COM 0618.002 2024-2026 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

Dr. Holeka Goro Inaba, Council Chair and Members of the Hawaii County Council December 10, 2025 Page 3 of 5 outreach services funded through state, federal, and private sources. HHF-funded outreach complements and fills service gaps without duplicating current efforts. The three outreach projects recommended for HHF funding this cycle are: • Going Home Hawaii — Justice Navigator services, primarily in downtown Hilo; • Neighborhood Place of Puna — Outreach for families with minor children and unaccompanied youth in East Hawaii; • Project Vision — Mobile hygiene services, street medicine„outreach, and case management in Hilo, Kona, and Pahoa. To strengthen coverage, an outreach requirement has also been incorporated into the West Hawaii Shelter and Resource Center REP to ensure adequate engagement from South Kohala to Captain Cook. We acknowledge that many rural areas would benefit from expanded outreach efforts. However, significantly increasing HHF outreach would require reducing fimds for shelter, housing, or supportive services, which are equally critical. We appreciate partner agencies who have stretched their outreach areas well beyond their homebase regions to fill service -desert gaps across the island, often at the County's request, but developing region -based outreach capacity is the most sustainable long-term approach. We welcome and encourage future proposals specifically targeting underserved rural regions, and we encourage Council to approve the maximum allowable amount of funding to HHF to fund these needs. Investing heavily in street outreach increases engagement, but without sufficient shelter or housing, people have nowhere to go from the streets. Prioritizing funding for shelters provides temporary relief, but beds quickly fill and cannot take in more individuals without steady movement out of the shelter and into permanent housing. Investing mainly in housing can leave outreach and supportive services underfunded which are critical in connecting with and stabilizing households. Our goal is a balanced investment across outreach, shelter, housing, and supportive services, within the reality that HHF funds are finite and more resources are always needed. Fiscal Evaluation of Aunlicants Office of Housing and Community Development (OHCD) places significant emphasis on continually strengthening the administration of the HHF program. Since the current team assumed their roles, substantial effort has been made to systemize processes, enhance equity, transparency, oversight, and strategic alignment, and ensure consistency with applicable codes, regulations and other County grant programs. We share Council's commitment to the responsible use of taxpayer dollars and to achieving the greatest impact for our community. We continue to seek guidance and partnership on refining our processes, and we hope that the selected nominations will be considered in conjunction with the careful and methodical steps that produced them. In that vein, our team takes the integrity of the grant review and monitoring process extremely seriously, and we want to directly address concerns regarding potential "double dipping" and misclassification of administrative and program costs. All applicant budgets undergo a rigorous, multi -layered evaluation based on fiscal rules and definitions derived from state and federal guidelines. Because the County has not issued its own comprehensive guidelines in these areas, we consulted extensively with Corporation Counsel and