Audit and Finance Committee Meeting Transcript – 02/27/2019 Title: City of Austin Description: 24/7 Channel: 6 - COAUS Recorded On: 2/27/2019 6:00:00 AM Original Air Date: 2/27/2019 Transcript Generated by SnapStream ================================== [9:37:26 AM] >> Good morning. This is the audit and finance committee. People Alison alter and I'm chairing this -- I'm Alison alter and I'm chairing this committee. I wish to call it to order at 9:37 A.M. Present right now are myself, vice-chair Leslie pool and mayor Adler. Kathie tovo and Jimmy Flannigan are off the dais at the moment. We'd like to begin with approval of the minutes. And we have a motion from councilmember pool. Do we have a second. Second from mayor Adler. All those in favor of approving the minutes raise your hand? Aye? Okay. That's unanimousith councilmember tovo and councilmember Flannigan off the dais. We now will move to citizen communication general. I don't think we have anyone signed up. Anyone wishing to speak for general communication? Seeing none, we are going to -- we are going to move to item 3, which is in combination with item 10, which is a briefing on menu civil service commission and any recommendations we want make with respect to appointments to municipal service commission. Staff want to come and provide that briefing? Welcome to councilmember tovo. >> Mayor Adler: Chair, there's the hearings in the house today on house bill 2, so I'm going to be in and out of our meeting to work on that as well. >> Alter: And we are hoping to move to executive session about 10:30, 10:45 if you would like to join us for that. >> Mayor Adler: Thank you. >> Alter: Go ahead, please. Thank you. >> Good morning, councilmembers -- >> Alter: Could you turn your mic on. >> Good morning my name is Sylvia Everett, I am the civil service administrator. >> And I'm Stephanie hall with the clerk's office. >> So today we're going to walk you through the process [9:39:26 AM] of recruitment and appointment or reappointment of the municipal civil service commission. Just a little background on this item. As you may know in 2012 article 9 of the city charter was approved by the voters, which established the municipal civil service commission. This is a five-member commission. Also established by ordinance was that the audit and finance committee would review commissioner applications and make recommendations for appointments. The role of the msc commission is to hear appeals and make binding decisions in the case of discharge, binding promotions and other disciplinary actions. They meet twice a month, the second and fourth Monday, and those are typically all day meetings. Also they can review proposed rules and potential rule changes from the hr director. And recommend those to council for adoption. Currently what we're looking at here, this is our current membership. The two notated in yellow are vice-chair Perez wisely and commissioner Rogers. Those are the two that are up for appointment where their terms are ending on may 9th of this year. Both of them have expressed interest in seeking reappointment. So that is something we wanted to make sure we expressed to y'all. Also additionally at each time of year when their appointments come up, council also has to designate a chair annually. Currently our chair is Pamela Lancaster. I'm now going to hand it over to the clerk's office to talk about options. >> Good morning. We want to present to you the two options for appointment or reappointment of these positions. We can either go ahead and do a full reappointment for the two open positions or we can issue an open call and ask for the applications for those available positions. If we move forward with the open call what we would do is work with posting that with the po's office and then we would collect the applications, we would screen them and then forward all the documents to the committee members. The human resource department also will help us [9:41:28 AM] with that. If we do that we would post an open call for approximately 30 days. We would include the requirements on there for residency and that they were a registered voter and we would also include any of the preferences we have for members on the committee experienced with appointment, the human resource labor relations and interim mediation. The process would continue where you would accept online applications like the normal standard boards and commissions process and they would also include their resumes, documenting any additional or relevant experience that they might have. We would gandy ensure that those qualifications are met along with chartedder 2 on .1. We would identify the candidates with the preferred background and.all that information if you. It is the council 6:00 audit and finance committee to review those applications that we received, that and may also include interviews. Appointments are subject to the approval of the vote of the council and T council degree ignites the -- designates the commission chair annually prior to the commission being appointed. The next steps here would be to either recommend reappointment of the commissioners full council or we could go ahead and post that open call which would include the 30 day advertisement and so forth. I also wanted to include a potential timeline. If we do go forward with the reappointment of those two members on may 9th we could issue that reappointment and elect a chair via resolution. If we go with the open call we can run that from February 28th to March 28th. Then on April 17th in an executive session we could review the applicants, then may 1 through 3rd call a special called meeting and then on may 9th go ahead and appoint those. I also included in your packets the two applications and the resumes of the current members. I unrstand that one is interested in being reappointed. Both are, pardon. >> Alter: Councilmember pool. >> Pool: Yeah, thanks, [9:43:28 AM] chair. And thank you for the presentation. I think that both of the two commissioners, Ms. Perez wisely and Ms. Rogers have served with distinction on the municipal civil service commission and I don't see any compelling reason to proceed with an open call in the additional work both for our staff and for our staff and us. I would like to whenever the councilmember tovo comes back, and we might want to just hold off on a vote abuse I don't think we can take one right this second, but I would like to make a motion to that effect. >> Alter: So councilmember tovo, councilmember pool has a motion to reappoint the two appointees and not move forward with a process for open call. Do you have any thoughts on that? >>>> Tovo: I would support that motion for the reasons that I heard you indicate. I'm sorry I had to step out for a bit. >> Alter: Do you second that? Great. All those in favor of that