A joint board featuring decision-makers from Vancouver, Clark County, the Council for the Homeless and the Vancouver Housing Authority could help organize Southwest Washington’s disjointed approach to homelessness into a single, cohesive strategy.
That was the pitch of Kate Budd, executive director of the Council for the Homeless, in her presentation to the Vancouver City Council on Monday afternoon. The change would put all the regional stakeholders in the same room, she said — including the groups who have the budget to move the needle on homelessness responses in a quantifiable way.
It’s a common-sense approach already being adopted in other cities like Columbus, Ohio, Louisville, Ky., and Providence, R.I., she added.
“The players at the table, who are all incredible people, often don’t have the ability to make particular changes,” Budd said. “It’s widely accepted in our community that more needs to be done.”
Her proposal would reorganize what the Council for the Homeless calls the region’s “Continuum of Care.” The new piece would found a joint executive board on homelessness. The proposed seven-member board would include Budd, two officials from the county, two from the city and two from the VHA. The board would also be evenly split between elected and administrative officials — one of each, from all three factions.
“The highest level of the continuum of care is the Joint Executive Board on Homelessness. This would be a newly created group,” Budd explained to the city council.
The board would hear feedback from a Continuum of Care Steering Committee, a body that already exists and is currently the highest authority in the community’s Continuum of Care.
Budd’s plan would formalize the specific seats on the steering committee to ensure diverse representation, including people with experience dealing with homelessness. The change would bring the steering committee into compliance with guidelines from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The proposal would also establish a relationship between the steering committee and the executive board — whose members would have more control over their respective organizations’ purse strings — and establish community advisory forums where the board could gather public input.
Locally, homelessness continues to rise. The most recent Point in Time count in Clark County rose 21 percent over last year, with seniors, veterans and families with children seeing the steepest increases.
It’s also a complex, multifaceted issue, and in Clark County the various factions designed to support people without homes and combat the root causes of homelessness have built a response to match. Different resources are designed to serve different purposes — the response to homelessness includes everything from emergency rental assistance to mental health counseling to employer resources, all from separate providers.
The result is comprehensive, but it also weaves a web that’s hard to navigate from an eagle-eye, policy-driven perspective.
“The theme that sticks out to me is a lack of collaboration,” Councilor Erik Paulsen said.
The council heard Budd’s proposal during a workshop session, where they couldn’t take a vote but they could instruct city staff on how they’d like to proceed. The council came to a near-consensus and told City Manager Eric Holmes that they’d like to move forward with Budd’s plan.
The sole holdout was Councilor Bill Turlay, who worried that the new executive board might draw resources from the city’s budget.
“We’re looking at this, we’re looking at Vancouver Strong,” Turlay said, citing a sweeping $30 million proposal of taxes and services currently being parsed by the city council. “We’ve got to make some priorities here and hold down our spending.”
“I’ll always advocate that we need to hear from our voters when we start asking for a lot of money,” Turlay added.
Chad Eiken, Vancouver’s Community and Economic Development director, clarified that the new group’s budget would come from existing sources of revenue.
“We’re not talking about new dollars,” Eiken said.
If the Vancouver City Council, Clark County Council, Vancouver Housing Authority and Council for the Homeless Board of Directors all greenlight the proposal, the first meeting of the Joint Executive Board on Homelessness will likely be held in the fall.
