it's a complicated issue but how does the influx of refugees affect what we're trying to do mayor councilwoman thomachoff i do not know how to answer that question mayor and councilmember tomochoff so refugees that are coming to the state of arizona come through the state of arizona des they have four refugee resettlement agencies within our state and they are the primary point of contact and services and help get them set up with housing and so on and so forth there are some cases where refugees who resettle here may need additional supportive services and those would typically be provided through our existing programs normally we're not seeing them coming through and they're getting into the homeless homeless continuum of care services typically it's their once they come into the community they're set up through the resettlement agencies and the resettlement agencies continue to provide them with unlimited supportive services until they get on their feet however [Music] we those agencies provide i would call them social services through their organizations that are funded through the state thank you mr melner thank you mayor first off i would like to compliment cass for what they've done for the city when we first brought you on board you know i went down and visited ramsey center and saw what you were doing i was impressed with how quickly you move forward and i want to thank you and all the organizations that work to make this program work thank you i i had just one question regarding when you were talking about the outreach and encampment program you you mentioned that you'd done quite a few outreaches with those individuals of the groups and then you indicated you had about 38 of those that you had a substantial substantiative engagement does that mean that they they they were willing to accept services from you or what what did that mean exactly can one of you come and tell me yes mayor councilman uh mullner jennifer is not in her head yes so that is what that means so um do you want to expand jennifer so what thank you um the regular touches are just encountering them on the streets they may or may not accept services in a more substantive engagement we're able to do a triage assess what kind of services they may require what kind of services a person might be open to and actually begin the process of building the rapport that allows us to deliver the service all right thank you very much uh if i may mayor follow up to that then is based on those statistics it showed that about 38 percent of those that you were contacted had a substantive engagement my question really relates to and it seems to have been spoken about by several council members here today is that there are individuals out there that have issues whether it's a mental issue or drug issues that don't want to engage my question is how how do we impact that part of the homelessness because that to me from my investigation and my comments from our comments from my residents in my district that seems to be the issue is that there are people that don't want to engage with our services we have services and we need to i agree we need to increase those we need to have better housing we need all those things but there's a a pretty good percentage of those who will not engage what are we doing to assist in that realm mayor and council member malnar the and i'm not an expert on homelessness i just want to put that out there i will tell you that you know in working in this area for the last two years i have certainly learned a lot and what i can tell you is that an individual that you encounter one time who says i don't want help the more you encounter that individual the more you build a rapport that individual the more you can relate to that individual that it increases the likelihood that they will eventually accept services i'll use phoenix rescue mission as the case in point a lot of the workers that they have in their program were homeless themselves and it is much easier to relate to a situation to someone else's situation when you have a similar experience or situation and so it's the repeated touches is where you get the results so to answer your question what do we do about the people who say they don't want services you keep trying you keep doing the street outreach because eventually they will come to a point where they're like you know what i don't want to be homeless people don't want to be homeless they might choose a lifestyle that causes them to stay homeless but people down deep inside do not want to be homeless they want to change their circumstances we just have to continue to provide the opportunities to do that through consistent street outrage having consistent investments in our homeless strategies is also critical and that's something that we have to think about from a long-term perspective we did get a lot of one-time funding we have a way to create this or to keep this model sustainable for the next couple of years but beyond that we're going to have to really dig deep and figure out okay how do we bring more partners to the table how do we bring other funders to the table how do we bring the private and faith-based and philanthropic or philanthropic organizations to the table to help us continue this work but i know that was a long way to answer your question it's continuing touches all right thank you and i appreciate that mayor just to continue on that and and i would agree that doing that would bring in those individuals who really do want a change in their lives and they do need some coax coats in order to have make that happen sometimes but i guess i'm speaking to again another group of people beyond those who i've gotten reports from police that when they've gone out and done cleanups and camps and things like that that they offer these services and they repeatedly repeatedly and repeatedly say no and then i've done my own investigation with certain individuals and have found that there are people that that don't want that because they are getting what they need on the streets um and that's the the point that i'm trying to to get to what can we do to address that group of individuals yes just one second lisa so mayor and councilmember melnar you actually bring me to some of my closing remarks and this is information for the public um so one of the challenges that we have because you mentioned people who aren't accepting services because they're getting what they need from the streets um so i would say to members of the public if you can give make sure you're doing so in a way that's healthy so there are lots of organizations out there that ensure that they're providing services that are actually designed to get people off the streets so rather than giving five dollars or a dollar to somebody who's panhandling on the straight corner do your research invest your dollars if you're so inclined to do so in organizations that have a proven track record of moving people from homeless to housed and keeping them housed there's organizations out there you can you know certainly obviously any of our partner organizations there's also a website givesmartaz.org where you can check out and do research so i'd say that is that is issue number one in terms of trying to really solve the problem because you're right there are people who may may not accept services because they're getting what they need um and then to that point um obviously mr st john can elaborate if needed but you know if someone is breaking the law then they're breaking the law they'll be asked to you know come into compliance and then there will be repercussions if they aren't um and i think that that's the the challenge i think we have seen a lot of success even with our police officers that are dealing with us on the on the day in and day out i've heard the stories from from some of the officers where they were to finally get someone into services or they gave them a ride to the nrac and they you know are accepting services so it's working but it's slow progress this what we've done in glendale in the last nine months is unprecedented we've never had this type of very specific and strategic strategic collaboration amongst our partners and with our programs and services and having the flexibility to adjust as needed to identify gaps in our services so there's there's a lot that goes into it and i appreciate the council's trust and patience as we implemented this program i do think it's delivering results and i'm very excited to see what we can continue to accomplish the other thing i would say to the public is if you see someone who is clearly experiencing homelessness and you would like to get them some help go to glendale1.com and enter a service request there's a service request specifically for homelessness we will then reach out to the nrac and send a street outrage team and see if we can't we meet the people where they are and try to help provide the services that they may need thank you very much appreciate that uh and i'd like to expand a little bit upon what you just said there's a million different scenarios and um each person just compounds the different opportunities and and variables that are in uh but for anybody to assume that because someone's homeless they're not employed is wrong to assume that somebody is not homeless and is employed is wrong the scenarios never stop and then there's the working poor the people that are just basically a breath away from from not having a roof over their home i was literally by my assistant that uh the glendale works program again you had mentioned phoenix i didn't know about phoenix but i guess scott still has also done the same program so we're on to something but the the very thing that makes scott's i'm sorry uh the works program successful is exactly what you just got done saying it's that constant going back and trying to establish a relationship they have to have a trust factor with people that are going there and knowing that the people that keep coming to you have had the same experiences it gives them a totally different mindset where they'll more than likely will let their guard down a little bit easier than if somebody who's never been homeless tries to go and help them we came up with the idea that we'd put up signs and encourage people not to enable which is what council member thomas shaw not a bad idea except for we have and i think probably everybody here has seen him gentlemen that stands right outside on glendale avenue right underneath the sign holding his sign up every day the same guy every day and i would be willing to bet that if we could figure out who the guy is he probably probably goes back to the same spot every day i don't believe that he wants to change his lifestyle because i know that people have reached out to him but that doesn't mean that we should stop either we have to keep stopping so i don't know what else you have to present but i just very quickly want to thank everybody that's here that has worked on this project over the years and we'll continue to do it sincerely thank you so much don't don't quit on these people please don't we got an opportunity to make a difference thank you thank you for having us if i may say just a couple more things mayor um 25 of the people who stay in our adult shelter are employed you know echoing what you're saying and communities are looking at options like tiny homes pallet homes things that you can get up quickly i know some of the phoenix city council members went and visited what they're doing in l.a where they're putting up pallet homes and the neighbors aren't complaining so there are other options that's the kind of thing that senate bill 1581 would support if that goes through a model and this will be the last thing i say i promise that i really like is the austin community first village program very dignified they are sheltering well providing a permanent home for the most chronically homeless other community members live there they have work opportunities and gardens and some of us are hoping to take a trip there in june i've seen it before but there are other ways to address that chronic street homelessness and um the controversial issue there is can you make people go and that's that's where it gets difficult but if you offer better alternatives and more options i do believe people will go so that's thank you thank you for making this such a high priority too mayor by my dad just one last thing so thank you to our partners and thank you to all of you i know this was a very long presentation hopefully it was a beneficial discussion for you and in the residence um that you that we all serve um the last thing i will say is if there are any service providers or faith-based organizations out there that have watched this presentation and are interested in joining our partnership or learning how to get connected to be a part of the solution please feel free to reach out to me my email address is posted out online but it's j moreno at glendaleazy.com okay come mayor if before we move on uh councilmember malnour i just i believe it was i did just mention the um the signage that we have that to discourage panhandling or to encourage those who would like to help to do so through agencies rather than directly and i know i'd ask for some of those to be deployed in my district i've yet to