motion? It's unanimous on the dais with councilmember tovond mayor Adler off. Thank you very much -- >> Tovo: I'm here actually. >> Alter: I'm sorry. It's councilmember Flannigan off. Thank you. >> Pool: And then if I could -- >> Alter: It's too early in the morning here. >> Pool: It's all great. I just wanted to ask staff if you would proceed with preparing the item for action. And if you can bring -- I don't know if we have to bring it as late as may, but if that's an appropriate time that's great. If you want to bring it early E that would -- and please include in that -- I did not mention about continuing the current chair, which is -- is it Ms. Rogers? I'm sorry, Ms. Lancaster, Pamela Lancaster. >> Alter: So maybe we should add that as an [9:45:29 AM] additional motion to recommend that chair Lancaster continue in that role and that staff bring this forward for us to vote on and council as appropriate as soon as possible. >> Yes, we can do that, thank you. >> Pool: Thank you. >> Alter: Any objections to doing that? Hearing none, it's so moved. >> Pool: This commission has been doing really good work. I appreciate our ascme friends that are in the audience today. I appreciate the support they give to our employees through the commission and expect additional good work going forward. Thanks. >> Alter: Thank you very much. So we're going to now take up items 4 and 5 together. We'll hear the briefing on item 4 first and take questions and comments as the fourth audit in our series and then number 5 is a summary of the four audits that have been undertaken. We will then take that up. I'm just checking if anyone else signed up at this point. At this point there's no citizens communication so we'll keep moving forward. Morning. >> Good morning, committee members. This is the fourth audit in our series of audits on homelessness assistance. The objective of this audit was to determine the outcomes of the city's efforts to prevent homelessness and assist people experiencing homelessness. Our report looked at the outcomes from the spectrum of interventions . The city uses to address homelessness. Prevention including rent and utility assistance. Emergency shelter, case management and of course housing. The city offershese interventions directly and through contracts. People may need multiple interventions at once to be successful at housing. The city works with many partners, the department of housing and urban development, the department of veterans affairs, other governmental entities, non-profits and faith-based organizations. These organizations along with various city departments, have different criteria for determining [9:47:29 AM] homelessness and therefore we don't have a definitive number for the size of the population. We wanted to start by acknowledging that the city has made significant efforts to address homelessness, including the mayor's effort on homelessness, the 1115 waiver which supports permanent supportive housing, federal grant to support youth homelessness, the homelessness youth street home, host, the bloomburg innovation grant and the city has also built on the ideas that peer cities have brought to us, including a daily program similar to Albuquerque's. We sampled nine homelessness contracts from the neighborhood housing and community development a Austin public health. We looked mostly at fiscal year 2017 although not all contracts have the fiscal year as their reporting year. Those nine contracts had 79 performance goals. Some were common to all of the contracts, such as number of unduplicated clients. Some were focused specifically on the service in the contract. An example would be number of program participants who attained a G.E.D. Of those 79 performance goes, 43 were met by service providers. That's 54%. As a result of missing these goals, fewer people were served than originally anticipated. We also found some contracts are amended and the performance goals did change over time. We noted that some contract performance goals were amended to be lower. To be clear, we found some reasons documented by public health for lower performance. During the scope period one service provider was undergoing renovations and therefore couldn't shelter as many people as they had anticipated. Additionally, while many of the city's contract we sampled track exits to housing, the continuum of care administered by echo tracks returns to homelessness and works with the city to report that amount to hud. The city has not used a [9:49:30 AM] long-term outcomes for evaluating its own programs although public health has begun to track the longer term success of rapid rehousing. The returns to homelessness measure relies on the homelessness management information system, hims. However we found that the information in hims can be incomplete. Our hims only captures local programs and only aph contracted as well as hud funded services are required to use it. As we noted in our previous audit, some service providers and some people experiencing homelessness are not hims. So a person could return to homelessness and the system would not pick up on that. Our second finding concerns homelessness prevention. The city is funding homelessness prevention services, including rent and utility assistance to qualifying households. Eligibility for this program is up to 50,000 per year for a four percent household. -- Four person household. However hud studies indicate that people most at risk for homelessness are clustered at 13,000 per year for a four person household. Feature than half those served in the homelessness program were in that hud designated high risk category. Homelessness prevention service providers also T us that there is a waitlist for their services. Our third finding was that case management services may not be efficient or adequate. And to highlight why case management is so important, a study done by the national alliance to end homelessness found that about half of the clients with case management at the Austin resource center for homeless, the arch, exited to housing. For clients without case management, less than one percent exited into housing. Case management services are not coordinated between city departments and contracted providers. City departments that do provide case management services use different systems to store case notes. And many providers also told us they do not have the capacity to meet the need for their services. Without adequate [9:51:31 AM] coordination, case managers may not know a client's full history, someone doing outreach may not know if the person they're talking to has a case manager. People may establish a relationship with one case manager and move to a different service and lose that case manager, but we note understand our report that funding for increased coordination was given to