Wednesday, November 5, 2025, 10 a.m. (Austin time), Austin City Hall
Committee: Public Health Committee
0:05 All right. Good morning everyone.
0:07 I called to order this meeting of the Austin City Council public health committee.
0:12 The time is 10:01 am on Wednesday, November 5th, 2025, and we are in City Council chambers.
0:18 Welcome everyone to our November public health committee.
0:22 Uh, thank you all for being here today.
0:24 I am Vanessa Fuentes, chair of our public health committee.
0:27 Joined here with committee members, council members Ryan Alter and José Velásquez.
0:33 We, uh, for our agenda today, we'll start with public communications.
0:36 Then we'll move on to approving the meeting minutes from October 1st committee meeting.
0:40 From there, we will discuss the public health committee meeting dates for calendar year 2026.
0:47 Then we will receive a briefing on bond priorities from several city departments.
0:52 That includes our homelessness strategies and operations office, Austin public health, Austin public library, uh, Austin, um, animal
1:03 services, as well as Austin parks, and well, a pr as well as a pr is what it says
1:09 in my notes. Oh, maybe.
1:13 Okay. <Laugh>, are there any questions or comments on the agenda?
1:18 Let's get to it.
1:20 Um, before we get dive further in and start public communication, I do wanna highlight that there are
1:26 a number of city memos included in our committee meeting packet.
1:32 Uh, two of them were previously distributed, including updates on the citywide encampment management prioritization initiative.
1:40 Uh, I wanna acknowledge that for me personally, this initiative has fallen short of our needs for our
1:46 unhoused community. I am very concerned, uh, with the failure of proposition q for the city to continue
1:52 to be able to offer services to our unhoused community.
1:56 And so I will be asking, uh, for us to take, to get a, a briefing either at
2:01 our upcoming work session or at the very latest, at our next public health committee meeting, uh, so
2:06 that we can have a greater conversation on the outreach that's being conducted and facilitated by the city
2:12 of Austin. This is done concurrently while we also have, uh, the state of texas dps troopers in
2:19 our city who are actively also doing sweeps of encampments throughout Austin, uh, with no connection to resources
2:27 or services. So, I think it is important for us to have a conversation, um, with the limited
2:31 dollars that we have around homelessness services, on how we might best ensure that we are compassionate and
2:38 humane in our response, and that we have a, a comprehensive outreach, um, program.
2:45 Colleagues, you'll probably have received a letter by several, um, homelessness service related organizations that highlighted a number
2:52 of concerns. And I wanna make sure our homelessness strategy office has time to look at those concerns
2:57 identified and to address those.
2:59 And so, while that's not on the agenda for us to discuss today, I want us to keep
3:06 this top of mind for our community, especially as it relates to ensuring that we have compassionate resources
3:13 and real opportunities for folks who are exiting homelessness.
3:18 So, we'll now, welcome speakers from our community.
3:20 May the clerk's office please call the first speaker.
3:24 We have sj.
3:31 Sj. Okay. They are not here.
3:36 Anyone else? Nope. That'll be it.
3:38 All right. Seeing that the speaker who is registered is not here in the chambers with us, we
3:43 will move on to the approval of previous meeting minutes for item number one.
3:47 Can I get a motion?
3:49 Thank you. Council Member Alter, seconded by Council Member Velásquez to approve October 1st, 2025, meeting minutes as presented.
3:56 Any objection. Thank you.
4:01 Now we will move on to committee meeting dates.
4:05 Co item number two, it's included in your public health committee meeting packet.
4:10 And this is for, um, meeting dates for our committee.
4:15 Any, uh, discussion conversation.
4:19 This has this meeting, uh, in February 4th.
4:23 So in January, since we'll be, um, you know, in a delayed start.
4:28 Our first meeting of the year will be February 4th.
4:31 We'll meet in March, April, May, June, August, September, October, November, December.
