BROWN COUNTY, WI (WTAQ) – Brown County Executive Troy Streckenbach’s 2022 budget proposal includes plans to utilize $84,000 to create a ‘Housing Navigator’ position withing the Community Services Division.
The position will provide direction for individuals experiencing housing instability and homelessness, who also intersect with other available county services that focus on people experiencing things like mental illness.
“What we want to be able to do is try to provide those individuals with some form of a resource to help them recover sooner than later,” Streckenbach said.
Streckenbach points out that while it will help connect individuals with safe places and resources to improve outcomes, it’s just one piece of a larger puzzle. He also says that the county is not directly involved in providing physical housing.
“We understand are playing around our area that we have authority to operate within, and that’s to deliver the programs and services to the individuals who are experiencing some form of crisis,” Streckenbach said. “Our goal is to get them in a position where they can live in a space and a landlord or provider can provide that space for them.”
The Brown County Health and Humans Services (HHS) Department has become increasingly involved in working with the area homeless community and connecting them to other services in the department. That ranges from crisis intervention to more intensive services like inpatient hospitalization.
“We’re looking at people that experience both mental health and substance use issues so that we can work on hard we providing the service that’s needed for that particular situation. [Then] we can figure out those other barriers to housing,” said HHS Executive Director Erik Pritzl. “I don’t think we have the solution on all those barriers right now. I think that’s something else that we need to address as a community. That’s not something that we can do in one year with one position, so it’s definitely something we have to look at.”
In 2021, HHS has served about 175 individuals who identified as homeless. 45 of those did not have a prior documented case and were most likely ‘new’ to the department. Pritzl says the Housing Navigator position could be vital in helping streamline the process of connecting those people to the right places.
“The coordination isn’t there. There’s not an awareness of what each part of the department’s doing, and there’s not a single point of contact for the other providers in the community to connect with. So it’s about relationships too…it’s [been] information that is very disjointed and doesn’t flow really well. So we want to create a position that can build those relationships with the different providers, and I think that’s key.” Pritzl said. “We need to make sure we’re connecting with those shelters and other providers so we can have somebody there that can talk about the needs of that person, to talk about what that person’s accessing currently, and to figure out what those gaps and barriers are…to homeless navigational outreach, especially those that are connecting those other departments services, so we can start understanding where do we need to connect them to within our department.”
Pritzl also added that the homeless population isn’t just the individuals dealing with mental health or substance abuse issues either, and that children, youth, and entire families are impacted.
Brown County Board Supervisor Joan Brusky is hoping to get the rest of the supervisors on-board.
“Stable housing can decrease government spending in the long run. Stable housing helps people lead healthier lives. We want to serve our people and our county, so this is a way to help them live better lives,” Brusky explained.
You can learn more about the 2022 budget proposal and view the entire document on the county’s website. The Brown County Board of Supervisors will hold the annual budget meeting on October 27th at 9 a.m. at the Resch Expo.