host in the 2019 budget. Lastly, despite the important work the city has done, there are still some barriers to receiving services. The city is working on addressing some of those. There's an arch redesign innovative technologies to help people experiencing homelessness maintain records and identification, funding for a day center. But as we note in our last report, the city doesn't have a lot of good data on the short-term needs of the population. We learned a lot about these barriers from people experiencing homelessness. The mansion to end homelessness suggests that programs incorporate more client feedback into program design. The city is working to collect client feedback through the Austin homelessness advisory committee, but in our review we found that client feedback is not consistently required in city homelessness services contracts. We made some recommendations related to homelessness service contracts and performance management. The assistant city manager agreed and has provided implementation plan. Thank U. >> Alter: Thank you. We've also been joined by councilmember kitchen. Thank you for joining us. Are there any staff responses to this audit that you want to share at this ti? No? Thank you. Colleagues, do you have any questions. We don't have anyone signed up. Is there anyone who wants to speak on these items who [9:53:31 AM] hasn't signed up who would like to do that? I don't have anyone right now signed up. >> You have an army of people signed up if you would like to. There's good stuff in it, there's stuff we don't like in it. So we're sort of here if you have questions, we're happy to talk about it. >> Alter: So I think we would like to hear from some of you. We do have a bit of a timeline at the end because we need to move to executive session by about 10:30, 10:45, and get through the other material, but we would welcome to hear from you. Mr. Gonzalez, did you want to say something at this point. >> Yes. Council, Rodney Gonzalez, assistant city manager for economic opportunity and affordability. Earlier when we said we didn't have a response that's not necessarily we don't have a response, our response is contained in the audit report starting on page 10 as management response. >> Alter: Sure, thank you. And councilmember pool? >> Pool: Thanks, chair. What I was going to suggest to Ms. Howard if given our time constraints, if y'all could huddle and come back with maybe the top points that you would like to make and maybe two or three of you present them or fewer to get us the information. And then we would have that. >> [Inaudible]. >> Pool: Sure. That would be great. Or you can do it after. But you're here, so -- >> I think we're ready. >> Alter: Why don't we just go ahead -- we need you to sign up as well as you go, but you can come speak and sign up. You guys all know the drill. I think that's fine. Is that okay? >> Kitchen: Yeah. I'll wait until the committee is finished with their questions, but I have some questions after you guys are finished. >> [Inaudible - no mic]. [9:55:42 AM] >> Alter: Councilmember tovo. >> Tovo: I think that some of these comments or questions may be touched on by our speakers, but I wanted to just talk a little bit about the nature of funding that we provide to contracts. It's my understanding that in quite a few cases city funding is really just a portion of the contracts that -- a portion of the funding that some of these agencies have. And so I wondered if I could speak to that point and the fact that in some cases they are receiving other kinds of funding and have metrics and performance guidelines that are associated with that, especially through echo. >> Sure. So of the nine contracts we looked at one was fully funded by hud and the city puts no funding towards it. One was fully funded by the city and there's no additional funding towards it. And the rest of them fall in that spectrum. We found in our last audit that it is best practice to braid funding to use federal, state, private, faith-based, non-profit and city funds in order to when you lose one funding stream to still have enough to still provide services. >> Tovo: Yeah, thank you. And again I think some of our speakers may hit on this point to having the city be part of tt coordinated effort. And I just -- I will have some more questions, but one of the points I wanted to make is the one that you raised and that is how important it is to fund case worker services. And so thank you for illustrating that so dramatically with regard to the numbers of individuals exiting housing at the arch and how that vastly improves when we have case worker services. And I would say that we are in the process of transitioning toward that at the arch, of having 100% of the individuals served at the arch receiving services, receiving case worker services with the aim of housing those individuals [9:57:45 AM] but we also need to look toward how the city might be able to partner with, say, the Salvation Army at their downtown shelter to provide that wrap around service as well because ultimately our goal that we all share is to get people exiting shelters into housing. And I think we can do a better job of that and I think it would willing be really cost effective. So on that point, colleagues, that's something that my office has been thinking a little bit about, especially with regard to our downtown shelters beyond just the arch. So again, I'll have some questions, but I'm happy to hear from -- hear some response from our social service providers. >> Alter: Councilmember kitchen. >> Kitchen: Thank you all so much for all that you do and to you for this review also. I think it helps us as we work towards, you know, identifying additional resources and other assistance that our social service providers need to hit the target in terms of providing. So when you all speak, if you can, it would be helpful to touch on either now or at a later point what the city can do to be of assistance with the data collection, for example. Whether that's a systems need or whether that's a personnel need, or whatever. Whatever things we're trying to do with our strategic planning process, which you all know we're moving in to as a city is make sure that we've got the right kind of metrics and make sure that we have got the systems in place to do data collection because it just helps us as we make investments and helps us make additional investments. I know there's a lot to it in terms of having the data systems and having the people that can enter that data. So I would just like to understand where we can be helpful in making improvements. [9:59:49 AM] >> Alter: Do you have a particular order that is is different than this? >> Joann Quinn from caritas will start. And if you can try to keep it as brief as possible, but to communicate what you need to