4:39 I think for me, the only meeting I would suggest that we strike is the August committee meeting
4:43 date, just in recognition that we are in, um, budget season at that time.
4:48 And it is difficult to have a committee meeting in the midst of that.
4:53 I'll make the, okay.
4:56 So we can do that till later the month.
4:59 Okay. Any other changes?
5:07 Okay. So we will, um, let's not adopt the meeting schedule yet, just because we, now that we
5:13 have feedback on that, we'll provide this to our committee clerk to update.
5:18 Um, we will remove the August 5th committee meeting, and then if we could also look at an alternative
5:24 date for the June 3rd committee meeting to ensure that our vice chair is able to participate.
5:33 Very good. Now we'll move on to, I'll close that item for discussion, and we'll move on to
5:39 item number three. This is a, an update from several city departments around our, uh, priorities for use
5:49 of possible future bond elections, uh, and funds.
5:54 So, I will welcome greg mccormick with the al Austin homeless strategies and operations office.
6:02 And, uh, david gray to kick us off.
6:07 Good morning everybody. David gray, director of the Austin homeless strategies and operations.
6:12 Uh, thank you for the opportunity to present today on our bond priorities.
6:16 Uh, I want to introduce greg mccormick.
6:19 Uh, greg leads our shelter operations and expansion unit, uh, with hso, and he'll be providing the overview,
6:27 uh, today. So with that, greg, I'll pass it to you.
6:29 Okay, great. Thank you, david.
6:31 And I wanted to invite up possibly chris anderson, who is our new deputy director.
6:37 Uh, not sure if he's had a chance to meet everybody or, um, be introduced, but, uh, we
6:43 can have the whole gang up here and present this.
6:47 So, thank you david Mayor, pro tem council members for allowing us to talk about our bond priorities,
6:53 um, for our homeless strategies and operations.
6:59 So, we believe in the vision that everyone should have access to stable housing and the support they
7:04 need to thrive. We know that that requires lots of mechanisms, lots of steps in getting there.
7:10 And we believe that shelter is crucial in it.
7:14 And so it's why we are really targeting shelter as one of our bond priorities, which I'll get
7:19 to in a couple of minutes.
7:21 These are some numbers from, uh, echo from their homeless response system report.
7:27 You guys have probably seen these in other presentations.
7:31 We feel like these numbers really indicate, um, and enforce our need for additional shelter.
7:37 Uh, we're seeing about 6,300 people, um, homeless, uh, each evening.
7:43 And I think you guys know that there are different mechanisms on counting, um, folks who are homeless.
7:47 And sometimes we do a point in time count.
7:50 We also have an hmis data system, which tracks folks who have touched the system in some way.
7:56 And so, uh, 6,300 is kind of the best of ballpark figure that we can get.
8:02 Uh, we've had a increase in people exiting homeless.
8:04 This is great news.
8:06 Uh, up 14% from 2023, 3055 people exiting.
8:12 Homeless, uh, is great.
8:14 And we wanna keep that increasing, uh, and serving people who are on the streets and homeless unique
8:20 people served. It's about 28,000 who have touched the system in some way.
8:25 Um, and then we've got some first time folks, data for you guys who they have not touched
8:31 the system. In 2024, we had about 8,000.
8:34 That was a little bit of a decrease from 2023.
8:37 So we like to see that our chronic homeless rate remains high.
8:42 Uh, this is something that we've talked about with council before and think that there's a good understanding.
8:47 This is really a big hurdle for us when we've got, um, a higher than average chronic homeless
8:53 rate. And so if we can really dig into this and tackle this, and we think shelter is
8:58 a good path to starting that, it opens up the resources for someone.
9:03 One of those first time that touches, it gets the assistance they need because it's available, uh, then
9:08 that we're able to get them out of homelessness quickly.
9:16 So, looking at our shelter system right now, this, uh, illustrates our city owned shelters, which you guys
9:23 are familiar with, the arch and eighth street.
