City Council Work Session Transcript – 5/5/2026 Title: ATXN-1 (24hr) Channel: 1 - ATXN-1 Recorded On: 5/5/2026 6:00:00AM Original Air Date: 5/5/2026 Transcript Generated by SnapStream ================================== Please note that the following transcript is for reference purposes and does not constitute the official record of actions taken during the meeting. For the official record of actions of the meeting, please refer to the Approved Minutes. [9:00:08 AM] may 5th, 2026, and I will call to order the work session of the Austin city council. We have a quorum of the city council present. We are meeting in the city council chambers located in Austin city hall at 301 west second street in Austin, Texas. The order of the day members is that we will go into an executive session to discuss two items, and then when we come out of the executive session, we will go in the order of the agenda, which will be the briefings and then the council item of interest. So unless there's objection, the city council will now go into a closed session to take up two items pursuant to section 55107, one of the Texas government code, the city council will discuss legal issues related to item C one discussion regarding a resolution directing the city manager to postpone any departmental reorganizations or employee transfers associated with the one arts initiative until such time that council is presented with sufficient information to justify those aspects of the initiative, and until council affirmatively [9:01:09 AM] approves their implementation. And we will discuss legal issues related to item E one. Discuss legal issues related to yogurt shop criminal cases. Again, both of these are private consultation with legal counsel under section 55107, one of the Texas government code. Is there any objection to going into executive session on the items announced? Hearing none, the council will now go into executive session at 9:01 A.M. And as I've indicated, when we come back out after the executive sessions, we will go in the order on the agenda, which is items, the briefings items B one, B two, and then we'll go to council items of interest item C one. With that at [10:19:10 AM] you'll see the only love that's true. [10:20:26 AM] >> We were already in order. We were just in an executive session. We are now out of that closed session. And in the closed session, we discussed legal issues related to items C one and E one. Pursuant to 551071 of the Texas government code. It is 1020 on Tuesday, may 5th. Members, as I indicated, what we will do is we will go in the order of the agenda. So we will start with item B one and the way I. What I'm going to suggest what we do is, since these are briefings and items of interest, I'm going to ask that we go with the speakers on that item. So we get it all done together and we have all the consideration together. So I'm going to turn to the city clerk because we have speakers signed up on item B one and ask that the speakers be recognized. >> Thank you. Mayor Betsy Greenberg and Travis Schneider. You will have two minutes. [10:21:27 AM] >> My name is Betsy Greenberg. I live in district nine, and I'm opposed to the citywide density bonus program as drafted. I'm sure you all remember the acacia cliffs rezoning to db 90 and the heartfelt testimony from residents who were about to be displaced by your decision. Before taking testimony about the case on may 22nd, mayor Watson mentioned that db 90 has been an extremely unhappy experience, has created significant unintended consequences. Division in our community and contributed to making some people feel helpless. He committed to a resolution directing staff to fix the problem. Council member Fuentes agreed and expressed support for looking at one for one replacement on affordable units. The resolution on this issue was passed on June 6th, at the same time that the acacia cliffs rezoning was approved. Instead of working to avoid displacement and the loss of existing affordable housing, [10:22:28 AM] the new proposal is focused on giving developers more options height, allowing a height bonus of 15, 45 and 60ft in addition to the 30 foot option allowed by db 90. The planning commission even recommended adding more levels up to 190 foot bonus, and as before, at most 20% of newly constructed units need to be income restricted. In the acacia cliffs example, less than half of the naturally occurring affordable housing would be replaced with income restricted units. If you really care about avoiding displacement and the loss of affordable housing, the new code would require it, and you would also eliminate the possible waiver of replacement units in section 4-18-33. Please direct staff to work on eliminating the pain that db 90 has caused. Instead of exacerbating the problem. Thank [10:23:29 AM] you. >> Thank you. >> Good morning, council members. I'm Travis Schneider, co-chair of Austin's mobility advocacy committee. Currently, the design commission is proposing an updated set of urban design standards to integrate into the updated citywide density bonus program. Some members of that commission and my advocacy committee have identified a key missing element from the current draft policy program, and that is a gatekeeper requirement for streetscape design. In other words, an equivalent to what the downtown density bonus program has with great streets. Such streetscape standards are critical for facilitating safe, comfortable, first and last mile travel between transit stops and people's origins and destinations. With the city's massive investment in light rail, we can't let four foot wide, bare bone sidewalks with no shade or bicycle infrastructure persist, as the only way to get to most of the future rail stations. This will [10:24:30 AM] not encourage ridership, so I would strongly recommend that development within the equitable transit oriented development perimeter be required to build its streetscape to an elevated standard, such as to project connect's proposed design standards or the 2025 green infrastructure working group's recommendations. At the least, this should become a gatekeeper requirement for the density bonus and even be considered as a base requirement for all permits within E tod above a certain size threshold to help minimize gaps in that improved streetscape. To summarize, downtown is not the only part of our city that needs to be pedestrian friendly, and private developers can assist in making this expanded vision a reality. So just like the downtown density bonus program, the citywide density bonus program needs a streetscape gatekeeper requirement, especially within a certain distance of the light rail stations. Thank you for your time. >> Thank you. [10:25:33 AM] >> That completes all speakers on item b1. >> Great. Thank you. Then we'll go to the briefing on item b1. Members. Just by way of some information, council member Fuentes has had her baby this morning. So we all we all want to say we all want to say congratulations to her. That's just wonderful. And what a great time of life. And the mayor pro tem is speaking of babies. His baby's graduating from law school today, so that's where he is. I just wanted to point that out to everybody. If I leave the dais for any purpose, I'm going to virtually pass the gavel to the mayor pro tem prior to that. And that's council member Ellis. So if I leave the dais, council member Ellis will be presiding at that point. Thank you for letting me divert us. >> No. Good morning. Mayor, [10:26:33 AM] council members, that's a hard announcement to follow, so hopefully we'll keep you as excited with this presentation as that announcement. So staff is very excited to be able to share our proposal for a new suite of density bonus tools that we're collectively calling the city wide density bonus program. I'm Stevie Greathouse, I'm a division manager in Austin planning. And joining me to actually walk you through the details of the proposal is Warner cook, who's principal planner and project manager, over this project. This proposal reflects several years of engagement with stakeholders and the public, and builds on work that began with the development of the equitable transit oriented development density bonus. Moving forward, these tools would be available to property owners instead of vertical mixed use or the density bonus 90 db 90 tools. They would also provide more flexibility, as well as stronger protections for existing naturally occurring affordable housing. This work response to direction that was provided by city council last year that we look at refining our density bonus tools to [10:27:35 AM] better address our goals as a city. We also wanted to acknowledge work that is being led out of the city manager's office to continue to expand our affordable housing toolbox beyond just density bonuses. These are an important tool, but they are just one tool of many that the city has to support affordable housing in Austin. I'll now turn it over to Warner cook, who is going to walk you through the details of the proposal. >> Hello, council members. As Stevie said, I'm Warner cook. Today we'll go through some brief background information on where we are situated in creating this new density bonus program. Then I'll walk through the details of the proposal and briefly touch on some of the planning commission's recommendations and let you all know next steps. So it's no surprise to you all or anyone in this room, that Austin has seen tremendous population growth over the recent decades as. And our housing production has not always kept up with this. It does. We have in [10:28:37 AM] recent years seen moderate, moderate improvements to housing affordability at some levels, but there are still many households in Austin that can't find affordable housing for their income level. The strategic housing blueprint, adopted in 2017, calls for various tools at different income levels to be deployed by the city, including subsidies and grants, fee waivers and among them, density bonus programs, which I'm walking through today. The last piece of background information is that, as Stevie mentioned out of the city manager's office, we've done a recent housing gap analysis that showed that the greatest need, where the private market is not delivering housing is at and below 50% median family income. Mfi. And today that is about $67,000 for a family of four. So families are struggling the most to find housing at that and below. A density bonus program, which is one of the tools recommended by our housing policy, allows a developer to build more in [10:29:38 AM] exchange for community benefits, which usually include affordable housing. They're market based and voluntary tools in the state of Texas, and so therefore they depend on current economic conditions for their success. They tend to therefore be most effective in moderate income ranges, such as between 50% and 80%, median family income and additional subsidies, or fee waivers or tax incentives typically need to be layered on, in addition to the density bonus, in order to reach lower median family income levels, Austin's real estate and construction market has changed in the last five years. We're in a different place with costs and uncertainty rising, and we've seen fewer new starts on denser developments because of that. And additionally, recent changes to state law like senate bill 840 or sb 840 have encouraged more market rate housing by Wright, but this does impact the effectiveness of the city's density bonus program tools. So taking all [10:30:38 AM] that context into account, city council directed us in June of 2025 to create a new tiered structure of a bonus program that we are calling the citywide density bonus program to offer an additional range of heights in exchange for income restricted housing. They also asked us to consider market feasibility, community benefits, relaxed compatibility standards and redevelopment requirements. At the same time, they asked us to look at updating or aligning existing density bonus programs such as density bonus 90 or db 90, vertical mixed use vmu and db etod density bonus. Equitable transit oriented development. Staff's proposal meets the following goals. We are looking to encourage the creation of new affordable housing without any additional city subsidy. We're hoping to provide more density bonus options that will fit in in different neighborhood contexts across Austin. We'd like to make density bonus programs more consistent and transparent. [10:31:40 AM] This helps review staff review more simply without errors or time delays. It helps property owners know what their options are when they're redeveloping. It helps builders move through the process and understand what they need to submit and everything, and it helps the community at large know what might be built on properties nearby. We're also looking to respond to the implications of senate bill 840, and ensure that our new density bonus program is not any more restrictive than that program, that it now allows different multifamily and mixed use housing to be built by Wright on commercial lots. Through this, as Steve mentioned, we've done community engagement over the last roughly year and a half that included both in-person and virtual options. We compensated focus group members of the community. We interviewed members of the development community, even the spring, we hosted a very successful housing affordability fair with Austin housing that had folks finding short term resources to address their affordability, while having the option to weigh in [10:32:40 AM] on longer term policy recommendations. And we've tabled at community events and libraries. We've also listened to planning commission hearings and city council hearings on various zoning cases and code amendments to understand community interest in those as well. Through all of these means, we've heard a variety of views expressed, but several themes have emerged from community feedback. This includes that community members would like to see affordable housing as a primary community community benefit, while still maintaining a mix of other benefits. When feasible, community members generally expressed a preference for taller buildings near transit, with mid-rise and shorter buildings more appropriate. Farther away from transit. Folks would like to see a mix of income restricted housing levels whenever possible, not only deep affordability or only moderate levels of affordability, and we would like to see as a community sensitivity to surrounding neighborhood context and intentionally preserving equitable, existing affordable housing, making sure that we're focused on the areas of [10:33:41 AM] greatest need and those struggling the most to find housing. So with all of that in mind, we've crafted a density bonus program structure that includes five new combining districts that would be added to a zoning base district. Only one of these tiers based on height could be applied per property, so there's no additional combining beyond that, even though they're called combining districts. As part of the action in may. Also just point out that council would not be asked to rezone any new would not be rezoning any new property. And then similarly, as Steve said, we would be retiring the density bonus 90 and vertical mixed use zoning districts going forward, basically not accepting any new applications. But folks that already have those entitlements would continue to be able to use them. The five new tiers that staff proposes range from no additional height beyond a base zone to up to 60 additional feet beyond a base zone. And these align with some of our existing programs height [10:34:41 AM] while adding two new tiers in between for more flexibility. The new Zones would be applicable on various commercial and office based Zones throughout Austin. No residential or industrial based Zones would be eligible for the citywide density bonus program under staff's proposal, but they would include potentially future mixed use Zones that are being worked on through the mixed use and missing middle housing study. So as I mentioned earlier, typically these programs need to balance the needs of community benefits with the additional entitlements in order to entice developers to choose to use this rather than their by right redevelopment options. So I'll walk through each of these benefits and entitlements, the first community benefit that Austin would receive from developers that participate in the program is, of course, affordable housing staff's proposal has the same affordable housing requirements regardless of tier, though. As you get up in height, you get more units, so it does increase [10:35:43 AM] with the higher heights. The total number of units for ownership, we would recommend that 10% of units be affordable at 80% median family income for 99 years and allow a fee in lieu option for rental. We would recommend that 10% of units are affordable at 50% median family income for 40 years, and that these units be on site only with no fee in lieu allowed. And again, this aligns with our understanding of the greatest current need being at 50% median family income and below. We would also require that developments that redevelop existing multifamily housing would comply with the tenant protections outlined in chapter 418 of the city's code today. And I'll just note that there is a minor update to that being recommended on the same timeline as the citywide density bonus program. They'll be two separate agenda items on your may 21st meeting. But today in city code, what's required would be tenant notice [10:36:43 AM] for months rent and fees to the tenants of the. That would be displaced due to redevelopment using the bonus program, moving expenses and some additional kind of lease based and security deposit protections. Additionally, and this is a difference with density bonus 90 today, is that the new program would require an increased threshold for affordability when redeveloping lower cost existing affordable housing, also known as naturally occurring affordable housing. Existing code would require either a 1 to 1 replacement or a 20% of the new development, whichever is lower. So that basically results in somewhere between 10% and 20%, depending on the number of existing units and the number of new proposed units. The final community benefit that we would recommend is that there be various active and mix of use standards. So we're recommending that at least 65% [10:37:44 AM] of the development be residential, and that 35% could be nonresidential. And this aligns with senate bill 840 new buy write entitlements. And we're moving forward with a recommendation to activate the ground floor of a building frontage, with 75% of that needing to contain nonresidential uses, though we would continue to allow for a site specific waiver at the time of zoning. This is just an example of how some of the different height tiers could stack on top of an existing limited office building, so ranging from 45ft up to 60ft. Additional site zero feet up to 60ft additional. In this case, the the limited office would reach 105ft. But again, you can't combine multiple tiers. We're also recommending relaxing compatibility standards for the new citywide density bonus program. On the left of this screen, we have article ten compatibility that applies by right and on the right hand, we have various [10:38:46 AM] adopted D, D 90 and dbi tod versions of compatibility. And staff is proposing something roughly in the middle of those two existing density bonus program versions. We would allow the same amount of building up to 90ft as dbi 90 today for the first. For the area between 25 and 50ft of a triggering single family property. And then after that, you could reach your full height if it was allowed to be above 90ft. Finally, a development would explicitly be allowed several additional land uses that they may not be by their base zone. These are uses that we've either heard from community and council that they'd like to see in mixed use developments, and expand on the list that exists in vertical mixed use and dbi 90 today, things like salons, grocery stores, restaurants, etc. So the planning commission recommended the citywide density bonus program at its [10:39:47 AM] April 28th meeting with several amendments. I'm going to walk through those briefly. Staff has initially taken a pass at our recommendations and responses on those amendments, but we continue to be in discussion with various departments in order to create a final response document that we will be uploading as late backup for your council meeting. There will therefore probably be two versions of the ordinance that you see on may 21st, a planning commission version and a staff version where there's differences. So the first amendment would be to allow a fee in lieu for rental, which staff's proposal does not allow. We're not recommending that at this time, generally, because it would be administratively complex as well as against our goals of geographic dispersion for affordable units throughout our community. For the second amendment, this would exempt projects that are smaller from compatibility. There's a few recommended changes there, but staff generally agrees with that recommendation. The third [10:40:47 AM] planning commission text amendment would recommend a scaling factor that's different from staff's. Our step up is every 15ft in height, and they're recommending in every 25 foot step up in height. This doesn't create a good replacement for db 90 or a lower tier than db 90. You know, it goes up to 85ft. So that's one of the reasons that we're not necessarily recommending it. Staff is neutral on the idea of creating taller base or taller bonus heights. And if council would direct us to do that, we would be happy to create those as part of the final ordinance. One of the amendments was to allow developers to round down instead of up. For fractional requirements. We calculate 10% of your total units, and sometimes that results in a fraction. Our current practice is to round it up, and we continue recommending to do that and to ensure that we're always getting at least 10% of units. And then finally, the recommendation to allow the citywide density bonus on [10:41:49 AM] multifamily lots staff continues to recommend only allowing this on commercial lots, though the missing middle zoning districts that come forward may also result in having a density bonus program that's tied to the smaller multifamily lots more in a more tailored way. Planning commission also made several general recommendations that staff is continuing to look at, especially around things like design requirements, offering additional types of community benefits, etc. So we will have more full responses to these general recommendations. For instance, one of them is to consider parking limitations. Council has already directed that through an item on its may 26th council meeting for staff to look into this. So we're continuing to consider these in this as well as future work. Finally, we're here in may. We're briefing you all and we will be back for council consideration on the 21st. And with that, if folks are just hearing about this or want to [10:42:50 AM] dig in a little bit more, we do have a website W W W speak up, austin.org/citywide db and we're happy to take any questions. Thank you. >> Thank you, members. If you have questions or you want to make comment as part of the work session, let me know. Let me ask now, is there anybody who wishes to be recognized? Councilmember alter. >> Thank you very much. Wanted to just kind of go back to where you started on kind of the why in all of this. You know, we saw how db 90 was working and not just db 90. All of our disparate density bonus programs. And so I wanted to first just underline something that you kind of touched on, but that is that density bonuses are intended for non public dollars to basically create affordable housing. Is that correct? >> Yes that's correct. >> And so we are, you know, [10:43:52 AM] often presented usually through hfc where we're deploying our bond dollars to these affordable housing developments across the city. Those are, you know, great. We we need more of them, but we don't have enough bond dollars to build the amount of affordable housing we need as a city. Right. >> And there's always additional need, as my understanding. Yes. >> Yeah. And so, and we have some programs that are not density bonuses. I don't know if like, would affordability unlock to be considered a density bonus? I guess technically. >> Yes, there's a density bonus program. It operates very differently. So we generally don't discuss it. But it is available citywide. Right. >> But even a program like that, we have only seen projects come through with with much Singh. That program has a very high level of affordability required 50% of units. And the only projects we've seen there at that level of affordability have been with some kind of public subsidization, using bond dollars or other public money, not just exclusively private. Is that correct? [10:44:52 AM] >> Yes, that's my understanding. They generally opt for low income housing tax credits or some other means of subsidy. >> And so when we talk about that level of replacement, what's the right balance between assuring that a project can actually be financially feasible and not need public subsidy? That's where y'all. I arrived at this 10 to 20% range, kind of depending on the scale of the project. >> Correct. And I should misspeak. We also have nonprofit developers that use affordability and lock. So it's not necessarily that they have subsidy, but they're more mission driven. And. >> And often they'll bring. >> Dollars, philanthropic dollars to the table. Exactly. >> Right. Okay. I do want to touch on two areas that our office is looking at as this moves forward. And if anybody is either very interested in these or is very opposed to these, I'd love to talk with you as we get closer. The first is around that first planning commission recommendation [10:45:52 AM] around fee in lieu. I do believe that allowing for fee in lieu as an option for all of our developments and reinvesting those dollars locally, you know, somewhere close by or potentially in a high opportunity area where we don't have traditional affordable housing developed. So we do get the geographic dispersion that miss cook mentioned it. While there are administrative issues doing that, there are also administrative eases by not having to keep track of all these units for the housing department. And you can actually get more units. There are efficiencies to to bundling these dollars together and yielding more units somewhere nearby. And especially at a time when our Cota dollars potentially are going to be stretched thin over the next couple of years. I think that this is something that would be very valuable and yield more [10:46:55 AM] units, and we can figure out the the dispersion question so that we don't just cluster everything, but that we do get those units across the city. But that's something that we'll be working on. And then the second is, and you touched on, you know, the real need that we've seen is, is in that 50% and below. But I really want to highlight the and below Wright we, it always sticks out in my mind every time we get the scorecard from housing works, that 1% of our housing stock is meets the needs for people who are earning 30% below. But 17% of our population is has that level of need. And so that disparity is great. And when we when we say 50% or below, we really know that's going to mean 50% Wright no developer in when they're making their books work is going to say, well, I could do ten units at 50%, but I'm going to actually do ten units at 30%. Unless they are mission driven, they're just [10:47:55 AM] not motivated to do that. And so I would like to look at an option, not an option, moving that to the area of the greatest need and recalibrating and saying maybe, you know, 4% at 30 and 4% at 50 Wright, you're getting less units, but you're meeting more of the need. And that's the trade off that we might have to make. But if we want to really tackle the need, the greatest need, I just think that's something we should consider as a council and decide if that's where we want to steer this. So those are my two things that really want to look at. The last question I have, and you also touched on, you know, we're not rezoning anybody here. Is there anything that as specifically as it relates to db 90, does someone have an entitlement over under db 90 or does db 90 give an entitlement different or over and above an entitlement from whatever we're calling it? Db C 30. [10:48:56 AM] >> The additional entitlements are the same. The community benefits are slightly higher under the citywide density bonus. So hence the the difference there. Primarily the redevelopment requirements. Only the tenant protections are currently required of density bonus 90 projects, whereas the unit replacement requirements are not. But they would be under the citywide density bonus. >> The. So the unit replacement under for 18. Not applicable to db 90, but yes. Applicable under D, correct. Okay. The reason I asked that question is we continue whether it's every two years or five years, we add a new layer, right? We we see what's working. We try to learn from what's worked and what hasn't worked. And then we add a new layer. And then we do it again and again, and we end up with all these Zones that we have to keep track of. The code gets more and more complex and bloated, and things that don't quite gel. And I would like for us to consider, and maybe it's not this month, but as part of this grander process of taking all our vmu and all our db 90 [10:49:59 AM] and rezoning them to the rules that we think are applicable today, and start eliminating things from the code, instead of just continuing to layer on and layer on and layer on. I know that can be a little bit of a headache, and I know we'd have to really look at how many properties are we talking about and, you know, do some stakeholder engagement. But I would like for us to think about that because at some point we have to start cleaning up the code instead of just putting more and more layers on. So I really appreciate the work y'all are doing. I think this has some, some real promise. And, and with that, yield back. >> Thank you, councilmember. Question. >> Thank you. Mayor. I've got two questions. One is on slide 14, where you have the