communicate to us, that would be great. Thank you. >> I wanted to speak to the concern around the adjusting of performance objectives because I know that one of the contracts that we have with Austin public health, the best single source plus contract that does both prevention and intervention for homelessness has made adjustments to that. And I just wanted to give some context to why those performance measures have been adjusted. For starters, the bss plus collaboration has existed since 2005 and so there's a lot that has changed on the ground between 2005 and 2019. And the strength of the collaboration is that it has changed and adjusted to meet the needs on the ground and to adopt evidence-based practices over the years. We haven't always been totally aligned with evidence-based practice, but as we've learned of those and learned how to implement those, that is what the collaboration has done. To that end, when echo brought into the community the coordinated assessment system, which is our way of triaging people experiencing homelessness, many -- almost all of the bss plus collaborateors have embraced that model and have been using it. When we started using it, it changed drastically the acuity of the clients we were then serving. And when that acuity changed to a higher level, it meant [10:01:52 AM] that it took longer to house people so that impacted their performance measures. So we just adjusted those performance measures to reflect the reality on the ground of us now participating in the coordinated assessment system. Does that make sense? Does anybody have a question about that? >> Thank you. Susan Mcdowell? >> After reviewing the report on Monday I called up our performance measures for the last three years and they reflect exactly what Jo Katherine described with our embrace and option of coordinated entry. But what I wanted to speak to real quickly is this issue of rating funding. And thank you for bringing it up and for recognizing the complexity of it because most of us, not only are we trying to braid funding, partially to mitigate from -- mitigate the risk of funding loss, more importantly to build capacity in the community because many of us have really embraced the frameworks to end homelessness. And we are really trying to build specific capacity, particularly in rapid rehousing. But to do that we're building a system that requires we not only braid funding, but braiding services, which means we have -- I know lifeworks and caritas have dramatically redesigned our whole service delivery system so a client can go from one interaction to another interaction to another interaction and make progress towards homelessness. And that requires a degree of internal and collaborative coordination that is just exquisitely complex and has exquisitely complex data needs. So councilmember kitchen, I don't know the answer to your question, but it is absolutely the right question. You know, we've been -- we've been doing this oh for a long time. Just looking at, you know, lifeworks, all of the funding we have braided [10:03:53 AM] around ending youth homelessness requires participation in multiple databases across state, federal and local agencies. And our own internal crm. So I don't know what the solution to all of that is, but it is the right question and I think one outcome could be devoting some resources to study that because it's not going to be a quick fix, but that's where -- that's where we could get some of our time and focus back. >> Ann Howard. >> I'll just round it out by saying we're happy to answer any questions that you guys coupled up with. I think that the theme of these four audits, and I appreciate the work the auditors have done. They've dug into the homelessness management information system, seen how complex it is, seen the collaboration at work. To me the theme of these four audits is scarcity. You know, we have people on the street, the police are afraid to tell them to move because we don't have anywhere for them to go. We don't have enough case managers. You want to know if people ever return to homelessness. Once we exit folks from our programs, the only way we will know if they become homeless again is if they ask for help. We would love more staff. We would love to be able to have people in the programs longer so that we are rock solid that that family will never need our help again. But we don't have that luxury in Austin. We're trying to stablize and get to the next client. So I think there's a lot of good information here that we can build on through the collaboration. >> I forgot that on the data thing. Yesterday we spent the morning with Amazon services and with the local his [10:05:57 AM] supplier to Austin called well sky. When Amazon makes a pitch to local and state government we want to help your community, the communities are responding can you help us with homelessness. So Amazon who was with us in July when lots of stakeholders said they want to help, yesterday presented the concept of a data lake where lots of data can be put in and regardless of the format you can pull it out. And we talked exactly about lifeworks who has different federal funding requirements, different grant makers that ask for different data, and there is a concept that might be very helpful to us. So there's a lot of work being done, but, you know, the homeless management information system is the best we've got right now, but with about 3 300 professionals using it in the community. >> Alter: We have two additional speakers. Did you have specific questions? >> Tovo: I did have a question, a follow- up question just for Ms. Howard. Could you speak a little bit to the role that echo plays in monitoring and collecting information? >> Your time's up. [Laughter]. >> Tovo: Did you know where I was going with that? >> I think one thing that people maybe don't know is that to keep the hud money flowing, which is now up to almost $10 million, we're very excited, these non-profit partners submit their client data, which becomes program data, which becomes agency data, which becomes system data. And hud is holding us accountable as a system. Our geographic area is Travis county. So all of the folks that are willing to play and share their data, we're all measured now together. [10:07:58 AM] And so together we're looking at how many folks are homeless, how long does it take us as a community to move them from the street into housing. What is that return to homelessness? In the last two years how many folks that we said exited to permanent housing are now asking for help again? What's the number of newly homeless? Who wasn't in the system I think it's two years ago, who is in the system now? So there is a lot of work being done to sort of help us get that big picture as to what is the health of this community in moving people