Mayor Steve Adler and members of the Austin City Council this week voiced frustration with key city initiatives to address homeless, saying they are moving too slowly and are failing to reach members of the community.
Adler told city staff during a Tuesday work session they needed to house people more quickly and do a better job of communicating the city’s efforts to the general public. If not, Adler said, the council would step in and begin directing staff more closely.
During a work session last month, council members asked staff, including Assistant City Manager Chris Shorter and interim Homelessness Officer Vela Carmen, for firmer timelines by which they could gauge the success and progress of city efforts.
The two key initiatives include the Guided Path Program, which targeted 99 people living around the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless with personalized services to get them off the streets, and a strategy to create more housing for people who are homeless by purchasing motels.
Of the 99 people included in the Guided Path Program, which is expected to be expanded throughout the city, 27 have been housed.
Ann Kitchen repeated the call Tuesday for a firm timeline on when the program would be built out to include more people and other sectors of the city.
“I need to understand when, because we’ve been talking for a while about extending beyond the downtown area,” Kitchen said. “I would like a date and I don’t want to go another month just saying that some time in the future it might happen.”
Adler asked for a timeline on when the approximately 70 remaining people in the program would be housed, and whether the city needed to allocate more resources to the project.
“I’m getting really frustrated with the pace of how this is moving. Because it’s moving exceedingly slowly in the community’s perception and in my perception as well,” Adler said.
The same was true of the motel strategy.
The city has yet to finalize its purchase of the Rodeway Inn on Interstate 35 near Oltorf Street, which will be the first hotel converted into a bridge housing complex. While the city plans to close on the property in April, renovations will be needed that will further push out the date of occupancy. The city also plans to purchase more hotels, but has yet to publicly name another target.
“Again, for me this time frame is not moving fast enough,” Adler said. “You’re talking about getting another hotel by the end of May, we’re still not getting to the 300 rooms that was the goal we were trying to reach with motels back before the end of the calendar year in December.”
Adler told staff he supports letting them formulate a plan and providing resources to make it happen, but he would like to see 30, 60 and 90 day goals for the program so the community can more clearly see progress.
Council Member Jimmy Flannigan said he was concerned about directing staff to do things before consultants hired by the city have an opportunity to dig into the Austin’s homelessness issues.
Council members last month approved a $95,000 homelessness consulting contract with former chief of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness Matthew Doherty.
Adler told staffers he agreed with Flannigan that the council should not get ahead of them, but felt there was a sense of urgency from council members that he didn’t see reflected in the city’s progress.
“We need a plan and we need to provide you the resources, because you’re experts, to be able to get that done, but I will also tell you that you’re losing me,” Adler said. You’re losing me because in the absence of our staff coming forward and saying ‘this is what we need to do, and here’s the plan, and this is how we measure it, and this is what we are going to accomplish by these dates,’ then as a council we are going to step in in order to just see things happening and moving forward. Its moving way too slowly for the perception of the people that live in this city.”
City manager Spencer Cronk said he heard the council’s concerns loud and clear, saying staff need to step up their urgency to create a more mature homeless strategy system than has been seen in Austin.
“I know that we have work to do, I know that that frustration is coming up in different ways, but we will be moving in that direction and we are getting there,” Cronk said.
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