$200K shortfall forces 'difficult decisions' for Street Outreach team

Two vacancies on the Burlington Street Outreach Team left by the death of founder Matt Young and the departure of Justin Verette will remain empty for the near future as the Howard Center deals with large shortfalls in the team's budget.

The nonprofit's leadership made the decision to keep the team at four members, instead of six, in early May, Catherine Simonson, the Howard Center's Chief Client Services Officer, wrote in an email to the city obtained via a public records request. 

"This will mean reduced availability but the shortfall in funding of close to 200,000 forced some difficult decisions," Simonson wrote in her May 3 email.

In an interview on Wednesday morning, Simonson said the team will not have the same level of visibility downtown as they previously had, and added that the members are currently "stretched." Since Young's death, Tammy Boudah has served as the team's coordinator and leader.

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Simonson had emailed Bob Rusten, the city's chief administrative officer, and Ron Redmond, the executive director of the Church Street Marketplace, asking for Burlington to pitch in some funds to help keep the team afloat.

Rusten included a $65,000 contribution out of the city's General Fund in his May 17 budget presentation to city councilors. The City Council will approve the final budget in June. 

The Church Street Marketplace, which is also a governmental body, will contribute $20,000, bringing the city's contribution to $85,000, said Katie Vane, a spokesperson for Mayor Miro Weinberger. 

Redmond said he is also trying to raise $15,000 from private sources. 

But the money will only be able to help alleviate the shortfall, not hire more staff. The Howard Center budgeted $256,241 for staff wages during the last fiscal year, and had estimated staff wages at $277,434 for six team members for this year, not including nearly $100,000 in benefits. 

The salary bump is necessary to raise Street Outreach wages to a competitive level, Simonson wrote in response to questioning from Rusten.

"Our agency salaries have been depressed and continue to lose competitiveness in the marketplace. One of the agency's strategic goals is to improve staff compensation," she replied. 

Last year, the team operated at a $141,060 loss, according to budget documents.

"We were not in a position to be able to absorb those kinds of losses," Simonson said. 

The Street Outreach Team was founded in 2000 through private and public partnership. Partners include the Howard Center, the Church Street Marketplace, the University of Vermont Medical Center and the state through the Department of Mental Health, among others.

"In 2000, public space became the place in which private tragedy, past trauma and current desperation unfolded, calling for a new response to address the needs and behavior of a small but highly visible cross-section of the community," Young wrote n a 2015 report to the city. Young died from cancer earlier this year. 

The team engages with people suffering from mental health and addiction issues, as well as homelessness, and seeks to reduce the need for the Burlington Police Department to respond to social service issues. 

Since 2009, a member of the team has been embedded in the department. A second embedded interventionist was added in the 2015 fiscal year.

"We added a position perhaps with not as much sustainability planning as we could have," Simonson said about hiring the second interventionist.

Many Burlingtonians have praised the impact of the outreach team, including police and shop owners like Lorre Tucker, who runs a boutique on Church Street and called the Street Outreach team an "amazing program." 

In 2009, the team relied on federal money to pay for staff. As that money ran out, it was replaced with funds from Act 79, a Vermont law passed to strengthen the mental health system. 

In the 2015 fiscal year, the team got $124,668 from those Act 79 funds. In 2016, the number was $170,626. 

The number dropped to zero in 2017--which coincided with the team's budget shortfall skyrocketing from about $3,000 to about $141,000. 

Simonson said that the Act 79 money coming into the Howard Center was beginning to shrink, and much of it had to go to serve specific populations. In 2017, none was left over for Street Outreach.

Redmond said that one of the reasons why the financial situation got so dire was the community partners who were overseeing the team stopped meeting. 

"We all got busy," Redmond said. "We didn’t necessarily have our eye on the ball on this one." 

The partners met a few weeks ago and are planning to meet again in August, Redmond said, to discuss the long-term sustainability of the team and how to close the budget gap that will allow Howard to potentially hire more members to bring the team back up to six.

"Everyone's committed to it, the challenge is how do we keep going," he said. 

The reduced team will continue to partner with the Burlington Police Department, and Simonson said they will continue to carefully monitor the outcomes they're having while "critically assessing" how large of a team Burlington can support.

Redmond said he believes the city will be okay with four members, though he does want to bring it back up to six.

"We have confidence in the team. The team is really seasoned," he said. "If this was a brand new team, we might be having a different conversation." 

In March, when Verette announced he was leaving the team to work for Spectrum Youth and Family Services, he told the Burlington Free Press the team had been exploring expansion into neighboring cities like South Burlington.

Simonson said conversations with nearby municipalities were still happening, but the four-person team would be stretched too thin to cover any expansions themselves. The conversations would be centered on whether the cities and towns would be willing to fund hiring another member for an expansion.

Contact Jess Aloe at 802-660-1874 or jaloe@freepressmedia.com. Follow her on Twitter at @jess_aloe.