off the street. So it always needs work and we could always use more professionals to help shore up the work. >> Tovo: Great. And I think it speaks to the fact that the city of Austin is, I think, somewhere in the neighborhood of 43% of the funding that's going to homelessness and there are lots of other players and lots of other monitoring going on. >> I think I would characterize that the city is around the waking to homelessness. You did a lot of work with the city manager's office, thank you Elaine, for trying to get a handle on. There's a lot of action and what is the city's role, but besides sort hurting a little bit, I don't think we need to move in a direction to try to separate the city's role from echo and all these non-profits and this H.U.D., you know, requirements around the homeless management information system. You're contributing resources to that system and the management of it. We need to make sure it can work. I don't think we need to worry that the city can't crunch the numbers. You can have licenses to the numbers. Vela knows how to use the system. The audit seemed to have concern that it was sort of [10:10:01 AM] an echo-led system. It's a hud requirement. There are lots of users. We can improve it, but I don't think it's a problem that it's not a city-run database or something like that. >> Alter: So do you want to ask these folks specific questions? We still have two more speakers and the other audit. >> Kitchen: Like a 10-second question. So we can talk more about the database issues. I think community-wide as you pointed out, this is a community-wide problem. And so community-wide date collection and analysis is important, and that's tough, it's very complicated from a resource perspective. And so I know there's a lot of things you all are working on, the Samson issue sounds -- Amazon issue sounds interesting. I think we just stand ready to help and so we can have more conversation about that off nine. >> Alter: Thank you. We may call you back up if we have additional questions. I have two more folks for citizens communication and then we need to hear briefly the overview summary. So Darline bueller. And Gus Pena, you will be next. >> Okay. Good morning. I was part of the group, but it got a little crowded over here. [Laughter]. Thank you so much for the opportunity. I wanted to just address very quickly the issue of coordination. So as a community we have been coming together for a number of years to coordinate services across homeless services. And what I think is important and it was really showcased by the audit is is it's important to coordinate services within the city departments. [10:12:02 AM] Integral care has been able to benefit from such coordination. We are about to open a housing first project this coming summer, and that happened because the constituent coordinated the resources to make that possible. A subsequent release for the creation of permanent supportive housing happened just right after we submitted our solicitation. And we had no takers in the community. And the reason at that point was because we did not have the resources so make that project possible. And by that I mean it is incredibly important for the city to manage the allocation of resources to create this project by bringing the capital, the operating expenses, and the supportive services. You cannot have only one of those things at a time, otherwise the creation of permanent supportive housing will continue to lag behind. So just wanted to put that out there since that is a key component. And I'm hoping that we have the ability to do that again in the future. Thank you. >> Alter: Thank you. Gus Pena? >> Good morning, chair, committee member. My name is Gus Pena, native east austinite, proud marine rps state veteran. I ran for city council in '96, '97. Ran for judge. I'm setting the predicate and I'm going to go ahead and enter the homeless issue. Then I ran for mayor. A lot of the things I want to mention is this, is that now we have a better homeless count than we had before. Last time was 2,000, 3,000. I understand that we do our own count with the va, and we have seen more than 7,000 homeless people. That's not including veterans. But anyway, it's getting better. [10:14:02 AM] I wanted to let you know also that when we speak about -- I was homeless also. I've been homeless. And it is very disparaging issue. It's a very -- it hurts even a person like me that's been educated and had so many positions and ran for elected office. Arch needs to be cleaned up. Let me get to the crust of the matter. Getting case management has been a roadblock, a roadblock thrown in front of the people that need roachers. I get complaints over at the bus stop. I take the bus and I say it takes a long time to be case managed. We talked about case management. It takes a long time and we have people out there, single moms and people that are homeless out there. Anybody who wants to come out with me, come on, I'll show you and I'll talk to you. African-Americans, they tell me, they're very blunt. You had two people at the city council meetings tell you -- I didn't even know these people, but I brought them along, to mention their problems with homelessness. The audit is good, but you need to go out to the homeless community to make sure what the needs are and make a better -- truer count of the homeless issue. The thing that I wanted to let you know, and thank the good lord, is that for veterans the secretary of veterans affairs and hud secretary Carson, and I met the secretary himself in Washington, they know what's going on here, and I met the current secretary of veterans affairs. If the veteran has a hud been based voucher E preens supporting voucher, you can now purchase a house. We've BP fighting for it. As president and co-founder of veterans for progress we made that one thing clear. We want to purchase instead of just rent a unit. It takes time to get case manage, people have complained about that. And it's one of the things that need to be improved. All these other organization talk about that. Case management needs to be improved. Self-sufficiency, wraparound services. Sometimes the homeless get [10:16:02 AM] into apartments but the services is are stopped there. But it's not good. It has to be solidified and it has to be a wraparound service to help out the people. Chair and members, I will cut it short, but I just wanted to let you know it hurts to be homeless. It hurts to be homeless. And it's something that should not happen here in Austin. Such a vibrant city. I'm a native austinite and it's an expensive city. [Buzzer sounds] Thank you for the work you've done and the service to our city, but it's still out there. We need the help out there. Thank you. >> Alter: Thank you, Mr. Pena. Would staff like to presentation proceed with