see them so i just would reiterate that request that that signage be made available in the intersections i identified thank you miss bower would you introduce item 2 for us please water resources update mayor members of the council just like with our prior presentation regarding the challenges of homelessness we are now going to transition into another issue it's very very important to our community is uh regarding our our water system and and i'd like to say as they're getting set up i think we're very fortunate that that here in the city that a we've got a a great water department led by craig johnson and his team you have a very passionate representative of the council and councilmember turner that really follows these issues very closely and then we're really i think very fortunate to have drew here who is our water resource program manager who is so well respected in the area so again a very important topic and looking forward to this but i think it's i think we're in a really good position that we have people are really paying attention to what is a critical issue here for the city and will be for a number of years and with that i'll turn over to mr johnson thank you mr phil good afternoon mayor council um i want to go back a little ways 1915 mr floyd sign purchased he sold the waterworks company to the city of glendale and that was our first municipal water works department over it's been 107 years over this period of time we have developed a high class superior water portfolio for the city of glendale on our citizens and it's made up of groundwater wells renewable surface water sources from the salt river the verde river and the colorado river and underground and we've stored four and a half years of underground effluent for uses just like what we're experiencing today also in 1976 we we developed our first srp surface water plant detroit water plant and the predominant part of our citizens were using ground water to time so then that plant now provided surface water for treatment and portable use for the citizens also in 2007 we built the oasis water treatment plant on that site there's two plants one's a groundwater treatment plant and the other one is an srp surface water plant and those two plants together have meets the demand for 45 of our citizens also in 1986 early 80s this colorado the cap canal came through this area and providing colorado river water to the agencies along the canal and we built the pyramid peak water treatment in 1986. that makes up 45 of the demand for the upper part of the city of glendale now the cap water that's coming through the pyramid treatment plant as we all know is undergoing significant challenges the challenges are mainly from low water intakes from from lake powell from reduced precipitation higher temperatures in the colorado river watershed and we are now approaching 23 years of drought in the southwest this is the driest time in the southwest in 1200 years this has caused both lake mead and lake powell to be at their lowest levels since they've been filled not only are lake mead and lake powell water level elevations in decline but the energy production from those dams is also in question the interior department is intervening to protect lake powell lake mead from reaching critical levels for water supply and energy production everyone has been asked to conserve as much as we can it's important to note the taps in the homes and businesses will not be impacted for the near future but the outlook for arizona colorado supply certainly warrants additional actions be assured just like in the previous 107 years that water services is on top of the current colorado developments and is working with federal state and other local agencies to get us through this together now i'll turn it over to drew and joanne and they'll go over the issues facing us in detail with the colorado river and what we are doing to make sure our strong water portfolio remains one of the best in the metropolitan area drew thank you mr johnson and it's a pleasure to be here mayor vice mayor council members and i think i was here last last year to talk about our tier one shortage on the colorado and now we're going to be talking a little bit about possibly even more shortage on the colorado let me see here there we go so today i'm going to be talking just an overview of the colorado river conditions how they've changed from even a year ago an overview of the salt river project water resources our next steps and then joanne toms our conservation specialist is going to be talking about our drought management and conservation tools that we're going to be using during this really stressful time on our water resources so i think i've showed you this slide before but it really is showing our portfolio it consists of central arizona project water which is basically colorado river water salt river project water from all the reservoirs and dams in the salt river project area groundwater from our wells and then effluent that we produce out of our wastewater treatment plants and we really like to say this is one water for glendale's water service area we use this water throughout the entire service area east of 115th avenue especially true this year we one of our salt river project waste treatment plants was down and that central arizona project water really was crucial from january all the way through april because we sent that down into the srp area so it is really kind of a one use one water for glendale's service area so kind of how did we get here on the current colorado river conditions and like craig said we have 23 years of drought in the desert southwest and even up in the colorado wyoming areas there's a new term that's being used it's called eridification and that's really just the drawing out of the western united states it's climate change it's less precipitation and it's higher temperatures and that altogeth all combined is really accelerating those shortages that we're seeing it's dry in the watershed so when that snow melts rather than running down to a drainage and then going into the colorado is actually being absorbed by the soil so that drying out really does even though we're getting you know potentially almost close to normal long-term average snowpacks we're getting much less runoff from that in in the 30 to 40 percent range so that's really what's causing this shortage is just the drawing and ratification of the western united states because of that the colorado river now has a new estimate total yield between the upper basin states and the lower basin states upper basins colorado wyoming new mexico and utah and the lower basins of course are arizona california and nevada we take about 15 million acre feet that's our use kind of that was granted to us for the upper and lower base mexico has about 1.5 million acre feet so out of that 16.5 what new scientists so what scientists are saying is new is that our new yields about 10 to 11 million acre feet well when we have a 16.5 potential use you can see where that problem starts really being accelerated we have historic low water levels in lake powell and like mead like mr johnson i had reported these are the lowest levels that since the fill of both of those reservoirs and those are the two largest reservoirs in the united states lake mead being number one in lake powell being number two and with that all of that snow pack up in the upper colorado watershed goes into the colorado river which then flows into lake powell lake powell has had very very small inflows into it over the last three years especially and that means that there's going to be lower water transfers from lake powell which happen every year into lake mead which then accelerates the shortage in lake mead and some of the water levels they start going down exponentially especially when the reservoirs are in a v shape as we start going down we accelerate that about every eighty thousand acre feet is about one foot of depth in those reservoirs so it really is accelerating and like craig said there's really uncertainty about power production at both hoover and glen canyon dams i'll go into that in a little more detail coming up but as we go down there's less pressure on those generators and those turbines and it produces less energy as we start to get lower water level elevations i wanted to show here kind of our current may 2022 conditions as opposed to a year ago in may 21 in the middle are the 2022 conditions you can see in lake mead currently it's about 32 percent full a year ago it was 39 full that almost equates just a little under 2 million acre feet that is no longer in lake mead with an elevation change of almost uh 20 feet in in lake mead lake powell unfortunately is even worse uh we are at about 24 currently in 2022 a year ago we were at 35 and uh we're getting a lot less we are almost a little under 3 million acre feet short of what we had last year uh elevation again is is very and this is the the big thing for lake powell is the elevation and i'll go into that in a little bit but we're almost seeing 40 feet of difference or actually 41 feet of difference in lake powell so blake powell has been going down extraordinarily fast so the bureau of reclamation's 2022 april 24 month study which comes out there's a there's one every month but the two that we really focus on are the april 24 month study and the august the april kind of gives us a precursor to what we're going to be seeing in the in in the august report the april kind of says hey this is what we should start preparing for the august 24 month report really tells us what stage of shortage we are going to be in in lake powell and both lake mead for the elevations come january 1st so this is going to be january 1st 2023 i'm sure i i probably will be back here talking to you about what that is showing for uh for the shortage coming up but really we get a pretty good indication from this april study so it is saying that we most likely will be in a tier 2 a shortage right currently we are in a tier 1. so what does a tier 2 a shortage mean it actually reduces arizona's colorado river supply by another 80 000 acre feet of water so that will bring our total arizona supply reduction to just a little under 600 000 acre feet that arizona will not be receiving projects it projects lake powell will be at a minimum power pool in march as early as march 2023 the minimum power pool is the level where lake powell and glen canyon dam will no longer be able to produce energy so that is the secretary of interior which i'll talk about a little bit is doing everything to avoid that there are some really big implications for that energy production page relies on a large portion of their energy for that as does the navajo reservation also page relies on lake powell for all of their water and as some of the navajo reservation about 30 percent i believe also depends on that reservoir for their water so it's it's very critical for water to remain above that minimum power pool in lake mead the good thing is it doesn't really reduce glendale's colorado river supply you you may wonder you may wonder why it doesn't reduce uh it's because we're being mitigated both through our drought contingency plan that was established in 2019 by the state and also we have a thing called the arizona water banking authority which is an entity that has stored water for times like this it is a state entity and we've stored about over 3 million acre feet in maricopa county to take that out to give to communities like us municipalities in time of the shortage of colorado river water so lake mead and lake powell water levels are predicted to continue to drop we we had a briefing on may 6th with the department of water resources the central arizona project and the bureau of wreck and it was pretty bad news we're looking at deeper cuts we're looking at the secretary really trying to hold up those water levels in pal we don't really know but all we really want to see is mother nature do a little more for us and really rain and snow but what we see right now is we just don't think that's going to happen enough to really get these things propped back up so that's why the study all these 24-month studies and some other studies that the bureau of rec are doing are really showing much deeper shortage tears as early as 2024 we could be in a tier three or deeper and according to this briefing on may 6. so as i said to help really protect lake powell because that is an energy producer it's water for page it's water for the navajo the us secretary and it also should i say it it actually helps protect our energy grid it's a crucial part of our energy grid it produces i think 5.6 million people rely on the power from lake powell so it is a really big energy producer so the u.s secretary of inter of interior really wanted to keep the level propped up above this power pool so they are going to transfer um instead of what we were supposed to get from lake powell until like made 7.48 million acre feet she's going to reserve 480 000 acre feet in lake powell and not transport that to arizona and to lake mead what does that mean that means our our new transfer is going to be 7 million instead of 7.48 of water from lake powell to lake mead in 2022. uh she's also going to be transferring water from upstream dams like navajo reserve