So, welcome. I'd like to now call along on housing authority board of commissioners, a special meeting on Tuesday, June 3, 2022 to order. We have a roll call. Katie Aparos, commissioner, chair, Gerald Keck. Commissioner Hidalgo-Bairing. Commissioner Tim Waters. Harold Dominguez, interim executive director. Molly O'Donnell, housing community and investment director. So, commissioner, Erin Rodriguez is not here to do personal who is not getting anything to do with personal interest. And we are waiting on commissioner... She's in the building somewhere. She is in the building. So, we're doing the review and approval of the May 3, 2022 in minutes. Do I have a motion? So moved. I'll second. So, it's been moved by Commissioner Waters, seconded by Commissioner Hidalgo-Bairing. All is in favor. We don't really... Hi. Hi. We are in public emergency room. We have three minutes to present the public emergency room. I would love to address the council just for just a couple of minutes. Would you mind giving us your name and address, please? My name is Ladsworth here. I've resided to 1750 College of Street. I've been there for approximately 10 years. I've lived in Long Rock for 40 years now, almost. And I'm here today because I've been talking with Doug at the city planning office. I would like to get permission from the city council to start a business here in Longmont in which membership of a membership only is smoking for the use of canvas. If any of you council members would like to talk to me further about what I would need to start such a business, please give me a call at<PHONE_NUMBER>. Again, I live at 1750 College. If you have any questions, now I'll be more than free to answer them with my remaining minutes. Thank you for coming. This is the Longmont Housing Authority, but where you really need to go is to our next Tuesday's council meeting at 7 p.m. or contact the city about your wanting to start a business. I will be there at the next city council meeting, but as if anybody in the city council would like to get a hold of me earlier to brain pick my head or, you know, and get ahead of the storm. So to speak, I would like to keep this on the download in the city. I know you guys only allow four dispensaries in town, so I figured you guys would allow even fewer smoker clubs, so I'd like to get in on the ground floor. Thank you very much. Thank you, and I'll see you next Tuesday. Thank you. So I'm going to turn it over to our interim executive director for all of the business. I forgot any questions. We can't answer them. Thank you. Take it away, Kendra. Take it away. All right. So we got our audit, and this is kind of my first time presenting this, so let me know if less is more or if you want, you know, more details. Basically, I'm going to run through what the changes have happened this year on the ballot sheet and the interim statement to kind of show you where the monies came from, what changes happened. So on the ballot sheet, our current assets, they increased, and those were basically due to developer fees. Developer fees that came in from Aspen Meadows saving apartments as well as the suites for cash flow surplus, which increased our assets. Reading the thing, I could tell that a lot of stuff was from developer fees. I have no idea what causes a developer to pay us a fee. So it's kind of all wrapped up in the actual development itself. There is both deferred developer fees and there's also cash developer fees. So it's basically, as the construction starts to build, they send equity payments that provide developer fees to the Longmont Housing Authority or the Longmont Housing Development Corporation depending on who the owner is. And then there's also deferred developer fees. So that is, it's kind of like, if we don't keep developing and getting the developer fees, we won't have enough money that we're revenue to fund the LHA. So that's kind of why, as development halted, we weren't getting developer fees in. And you may be able to talk a little more about it too since you're involved in the construction process. Sure. So when you do a low-encompassing tax credit project, you get equity investors that invest equity in the project in exchange for the tax credits long-term. And as you meet certain milestones in the construction and getting to like a lease-up point where you can actually get cash flow at that point, portions of that come in as fees, which is set out at the start in your pro forma and your development agreements. So you get fees at that point at a negotiated rate, and then you get deferred developer fee over time as well at a negotiated rate. So they're paying you for the benefit of the lifetime. See, what I'm trying to figure out is what the consideration is, which was not mentioned by either of you. Yes, it is wrapped up like the equity that brought it. Okay. It's the equivalent of pay-to-play? Yep. That's probably the best way to say it. Yeah, that is a good way to say it. Non-current assets, they increased about $5 million. That is mainly due to the $4.1 million carry back now. That was carried forward to LHA with AMAs to solution. So AMA dissolved this year, which LHTC was a part of. When they did the transaction, they actually put the note on AMA, but we really needed to dissolve AMA. So at the very end of December, we got that transferred, and that caused an increase in our non-current assets for LHA. Non-capital assets, it's literally just the depreciation that we have. We did write off a lot of depreciation as it was old. A lot of it was back in 2016 that we didn't even have, but the majority of it was just the annual depreciation. Our current liabilities, they increased, and it was a combination of things. Last year, we had several things on our balance sheet, such as our PPD loan. We got money in for that. Our CARES Act funding, which was money that came in from HCD, and an LHTC payment that was loaned to us for the build of AMSA. All of those were reductions on our balance sheet, and then our additions was our local rental assistance, which is a news program provided by the city of Longmont. They fund us and we fund local vouchers for them. Along with our briar wood loan, which was moved from our long-term liabilities to our current because of the loan payment that was due in April. You'll also see that as a subsequent event in the audit because we are in the process of refinancing that for an additional 15 years without the loan payment to put us in a better position. Long-term liabilities basically decreased due to reproduction in pension liability and less in the briar wood mortgage, moving from long-term to current. I put these up here, which is basically the assets and liabilities of the whole organization. You have the general fund, the housing choice vouchers, the Housing Choice Vouchers CARES Act, which had to be reported separately. You have the Longmont Suites, which is basically the vacant land next to the Suites. Briar Wood Apartments and Office, 615 Main Street, moderate rehab, which is basically the in-between vouchers. And then they have the RISE program, I need to have them switch that. That should be the LRA program. So we'll start recognizing whether you ask me if she vouchers. What is LRA? Local Rental Assistance. So the City of Longmont provided LHA with Local Rental Assistance. And so we're working with the agency at the City of Longmont that's kind of the eligibility for homeless individuals. And they go out looking for... Because you're on this. I promise to answer next time you're here for Commissioner Yarber of Restricted Persons. Unrestricted cash. What's the difference? So Restricted is... I'll kind of use the housing authority as... So housing choice vouchers, that money is restricted specifically for housing assistance payments. Then you have unrestricted, which can be the housing choice voucher admin or anything else that doesn't have a particular... You don't have to use it for a particular use. So if there's money coming in... So for example, if we have money coming in... So here. In the general fund, it's all listed as unrestricted. Because nothing in our general fund says that we have to use this for a specific use. Same thing for here. You have restricted. So our housing choice vouchers are about $65,000. And our admin is actually in the negative right now. A lot of that is because we have to report the fluctuations that happen