breakdown between ownership and rental of the units. And it seems like there's a pretty big gap there between how we're analyzing the rental units, whether it's fee in lieu or the percentage of mfi versus [10:50:59 AM] ownership. One thing is, I'm curious if there's any kind of analysis you can share with me or us about how you evaluate it and arrived at those conclusions. And then I'm also wondering if part of that is to potentially encourage home ownership as part of your calculation. Why that why that difference exists. Can you speak a little bit to that? >> Yeah, I can speak at a high level, and then we can follow up with more information from Austin housing. But my understanding is that we set the median family income higher in the ownership developments, primarily to protect those affordable unit owners in the future. So, for instance, in an ownership development that's usually a condominium that might have an hoa, those fees that or special assessments that an hoa may have for the condominium are not something that the city can continue to have any authority of after the sale of the unit to the lower income homeowner. And so since they would only represent 10% of the total condo association, [10:52:01 AM] they wouldn't necessarily be a large enough voting block to say, hey, no, we don't actually want to renovate the pool right now. That would be too expensive for. And that's one instance. The reason that we also set it at 80% mfi. That's why we allow fee in lieu. The example I just so that we don't set up low income homeowners for difficult times and we collect those fees and then put them into a development with more low income home ownership options that has a little bit more protection on the 80% median family income. My understanding is that generally, it's challenging to find a traditional mortgage product for folks making incomes lower than that. And so therefore, you know, that tends to be the area, the sweet spot of the lowest mfi that is also able to qualify for a lending product. >> Okay. Thank you for that. And yeah, it would be great to follow up and get whatever other analysis that you've prepared that helps me better understand those options. The second question was on slide 16 [10:53:03 AM] about the redevelopment requirements, where you have that scale between or spectrum between 10 and 20%, depending on the specifics of the project. I'm trying to figure out how you're defining affordability in that case. So for instance, the examples that are on here, are we talking about affordability or looking at projects that previously qualified for density bonus programs. And that's how you're getting those numbers. I'm asking in the context of there may be projects that are market rate affordable, right at much lower affordability at 100% right now, just based on their age. But I'm assuming under this model, most of them wouldn't qualify for new affordability. >> So we're recommending the existing code, which was adopted in may of 2024 for this provision. It has not yet been [10:54:04 AM] triggered because it only today applies to density bonus, and we haven't made it all the way through a site plan for that density bonus project. But what I will say is you basically would look at the apartments that are in a complex at the time of redevelopment, those that are renting at rates affordable to 70% median family income and below, regardless of the income of tenants in there, whether that's lower or higher would be kind of your that would be the total number of existing units that would qualify in your new development. We would still calculate what 10% of your total new units are. And in the case that your existing qualifying number at 70% is higher than the new 10%, you would be required to have additional income restricted units up to a maximum of 20% of your new development. So there's kind of a limit on that 1 to 1 replacement, and you [10:55:04 AM] either hit it or you don't. And if you hit the 20% before you get to full 1 to 1, those new units per code today would be restricted to 60% mfi below. And they would actually have to have qualifying tenants in those units. >> Got it. So just to make sure I understand this is based on you said, the 2024 db programs, what's already qualified or was built under that code. But in the case of units that are just aging and were not built with that code, this really wouldn't apply. >> It's regardless of whether they were originally subsidized or incentivized or just fully market rate. So it's just whether the units are naturally occurring, affordable and available at 70% mfi and below, or they were created through some kind of bonus or incentive. It's agnostic. It's just what the units rent for today that we look at. >> Okay. All right. Well, I'll follow up and try and get some more details on that as well. Thank you. >> Other questions or comments? Great. Thank you all very much. Thank you. That'll take us to [10:56:05 AM] item B two. And I'll turn to the city clerk to call on people to speak. >> Thank you mayor. Beginning with remote speakers on item B two, Malcolm Yeatts. >> My name is Malcolm. I am the chair of the era contact team. The era contact team had requested many of the improvements to the 311 system that are included in the November 6th, 2025 council resolution sponsored by council member member Velasquez, and that are now included in item b2h. Zo presentation. However, additional metrics need to be included in homeless encampment management dashboards to make it an effective tool. On may 3rd, I sent an email to all city council members listing these additional metrics. Please read this email and include these additional [10:57:06 AM] metrics in the dashboard requirements. These additional metrics are the cost to city departments to deal with the homeless population. Once citizens realize the true cost of the homeless issue, they will demand that their state representative introduce legislation to fund appropriate programs. The current approach of the city to dealing with the homeless issue pits citizens against city council. It does not solve the problem, it only moves it. In addition to expanding zo services, our economically unsustainable. When the city is already facing budget shortfalls. The reason for much of the homeless population is that the state legislature does not adequately fund programs for mental illness and substance abuse. Often, taxpayers cannot continue to fund programs that should be funded by the state. Citizens. City departments and city council need to work together to demand the state [10:58:09 AM] legislature adequately fund programs for mental illness and substance abuse. In addition to citizens contacting their state representatives, the Austin city government needs to coordinate a program with other large Texas cities to lobby the state legislature to fund mental illness programs. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Continuing with remote speakers on item b2, snehal Patel. Please unmute. >> Thank you, mayor and council members. Thank you for your time. I'm an internal medicine physician who cares for many people experiencing homelessness, and I'm asking the council for some specific action. First, pause. The planned expansion of APD embedded encampment sweeps and reset any encampment response. As a public health led operation. First, I ask council [10:59:10 AM] to direct the zo to to suspend the encampment management expansion pending council review of the health and fiscal impacts my patients describe clean up teams paired with police with little or no outreach, and no meaningful access to shelter or housing that is driving preventable harm and worsening of public health crisis medically. Here's what a sweep looks like. A person with diabetes loses their diabetes meds, leading to severe hypoglycemia, hospitalization complications including infection, possible sepsis and limb loss, or even death. A person with heart failure loses their medications, leading to decompensation hospitalization, again leading to significant morbidity and possible mortality. Someone loses their id, they can't refill their prescriptions, they can't access benefits, and they can't move toward housing because vital documents were trashed. Austin residents, including my patients, describe sweeps where they lost everything. Second, before any [11:00:10 AM] restart of encampment management, we need written reporting on the health outcomes and harm metrics, including loss medications, ids, avoidable ems, transport, Eid visits and deaths linked to displacement. We need system outcomes including shelter placement, service connections and lasting connections to housing, and we need full cost accounting across departments, including downstream costs that are shifted to ems, public health and safety, net health systems. Third issue increased budget directives that prevent displacement, such as low barrier shelter storage and on site outreach and clinical teams. Sweeps don't eliminate costs. >> Also speaking remotely on item b2, Yasmin Smith. >> Good morning, mayor and council. My name is Yasmin Smith, born and raised Austin I, vice president of justice and advocacy for the urban league. And I'm here asking you to do something simple but critical. Pause. Pause. The proposed ramp up of encampment sweeps until [11:01:11 AM] you until it is thoughtful enough to mitigate the harm we already know it will cause. I want to begin with acknowledgment 311 calls represent real concern. A mother who no longer feels comfortable bringing her child to the park, a worker navigating spaces that feel unpredictable, a neighbor watching conditions decline, and asking who is responsible for this? That is real and it deserves a response. But how we respond will define whether that response actually works. Because what we cannot do, what we must not do, is allow urgency to replace strategy. Because displacement is not resolution. Enforcement standing alone is not a system. And if we look beyond the complaint, we see the other side of the same story a man sleeping with his documents in a plastic bag so they don't get wet because those papers are the only proof he exists in the systems that might help him. A woman holding on to her medication like it's oxygen. Because in many ways it is a person choosing the same place to sleep, not because it's safe, but because it's known and the unknown can be more dangerous. We have seen this before. Hundreds of sites cleared, thousands of people contacted, and still people returned because there is not enough help to accept. So the question [11:02:12 AM] is simple are we solving homelessness? Are we simply just moving it? If this encampment increase, efforts should move forward. It must be different. No displacement without a real place to go, no destruction of essential belongings, no enforcement first approach, and no pushing people into isolation where they cannot get help. We offer this not as an opposition but as partnership. We are ready to work with you to drive companion language and build in the build in those guardrails, because we cannot fund movement more aggressively than we fund stability. You can protect public spaces and protect human dignity because when someone loses laughing, they have their shelter, their medication, their existence. They are further from finding their way back. Paul, do this with care, then move forward together. Thank you. >> We will now move to in-person speakers. Erica Chadbourne, Andy Brower, Michael Ibarra. >> When your name is called, if you're here, please come down. If you're not here, you can't hear me. But if you're if you're here and you hear me, please come down and go ahead [11:03:13 AM] and make take a place at the table. Why don't you call a couple of other names? >> Eli Cortez, Tony Carter, Jennifer Miller. Patrick Pickard. >> Please go ahead and start. Just state your name for the record. >> Hi. Good afternoon. My name is Erica Chadbourne. I'm an educator. I taught at Texas school for the deaf and the ACC Riverside campus. I live right at I-35 and oltorf close to Travis early college high school, and I'm a member of the south Austin neighborhood safety alliance. We have created this organization for several reasons, but one of for me, one of my big passions is making neighborhoods safer for the high school students who live east of I-35 and commute over to the high school. So we've started a safety community and we are having regular meetings. And I want to invite you because if you want to understand how these [11:04:13 AM] students, neighbors, educators use three, one one use 911 report encampments, report interactions with unhoused folks. Like, for example, the students just went on a field trip in blunt creek and were verbally threatened by somebody camping there and had to abandon their field trip. They didn't call 311. And so to understand the reluctance on their part, I invite you to come to our next meeting, which is on June 23rd at the high school. It includes students, faculty members, administrators, APD constables, capmetro life, van eenoo, restorative justice, neighborhood associations, business owners. And I know for myself, I've learned a lot from these students and understanding how they experience safety or not in their neighborhood. And I feel like it could really impact how you decide to approach 911311 [11:05:21 AM] reporting. Come and listen. I invite you. Thank you. >> Thank you. Please, anyone please begin. >> Good morning y'all. I'm Mike Ybarra. I'm also a member of stanza with Erica. I want to flag something time sensitive for you guys this morning regarding the new homeless service center on I-35. The operator applications for that center are due on Monday, this coming Monday, and before that deadline passes, we. We need y'all to to keep some things in mind, we were told that this facility was going to be a housing navigation center, but the rfa for the center operator and the sos public statements tell a completely different story. They describe a full service day center focused on individuals, again, homeless individuals. Whereas housing navigation for families is going to stay at the sunrise center on manchaca. That's not what we were promised, and it's [11:06:22 AM] not what we need in our community. We think that there's still time to get this right. We're going to deliver a white paper to your offices this week with detailed policy recommendations, but the framework of that paper is simple. We're looking for a prohibition on services that encourage folks to stick around and set up camp appointment only access controls and firm accountability mechanisms. We think that without those guardrails, the facility is going to relocate the most controversial elements of sunrise just into our neighborhood, and that the fallout will be even more challenging for the city and for this council than what's happening at sunrise today. Most of y'all weren't on the council in 2019, so you probably don't remember that. In that year, council reversed course on a shelter plan for bannister Laine and put it in our neighborhood. But at the time, the incomparable dahlia Garza said that she would have, quote, big concerns if every single one of these is going to be put in the majority minority parts of our town. And we think that without the guardrails [11:07:22 AM] that sansa is calling for, that's exactly what y'all will be doing. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Good morning council. Thank you so much for the opportunity to speak. My name is Eli Cortez and I'm an organizer of vocal Texas. I'm a resident of district three and also live in the old turf area in my neighborhood, where I am happy to see these services go into place. I, as an organizer with people who are living outside, talk to them every day, and I'm talking to people who are being swept every single day. I'm not going to sit here and tell y'all what happens in encampment sweep, because I know that you already know that. I know that all of you have been here while we brought people here and talked about how they've lost their belongings, lost their medications, lost their, their documents, that our city limits research and resources into them acquiring Jesus survival gear, their medications. So I'm not going to sit here and list because you're going to hear that from other people that are going to be here today. If you move forward with this plan to create five teams, five teams that are APD led six teams in total to conduct encampment sweeps daily and send police and Austin resource recovery out into out into encampments. Every day you're going to see [11:08:23 AM] those two exact outcomes. You're going to see an increase in tickets and arrests. You're going to see the increase in people's belongings being thrown out and thrown away. We cannot move forward with such a rampant escalation of force on our in-house community. In a year where we're facing a huge deficit in our budget and we've already lost this recent like, our services are going to be underfunded in this upcoming year. If you can afford to send out five teams to encampments that are made up of police officers and people to throw away people's belongings, then you can afford to replace those. One of those police officers with a mental health care worker, or with ems, or with real services that are, that are, that are conjoined with with those days of enforcement, you're going to hear a briefing in a little bit that police officers are not going out with the intent to ticket and arrest people, and that people aren't going out with the intention to throw away people's essential belongings. But we all know here in this room that that is what's happening in those encampments. And if you move forward with a plan that so rampantly escalates, that that's the only thing that you're going to see, please pause the plan. We're not [11:09:25 AM] asking you to stop enforcement, but until we can create safeguards and invest in real solutions and make sure that people's rights and their their dignity is protected, we cannot move forward with such a rampant escalation of force against our unhoused community. >> Thank you. >> My name is Jennifer. >> And could you state your full name, please. >> Jennifer Miller? >> Thank you. >> I've been unhoused for three years, and in this three years I have had two sweeps and in two sweeps. I've had documents come up missing. I've had them thrown away. I've had. People just. People just don't understand. We have to start over. And when we start over, it makes it complicated. And it's real hard on us, you know? And all I'm asking is for y'all [11:10:26 AM] to be understanding and help. Pause. You know, because we can't we can't do this. We can't sit here and keep starting over on a daily basis with our documents or our our medicines. I take nine pills and I need help to keep my medicines up on a daily basis. So all I ask is for you to please pause. And because. You could use this money to put us somewhere, you know, somewhere safe, I got you could help us get into housing. You could get you could put money into these vouchers. Everyone keeps talking about because I'm not seeing anything is better than increasing sweeps. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Next on item B two, Karen Smith. Kate Graziani, Lauren [11:11:28 AM] Perkins, lily Hughes. Paul tardy. Please state your name and begin speaking. >> Thank you. >> Whoever wants to begin, go ahead. Just state your name, please. >> Hello, my name is Carrie Ann Smith and I'm a leader with vocal Texas. And I'm here to talk about these compassionate sweeps that they're going to be talking about at their after me. I wanted to say that I was swept over a year ago, and all of the resources that they claim that they give you, they do not give you any resources at all. When they came and did my sweep, they took my generator. They took all of my belongings and they. When you're trying to start over and trying to do things the right [11:12:29 AM] way, it's hard for them to just literally just take all your stuff. And when they took my stuff, one of the, the things like the officers, they literally antagonize you. Like they took my bike riding it down the street, up and down the street, not I, I after they wrote it down the street, they stole it with the rest of my belongings. Never came back with any resources, no housing, no resources to anywhere. Just left me out there in in the streets. I just really want them to put it on the pause and take consideration of the things that they, they are doing out here. Just please put a pause on this. >> Thank you, thank you. Wu, please. >> My name is lily Hughes. I'm here to ask you that you pause this new a P D led plan to sweep our unhoused community. [11:13:30 AM] I'm a social worker and I've been an outreach worker for our unhoused neighbors for four years. And these four years I've sat before this council many times to plead with you to provide all austinites with the same dignity, respect and care. Unfortunately, the two minutes I have does not allow me the time to summarize the flaws in this plan, nor ask the questions I would like to. So I will use my time to describe what I have witnessed and why I'm urging you to pause this plan. I spent years watching the city attempt to bow to the state government by violently sweeping the homes of our people. Our people have built or survived the lack of housing and shelter in Austin. I spent this time scrambling to use our limited resources at THA to assist the folks we work with. I've seen people I love, experience horrifying treatment, and several people I've worked with have died due to these policies. I watched in horror in November when H. Zo launched the failed three week initiative that ultimately cost nearly $1 million and connected a fraction of the 1212 people they swept to shelter. As an outreach worker who serves people living in encampments every day, I was shocked to [11:14:31 AM] learn about this new plan in the media. We were told this plan is more intentional than the November initiative. But ten days away from the launch date, not one question I had about concrete details could be answered. The city should not launch this plan without these questions being answered. But let's be clear about who this plan is designed to help wealthy homeowners who do not want to see our unhoused neighbors. Ironically, this plan is going to increase the rates of homelessness that the city wants to literally sweep away. It's going to cost millions of dollars only to make the situation worse. Taxpayers should know that those millions of dollars could be invested in programs that benefit all of us. But instead, the city is choosing to waste our money on cruelty. This is inhumane, ineffective, and incredibly costly. I want to live and work in a city where everyone is valued. I want to be able to find our folks when they're up for housing. I want to be sure they have the support they need to thrive. And after four years, I can confidently say that I cannot do this in the current system. It's time to pause this plan and use these resources for services and housing, not cops and suites. >> Thank you. [11:15:33 AM] >> My name is Lauren Perkins. This plan manages homelessness. Instead of ending it, it prioritizes coordination, metrics and system performances and leaves intact the conditions that make people die. Outside. Encampment sweeps are described as resolution or abatement. Those are administrative terms. The reality is loss. The reality is people are pushed further from services into more dangerous conditions, into isolation. People die after sweeps, not in theory. In reality, echo reports over 1000 unhoused people died in Austin under a five year period. That's the same number of constituents living in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city limits. That's Enfield and district ten. Zo talks about reducing harm, but harm reduction starts from a different premise. Housing safety and medical access are not incentives. They are baseline conditions for staying alive. We know what works because we've seen it in Denver and in Houston. Low barrier shelter without surveillance, naloxone, safe for use supplies, and peer led outreach that meets people where they are [11:16:34 AM] with this plan expands our carceral strategies disguised with the language of public order and cleanliness. These so-called cleanups move people out of sight without offering real alternatives that recognize the basic humanity. They increase overdose deaths, disrupt medical access and fracture networks people rely on to survive. Displacement is not care. It is violence. So the question is not whether is this plan coordinated? The question is coordinated towards what? Because this looks like an attempt to end, not like an attempt to end homelessness nd more like an attempt to manage its visibility, to make it less disruptive to the people in the city who already have housing stability and political power. So here is a hard question. Is this plan trying to build empathy in those communities, or is it designed to insulate them from ever needing it? Being unhoused is not a moral failing, but choosing to do something that actively harms them instead of helps them is one. When you choose to listen to the wants of someone in $1 million house, instead of the needs of someone in a $30 tent. When you put their discomfort [11:17:34 AM] of visibility, of poverty. >> Thank you. >> Very much. Of impoverished. Thank see who you really are. >> Your time has expired. Thank you. >> Good morning. My name is Kate Graziano. I'm with Vogel, Texas. Yesterday you should have all received a sign on letter that I think will be distributed this morning. If you haven't received it, it's signed by 31 organizations representing service providers, faith leaders, labor advocacy and civil rights organizations. And I want to be clear, we're not asking you to not enforce the camping ban. We're imploring you to pause this half baked, inhumane and expensive plan and use our scarce resources for real solutions. I was part of the coalition that helped overturn the camping ban back in 2019, and I ran a service provider organization for people who are unhoused. So I know full well that the camping ban did nothing to solve homelessness. And I think you all know that too. So why do we have this plan that doubles down on [11:18:35 AM] enforcement when we know that it won't do anything to solve homelessness? Where did it come from? Why does it lack real solutions for people? Despite what's been said in the media and what you might hear today, this plan is not a connection to housing plan. It's not a let's move you to a safer place plan. This is a policing plan, plain and simple. And it's the easy way out. And I get it. Things are tough right now. You're facing a strapped budget, increased pressure from the state and from the feds. It's hard to find good service providers to run the programs, let alone find a neighborhood where they will be allowed to operate. There are certain minority voices that have been been emboldened here in this town, but that is your job as public servants to do the hard work, to keep our most vulnerable community members safe. And this plan is a failure of that job. The same way bowing to the state on ice. Collaboration was a failure of that job, right? With our sign on letter and our testimony today, we want to show that this plan does not represent what Austin wants. Only 90,000 people voted for that camping ban, and most of them wanted to [11:19:35 AM] see solutions to the camps that they were seeing popping up around the city. This plan fails them too, because there is no housing tied to this plan. Folks are not going anywhere. They're still in their neighborhoods, they're still unhoused, and they're going to be more desperate and more in need of help than ever. Please pause the plan. >> Take a deep. >> My name is Paul tardy. The zo presentation, which you can find online, attached to this meeting today, conveniently excludes the counterproductive and harmful effects, which are the byproduct of encampment sweeps. Surveys conducted by Texas harm reduction alliance and anecdotal evidence have provided insight to the types of property that are seized from unhoused people and destroyed by the city. These items include tools, vital documents, survival supplies, medications, and sentimental items. As vital documents are destroyed, it sets people behind on their path to resources to get off the streets. Identification is needed to obtain housing, get other forms of id, establish [11:20:36 AM] employment, receive food stamps and get disability or retirement benefits. A person is only allowed ten social security cards and birth certificates in their lifetime, and the loss of identification could take time and money that some people don't have in order to meet deadlines to receive services like housing, which some have been waiting years to receive. The destruction of survival items like tents puts a strain on service providers. As each sweep increases the need for supplies. This further exposes people to the elements and degrades mental health. So plans on shelters being the solution. But many people cannot enter them with their pets or partners. And not all shelters provide needed services, while also being located far away from other resources. 