nava excuse me flaming gorge reservoir in the amount of another 500 000 acre feet that's a fairly large reservoir in utah so she's planning to hold take that water and transfer that during the 22-23 water year so reductions in volume that are going to be transferred from lake powell into lake mead really will affect lake mead water levels so this in the in the may 6 briefing that's really they were saying yeah be prepared we are probably going to see deeper cuts probably earlier than expected because of trying to prop up lake powell and the effect it's going to have by doing that on our lake mead where we receive our water of course lake mead goes and goes into havasu lake havasu and from havasu it goes into the cap canal travels 336 miles all the way down to tucson so it really is a a critical time for for both lake powell and lake mead and like i said future cuts we think are coming we really don't know and it's really dynamic and i wish i could have a crystal ball to say what does that look like and what does that mean uh but we we really you know if you talk you know especially listening to the may 6 you know we really do not know because we're relying like i said on mother nature to provide that precip and that snowpack and and with along with that the temperature and and everything else that goes along with the sortification that i talked about earlier so some of the actions being taken you know we are and we have been working on this and i mean that collectively as states and the us government really trying to say hey what can we do for lake mead and lake powell so some of the current actions that are being taken arizona california nevada's 500-plus plan and you're going to be uh hearing that tonight a little bit you're going to vote on that to the 500-plus plan this is the compensated conservation which we are asking to contribute 350 acre feet of that so that water actually stays in lake mead to help prop it up so that is the plan to save up to 500 000. right now i don't think it's quite there i think it's about 250 but they keep asking for more contributions from different individuals and different such as uh the gila indian reservation uh community um so like i said you're gonna be voting on that tonight hopefully if i if you have any questions about that i can answer those too arizona is still working within our drought contingency plan guidelines these are all the cuts that are coming when you see those levels of 10 75 10 50 10 45 and 10 25 those are all within the drought contingency plan with associated shortage cuts and then we're really trying to conserve as much water in both reservoirs to help sustain water levels above these critical levels lake powell like i said the secretary's doing that we're trying to do as much with this 500 plus plan for for lake mead trying to do as as much conservation as we can and that is kind of the critical part that they're asking all the municipalities that joanne will talk about in a little bit too of how what else can we do what else can we do during this very dry time to conserve to do other things the good news salt river project reservoirs so salt river reservoirs are currently at 77 percent fall that's that's pretty good verde river reservoirs are currently at 33 percent full that's a little low but it usually happens for the birdie because it's more it's a smaller and flashier system total system is about 72 percent and compared to last year was 75. so it's a little lower but you know we're doing pretty good on our salt river you know project supply the monsoons last year helped terrific uh terrifically they uh we're expecting another good monsoon this year which probably means we're not going to have one because every time the meteorologists say we're going to have something never do but we're hoping for that because even the last year's monsoon actually put more water in the salt river project reservoirs then did the winter runoff that's pretty amazing when so we had a really terrific monsoon so i'm doing a little dance in my backyard trying to make sure that happens so for 2022 more srp groundwater will be used for delivery and that's the great thing about srp because they not only have surface water but they have a lot of wells located within their service area so if the reservoirs start getting down a little low they turn on those wells put it in the canal and will serve it to us so our mix between surface water and groundwater will change this year they're actually using more groundwater trying to reserve those we're at the water level in the reservoirs and and using less surface water did i skip one nope i didn't okay so the next steps um glendale's water portfolio remains very secure but we have to continue to prepare for accelerating and sustained shortage conditions and we really have and i'll the next slide i'll go into some of the and i think you've heard a lot of those but go into some of the things that we are doing so the arizona municipal water users association amwa along with glendale are revising messaging to proactively transition with the changing conditions and this means looking at adaptation how do we do long-term adaptation looking beyond the next few years what can we do explain the seriousness of the condition to our customers to the 10 cities of amway and beyond what what are we to expect in the coming years not only next year but within the next three years after that and then remind customers that we're not running out of water at our tap you know we're doing good we just have to start just like california did a couple years ago maybe conserving a little more being very conscious of our water use really starting to look at what does the future look like with lower colorado river supplies so then with the sport of city council management glendale is preparing for water shortages by the following and i know in water services we really do appreciate these things because they we do look at that this is our resiliency our redundancy for the future loss of this colorado river so we're drilling new groundwater wells for resiliency and that redundancy we're actually putting one in sierra verde park council member thomachoff's area and another one by the new children's hospital and those will be underway hopefully drilling by the end of june or early july these will help when that if we do get reduced of our colorado supply we can turn these wells on put them in the distribution system and it kind of replaces some of that colorado river water we're doing interconnects projects with peoria and phoenix which in times of emergency use we can call them up and have them turn on those interconnects and actually feed us water if our pyramid peak plant goes down which is our main colorado river plant we're working on the salt river project with numerous water supply projects they're very innovative and and they always like to get us involved with with really great projects we're working i think on three of those one is the raise a bartlett dam by 96 feet which will provide more water because the horseshoe dam in front of it is being silted in so this will actually give us some new water and potentially some new resource water resource the flood control control project in roosevelt lake this is utilizing the flood control space in a slower time so we actually can get about 5 600 acre feet out of that once if it fills up to that area and just an exchange of effluent project that we've been working on for multiple years with with the srp if that happens i think it's going to be really great for our portfolio again so we're we're really trying to work with as many entities as we can to really shore up our already strong portfolio and then conservation and adapt adaptability adaptability there we go that word always gets me projects excuse me um so joanne will be talking about about those too um so just to kind of reiterate glendale really does have a strong water water portfolio as craig said also we have over four and a half years of supply underground for future use and that's a combination of some effluent we've stored cap new conservation space water that we have in roosevelt lake that has been recharged so we do have a really good supply of water underground and we're going to continue to message and plan and implement especially during these times because we have to to really make you know sure that our citizens we're going to have water at that tap we're going to be doing everything we can and joanne tom's next to me is has great leadership in that and she's going to be talking about how we're going to message and plan and some of our drought management plans and i have full faith that joanne will steer that boat down the r you like that steer the boat down the right uh river yes so and with that if you do have any questions i guess maybe i can take those at this time thank you mayor um you know we're really lucky uh our citizens are really lucky to have you all in this department um you guys are very knowledgeable very confident is why i say we're lucky we're in a drought and you guys are very confident where we are and where we're going to need to go and what the next steps are so thank you for that but i also want to thank the staff that works with you who are out there treating the water doing the inspections and checking those are the boots on the ground and i mostly thank them but your leadership as well but thank them for for the work that they do and and when you're dealing with water there has to be a certain level of trust because they have access to water that goes to every single home and when we can trust people like this staff man that is great so our citizens are lucky to have you all question for you i've seen on the news and i don't believe it was glendale if it is it wouldn't surprise me because you guys are so uh innovative when you all or when the city tests our fire hydrants we just run water out like crazy are we reclaiming that because i seen on the news i don't know if it was city of phoenix or someone else is doing that are we doing that to save that water yeah mayor vice mayor council members yeah that was city of scottsdale okay that was doing that in fact i think on that video was an ex-employee of water services where we first started trying to get that project going and we actually looked into it here that's something that i think will be considered as one of the the choices of a way to save water within glendale i think it's a great idea i think it's proven technology at that time it we are still wondering if it had had a proven technology but i think you know scottsdale's kind of trial did show that it is a pretty viable option for us to try so i think that would could be in the future an option it is rather expensive but i think we could definitely as far as water savings that would be a really good option well i'm glad to know that one of our neighboring cities or cities in the state is doing that but let me help you with that um i'll ask for a council member item of interest and that's right now let's begin studying what it takes for this council to get the or for you all to bring us a proposal to begin that process of of reclaiming the water we use in our fire hydrants i think that will help you let's start doing that now if there's a cost to it we're recouping it from the water loss and i think it's just the right thing to do so hopefully the call for an item of interest will help you thank you thank you mayor uh you mentioned something effluent gray water i think that's got to be an option that now has to be considered is there enough enough technology available to actually reclaim gray water these days mayor council member clark yeah that's a really interesting point because some cities are saying that could be their most valuable water resource because it's always occurring you know we're always flushing taking showers doing other things there is technology it's called direct potable reuse and that's actually taking some of the water that we get out of our plants our a plus quality effluent taking that through advanced treatment and then serving that to customers california has done this in other communities scottsdale does have a pilot program where they in their in their plant they actually have this little mini uh advanced treatment system with the drinking fountain at the end so they were the first ones to actually pilot that in in the phoenix metropolitan in arizona there has been a bill that passed through and i think it's in the budget considerations right now for this direct potable reuse actually developing right now we're just in the pilot phase but there's going to be rural development for that and money needed to go forth with some of these projects so that bill is addressing that i believe right now that's in the budget process so i think everybody's kind of saying you know yes this is good some of the grey water systems are a little tougher because the home number one has to be you know that's just like from your sink and from your shower potentially and some of those are a little tougher to permit and plumb in the house you know but those are also some options what we'd like to see is a municipality we'd like to see all that water come to us because then we can do something with it you know one of the projects that i had talked