with our pension plan. And so that causes us to go into anything because we still have to report it, even though we haven't really paid out on the pension, but we still have to report all the liabilities that may be due to us later on down the road. So that's kind of the difference between unrestricted and restricted. If it has to be used by a federal source for a specific purpose, like I can't take this money that's for the housing choice vouchers and the housing choice vouchers in. Is it for something else? It's obligated. That's cash from the bank. It's obligated for purpose. Or you're hungry. For a specific purpose. Yeah. And then this is the liability sheet. So I don't know if you guys have any questions on the balance sheet. So revenues and expenses. Once again, we increased new development fees for ANSA. Specifically for the deferred development fees. A lot of the cash came in. As well as the ANSA carry back note again. That is a big one on every little piece of information. So operating expenses, we didn't really increase it a lot. But the biggest increase that we saw, which actually is kind of a good, is that we had a higher increase in expenditures for housing assistance payments. That means we were paying more vouchers out in 2021 than we were. We saw about $305,000 difference from the prior year. And then our non-operating revenue loss again. ANSA carry back loan interest, the PPU loan recognition, and the gain of sale on LHA's family. It was not in great shape. It was an utility van for parts. And when we did the for maintenance purposes, we got a transport. And just so you know, when we took it to our fleet department to review it for safety, we needed to sell it. So, yeah, exactly. And so we're in the process of freeing out. So, yeah, yeah, free evaluating how we work with our broader maintenance group. I just, because we've had issues around transporting residents, I just want to make sure we were missing an opportunity because we owned it. I don't think we realized we owned the van for like a few months after we took it over, to be honest. It's just part of the learning curve. Because nobody used it. We got one for sale. No, I'm probably some part of County Roosevelt. So, I won't go into all the notes. There's so many notes.  But our last thing that I wanted to present to you today, was we have no, to say a lot of my names. We're 20, 20. Good job. This kind of shows you where we were at in 2017. We had, so this represents the financial statement findings and then the dark orange is like single audit findings, programmatic eligibility, that type of stuff. So in 2017 we had one. In 2018 it went to seven. So we had three financial statement findings and four regular single audit. Same thing in 2019. In 2020 we were able to drop all of our single audit findings. We staffed it a really great job of getting all the files cleaned up. They audited probably 16 to 65 files in 2020 and we did the same thing in 2021. And then we got rid of our final financial statement findings, which was the separation of duties, the financial statements, being able to prepare our financial statements. It may have been adjusting journal entries. Could you tell us what single audit finding is? Yeah, so a single audit is if you receive $750,000 then you're in federal funding you have to go through a single audit. It's required by the feds. So what they do is they audit that to do a transaction. They audit that program. So they take your total dollars on your SIPA and they say here's a percentage. So let's say 10%. And then they have to pick 10% of the programs in that SIPA and audit those. Since we only have HDB that's the thing that will always get audited. But they will do. And then so the feds also tell us they'll tell the auditors that says this is what we want audited. So they audited HQS inspection so audit eligibility was this person actually eligible for the voucher. And so they'll go through the whole file review to do those specific testing and ask questions. And that's usually where it was. It was usually eligibility. It was HQS inspections. It was CMAP reporting. All those types of stuff that we were seeing. Thank you. And where it touches on what she said. So I think you heard me say last time when they turned in the last HCP report to HUD. They had no fadals. Which means there's problems with your qualifications. Well it's not here it is here. Because they're all connected to each other when they fold it. So when we get no fadals in the submittal in terms of the HCP voucher piece that's pretty significant. It does the first time they've done that in a while. It happens. Most places I think I think most places shoot for like 95%. So to have a hundred is Yes. Open it up to questions. Do you have any questions for me? It was very impressive to read. It felt like you guys pulled a rabbit out of a hat. I mean it did. Because it was big favorable gains. I mean without understanding half the entities that had an acronym. It still was obvious. So I'm really impressed. I know it's a lot of hard work. I know it's a lot of hard work. And yeah even without the PPP I mean I'm just excited. You need a motion to accept yourself? We don't specifically need a motion. It's more about a summary. What I would say is I don't think any of us can be honest with you every time I was talking to them they were working on this. Just the hours and hours that they could end and track me now and getting AR and AP and everything sorted out and reconciling you already and shifting to you already so that we could fully utilize the program and it was just amazing and now we can do this, this and this and she can just answer it. And so the controls that we have now both from an audit perspective and then from an operational budget perspective and what we can move are pretty impressive now. Unfortunately to many residents we say no a lot. But it's because we're seeing the numbers as they're coming in now that we're here it's really now how do we expand the revenue component so we can say yes more and we had a baseline and I think we're in a good spot now. Can you just answer my question? No, this is a value more freedom going forward because you're in a good place. That's where the developments keep and so when you see Christmas 2 and why Christmas 2 is so important and then why we said well we're going to push Village Place Recindication off to the end of 2022 right? 2023 well we're going to push Village Place off but we're going to bring the property over up in terms of like you know that's what a lot of these folks are going to be working on. It is about getting those developer fees now into the system so that you can have that consistent source of revenue coming in and do more but you can't get off cycle on development. To give you a little bit of an idea is our expenditures for this year are $847,000 a lot of that is management it's accounting, it's our IT it's our regional property manager all of that can't be paid for at the property level, it has to be paid at the LHA level. So when you bring in the management fees and you bring in even LHTC it's a corporate management fee so if LHTC goes away we won't have that corporate management fee we only get about $485,000 from that and if we have expenditures of $847,000 then we need that $361 to be made up by developer fees that are coming in to the LHA or other revenue sources that we have. I know you explained it simply so that I can understand but I think it's the same mindset and strategy and paradigm that just goes into our payable housing and everything that it's the same exact we don't have the funding revenue from CDBGA for other grants but it's getting those fees to offset what the city can't provide so I think that's why we've learned probably for the first time in the history of the city we are now developers in that we have developed commercial property with affordable property in it so we're in the middle of trying to figure that out we've now developed a Christmas we're now getting ready to develop the Hoover Street we're on that side of building properties and so it's understanding the security structures and that's probably what let us learn through many of the points that you saw previously as a council is we were running into those barriers ourselves and it was like 150,000 that we had to figure out of securities at the last minute or the deal was dead we're