48% of surveyed participants had medication destroyed in sweeps, including those for HIV, schizophrenia, anxiety, bipolar, diabetes, COPD, heart conditions and chronic pain. In one case, naloxone was destroyed, which resulted in a person dying of an overdose because it could not be administered. As sweeps [11:21:37 AM] ramp up, it will exacerbate symptoms related to mental and physical health, on top of the stresses related to having one's possessions stolen and being forced to relocate. Sentimental items destroyed in sweeps include the ashes of loved ones, family photos, letters from loved ones, musical instruments and family heirlooms. How are unhoused people supposed to trust the city when they are treated this way? Correct course before you do more damage. >> Thank you. >> Continuing on item B two. Sasha. Rose. Matthew. Malika. Summer. Alexander. Harry. Cox. Julie. Bonnie. >> If your name has been called, please come forward. >> Hi council members, my name is Sasha rose. I work with Austin mutual aid and a numerous amount of organizations here that are currently trying to address solving homelessness. But let's be real, this plan does not [11:22:39 AM] solve homelessness. It's actually a approach to displace people without addressing why they are unhoused in the first place. So the reality is we have about 3000 shelter beds, but 5 to 6000 people experiencing homelessness every year. Full stop. That means we have no place to go. We are using this plan essentially uses the carceral system as a form of shelter. That's what we're looking at when we have APD led sweeps. This leaves thousands of people with nowhere to go, and at the same time, for every 100 extremely low income households, there are only 23 affordable and available units. I watched the whole thing from earlier as well. We are cycling people through incarceration instead of housing. In Travis county jail, an estimated 400 to 800 people at any given time are dealing with homelessness or housing instability, and nationally, 1 in 4 people leaving jail will experience homelessness within a year. At this point, we have to be using. We have to be honest. We are using incarceration as a form of shelter, not because it works, but because we have not built enough housing or shelter. This is not a solution. This is a system failure and this has [11:23:40 AM] life or death consequences. In Austin, hundreds of people experiencing homelessness die each year from exposure. Untreated illness and instability sweeps increase that instability. They make people harder to reach, harder to support, and more likely to die. This plan is also geographically inequitable. If you look at the city's own maps, services and enforcement areas are concentrated in specific areas, primarily central Austin. South Austin, where just pushing people farther and farther out, away, out. That reflects a pattern of pushing both homelessness and responses into certain communities rather than distributing the solutions equitably. This is spatial segregation, and it matters. We are known for this, y'all. The housing mismatch. People are being swept. They're often living on SSI, maybe $900 a month. Social security at the top is 800 bucks a month. They can afford 300 to $600 in rent. We're talking about 70 to 80% mfi. That's 15 to $2000 per month. >> Thank you very much. >> We're awfully. >> Please go ahead. >> Good morning mayor. My name [11:24:40 AM] is summer Alexander and hello. Good morning, council members. My name is summer Alexander. I'm a reentry and recovery peer specialist at Texas harm reduction alliance, and I am here again today to speak against B two. I'm asking you to pause the plan. I'm urging you to invite the trusted organizations that work within these communities every single day, to be a part of the planning and execution of solutions like this. Organizations like Texas harm reduction alliance, echo, heart of Texas, and vocal, the people who are out here day to day working directly with these individuals, they need to be met where they're at. We collect the data, we understand what they're going through on a day to day basis. I was completely blindsided to learn this plan was even being put in motion. Right now, what you have created is a band-aid. It does not provide real solutions to real problems. And I can show you why. Yesterday, a peer of mine, a man living with two end of life medical conditions, was evicted by the very organization that was supposed to be housing him. He is back on the streets this morning, and the last words he said to [11:25:40 AM] me last night was, I'm convinced I'm going to die here. That is horrible. I am born and raised in the city and I am disappointed. When he was housed, he was still fighting two criminal charges that he bonded out on charges he accrued during as a result of being unhoused in the first place. He bonded out specifically so that he did not lose his housing. Despite that sacrifice and despite despite the promises made to him, he lost it anyways. This is the cycle that no one from this dais wants to talk about. We sweep site and arrest people for being unhoused. Then the very few who can present vital documents because they might have them after they've been swept. They are given keys. Once housed, the criminal case, the criminal cases we've given them, they follow them into the apartment, and then they're thrown right back out on the street again. We are paying tax dollars to house people and then simultaneously prosecuting those same people. We are funding both ends of a cycle that fix nothing. The plan in front of you expands, sweeps to 6 to 5 days a week and track citations and arrests. [11:26:40 AM] >> Thank you very much. >> Good morning mayor, council members, city manager. My name is Matt Malika. I'm the executive director of the ending community homelessness. Homelessness coalition, or echo my testimony this morning is going to be a little different. But following the same thread as some folks we've heard today, I want to express appreciation for zo and their team overall through the work they've done over the last several years. And I want to thank this council for some investments that they've made in ending homelessness, investments in permanent supportive housing, investments in emergency shelter and investments in rapid rehousing. Echo makes decisions here in our community based on data and lived experience. The data here is known to all. It's obvious that encampment sweeps and raids do not end homelessness. In fact, they. They exacerbate it, as many of the people here you've [11:27:41 AM] you've heard here today have discussed. The data, however, ignores political realities. We understand budget shortfalls, and we understand state and federal strategies. We know the pressure that this council and community is under. We have suggestions on how the plan could be made better and will send the homeless strategy office. But I want to take a minute and talk to you about James. James lives under the bridge at Cesar Chavez mopac, and he has for seven years. James is dying of cancer, brain cancer and liver cancer. It's metastasized. James. I went with James and showed him the presentation from the homeless strategy office yesterday. James asked about the blue dots on the map that you're going to see during David's presentation, and he recognized his own dot. He asked what the council members would say about the dots and who do they see? Do they see people making calls [11:28:43 AM] concerned about encampments, or do they see the people in the encampments? James is quote, was solving for the caller will win elections. Solving for the people will solve the problem. >> Thank you, Mr. Malika. >> That concludes all speakers on item b2. >> Thank you. Thanks for everybody speaking. And, Mr. Gray, you have the floor. >> Good morning, mayor and city council. David gray, director of Austin homeless strategies and operations. And joining me to my right, your left is my deputy director, Chris Anderson. And then we have a number of staff from the department here as well. In case you have [11:29:44 AM] questions for us regarding the presentation, as well as representatives from a variety of city departments who do this work with us today, we'll be providing you with an update on several elements of zo and work that we've been performing since the last time we've had a check in with all of you. We'll start with some updates regarding a few council resolutions from November, and then we'll provide you with some updates about our street and community outreach division, followed by the homeless encampment management work that falls under our public space management division. So to get into the two city council resolutions, this first resolution from from November directed the city manager to do a variety of things. And in the interest of time, I'm going to skip down to that fourth bullet, which talks about expanding the violet keep safe program. The violet keep safe program is a program that's actually run by the Austin community court. It provides safe storage for individuals seven days a week, open from 7 A.M. To 7 P.M. [11:30:46 AM] Although closed for two hours in the middle of the day for lunch, the violet keeps safe program employs people with lived experience, and for data from last year, over 640 individuals were served through the violet keep safe program, with an average engagement of 86 interactions per day. The violet keeps a program was transitioned to Austin community court in an unfunded manner. And yet the court has run this program exceptionally well, increasing it to the current seven day operations back in 2021. The court is in the process of expanding storage solutions for people at the violet keep safe facility. They're transitioning from those purple violet keep safe bins that many of you are familiar with, with the stacked gray bins, which provides both a more dignified experience for people who are storing items at violet keep safe and allows the community court to accommodate more people. And then we are working in partnership with the [11:31:48 AM] Austin community court for an additional 50 bins. Of course, as part of the resolution from November, did ask us to look at options for expanding locations across the city, and our ability to do that will depend on cost drivers that we're still in the process of calculating and determining. Another resolution from November was on. That same city council agenda directed us to do a number of things regarding the development and production of a homeless encampment management dashboard, as well as some modifications to the Austin 311 system to make it easier for residents to get in contact with the city when they had questions or concerns regarding homeless encampments in their neighborhood. Beginning with the 311 service request process. As the process exists today, there is no dedicated service request option for homelessness. If you were to call into 311, typically what you would need [11:32:48 AM] to do is select another option, such as a request about parks or streets. And then through that pathway, you make a report about homelessness. All of those reports about homelessness, then get directed to our office, where we average about 150 reports a week or 700 to 750 reports a month. In our future state, the goal would be to have a dedicated service request process specifically for homelessness, to empower residents to reach out about encampment concerns, and to also request outreach when they want some assistance. For individuals who are experiencing homelessness. If it is an immediate hazard, those calls will continue to get rerouted to 911 for our public safety response, and then the data from the 311 calls will feed directly into the dashboard, which I'll touch on. On the next slide, we are working with Austin energy's 311 team to bring forth this enhancement, and we plan to have this done by the end of the year. When it comes to the [11:33:49 AM] dashboard, we are still in the process of developing a homeless encampment management dashboard that would be publicly viewable by all, as well as allow us to do better coordination. Internally. We are working with Austin technology solutions, Austin 311 and the city's arcgis vendor to develop a suite of solutions around the dashboard where we're taking encampment information, as well as a variety of other business data layers to populate the map with the goal of having this feature ready for testing later this year, and the full solution out simultaneously with the Austin 311 updated process. As I mentioned, part of that first resolution talked a lot about street and community outreach, and so we did want to provide you with an update on the work that we've done within our street and community outreach division. This division, which is led by raven, who's here in the audience today. The goal of this division is to connect with our unhoused residents and [11:34:51 AM] provide them with access to stabilizing systems of care and to deliver needed resources. Our core value through the street outreach division is to establish trusting relationships with people who interact with this division, make sure that we're meeting our clients where they're at geographically and in life, and honor their motivations to come into shelter or connect with housing or other supportive services, and also make sure that we're looking after the well-being of our staff who are on the front lines doing this work so that their cup is filled as they try to fill the cups of other people. Our street and community outreach work is anchored in three core tenets, which include reducing morbidity, identifying pathways to safety and to housing, and improving our response to unsheltered homelessness. In terms of the actual work performed by this team, it's typically categorized into four key buckets. The first is assessing needs of individuals who are on our streets, connecting those folks with resources, understanding what the unique challenges are, and [11:35:51 AM] how do we make sure that we're prioritizing services to connect people with the right resources at the right time? This team also distributes supplies to individuals on the street. I do want to be clear that our supply distribution is in compliance with all local and state laws regarding what we're able to do. And so typically, the supplies that we would distribute include things like hygiene kits, inclement weather supplies, when we know it's going to be a cold night or particularly hot day, bus passes, narcan, water, etc. The third involves coordinating services and referrals. We worked with a variety of outreach partners to make sure that folks who are on the streets get connected to the services that they need to not just survive today, but also get them on a path off the streets. And so those connections could be with healthcare resources, navigation, diversion, shelter, and other community assets. And the ultimate goal of this team is to increase stability, supporting our clients and help [11:36:53 AM] them sustain their engagement over time, ultimately with the goal of getting them into stable housing. As I mentioned, we work with a variety of community partners in order to deliver the work in these four key buckets, and I'm really grateful for all the partners that engage with this team on a daily basis. One of the things that we do currently is we hold weekly coordination calls with a host of community organizations and partners who do street outreach work as well, and it's a place for these organizations to share information with the city. Let us know what the needs are also for us to share information with them and let them know what our needs are and what our operations are. You've heard a lot about the encampment management piece already. You know, one thing that we did through these weekly meetings was actually provide updates about the encampment management work and the map of those locations with those outreach partners so that they could let us know if they were doing work in certain spaces, and we would hold off on the encampment management. If those partners [11:37:53 AM] are doing work. We believe that having these work coordination calls have created a real, trusting foundation for collaboration and partnership, and ultimately for all of us to do this work better as we pursue improving the lives of people who are unhoused. Beginning in the summer, we will start doing biweekly case conferencing. This is very similar to doctors and nurses who round in the hospital. It's an opportunity for us to identify the folks with the greatest health care needs or greatest challenges, who are on the streets, and figure out how we create custom programs to get them off the streets and to address their needs. And so this is true system coordination. And we look forward to getting this program off the ground. And then in summer 2026, the echo organization, which manages the coordinated entry system, will start hosting monthly be on the lookout engagement meetings with street outreach partners that be on the lookout list is a list of individuals whose names have been pulled for [11:38:53 AM] rapid rehousing and permanent supportive housing and other housing resources. Oftentimes, the boots on the ground know those individuals or know where they're at. Under the current system, it's the responsibility of the housing provider to find those individuals. But since we have folks who are on the streets every day and we have community partners who are on the streets every day, we want to be able to leverage that partnership network to more quickly find people and get them connected to the housing resource that their name has been pulled for. In terms of our own internal team, we have been hiring staff, training those staff and making sure that our operations internally are such that we can provide coverage across the city. And so currently, our division is comprised of three teams, two staff assigned to each team, with coverage divided across north, central and the south Austin areas. Having these teams assigned to specific areas helps us provide a consistent presence with folks in encampments in these parts of towns, built relationships, [11:39:53 AM] built familiarity, and ultimately help get people on a path to stability and success. The three geographic areas will align with the encampment management areas that we'll discuss shortly, and I'll explain why in just a moment as well. Transitioning now to our public space management division. I want to begin by just saying that our public space management division is a separate division from the street and community outreach division. It's completely separate and apart. When we first became an office, the street outreach and space management work was all under one division, and we very quickly learned that that was not the best way to organize ourselves. It was very confusing for our staff to know which hat they were wearing on which day. But even more importantly, it was very confusing for the folks on the street to know who was showing up and for what purpose. And so raven oversees our street and community outreach division. But Patricia, who's behind me, oversees our public space management division. This is the division that's responsible for working with multiple city departments to coordinate [11:40:54 AM] encampment cleanups and closures. When the encampments are on public property, we will work with a host of city departments to go through the process of homeless encampment management, which I'll describe shortly. But when the encampment is on private property due to state law, we have to make sure that we respect those private property owners rights. And so therefore, we will go in hand in hand with the code enforcement department to navigate the process for addressing encampments on private property. Ultimately, the goal of this team is to clear and clean locations to restore, restore them back to their original condition for the enjoyment of all. However, if an encampment has active people camping there, then the encampment management team will pause their activity and connect those folks with the street and community outreach team to provide resources to connect with folks in a meaningful way. And to do that before any cleaning is [11:41:54 AM] scheduled. Once the street and community outreach team has had sufficient time to complete their work, then the public space management team is responsible for posting the 72 hour notice, letting people know of the upcoming cleanup and closure. We will make some exceptions to this rule, especially in life safety incidences. For example, last week we had some pretty significant rain across town, which led to some high water and some rushing water and some of our creeks. In those scenarios, we will not wait 72 hours. We've already had some some fatalities of people experiencing homelessness who have been swept away in a rushing water. And so when it's a life safety risk incident like that, we will bypass the 72 hours and just work to get people out of the encampment and close the encampment as quickly as possible. Now, I know a lot of the conversation recently in the news, and here today has focused on, excuse me, has focused on the homeless encampment management process. This is a process that we [11:42:55 AM] created with the goal of providing a consistent response across the city to help reduce health and safety risk at high priority sites. And the goal here again, is to have a consistent response. We want the public from our housed residents all the way to our unhoused residents to know how the process should work and what they should expect to see when the city has been called to come in and clean and clear out encampment. The reason why this process exists is because, as has been stated today, the city back in 2020 repealed a camping ban, which the voters subsequently reinstated in 2021. And on top of that, the state of Texas passed a law that banned camping statewide. And so we do have to do encampment cleanups and closures, but we believe that the homeless encampment management process allows us to still do the things that the voters of Austin and that the state are requiring us to do, but to do it in a person centered way and in a way that leads with our [11:43:56 AM] ethics and our values. The way the process works is essentially six steps. And each of these steps is a little bit more complicated than what the slide shows. But in a nutshell, these six steps begin with identification, which is when the site pops up on our radar, whether that's from an Austin 311 request service request, a staff report, a contact from one of your offices. We will then send a team out to do an assessment, and what they're looking for are health, safety and environmental indicators to let us know about the condition of the encampment. Based off of that assessment, we will then prioritize sites for outreach, cleanup and closure. If there are people in the sites, we automatically go to step number four, which is outreach. We want to make sure that we are providing meaningful engagement of folks who are in these encampments and giving them every opportunity to connect with the services that they need, and the shelter beds or the housing resources that are available. Before we proceed to step number five. Step number four does not have a time limit. We engage with people as long as they need to be engaged. But [11:44:57 AM] once we provide the opportunity, whether it's the shelter opportunity or the service opportunity, it is up to the person in the encampment to say yes or no. If they say yes, we will facilitate the connection. If they say no, that is their choice. But at that point, the outreach has completed their purpose and we need to proceed to step number five, which is the notification, which is a 72 hour posting, followed by step number six, which is when we do the enforcement, the cleanup and the site restoration. The reason why we are here today talking about the modification to the homeless encampment management operations is because the current staffing model is insufficient to keep up with the level of service requests that we're receiving from folks. Currently, we have him operations three days a week, which with one team available each day. And that's one team that might be in north Austin one day. And then that team might be in central Austin the next day, and then it might be in south Austin the third day, and that's it. Excuse me. [11:46:01 AM] Battling a cold. So under this model, this model has been insufficient to keep pace with the 700 to 750 calls that we receive every month. It does not allow our crews to consistently follow up on sites that we have previously cleaned and cleared. It also leads to a lot of reoccurring encampment activity, which ultimately means that we do not have sustainable progress when it comes to reducing risk. And we also are seeing an erosion of public confidence and trust in the process, and staff feel like they are unable to deliver their best work in a truly sustainable manner. Under the new structure that's launching in mid may. Thank you sir. Under the new structure that's launching in mid may, we will shift to having six homeless encampment management teams that are working citywide five days a week. Three of these teams are geographic based teams. So one focused on north Austin, one in central and one south, a fourth team that's focused on roadways and [11:47:01 AM] transportation corridors, a fifth team that's focused on waterways, and a team that's focused on litter abatement. Now, across five of these teams, as have been mentioned, there are Austin police officers who are attached to these teams. And I want to be very clear about why those officers are there. Those officers are not attached to these teams with the intention of citing people or making arrests. Those officers are there for two purposes. One is to protect city staff that are out attempting to do cleanups and the closures. We have had instances where city staff have had weapons drawn on them, or we've had very people act very aggressively towards city staff. And this is not just unhoused people. Some of these are folks who just do not like the fact that cleanups happen. The second reason is because we've done cleanups before, where we've had house neighbors show up at an encampment and antagonize and belittle unhoused folks who are watching their stuff get discarded. And we don't want that to happen either. When we have apt attached to these units, it helps us maintain a level of [11:48:02 AM] decorum and safety for everybody who is in that area. Now, that's not to say that citations and arrests will not happen if somebody refuses to leave the area. The officer might have to issue the citation. The citation is a class C misdemeanor, and that person is referred to community court, where they can have that citation handled in a non fine based way. If the police officer sees evidence of illicit or illegal activity in the encampment, if somebody manufacturing drugs or their sexual sex trafficking happening the encampment, the officers will have to respond as is their duty. But that is not why they are going out. Those things are a byproduct of stuff that they might see in the encampment. Our office will be responsible for assigning sites to outreach and the homeless encampment management teams. I know in the past, some folks have expressed confusion as to who is ultimately responsible and accountable for the process. Working the accountability stops with us when this process is followed. Our colleagues at emergency [11:49:03 AM] management will help us with tracking the day to day operations, including the performance tracking and offering logistical support, and then the city's communications and engagement office is providing some resources and capacity to help us communicate updates regularly to the city council, media and the public when we talk about. Thank you. Now I have two waters when we talk, Chris, you can have one if you want one when we talk. Chris. Chris is not what my Cody's okay. When we talk about how we prioritize locations for these operations, there's a number of criteria that we consider. We begin with looking at sites that are on the keep clear list through the heal initiative, which again, is that initiative where we set aside shelter beds for everybody in an encampment. And over the course of three weeks, we create our own by name list. And then in the fourth week, we move everybody into the shelter, and then we spend multiple subsequent weeks restoring the space to its intended public use. Because of that level of investment, we then designate those sites as [11:50:05 AM] keep clear areas. So we're beginning with those. We're also looking at life safety risk. These are sites where they are prone to flood incidents, wildfire and high wildfire risk incidents, as well as traffic safety concerns. And then we'll look at the Austin 311 service request, as well as elevations that are escalated by the 311 staff. Other factors that we look at when we're doing the assessment is the health of the folks who are in the encampment, whether or not there's presence of kids or seniors or other subpopulations, how close the encampment is to other sensitive locations like schools and daycares. The risk for environmental impacts and hazards, which again, could be flood and fire risk, but also includes environmental sensitivity, endangered species concerns. We will look at the overall number of individuals in the campsite, and we'll look for signs of illicit and illegal activity and behavior. All these things are things that we evaluate when we're doing the assessment, and then we make our prioritizations [11:51:07 AM] based off of this evaluation, as well as the services that we have available at any given time. This is a map that we've shared with the public. It was also featured in the Austin american-statesman. So this is information that we were very transparent in providing to the community. One of our commitments at the end of last year, when we did that three week enhanced cleanup initiative, was to be much more transparent with the community and with our partners about where we intend to do this work. And so what we've done is we published a public map. The qr code is on the screen as well as the bitly link. And this is a map of the sites that are on the initial list for this enhanced homeless encampment management effort. We're in the process of bringing some enhancements to the map so that folks can see what stage of the process different sites are in, so you could see which states you know, what sites are in the outreach stage, which ones are in a keep clear stage, and we look forward to having that information updated in the [11:52:07 AM] coming days. I know the team is actively working with our development to bring that enhancement available for public viewing. In terms of performance metrics, these are some of the data points that we will be measuring, and we will be regularly reporting back to council and back to the community. We'll be looking at our total number of sites that we're visiting, how much debris is being removed, how many folks are getting connected to shelter and supportive services. Those are positive outcomes. We'll also be tracking some of the negative outcomes, which will be citations and arrests. We will look at shelter and service acceptance rates, which is a proxy indicator for whether people are engaging with the services or are they simply moving on. We are also going to be tracking metrics related to our workload. So how many? Three, one one requests continue to come in. Are we seeing a decrease in that request volume? What is our response time to those requests. And then ultimately also looking at cost. So how much is this costing the city and taxpayers to do this work. And whether or not we're seeing [11:53:07 AM] signs of repeat activity at these locations and will be assessing for repeat activity every 30, 60 and 90 days of the initial date of cleanup. And on in today's presentation, just with a reaffirm a reaffirmation of our commitment to the supportive services. You know, our office stands kind of unique in both the enforcement as well as the supportive service intersection. And while we're doing more of this homeless encampment management work, we're also not backtracking on our commitment to providing and expanding the availability of supportive services for folks in our community. Since 2024, the city and our partners have increased permanent supportive housing in this region by over 600%. That's over 1100 actual new units of housing that people are moving into. And we still have folks moving into some of those units, and some of those units haven't opened up yet. And so there's going to be more space for people to move into. And just a couple of weeks ago, in partnership with Travis county, we released a request [11:54:08 AM] for proposals at just under $7 million. This is the first time that we've done a joint solicitation with Travis county for homeless supportive services, and we're really happy to go hand in glove with our county partners to make sure that more of these resources are available. Also, the homeless shelter opportunities provided by our department are at an all time high. Since we became a department in December 2023, we've added over 400 new beds for homeless shelters. We're also working with the other ones foundation to bring online 100 additional beds at the Esperanza community by the end of the year. And just about a month ago, the city council, under the guidance of the mayor, dedicated funding that allowed us to draw down close to $50 million in money from the state of Texas to add an additional 325 beds at the Esperanza community. So that will bring that capacity for that shelter from 100 beds to over 500 beds in a matter of four years. And [11:55:09 AM] we're in the process of opening the south Austin housing navigation center, which will be a critical piece of our system, helping households that are at risk of homelessness stay housed, and helping people who are experiencing homelessness get on a pathway to finding housing quickly. So again, I just want to reaffirm that we are still committed to doing these things and more to make sure that folks have meaningful opportunities and pathways to get off the street. And so with that, I thank all of you for the time this morning. And our team, as well as my colleagues from other departments who are here today, are happy to answer any of your questions. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. >> Thank you, councilmember Velasquez. >> Thank you, mayor, and thank you, director gray. I also want to say thank you to to your team and lieutenant Marcus Johnson for the time that you've spent the numerous conversations that we've had around this issue and the being open to the suggestions that we've made and and adjustments that we've asked for. I did have a couple of questions. [11:56:10 AM] What, what oversight is going to be in place to ensure that protocols regarding our outreach and connection with services and proper communication will be followed? >> Thank you sir. So currently in the lead up to this, we've done a number of things with city staff from multiple departments to ensure that people are educated and informed about what the process should be. Patricia Barrera on our encampment management team has also created a very specific operational plans for each of these locations so that folks understand who's there, what sites have been cleared for cleanup enclosure, what sites are still undergoing active outreach, and Patricia will have regular check ins with all those departments around the work. We currently have two set check ins a week with multiple daily interactions, but looking to increase that again, just to ensure that departments are not going to sites that are slated for outreach and they're not [11:57:11 AM] going to clean up sites where the posting hasn't happened. So ultimately, our department will be responsible for managing that. If there are any issues, we'll, you know, be sure to direct that with the departments and make sure that they clearly understand where the violations occurred and how we take corrective actions to ensure that people are following the process that we've just laid out today. >> Thank you. And when it concerns the the training that APD will be receiving regarding providing outreach services, would that be a question for you or for lieutenant Johnson? >> Sure, yeah, I'll I'll invite lieutenant Johnson to talk about some of the specifics. And I'll also invite Patricia Barrera from the encampment management team to talk about some of the work that she's done to also ensure our officers are prepared to provide people with resources and information when they're part of these cleaning crews. But first, we'll we'll go to lieutenant Marcus Johnson from APD. [11:58:17 AM] >> Excuse me. >> Good morning, council mayor. City manager. Thank you, David gray, for that exceptional explanation on this whole process regarding the outreach efforts. And one thing I want to make clear before I continue is it's been brought up many times that the Austin police department is leading this. But I think David gray has clarified that the homeless strategy office is leading this entire operation and the outreach efforts. And of course, our officers play an active role in that process by assisting them. And we've been asked to assist in this daily operation routine. As far as our training, all of our officers, our mental mental health certified to recognize the signs of psychological distress, as well as utilizing de- escalation with all the training that we have. Additionally, we also have officers that are cit trained, which are crisis intervention team members who have an additional layer of training so they are able to recognize, through their enhanced training to manage mental health crisis [11:59:18 AM] and connect individuals with resources. But I'll be clear that our main priority is to provide safety and security for city staff on CNN to seek voluntary compliance before any type of enforcement action is taken place. >> And with that, and just to clarify, is that the that we were we were told that as part of these of these cleanup sweeps that APD would be undergoing training to provide outreach services specific to this specific to this undertaking. And I was also curious if one, what that looks like. And then two, if that'll be a if that's a one time training or ongoing training. >> Some of the training that we've gone through is through some of the operational planning for this daily operation, but we've been doing this operation on a weekly basis, three days a week. And the officers, the district representatives, who are the officers responsible for assisting in these operations, [12:00:19 PM] have all been trained up to this point. And so we've been doing this for several years. So the training, any additional training in involving this operation will be minimal at most, because we're not really doing anything different other than ramping up the, the, the process in which, you know, how often we do this, which is going from that three days a week to five days a week. >> Good morning. My name is Patricia beretta. I'm the manager of the public space management division. We did do quite a bit of operational review and training for the APD, as well as the rest of the crews. The outreach itself will be taking place prior to any any of the crews and APD arriving on the scene. Now the they do have instruction if something is changed, if there's something that they need extra help with that they will they will notify us. They will notify us so we can stop operations where we need to. Now, the outreach itself, once [12:01:23 PM] it's taken care of, what we're doing is making sure that each and every location has had its outreach taken care of, and that the folks there are notified, as well as are aware as to the resources that they could access in order to make sure that their vital documents, their most precious things are placed somewhere like in the either in keep violet, keep safe, or in any of the navigation centers that provide some of the. The document storage. >> We're not going to have you call out. You've had an opportunity to speak. We're now hearing a briefing. So we're not going to do it that way. >> So the the during the operations, we will be will be monitoring the locations and making sure that if there's anything that's surprising the officers or surprising the crews, that we will be able to go on scene and make sure that the folks are getting taken care of. >> Thank you. And I'm sorry. >> I'm sorry. Just a quick [12:02:24 PM] addition to that. So part of the reason why Austin emergency management is attached to this operation is because they have access to certain software that allows us to upload videos, kind of document the process, make sure things are happening in proper order. And so I'm appreciative to them for giving us access to those resources. That's just another layer that we'll be able to use to make sure that the operations are happening in the way that we described them today. And more importantly, if things are not happening right, we'll have access to that to to understand exactly where breakdowns occurred and how we take the corrective action to get things back in proper order. >> Thank you. And I know this is there's a little overlap on this, but what constitutes a reasonable amount of time for folks to gather their belongings within an encampment before it's enforced? And, and is there room for this to be adjusted as necessary? >> Sure. Let me talk a little bit about the outreach piece, and I'll turn it over to lieutenant Johnson to talk about, you know, once we get to the reasonable amount of time and you get to the encampment [12:03:24 PM] management piece, you know, one thing that we've committed to, to this process is when you get to that step of outreach, we want to give our outreach staff that the amount of time that they need to make good on an outreach connection. So if raven and her team are out at an encampment and there's somebody there who says, hey, I want to go into a shelter, and we do not have a shelter bed available that day, we will tell that person, stay in place. We will make sure the encampment management team knows that we have an active operation, outreach operation going on here, and that this site is not ready for the encampment management component. And so we will continue to check in with that person up until the moment when the shelter bed is available. Now, once that shelter bed is available, in that case, then that person is prioritized for that placement. We've now given that person multiple days to prepare. We we have that bed available, and our hope is that that individual will come into shelter voluntarily. We cannot force people to to enroll, but we can provide them the opportunity to come in. Once [12:04:25 PM] that person says, yes, we get them in the same day. But if that person says no, then there's a posting for 72 additional hours before APD or any of the encampment crews come in. So I just wanted to start at the beginning because I think it's important to contextualize what lieutenant Johnson is about to say by saying that there is multiple days of outreach, followed by at least three days of notice about an impending cleanup before a P D and the cleaning crews come in. So with that just context, then, lieutenant Johnson, if you want to talk more about once the teams arrive, what is the reasonable amount of time? >> Thank you. And and here at Austin police, we understand that the site operations are are sensitive in nature. And that's why it's important that the homeless strategy office puts out that 72 hour notice and the signage so that individuals are aware that that cleanup is coming. With that being said, when we do arrive, in addition to that 72 hour notice, we're there to give another 15 to 25 minute notice [12:05:28 PM] to give them an opportunity to collect belongings. But within that, officers are ensuring that individuals are picking up their belongings. Important documents I have personally witnessed and seen on body worn camera footage of officers doing just those things and reiterating to individuals that they're giving them opportunities to comply with the cleanup. This is all to ensure that we're in compliance with city policies, and we're also managing our limited resources. So we have to be fiscally responsible whenever we're bringing officers out there and city crews to clean up. We don't want to stay at one particular area for an extended amount of time. But we also recognize that we need to be cognizant that we might be dealing with someone with mental health issues or something of that nature. So we need to also be flexible and we recognize that. So we're not rigid. We prioritize that flexibility. And on a case by case basis, we're willing to to extend that that olive leaf and give additional time when needed and when necessary and if needed. There have been times where the officers have [12:06:29 PM] reached out to the homeless strategy office for an additional contact, or to request that they come back out to provide services or outreach. >> Thank you. And my last question is about the the dashboard. How are ar and APD? How will they be reporting metrics on the dashboard once it launches in the in the fall? >> So for that question, I'm going to invite up Charles Lucien, who is our our project manager for the dashboard. >> So over the next several months, an internal dashboard is, is being developed and we're using a tool made available to us through Austin emergency management, as David mentioned earlier, what we can expect later this year is transitioning over to a purpose built geographic information system technology suite. What we expect is that field teams will have a mobile application available to them, where they'll input key metrics and information on the back end. Mission control, which Patricia [12:07:30 PM] manages, will be able to to capture and input additional information that will then feed into the public facing dashboard. And so what the public can anticipate is being able to track the full life cycle of an encampment from the time of a three on one service request being submitted to some abatement action. And of course, the steps that have been spoken about the intermediary steps outreach, 72 hour notice posting, etc. And until that abatement action occurs, if you'd like a point of reference, I think the city of Portland, Oregon has done a really good job of developing purpose built, gis based encampment solution with a very robust public facing dashboard. So that that illustrates and gives a visual reference of what the public could anticipate later this year. >> Thank you, mayor. That's all my questions. >> Thank you. Councilmember, councilmember Siegel, councilmember alter. >> I first of all want to thank you, director gray, and your team first for the work that you've done. We've experienced [12:08:31 PM] as a city such a significant growth in homelessness over the over the last 3 to 5 years and, and the work you've done to make outreach and how we approach these issues more systematic and increase the reach of the programs to more of our city is very much appreciated. I know that prior to the budget allocation for additional encampment outreach teams and and up until the point that you have implemented things or are implementing things in the way that you are, that the reach into my district in the northern and northwestern suburbs was limited, inconsistent. Perhaps. More limited than what's experienced in other parts of the city. We'll leave that there. And, and the consequences that that has is making it challenging to actually access shelter, because these programs do reserve shelter in order to be. Do reserve shelter for individuals. And so I very much [12:09:32 PM] appreciate all the work you've done to bring that forward and also to increase transparency. As we look at the map and the dashboard that are coming out and the improvements around 311, these are just incredibly important to my constituents, both those who have shelter and those who don't. So I'm primarily thanking you for that, but also for the extensive amount of time you've taken. Answering our office's questions in advance of this briefing and your responsiveness to those unique characteristics that play out in our district, which perhaps haven't been encountered as much in the past. Incorporating that into your plans, just appreciative. Look forward to expanding violet keepsake more so out into this area where people are living without shelter as well, because clearly it's an important component to successful outreach. Thank you. >> Yes, ma'am. Thank you. >> Thank you, councilmember, councilmember Siegel, councilmember alter, councilmember Ellis. >> Thank you, mayor, and thank you, director gray and staff, for all this information. And I want to thank the community [12:10:33 PM] members who came today to share your stories, especially the folks who are directly impacted by these sweeps. It takes a lot of courage to come here at city hall and share your story to be vulnerable. And I think we really appreciate that. I just want to say that I'm not comfortable that our city is ramping up sweeps so rapidly without providing new support programs and services. I don't see how, in the aggregate, this does improve public health or public safety. It seems to respond to one set of concerns and create new ones. Fundamentally, we only have one bed for every five people living unsheltered. And so for those people who aren't coming in, who don't have a bed or a program to take advantage of, it seems like we're just making their lives worse, less safe, less supported, less dignified. I don't know if that's a question you want to address directly, director gray, but I did want to ask if you could share a little bit more about coordination with community organizations to provide services, how that outreach is [12:11:34 PM] going to work with. So, and if you have kind of any pushback against my my concerns, very open to that as well. >> Sure. I'm going to invite raven Rojas, who is the division manager for our street and community outreach, to get into some of the specific details about how we coordinate the street outreach services with partners. But but I will say this, councilmember Siegel, to this is not a pushback, but, you know, we know that we have a shortage of shelter beds. And that's one of the reasons why we've given raven and her team somewhat of a of a veto authority to say, you know, things cannot proceed to the encampment management until the street outreach team has had the necessary time and access to the necessary resources to make a real opportunity or a real pathway for somebody. So we are not going into all those sites on those map with cleaning crews. Day one, if raven and her team and the outreach partners that she works with are still engaging with people there, there's still an unfilled commitment [12:12:35 PM] for shelter bed or an unfilled request for a service connection, and they need more time to work. Then they will be afforded the time that they need to, to make those opportunities happen for people on the street. But with that raven, I'll turn it over to you to talk a little bit about some of the more specifics that you and your team do. >> Good morning. Thank you for your comments, council member. I really appreciate them. I'm a social worker, and so I will be keeping or I will be taking this role as gatekeeper very seriously. And so we will not be moving forward with any sites that were outreach has not been fully completed. And the spirit of transparency, I'll be quite honest. We we have a lot of aspirations that we would like to implement in the near future, but the the concrete strategies we have in place are going to be implementing those. Coordination calls and increasing the cadence of those calls as well. We are working closely with echo to bring [12:13:35 PM] online more of the features of our new hmis system that was introduced last year. We're also trying to figure out how we can get creative with a, a messaging system across all outreach communities, so that way we can communicate in real time. So yeah, I think hopefully that answers your question. >> Thank you. And one follow up and feel free to provide additional context. One of the things we've heard is that capmetro does not allow people to ride with too many belongings. And so what is the plan to help people leave a site with their belongings? >> So at least for my outreach team and the communication that I've been sharing to share with our other outreach partners, is that we kind of need to shift the way we do outreach, right? Unfortunately, none of us like enforcement, none of us like sweeps, but we kind of have to have a radical acceptance [12:14:36 PM] moment. And how can we shift how we are providing outreach services and how we are communicating to our unhoused folks? That is in line with our current reality right now. >> And then last question, my understanding is the outreach is happening before an enforcement action. But certainly in some instances, people are not present during the action, or people who are present during the action weren't around for the outreach phase. And so how do we handle those kinds of gaps? >> Yeah, we actually had a great suggestion from a community partner member last week of while we are posting the 72 hour notices, we should also have a one pager of, you know, if you're missing outreach during our attempts, then these are some resources that you can access. These are some navigation centers you can go to. Here's the contact information for violet keepsafe because you brought up a great point. We're not always going to be able to make contact with the individuals in the encampment. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, councilmember, [12:15:37 PM] councilmember, councilmember Ellis. >> Thank you very much. I, you know, clearly this is a really difficult issue, right? Of course, we're talking about people and their ability to just simply survive. And also balancing that against the legal restraints we're under. And the public health and public safety restraints were under. So I certainly do appreciate the the challenge of the task in front of you. I am trying to really grapple with, you know, we have talked many times about we have only so many dollars, and we have to prioritize those dollars to do the most good. And given, you know, the, the, the disparity of beds that we have versus people who need them, I'm trying to figure out. Are we going to be getting the most good out of the dollars that are going to be spent here? So [12:16:38 PM] my first question is simply around the dollars. What what do you anticipate this is going to cost? >> So that's something that we're going to be tracking really closely. One thing that we try to do to be mindful of not increasing cost drivers to the city, is looking at city staff and resources that we already have, and shifting those staff from other things to support this initiative. There are some things that are being paid for through this initiative that can only go to encampment cleanup and encampment closures, you know, certain revenue streams that the city has that have to be used for litter abatement, trash removal, etcetera. And so, you know, if we weren't using those for, for this effort, that's not revenue that we could use for some of the other supportive services. But but I will say, you know, just to, to the point, right, we know that getting people into the supportive services is generally less expensive than doing the encampment enforcement efforts. And that's why we've made it such a point and why I'm glad that council [12:17:39 PM] has also made it such a point to invest in the homeless prevention services, to support efforts around permanent supportive housing, rapid rehousing or shelter expansion, because we know that those, you know, once we get somebody into those shelter or housing units, those costs tend to be much less than the public safety cleanup costs associated with the encampment management work. >> And just looking kind of at the buckets, you touched on the cost a little bit. We'll have the outreach teams. Those are funded through homeless strategies and operations general fund. Then when it comes to the actual cleanup effort, that's generally a team of is it one APD officer and one rr person or so. >> It's generally two APD officers and 4 to 5 city staff per cleanup team. And those city staff are from a R R sorry, Austin resource recovery, transportation and public works and the watershed department. Parks and recreation will also [12:18:40 PM] have staff dedicated to a team, but that team will focus on litter abatement. And that team currently focuses on on litter abatement now. So again, for all those staff and teams, it's shifting them from similar work that they do for their department to doing that work. But under this context. >> Got it. So and as you mentioned, whether it's Austin resource recovery, transportation, public works, watershed, those are funded through fees and there are restrictions on those fees. It's not like we could take those fees and use them for for housing or other shelter. But in terms of the cost, kind of we could think of the APD side of the equation that's going to have the general fund impact and then the cleanup, the actual cleaning up. That's going to be some kind of enterprise department impact. So kind of fair assessment. >> Yes, sir. >> Okay. And I think I can add one point to that council member. So the three fees that are would be impacted or that would are relevant to this are, like you noted, the clean community fee, the drainage fee [12:19:42 PM] and the transportation user fee. I believe those are the ones that are applicable to the enterprise departments that are doing cleanups here. >> Okay. Then you talked a little bit about the the beds. You know, we're we're going to go talk with individuals and offer them a place to go if we are wildly successful. Right. And everyone takes us up on a shelter bed, what kind of capacity do we have right now? Not the raw numbers. I mean, I know how many total numbers we have, let's say at northbridge or Shaw, but our southbridge. But how many actually open beds do we have on a given day? >> As of today, we have approximately 45 open beds right now across the system, with an additional 30 beds that will be opening in the coming weeks. And so that's our our system capacity as of today. But I want to be clear to, you know, every day we are doing the work to get people out of shelter. Shelter is not [12:20:43 PM] intended to be anybody's permanent destination. We want to get you into housing. So while that 45 bed count available, that's the available count today, that number can increase or decrease tomorrow. It really just depends. We have outreach crews right now in some of these locations working to bring people into shelter today. So the capacity is always a moving target. It is something that we track and measure, but that's also why we made the commitment that if somebody wants a shelter and a bed is not available that day, we will not deploy outreach. I'm sorry, we will not deploy encampment cleanup. We would not post until the bed opens up for that client. And we were able to get that person into the shelter bed. >> And are we holding, you know, for he'll we'll hold certain beds open. Is that the same plan here? >> So there are certain shelters where we prioritize those shelters for encampment management activities. And so historically, northbridge and southbridge have been [12:21:44 PM] prioritized for the healing initiative. Marshaling yard has beds that are set aside for a pd. Our outreach groups and other outreach groups. And then arch and eighth street tend to be the beds that we use for clients who self enroll or get on a wait list for shelter. And so we will predominantly be using marshaling yard, northbridge and southbridge to support this operation, ensuring that arch and eighth street can continue to provide beds for folks who, you know, want and are self seeking shelter. But this is something that that we are looking at. Raven, I talked a little bit about the, the new hmis tool that echo is, is still in the process of fully bringing online. One of the elements of that tool is, is a shelter bed management platform. And we're looking forward to being able to work with echo on building out that platform. And that will help us just make be able to make some more real time adjustments to shelter bed management, not just within the city shelters, but but also, you know, across the, the [12:22:45 PM] regional shelter ecosystem. >> Right. Well, one request I would have as we look at the kind of tracking of metrics, if you could help report out or track for us kind of the number of beds and days held open, you know, if we're holding a group for five days, ten days, I, I still do have some concerns around that model. I understand the rationalization, but given the limited resource, you know, having beds that are sitting unused while there are people out there who very well would would use them if, if we target it, right. I just I have I continue to have some concern there. I saw on the map that there are some former heel sites, you know, of course, the ones I'm most familiar with around manchaca and Ben white or packsaddle pass are those sites. Sites where we think we're going to do encampment cleanup, or are you identifying [12:23:46 PM] sites as well, where we just need to continue to keep the area clean? Well, I guess let me just stop there with that question. >> Yes, sir. So so once through this new initiative, once we do that work of cleaning and clearing a site, the at that point, the site does become a clear site. And under this new model, we will be revisiting sites multiple times a week to ensure that they are kept clear. And that does include those former or I guess even current keep clear sites under the heal initiative. >> Okay. I just want to kind of understand what's going to be different, right? We have had heel sites that we've said