about was our srp exchange possibly for affluent this is a a masterful idea that was developed by mr johnson and srp that really looks at providing us you know a high source quality source of water through an exchange of our refluent so as you said effluent has become so valuable and in many communities and i know peoria is one of those that they're counting on that and trying to get funding to actually do some of the direct potable reuse for the future are are we also pursuing that and looking at funding sources to develop our own program mayor council member clark right now we don't think because of what we're going through with the exchange process we're in in beginning talks because of that right now we don't think we we might not need that because of this this potential project in the future um i think it's always always something to consider and have in our back pocket i think other folks the good thing is other folks are going to get out there and actually do some permits they're going to do all the leg work for us so if we do have to come in a little after this you know we're going to have the permitting process down we're going to have the technology even advanced more than it is now and we'll have a lot of those a lot of those kind of growing pains figured out on how do we do direct portable reuse and serve that to customers thank you one final question i would think you know you've always our department has always touted redundancy and i think this is a component of redundancy so i would like to see us get involved sooner rather than later and i understand letting someone else develop the growing pains and and go going through that but i also think it's important that we prepare now and maybe secure funding and anticipation of such a project because i think that's the wave of the future and as you said effluent is going to become very very valuable and it's about time we've retained our own thank you she made me think of something when i grew up in maryville um lived uh like a lot of people in john f longhom uh block house no insulation just as bare bones basic as you could get and and like most people we had a swamp cooler and like most people we didn't have a float on it the water just simply ran through the cooler and ran on the ground and we had the largest most fruitful lemon tree that you can imagine in the greenest grass it was also great for a place for mosquitoes to grow i can remember as a kid it seemed like all summer long i had mosquito bites but when i was in the legislature i know for a fact that we dealt with this i can't remember what was done but the idea was is the gray water the bathtub the shower the dishwasher your kitchen sink those type of things where people could permit to where they could use that to water plants in their yard does glendale allow that now is that something that can be done is that something that we even even discuss i'm going to take a stab at answering that mayor so a couple of years ago i presented to the citizens utility advisory commission on gray water so i did some research so the arizona department of environmental quality oversees that gray water permit so what you're talking about like using your shower water or your laundry to water your trees so that is allowed years and years ago they used to require residents to get a permit but they knew that so many people were doing this rogue without getting permits that they developed a list of best practices so if you go on the adeq website now you can see gray water rules and one of the bigger rules is that you really don't want to store that gray water so for example if you're um have a washing machine and there's soap and there's you know dirt you don't want to have like a secondary containment you just want to put it out you know to the trees and then there's special types of soaps and so in conservation we've partnered before with a group called the watershed management group and that's really their bread and butter is you know how can we maximize every single drop of water whether it's gray water whether it's rain water but like drew said i think as the city we are the best at treating that water you know we want people's waste water so that we can treat that and we can reuse that but we know that people are going to be using that you know clothes washing for their their trees their fruit trees um but the adeq has really good rules so we in glendale i don't believe we prohibit that just because adeq allows that well and you sort of answer my question so if somebody's building a custom home do we encourage it because i understand why the city would want to water but i also understand that if a person doesn't have to buy water back again i mean you already paid for it once turn around have to buy it back again if you can utilize that for two different purposes that's a far better use of your water and and the benefit is uh now you don't have to spend money again to water your yard or your trees right so mayor and council um i don't think that the city like i said prohibits it or has special permitting for it that's something i'd have to definitely look into with our building code um but you are right that usually you'll have to have a different stub out for you know whether it's your shower water or whether it's your you know sink water or your washing machine but again there are groups that do help have workshops for people like i said the watershed management group and they actually have like tours where people can go and see another resident that has these different stub outs and i've even seen instances where they would like label the stub outs like this goes to the apple tree this goes to the citrus tree and this goes to the fig tree so there's some people that are really really into that which is great okay and i guess my my again i'll i'll say it again do we have a program that would encourage people to do that do we have anything i know we have programs that say we'll give you x amount of money if you change your landscape into xeroscape but do we have something that says if you want to utilize that i i think it's a good idea it's it's cost prohibited for somebody to go back and try to change your plumbing once your home is built but if we at least give that as an option for people to think about when they're building uh it might help with resale also and i'm sorry mayor if i didn't answer your question um no glendale currently doesn't have a rebate for gray water um we just have like workshops to teach people how to how to do that if they want to and my question wasn't a rebate it was a way for people to understand that they could do it and and not necessarily discourage it but let them know what they can do legally to do that that's something you never hear about i've never heard anybody say i want to buy a house over here because i can get this done yeah so mayor and council yes we can definitely do more education in that area for sure that's a great idea thank you question yes mayor thank you um so um and thank you for the presentation i think you covered things well there's um sometimes those of us spend a lot of time in this maybe forget a few of the minor details that the general public might be wondering about and so i was going to see about hitting maybe a couple of those so one is that if if the colorado river and the c.a.p is going to reduce supplies to the cities but it's not going to impact us at our taps well who is it impacting that's a good point it really does impact the system the colorado river system and even though it's not impacting us it's we're being made whole while in reality if we weren't being made whole by the mitigation we would have to be reduced so it's really buying us time i think council member to to look at how do we adapt how do we build more resiliency and redundancy so it really is affecting i think you know some of the upper basin states and some of the other the way we collaboratively use the river and that water supply so yes i think it really it's delaying while we hope for mother nature or we can figure out what we can do to increase the supplies okay well i was kind of thinking about maybe in the area of like cuts to agriculture that's one of the things that's happening so this reduction in water is really being felt first and probably foremost by agriculture um industry are they feeling cuts at this point i know it's a it's a it's a tiered kind of a thing so yeah who loses water first then who loses a second and then finally at some point the cities actually will lose water mayor council member thank you thank you for that question too yeah it is really the ag community and it's really based on that priority system of colorado river water you know the farmers and a lot of the farming community have ag agricultural water we call it nia non-irrigate or not indian agriculture water that's a very low priority so when you start getting these cuts it goes first and really right now in that community it's pretty much gone all of that nia water the next it starts to affect is municipal and industrial water so that's that next tier of priority um in a two in a tier two a and a tier two b we start seeing some of that reduction of that municipal and industrial water but again it's being mitigated through either the the drought contingency plan or by the arizona water banking authority when we get into deeper cuts so it really does affect uh those lower priorities and as we go on we we also have some what we call priority three water it's our our highest priority uh that is really water that has been giving that designation uh and we don't have i wish we had all of our water that because that really is the last to be cut so um and most of our water is the uh municipal industrial and that and the p3 water we only have about i think four percent of our nia water that is glendale's but as a as a state and a system yeah you're you're totally correct uh council member that the ag community will get cut first uh within that okay thank you and mayor if i can so as less water comes down through the cap the central arizona project still has to operate the canal the pumps and all of that so they basically have fixed costs but a reduction in in acre feet of water coming down and correct me if i'm wrong but that is causing the cost per acre foot of cap water to rise and am i right on that yeah mayor council member yes you're totally correct on that it uh in fact this year um we are expecting close to a 25 35 percent raise in our cp rates for our raw water um and that water really i think at the last central arizona project or the cawcd central arizona water conservation district board meeting they they had talked about how can we help the municipalities with some of this cost increase by using ad valorem taxes that are collected on behalf of cawcd and actually the board did recommend adding some of this tax money to offset some of our charges it was going to be about 41 i believe was the initial estimate for the increase um now it's going to be definitely less than that but it still is an increase and as we you were totally correct council member as we start getting less and less water because of these shortages and through that cap canal because of that o m stays the same and it's right over a lower amount of water our rates will continue to rise for cap okay thank you and advise me if i can continue so as i my recollection is and you know for what good my recollection is that the cost increased to um uh amwas cities the 10 major cities here in the valley was going to be an increase of about 70 million dollars and there were some board members who were in favor of offsetting uh that cost to us and others who were in favor of not doing anything at all ultimately they were able to find a price in the middle so they are going to be offsetting out of their savings their their fund balance if you will they'll be taking some money out of fund balance they have several fund balances but they'll be using some of that to help mitigate the price increase that's going to the cities so cities like ours and i explained to the board when i was there that we go through a lengthy process to establish our rates with uh starting with workshops and the advisory commission and and public meetings um and then back to workshop and then to voting meeting it's all uh there's a lot that goes into it and we just adopted a five-year rate plan and now based on the projections that the cap gave us for the cost of water in the future and now it's you know measurably larger and so somehow our city and all the other cities are going to have to figure out how does that you know where does the shortfall now that extra charge going to come from and the challenges you know is it going to come out of cities increasing their water rates again uh is it going to come from uh for stalling capital improvement projects which are actually projects that are meant to conserve water that are meant to prevent leaks and and waste water waste in the future or to ensure redundancy and resiliency between cities so we don't end up in mms so it gets it gets rather complicated at that point so um so and that's something that's going to roll back to us as a council um you know how are we going to you know the policy issues to how do we how do we move forward in the not