learning it and so we're bringing different tools because we're actually fighting through at the same time that other developers are another project you said we say no a lot was I to understand that was we say no to residents more because we don't have any funds is that what happened then there's a lot of requests that we can't fund okay but I gave fewer people than I ever did and I know they're not my word but I gotta be away we're still fighting through a lot of issues but yeah I think it's you know we said I talked to one of my copy using conversations that I do with Lisa we have supportive services at the suites and we have a companion at the lodge at Hartstaff ideally over time we want every one of our facilities to have some component of supportive services we're just not at the point where we can do that we're trying to build budgets for what are you calling Lisa of activity funds and so like they want to do things and sometimes it's when we would like this furniture and it's just like big and every property is different so their margins are different so just curious with the mental health of dollars that we set aside health with getting care at each LHA facility it will be a total wrap around that hopefully a mental health person or an addiction person like in a cafe or will those dollars help with that she could and what we're trying to do taking my LHA hat off and putting the city hat on and before I say that Michelle back here in the corner what we haven't talked about is now she's augmented budgets by utilizing funds available for older adults and bringing grants in and all sorts of things and so we augment with other pieces too I don't know how many grants apply for everything from pendants to computers to what else Michelle fire stops grants I mean she's augmented too but back to answer where we're coming from is yes I mean it's over trying because that was the hope is that we'll be able to use those funds to help I would just add that we just concluded some input from the residents on the various amenities that Harold was just talking about and we had three advisory board members who were doing those conversations and so by the end of the week we'll have those all pulled together but we asked residents to do some prioritizing on those requests that they're putting in we want new grills or we want this or we want that and we've been met with Kendra to try and understand what are the dollar amounts available at which properties for resident services and some properties do not have dollars yet and may not so we're trying to do that property by property to get an idea so all the residents have an opportunity to weigh in on what's important to them there's a whole history there I mean there were LHA residents who thought they were getting into one kind of an environment only to discover over time as marginal dollars decreased the kind of programming that occurred just didn't happen that people are still resembling in some cases one of the kind of spirals that LHA got into when development for the most part stopped nothing going on that Fall River came on was the fact that LHA was surviving on development so they pulled LHA pulled management of the properties away from what was the firm who remembers that we were contracting to manage our property so we became property managers partnering with LHA LHDC to develop and we had people managing properties in many cases and we're ill-equipped to do the management that became the source of serious complaints from residents so now we're on an upswing we've got Kristen Golan we've got six projects we've lined up at some point that's going to play out though we're going to tap out on development we're going to max out on development and we're going to in LHA none of us will be around at the time by the time those projects open it's going to be in a similar situation where the developer fees are not going to be rolling at some point along the way there needs to be a strategy for what are the possible revenue sources in addition to the kind of things that Shells would be managing to offset what would be the loss of revenue or developer fees when LHA is not doing kind of what we are now on the front end of the deal part of that is the management fees that we're building in so you all improved a lot of agreements on christen 1 and 2 they put on about $3,400,000 in christen 1 I think so that's what we put in christen 1 we put in $1.8 million in christen 2 so we're at $2.1 million total embedded in the agreement was a negotiation that we take over management of christen 1 and christen 2 which then builds an ongoing revenue stream to help deal with what you're talking about now so every time we do this we have to figure out how we get more management of these facilities so that when the time comes where you don't have development occurring but that's in play the other side of that development component though I would say also comes into there's also redevelopment opportunities and things like that reaching a history syndication that we can do to bring into this that actually was my question was we're going to end up if we're in perfect equilibrium where people died out of our senior housing at the same rate they came in you would still have to recidicate those buildings and those would yield development on these too because they also have that so the ARPA funded projects that we're bringing in are that's going to be a big boost it's going to be a big boost make that first and last time and be a big boost however just like LHA did years before before this gap period they would have a periodic schedule of doing development because they can access city private activity funds and some other affordable housing funds to help do that so that would be the idea where we had this big boom because of ARPA what we're supposed to do is take advantage of that to do great work in big fashion and then regulate it going forward so there will always be development happening it's just probably the pace after ARPA's through will be more Emily we are doing other stuff with inclusionary housing we do have another creative revenue source and that's that so for inclusionary housing developers offering their affordable units on site but they don't have the expertise to do property management they have contracted with LHA to do income verifications all day long for way quicker than they could so they're paying a fee to the LHA to process their income verifications and recertifications so that they can provide those units on site without needing to specialize it's a fiber optic something so it's getting hold of ETS not somebody hurts it so is there any other audit questions no it's very well done you're going to take a breath next year it's time to start the mission I think we have to start the budget that's right start the budget our heart's still in the log so we'll go ahead and ask them before we set out we are I think we'll have to it's going to be one thing once we start adding more properties we're going to need more stuff because right now we're probably maxed our accounts with all of the investor reports that we have to provide on a monthly basis they just hired a manager that's going to be at Fall River and Spring Creek and then the one that was at Fall River and Spring Creek so there's still going to be one manager from Fall River and Spring Creek with an assistant so Lisa's got the detail because of the size of the properties there are only 60 units so the revenue cannot support a full-time manager but between the two properties they can support one full-time manager and with all the lifetime properties we have two assistant managers that float and help out because that we had a little there when we had a couple of vacancies but they're are we going to talk about our new person so we have, she's coming from London Housing Authority she works with actually one of all these new hires as well great references, used to running 300 to 500 units at a time it will be easy for her because she's had five properties under her out once so she will transition and start hopefully later this week we're going to have her dive in head first to Fall River because they're the least dependent on a manager but so she can get feet wet start running the process there and Cat will still maintain Spring Creek and then she will slowly ease into Village Place as Rachel eases into Spring Creek