we're going to keep clear. They don't. So how how this will be different. And I don't I'm sure you've thought of that. I just want to make sure that. >> Yes sir. Yeah. Well and that's part of the challenge with the existing model again, is that we have three teams that go out one day per week per team in a different part of town. And so in talking about [12:24:47 PM] that location, you know, you have one rapid response team that's a, a P, D and Austin resource recovery team. Once a week, they're going throughout all of south Austin to, to do encampment cleanups at sites that we posted. At that level of capacity, you're not able to keep clear those former heal sites. The moment that team leaves, people know that they have at least a week to resettle. And in some cases, people do. And from the public's perception, it looks like the city has not done anything. And we we are not able to sustain any safety progress that we've made at those locations. Under the new model, you'll have five teams working citywide, five days a week. So it's it's a significantly enhanced staffing upgrade. But what that will allow us to do is then be able to revisit those sites on a much more consistent >> Basis. So again, multiple times a week. And so that that is part of why we're moving in this direction. It's about making sure people have meaningful opportunities for [12:25:47 PM] outreach and engagement. But once that occurs, we're able to maintain the progress on the sites that we've already addressed. >> Well, just one final comment for you. And I have a couple questions for APD, but I. As we roll this out and as we think about this, I think we all have to recognize and I, I imagine you would as well that a part of this is going to mean moving people from one site to another site to another site to another site. And we are going to have this circular movement and circular enforcement where we go to one campsite, you know, let's say it's five people and two take us up on shelter. The three go somewhere else, and that somewhere else eventually will become a site where we do the outreach again. And you even touched on in some of our previous iterations, we've had that instance where we see someone, again that we've engaged, and sometimes it does [12:26:47 PM] take multiple engagements to get someone into shelter. So there is that element to all this, but spending money to move the problem instead of fix the problem is a just given the lack of resources, a really hard pill to swallow. And I, like I said at the beginning, you're trying to thread a needle here and I don't envy what you're trying to accomplish. But we're not. Housing is the solution, right? Like that's, that's ultimately what's going to solve this problem. It's not moving people around. And, and so I just, I'm going to be very focused on the cost element and making sure we're getting value out of what we're spending. Because if it's not, if we could better spend those dollars on housing resources, that's something I think we just really need to focus on. I do have a question. I'm not sure if it's for lieutenant or the chief, but the chief stepped out, so maybe it's just for the lieutenant. You talked about district reps. [12:27:48 PM] Are the doctors the one who are all, like, dedicated to these teams, or is it non doctors as well? >> So currently the district reps will be assigned to assist and they've been doing this. We've been doing this for a number of years. But there are going to be times where we may have to bring in officer, other officers and other resources depending on staffing, because they're also still having to engage. Do their community engagement, respond to city council caps and other things that fall under the community engagement umbrella. So we are trying to maintain that proper staffing level for David and the homeless strategy office. >> And if we. So under the current state of play, we. Have. You talked about the three teams are going out once a week, once north, once central once south. Now we're going to have five teams going out daily. So that's a total of basically 30 engagements. So it's a significant increase just given the officer pool that we have. And you know, the the patrol [12:28:51 PM] directive that the chief has implemented, where are we drawing these officers from? >> They're they're being pulled from the district district representative office. So they, the doctors are basically being reassigned and repurposed to do this only. And, and then in addition, they have to still do their community engagement duties. And that's what we're trying to evaluate and look at how we're going to, to make all of that work. But we're managing it and we're, we're here to assist. >> Yeah. I mean, we, we are in heavy contact with our doctor and I know how much they already have on their plate. So are we going to add doctors or are we just I mean, because we don't they they can't even do what they're already asked to do. >> So currently the currently the district reps. Well, right now the staffing priority is, is patrol and getting our numbers back. I mean, we're still a little over 300 officers short the vacancies, but district reps is a specialized unit, just like most of our specialized units. Until patrol staffing increases, [12:29:53 PM] that's when those specialized units can be replenished or returned back to service. So the district reps are no different. They're kind of in that same situation. >> Okay. >> Well, this is not this is an open question, not for for answer, but for consideration. Given the cost of just personnel cost for APD as well as available resources, I do think it's worth asking the question of is this something that a non-police officer could do? You know, some someone who does have security training, maybe we even provide that training, but do we need a uniformed officer, or can we hire someone more cost effectively to provide safety, to be there and make sure everyone stays safe, but utilize our police resources to the best of their ability? So I'll just kind of leave it there and appreciate the work y'all are doing. >> Would you like to answer to that question? Council member. >> You have one. >> I was going to defer to my [12:30:53 PM] deputy director, Chris Anderson, to provide an answer. >> Sure. >> So I think there's a benefit. You know, one, we're already having the the doctors who are experienced in this work, and they've already been engaged with our public safety management team. And so there's a lot of institutional knowledge within that group. They also have relationships with the with the people and that are in these camps and across various parts of town. And so there's there are those benefits that you would get from using this pool of officers as opposed to having contracted security, contracted security would again rely on us to then expend money from our operations or social services budget on this item, which is something we wouldn't want to do if we were going to provide that. So we also have the higher level of accountability that I think we have when we have our highly trained officers doing this. I would rather have folks that are people that are providing this security, that have the highest level of training and experience. The doctor [12:31:54 PM] specifically is a special group, are have lots of experience with that group, and they've been in and around this, this work with people experiencing homelessness for, you know, decades in some cases, some of these folks have been doing it. So it's also the preference that we got when we spoke to our clean up, you know, departments. So from resource recovery, tp and others, that was the feedback was that we liked having the officers there because of that. And so I know that there was something that we had explored and looked at originally, but I think for what the purpose of this operation, it's better to have it. And plus, there are times when there is a necessity for a law like an enforcement action to take place, which is something you couldn't do with private security. >> Sure. It's cost nothing comes for free, right? So the work that the doctors are doing right now is probably going to be picked up by a patrol officer, and that work is going to require then something else [12:32:54 PM] to go met or we have more overtime. So there's going to be a flow of these dollars somewhere. It's not just going to come out of nowhere knowing the cost of a police officer versus potentially getting even an zo employee security training, I think it's just worth exploring further because we just don't have the resources. >> No, thank you, sir. And I think the thing that we were really hoping for is to keep building on the lessons that we're learning as we're doing this work and building on that institutional knowledge. >> And I'll just add really briefly, councilmember, I know you all have other items on your agenda. Sometimes the cost savings from the security is not what it appears to be. And we can provide your office with some data on that. >> Councilmember. Councilmember duchen. Councilmember qadri. >> Thank you, mayor, I have just a couple of brief questions. Can you talk me through the decision making for creating the six teams? I see three are geographically based, and the other three are other sorts of locations within the city, like roads or waterways. Can you talk me through that [12:33:55 PM] thought process? >> Yeah. So the the work that is being done by rapid response is something like this. Lieutenant Johnson that's something that's already done. So integrating that, that work is already being done by Austin resource recovery and APD. So that was sort of the baseline, you know, group that we look to for staffing. It was within the scope of practice of what Austin resource recovery does. And so that's what the decision to staff most of our teams with their folks. But there are special, you know, you know, situations where we need to have dpw, especially along the busiest corridors. So highways, I-35, underpasses, our bigger, you know, streets and roads like, you know, Lamar burnet, Anderson Laine, it's going to require, you know, a, a higher level of staffing. And there's also specialty equipment that is required for certain types of jobs. For example, the [12:34:55 PM] watershed department has different equipment that would be needed as opposed to what resource recovery could do. And there was one of the lessons we learned during the enhancement operation from October was we had to match the personnel and equipment to the specific types of job sites that we were going to. So putting transportation and public works employees in a watershed was not the best use of time and resources. They often didn't have the right equipment. So that the idea was to have representation from each of those sort of types of encampments, and then being able to then spread the work out from those teams. >> Okay. And so it sounds like maybe the teams aren't the exact same size. In that case, you may have, you know, the transportation team requires more vehicles and more personnel than other teams. >> Yeah. And like, for example, team six is a specifically a litter abatement team. So does a team that actually doesn't have assign officers to it. It is there for post cleanup, litter abatement for our, you [12:35:58 PM] know, more sophisticated cleanups. We're using heavy equipment and where they're picking up, you know, using grapplers to pull up, you know, sort of the larger debris. And what it leaves a lot of fine particulate that needs to be sort of picked up by hand. So that is a separate team that would be doing that work. So we're trying to match the skills and the needs of the job with the different teams that are assigned to it. >> Okay. And is I see that litter abatement is Austin parks and recreation. Is that happening in conjunction with the other ones foundation and the workforce first program, or is it a separate team? >> Yeah. >> So that's a separate team. So. Right. So the and we do not use the the other ones foundation contract to do any work on active encampment sites. And that's largely because the individuals who are employed through that program are people with lived experience. And so what we're trying to do there is avoid any harm trauma by [12:37:00 PM] having folks with lived experience go into other people's encampments and feel like they're they're clearing people out. So those teams focus on separate litter abatement. >> Okay, I see that helpful information. And then is the clean creeks crew, the folks that are doing the watershed protection? >> Yes, ma'am. That that is part of the watershed commitment is using some of the capacity from that crew. >> Okay, fantastic. And then I have another location that I know we've talked to you all about that's not reflected on the map. Is there a specific criteria by which it reaches a threshold where it will end up on the map? >> Excuse me. I'm sorry. We have a clarification to make regarding the clean creeks crew. Invite Amy to come and provide a little bit more context on that. My apologies. >> Okay. >> Good afternoon. >> Council members. Mayor, city city manager. So the clean creeks crew is going to continue doing some of their work with watershed, but there were also a watershed team that will be handling creeks as part of this, as part of this effort. >> Okay, so a specific focus on [12:38:02 PM] encampment assistance versus the entire crew that kind of goes around and circulation over the course of a year to help keep the creeks clean. >> Yes. >> Okay. Okay. That's helpful. And then I have one location. I know that we have been in communication with your office about in the district. That's not reflected on the map. Is there just a specific threshold by which some of these locations might end up on the map? >> So, so there are locations on this map that's based off of the prioritization factors that I had laid out in the presentation. However, there are other teams that will be assigned to do other work throughout the city. I know your office has shared some information with us, and we have folks who are out doing some assessments in those areas. But the homeless encampment management program is just one program under the public space management division. And so there's other ways for that division to deliver assistance to offices and neighborhoods outside of the sites that have been identified on the map. >> Okay, I know I have one that's near a commercial [12:39:02 PM] property, and so it's not necessarily adjacent to neighborhoods, but just trying to work through the expectations of when certain issues might be addressed versus not addressed. And then my last question will be, I know one of your earlier slides had touched on the conversation around privately owned land. Can you briefly talk me through what that looks like when there is an encampment on privately owned land? >> Sure. There's a variety of state laws that protect private property owners rights. And so when the encampment is on privately, privately owned land, the first thing we'll do is, is reach out to code enforcement or go through cat to verify that the encampment is actually on private property. And then we'll work with code enforcement to identify the private property owner, notify them of the concern that's been raised with us. If the private property owner is willing to engage with us and allow us to send outreach onto their private property to engage with people, we will do so. We typically will look to the private property owners to take the lead on any cleanup, as [12:40:03 PM] well as securing the site, because we we're really hesitant to use public benefit for private good in that manner. If the private property owner is non-responsive to code enforcement into the city, there are steps that can be taken by the city to do the cleanup and then to put a lien on the property. We we do our best not to go that route if we don't need to. However, that is an enforcement option that is available to the city. But we. We will work with code enforcement on anything related to private property because they have the unique subject matter expertise on those state laws. >> Okay. Thank you. That's all I have. >> Thank you. >> Councilmember. Councilmember zo qadri. >> Thank you, mayor, and thank you, director, for the updates here and presentation. I just have a couple of questions. One that we haven't really talked about this afternoon is helping me understand how specifically mental health and mental health beds work in the hem operation. [12:41:05 PM] My understanding right now is that some folks may not be appropriate for traditional beds. So what sort of process do we have? What sort of resources do we have and what sort of collaborations do we have that involve our mental health authority or other similar resources to make sure people are, you know, we're trying to funnel the best kind of care or most appropriate kind of care to folks that need that kind of care. >> Yes, sir. I'll defer to to Chris to talk through some of the direct work that we do with the mental health services. But right before you go to him, I'll also share that as part of some of the broader city initiatives like the no wrong door initiative, conversations with Travis county around a jail diversion. You know, we participate in those spaces as well, you know, as opportunities for us to get folks with mental health needs connected to the proper services. But, but with that kind of general context, I'll give it to Chris to get into more, some more of the specific [12:42:05 PM] details. >> So our internal outreach division that's managed by raven, part of their coordination calls include both representatives from integral cares host team and from integral cares path team, which is a outreach team within integral care design to engage people experiencing homelessness. So we are working with folks that we feel like might be most appropriate for referral for behavioral health services through our, you know, through integral care and coordinating and doing the staff casings that are required to, you know, meet the need, the specific need for each of those individuals. Also when we're, you know, integrating people or trying to make referrals for clients into shelter, one of the our operators are southbridge shelter, which is just recently took operations from the other ones. Foundation is contracting out with integral care, providing behavioral health services within the bridge shelter. So we're trying at multiple steps to integrate the [12:43:07 PM] work that is being done by integral care with the folks that we're serving. >> Okay. Thank you for that explanation. Yeah. I'm also curious about some of the issues that we heard earlier regarding medication bottle possessions. Is there a sort of a moment as you've implemented hem or more recent camp work that ensures and maybe it's the violent keepsafe storage or other programs that there's sort of a separation between the prior ways that might have resulted in those incidents versus what you've what we're what we're implementing now with him. >> Yeah. You know, I think if we get the cooperation that we know we're going to get from our sibling departments to go through this process, that will really help us mitigate and minimize instances where people are losing medication, vital documents, etcetera. However, you know, we, we did do a couple of community wide meetings on this topic. One of [12:44:08 PM] the recommendations that was raised to us from a community member was incorporating some real time feedback loops from people who are in encampments regarding cleanup operations and stuff like that. And so we're looking I thought that was a great recommendation and also a way for us to kind of track in real time instances where people might get separated from personal belongings or stuff like that, so we can act more swiftly to recover those items when possible, or work with the client to replace those items when necessary. And so we're going to be looking at different ways that we can incorporate those real time feedback loops. But again, the whole purpose of this process is to make sure that people have that meaningful outreach. And if folks say, hey, I need a safe place to store my medicine or a safe place to store my records, that we could help facilitate those opportunities for the individuals before the cleanup happens. >> Got it. Thank you. Does that mean that that kind of information, as you talk about recording it or being able to [12:45:09 PM] track it, might be reported in the field data in the dashboard? >> We will look into that. Yes, sir. So I think we need to see what kind of information we were receiving from people. You know, some of the data reporting is a bit of a juggling act between sharing enough data so that we are held accountable by the public, while also protecting safety for people. You know, one thing I should have mentioned on the encampment map is that those pin drops are approximate locations. It kind of is the general area in which we'll be working. We we didn't put the specific encampment locations on that map because we've heard from other cities that did that, that when they put in the specific encampment locations, bad actors went into some of those encampments and did bad things. So all the data sharing is a little bit of a juggling act between wanting to be transparent while also wanting to protect individuals rights. And so within that context, we'll look at the feedback that we get to try to suss out, you know, what we think can be shared and should be shared versus what might be somebody's personal private information [12:46:10 PM] that we need to just maintain some confidentiality around. >> Okay, well, I know you guys will be sensitive in that, but I look forward to seeing what can of that nature be included in the dashboard. Yes, sir. And the last question I've got is just to follow up, councilmember alter's questions regarding the using the doctors for part of this process and just sort of sharing his concern. That one, the one hand, I very much appreciate that that's a kind of budget neutral approach to solving that part of the process. I do worry about, and I know you and I have talked about maybe over time, as they become familiar with whatever it is, the the process or the camps or that it may take, they may become more efficient over time as they address or participate in this in the hem program. I am wondering, though, again, as part of reporting, whether there's a way to evaluate any kind of trade offs that they may be experiencing from their traditional work as a result of [12:47:11 PM] having to instead now step up their involvement in the hem program? Is that realistic to track or work with lieutenant to to better understand that? >> Yeah, I'll take that question. I'll say this. This is not the first time that the district reps have had to forgo their actual duties and respond. I think back in 2020 or 2021, we had a cleanup operation that that went forward for about 9 to 10 months, and we tried to balance things. Then I think this one now with the approach of the homeless strategy office, is a lot more organized. Of course, the trade off is it still comes at a cost for us, whether that be the workload or responsibilities. And we're currently trying to evaluate that. I've had several meetings with the district reps over the last eight weeks or so to discuss how this operation is going to impact our ability to [12:48:11 PM] do our normal duties. And so I think it's as this ramps up, and we did this, of course, back in October, and the difference between the one in October and the one now is we had additional resources officers, and it was on on a much larger scale for a short period of time, whereas this one is going to be on a much shorter, longer scale, but, you know, with limited resources. So I think we're just going to have to evaluate and see what the impact is as we move forward. But I'm trying to to remain optimistic about all of it. >> Okay. Well, I appreciate your optimism. And yeah, I'll just follow up with you or our doctors and get a sense over time, to the extent that that this may be trending in the right direction or they may be struggling. I know some of them run very specialized programs, and I want to make sure that those don't lapse anyway as they as they do this work as well. Thank you. >> Thank you, councilmember. Councilmember qadri. >> Thank you mayor. Appreciate, David, your team and then [12:49:13 PM] everyone who's come out today around this item, both the service providers and our unhoused population. I just have two quick questions. The first question was when zo worked on this on this new plan around around encampments. Did you all work with any service organizations? Did y'all work with, you know, central health? You know, who were the partners in the, in the space that y'all worked with? >> Yeah. So on the street and community outreach side, I know raven and her team have been getting feedback from the outreach partners who, who they engage with on the homeless encampment management side. We work predominantly with the city agencies that are part of that work, and then kind of brought open that process up with community stakeholders to talk to them about the the plan and get their feedback and their input on it. At the first community meeting that we held, we had about 65, 70 people attend that one. And at the following one we had about between 55 and 60 people. It's [12:50:14 PM] in that one. >> Got it. Thank you. And then my second question, hearing from a lot of the, you know, service providers today, hearing from folks from our unhoused population, just about a lot of worries. They have just potential, you know, blow blowbacks, you know, folks that feel like they're on very shaky grounds, you know, they've already deal with. You know, lack of services at times, you know, shelters and these sweeps. Do you think there's been enough outreach or there's been enough engagement with, with this population to kind of, you know, not only ease any worries, but but also to address any real concerns. >> Yeah, just my personal opinion is that we can never do too much engagement. You know, I think for, for a lot of folks who find themselves on the street, you know, it's a lot of broken trust has happened. No one just wakes up one day and says, I'm going to go live on [12:51:14 PM] the street. You know, a lot of things have happened in life that have gotten that person there. My hope is that we, you know, we continue to have an open door policy. We continue to make space, and we will continue to make space to have these conversations. But but my hope is that we're able to really demonstrate something different through this process, minimize mistakes and maximize getting people into services. And I think if we follow a process that people understand and that shows results for everybody, not just cleaning up encampments, but really getting people into services, that the process will build the trust in the program, not not just the by word and conversation, but by actual action. And that's, you know, what our department is moving towards. >> Great. Thank you. >> Thank you, sir. >> Thank you, councilmember. Thank you all very much. Thank you sir. Appreciate the presentation. Appreciate your work, members. That will take us to the next item on the agenda, which is item C one. And I'll turn to the city clerk to start calling names for people that have signed up to speak. >> Thank you mayor on item C [12:52:16 PM] one, ramzi basic, Sarah lambert, Michael keel, Christina Tremmel. Please state your name and begin speaking. >> Hello council members, I'm ramzi besix, I'm a senior software engineer with Austin fire. I'm speaking today in my personal capacity as a union member and as the chair of our petition team for the stop owts campaign. After many months of afscme meetings where members were repeatedly reporting their concerns over the oats initiative, we created a petition two months ago to prove that the city of Austin workers are against this consolidation. I think I believe right now you're getting passed out our petition, along with 807 employees who [12:53:17 PM] have signed stating their opposition to this consolidation. Our petition is demanding that the consolidation cease, that the city stops wasting money on consultants and that the city of that the city work with frontline employees to identify ways to save money that does not disrupt operations. There are 870 807 reasons to stop the consolidation from 38 different departments, covering every department, with more than 100 staff members. Austin energy is by far our most vocal department with 132 signatures. We also have strong representation from departments affected by phase one of the consolidation, with 408 signatures from those departments and 64 signatures from public safety departments. Specifically where those where it staff members from those departments will be completely consolidated. As it stands right now, the city's public servants don't want to be [12:54:19 PM] consolidated, and they don't want their coworkers to be consolidated. The next speakers will detail a fraction of the 807 reasons to stop this risky and unproven consolidation plan. We are asking that city council vote to hold city management responsible to the greatest extent possible and to stop the consolidation. Thank you. >> Hello, I'm Sade lambert, district number one, 14 year employee of the city of Austin. I'm a lowly middle manager with an mba, and for the first time in 14 years, I have come to you guys as a concerned citizen. Thanks to intentional misdirection from people with fancier job titles than mine, there seems to be continuing confusion among our fellow residents, the media, and even you esteemed council members about what exactly we're concerned with. So before complete, completing this silly, condescending messaging continues. We want to make one thing clear dudes and dudettes. [12:55:21 PM] We are for saving millions. We are against dangerous chaos. Here's a simple chart that my friend in district eight made. She's ten years old. This is a picture of apps. We have too many apps. At the city of Austin. We double purchased a bunch of the same ones or bought different ones that do the same thing. Fewer apps save millions of dollars. Yay! Yes, for apps consolidation, this is a picture of humans. Humans work for individual departments because those departments have individual legal requirements, regulatory needs, security needs and strategic goals. Plucking up all