the presentation for item five and then we can have any additional conversation on the dais. >> Good morning, committee members. This is a summary of our series of audits on homelessness assistance. Wins since we began this audit in March of 2017 the city has taken steps to end homelessness. These include securing grants from the didn't of housing and urban development, endorsing a plan to end homelessness and approving additional budget funding for homelessness services. The first report concluded with the enforcement of certain city ordinances may create issues for people attempting to exit homelessness. Additionally it noted the enforcement of these ordinances did not appear to be an effective way to connect people experience persian gulf homelessness to the service -- experiencing homelessness to the services they need. This report also indicated that other U.S. Cities had faced lawsuits in the enforcement of similar ordinances, some of it was based on conditions that also and in Austin. Since this audit was accepted --. The second report noted that while many city departments deal with homelessness in some way, the city had only recently started to coordinate its homelessness assistance efforts. This report concluded that without a coordinated effort the city may not effectively provide homelessness assistance services . [10:18:04 AM] , Effectively allocate resources, or effectively identify opportunities to aid people experiencing homelessness. Since our audit, the city has begun the process of hiring a homelessness city strategy officer. Our third report found that because the city did not have a complete understanding of the size or needs of the homeless population, it was unclear whether the city was effectively allocating resources for homelessness assistance. This report noted that the city was not meeting its goal for creating new units of permanent supportive housing, which led to a greater need for short-term services. However, the report also determined that the city collects limited information about the short-term needs of the homeless population. The fourth report was just presented. It concludes the city is making efforts to solve homelessness, but needs to improve its contracting process and increase case management coordination. >> Alter: Thank you. Colleagues, do you have any questions for staff or comments at this point? >> Tovo: Just a general thanks for really digging into this issue and elevating areas of importance. And I just wanted to add my thanks to one of my colleagues who thanked those in the audience for continuing to be involved in this work on a daily basis and also to helping us kind of find the path for moving forward. So I think between the action plan that we passed last year and the audits, I think we've got a good guide -- some good guidelines for how to move forward and I think especially today with the focus on really the scarcity of resources for what we know works, which is case management, I think that really helps us understand how to leverage our resources and really prioritize the spending. >> Alter: Anyone else? Ms. Kitchen I don't think anything to add from what I said before. >> Alter: Thank you. I did want to ask staff about an issue that was raised in this audit. It was helpful to hear from the advocates about some of the issues that went into [10:20:04 AM] changing the performance goals and it's clear that those changes came in part from efforts to make the process more effective and to target those at highest risk, which was exactly what was highlighted in the audit. It however, raised a broader issue for me as a councilmember. We have certain contract amendments come back to us for a vote, but we never see performance goals and I'm not suggesting that we should vote on performance goal changes, but I'm wondering if T manager's office can think about whether there should be some appropriate reporting back to us when performance goals change and contracts that we have approved so that we're aware of those changes. So for instance, in this case we might have learned something sooner as a council if we had been made aware of those performance goals changing. That would have been relevant for us for understanding how we're tackling this broader issue. And so Ms. Hart, maybe you can get back with some sort of process on that. I don't know if there's a patrol on that. >> I don't know that we have a procedure yet, but I'll be glad to work with purchasing and some of the departments here to see how we might best communicate changes in contracts and amendments. Changes in performance measures back to the council. >> Alter: Great. Thank you. And I want to thank our audit staff for put butting together these four audits and community as well for being engaged. We have set homelessness and addressing homelessness as one of our top priorities in strategic direction 23 and the more information we have about what we're doing right and what we're doing wrong and how we can improve helps us to get towards the goal of ending homelessness. So I appreciate everyone who is involved in addressing these issues in the community. Stephanie Hayden, did you want to add anything? You've been up there. >> Stephanie Hayden, Austin public health. First of all, I always [10:22:07 AM] appreciate audits. They do offer us a venue to improve the quality that we're providing. I am appreciative of our partners because we've all worked on this for several years. And the thing that I would say is that whenever any of us go to different places and the issue of homelessness does come up, Austin has best practices. And there are other cities that really, really applaud us on our ability to work collaboratively with our partners and they're excited to know that our elected officials has homelessness as your top priority, one of your top priorities. So I just wanted to say that, but we are constantly making improvements and we know things are going to get better and we feel like we're in a good place and we're excited about where we are. And we're excited about where we're going to go. So thank you very much. >> Alter: Thank you. Do we have a motion to approve audits number 4 and 5? Councilmember tovo makes that motion. Do I have a second? Seconded by councilmember pool. All those in favor? It's unanimous for those present. Thank you. We will now move on to item 6, lobbyist compliance audit, which looked at whether lobbyists are adhering to city code provisions. >> So while the team gets up here, this is an audit that's required by city code based on the most recent revisions to the lobbyist compliance ordinance. And Patrick Johnson was the manager on this office and Jo Jo Cruz was the lead and we'll be presenting today. >> Good morning, committee [10:24:08 AM] members. I'm Jo Jo Cruz and I will be presenting to you