City to Prioritize "Hlessness Response"

 By Sarah Owens and Michael Livingston

 

This week, Council held a work session facilitated by consultants from Moss Adams to update the City's first ever citywide 2017 Strategic Plan.  The three-to-five year plan has not previously been updated.  The update involves choosing new goals and actions.  Below are the goals and actions the City's focused on for the last three years.

Short term (3-5 yrs) Goals from Salem's 2017 Strategic Plan

To update the 2017 plan, City leadership needs to select ("prioritize") three to five strategies relating to the City's six "Service Areas" or "Result Areas" (Safe Community, Welcoming and Livable Community, Strong and Diverse Economy, Safe, Reliable and Efficient Infrastructure, Natural Environment Stewardship, Good Governance).  Moss Adams presented Council a preliminary "short list" of five priorities based on a survey of Council members.   

11/16/20 Work Session on Salem's Strategic Plan

The survey given Council was based on Moss Adam's "long list" (below), which was compiled from surveys of City management, staff and the public (bottom of the post).

 

 

But what does it mean to "prioritize" a phrase that's not defined?  That was up to Council to decide.  Moss Adams told Council that prioritizing financial stability could mean putting extra time, energy and staff resources into identifying new ways to create financial stability for the City.  But first, was Council ok with the short list?

 

At first Council focused on what didn't make the cut.  Councilor Hoy said he saw DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) not as a separate strategy but more of an overarching goal/philosophy, whereas Councilors Ausec and Leung thought DEI should get more attention.  Councilor Andersen said he saw Infrastructure and Public Safety as being subsumed by Environment and Homelessness Response.  Mayor Bennett was concerned that Great Neighborhoods not be left out and was willing to drop Financial Stability.

 

Next, Moss Adams asked Council to discuss what the phrases meant to each of them, starting with Homelessness Response.  What would success there look like?  The City's management teams, for instance, saw it a couple of  different ways.  One view focused on "direct daily response actions" to mitigate negative impacts, the other focused on "preventing homelessness."  The question for Council was, "how would we know we had actually reached a point of success" on the City's homelessness response? 

 

Hoy led out, but ended by saying he didn't understand the question, and was prompted, "What are the specific outcomes you're looking for?", at which point Bennett jumped in saying, "that the public knows what we're already doing right now", and that he wanted "a list of those programs that are actually in the works."  Hoy took a different tack, saying the City needed to "double-down" on partnerships, regional efforts, stop working "in the silos of government", to which Bennett added, "we just can't do it alone."  

We just can't.  It's too big.  We can keep having 36 units here, 25 units there, and a parking lot here, and a parking lot there and a couple of warming centers and we've now taken care of 200 people.  We still [have] 1,300 people unhoused and probably 200 [more] moving into town.  So [success is] really finding some sort of public satisfaction that [the City] has committed adequate resources to addressing the problem.                

Councilor Ausec said, "What I think is important to say is, if as a City we're not capable of housing everyone, what are we going to do for the folks we can't house until we can get to that point."  Councilor Andersen basically agreed with Ausec, but said the City also needed to "respond to the public's concerns about what's going on in parks, what's going on downtown, and that sort of stuff", because "when people say they're concerned about homelessness, many are concerned about issues 1 (Homelessness Response) and 2 (Affordable Housing), but many are concerned about 3 (Economic Development)."  "Probably most", Bennett quipped, chuckling.

 

Hoy summed up the problem as deciding what to invest in managing homelessness (crisis response), and what to invest in ending homelessness (housing).  Councilor Nordyke said she thought "the people of Salem will feel we have made a difference when homelessness becomes less visible" and the best way to achieve that was a Housing First strategy.  Ausec said he wanted to see the top two priorities  reflected in the City's budget.  Councilor-elect Phillips said the top two priorities could be combined, and that he would define success as a mobile crisis response team, a low-barrier shelter, and a sobering center.  Then the discussion bogged down over how much money was needed, what type of housing, the need for collaboration, etc., etc.

 

Wrapping up, Moss Adams told Council that, next, they plan to develop a long list of potential objectives/actions for each of the priorities (like the 2017 goals and actions above), work with Council and management to select which ones to include in the plan (i.e., which to make the measure of success), submit a draft plan by the end of December, and begin developing the 2021 Council Policy Agenda based on the response to the draft plan.  

 

The next work session is scheduled for January 19, 2021, at which point Councilors-elect Gonzalez, Phillips and Stapleton will have been sworn in, and the public will find out just what prioritizing "Homeless Response" will (and won't) mean for the next three to five years.