the people from their jobs and stuffing them all into one department is bad. That's what we're against. That saves $0. So far, it has cost a strategically undisclosed portion of $4 million. And [12:56:21 PM] whenever has making a government department double its size been more efficient? So union, let's all say it together. Apps consolidation saves money. Apps consolidation is good. Cramming people together costs millions of dollars and is ineffective. Cramming people together is. >> Thank you. >> On item c1 Joe Brian Weldon, Duncan. Curtis. Braniff Davis. Please state your name and begin speaking. >> Whoever wants to begin, just feel free, okay? >> Good afternoon mayor. Members of city council, city manager and city attorney. My name is Duncan Curtis. I am an [12:57:23 PM] it infrastructure engineer at the city of Austin, and one of the over 800 city workers who are opposed to the one eights project. Now, firstly, I really do acknowledge the financial position the city is in and that we're not against change nor against making efficiencies. We also understand that the council and city manager have to make some difficult decisions. However, the city cannot afford to make another public mistake and it may be about to make a big one. Workers across the city have regularly pointed out that this is moving forward without the necessary safeguards in place. Let me put it in Texan terms, this is akin to running your longhorns through a China store. Now, this is something you should never, ever do. But if you do, you need to jolly well make sure you do a lot of preparation, put up plenty of [12:58:24 PM] guardrails and plenty of safeguards. Yet on the 29th of April, we received a memo which, continuing the same move fast and break things approach where city management is saying that the consolidation will move forward and safeguards will not be refined until after the transfers. This is a public organization. It's a city council. It's not a tech bro startup. Key issues like validating services, ownership, access, operational dependencies, governance, training needs and support models remain unresolved. These critical issues need to be put in place before the largest reorganization in Austin's history, not after putting the cart before the horse was never a good idea. >> Thank you. >> Good evening mayor, members of city council. My name is Brandon Davis and I'm a wildfire scientist at the [12:59:24 PM] Austin fire department. I'm speaking today in my personal capacity as an active member of afscme. Today, during public service recognition week, we are here to stand up for hundreds of city employees. I wish to speak about the risks that one ets poses for public safety in Austin. Ets and the Gardner report have treated public safety it staff as plug and play personnel who can easily be consolidated. We are subject matter experts first and foremost, who specialize in specific needs. We cannot be moved around so carelessly. I'm a wildfire scientist, but because the city has no nuance in its job titles, I am only an it specialist in the eyes of ATS and the Gardner report. The exemption carved out by the Gardner report for operational technology is so specific and antiquated that it does not include people like me. I report to a fire chief and I am available at a moment's notice. I manage our city's situational awareness platform, which firefighters use to collect information 24 over seven during an emergency and was made in-house and saved the city over $300,000 a year. I might add, by every logical definition, we are operational [1:00:25 PM] technology, ATS and the Gardner report did not consider or ask any of our chiefs or managers about the integral role we serve. I constantly receive feedback from our fire chiefs questioning how it staff centralization makes our work for austinites more optimized, efficient or effective and even. The afa president yesterday spoke to the public safety commission against this item. So why isn't ATS listening to our public safety experts? Furthermore, the phase one rollout includes public safety it specialists. While it is sold as improved service delivery, it feels foolish to put specialists so tied to public safety first. In this consolidation experiment, the plan has me move under an ATS supervisor who knows nothing about wildfire. In August, during the height of our summer wildfire season. These concerns are shared by public safety employees in the city at all levels, and we have expressed these concerns repeatedly to ATS with no explanations or no no acknowledgment of our concerns. And that is why we ask city council to vote to hold city management accountable. Thank you. >> Thank you. Please. [1:01:25 PM] >> Good afternoon, honorable mayor, esteemed council members. My name is Brian Weldon, resident of district three. And I'm here in my personal capacity as an asthma union member. I'm here today to talk about cybersecurity. I just wanted to flag that before relying on, you know, consultants, management's word that centralization is the best way to improve this. It's important to understand that this is an opinion and not really established. Fact management claims that centralization is more secure, but the insurance industry often sees it differently. Centralization, as outlined in the one ATS plan, creates a homogenized network. In other words, if a hacker gets the keys to the kingdom and a centralized ATS, they have lateral access to the power grid. Nine over 11 I'm sorry. 911 and the airport simultaneously. Many cybersecurity insurance providers which as I understand it, we carry. After the 2020 data breach. They basically offer lower premiums for segmented. In other words, decentralized networks because a breach in one department is [1:02:26 PM] contained and doesn't take down the entire city. So my question is, is have we consulted with our cybersecurity insurance carriers on this? Again, want to reiterate that centralizing everything under one ATS, as it were, increased the blast radius and could could lead to higher premiums and uninsurable risks for critical infrastructure. Dallas learned this the hard way. A ransomware attack on the city of Dallas in may 2023 was made much worse by lateral movement of the cyber attackers through the centralized city of Dallas computer systems, resulting in the loss of about 21tb of city data and $8.5 million in direct costs associated with mitigating the immediate consequences of the attacks. I'd like to thank the council sub quorum who brought this item forward, and we ask that all of council vote to hold city management accountable to the greatest extent possible and stop the consolidation. Thank you. >> Continuing on item C one mana Mclean, Michael Hernandez, Lori Mitchell, Ben suddaby, [1:03:27 PM] please state your name and begin speaking. >> Good morning, mayor, city manager and members of the city council. My name is mana Mclean and I am an it manager senior over enterprise geospatial services in Austin technology services. I'm addressing the risks to operations for gis support with this it. Consolidation. Gis at the city is organized using a hub and spoke model that means a central group in ATS. My team manages the platform, licenses, integrations and foundational geospatial data. While departments have subject matter experts in their field responsible for business specific data sets and analysis. This is successfully accomplished using a mature governance model that has been in practice for nearly 24 years. Gis has one of the oldest, if not the oldest operating boards at the city of Austin. The geospatial information [1:04:28 PM] management operating board, or god, is actively managed and supported by over 25 departments at the city. This board has collectively developed gis data standards and policies and procedures that are practiced across the entire organization. The god collectively supports a citywide gis platform strategy while allowing departments to be enabled, working alongside domain experts in their field, Gartner has recommended that all gis titles be consolidated into it. However, it is unclear what data they are using to support that recommendation. Esri, the top gis software company in the world, surveyed the top 24 cities in the country by population, and it spend and none have all of gis consolidated into it. In fact, esri often references city of Austin. Gis is an example of organizational excellence. That is because gis is an applied operational discipline, not a generic it function, and is [1:05:28 PM] most useful when subject matter experts are closely aligned with their business unit. Thank you. >> I'm Lori Mitchell, I'm a city employee and member of district eight. I'm here speaking personally as a member of asmi. And ATS is currently not meeting the encumbrance requirements as stated in the city charter act, ATS is in the bottom one third of departments. How can ATS function at this level? And anyone expects success of a consolidation of this size. The recent findings of the three executives who were guiding oats are proof that we cannot trust that ATS is prepared for this enormous upheaval of the city's technical services. The executives brought by city manager Broadnax with him from Dallas were fired for unethical and possibly illegal actions. There is no reason to trust the plan that unethical people created will treat our city [1:06:29 PM] employees fairly or safely. ATS has not shown that their hr and finance departments are ready to absorb 189 workers immediately in phase one, much less in an additional almost 1000 workers to follow shortly thereafter. It seems the city is following the standard operating procedure of throwing departments together and leaving them to work out the details later. This does not result in cost savings. It costs more time and more money to straighten out the mess created by the lack of responsible leadership. In the last five years, the city of Austin has had two other consolidations that have failed business process consultants in capital contracting and financial services were consolidated, and that failed due to a lack of an actual plan for success, an enhancement of very important software package [1:07:30 PM] was severely damaged, resulting in increased cost, not cost savings. >> Thank you very much. Thank you. >> My name. >> Is Ben suddaby, resident of d4. I'm reading this statement on behalf of an Austin technology services employee who fears retaliation. I'm asking you to stop further department transfers into a centralized technology department. Because ATS is not prepared to handle the workload. The number of changes to this proposal in just a few weeks signals poor planning. No clear change management process has been identified even in this reduced one ATS model, serious risks remain. There has been no complete census of the contracts that would be brought under this model. We do not know how many purchase orders, invoices, renewals or compliance obligations will be added yet staff are being asked to absorb all of it. No [1:08:32 PM] additional support staff have been allocated. The workload will increase, but staffing will not. That is not efficient. It is a guaranteed backlog. There is also no clear plan to train incoming I.T. Staff on purchasing and invoicing procedures. These are complex processes that directly affect compliance with city policy and charter requirements. We have already seen what happens when this is rushed during the October 2025 merger with information security, a department of fewer than 30 people support staff inherited unresolved invoices and a surge of contracts. This led to delays and compliance risks. That was a small example. This proposal to move 189 people within phase one is much larger. Contracts can lapse, services can be interrupted. The city can fall out of compliance with its own financial policies. City council has authorized an external efficiency audit. If [1:09:32 PM] one ATS moves forward without proper planning and staffing, the result may not be efficiencies but preventable violations. Proceeding now puts the city at unnecessary financial, operational and security risk. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Good afternoon, council mayor. My name is Michael Hernandez. I am currently an I.T. Support analyst senior at Austin public library. I've been with the library for two months short of a decade and. I want to talk about how this consolidation is being sold to us as it workers. We're being told that this is going to be an excellent opportunity for career development. And, you know, we get to get the opportunity to work with new technology that we haven't been able to, that we would like to mostly as a means to develop us as it professionals. Let me be absolutely clear. I'm a library [1:10:32 PM] worker first and an it professional second. I cannot like as a library worker, I love the library. This is why I've stayed with the library for so long. I could have. If I really was interested in developing my it professional career, I could have done so already. I've stuck around with the library because I love it. I love its mission, I love its staff, and I love the public that it serves. If. Library it is removed from the library. Those services that we provide, those essential services that we provide to the public will be severely diminished. From my experience and from library staff accounts, every time we reach out to ATS, they have shown time and time again that they are unable to support our services, let alone sometimes they don't even know what our services are. So how are they expected to support us? [1:11:34 PM] Basically, I would like we're asking you to vote to stop this as much as possible because it's going to hurt their community. Thank you. >> Continuing on. Item C one Briseno Garza Franck. Hereford. Michelson. Tooley. Stephan. Rey. Please state your name and begin speaking. >> Good morning, mayor and council. My name is Brianna Garza and I work for Austin public library. I'm here to read you testimony from an ATS employee who is choosing to remain anonymous due to fear of reprisal. As an ATS employee, it is shocking to watch our cio continue forward with the plan to ram through one of the biggest reorganizations in city's history. As ATS [1:12:34 PM] employees, we have been given no information regarding oats beyond the oxymoron of being advised that it won't affect us yet. Also to embrace change. For a cio whose last email to staff said she believes, quote, that transparency is the best way to navigate significant changes. She's being surprisingly mum on what the actual plan is to incorporate X number of people into our organization, instead of working with frontline staff, those who are directly involved in the daily operations. ATS executives have spent millions on contractors and consultants, outsiders hired to follow orders and not ask questions. Yet, as ATS employees, we will be expected to make it work. It won't be executives or consultants or contractors who will need to figure out how to implement their nebulous, flimsy, ever changing plan. We aren't even given the courtesy of months to figure it out like they give themselves. There's [1:13:35 PM] just a looming, moving target dubiously named day one, the apocalyptic reference apparently lost on leaders, but not those of us who know we're the ones who will be expected to carry the burden of something we did not ask for nor want, with the added insult that shuffling employees around an org chart does not save money. All of this is unnecessary and prevents us from our actual meaningful jobs. We ask that all of city council vote to hold city management accountable to the greatest extent possible and stop the consolidation. Thank you. >> Good afternoon. My name is Franck Hurford and I am a senior it business analyst for the transportation and public works department and a member of acm local 1624. We must distinguish between two types of centralization centralizing software licensing. It's unequivocally good. It leverages purchasing power. However, centralizing people is a mistake. It is a support function. Our teams don't just [1:14:35 PM] know tech. We know the specific business needs of the departments we serve. The city's various departments have made massive investments in our specialized training and departmental expertise and experience. When you pluck experts out of the field, you don't gain value. You lose that institutional glue that makes our data actionable. For example, take my team's vision zero data suite. The team isn't just programmers. We've become crash data specialists. Our work has helped Austin achieve a 38% reduction in fatalities and serious injuries, saving citizens an average an estimated 78 million in crash related costs. I know that's not out of your budget, but it's out of the budget of our citizens. And that's the real point, isn't it? In contrast, the city of Dallas tried to replicate our program but failed. Why? Because their centralized staffing structure prevented them from allocating the specialized human resources needed for such a life saving initiative. Mayor Watson, when you accepted Bloomberg [1:15:36 PM] philanthropies award for what work cities gold certification, you praised our city's teams for using data to improve lives and foster innovation. I'm asking you now to protect those teams, keep us embedded where we are proven to succeed, and so we can continue to keep Austin safe. We ask that all of council vote to hold city management accountable to the greatest extent possible and to stop this consolidation. Thank you. >> Mayor and members of city council. My name is Michael Santulli, and I support the work of the city demographer, managing projects like updating demographic profile dashboards with key statistics for the city, metro, and each of your council districts. I'm here today in my personal capacity as an active member of afscme. I work on an interdisciplinary team and having an it data analyst with deep knowledge of gis and databases, as well as planner certification and contextual knowledge is critical to our work. Management says many workers will stay embedded for a period [1:16:36 PM] of time, but that only speaks to physical location. The real issue is operational authority. Who sets the priorities? A worker can stay physically located in a department without direct accountability, or without sufficient capacity to meet the department's needs due to dueling demands. Who doesn't love having multiple bosses and juggling conflicting priorities? I myself waited over a year for ATS to close a ticket just to integrate two approved softwares. I don't want to imagine how prioritization of our work would look in an embedded but centralized model. If departments carry the internal operational risk and public expectation to succeed, they need meaningful authority over the technology workers supporting their mission. And how is this not more confusing than leaving folks where they are enhancing coordination across departments and improving technology governance citywide? My team led a multi-department working group to update the city's population and jobs forecast. That working group success was rooted in analysis from our it data analyst proof that a federated [1:17:37 PM] model preserving department contextualized technology capacity is a powerful catalyst for collaboration between departments rather than the barrier. The city manager has told you it is embedded, but centralized doesn't solve the problem. It creates new ones. We ask that all council vote to hold city management accountable to the greatest extent possible, and to stop the consolidation. Thank you. >> Good morning. My name is Stefan rey. I'm an it supervisor with Austin public health. I'm speaking today as an active member of afscme. I became an it supervisor before the covid 19 pandemic. Our embedded health it staff was critical to the response from development of testing and vaccination sites to systems for collecting data and publishing public dashboards. Austin public health saved lives. Health. It played a crucial role. Today, our embedded health it staff [1:18:37 PM] support unique technology solutions administered public health specific applications, developed data models to further health data integration, and push the edge with what ai can do for public health. For this, an enterprise level it structure built around a federated model is a better choice. A federated model allows the city to standardize security, data procurement and application government governance without moving workers into Atmos. Embedded staff provide faster, more accurate, specialized support. They understand development operations, missions, and risks. They've built. They've they've built specialized knowledge through ongoing interaction with everyone from executives to frontline workers. Federation improves collaboration by allowing departments to share expertise across the city. Give ATS a focused role in scalable service, support delivery and [1:19:38 PM] governance responsibilities instead of forcing it to manage every specialized departmental need. Our community will not care if the city has a unified org structure. If services become slower, less responsive and less specialized. Federated model keeps technology connected to the real world. Austin deserves a strong, federated it model that does not sacrifice the very expertise that makes our public services work for everyday austinites. >> Thank you. Yes, ma'am. >> Good afternoon, mayor, city manager and members of city council. My name is Christina Tremmel and I'm an I.T. Business systems analyst, senior at the city of Austin. I am one of the over 800 city workers opposed to the one ATS. And I'm here today on my vacation time to share my beliefs in a personal capacity. I'm here to highlight why the auditor's recent consultant contract management audit strengthens the case for council oversight in this consolidation effort. There have been three consultants involved involved in the one [1:20:39 PM] ATS project and the application rationalization project. Gartner. Loblolly and parcel. So far, millions have been spent and none of them have proven the case that staff centralization is safe, necessary, or cost effective. If management is relying on consultant driven recommendations to justify ot's, it should meet the audit standards and staff consolidation doesn't. We're in a post prop Q reality and difficult decisions lie ahead. The application rationalization effort shows that when there's a business case, it can be demonstrated for staff consolidation. The city still has not publicly produced return on investment, cost benefit analysis or clear savings models. The data provided by Gartner to justify staff consolidation is flawed, and we shouldn't let sunk cost fallacy result in even more wasteful spending, both in the continued consultant spending and in the thousands of staff hours that would be diverted away from critical city services to implement this consolidation. Thank you again [1:21:40 PM] to council sub quorum who brought this item forward. And we ask that all of council vote to hold city management accountable to the greatest extent possible and stop the consolidation. Thank you. >> Thank you all. >> Continuing on item C one Nathan Wilkes amenity Applewhite, Justin green, Corey Erb. Please state your name and begin speaking. >> Nathan Wilkes, mayor and council my name is Nathan Wilkes and I'm an engineer with transportation public works. I'm here to talk about existing efficiencies and cost savings. We support making refinements to our current federated structure. I learned about federalism in grade school federal, state, county, local. With politics aside, if the federal government proposed to absorb Austin's local government into their scope, it would be untenable. Span of control issues alone would result in our unique local [1:22:41 PM] priorities not being met. Governing would be top down and services would suffer. This centralization would not be more efficient. It would just be worse. The existing it federated model has been organically developed across departments in response to its limited span of control to support department and work groups, needs and challenges. And you all and council know better than anyone. We have many, many services and all the needs and challenges that come with them. With prop Q and other budget pressures, the writing's on the wall. We're going to have to work together to get leaner and find ways to save money while delivering these services. Few areas have the ability to improve efficiency, like tech and data teams, streamlining data and workflow, and moving beyond existing paper systems. Without these efficiency gains, we will have higher fte costs in other areas and overreliance on consultants. I get excited about challenges like this, but meeting this budget challenge without tech and data teams on our side is like asking me to work without my right hand. The federated structure also supports effective teams to [1:23:43 PM] incubate ideas, have capacity to solve big problems, and build internal trust. I'm talking about both interdisciplinary data teams with developers, project managers, gis specialists, and data scientists, and their proximity, team spirit and trust to internal customers like me and others they serve at tpw. Investments in this structure have resulted in many process and efficiency innovations, with more on the way. There are too many to list and go into detail about one ATS would break up these teams and our ability to innovate and chill this momentum. Thank you. >> Please begin. >> Good morning mayor, mayor pro tem and members of city council. My name is amenity Applewhite and I'm an I.T. Supervisor senior on the data and technology services team at Austin transportation public works. Today I will highlight the fundamental issues with the consultant report from Gardner that forms the crux of the staff consolidation effort. 1at. S leadership accepts face value. Gardner's assertion that Austin [1:24:44 PM] overspends on it staff compared to its peers. They've done so without questioning whether those so- called peer cities are cities Austin should even want to emulate. Do these cities have service levels and resident outcomes that Austin should aspire to? For example, can these cities claim year over year reductions in severe. In severe traffic injuries thanks to their nation leading, data driven vision zero program? In other words, we're missing half the equation. The return on investment ATS has now released an updated cost comparison that removes Austin energy's ot spending, but does not remove the cost of their other staff. Austin energy alone holds 20% of the city's it titles, and amounts to 29% of the city's budget. Yet only one of the nine comparators even runs an electric utility. We won't have an honest picture of our it spend compared to these phantom peers until Gardner eliminates the Austin energy portion of this analysis. Frankly, I'm not sure how we [1:25:45 PM] can take their analysis seriously at all if they're not willing to be transparent with Austin residents. Even without these adjustments, though, this means that the application rationalization on its own up to $149 million, could bring Austin's I.T. Spending down to the group average, which, of course, still doesn't take into account our it staff or the workforce. Roi to the council members who brought this resolution forward. I thank you, and I thank all of you for listening. I urge you to pause it. Staff consolidations into ATS. >> Please. >> Hello. My name is Justin green and I am the assistant manager at the Houston branch of the Austin public library. I am one of the 807 city workers opposed to one ATS. The city has been putting on a big old song and dance about listening to their workforce during this process. But despite workers across departments and titles raising the alarm, their voices have not been heard. 