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Aurora committee presses operator and city on mold, staffing and safety at Navigation Campus
Summary
City staff and the operator told the Horns committee they're remediating mold on closed upper floors, adding case managers and testing tier-3 plumbing, while council members pressed for incident counts, training and clearer resident feedback; the committee scheduled a site visit for April.
Chair Jackson convened the Horns committee at 9 a.m. and opened a lengthy update from the Navigation Campus operator and the city's homelessness manager after multiple constituents reported troubling experiences at the site.
The city's homeless manager, Stephanie Piper, told the committee the City owns the building and selected Advance as the operator. "I will look into the mold on the 3rd Floor and get back to you guys on that," she said, and said the City will not use affected floors until contractors remove the mold, perform air scrubbing and retest the rooms.
Piper said the City is replacing and upgrading exterior lighting, will install a temporary outdoor area within roughly 30 days, and is pursuing a permanent outdoor space later this year following an environmental review. She described the mold work as "room by room" and said the City solicited multiple bids before selecting a remediation contractor.
Jim, an Advance representative, said in retrospect the campus "opened too early" given plumbing and other building issues encountered after the winter surge in demand. He reported the nightly census is "between 303 50 on any given night" and said the operator has three residents in tier 3, about 55 in tier 2 and intends to add a small number of tier-3 placements in April and increase slowly toward a year-end goal of about 100 tier-3 residents.
Council members pressed for more detail on case management and outcomes. Jim said Advance conducts rapid assessments and currently has four case managers on staff and is hiring two more, with a staffing goal of roughly one case manager per 30 guests. "We do this rapid assessment, try to identify what the needs are, and then connect them with a case manager," he said. He added that case managers are required to hold a bachelor's degree so services can be billed to Medicaid when appropriate and that the operator has a licensed clinical director.
The committee raised an ethics allegation that workers traded food stamps for favors; Jim said that incident "didn't happen here" and that the staff person involved at the day resource center in August is no longer employed by the operator.
Jim acknowledged occasional fights among guests but denied staff assaults; he also said mold testing elsewhere in the building returned clear results and that the identified mold is restricted to closed areas the City has not reopened to guests. Officials said they maintain incident reports for shifts and will include incident counts in future quarterly updates.
Council members asked the operator and city to do three things before the next meeting: provide the number and categories of incident reports (assault, medical attention, mental-health crisis), summarize resident feedback gathered in town halls and kiosks, and supply a clearer timeline for remediation and tier-3 expansion. The committee agreed to consider holding the next meeting in person at the Navigation Campus and set a tentative date of April 21 at 08:30.
The Horns committee's discussion mixed operational details (occupancy, case-management ratios, HVAC and plumbing fixes) and oversight questions (transparency, training, incident reporting), and members asked staff to bring organized, thematic responses to their outstanding questions at the next update.
