Providence Committee on Urban Redevelopment, Renewal & Planning-Monday, April 29, 2024-5:30 PM

Doing the best. Well, here comes... What's his name again? Yeah. Can

see.. What's his name?.

What was his name?

Oh, she come and sit herself. Oh, she's not coming. No. I was like, come on. You can do it once.

She know how important this is. So we don't wanna have for tonight. Yeah. Oh, that's

what it sound like, because I was gonna say Gonna be an intervention. You can't put that. Yeah.

I don't wanna keep people that you have to work all day.

Yeah.

We can get started at 05:35.

There

are no votes. Good afternoon, everyone. The meeting is now called to order. Madam clerk, will you please call the roll?

Chairman Harris... Chairwoman Harris?

Present.

Vice Chairman Pichardo is absent. Consentman Gonzales is absent.

Consentwoman out there, Gray? Yeah. Consentwoman Ana Vargas is absent. We have two present, three absent. We don't have a forum.

K. So tonight, because we don't have a forum, we're just gonna have a discussion. We have some great groups here tonight, and we got excited about them coming. Don't wanna waste their time. But, madam Thur, before we get started, could you please read the first item on them?

Sure. Item number one, communication from his honor, the mayor, dated 03/29/2024, submitting the community development block grant budget for program year 2024 to 2025. The following has been invited. Emily Friedman, director of housing and human services, department of housing and human services. The following have been invited for presentations, Open Door in Rhode Island, Nick Horton, Genesis Center, shop culinary entrepreneurship training, Shannon Carroll, president and CEO, First Works, Kathleen Fletcher, executive artistic director.

Okay. Thank you. I'm gonna ask Emily to do what she always do, introduce us to this budget. And, yeah, and tell us what we have to do to get it out the door.

Nice. Good evening, everyone. Emily Friesman, director of housing and human services joined by High Quality.. We are joined... Pleased to join you again this evening to present the proposed HUD entitlement grant budget on behalf of mayor Smiley.

To remind where we have left off, we are working to develop a budget based on assumed numbers. We do not even have our set allocations from HUD, but because of the lengthy process to develop our action plan, we must develop a draft budget using assumed budget figures. So using our budget projections, we must work collaboratively to get this budget into a final form, substitute, pass out of committee so that the council can then deduct the two necessary local packages. This budget approved by the council will then be incorporated into final annual action plan to be put out for the federally prescribed thirty day of comment period and submitted to HUD for their approval. We need to endeavor to have these steps completed in these HUD approvals in place by July 1, the start of the new fiscal year, to avoid any delays in project initiation or gaps in agency contracts.

So at this point in time, we need to have identified all projects before passage out of this committee so we can build into the action plan for our HUD's approval. Our goal, to reiterate, is to pass out before the five ten docket deadline for May and June council passages. So our goal and our hope is that you will be working with Kyle and Sam on council staff to complete your identification of your eligible board projects as those projects need to be incorporated into this ordinance to pass that on the committee and amending to our action plan. Of course, if you require any assistance in identifying potential projects or wish to discuss, let's please pry... Prioritize those discussions this week.

And staff are, of course, available in the council office and in housing human services to assist and advise. So please let me know if we could be providing any additional items that need your consideration. We look we look forward to working through next steps. And if there are any further questions, we'll yield our time to these excellent organizations here to speak to

you about their work. Counseling, great. Do you have question? Thank you. At this time, I'm gonna ask Sam.

Sam, can you give us sort of update on our award projects? And what have we been do... Been doing with the council?

As far as the projects that have been confirmed?

And confirmed.

Okay. So we have about four projects identified. One of them actually being councilwoman graves, which is, I think Kyle told you about it. It's way finding signage and the mapping portion of that. We're still working to identify, the remaining counselors, and we should have we should have the full list before May 9.

So we're working hard at it. You know, we're still waiting on some responses, but we should meet that deadline. Thank

you so much for letting me get update. Congratulations, counselor for being in school. This time, we're gonna start to listen to the presentations about invited guests. So I'm gonna start with Nick Gordon from Open Doors. Nick Jonas at the table, and he's identified himself for the record..

Find any available chair. You can take the bottom if you want. If you wanna face us, they they exit the table. So

You're okay. You're not

just gonna be... You have to Thank

you for being here. Yeah. Thanks so much,.

So my name is Nick Horton. It's great to meet those of you who I not met before. I'm the co director of Open Doors. Our agency has been around since 2003. I've actually been working there since 2004.

So we've been... I've been a collaborator with the city for a long time now. We focus on providing services both to people in the criminal justice system coming out of prison, people that have criminal records, and also people that are homeless. We were the first... We are the largest agency dedicated specifically to this mission around justice involved individuals.

Although over the past four years, our mission to strip out our work has grown as we have taken on I'm sorry. After that, I

did too sworn in. I'm so sorry. You gotta swear. Thanks. A little delayed.

Slight and visual hand.

Do you swear on the penalty of perjury that the testimony that you're about to give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

I do. Please state your full name and

your current address for the record.

In accordance? Okay. You can do the open doors. Yeah.

Great. I'm so sorry for that.

I'm gonna continue.

And,, so What

did we just can he Yes.

Yes. He can share it with this. So just for the clarification of the record, since we don't have a quorum, we can't vote to enter any exhibits into the record. You're more than welcome to refer to any exhibits, but they will not be officially on the record until we can have a vote on that at another time.

Sounds good. I just wanted to bring up our annual report, which shows... Just sort of illustrates a little more than my words, some of the work that we do. So as I

was saying, scope of our work has

expanded dramatically over the last four years with the housing crisis. Our agency in 02/2019 ran no homeless shelters, and we are now, I believe, the largest shelter provider in the state. We run a total of 230 beds homeless shelters... Homeless older beds across the state, And in total, 320 beds, which combines shelters, transitional housing, and permanent housing. Our main office is in Silver Lake on Plainfield Street located in the only building in the state which is permanent housing specifically for people with family records.