Homelessness is likely to be on the agenda for Utah lawmakers during the 2025 legislative session. Proposals already being discussed include drug-free zones at homeless shelters and a statewide Know-by-Name system to track individuals. The ideas have the support of the Utah Homeless Services Board.
Know-by-Name is currently a pilot in Weber County. It has individualized care plans for homeless individuals, centralized caseworkers instead of multiple caseworkers for different needs and information is shared between providers. The program is a partnership between Utah Impact Partnership, the state’s Office of Homeless Services and MGT, a national technology firm.
“It’s an opportunity where we can integrate so many of these services,” said Utah County Republican Rep. Tyler Clancy.
What Clancy envisions is that if a homeless person interacts with mental health services, law enforcement or homelessness services, there’s accessible information about who that person is, what interventions have been tried and what has or hasn’t been successful. Too often, Clancy said, different services are siloed and it’s hard to track or share data.
In the Weber County pilot, a spokesperson for the Office of Homeless Services said, “Case managers employed by the Ogden Police Department participate in the project, but that Know-by-Name data is not available to OPD employees for law enforcement purposes. No other law enforcement entity is involved in the pilot.”
Clancy plans to introduce legislation to set the groundwork for a similar system on a statewide level.
“It would be putting the tools in place to share data more effectively between agencies.”
In a letter sent to State Homeless Coordinator Wayne Neiderhauser earlier this year, Clancy wrote that he envisions “a system where every person receiving municipal and state services has an individualized improvement plan within the Know-by-Name system. Each person would have a dedicated behavioral health specialist helping them make sustained life improvements.”
There’s already an existing statewide database, Utah’s Homeless Management Information System, that allows certain information about individuals to be shared between providers. Wendy Garvin, executive director of Unsheltered Utah, said it includes things like how long they stayed at a shelter and reasons they may have left.
Garvin is satisfied with the current system and has concerns about expanding which groups can see information about homeless individuals and how much information they can access. Her issues range from creating unnecessary work for providers to violating individuals’ privacy.
The current system, Clancy said, is managed by the state but is run through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. That means it can be hard to adapt the system to meet Utah’s specific needs. Clancy also wants a system that has more flexibility for agencies to work collaboratively and one that makes it easier to track data about the homeless community.
Clancy, who is a detective at the Provo Police Department outside of the Legislature, thinks it would be a positive thing for a police officer to be able to see what resources a person has interacted with in the past and contact a case manager.
“There's a middle ground in between medical privacy, but also system effectiveness,” he said. “By expanding that toolkit, I think we'll see better outcomes for homeless Utahns.”
Garvin said she’s fine with a police officer being able to access the number of an individual’s case worker. Her concern is about law enforcement being able to access health history information.
His bill would ask the state’s Office of Homeless Services and the Utah Homeless Board to “start laying out what we will need to scale, and create administrative rules on what the Know-by-Name system would fall under,” he said.
As details of what this would look like are still being fleshed out, Clancy said there will be conversations with stakeholders, like service providers, about what this should look like and talk about things like privacy corners.
Right now, the Know-by-Name system in Weber County is managed through the current Homeless Management Information System.
“Eventually I would like to see it evolve and move horizontal to HMIS,” Clancy said.
During a Nov. 21 town hall hosted by Solutions Utah, a community advocacy group formerly known as the Pioneer Park Coalition, Utah Homeless Services Board Chair Randy Shumway said a statewide Know-by-Name system is one of their eight legislative priorities for the 2025 session.
If a person goes to a provider to talk about what services they need and has a painful conversation, Shumway said, that person shouldn’t need to go through that process again if they go to another provider.
“But instead, we're able to synchronize services around that individual's needs.”
Shumway told attendees that each person would have an individualized care plan based on a “pathway to human thriving” with measurable outcomes.
Other priorities include consistent law enforcement from the Salt Lake City Police Department, predictable funds for operations and wrap-around services, criminal justice reform, and accountability for various housing programs. The board also wants the possibility of involuntary commitment for those posing a very high risk to themselves and others.
The board is also in the process of creating a 1,200-bed homeless shelter on a 30-acre centralized campus.
Clancy plans to propose legislation that would deal with standards for homeless shelters. It would include making homeless service centers drug-free zones. That would mean increased penalties for selling and using drugs in those areas.
Garvin is hopeful about the centralized campus plan, as long as they follow through with having enough services there.
For the other legislative priorities, she said they’re not new ideas, including having drug-free zones. There’s been at least one failed attempt in the Legislature to do that. The problem, Garvin said, is there currently isn’t enough staff at those sites to enforce that.
“The state doesn't fund things well enough to follow through on them,” she said.
Garvin does have concerns about involuntary commitment and sees it as a threat to personal freedom.
To her, the top priority should be more ongoing funding for services and operations.
“I just don't think that we're going to get it by asking the Legislature, because we've asked the Legislature every year forever.”
Clancy expects a debate during the 2025 session over the financial responsibilities of individual municipalities, the state and what should come from the federal level.
“Once those roles are identified, then I think we can be more precise with our funding sources, amounts and management.”