just in the face of potential reduced water but increased water cost so and it was mentioned today that we have a four and a half year supply of water stored and and it's a good thing we do and a lot of this water is water that had we left it in lake mead california would have had claim to it it would have you know it's we don't have that if we don't take it then we lose it for a lot of the water so that's a lot of what we've been able to store over the years and it's good that we do and four and a half years is one way to look at it another way perhaps to look at it would be if we were to have a 10 reduction in water supplied to us what we have stored could last roughly 45 years to make up for that shortfall so just i don't i'm not predicting a 10 reduction i'm not saying it'll be that or it would be less or more i'm just saying it's not just a four and a half year it's to to backfill any water uh cuts that we may have and i want our residents to know that that's we're looking long-term and trying to make sure that uh we'll always be in that situation and then the other thing i guess i would i've got a few other points but um i will say that i think we need to make sure that water policy is something we're looking at throughout the city some cities have already instituted their doubt their drought contingency plans and that may be something for us to consider as well other amway cities may be doing it in the near future we may want to do it in concert with other cities to raise awareness for what we're doing and what we need to do and the other is that i would say that water policy needs to be part of our economic development policy as well and that economic development and our water services department need to be communicating tightly about what kinds of economic development are we looking to entice into glendale in the future we've in the past we've talked about do we or don't we want low-wage jobs well we need to look do we don't we want high water use industries in our community can we afford in essence to have them and we need to make sure that the water use is an important and a high priority evaluation of any of our economic development activity so enough for now but thank you all right i just want to remind everybody there's still more to this presentation but we're going to take your question and then i stepped out for a minute i thought we were finished i will wait to the end okay thank you okay so thank you mayor and council for the opportunity to talk about the city's drought management plan so the city has a drought management plan which is different from the drought contingency plan that drew talked about to prepare and respond to water shortages and to keep the community informed about how they may be impacted this plan is for the glendale water service area that includes all of glendale's water supplies in the plan there are various water reduction measures to conserve water such as discouraging the use of decorative fountains and water misting systems prohibiting water waste restricting landscape irrigation to selected times and days prohibiting winter grass and prohibiting the washing of vehicles and paved areas please note that these measures on outdoor water use because water savings can be achieved without compromising public health and safety the plan is required by state law so other water providers have their own plans is in chapter 33 of the city code and was last updated in 2016. water services staff have updated the plan to correspond with the colorado river shortage tiers finally i want to mention that the plan will need to be updated again in the future as conditions change and because the colorado river existing management guidelines are set to expire in 2026 the drought plan has five stages the arizona department of water resources recommends to have a stage zero normal conditions to serve as a baseline i use the acronym wade why alert declaration and emergency to help me remember stages one through four the stages are color coded to help customers identify them and the required actions the prompt for each stage is based on the percent of actual water supply reductions whether it's from the central arizona project or the salt river project since the city's water supply and demand may change there is flexibility in the drought stage prompts and the response measures each stage is progressively more stringent than the last stage in stages one and two the focus will be on increased water conservation communications and services for our customers who will be asked to voluntarily reduce their water use the city however will demonstrate leadership by having mandatory water reduction goals and following the mandatory water reduction measures that's appropriate for the particular stage in stages three and four water reduction measures will become mandatory for all customers so that includes residents and businesses in stages one and two those are declared by the city manager and stages three and four are declared by the city council because there is an enforcement component with those latter two stages as you can imagine when we implement the drought management team it will require a tremendous amount of teamwork communication cooperation and coordination the drought management team will be led by the water services department but will include key staff from several city departments the team will consist of an executive team that will be made up of directors and an implementation team that will be made up of managers water services will provide technical assistance to city departments and monitor water use and savings the departments will provide feedback on challenges to achieving these water reduction measures and re achieving those goals the team will communicate with customers lead by example and make sure that the city is following those mandatory water reduction goals i'm excited to show you this dashboard this is a screenshot of the city's water use dashboard which was a collaborative project between the department of organizational performance it and water services this dashboard shows the city's mirrored potable water use over the past five years starting in 2017 all the way through 2021 the dotted line shows the city's average historical water use the green orange and red bars show the 5 to 10 10 to 15 and 15 to 20 percent mandatory water reduction goals that align with each of the city's drought stages i just want to convey that i'm very extremely grateful to the department of organizational performance and i t for helping create this dashboard because this will allow conservation staff to be more out in the field providing direct assessment excuse me direct assistance to our customers whether it's city departments or residents or businesses and less time doing manual data entry so i'm extremely grateful to have this dashboard at our disposal it's just a great example of innovation at the city in cooperation with other departments i want to highlight that communication is essential in keeping the community city leadership and employees informed about the glendale drought plan to date water services has partnered with public affairs to create a drought preparedness webpage various press releases social media content and drought information that's in the city's clean and green calendar and the city's annual water quality report also on april 27th the water services department hosted the seventh annual environmental summit for over 55 city employees which covered water resources the drought plan and we also had a water conservation brainstorming session amongst those 55 city employees and it created a lot of dialogue and some really great ideas water services is aware that city employees may be asked questions about the drought plan about water shortage about our water resources so we're preparing various drought faq sheets to provide to those city employees this next slide just goes over a tentative timeline and i just want to reiterate that it is subject to change just because things are changing and are so dynamic on the colorado river watershed ongoing water services is maintaining communication with all of our stakeholders and our partners like the arizona municipal water users association an announcement should be coming out in the next week that other amwa member cities are intending to enter stage one of their drought management plans glendale is also prepared to enact stage one watch of the drought management plan however there are several elements to continue to prepare for such as activating the drought management team that i talked about finalizing our drought communications plan and reviewing the bureau the bureau of reclamation's august 24 month study which is the official determination of what colorado river shortage tier we will be in for calendar year 2023 when these elements are in place glendale will declare a stage one of the drought management plan again the emphasis of stage one is to raise awareness and promote the city's water conservation tools i want to reassure you that we're prepared for this before i talk about the city's various conservation tools i do want to show this chart that shows how the city's water demand and population has changed so from 2000 to 2020 glendale's population as displayed in the orange line that has increased by six percent yet our demand as displayed by the blue bars has decreased by 10 percent water conservation has been part of the city's long-term water management strategy that's why the city has invested in programs to help our customers improve water efficiency so one of the tools actually two tools that i want to talk about are the landscape rebate and the water budget program the city's landscape rebate program incentivizes the conversion of unwanted grass to xeriscape since 1986 over 5600 residential and 54 non-residential customers have converted unwanted grass to xeriscape if you add up all of that acreage that's 118 acres of grass to xeriscape so that's about 118 football fields it's incredible this council approved program has resulted in the savings of millions of gallons of water every year another tool is the city's landscape water budget and this actually shows customers how their actual water use compares with the recommended water use so in the chart you'll see kind of like a bell curve with the yellow or maybe kind of orange bars that's what a recommended water budget should be based on the landscape type on the size the density and then the red bars is showing what an actual customer was watering based on their water bills so this one program is very successful in that it just helps customers with large landscape areas know how much to water every single month it's a reminder to change their irrigation timers monthly ideally and if they don't do it monthly at least seasonally i also want to talk again about the department of organizational performance in it because we are working on another dashboard and this dashboard shows 80 different properties and i forgot to mention we're also partnering with public facilities recreation and special events so we will have a dashboard that shows the recommended water budgets for 80 different city properties so this is very exciting another tool that i want to talk about are the water efficiency assessments that water services provides this includes creating an inventory of water using fixtures identifying leaks creating landscape water budgets that i talked about offering free water efficiency devices such as pre-rinse spray valves for commercial kitchens and faucet aerators and it also entails preparing a report with historical water use and recommendations to date conservation staff have conducted assessments at 18 city facilities identifying 2.4 million gallons of potential water savings and at 26 businesses identifying 16.7 million gallons of potential water savings another tool for those that enjoy working online is the water use calculator so again as an animal member city we take advantage of all of the wonderful amwa resources and one of which is a calculator this helps a customer create a monthly water use budget based on the number of occupants age of home and devices water use behaviors and the size of their landscape and pool and then the city has a new water savings calculator which allows customers to input their monthly water bill data calculate water saving goals and learn what steps to take to achieve those goals and then finally i just have some good news i just want to thank aps for giving the city a five thousand dollar grant to make water efficiency kits for glendale residential customers the funding was originally for 250 kits but it just it just became very popular that we keep sustaining this so to date we have over 500 kits we've processed and i want to thank community services for their partnership on this program because the kits are all being distributed at the four glendale public libraries um so again wonderful collaboration and then i shared this at a september presentation but i just want to remind the mayor and council that we did receive a 50 000 water smart grant from the bureau of reclamation and this is to help you know city facilities also non-residential customers improve their water efficiency through upgraded irrigation technology equipment um so that could be like smart