the results of our lobbyist compliance audit. The Austin city council passed an ordinance related to the new lobbying requirements that took effect in June 2017. This lobbyist provisions require a person to register as a lobbyist with the city clerk, pay applicable fees and follow up with reports in a timely manner. The registration requirements are shown to the right of this slide. The city auditor is also required to conduct an annual audit of lobby registrants to ensure that their filings are in compliance. If we find an apparent violation we are directed to notify appropriate parties. As part of this audit and in response to the request from the city council audit and finance committee, we obtained a number of registered lobbyists with the state of Texas and the city of Austin in July of 2018 and updated them last month. We found that approximately 20% of city of Austin registered lobbyists are also registered lobbyists with the state of Texas. By showing this graphic we tested a sample of registered lobbyists in each of the three registration category and found that lobbyists are generally in compliance with city code provisions. Except for one issue related to non-profit registration fee, which is an apparent violation. Lobbyists registered under the non-profit category are limited to only lobby for their regular employer. We found that one lobbyist paid the 25-dollar non- profit registration fee, but reported lobbying for three non-profit clients. [10:26:09 AM] We extended testing to two other non-profit registrants in our sample, but didn't find any further violations. As part of this audit, we also noted some observations regarding the administration and enforcement of lobbyists. For our first observation, some code provisions do not fully address the effective a enforcements of these requirements. For example, the duties on the lobbyists to [indiscernible] And provide the code and provide information to the city. City rules are unclear and enforcement efforts are not proactive. Current city administration and oversight efforts are limited. However, the city clerk is in the process of implementing a new online filing system that is intended to improve the accuracy and compliance of filings. In addition, city departments have identified code improvements for consideration. For our second observation, the city does not have a proactive process to use the lobbyist's information and track lobbying activities, especially by potential lobbyists that are not registering. Specifically information required to be provided on visitor sign-in sheets was not always legible, complete and consistent. Information collected by the city does not appear to be used or analyzed. We saw indications that approximately 10% of visitors not registered as lobbyists may have met the conditions to register as lobbyists. For example, some registered visitors reported receiving compensation or attended multiple meetings. We did not issue [10:28:09 AM] recommendations in this audit, but we intend to notify the city clerk, city attorney, the ethics review commission of the apparent violation as required by the code. Also we encourage the office of city clerk to partner with law department to identify and present potential clarifications to council for consideration. That concludes my presentation and we're happy to answer any questions. >> Alter: Thank you. Colleagues, do you have any questions or comments at this time? Councilmember pool? >> Pool: Thanks for this report. I appreciate it. I had some plans to revisit the campaign finance ordinance and look at places that needed to be addressed and so this does point some arrows and target some areas. So I thank you for that. It's really helpful. I think we probably should be looking at updating the language. It's almost a 20th century response for us to be using registered mail to send out notices, and I know even our process servers now do that electronically. So I think we may be able to shift into the 21st century as far as using electronic means to notify folks. And I would like to look at what you were talking about waiving fees for someone in a -- who was affected by a natural disaster. Normally contracts have the acts of god kind of carveout so that if there's something that there was nothing at all that you could do about it and you were affected in many parts of your daily life, then governmental entities tend to recognize that and have some sympathy for that. So I think those are some areas that I will look at and drill down on to try to improve the ordinance and if there's any other suggestions that either the communit has, the lobbyist community, oversight groups, watchdog groups or our staff, I would appreciate [10:30:09 AM] hearing that and we can run with a revision and amendment to increase the effectiveness of this particular ordinance that I have some pretty deep attachment to. So thank you all for bringing these issues forward. >> Thank you. And councilmember pool, thank you for your leadership in getting this owners and this process in place in the first place so we can have a better handle on the lobbying process. As we make a motion, I would like us to consider, you know, formally requesting that the next steps for code revision that have been identified by staff be brought to audit and finance for review and part of the outstanding issue seems to be how do weigela with non-compliance, which was an issue that we knew from the beginning when this was set up and how it was designed, but that to provide us a little bit of a look at what other cities are doing with respect to that non-compliance part, maybe we can learn something that we can take up that's not -- not as onerous as what might be implied by this audit but would get us partly towards achieving greater compliance and better understanding that data. I'd definitely like to know which department did not have the documents available through the process of the audit. >> We reached out to planning and zoning. >> Alter: Okay. So as part of that, I would also like to, in an appropriate interval from when you did it, go back to planning and zoning and review their documents. It's a little bit disturbing to me that planning and zoning, of all departments, which would be one of the ones most lobbied, would not be in compliance with this ordinance and that would be information that I know would be [10:32:13 AM] potentially relevant for all concerned. So if someone would like to make a motion to accept that direction so motion made by councilmember tovo and seconded by councilmember pool. All those in favor? Thank you. So we can stay on lobbyists for just a second, since our agenda is a little bit out of order, I'm going to call up item 8 and then go back to 7 if I might. Item 8 is the city attorney's report regarding the enforcement of