Tulare County task force reviews edits to Pathway Home plan; members to return with feedback next month

Amy Shucklian, chair of the Tulare County Task Force on Homelessness and Tulare County supervisor for District 3, opened the meeting and later invited Bradley Cottingham to present a series of proposed revisions to the Pathway Home strategic plan.

Cottingham said the group has worked for six to eight months on changes that include correcting typographical errors, marking completed items as done, consolidating strategy numbering, removing objectives the group judged unattainable given current funding and capacity, and reformatting the document so each “goal” contains discrete objectives and strategies beneath it. “It's similar to the 1 that's in there, but I think it would just be, easier and more understandable for anybody who ends up reading the document to kinda navigate through it,” Cottingham said.

The proposed edits Cottingham reviewed included: marking Strategy 2.2 and 2.3 as completed and removing them from the active list; renumbering items in Goal 2 to account for deletions; removing a Goal 4 prevention item the presenters said the county currently lacks funding to pursue; consolidating a proposed environmental cleanup action into a new county-wide navigation guide; and deleting a completed item establishing jurisdictional action committees under Goal 5, Strategy 2. Cottingham and a colleague recommended changing the plan structure from the current “goals then strategy” layout to a three-tier format of goal → objective → strategy to reduce ambiguity.

Task force members did not vote on the amendments at the meeting. Cottingham asked members to review the redline and “approved” copies distributed at the meeting and bring feedback to the next task force meeting. The plan as presented will be discussed again next month for possible final edits and an amendment vote.

Procedural action: the task force also approved the March meeting minutes by motion of Mary Alice (mover) and a second by Dana Wilde; no additional roll-call vote tally was recorded on the transcript.

Why it matters: The Pathway Home plan guides the county’s coordinated response to homelessness. The changes would remove tasks the presenters judged unachievable with current resources and create a single, county-wide guide to improve coordination among outreach teams and jurisdictions. Members said further review is necessary before any formal amendment.

Next steps: Task force members were asked to review the proposed redline and return with edits and comments at the following monthly meeting, when the group hopes to vote on the amendment if consensus emerges.