irrigation timers that could be pressure compensating irrigation equipment um so we're very very close to having our online application for those customers i think we have like 15 hoas that are in the queue to apply for this so this is really exciting so that concludes my presentation and i welcome any questions good thank you mayor a good presentation not great news a couple of questions number one is it is it time for us to update our incentives for residents to offer i've had residents ask me why don't we incentivize conversion of backyards why don't we incentivize low you know replacement of uh appliances and so forth with low low use um devices is is it time is it is this the time for us to take a look at incentivizing people i mean because there's an expense for people um but there's you know a good reason to replace um you know maybe your washing machine i mean the newer washing machines use a lot less water than the older washing machines and things like that so is this the right time for us to take a look at maybe revamping that program so mayor and councilmember tomachof it's like you read my mind you know you guys know i live and breathe water conservation i've been so blessed to work at the city for 17 years and i'm always wanting to grow the program and so i would love to come back with a proposal on additional water efficiency rebates um that we can offer to whether it's our residential customers or our non-residential customers but i i think the timing is is ideal okay thank you mayor if i could i have another question um when would be the time for us to i guess it would start with cue act too and this was why the exact reason why i didn't want to approve a five-year water plan because we the writing was on the wall i mean we are we have no way to anticipate what our cost of water is even going to be next year um much less in two or three or four or five years so um i know that the the it was approved based on the idea that it it's going to be reevaluated every year um i mean we're not going to be whatever our increases that we approved is certainly probably not going to cover our increase in cost even most likely next year so how are we moving forward with planning and getting out in front of this um as far as what our rates are uh mayor councilmember tom trump that's a good question we've got um when we fight when we finish this year we're all we see pretty much where we're going to be at in end of the year we're going to be in the black at the end of the year and whatever we have left over goes into our fund balance then we'll then we'll reevaluate because we're getting price increases pretty much on a regular basis for our chemicals and stuff but i think we'll we'll evaluate that and we'll talk to the city manager and then we'll look at where we go from there but right now i'm seeing that we've got uh we'll have a uh we'll be in the black we'll carry that over and then we'll go from there so that's how we want to approach it okay um i think that's i think that's a good plan mayor if i could one other thing councilman turner brought up i thought an important point we look at the economic benefits to the city of proposed industrial uses that were and i don't know if it's possible but i would think it would be incredibly help for us to know if we could get a projection on what kind of water use is that industrial use going to to how much water is it going to use um if that's something that they can project i think it would be something that we should know um and then i don't know whether you know we would need to offer incentives but i know that there's been in fact i think one of them was in glendale has proposed and i know that it's epcor i know that but it's still water i mean it's still water it doesn't really matter whether it's coming out of our resources or epcor where it's coming from it's coming from srp or cap it's water in the valley so um but if they are recycling and and reusing their own water if they're using it for cooling or cleaning or what they're doing and if there's i mean those are kind of the kind of things that i think moving forward with the situation we're in um that we should know that um what you know what what what is the water use and do you have a plan for reusing the water um and then lastly um thank you for coming out i held a meeting i think our responsibility is to set a good example number one and to make sure that the residents are informed because people want to do the right thing they really want to do the right thing if they understand the situation we're in i mean we don't certainly don't want to end up in stage three or four if that's where we have to go but i think if we really take the time to try to educate the residents on you know it's a lot it uses a lot less water to drive through a car wash and to wash your car in your driveway and things like that that people maybe just don't even know that they shouldn't be doing and letting your sprinklers run into the street and you know down into the storm drain and so i think you know it's our responsibility as as representing citizens to make sure that they have the information because if they don't have the information they can't do the right thing so i'm we're going to i'm going to be asking you to do a repeat performance with this new information and i think councilmember milner and i are going to partner on that and to make sure that we inform residents and give them an opportunity to do the right thing and conserve water thank you mr milner uh thank you mayor just a quick question along those same lines i noticed on our website that the incentive for converting grass excludes artificial grass to me it would seem that we'd want to encourage that because it does two things it takes away the water use but it also adds you know some greenery to the city why don't we allow that so mayor and councilmember melnar that's such a great question and it is a very popular question so back in 2008 uh the centers for disease control had a health advisory on potential lead exposure to artificial turf and that was based on research on fields back in the east part of the united states i want to say it was in new jersey so um at the time the staff decided that let's just play it safe and let's just not incentivize artificial turf we'll still um allow a customer to put artificial turf in we just won't measure that as part of the landscape conversion so we constantly are doing research on that i actually did some research the city of scottsdale will allow up to a thousand square feet for artificial turf and so i shared that with management staff that maybe we want to look at that where we don't exclude it but we may want to limit you know how much that the city will incentivize it so um you know at amwa we actually brought in some professors from asu to talk a little bit about you know the pros and cons with artificial turf and these particular researchers were experts on the urban heat island effect and so they were talking about some of the cons with just really increasing the temperature and that you still have to put water on the artificial turf to clean it and to cool it down so there's there's some pros and cons with going with artificial turf but i think you're right is it it may be time to re-look at that and maybe change the policy for that and i'd be happy to come back with a proposal on that as well yeah i think it's time to at least look at it and determine if we should do it thank you all right let me i've got a couple things that we used to have a frequent visitor on tuesdays and uh i think everybody remembers him but he always always always complained about overflow from islands and on a main road so i guess number one is uh is there any plans or thoughts about how are we going to deal with it we have a consistent violator like i'm not saying you want to penalize but you certainly got to make them aware that what they're doing uh again his his concern is uh it's it's creating damage to the road which i know that water on a consistent basis over and over and over and asphalt is not good but the other side to that is that's water that maybe you know down the road we may actually need so that's something i think we need to be talking about on occasions like that and then secondly i think we need to be looking in our own house as a city uh how come we haven't converted all the urinals uh in city owned property to the waterless a lot of businesses have done that i i know it's not the cheapest thing in the world but over time i think it certainly would be wise both in cost as far as not using water and at the same time it certainly accomplishes a goal it's hard to tell somebody to do something when we're not doing it ourselves good thank you man similar to what the mayor said on the urinals but not necessarily just there's there's a lot of businesses out there that that run water non-stop throughout their operations it's because of they can't afford to turn it off because they're cooking so much the water needs to keep running so that and then there's a lot of business that have cooling towers that run quite a bit of water and what what those businesses are doing excuse me are putting meters on there to get sewer credits so they're getting super credits but we're just running water like crazy so if i were to ask can we go out there and stop that is that just nickel and diming us or is that significant amounts of water that we're losing so mayor and vice mayor i can uh answer your question about cooling towers so that's a big part of conservation training so cooling towers are as far as indoor uses the biggest indoor use um the reason that it's such a big use is because the cycles of concentration you want to make sure that you keep the total dissolved solids down and so in summonses instances um that water that goes down into the cooling tower just goes straight down into the sewer that would be one cycle of concentration ideally in our climate you'd want to have something like two meaning that the water just circulated at least a couple times but what happens is that you know it's a little bit of water chemistry and also you don't want the cooling tower unit to get scaled up because then it just doesn't run efficiently so there's plenty of room for improvement as far as improving the cycles of concentration with cooling towers there are contractors that specialize that in that right they go to the grocery stores they go to other large you know schools they go to other large commercial customers i'm not sure if i'm answering your question but that is a huge water use and and perhaps there's a requirement that a property has to do at least two cycles of concentration i don't think it's realistic to get higher like some cities in california can because they have just different water quality but that could be a policy no thank you and you're and you're very knowledgeable in cooling towers because you outlined it exactly how it works and why they have to flush the water but well i guess my question simply is with those restaurants that have that practice and cooling towers for schools and colleges and everybody else if we were to go out and create a policy that had stopped that or reduced it or reclaimed are we talking about a lot of water or is it just nickel and diming is it it is a lot of water i wish i could um i don't have that data with me but i could look that up for you as far as but it is you know most of the water use for us and our climate is going to be outdoors but then when you look on indoors a lot of times people think it's going to be toilets um you know showers but it would be a cooling tower as far as the type of facility no need to go out and study here and that i just want to know if it was significant or if i was just it is yeah you can share with them how you're going out now and looking at the commercial entities and so we we have a service that goes out there for free now and looks at that we could look at expanding that but you might share with them what you're doing now right so um mayor and vice mayor and council when we do the water efficiency assessments for city facilities and for commercial facilities part of that assessment is looking at all water using fixtures appliances devices and we do actually go out to the cooling towers and it takes time to kind of learn it and they're loud they're not the funnest places to be but there's things that we're looking at we always want to look at the um the chemistry log so if they have a contractor that's doing the you know the chemicals we can see what their cycles of concentration has been we look at the makeup water we look at the blow down water we look to see if the float is working properly so there's like a little checklist that we do we're kind of providing at a high level you know uh service i'm definitely not a cooling tower expert i will tell you that first and foremost so um but there are they are very complicated uh i mean they're they're simple in a way but they you you have to get experience and over time we've we've done that by looking at city facilities and then also commercial properties thank you all right um just to maybe touch on that one point i was impressed very impressed with the slide that you had on the water efficiency assessments um slide 20 something but um so you've