so it will be a smooth transition so the residents don't fill the manager's laptop because I think they have that from previous so it's going to be a slow transition over my plan is almost six to eight weeks between the two properties to get the new manager in and Cat over to Village Place it's also been evaluating the workload and does a property of 60 people really need one full-time manager or is that a want and has done a really great job of evaluating really what it takes to manage a property of what size and use her property management resources effectively and for some residents that is a change that is changes hard yeah so I don't know if they said it's part of what I've asked them to do is figure out how we can rotate, did you talk about that no not yet I also asked how can you rotate it's important too we see this in a lot of our operations where if somebody stays in something for so long you intend to create relationships and then it just becomes a challenge and so I've asked them to look at how can we create some version of a rotation so we can cross-train and we can keep people engaged at a different level and sort of recharge their batteries and we're looking at that all over whether it's the DRC or the safety we know you can't keep people in the same boat because it'll bring you out so in this rule off topic from the audit I'm assuming is that who since we are now fully staffed or close to it close to it who do we contact if a resident contacts I I'm struggling with that both of you and Lisa myself and Molly I normally would have said Michelle but Michelle is close to it something that we're all really jealous of yes so it doesn't matter which property they'll put all three of us on there and at that point we can all circle in pretty fast depending on the nature of it what we're trying to do is push decision-making at the appropriate level and so sometimes we will push to the manager or I'll push to Lisa depending on the nature of the issue then it'll escalate to Molly or me sometimes it brings Sarah already in depending on the nature of what we're dealing with and really some of these complaints I think you probably already know about they get frustrated and say all of them contact the council both of them and I think I don't get it because it's just sorry you've dealt with this today I would appreciate an email from somebody with the names and email addresses and phone numbers writing the order that you would like us to refer to whether it's you or on this guy maybe it's on these issues of tarot or something like that I could drop it into my matching folder and just pull it up and get it so I'm not searching for that Exactly, thank you that's a great point because I haven't been struggling with that you're doing okay I think of this as really a trouble If we're right now I'm always saying just at least copy me on it because we're always learning right now That's great Okay, if we're done with the with the audit we need to get into the advisory board election So this one turned into a bit of a fiasco this year and part of it was because of the transition that we made with you all in terms of being an actual LHA board and so what happened in this was that the clerk's office approached this as they would for normal council advisory boards You are not that You are the housing authority board which is different in terms of who can be on the board and who can't be on the board So for example you may have Warren Seely who's working with the county in terms of affordable housing Warren moved and advised this Karen is still here Karen reached out to Eugene We were like, oh this is an issue with the charter the charter doesn't apply because you're not the council and the housing authority So when we went through this and how positions were advertised and what we went through we realized we need to separate this process from the city process because you all aren't the city council you are the housing authority board and so and they advise us and they advise you as your housing authority role not as city council members So we called a quick time out and we're going to I'm channeling my inner Eugene he didn't smile I'm channeling my inner Eugene where you have to bring the separation that you need into this and so we're going one of the things we wanted to talk to you all about is restarting the process but starting it as the housing authority board We had this conversation with the advisory board and they indicated that there were some things that they wanted to look at in terms of specifics that they think they need on the board so Cameron Grant is no longer on the board they really felt they need some kind of legal somebody with an attorney background on the board they also talked about somebody with development experience that can help them through the conversations what else did they finance finance experience and that's a little bit different so we have Tom the bee who Tom's an accountant at CU so this is more the internal auditing of that financial piece what they were really saying is somebody on the background in terms of building the capital stacks on the development side and so they wanted us to talk to you all about that to see do you want to be more focused on what you're looking for in the board to fill some of these roles or you just want us to open it up again as the housing authority board and we can bring this back Yeah, well that you know on the board the last few years we've had a banker we've had a developer, we've had an attorney all of which were helpful in building capital stacks or the relationship that comes or whatever when that was the executive board I don't know that the city needs somebody on that board with the expertise on financing or how to build a capital stack you probably get that pretty well or to be providing legal advice it seems to me that more than anything we would need a board that would advise us on the kinds of things we ought to be doing in the interest of resident quality quality of life one of our goals I think we ought to go back to that list of goals you gave to us and say you know what that's the top of the list we need a board that's going to advise us on what we ought to be thinking about policy and resource allocation to help accomplish that goal which of the other goals would the advisory board be most aligned with because I just think it's shifted or changed in terms of what they need versus what we already have with the relationship with the city no that's fine then what we may have to look at is what do we bring to the advisory board what do we bring straight to the board the development is a good example do we bring that to the advisory board or is that something that we bring straight to you all depending on the base of the food square well it may be something you take to them but the questions you ask or what you're asking advice on would be different based on the composition of what we'd like to do so we did just process the bylaws update to make sure that the resident quality of life is central and I think everyone on this advisory board whether they're a resident a citizen that's not a resident or a professional in that industry they've all committed to that I think do we want do you want a mix of expertise or primarily resident based that's one thing we were wondering about because the applications that we do have are more in one area than the other so Commissioner Martin it seems to be in line with what we've done with the city boards that the advisory board should get to choose they're going to be passing people on to us based on the idea of how they meet the board's needs so if we've if we've clearly defined what the advisory board's charter is then why not leave it up to them as to what they need and I think they wanted to ask you I mean that's the question right so we're going in this new process where the advisory boards are looking and I think that was kind of the agendas of that conversation is what is it that you would want to see because you know similar to what I said before side boards they were concerned about bringing recommendations that made it a bit different than what you all were expecting so to me this is the flip of basically what we're doing on our board interviews as council people we're asking those advisory boards to tell us what they think they need on those boards we are now telling the advisory