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'A hot mess' | Council vote will mean millions to fund Trent Shelter short-term or shut it down this winter

Spokane's city council must approve a four-month contract extension or the city's largest homeless shelter will shutter January 1.

SPOKANE, Wash — With the question of who will run Spokane's Trent homeless shelter next year still up in the air, city council is now tasked with deciding whether to keep it running through winter.

During a public infrastructure, environment and sustainability briefing Monday, Spokane's Director of Community Housing and Human Services Kim McCollim laid out the need for a short-term contract extension.

"The contract ends for both Revive and Salvation Army at the end of December," she said.

"So, effectively we're deciding whether to operate TRAC for four months or shut it down January 1?" asked council member Michael Cathcart.

"Yes," McCollim said.

If approved, a four-month extension will keep the current contract to operate TRAC with the Salvation Army from January through April.

"The total contract increase is $3,930,000," McCollim said.

According to the agenda of Monday's meeting, $3.2 million is to fund operations through the first four months of 2024. However, $730,000 (which McCollim said is already planned and available and is not "a new dollar request") is to cover the Salvation Army going over budget in 2023. That extra funding includes warming center costs and higher costs associated with a surge during summer and winter. TRAC consistently shelters more than 300 people a night, but that meant 'higher variable costs (meals, laundry, portable facilities, consumables) during the winter months.'

Council has a tough choice come Monday when the contract extension comes up for a vote, though for some it felt like there was no choice. 

"This is the only choice we have, the amount being requested is more than really we can truly afford," City Council President Betsy Wilkerson said.

KREM 2 News reached out to Wilkerson, Cathcart, and McCollim for comment Thursday but did not hear back.

Several council members expressed frustration about having to make the call in what Wilkerson called "the bottom of the 9th," with only a month left in the current contract. 

Much of the frustration stemmed from the process of selecting a 2024 shelter operator stalling in September. Mayor Nadine Woodward put a pause on the process of awarding the contract, after requests for proposals (RFP) were put out in the summer. The timing raised many eyebrows since it came shortly after it appeared Jewel's Helping Hands was set to win the bid.

KREM 2 News asked city spokesperson Brian Coddington about that timing. 

"What I can tell you it has nothing to do with the applicants themselves, it has everything to do with the ability to pay whatever chosen applicant occurred," he said. 

Coddington said in June, when it was decided to put out an RFP for a one-year contract around June, there was a commitment of $9 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds. 

"When the previous council president [Breean Beggs] left, the council discussed it in did not want to utilize those $9 million for that. That's what caused the pause in the RFP process," Coddington said. "We spent time discussing how to cover the $9 million attached to that contract, because you can't as a city issue a contract without any ability to pay the contract."

Coddington said the delays continued while the city and council tried to figure out the funding. 

Now, with the process still delayed and a new mayor taking over, Coddington says it makes more sense to wait to allow mayor-elect Lisa Brown to decide how to move forward and not saddle her administration with a one-year provider they didn't choose.

"A short-term extension of the contract gives them flexibility to have other options," Coddington said. "As we understand it, as the mayor-elect has campaigned she has other ideas about how she wants to do things, so she'd be able to bring forward options for council to consider."

Some council members, including Zack Zappone, said they were hesitant to move forward on the extension given Salvation Army's track record of overspending. Zappone said he had a hard time wrapping his head around the bloated budget, which was only $5.6 million when Salvation Army took over the contract. The budget for that same time period, he said, has now ballooned to $9 million.

“The financial continuity of this particular program has been a hot mess," Wilkerson said. 

Cathcart suggested requiring audits from the shelter operations or some type of on-site monitoring as a "guardrail" to make sure there's no overspending with the short-term contract. 

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