done these water use surveys and and the point being that at 18 city facilities you're able to find a way to save 2.4 million gallons of water which okay that's 2.4 million but more importantly it went to 26 businesses so half again as many businesses and came up with ways they can save 16.7 million gallons of water so it makes me proud that our cities our city was already doing well but we found ways to save money but this this program we offer is a huge service to our restaurant to our hotels and to any of our other businesses that use a fair amount of water because that's 16.7 million gallons of water that they've been paying for that they don't have to and 16.7 million that stays in our system to be used by all of us and to to be used wisely so it's very impressive that's an excellent program and and uh i appreciate that we have that thank you what do you have left oh that that concludes our presentation additional questions there's no other questions we'll try to get on to our last item item number three thank you presentation of the city's a z tax central app mayor members of the council here to provide staff report on this item we're real excited about doing we're going to ask our director of i.t information services pharaoh's machina to come up and he'll lead us through the presentation mayor council good afternoon we're here to give you a deeper look at our new aztecs central application we talked about it in our previous presentation we'll walk you through the rationale behind building the app um the team that was involved and the way we developed through a close collaboration with department of revenue and also the facts that led us to develop this application so uh with me for this presentation our presentation is about three-part so i'll walk you through how we came to the decision of making the app jonathan hill from our finance team will talk to you about the business case behind this business challenge and problems we were experiencing and how this application resolves those and he will also provide you a perspective in terms of how this can benefit other cities brian from rit team who's the architect of this application will walk you through a live demonstration of this application we'll conclude our presentation with a view into our uh product webpage which is part of our city's website and we'll end with our short web commercial of this product so before we proceed i have my project team here with me so they are here this is a team effort collaborative efforts this is it team finance was part of it and certainly we needed the leadership support from city manager's office when we went up with the idea that there is nothing commercially available and this is a viable solution that we can turn this into a product as opposed to a project that was developed for internal use only so um next slide please so how did we arrive at this decision and it's one thing for us to come to conclusion to say yeah this looks good let's turn this into a product it's another thing to base it on facts that were available to us um not a news article published in the newspaper but by auditor general of state of arizona who audited department of revenue and found that the new law and the way they were collecting taxes there were significant gaps and issues and challenges same article cites a story of a business owner from glendale experiencing those problems um recognizing the fact that sales tax revenue is life blood of the city and the recommendation from this audit report were that we should have more data accessibility and there should be more collaboration between department of revenue and the cities so we can address this problem appropriately so that led us to this decision of turning this project into a product so not only we benefit from it but our other neighboring cities can benefit from it so with that i'm going to hand it to jonathan so he can talk about the role of sales tax revenue in the context of our city the challenges without this application and how this application solves this problem jonathan good afternoon mayor council so i'm going to go over a little bit of background and sell of sales tax so everyone's on the same page and talk through the struggles we were having as a city and then also how the solution that was developed by business and i t overcame those solutions so as faros mentioned sales tax is the lifeblood of sales tax i mean sorry of the city uh this graph shows just that over half of our general fund is rece is uh from sales tax we get you know just 51 percent and this doesn't include state share of revenue so this is self-collected city of glendale sales tax this slide represents uh how a business used to file and pay sales tax which is the first half and the second half is how currently it works prior 2017 a customer walk into a business buy an item on that invoice you would have that item and sales tax the customer would pay for that uh they would pay the business and then the business would have to file a tax return to each city that they were located in and to the department of revenue this is how glendale used to receive our sales tax and the tax return information straight from the source straight from the business in 2017 simplification you may have heard of went into effect it was signed prior to that by starting in 2017 is when it went live so the same thing same transaction happens but to make it a little bit easier for the businesses they'll have to file one tax return now and so that tax return is filed to the department of revenue notice on this slide on the second half it's missing something something important to us right the city it's the glendale so how do we get our sales tax so the same flow that you said you saw the previous slide now department revenue gives the money and the data to the individual cities so about the money and the data so every week department revenue deposits the money and for the individual cities and with that money comes the nine different uh files you see on the screen this is raw information that dor provides to us it's you know the or got it from the taxpayer and then dur process in the system and then delivers it to us each file is unique uh in its own right it's not consumable consumable on its own every file is unique has their own information and so you see nine on the screen so depending on on the week we can get up to 13 of these files now for the city of glendale we took some of this information and we put into a database and how we consume that data are users of the data as you see on the right auditors our collectors and our licensing staff would have to use microsoft sql to pull that information out of the database and as a as those titles and those those are not usually i.t titles right so this is a non-native skill set that our staff had to learn how to use to be able to help our taxpayers and the businesses so i use an example if a business called us and they want to inquire about their sales tax usually would have to you know get the information and call them back because we ourselves would have to run up to nine different queries pull that data out and put it into a more usable format that you know finance people like which is excel and so it would put in something like as you see on the screen get an overall picture of that business's tax information and then we'll be able to call the customer back usually one or two hours later and explain to them what information we found so we want to help them with their glendale location but if they have other locations throughout the state oh thank you for your help how about my phoenix location so unfortunately we didn't have that information hop on the phone with department of revenue again so you know this was something that uh as our city staff and our customers you know we want to provide the best experience for them so we knew we needed something better and what does that mean so you know that example i just gave you they had their phoenix location so how do we get all their statewide information how can we get that so that's what it did for us they got all the information uh from the statewide data that dor provides and gave us access to it and so we had about average of 50 of the data so now you can see we have a hundred percent of the data and so the numbers you see on the right those grow up to half a million to a million records each week per file yep profile and so as you can see that's a large amount of data that's one of the reasons why we didn't have that data before it was a lot to consume luckily for us it was able to figure it out now we have access to 100 of the information but there's still that issue of how do we get access to it right we don't want to use something we're not native we don't have to spend a lot of time using sql we're going to be able to help customers on the spot so that's where it came up with the aztecs central and so with that solution as brian's about to demo it cut down our research time from that one or two hours to two to five minutes so now we can help those customers on the phone they don't have to worry about if we're gonna call them back we're gonna answer their questions for all their locations across the state right then and there um so we got proactive notifications so what that means is anytime if we trigger an account anytime new information comes from department revenue to us we'll get an email notification we don't have to do manual repetitive searches anymore that will come to our inbox ease of use we wanted something like i said that that's a native to all of us uh we got tired of using sql learning how to code uh to get information so we wanted something you know like i'll use google um how you can search for a business on google that's the same way this system operates and brian's going to show you that shortly another thing is business driven innovation so we worked with it and they let us lead this but they were also open to listen to our id our ideas were the users consumers of the data so they know how we want to see it so their willingness to be open and take our advice and and present this solution to us um that being said there's any questions before we walk through the demonstration preparing council thank you i get the best job of the day i'm sorry is that better kind of repeat sorry mayor and council thank you um i do get the best job of the day like i mentioned uh because as soon as we get over here get to show you guys some of the tools and and really the fruit of the collaboration that jonathan mentioned between it and finance it was really a great thing to be a part of opening up the application here we're going to show you today as faro's kind of mentioned we're going to show you the version of the application that is for the partner cities um as we attempt to open this up and and have the other cities join us and so it doesn't have every feature that we have on our internal it doesn't hook to every source it really focuses on the statewide data and that's the big difference as jonathan mentioned so it's hooked to our demo database so all that information is scrambled on the department of revenue confidentiality laws we scrambled up all the data so that we can demonstrate to you and other cities um along the way so here this is the typical landing page we have favorites that come up over in this section which i'll show you here in a second but that is some of the ability to mark and allows the cities including our staff to move from a reactive to a proactive nature over here is this related to me and it's just another step in moving to that proactive in which the system as the files that jonathan mentioned are imported every week the system keeps track of the ones that are important to the user that is logged in and then will provide some basic information you know that taxpayer has filed a return has made a payment or maybe there's a new owner that kind of stuff that could facilitate questions coming from the business owner a quick run down here on the menu as jonathan mentioned we get they say finance came to us and said that they wanted an easy way to search this data um jonathan likes to throw out google but we all know bing is out there and you know it's it's just as good we can be honest but with that we came up with these five searches that are the key to getting the information right now and which we'll demonstrate here in just a second we allow them to also dive into the key data files in the raw state and then break it up by the different cities so if a taxpayer does call one of jonathan's staff for example and inquires not just about a glendale location but a phoenix or maybe a chandler location they can see that information as well the system also tracks favorites and then the history so that if a user looks at something a week prior and then wants to go back and look at it again they can just jump into their history and then quickly get to it lastly there's the reports menu the the top four are the standard i should say top five sorry and then the ones below such as the downtown auto dealer our sports entertainment district and other things those are city-specific groupings and what that allows is for jonathan his staff and management to group businesses based on their location or areas of interest so that they can quickly be pulled up