Wednesday, November 5, 2025, 10 a.m. (Austin time), Austin City Hall
Committee: Public Health Committee
Chair Vanessa Fuentes convened the Public Health Committee on November 5, 2025. The committee approved the October 1, 2025 meeting minutes and discussed 2026 committee meeting dates, with direction to remove the August date (budget season) and find an alternative for June so the vice chair can participate. The main item was a series of department briefings on potential 2026 bond priorities: Homeless Strategies and Operations proposed a roughly $50 million large shelter to replace the Marshalling Yard and a north navigation center; Austin Public Health proposed two new public health centers (Colony Park, ~$42M, and Northeast, ~$51M); Austin Public Library proposed $128.3 million including a Colony Park branch co-located with the health center, expansions, resilience retrofits, and land acquisition; Parks and Recreation proposed about $300 million across six programs; and Animal Services proposed a $40 million renovation and expansion of the Betty Dunkerley campus. Fuentes also flagged concerns about the encampment management initiative, the failure of Proposition Q, and state DPS sweeps, and requested a future briefing on city outreach. No votes were taken on bond items; the meeting adjourned at 11:56 a.m.
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.