Another $6.1 million of COVID-relief funds will be used on beleaguered Trent homeless shelter

Another $6.1 million of federal COVID-relief funds will be spent to operate the city-run Trent Avenue homeless shelter for at least part of 2024.

The City Council voted 6-1 to pull the funding mostly from other dedicated purposes, with Councilman Michael Cathcart voting in opposition. He had longstanding concerns with using one-time funds to operate the shelter, which has no sustainable funding sources.

Cathcart’s colleagues unequivocally agreed with his concerns but expressed anxiety about closing the shelter ahead of the coming winter and frustration with the mayoral administration for failing to provide an alternative.

“We as a Council have asked for a plan,” Councilwoman Betsy Wilkerson said. “What’s the administration’s plan, how do we go forward, are there any other options?”

“We never got that back,” she added.

City spokesman Brian Coddington, who acts as the unofficial chief of staff for the office of Mayor Nadine Woodward, stated Monday that the City Council had assured the administration that there would be funding for the shelter if the city began a search for a service provider to operate the facility next year, a process that began in July and has been put on pause.

“ARPA was the guarantee,” he wrote in a text. “This was always the plan.”

The city will raid a number of buckets of previously allocated American Rescue Plan Act COVID-relief funding to keep the beleaguered homeless shelter open through the winter and for an unspecified amount of time afterward. These include $1.2 million from a mobile medical program and $300,000 from an eviction defense fund because the city was unable to find a qualified bidder to provide the service.

The lion’s share of the funding, $4 million, was initially allocated to building an affordable housing project, Liberty Park Terrace II. Instead, that project will be funded with the 1590 fund, a sales tax approved in 2020 to build affordable housing. The city argued that there were concerns about the timeline of the project not lining up with the federal deadline for using ARPA funds.

However, Cathcart argued that Monday’s allocation meant the city was essentially dipping into 1590 funds to pay to temporarily keep the Trent Avenue shelter open, rather than making long-term investments into housing.

“I believe that this is effectively just using 1590 for a purpose that it was not approved for,” he said. “It’s just doing it in a roundabout way.”

The $6 million package also includes roughly $110,000 of ARPA funds previously allocated to administrative support and legal services that the city no longer needs, according to a staff report, as well as $120,000 for a community engagement coordinator whose duties have been absorbed by current staff. Another $390,000 of previously unallocated ARPA funds will also be used to operate the shelter.

After Monday’s vote, a total of approximately $10 million of ARPA funds have been spent on the operation of the Trent Avenue homeless shelter, out of the over $80 million allocated to the city, Councilman Zack Zappone stated.

“Over 10% of all ARPA money is going to fund (the Trent shelter), which has no sustainable future, no real proven outcomes right now, but seems to be taking all the money that could have gone to long-term solutions,” he added.

Monday’s allocation of funding won’t be enough to keep the doors open through the entirety of next year, however, at least not without reducing services or the number of beds. The cost to pay an operator of the shelter next year alone is expected to be around $9 million, on top of another $313,000 to lease the property and any additional costs to provide case management or other services.

There may be additional funding coming from the state, which would be coming next summer, Zappone said in a brief interview.