9:26 Um, the Austin shelter of women and children run by salvation army, marshaling yard, and then south bridge
9:32 and north northbridge shelters, those make up a little over a thousand beds.
9:36 And then we've got community organizations, uh, that are doing a lot of good work and providing shelter
9:42 for others. And so you can see that our shelters capacity has increased considerably, uh, especially since 2022,
9:50 2021. We'd like to com com, uh, continue to increase this.
9:55 Um, we have a goal of adding 500 to 600 additional shelter beds, uh, within our system.
10:02 We're talking about how to do that.
10:03 We think that the bond, uh, might be able to provide an avenue to, to do that as
10:07 well.
10:13 So this can, you know, it requires ongoing investments.
10:17 And we're looking at this, um, constantly.
10:20 We wanna make sure that our investments are prioritizing systems that will decrease homelessness.
10:26 We wanna look at how we're measuring it.
10:29 Uh, we're looking at the prevalence of homelessness.
10:31 Um, all of our investments really want to ensure that not only those that are on the street
10:38 are getting assistance, but those who May be at risk, um, of becoming homeless, people who are getting
10:43 eviction notices, people who are, um, starting to hit hard times.
10:48 If they reach out to us, we'd like to make sure that we can find the resources to
10:53 help them in that moment of crisis so that they do not become homeless.
10:58 Um, and so this is kind of looking at all of the appropriate interventions across the board, uh,
11:03 and how we're, um, looking at what resources we allocate for each.
11:12 So onto the, the, the meat of this, the looking at the bond priorities for our department, we
11:18 are looking at proposing a homeless shelter, bed expansion.
11:22 Uh, I believe I talked about this at, at another presentation before.
11:26 This would be a large shelter that we would build.
11:29 We know the marshaling yard is temporary, so it will need to go away at some point.
11:33 That's almost 300 beds that we would need to be able to provide for.
11:37 We don't wanna lose those beds.
11:39 And we'd like to, um, add on top of that.
11:42 Our estimate right now for cost for this is 50 million.
11:46 We are continuing our due diligence on both scope, site and cost.
11:53 And we'll have more to present in the future on this.
11:55 But we we're looking at a large shelter that could replace marshaling yard, potentially.
12:00 Uh, we talk about the downtown area and whether the arch in eighth street will continue to be
12:05 there. If we needed to replace those, this would be something that could, uh, help with that.
12:11 And then a navigation center.
12:13 And we've talked before about how key navigation centers are to helping.
12:18 I talked a little bit about when people get into a difficult situation, they need to know where
12:23 to go and what resources they can access before going into shelter.
12:27 We wanna keep people from going into shelter, if at all possible.
12:31 Housing navigation centers really do this.
12:33 Uh, and we, um, we need more of them.
12:37 We are, we've just purchased, uh, one for a south navigation center.
12:40 We'd like to get one north so that we can cover the population.
12:44 Uh, Austin is so big with the transit systems difficult.
12:47 We want to be able to reach out to individuals where they are.
12:54 So our next steps, uh, we're, we're looking to identify sites.
12:59 We're looking at different locations.
13:01 We're looking at zoning and accessibility and all kinds of things.
13:04 Um, as we assess where a shelter could be placed, could be built, uh, we're looking at the
13:10 feasibility, environmental conditions, how ready could it be?
13:14 What the, what would be the timeline, uh, on doing something like this?
13:18 We are engaging with city planning, with public works and community stakeholders.
13:22 We've started some conversations about what would you think want this to look like?
13:27 Um, and then we're looking at program and feasibility finalization.
13:33 We have engaged with an architect, uh, who we've been working with for probably the last two or
13:39 three months. They have gone and visited some of the larger shelters in the state.
13:43 They've gone up to Austin and gone up to dallas, sorry, for the Austin street center shelter, which
13:49 has about 400 individuals.
13:51 They went to haven for hope and visited that as well.