again in future months and then comparisons can be made and all of that kind of stuff which council has before asked for such information so it's allowing staff to be able to get that information to to you all faster with that said using that example um that pharaohs mentioned in the beginning if a business owner were to call the city and inquire about taxes that were going on while on the phone they can search for that business and again we're using scrambled data so the the names are going to look all all nice and funny and then they can click into that and then it loads and one thing i'd like to mention is that while we're looking at scrambled data we kept the same volume so that search that just occurred it is searching through all the statewide data there's about 35 million payments like about 24 million tax returns and all that stuff and our goal was at nit was to make it fast so that again we can get that time savings and if the business owner is on the phone we don't want to go uh please hold on one second it's loading i think we've all heard that when we've called in a different help desk so from here we can see that we are on a glendale location we can see because of the groupings that this location is in one of our areas we can scroll down and we can see information quickly about different periods that have been filed about payments and about returns um additionally up here at the top we quickly can recognize that this business owes the city 2600 now if this business owner was on the phone with us that would probably be their question is why did you guys send me a bill why do i owe you money where before as jonathan mentioned we would have to call the business owner back but our goal was to be able to be on the phone we can quickly scroll down we can see that maybe it's likely based on a history here that a couple extra zeros were accidentally entered and so the system's going hey you owe us money that perhaps the business owner doesn't really owe us um and so it's quick identification of that at the same time as jonathan mentioned if the business owner was like well what about my phoenix location you know are those filings coming through in the past we would have to send them to dor which i can imagine as a business owner would be very frustrating now our staff can click on this area right here which is our fictitious license number for the state now every location for this business loads as you can see we can see every location that this business has within the state and then this phoenix one was the question in particular we can click on it and now we can answer with them on the phone the question of no all your filings for phoenix are coming through just fine and lastly we'd like to point out if that business owner even started asking us questions about other businesses that they may own they can quickly click on an owner jump over to a search and i'd like to point out that just searched about five or six million um owners um statewide and then we can jump in to say this was the printing one that they have a question about and now we're on to this license answering their questions so really what we want to demonstrate to you today is how fast the information can be retrieved sorted through and really we took the statewide data and we tried to give it context so that it has meaning not just for staff but for the business owners that call us every day with questions thank you any questions uh again thanks uh for a great job uh i know this is a critical thing for our taxes uh just one question regarding how effective will this new program be in in auditing um say non-compliance uh businesses that aren't paying their taxes the way they should be mayor council well now we have the mission the information available to us immediately and quickly so this way in the last slide on there i don't have the slides from in the last slide where it talks about ease of use there's a number on there there's 21 000 licenses search there it is when we got this we in the first three months this went live internally for glendale january 2021. in three months we searched 21 000 statewide licenses that's more than the staff did all prior to the system you manually enter into sql so by having this information available we're able to quickly search businesses identify businesses um that either are non-compliance either with not filing or maybe just finally not paying you know now with the system you walk go to lunch come back within within as fast as brian showed you we can see if that business is current you know we drive out there's a new business we drive a driving home write it down come back to work that fast we can see if they're compliance i appreciate that uh and a good job any other questions oh not a question but a comment congratulations to your department and to finance for working collaboratively and coming up with a program that makes sense for the city and and i would think that other cities would be very interested in the same program and i think you ought to charge them a million bucks for it thank you she wasn't kidding we're serious council members yeah i take it very seriously but again uh not every city is as rich as we are so we're going to cut some slack and then give them a discount for franchisee would be just fine yeah thank you mayor once again council member clark and i thinking just with the same brain i was asking to ask how much can we charge for this and you know we're working through those details [Music] basic objective initially for us was to ensure that we are able to maintain a technology environment that can support as many city as possible so it has scalability and also to have a dedicated support team to support that now we cannot deploy all those things up front because we don't know what that demand is going to be the good news is that when we launched this early this year at gfo's ac conference there was tremendous amount of interest i think there are about close to 15 cities who've shown keen interest in this and we hope to sign up more cities and that will give us a general idea in terms of where we need to be because that would show us the size and scale of our environment so we're working through those details right now great work so just in closing i want to point out now that this is a product and we've built it so and we presented it in one session so we want to make sure that people come in they look at this product so what you see in front of you is the product website which is part of city's website because it is powered by glendale the brain trust that exists here and just to close it off uh if we can show a web commercial that would be located on this website so it will provide it sales tax is vital to your city but sales tax administration can be challenging with its repetitive processes and multiple data sources the hours it can take to help just one business can be daunting your city could be spending more resources time and money trying to help businesses ensure sales tax compliance than actually reconciling and reporting revenues the aztax central app powered by the city of glendale and built to comply with the arizona department of revenue security requirements eliminates all your admin headaches what used to take hours now takes minutes aztac central effortlessly brings key pieces of data together allowing you to quickly view all of a business's information on one page making data more searchable accessible and digestible with just a few clicks you can share notes search businesses and owners and group businesses in key areas it's fast easy to use notification enabled and secure visit aztaxcentral.com to book a personal demo today [Music] you good thank you okay so uh mr city manager what i would actually really prefer is uh when we have the league of cities and glendale's hosting that this year that this is one of the presentations that they're able to make at that mayor members of council we we would be uh thrilled to do that they they're being a little bit understated when they said there was a lot of interest uh what they didn't tell you was they were blown away by the technology and the speed and the just the how thoughtful the entire application was there have been other cities that have tried to replicate a model like this some very large much larger cities and nobody has developed a product like this i think what i was most proud about was the entrepreneurial spirit to not only develop the product but then to put it in a format to be able to drive it out to other other organizations i think that's we hear that a lot from our citizens that we they want us to be thinking more entrepreneurial and this is just a great example of the leadership uh that that pharaohs and his team has has demonstrated here again kudos as well to our budget and finance team as as councilmember clark pointed out it really is it takes a collaborative approach to doing this we'll make sure we uh we'll work with you in terms of the presentation here um but we just thought this would be something you'd be very proud about as as leaders of this city uh to see what your team is doing for you i i'm very proud and the fact that we're going to have all 91 towns and cities in their council and their mayors and and their city managers it's an opportunity to really really shine a lot on glendale i don't know but there's a whole group of people over here that's not normally here is this your folks you guys are awesome thank you good job [Applause] okay now go back to work we got work to do here thank you so much thank you okay city manager's report next item is just that mr phelps yes mayor members of council two quick updates uh for you um well we just received i think a really neat ranking as a city and this was a at the end of april an online site called wallethub i'm sure you're familiar with it published a report ranking the top united states cities whose unemployment rates have bounced back the most since the covet 19 pandemic they compared 180 cities across the country what they first did is they compared the change in unemployment each year from march 2019 through march of 2022 in order to show the impact of of covid in the second category they looked at each city's overall unemployment rate and then they use the average of those categories to determine a ranking using this methodology the city of glendale is ranked the seventh best city in the united states for recovering uh the most from the pandemic and if we only look at just since march of 21 through march of 22 we actually are the third ranked city in the country for uh bouncing back from the pandemic this really is a recognition of the quick action that the council took uh and the policy direction that you provided uh to staff in terms of uh of of really how we approached economic development how we tried to help our restaurants i mean there were a number of things that were all driven uh by each of you and so uh i i would hope you'd be very proud of this particular ranking the second item real quickly i mentioned to you in my last uh manager report that we had selected the architectural firm to lead our downtown reinvestment project we have now selected our general contractor as well like with the architectural interest there was a lot of great firms that that submitted we got it down to a short list of three we had a very diverse team that kind of looked and interviewed all the different companies and we're excited that we've selected oakland construction oakland is a large multi-state contractor but they have a very strong presence here in in arizona you know some of the states they do business in they've done major projects in arizona colorado nevada utah new mexico indiana and idaho for those of you who went on the tour of the recently redeveloped footprint arena that that was a project where they were the general contractor on we're really excited about it they're the owner of the company bill oakland is is situated here in um in arizona and uh we you know we couldn't be more thrilled to pair uh holly street which is our architectural firm with uh with that we'll have more to tell you about the process but that um that does conclude my report excellent so who was first and second who was first and second you said we were third we'll get that information free mayor i i'd be curious on and i'll be curious if it was in arizona no okay city attorney's report no report thank you thank you council item special interest council ms clark nothing today mayor thank you councilmember hugh nothing mayor councilmember milner nothing today mayor councilmember tom trump nothing mayor that's member turner not today mayor yes mayor i'd like to just reiterate uh boy we're on a roll there you know gotta have one just one uh get our staff to uh start formulating a plan on how to reclaim our fire hydrant water during testing sounds like they may already be on it but uh they can bring something in the future thanks mayor thank you i and and you know when you say that that made me think years ago we discussed that very thing and and so i don't know whatever happened to it but i know that that was one of the things they were talking about doing years ago okay motion going to executive session so move second have a motion in a second all in favor would i hi any okay for an executive session you