board what we would like them to bring to us but as far as what's on the advisory board when you bring your development review etc to them to be on that board to have enough expertise to question you so that there's a different treatment as to what you bring back to us does that make sense or because if it's totally resident based we won't get any advice on anything else and it's very different than it was before just based upon this audit that even though it was heavily makers financial people etc on the advisory board as Commissioner Waters said we're not fair anymore we probably know the capital stack and the revenue better than the other commissioners did but what is it we need from the advisory board and I just I don't think it should be totally resident based I wasn't suggesting totally but that's just one since that the top of our list it should be those kind of quality of life for the residents should be great but they should also they can have that expertise and be looking at it through that lens some people but it should be definitely quality of life for residents and what are you what you're doing what you bring to them is that quality of life based that's what I think they should be looking at when you bring to them but then they're going to advise us is that right do I have this right so right so what we do is we bring everything that we're bringing to you just ahead to the board and then they make recommendations and then we bring it to you with the recommendations okay we really should have that expertise oh yeah let me stop they have proposed increasing to seven members instead of five to try and expand the base but they're going to have to deal with who applies so and the thing is it seems like they should say they can identify not just our residents are unhappy about such and such a thing but we don't think there are enough resources to meet these residential needs and then it would be up to us to decide what's needed right then you can go with the tax credits with the staff they don't need to say you need tax credits they need to say you need another building or decide whether or not you should have more case workers or roll per case workers or programs what kind of programs do you have to be able to find benefits and then question you on that and then advise you to place it to us does that make sense so what I'm hearing is adequate representation from people who live in the facility so we don't lose sight of the resident experience and our units but with some expertise that can balance out the group yep and I think they have that too in the seven I think they all have I think if we can enlarge it a little bit I think we can balance it are you pleased with the board? yeah I mean this group has fought through a lot are there more now? I think some are I think the board wants to continue you know for example I know Warren really wants to continue and she's bringing a different set she's now doing work with the county which actually brings some interesting partnership components that we can have they're committed I mean and they're volunteering and they're out there doing you know the work with the residents and so I think what I would say is you don't want to go too far on the side of having experts because you lose the residents which is I think where we came from you also don't want to lose the other side where you lose side of some of the development components and you want it to be meaningful as an advisory board so that's the important part of crafting that agenda so that they do get to advise which you may or may not accept so that's a deans so then most likely we would be bringing bylaw updates to the next meeting to get the 7 and then address the election okay do you need any voted here if you are given the direction of increasing the size of the board and then the specifics about resident component and technical we'll bring that on this in July one more pass it if we had our goals lined up and we asked the question what kind of expertise would you want to be an advisory board to help advance our thinking our planning resource allocation to accomplish those goals what would be on that board that's not there in terms of expertise somebody with social service experience that I think would advise us on that I think there would be some development components just I just think what we can talk to those goals kind of the range of expertise or experiences that would be most helpful to ask in terms of an advisory for all advisers and what I can align we can align the membership with the goals that's easier for you all than we can do that and the residential component is going to be important too Cameron was awesome on the board but we don't need a legal opinion we're only doing legal as an example well on the development side as I mentioned you though excuse me I'm interested in the possibility of building more units for families or for single people who aren't qualified to live in an assisted living for older adults if that's possible I know that I know that speaking to myself the elderly community is exploding and we do need that housing but we also have a lot of people who need that lower income housing as well just to be able to live here that is Christmas Christmas is not age restricted that's what I thought it stands that it's balanced that's what I'm looking for I agree why don't you look at me when you talk about exploding seriously I did not look at myself I exploded in the mirror I think I can join an AARP and I'll be quiet that's what fun that's Michelle oh you're going to celebrate that you're going to celebrate that it's not 50 you're still a kid I'm thinking for the discount for hotel rooms you're crazy alright now I think we're good and I think we can bring something back I know that's what I was thinking but okay we can take your feedback and bring something back so do you have any recognition or comments feel good so let's have a motion to adjourn second thanks for your time today and what you gave us here in the Boston Guides because we're now, you saw the team fully built we're now going to start moving incredibly fast and some of these things that you saw earlier we'll just bring that


So, I started contributing. I'm a third-year CS student from Canada, undergrad at this university called the University of Waterloo. And so, I first started as an application developer. I worked on some of the core system apps for Plasma Mobile. And over time, I've just been getting more and more responsibility in starting to maintain the stack. So now I do work all the way up and down the stack. I still a lot of learn, but yeah. Okay, I guess we'll skip Bouchon for now. Hello. Can you hear me? Okay. Oh, hello. There you go. Hi. So, I think I was contributing to Peri from 2013. It was involved. At start, I was involved with Plasma Mobile, like starting from right when it got into KDE. And I, right now I'm doing some of the release management and maintenance and general cleanup and some of the things currently in the Plasma Mobile project. And I am working on the, like in my personal life, I'm working on the automotive sector. So, yeah. Next slide. Okay. Hopefully the screen changes. Yeah, there you go. Okay. So this is an overview of what we're going to be talking about today. So we'll be starting a bit about the shell itself, you know, the actual Plasma shell and how we're adapting it to mobile. Then we'll be talking about the underlying stack on how we're actually getting to work on these, on these phones. Then we'll talk about the Plasma Mobile ecosystem. So what's going on in the world of apps, the apps that we're developing, frameworks related to how we develop these apps. And then we'll be talking about actually running Plasma Mobile on hardware. So this is probably the topic that's gone, or that's changed the most in the past two years. There's been a lot more interest in the community in porting to devices. So that will be fun. And the last thing we'll be going over is future developments, what we are aiming to do and what we're going to be focusing on for the next few years. So what is Plasma Mobile? So it can kind of refer to two things, really. So we can refer to either the ecosystem or the shell. So Plasma Mobile, if you just talked about the Plasma Mobile repository that we have on the KDE GitLab, that's basically our version of the Plasma Desktop repository. So