lobbying regulations. >> Good morning. Lynn Carter with the law department. I have the city attorney's quarterly report, which was both written, and I will provide you a quick oral report. There's been a somewhat decrease in the number of lobbyists registered compared to last quarter. We dropped 11. Most of those are the interest, there are five fewer entities that are registered, three less individuals, and then -- I'm sorry, three less business entities, and then eight total individuals, regardless of whether they're registered with a business entity or individually. There are no surprises in regard to the number who failed to file their quarterly reports on time or had late fees. Those were resolved fairly quickly. Compliant compensation was shown to be reported, and there are no -- there were no enforcement actions. Do you have any questions? >> Alter: No, I don't. Do we need to take action on this item or -- [10:34:14 AM] >> No action needed. >> Alter: No action is necessary. I did want to add just one thing to the prior audit. I'm not sure -- I'd like a little bit more information about the violation by the person who was advocating for nonprofits. It may be that it was a quirk of the code and how the code was written but not necessarily a violation in the spirit of what the code was trying to do, and I think that might be relevant as we move forward to the next steps. >> Patrick Johnson, City auditor's office. We looked at it -- it's actually in the ordinance, laying out what the fee is and the requirements there, for nonprofits, and the language essentially, as we read it, limited a lobbyist in that category to lobby only for their regular employer. And we assumed there would be one regular employer. When we looked at the filing, there were three filings on -- there were three documents filed, each with a different nonprofit that the person intended to lobby for. So we looked at that as an apparent violation, certainly not -- we're not saying it is a violation, but flagging it as such. >> Alter: Councilmember tovo. >> Tovo: It sounds to me as if that's an ambiguity in our code that I think should be clarified, so councilmember pool, as you look to making some other changes, it would seem like that is an area that needs attention. >> Yeah, and I think in our discussion with the both the clerk's office and the law department, that that seemed to be the case, and I think that was one of the issues that was -- we were going to bring back for consideration. >> Alter: And I just hope that will be handled accordingly for the people involved if it's an ambiguity in our code an something we didn't anticipate that it should be and accordingly in this particular case, since it's supposed to be for transparency and not necessarily [10:36:16 AM] to raise money. >> Right. >> Alter: For something. Okay. Thank you. We will move to item 7, approve proposed changes to the urban renewal board bylaws. >> Good morning, I'm with the clerk's office. I'm here to present some proposed changes to article 8a of the urban renewal board bylaws. The proposed amendment is for the creation of a committee, it's called the urban renewal plan implementation committee, to develop performance measures, strategies, and goals to evaluate the effectiveness of the urban renewal plan. The amendment addresses a review process laid out in part 4 and 5 of ordinance 1208-1213-101. Our staff agrees with the amendments to create the commit, and this concludes my presentation. >> Alter: Great. Thank you. While councilmember pool is off the dais for a minute, maybe we will briefly take up item 13, identify items to discuss at future meetings, and we'll come back and make a motion to accept the proposed changes. Councilmember tovo, did you have any items? >> Tovo: Not at this point. >> Alter: Okay. So as chair, I will be speaking with each of the committee members to think about issues that we want to be raising. Two that are of concern to me, and one will be in our next agenda in April, is bringing back the capital contract audit of public works and to understand what steps have been taken since that audit was presented to audit and finance to address the concerns that were raised that were very serious concerns. Another issue is that we have put in a lot of money for deferred maintenance of our facilities, but we don't have a clear process [10:38:19 AM] in how -- how those funds will be allocated. And so a report back to the audit committee about how that is being addressed, I'm not sure if that will be on the April committee meeting or not, but we will get together and have a conversation about goals that we have for this committee moving forward. That being said, hopefully councilmember pool will be -- is there anything else on the agenda that we need to address and can we vote that one out with two of the three here, or do we have to -- okay. >> I'm pretty sure you need quorum to -- to take action. >> Alter: Would you like to make a motion, mayor pro tem tovo, to accept the proposed changes to the urban renewal board bylaws. >> Tovo: Yeah, I'll second. >> Alter: Okay. Made by councilmember tovo and seconded by councilmember pool. Those in favor? Okay. The committee will now go into closed session to take up two items, pursuant to sections 551.076 and 551.089 of the government code, the committee will discuss security audit matters related to item 11, a security audit related to information security management in the city pursuant to section 551.089 of the government code, the committee will discuss matters concerning information security related to item 12, the state of confidential network security information in the city. Is there any objection to going into executive session on the items announced? Hearing none, the committee will now go into executive session. I believe we will only come back for me to close out the session. We've completed the rest of our agenda, although actually we may have to come back to do a motion [10:40:21 AM] to accept the audit or any other motions on 9 that we so choose. So we will come back for that. Sorry. Thank you. [Executive session [11:41:36 AM] ]>> Alter: We are now back from executive session. We are out of closed session. In closed session we took up and discussed security audit matters related to item 11 and matters concerning information security related to item 12. I will now entertain a motion with respect to item 9. Councilmember pool. >> Pool: So my motion is to approve item 9 and request our staff to come back in three months with a follow-on update and report. >> Tovo: Second. >> Alter: Seconded by councilmember tovo. All those in favor? Everyone in favor. The motion passes. With that -- unless there's any other business that anyone wants to mention at this point, I will adjourn our audit and finance meeting. Thank you.