650 [1:26:46 PM] interviews conducted by loblolly pointed to a strained it workforce, holding their departments together at the seams. Multiple department directors have voiced their opposition in meetings, memos and emails, and of the 100 plus responses submitted through the official one ATS sharepoint, the majority of which were opposed to consolidation, almost all went unanswered. The city's response to broad, diverse and deep concerns is we're moving forward, so get with the program. So what happened to all the feedback the city received from its workforce? Where did it go? Well, look at what we found in the dumpster. Tc Broadnax. You should know better. You can recycle shredded paper with the help of Austin resource recovery. This is why hundreds of city workers have put countless hours into our campaign to stop oats. We know that the official channels are worthless, so we sacrifice our time and energy outside of work, circulating our petition, putting on rallies and press conferences, and using our time off in order to speak with you [1:27:46 PM] and do prop comedy. I'm on vacation, but I'm not in aruba. I'm here. We feel compelled to spend our time this way because we know it's the only avenue to having our voice heard, and it's starting to work. We're seeing some changes in the timeline, and management is shifting course, but only because they're feeling the heat from our campaign. It took this much for them to start listening to their workforce. Does this inspire confidence that the process behind perhaps the largest internal reorganization in our history has been legitimate, vetted and ready to go? I ask that council oppose oats in its entirety from top to bottom, from phase one to the end. Thank you for your time. >> Continuing on item c1, Ashley Kraus. >> There's one more person. >> Sorry. >> Apologies. Good afternoon. My name is Corey Erb. I'm a district three resident, and I use mapping software to analyze the city's built environment related to stormwater drainage and flood control. I want to address some claims versus reality. City management forced more than 600 employees. Okay, [1:28:50 PM] more than 600 employees into a 30 minute job interview. They're now on their third highly paid consultant to try to justify the oats plan. You've heard that 91% of it employees felt listened to. The reality is, half of those survey respondents expressed a significant concern about the it consolidation plan. We're now on version 4.0 of the oats plan, but most of the tweaks were in the original Gartner report and only announced after workers from directors to frontline staff raised the alarm. Entire department it staffs are still being consolidated in phase one, including fire, ems, public health and libraries. The stabilization period and phases are not new. The Gartner report is fatally flawed based on bad data. Austinites are proud that our utilities are in public hands. Water electric resource recovery and have public oversight, accountability and lower costs. Copying fully privatized cities will only ensure that that happens here. [1:29:50 PM] Good for the consultant class. Bad for us. It's clear that when management claims to have taken input on the plan, they really mean that they've collected feedback after the fact that they've ignored or misconstrued to justify going ahead as originally planned. What we're asking for is one plan that we co- develop and truly collaborate on from the beginning. We know where cost savings are, and we want to work together on this and future changes without putting more public money into private hands. Please forgive the very analog presentations we're volunteering our time to be here. Thank you very much for your time and consideration. >> Thank you all. >> On item C one. Ashley Kraus brydan Summers haydn walker. [1:30:53 PM] >> Okay. >> Good afternoon, mayor and council. I'm Hayden walker, I'm director of planning at black and motel, and I live in district nine. I wanted to speak today about the importance of good data and data driven analytics and making impactful change in the city of Austin. Vision zero projects have saved lives, and they saved the city hundreds of millions of dollars annually. I was the chair of the pedestrian advisory council back in 2015 when we first started having discussions about vision zero. At that time, the database the city staff relied on was limited mostly to a few notes from a police officer at the scene of a crash, when a person walking was hit by a person driving two tons of steel. The crash was usually listed as pedestrian, failed to yield to vehicle. That tells us very little about what needs to change. Today, we have robust data that gives staff and advocates a much better picture of what is actually going on [1:31:53 PM] and what we can do to improve outcomes. We have data that shows before and after project implementation. Decision makers learn from the data that works and what does not, and we can iterate changes based on facts. And David. Data driven analysis as an advocate for safety for all people in the transportation system, I'm concerned about these proposed changes to your it department. You need software developers who work directly with transportation staff to create these powerful custom databases. The ten year vision zero report is an excellent example of how data is now tracked, and how we can save both lives and money. I fear that centralizing it services will make it difficult for Austin to continue to be a leader in implementing vision zero, where strong staff collaboration has resulted in measurable roi and informed progress. Thank you very much for your time. >> Hi, I'm Ashley Kraus. When asked me raised concerns about [1:32:55 PM] the efficiency audit, you paused and the ordinance became stronger because of it. Thank you. We supported that ordinance because we believe deeply in efficient and effective public services. We oppose reckless restructuring disguised as efficiency. Directors from all over the city have raised concerns about this proposal. So when the people responsible for keeping the lights on, the water running and the planes in the sky are sounding the alarm, this council should listen. This resolution doesn't defend the status quo. To borrow a phrase from the mayor, it's just common sense governance. A pause creates space for analysis, transparency, and worker input before a high risk, city wide reorganization moves forward. You were told that there will be no layoffs, but cfo van van eenoo stated publicly that reducing applications would eventually mean needing fewer people to support them. And when workers asked about that contradiction, we were told, quote, the city is not an employment service. True, but don't we deserve [1:33:55 PM] empathy and honesty? You cannot tell us not to worry about layoffs while simultaneously describing a plan designed to eliminate positions over time with no clear outcome goals. Why haven't we been shown where the staff consolidation savings comes from? Is it because it doesn't exist? Where is it if not from projected risks in future years? If management had produced a clear, detailed plan from the beginning, I would not be here to speak with you today. You and every resident in your district has been asked to trust a massive reorganization on the basis of vague promises and incomplete analysis. That is not common sense. As a manager, I wouldn't accept that from my direct reports. And you shouldn't accept it from yours. Acme has been here a lot longer than this management team, and we're still going to be here ten toes down. After they are gone. Every member of our union will remember the council members who had the courage to stand with us when it mattered. And that time is now. Thank you. [1:34:55 PM] >> Good afternoon, mayor and council. I'm Brian Summers, president of local 1624. We started this campaign two months ago by delivering a letter to the city manager demanding a stop to oats, and since that time, we have been thoroughly laying out the risks that are in front of the city. And you see that today with, what, 22 people here at 1:35 P.M. On their vacation time to continue to make this case to you, I appreciate the seriousness of the council members that have been willing to address this issue. Our sub quorum Velasquez the sub quorum with Ellis qadri Siegel and councilmember Fuentes, thank you for taking this situation seriously. We are aware of the concerns around the city charter, and that's why you went into the executive session earlier to talk through that. Have a discussion, not in the public about this issue, but we're also aware that the city council has the ability to have oversight of the budget, and [1:35:56 PM] there is a way for us to move forward. It's going to take creativity and bravery from the city council. We can thread this needle and that will be a compromise. We are already compromising by being willing to move forward with. This is a plan to address this issue, because we have been saying from the start that we must stop oats, but we are willing to compromise. Let's figure out a way where we can craft a resolution that's going to provide the oversight that's necessary to alleviate the risks, while also providing respect and dignity for the city workers. We will not accept that you are making this a decision between efficiency or doing what is right to protect the risks of the city. You cannot say after today that you are not aware of the risks, and that liability will sit with you if this consolidation moves forward and it has negative outcomes for the citizens. Thank you for your [1:36:56 PM] time. >> Mayor. That concludes our speakers. >> Thank you, Mr. Benigno. If you come forward. Councilmember Siegel, I'm going to recognize you and. I'll recognize you when they get here. >> Thank you. Mayor, I can I can talk for a couple of minutes while they get settled. So thanks, everyone for being a part of this conversation. This discussion item was put forward by council members Fuentes, Velasquez, Ellis, qadri and myself to ensure that we have a public conversation about the one ATS process, including a variety of concerns raised by department leaders, civilian employees and community stakeholders. And to start, I'd really like to share a deep. Thank you to all of our city employees, your committed civil servants who are sharing your stories in public in front of the chief executives of this [1:37:57 PM] city. I believe you when you say you're not doing this, you're not taking these risks. You're not speaking out just to protect your own jobs. You're doing this for the best interest of the city. And our goal today is to have a public conversation with our cfo and ATS director to address some of the most important questions and receive as many assurances as possible that the city is ready to move forward as a sub quorum. We're very appreciative of the idea that one ATS is motivated by a commitment to efficient use of city resources, in particular the application rationalization initiative, which could save many millions of dollars in future years. That's something we do recognize as essential. And we also acknowledge that even the step of reforming our software licensing and tech acquisition policy processes that will require some reorganization of of some employees. And the city manager's memo of April 29th does provide important information about the one ATS program in particular, phase one, which would begin this summer. And so to start, [1:38:59 PM] several of us are going to have questions, but I want to ask the cfo and ATS director to provide a couple clarifications on the memo before we get to the bigger conversation. And so I guess, Mr. Benigno, I'll start direct my questions to you, but if you could start by providing some more context on the 189 employees who are projected to be impacted by phase one, including the types of jobs these folks do and why they are included in the first phase. >> Good morning, mayor, city manager, council members. Kara Calaycay, department director for Austin technology services and council member. I'll address that question. So the first phase of one ATS brings in our information security professionals across the organization. Our vendor management professionals, our business relationship managers, and our enterprise architects. [1:40:01 PM] We feel that this is extremely important at the point of doing our application rationalization work, so that we have the those who are involved in technology procurement support, as well as our enterprise architects that will be working with the stakeholders on the selection of upcoming technology or the rationalization of that technology of existing technology. Our business relationship managers are a key link into our department areas, making sure we understand the business needs and business outcomes that we need in each of those areas of our organization, and information security and cyber security are critical to our city as a whole. Having that visibility up front as we. Visibility up front in our organization into matters around security are just [1:41:04 PM] foundational to managing the cybersecurity risk in our organization. Additionally, we have departments within the city where we already have very strong ties and supportive relationships in our financial services department, our human resources department, in our public safety departments, where we already have a dedicated deputy cio who focuses in on public safety technology and better aligning those technology resources into that organization. So either the alignment or we're working on projects to remediate items that were encountered during audits where we need to strengthen our relationship, mitigate the issues, and continue that management and partnership. >> Thank you. Director. Yeah. Go ahead. >> I mean, that was a lot of details. And so I kind of [1:42:05 PM] wanted to just zoom out a little bit bigger picture as shown on the slide here. We did see the message board post for a lot of these questions that were posted to the message board yesterday. Staff has put together some slides to just help to speak to those points. But from a bigger picture, enterprise wide functions, these are functions. A lot of discussion about centralized model versus a federated model. These functions information security, vendor management, business relationship management, enterprise architecture, which are currently to a large degree in Austin, handled in a decentralized way. Different departments, individual departments having individual roles and responsibilities in these areas, whether it was a federated model that people wanted to see us move to, or a centralized model, these city wide functions we would want to centralize into ATS regardless. So that was one area and one reason for putting these into phase one. We also view these things as being essential to really advancing and realizing [1:43:05 PM] the potential benefits from our application rationalization process. I mean, you can think about vendor management where we have multiple departments managing the relationships with individual vendors. It's kind of hard to get to a consolidated approach to application rationalization if vendor management is still dispersed throughout the organization. And then the second big piece are departments that already have a very close and tight, not completely full, but a very close and tight integration with the Austin technology services department. So one of the larger I.T. Department or it functions on this list would be financial services, where there's about 40 it professionals that support our enterprise wide financial management systems, procurement systems, those staff and ATS already closely collaborate. In fact, they're currently closely collaborating on a financial management system modernization process. And that process is being led. And the project [1:44:06 PM] managers are in ATS. And so there's already a lot of close integration between ATS and the departments on here. Long story short, we think these would be the easiest departments to make the transition from a decentralized model into a more centralized federated model. >> And just to follow up briefly, is this a final list or is there a possibility that, you know, there would be additional changes before August based on feedback from departments and employees? >> Yeah, and I think it's possible that this would change. I mean, this is where we are right now. I don't think there would be a fundamental change to it. But you'll notice on the number of positions we put the words estimated because built into the process is we've interviewed and Cary and our team have interviewed individual employees to understand what they're doing in their various organizations, leading to recommended assignments. Those recommended assignments are currently being vetted by our human resources department. They will subsequently be vetted by the city manager and his team. [1:45:07 PM] They'll be vetted by department directors, leading to an announcement of here's your final, you know, here's your assignments in the new one ATS department. So we think this is is probably pretty close, but I did want to put the words estimated in here because as we go through that process, there could be, you know, some positions here, some positions there that, that, that we learn something about that makes us want to change the recommendation. These departments and these functions, I don't see those changing, but the specific ftes counts could certainly move some. >> If it turns out that some of the impacted employees maybe are more essential to operations and less appropriate for a centralized approach, that's something you will consider. >> Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, we've heard some stories today that some folks are an I.T job titles, but they're not actually doing it work. They're doing more departmental specific work. So this whole vetting process is to ensure that removing the it people into the it department and not [1:46:07 PM] moving individuals that are in an I.T job title. But for whatever reason, doing some work different than information technology. >> Thank you. I want to move to the comparables in some ways from the the story of one ets. I feel like it starts with this idea that other cities that are comparable spend a lot less on technology services. And I know you have some slides on that, but I guess the opening question is, you know, please explain the comps that were used to justify the projected savings from one ets. >> So I'm happy to do that. And and by the way, I'm Ed Benigno chief financial officer for the city of Austin. And next to me is Kara Calaycay, the city's chief information officer and the director of Austin technology services. We do have some of our consulting team with us in the audience. If we need to get down into some of the the details. We have Diana Warnock from Gartner consulting with us. If if there's some [1:47:08 PM] real detailed information about how they did their work. And then we also have a representative from loblolly here in regard to their. That's our change management consultant that we've been working with. So in regards to the comps and I, you know, I won't spend a lot of time on this. I think people know. Why you might do benchmarking, but, you know, really in Austin, we use benchmarking and comps like all over the place. Departments go out and they benchmark their peers to improve performance. We look for ways to a pretty common piece of a efficiency study is to benchmark against your peers to see how efficient you are against similar organizations. In our regular contract negotiations, our negotiators go out and do benchmarking to inform what other comparable agencies are are compensating their employees. Human resources does the same when we do market analyzes. So lots of reasons for doing a benchmark. The key thing I wanted to say on this [1:48:09 PM] slide is I've never seen where there's a perfect match. And I don't know that that invalidates. I don't believe that invalidates benchmarking the fact that we don't have a perfect match. As you look at the city of Austin, the 10th largest city in the country, if you try to get a perfect match based upon size services, funding structures, it's just honestly, there's not going to be a perfect match. So you try to find what are the best matches you have and what can you learn from those from that information? I would say even for comparatively simple scenarios like salary benchmarking, you're not going to find a perfect match. There's going to be variances in the job duties of what that position does in this city versus a different city versus a different city. There's differences in cost of living between locations. Some places have various specialty pays that we may or may not have. Step systems could be different. There's all kinds of differences that, you know, [1:49:09 PM] make that even that simple analysis challenging. But nonetheless, we use those benchmarks to inform our compensation structures and negotiating position. The other thing I really wanted to highlight on here is that Gartner does. And as Gartner client, I'm I'm happy that they protect the confidentiality of their client data. So they have deep experience with cities and private sector companies across the country. And that gives us access to a wealth of information, but they are obligated to protect the confidentiality of the information that they get for their from their clients. And they do that for Austin, and I would expect them to do that. And they do that for the other clients have as well. In terms of the peer group profiles, though, we do know this that Gartner put into the peer group for us nine governmental agencies, six cities, three counties, four of those agencies operated an airport. One operates an electric utility. On average, their [1:50:10 PM] budgets were a little bit smaller than us 4.4 billion, and their fte counts were a little bit smaller than ours, about 14,700 versus Austin, 16,400. So I think it's close. It's a reasonable approximation of the size and complexity that we have here in the city of Austin. But I also want to stress that on the slides to follow, they speak of the savings in terms of percentiles. So, you know, if we are spending 6% or 7% and somebody else is spending 4%, that kind of the taking a percentile approach adjusts for the differences in scale and size of some of these operations. Over on the right, they take a different approach. They call that their secondary peer group, where they're looking at 100 state and local governments across the globe. Again, just as a as a broader sample set, maybe less specifically alike to Austin, but a broader sample set. And the results of both of these are on the next slide. This one is just to show a little bit about, and I know [1:51:11 PM] that's hard to read. I apologize for that. But what essentially it shows is on the left hand side are the different functions that the city of Austin provides, from animal services to code enforcement, all the way down to the bottom transportation services, watershed protection, and in animal services. The first one on the list, 100%. All nine of the peer groups included animal services. Skipping down a couple rows to the convention center, two thirds 67% of the nine entities had a convention center. They operated. And so they looked at that across all of the city departments and gave an aggregate score at the bottom of of an alignment between the city of Austin and this peer benchmark that they created of 86%. And then over on the right, the smaller table takes a look at the services that are provided. It services that are provided from infrastructure and networking to cybersecurity, application development and support, all the way down to the bottom being public safety and tech support. So what this is saying is that we have [1:52:12 PM] alignment with most areas, although only two thirds of the comparable cities provided public safety. >> Mr. Rainey, let me just jump in because I know the mayor only wants me to, you know, ask questions for for so long. So I'm going to try to work through maybe seven more questions. And if you could just try to I mean, I know we've got the slides, but if you could just try to give the summary answers because. Yes, sir. Unfortunately, there's a lot of different areas of questions we have to get to. >> Yeah. So I won't go through the slide then a lot. The key takeaways are, and this was, I think, an important one because a lot of people have been waiting for this. What's it look like when we remove operational technology, which is the shift we made to the process. And so this is the data that removes operational technology. Getting a more apples to apples comparison with those other jurisdictions. And we basically see that Austin is spending 6.7% of its total operating budget on I.T. Compared to our peers of about 4.2%. And then importantly, on the top right, you can see in our peer agencies, about 80% of [1:53:14 PM] the it spend is in the it department and 20% in the non it departments in Austin. We're about a third centralized and two thirds decentralized. So just want to leave you with that. And then this was the final slide that just shows that information in a similar fashion. But the green bar is an important one because a lot of people have brought up concerns on the benchmarking related to the utilities. And so this is looking at a Gartner benchmark, specifically around utilities, where they identified 4.2% of total spending and utilities being for it. And so whether you look at it at utilities only or our peer average is also about 4.2%, that that medium gray bar, either case, those are both far below what our current spending profile is. >> Thank you. And just kind of drill down a little bit pretty quickly. I mean, we'll acknowledge that some of our people in it titles have non-it functions, right? So there's some, I guess you could call it margin of error or variance related to that aspect of our [1:54:15 PM] current hr classification system. Also, we don't know exactly how each of these communities identifies or or defines ot versus it. These are not generally, you know, accepted definitions. And so I mean, in challenge these assumptions, if I'm wrong, but I guess I think one of the most important questions is if we separate ot operational technology from consolidation, does that impact the benefits of this program or the, you know, projected return on investment? >> Potentially? I mean, it certainly lowered the the numbers that you're seeing here compared to the original analysis, it did bring those numbers down, but we haven't done that. Detailed analysis to say excluding ot does or does not impact the potential savings resulting from, from the work that we're doing. We've just made the decision [1:55:15 PM] that ot is not going to be part of this process and are moving forward, looking at the rest of the organization, and these numbers pertain to the rest of the organization. >> So if you could share a little bit about how we define ot versus it, and then also if you could give a little context for when you go department by department, will department leaders be able to kind of appeal or challenge these designations? You know, how are how are you going to sort out, you know, the idea that we have technologists in the fire department who also provide essential wildfire prevention services, you know, things like that. >> Thank you for the question. Council member. So specific to operational technology, we're talking about systems that impact physical processes. So things in our water utility, our electric utility, things that have industrial type control systems within within our departmental organizations [1:56:18 PM] specific to the identification of ot, we, we look to frameworks. So there are frameworks that were developed for this reason, for this model for securing operational technology. We have the employee surveys that they provided along with the information that we gathered during their employee meetings, where we where, you know, based on what the employees have shared that they're doing, we're able to look and see if they are impacting those physical processes within those departments. And that helped us to identify those resources that are truly performing ot functions. Now, this week, we're scheduling meetings and meeting with department directors to share our findings and validate that that we have it correct. And here other considerations that they would like to share with us about the process. And I know there will [1:57:19 PM] be some we've I've had plenty of very good discussions with department directors on the needs around their departments. >> So applying that framework to the library, you know, the wi-fi networks that our 24 libraries, you know, maintaining the desktops, that feels more clearly it. But we have this whole online collection that impacts how people get books. And that's obviously a beloved public service. Would maintaining the collection and its digital elements, would that be ot. >> It would not. Those are applications commercially, commercial, off the shelf or somewhat customized applications that we would need it specialists to develop and support. They're important to the operations of the library, but it is not a piece of operational technology. >> So those people would be withdrawn from the department and then the department director. If there's a problem with the collection, people can't get their books. They kind of have to get a ticket. Or how does that work? Like, [1:58:20 PM] how do we make sure that, you know, these customer facing, you know, essential programs and services of the city aren't kind of, I guess, lost or diminished in this reorg? >> Sure. I want to make sure the, the concept of being taken out of the department, it's let's change the, the framing of that. People will report into Austin technology services. In many cases, they'll be aligned with the departments they're working on today. That is not always the case, but often that will be the case because we are maintaining domain expertise throughout the city. There might be some areas where your domain expertise is very aligned with another domain, and we want those technologists to work together and more broadly cover multiple domains. But the knowledge of the business is always important in how we deliver the technology. So we want to make sure the technologists are still partnering with the different business areas around [1:59:20 PM] the city, so that we get the business outcomes out of the technology that we were all looking for. >> To me, that's one of the most important things I've heard that, you know, we've got skilled technologists who are working for the library not because they want to be a tech worker, but because they love libraries, right. Or some of these transportation and public works folks who probably could get paid more in private practice, but they're committed to vision zero and mapping our most dangerous intersections and saving lives. And so how do we avoid losing these committed civil servants who, who are embedded in these collaborative work environments, who are driven by the mission of their departments and didn't sign up to work, you know, for a tech desk, right? They want to be serving the people. Like, is there a plan to prevent attrition? >> So we're going to work through those items and a variety of different ways. First of all, the Austin technology services, that is our purpose to serve the mission of the city of Austin [2:00:21 PM] and its departments. So we are completely aligned in that. And we know we need technologists who have that knowledge of the different business areas or have the the need and drive to learn different areas of the business business so that they can be provide solutions that don't just serve one department. Maybe they can serve multiple departments. I really think that the focus here should be on the opportunity to learn more about our city and the different services we deliver around the city, and how those things can be applied within individual departments. And once again, broadly. So as we go through the consolidation effort, we want to keep people focused in on the work that they're doing today, which we will do as they as they [2:01:21 PM] transition into the department. But we're going to start learning even more, even deeper and making sure we have good documentation of the systems that they're managing and the processes that they're enabling. And do we have others that are doing very similar things in other departments? So they have an affinity for working together and maybe working with sets of departments instead of just one department. And in terms of attrition, we once again, I think Austin technology services is an amazing department. You get to see the city of Austin and all its pieces and parts. And so first, we definitely want to make sure we're welcoming people into the departments and know that they have a place here and that we are serving the city. We want to make sure that they understand that they will have support. We're going to have office