we are just a different Plasma shell except targeted at mobile. Yeah, we target at mobile use cases and we provide our own implementations of several things that exist in Plasma Desktop. So we mostly do our changes to what Plasma Desktop has differently through something that's known as the global theme or the look and feel. So basically, well, our goal right now is basically if you want to switch between the desktop and mobile, all you need to do is set our Plasma Mobile theme and then you log into the Plasma Mobile session and then you should be able to get into Plasma Mobile. Okay, Bushan. Yeah, hi. So just to talk about numbers, like after getting introduced into the KDE community. So this does not include the numbers from the fabricator, but right now we have like total 2000 plus total merge request that is running over at least just the Plasma mobile and does not include the rest of the KDE things like Plasma code, Plasma Excel, and the frameworks and other projects. We have total 40 plus projects right now in the Plasma well-developed group and we have 300 plus tickets, which includes like open and closed tickets. And we have six plus active downstreams like open-source, Fedora, and Mancharo, Ghost Market Ways, and several others. So this is how the numbers are growing and I hope that the mobile community keeps growing over the time. Next slide, please. Okay, so I'll just be going over some of the screenshots of what the shell looks like right now. Well, okay, this will be coming on Plasma 5.26 in a few weeks. So, yeah. So on the left here we have one of our home screens, which is Halcyon. So the equivalent technology that we're using, that's used in desktop for this would be how Plasma desktop has folders on the desktop. We use that sort of concept here except we provide the entire home screen. So yeah, it is just a Plasma session except we have our own components. So you'll see on the bottom we have this navigation bar. Traditionally we've used these three buttons for navigation, but I think one or two Plasma versions ago we did add support for removing this bar so you can use gestures completely. And then we have our status bar at the top, which gives us some of the tray icons, I guess you can say. And yeah, so these panels are actually the same technology as what's used for Plasma's panels. So in a traditional Plasma session you have your applications on the bottom, you got your time, you got your widgets and all that. We're just using that here except for navigation bar and the status bar. So that just kind of speaks to how flexible Plasma is and the work that's gone in the past few years for allowing us to use the same concepts except in different contexts. So in the middle we have the traditional home screen that we've had previously, which is a bit more like a traditional Android home screen. You've got your pinned applications.  And then on the right side that's just our task switcher. So if you press this button or if you flick up with a gesture it'll show you that task switcher menu interface. And then these are some more screenshots of the shell. So on the left here we have our quick settings dropdown panel. It's basically a quick way to access any sort of settings you want to quickly toggle. We use our own thing or use our own package type called quick setting packages. So that allows applications or just the shell components to provide their own quick settings that will actually show up here. We did investigate whether we could use desktop widgets to put here but it didn't really work out so well. So for now we have a separate thing from desktop that's just called quick settings. So over in the middle we've got our pinned view. So if you just swipe down once you'll get this view that allows you to quickly see all of your notifications. So as you can see there there's a screenshot notification. It uses the same technology that desktop uses for the notification widget. So it'll look pretty similar. And then on the right side we have our audio applet. So when you press the volume buttons it'll show up with just the pop-up for the volume. And then when you click the arrow it'll actually show you all the inputs like the audio applet that we have on desktop. So it allows you to quickly change settings related to your microphones. If you have multiple microphones you can change all of that. Outputs as well as different application volumes. Okay last thing about the shell is just our lock screen. So this is provided by our Clouds mobile theme. So you have the desktop lock screen. We replace it with this lock screen which is a bit more geared for touch. In the past year we spent a lot of work in trying to get notifications to show up on the lock screen. Actually I do. On the top right there's a notification that actually came from my other phone. And yeah we can actually allow users to quickly see their notifications on the lock screen. They can see audio streams that are going on. So for example I have a music app running. And you can also actually bring up the quick settings menu from the lock screen. All stuff that was done in the past year. Okay so I'll just quickly overview the stack and then Bouchon will talk a bit more about our telephony situation. So our stack. Obviously as a KD project we have Qt. And we also make a lot of use of Kwin with Wayland. In fact Plasmable does not support X. Well we have X Wayland but we cannot run the shell in X. We have a hard dependency on Wayland. And then we use this project called Malik Keyboard which provides our virtual keyboard. So the keyboard that pops up when you focus on a text field. So this project was actually, I believe it was developed for, I think it was Ubuntu Touch. We still share the same code base as them. I believe Ubuntu Touch has some patches on it. But yeah we do actually share the same keyboard as Ubuntu Touch and I believe Sailfish OS. And then for telephony we switched recently to Modem Manager. So that provides our access to, or that provides our ability to do calls, SMS, mobile data. Yeah and then everything else really is what you're accustomed to on desktop. So pulse audio or pipe wire, Bluetooth stack is exactly the same. So this is kind of really the beauty of pouring Linux to mobile. We can just use the same stack. As long as the hardware is supported, we can just use what we use on desktop. Okay, Bhushan will talk about telephony. Okay, so about telephony, I think one of the major changes that we did during 2021 and 2022 was switching from Opponent Modem Manager because we had some concerns about the availability like how alive the Opponent project was and also the stability of overall Opponent project. And we noticed that some of the mobile quiz projects like Phosh or Xenomobile as you call it they're starting to use the Modem Manager. So we eventually decided that it is best to switch to Modem Manager to improve telephony stability. We have a custom application called PlasmaTiler which is basically front end to Modem Manager right now. And we have a space bar application that can allow you to send SMS and MMS. And we are using the call audio from the mobile project to get another great project, distribution shout-out to them. And that we are using for audio routing because audio routing on mobile devices is super complex. There are multiple ZINs and multiple sources and each device has its own perks. And it's a way to customize it in your own device and also using Call-O-UV allows us to share the same stack between multiple projects like Phosh, Tyler is also using the same thing and for example other projects are also using the same thing. So ultimately it allows us to have the same set of standards and projects. Okay, next slide please. So in terms of stack evolution as I mentioned we did open local Modem Manager migration and that brought up lots of telephony improvements. I think if you have tried Plasma Mobile in 2018-19 you have heard lots of complaints that Plasma Mobile's telephony and overall stability of the phone stack is super bad. But thanks to Alexei and some of the contributors we have ported it to Modem Manager and that has brought down lots of stability improvements. And actually nowadays it is actually in a usable state where you can actually use the telephony. There were also major improvements in the compositor and this is also thanks to our goal of bail-in in the general credit goals. So we had window overlay support for the lock stringer very recently so that you do not miss your calls when your phone is locked and it allows Tyler to bring windows on front of it. There were lots of improvements in terms of virtual keyboard input. There are certain bugs there still but overall the stability of the whole virtual keyboard is improving quite a lot. And we also added support for excellent clients in the virtual keyboard. So traditionally lots of people ask that PIDOLQ allowed us to have a virtual keyboard working on some of the applications that are old school or some of the applications that are not using bail-in. And so based on this user's request we also added support for excellent clients in the virtual keyboard so that now if you are using programs you can enter input. And there were also lots of performance enhancements in the compositor, in the application, in the cell and almost everywhere. So lots of applications, start-up type, time to improve. For example, Krader, I think that was one of the most heavy-aged applications. And it's a start-up performance has been improved quite a lot and similar for the Queen and every other components that we are using on the platform. Next slide, please. Okay, so applications. So we have two categories really of applications. So we first have our convergent category which are basically applications that we designed to work both on desktop and mobile. So the intention eventually is that, yeah, we shipped the same application for use on both of them without any changes really. So some of these applications you might already be familiar with. So we have Discover, the app store that we also use on Plasma Mobile. We have our own UI for that that I'll show later. Alisa, which is a music player, Coco, Cass, and the list goes on. It's actually most of our apps we do try to design with all these different form factors in mind. So using Kirigami, we can actually accomplish this. And then there is a second category of applications that really are the mobile equivalents of desktop applications. So one of the biggest things is that some of our existing desktop apps are quite hard to port to mobile. So we just basically created a mobile equivalent of them. So that could include our browser. Usually like a lot of people would use Firefox on the desktop. I know Firefox hasn't expressed interest in actually making a mobile form factor. So we actually have our own browser, AngelFish. We also have our own version of console except not in Qt Widgets. It's in Qt Quick. It's called QML console. And then a file manager, which is index because currently Dolphin doesn't work super well on mobile yet, maybe. And then we have our actual application release cycles. So our core applications iterate pretty frequently and we have a lot of changes, especially Dialer and Spacebar, which provides SMS. Those need to be fixed pretty often. We do a lot of work on those. So basically we have this separate release cycle called Plasma Mobile Gear, which happens every two months. And then we have the normal KDE gear release service, which is where most desktop apps are released through. And I believe that's every four months. Then we also have a separate thing for Maui applications. So there's another project from within KDE that also develops convergent apps. They release on their own release schedule. And one of the biggest things that we did in the past, I believe it was exactly a year ago now, we started packaging all of our convergent apps as flat packs and we pushed them to FlatHub. So basically people from, no matter your distro, as long as you have flat pack, you can actually install our apps. You can enjoy them on other desktop environments as well. Fosh, you know, mobile. Yeah. So this is just taken stream. I'm not going to read all of them, but this is taken straight from our homepage. And this is kind of our list of first party apps that we develop. So these are just KDE applications that have been designed with Plasma Mobile in mind. As you can see, we have a lot of our system apps, but we also have different apps like NeoChat, which is a matrix client, slowly starting to move into FOS, FOS social networking. Yeah. Yeah, if you use NeoChat, you can use it on mobile as well. You can use the same app on desktop and mobile. And then we also have Maui apps like Pix. So Kirigami, so this is kind of the framework that really allows all of this convergent work to happen. This is how we're able to take a desktop interface and make very minimal changes and have it work on mobile as a first party experience. So we primarily develop with Qt Quick. Kirigami is a Qt Quick framework. Qt widgets, while it's possible for us to make mobile experiences out of them, it's definitely harder to, and we don't really have the infrastructure yet. So for the most part, everything that we do on Plasma Mobile is in Qt Quick. So for Kirigami, these are some examples of some of the components that we've contributed upstream. So we got the idea starting from our mobile use cases. We pushed it upstream to Kirigami so that they could be used on both desktop and mobile. So navigation tab bar, dialogue, form components, not decided yet. So here's some screenshots of some apps. So as you can see on the bottom here, this is actually a new component that came here that was added about a year ago. It's called the navigation tab bar, which allows you to navigate without using a sidebar for, if you have like three, four pages in your application. So it's easier than, for example, opening the sidebar and then clicking an option. So on the left here we've got Discover. So you may not be familiar with this interface. This is how it looks on mobile. Very minimal changes needed, which is the power of Kirigami. And then, yeah. In the middle we have our browser, which is Angel Fish, uses, I forgot the name, Qt Web Engine to do all the rendering and all that. And then on the far right, we have Elisa, which is an app that used to actually be a desktop specific application, but got ported to have a mobile interface. So now we can use the same app on desktop and mobile. That's how that looks with the dark theme. Some other applications. This was originally developed, so this is CAS on the left side, which is a podcast player. It was originally developed for Plasma Mobile, but eventually it also got ported to have a desktop interface. So now, yeah, use the same app on desktop and mobile. In the middle it's another convergent app, that's Kweather, which is actually one of the first projects that I worked with when I first started contributing. And then on the far right, we've got QML console, which is our cute, quick, or mobile version of console. And these are some examples of non-KDE, non-cute applications, just to show you that Plasma Mobile allows you to run any application. It's Linux, right? So on the far left, we have a GTK4 LibitBoida app from GNOME. This is GNOME clocks. Works perfectly. And then on the center, we actually have a Flutter application. So applications developed with Flutter that are meant for Android and iOS. Maybe in the future we'll see a lot more of them on Linux. So since they can actually also use the same code base, we actually have it working perfectly now. Yeah. And then on the far right side, that's actually an electron application. So I know it's a bit slow on the pine phone. You have to basically steer the browser to open it. But it's working perfectly, like touch support and everything. I guess it's because Chromium supports touch. Well, you can use that if you want to. Yeah. Okay. Who shot? Yeah. So about the Plasma Mobile, you saw that Kevin presented this UI and all that now. Like how to use that, or actually hardware like. So part of the major changes that happened was that we dropped the volume support. I think it actually happened back in 2021, but we still included this here because it's not worthy. So it was a decision that we made that we will only support the main item was because it supports the philosophy of the Plasma Mobile project much better. We are also getting pre-installed on the Pine 54 Pine 4 and Pine 5 Pro devices. So the devices that Pine 64 is selling, they are including this pre-installed. And we are also supporting various devices for example, Portable 2s community is supporting these devices 8.6, 6.6 devices and several other devices that you