hours and we're going to have team building, and we'll have opportunities for people to get to know one another and understand the [2:02:21 PM] things that they're doing. We have change readiness workshops for the leadership that's coming into the department. We've started the change management workshops with the leadership in the department so that as we transition, we'll have those good conversations about the things that are identified as risk and those things that are identified as opportunities where we can work better together. Other items around, you know, I attrition in technology as well as in our departments. There are many different methods that we try to address that with. We have great employee recognition programs. We have training opportunities so that people are understanding and learning the newest technology and can apply it in their departments to serve those business outcomes. >> If I can just jump in director, because I think I'm on my last minute, if I haven't exceeded it, then I'll pass to you. Mayor, if you could just [2:03:22 PM] share in terms of service delivery for departments, how are we going to track quality of service delivery through these different phases and to make sure that we're really, you know, the the libraries are still getting the books checked out that, you know, I guess in a future phase, it could impact parks and our ability to reserve a tennis court or, you know, all these thousands of ways, you know, the outage map for the electric utility, how are we going to make sure that we maintain high service levels? >> Sure. So we have approached this from a do no harm focus. So if your service level is such today, it will be that tomorrow. That's why it's important that we have the technologists still focused on their departments during the transition. During the transition, we're going to make sure that we've documented that baseline work so that we can understand where those current service levels really are and documented by data, so that we know we're meeting that and continuing to exceed that over [2:04:23 PM] time. So we'll be establishing those kpis and performance metrics that we need so that we're tracking the effort for the city as a whole and have very granular visibility into how, how we are performing for individual departments. >> If I could just add one, one thing to that first part that Eric was getting to is about the concern about attrition. And I certainly think it's a valid concern that staff needs to be aware of and be able to respond to. I know we're trying to be concise on our answers because there's a lot of questions to come. I have a list of, you know, a half a dozen plus major reorganizations that I could think of just off the top of my head. In the 15 years or so I've been with the city, I've never seen a reorganization that has as much detailed analysis. The length of a runway to the launch of it, as much communication and as extensive of a change management plan that this reorganization has. And we simply have not seen major attrition or really any blip in [2:05:25 PM] attrition at all coming from other major reorganizations, reorganizations that involved moving parks, police into the police department, reorganizations that moved information security individuals into ATS. I mean, there's a lot of experience with reorganizations. We've done this before as a city staff. We have experience with this and we think we have plans in place and methods in place to address the attrition issue. And it's something we'll certainly be monitoring before we enter into future phases and adjust as needed. >> Thank you, councilmember. Councilmember Velasquez. >> Thank you. Mayor. How will the future phases impact workers wages, leave benefits, telework and seniority? So how are we planning for that? Sorry, I apologize. I didn't mean to interrupt. >> You know, so of those things that were mentioned, telework is probably the one where there is the possibility of change. We want to make sure we're aligning to our departments. We [2:06:26 PM] want to make sure that telework is available where it is practical and makes sense for the business need that is being served. If have people who are outfitting technology in a squad car, they can't telework. They. They have to be there doing that work on hand. But where it is practical, then we will definitely leverage city telework process processes. The other items. No change to pay or benefits or seniority as people move into the department. >> Thank you. One other question. What are the future plan phases and what departments and classification or processes will will those affect or impact. Excuse me. >> And we have a slide for that. So there are three phases in the 1ats initiative. This first phase impacts 189 people in in the departments as shown here. As we move into future phases, [2:07:30 PM] phase two, our focus will be on it project management, the it business systems analysts that support those projects and data roles. Those will come from across the city, inclusive of aviation, Austin energy and Austin water. And then we will focus in on the technologists in the departments that you see listed here on the slide, bringing that total to. In the second phase, there will be 210, 218 estimated and Austin water. >> Thank you. Thank you, mayor. >> Thank you, councilmember Ellis. >> Thank you. Mayor. I had a couple questions. First off, about transparency and accountability. How will the city manager's office be communicating with the stakeholders, including city council, department leadership and other folks that are [2:08:31 PM] affected by the process? >> So there is a a communications plan and change management plan associated with the project. There is a project intranet, website, sharepoint site for all the individuals who within the city to review to see what's happening with the project. There is a communications form on that site along that along with the faq. So as questions are asked and we have responses to individuals, we can post similar information to the faq. In case anyone else has a similar question. As part of the communication plan, there are memos that are being drafted to share with different stakeholders across the organization, and as we move into the two month period before people transition into the department, we'll be having [2:09:31 PM] employee meetings and workshops to answer additional questions and get people ready to join their new teams. >> I appreciate that, I know we heard from some of the speakers earlier just about the communication and trying to make sure folks know what's going to be decided, when it's going to be decided, how much time they have to prepare for any changes, like when to drop their kids off at daycare and where they might be officing if they happen to change. And I think as much predictability as possible and as much information as possible that can be shared well ahead of time, is really going to help folks out. If there's any, you know, surprise transitions coming for things like workplace. We also heard from a couple of the speakers. They were actually reading comments on behalf of other folks that didn't necessarily want to come and speak or share exactly who they are and what their name is through this process. And so can you talk a little bit about safe line of communication? If [2:10:32 PM] there's needs that need to be escalated, either to a department director or above their level, if there are some major concerns that come through this. >> Yes. So as part of the process, we're setting up a sort of a one stop shop for questions, pulling together hr professionals, finance professionals, others within the department department to answer questions and escalate issues. Once again, internal processes. We do escalate through the chain of command if we need to escalate outside of that chain of command, then there are hr processes. I'm sorry, our corporate hr processes that we would reflect on for those processes they have associated with MC S. I believe our our hr director shared that our labor relations area could be involved if that is necessary. >> Okay, that's good to know [2:11:32 PM] because I really want to make sure folks, you know, they, they speak of fear of retaliation. And I know that that is not customarily how the city of Austin treats its employees, but really want to double down on folks need to be able to communicate what it is they're experiencing in their workplace, especially with such a large staff transition that that is being discussed. And then can you talk a little bit more about being able to be adaptable through this process? What does it look like if someone does bring bring a concern up? How how will their suggestions and their feedback be incorporated into any changes that take place? >> I think a lot of that will happen in our workshops. So I will give an example that with our senior leaders currently in Austin technology services, we started with a high level change management workshop, talking about the things that are concerned them and then the opportunities that are there. And then we've used and [2:12:33 PM] reviewed that feedback as we've shaped what this is going to look like going forward, maybe concerns that from one manager's span of control was going to be too large. Well, we we looked at that and we addressed that within the placement recommendations so that we have appropriate span of control and that we have definition for the different teams in their functions. I think there's an assumption that I, as a technical manager, I do this function. So I just have to take all these people into the organization. We can have multiple leaders that are funneling in to a higher level leader that lead teams of people that that will address those functions. So we will take those those suggestions and look at how we can adapt either our change management processes or how we're implementing the actual work [2:13:36 PM] processes as we move through that process. And I will say that part of those work group meetings is to talk about standards and processes. What are the good practices that are out in the department that will want to adapt into Austin technology services? They're not coming into the department with us saying, this is what we're going to do. They're coming into the department so that we can build good practices for the city that we can all leverage. >> Thank you. Oh, did you have something. >> I just want to direct, like very pointedly, this concern about retaliation and just say that there is no retaliation that is going to occur to anyone in the organization for talking to us about one ATS. We appreciate our employees. We value our employees, appreciate the feedback and the input. So certainly do want to have a process like Erika laid out for individuals who just want to be anonymous for whatever reason and bring their voices forward. But I don't want to let this conversation die thinking that there might be some reasonable [2:14:36 PM] fear of retaliation. That is just not the case. >> Thank you. I think folks are just worried and trying to cover all bases, but I know that we as an employer don't don't do that sort of thing. I'll close out my questions by just saying we've done a lot of work over the, the last few years about employee retention and trying to make sure that we're recruiting the best of the best and able to keep the best of the best here working at the city of Austin. And so I really hope as these conversations progress, that that we keep that in mind and don't go backwards because we've had to change some of our incentives and pay scales doing market studies to try to be competitive. And I would hate to undo that work simply because of restructuring. >> Thank you, councilmember councilmember Laine, followed by councilmember qadri. >> Thank you. I want to thank all of the employees who have taken time out of their work to come and share concerns, both now and previously, as well as our leadership for this project before us here, and also our city manager. I the second set [2:15:38 PM] of slides I found helpful. I'd like to take a moment to better understand the phasing and, and these slides have helped me already somewhat, but I've got a few questions. Can you walk me through what steps have already been taken to strengthen governance and strategy? >> Yes. So as part of our work with Gartner, we looked at our existing governance models. I think earlier, one of our managers about the governance model for gis. That was one of the ones that they studied. And we've come up with a three tiered governance approach. One very operational technical in nature, another where we really approach the business problems that are coming through within the organization. And at our highest level, the city manager's office, the assistant city managers and deputy city managers looking at and prioritizing key initiatives [2:16:41 PM] across our organization. Very important as we go through our application rationalization, we want to make sure as we as we actually consolidate and rationalize those applications, that we just don't continue to grow. And so there is a commitment there to looking at the priorities for the city so that we are focusing on the right technology at the right time, so that we maintain that healthy portfolio of applications. >> Okay. Thank you. I noted in the Gartner report, there really was I saw an emphasis on the need to strengthen those areas in order for there to be long term success of this project. Would you say that that is complete, that work is complete, or is there more to do on it? Still. >> There's more to do. We have a a draft of the governance structure that we'll be sharing our initial draft draft. We got feedback from department [2:17:42 PM] directors and they were saying it's too complex. So we went back and we consolidated some things to make it easier to navigate our governance processes. And we'll be sharing that out shortly. And then the commitment from the assistant city managers and our technology steering committee to help drive and guide the efforts during application rationalization. >> Okay. Something else I noticed in the report was. The establishment of a tech leadership board and architecture review board, reestablishment of the it governance board, creating the transformation program office, and then a transformation team. I'm interested to better understand. I know that our city as a whole once made more extensive use of tech task force, task forces and steering committees, and I would like to understand what has been created in terms of committees [2:18:43 PM] and task forces that bring the different job responsibilities together in ways that can help guide this process beyond just these one on one interviews and the Q and a form. >> Sure. So we do have multiple boards, some that you called out, enterprise architecture, that is one of the newest boards. And during this process and during the centralization, they're going to play a key role specifically in the application rationalization, but more so in bringing the enterprise architect architecture practice together. We have a technology leadership board, which I believe will expand as part of this process. And so I work with the technology leaders at some of the larger enterprise departments on some of the key decisions. Once again, the technology steering committee at that highest level, along with our information security board, making those high level [2:19:44 PM] strategic decisions around city technology. Those are three of the key boards, once again, all of them established. But they'll grow and change and have a more focus, more focus on the items that will be coming in front of them in the next three years. >> So as we think about communication and council member Ellis, for example, comments about early communication and that sort of thing, do you anticipate any other opportunities or for committee styled? Input throughout the coming three years, or do you would you say that's. >> Well, I'll say the change management process and the communication processes associated with that continue throughout the program, throughout each of the initiatives. So once people are in the department in phase one, the communication continues. Everyone is going to understand what's going to happen. In phase two, we'll have those [2:20:45 PM] same processes and faqs and forums for people to talk about the work that they're doing and communicate to us what's working and not working with the centralization effort within the organization. So I'll just say that's an ongoing discussion. >> Okay. We heard some concerns around titles and mapping of responsibilities to titles. And certainly we've heard some examples of it job titles, not necessarily doing it work, but perhaps also the reverse exists. I'm sorry, I may have just said that backwards, but we've heard a lot of comments around titles and their connection with responsibilities, and I'd like to better understand also, if you are, how complete you are on that detailed work of mapping out the responsibilities. >> So I'll go back to the [2:21:47 PM] employee surveys and the information gathering meetings where people detailed out their technology work. There were some instances where we said, we really don't think these people are doing technology work, and we're having those conversations. And with our human resources department so that we can then have the conversations with our departments. For the most part, though, everyone had a substantial technology component in what they were doing. Information technology, very specific, big focus on data, also gis and data. And under the technology umbrella that they seem to all fit. We will continue to have those discussions as people transition into the organization. But we do believe that each of the people we identified is a technologist and should be within the organization. >> Okay. You mentioned that [2:22:47 PM] information coming through the survey data. Can you tell me a little bit more about the collaboration with hr and in getting to titles matching responsibilities that has happened thus far? >> So I'll be clear that the people are coming over in their titles. So our and reviewing what people do out of the surveys and the titles that they have, they seemed appropriate. And based on that, we have placed them into the functional areas of the organization that make the most sense. Hr is reviewing those placement recommendations and will identify if they think there are any mismatches that we need to go back and discuss, or to talk with the departments about. >> Okay, on the slides that we received today, slide 15, which breaks down phase one, I see key enterprise functions at the top, and then departments that are currently highly integrated [2:23:47 PM] with ATS. And I also appreciated the memo that we received that broke out, you know, by week what is planned in the coming months. And I, I've heard that characterized as extending the time we're taking on, on this work. But when I look at the list of these of these functions on page 15, it looks like a compression to me of stages that were laid out by Gartner. I'm just looking at their target state roadmap, planning overview, and it really looks like what we're seeing here is a compression of stages e1 and e2 with going ahead and beginning departmental integration. And I bring that up because this was a this is a very, you know, thorough report. And it has a lot of specific information around the types of phasing that will make this successful. And what I'm seeing here looks like one, a [2:24:49 PM] compression of two steps that were laid out initially to me as being distinct from each other. And then two, a lot of the concerns that I have heard. They relate to the earlier stages, you know, the, the title mapping, the having a detailed transformation work plan that's been laid out and vetted with the department heads. And my concern is I, I'm a supporter of this this initiative. I think it's important. It will help us to deliver our services more effectively. There is a lot that matters. But I also really see that it's important to do it on a strong foundation, and some things can be compressed, but other things are foundational. And so I am concerned that it looks like compression to me. And that resonates with the comments [2:25:50 PM] that I'm hearing as well. So I raising that concern. I don't know if either of you have anything to share about that. >> Well, thank you. I appreciate those comments. Specific to the compression, I think there are multiple ways to do a project and a program. And we've we've selected this this method. Gartner has made good recommendations that we have incorporated into how we lay out the project and execute the project. I think you're the discussion around the transformation work plan. Our focus is bringing the organization together so that we can have those good conversations and hear those concerns as they are within, in the department, within the work groups that they would be functioning in. I think it's [2:26:50 PM] important that as we go through that initial stabilization process, that's from August through the end of the year, that people will be focused on the work that they currently do. So we have those that continuity of service while we build out for those teams, those functional teams, what those key performance metrics will look like. And I think it is better that they do that as a team together than out still being outside of the organization. That is that has been our approach. >> Okay. I hear that that that there has been a shift in approach since what Gartner laid out. And I'm just going to elevate that. I do find that potentially concerning, particularly given the nature of the concerns that we've been hearing. So thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, councilmember councilmember qadri. >> Thank you. Thank you, mayor. And I also want to thank all [2:27:51 PM] the workers who came out today to to testify. I have two questions, and hopefully they're not too complicated. The first question is it's my understanding that the that the city's total I.T. Spend was initially reported at about $449 million, which is about 7.6% of the operating expenditures. And if you compare that to the peer average, the peer average was 4.2%. The updated figures that we see today on slide number six appear to remove the operational technology. So the ot and it reduces Austin's total to $364 million. So almost what is that. It's about $85 million. So it's it's an $85 million decrease and closer reflection of the true cost. So is it correct to state that with further refinement of the it spend estimate? Is that why it was. It was lowered from 449 [2:28:52 PM] to. Sorry. Yeah. 449 to 364. >> So there were two elements. So the I the, the initial it spend was all technology, both it and ot. And it was developed on the projected budget. They've gone back and gone back and adjusted that for actuals and remove the ot spend. >> Got it. And then my second question and this is also going off of the slide deck, given that Austin operates both in airport and utility, which many peer cities don't do, is it possible to provide a comparison based on general fund expenditures only to ensure a more consistent kind of baseline across across cities? >> That would be a different level of analysis. I think we, [2:29:52 PM] I think the we would have to look for peer cities that only had those general fund functions then. So I think it would change. It would change our benchmark cities. And I might ask Diana from Gartner if there are other ideas on how to make that adjustment. >> Hi, everyone. Diana Warnock with Gartner consulting the. I think we need to restate the purpose of a benchmark. The purpose of a benchmark is to give you insights into where you have opportunities to optimize. Like Ed said at the beginning, no benchmark has a perfect 1 to 1 peer to peer comparison to it. And if you want to scroll back to the slide that has the the bar chart, there were multiple ways [2:30:53 PM] that we were looking at what our, you know, the financial part of the business case for change. You know, we've done extensive work in phase two to make sure that we worked with the five largest it spending departments in the city to remove operational technology from the spend, which all Gartner benchmarks remove operational technology for an apples to apples comparison. When you think about the outliers of having, you know, an electric utility, aviation, whatnot, that's why we also included these other comparisons where you can think about things at like a, a peer quartile point of view. Also looking at the it key metrics data from a utilities average or transportation across all aspects, the city of Austin is spending significantly more than peer groups. When you look at various types of peer groups, whether it's the custom peer groups of cities or other ways [2:31:55 PM] to look at this from other industries, even with removing Austin energy's total I.T. Spend from the overarching, you know, total amount of it that is spent from the city, the you're still at 4.9% above the peer group. And that's I can pull up the number. I think it's $38 million more than, than the peer group would be. And that's not looking at a custom peer group without an electric utility, because the peer group did include an electric utility. The peers are not weighted. So even though there was only one, there still was a peer with an electric utility. And the peer data is not weighted in any way. So we don't skew things from, you know, one peer to the other. So yes, if I go back to the the question that brought me up to the podium here today, there are different ways to do benchmarks. There's different ways to think about how to [2:32:56 PM] customize your peer group. And it's all oriented around what is your goal? What are you looking for? The question to garner was to look at things from an enterprise wide perspective. How are we spending on it across the city? Not how were we spending it for certain departments for certain reasons. And so we can do different benchmarks for a variety of different reasons. But what was asked of us was looking at things from an enterprise wide perspective. And I know that's a long answer to your to your question. The short answer is yes, but I think it's much more nuanced than that to think about what's right for Austin. >> Great. Thank you. >> Thank you all very much. Council members. I don't have anybody else signed up to speak. Councilmember Siegel, you're looking at me like you want to say something. >> I was going to close this out, mayor. >> Sure. >> Go ahead. And I just agreed beforehand to kind of lob a couple questions back to cfo van van eenoo, just to kind of [2:33:57 PM] provide additional assurances. So the first is just basically that we're going to this is going to continue to be an interactive process with all the stakeholders. So I wanted to ask director and cfo if you would reiterate your willingness to conduct this consolidation in a careful way. That includes stakeholder engagement, to incorporate concerns from department staff, residents and council, and in a way that course corrects as necessary as issues arise. >> Yes. Short answer is yes. I do want to just give a little bit of a longer answer that I think we've been doing that and we have done that. We initially had different designs on how we would recommended rolling this out, but based upon the feedback we got, the concerns we heard, even concerns that we didn't always agree with. We did course correct. We removed ot from this process. We moved from an all at once approach to a phased approach. We built more time into the first phase [2:34:58 PM] of the implementation. So, you know, people that have been concerned about this looming may deadline, that's not nothing. You know, we're looking at an August 10th go live date now. So building more time into the process as people requested. So we have adapted our process and we will continue to adapt our process. I just hope that adaptions don't get thrown back to us as a, as a failure of our process. Because, you know, that was a comment that was made that our failed process because we've changed things, we're changing things to be responsive to the concerns that have been raised and will continue to do so. >> Thank you. The second question of three is related to something we didn't discuss as much, but kind of the difference between decentralized, centralized, and then what apparently is more of a middle ground, which is federated. And I wanted to ask your willingness, director and cfo to explore a more federated approach to technology services that is somewhere on the spectrum between centralized and decentralized. And that balances what are obviously the [2:35:59 PM] benefits of centralization. For example, quality control, cost efficiencies. But then there's also benefits of decentralization, like responsiveness to constituents and commitment to departmental missions. So what is your willingness to continue to iterate and explore a federated model? >> Certainly continue willing to have continue to have the conversations. I mean, we have had a lot of internal conversation about that, a lot of conversation with our consultants. You know, we could have a different briefing and to explain why we believe a centralized a, you know, not completely purely centralized, but a highly centralized model is the best for Austin, but certainly willing to continue to have conversations with council members and department directors and it staff about what a federated model might, might look like. So happy to have those conversations, but just want to kind of be clear in managing expectations and staff feels that we've done that work, had those conversations, and that we're [2:36:59 PM] moving in the direction that's best for Austin, but would welcome continued dialog on it. And, you know, if we need an additional briefing to talk about those models and why we think centralized, what we're proposing is the right model for Austin, we'd be happy to do that. >> Last question. If you could just share your willingness to continue to provide updates to council about this process through the phases, including challenges, successes, and outcomes? >> Yes, absolutely. >> Thank you, mayor. >> Thank you. Council. That concludes all the items that are on our work session agenda for today. So without objection, the work session of the Austin city council for may 5th, 2026 is adjourned at 2:37 P.M. Thanks, everybody.