can reach out to that community and figure out how it is getting which devices they are supporting. And if you have some distribution, you can also install those as a regular packages on your desktop or on your tablet for example, it is getting packaged in Alpine, Fedora, MindFarrow, Portable 2s, Arcana, OpenSUSE and Fedora. So you can simply install the packages of the applications or the shell and have it working on your desktop device as well. Next slide please. Yes. Okay, so I want to talk about a bit about the major challenges that we are going to face in the future. So we are seeing more and more better lock-in. So we are saying that companies are locking their devices bit more in the name of security or in the name of basically they are trying to lock the devices bit more and bit more and it is getting harder to install the custom software on those devices. So like once you buy the devices with the Android, you are stuck with that. That's the end of the story. And there is also lack of more generalized adoption for the OpenMobile project. So we are seeing that we are working on these mobile projects but people are not adopting it as quickly as they should be. So it is just not about the class mobile but it is also same story for the other projects. So it is still this OpenMobile projects are still a kind of more kind of a cheeky thing so that they want it to become more and more open to the general public. And so we have like lots of OpenMobile projects communities that are lots of restrictions there are lots of communities working on the user interface there are lots of community people working on the applications but in general we feel like there is a fragmentation between these communities there is a lack of collaboration between these mobile communities so the communities are working on this solving some problems in their own small bubbles and they are not communicating with each other and they are not having some kind of synchronous communication between each other and that is in longer term hurting each other and hurting this initiative about having OpenMobile projects. Next slide please. So this is so now we are going to look forward to our 2023-2024 goals so really the biggest thing that we really need to focus on nowadays is stability and performance so a lot of the initial development work of the past two years was really on implementation we needed a shell we needed all these things to be working now we need to investigate a lot of the issues that we have on a lot of these mobile devices that OpenMobile has been ported to so issues like suspend waking from suspend bugs with window management things like that so we need to spend more time to create better workflows for investigating these day-to-day regressions that happen on our dev branch and yeah so the second big goal really is KDE PIM so we want to be able to provide an experience for users that allows them to unify their contacts emails, calendars, all together this is already a big thing on desktop we want to bring that work to mobile hopefully within the next year there's actually a buff about that you can check out, I think it's just called the KDE PIM buff yeah third thing really is improved tablet support so we've actually heard a lot of feedback from users that they want to see Plasma Mobile on their tablets they want more of a touch-based experience that they kind of see on like for example their iPads or Android tablets so that's another big thing that we need to work on improving the shell, improving applications so that they work well with widescreen layouts and the fourth big thing which this is like, this is probably, this is a really really big topic which would be convergence so this is probably one of the major selling points of having a Linux device is the ability to basically run desktop applications so the goal here is you walk up to any monitor, any display you take your pine phone any other phone, you plug it into the monitor and actually if you plug in a mouse and keyboard you get a full desktop experience so then you can do, you basically don't need a laptop as long as you have a screen you can plug in your phone and you can do stuff you do on the desktop so a lot of work we need to do for multi-displays having multi-window mode things like that so yeah so one of the things that we are looking for towards hardware support is like we are hoping that we support more and more online devices, this is kind of open call to also people who are capable of doing this work and this is also called mobile manufacturers that more mainline devices or more devices that are running near to mainline data scandal they make it much easier for us to run Plasma Mobile on it and it makes, also makes it much easier to basically bring Plasma Mobile to more users also we have I want to show the numbers that we are taking in terms of activity but still we expect for active contributors working on the Plasma Mobile project and we also expect that we also expect that Plasma Mobile project becomes a platform for people looking to contribute to KDA so I think you saw the tearing who started working on writing to Plasma Mobile and now also it's also contributing to some things in the desktop as well so we are looking for some more we are hoping that Plasma Mobile is the project where people can get started working on the KDA community and yeah as I mentioned earlier that more hardware vendors that support the layups mobile, acts like this alright contribute so we definitely need more contributors I'd say the amount of active people working directly on Plasma Mobile is in the single digits despite we have quite a few users that came from the Pine 64 community that have been trying it out so bug testers, developers yeah just if you would like to contribute you can join us on matrix you can check out our documentation as well generally you need a lot more testing so feel free to join us on matrix you can also check out our website which contains a lot more information about the project so questions I know we kind of ran pretty late so if you have other questions or you want to try out some of the devices you can come to the Buff on Monday and I'll have a bunch of devices out if you want to try them any questions so we have a couple of questions both from the online folks and maybe someone in person here as well I'll be trying to go change so first question comes from Umberto what's the best way of testing and developing the mobile Linux ecosystem without hardware like a pine phone so it would actually be pretty similar to the way you develop on desktop so we have this tool called KDE source builds you can build the entire KDE stack on any distro as long as you have it set up so I'd recommend that if you just want to try it well if you want to just try it yourself you don't want to do the development you don't want to compile everything we have post market OS they provide a tool that easily builds builds a plasmable image and it'll run it in a virtual machine and you can try it out yourself yeah I think I mean there's more information on the website and you can also ask us in the matrix channel if you have more questions on that any questions from the online in person audience if so raise your hands if not I'll go through the online questions I find from I find myself accidentally closing apps because I confuse the order of the buttons and tapping the X a single time closes it could it be made so a gesture or a second action is needed to close the app yes so we've kind of just kept with the close button on the bottom for a very long time I actually didn't get around to it for Plasma 5.26 but I was planning on having it hold to close so basically you hold the close button for a set amount of time and close it eventually we kind of do want to move to gestures or allowing you to customize the bottom bar because I know a lot of people find the X fun a bit weird so yeah okay we sorry we don't have any more time for questions so first of all applause please again for Bushan and David if people in person have questions can they find you here and trouble you about their Plasma mobile stuff and for the online questions I didn't get to maybe Bushan are you in the matrix room and people can ping you there and ask some of those questions sure matrix channel so it's a I think David showed it in previous channel then I will also send I think that