Clark County won’t help Vancouver pay for homeless shelter

Clark County won’t help Vancouver pay for a 150-bed homelessness shelter after all.

Even so, city officials plan to press ahead in hopes of opening the shelter — likely at the former Naydenov Gymnastics building near Vancouver Mall — in summer 2025. But people who live in Clark County but not inside Vancouver city limits won’t be allowed to stay there, despite the fact that there are no shelters in the county outside of Hazel Dell.

“While that’s discouraging and I’m disheartened by the lack of partnership and collaboration … I think it’s still clear to me what we need to do, and it doesn’t affect my commitment at all,” Vancouver City Councilor Erik Paulsen said.

The homeless shelter (referred to as a bridge shelter by officials) is a key part of the city’s plan to address homelessness since declaring a civil emergency in November.

The county has flip-flopped on whether it will help the city fund the shelter, which will be the largest in the county.

The city approached the county in May for quick help acquiring a building using Mental Health Sales Tax funds, which are collected throughout the county.

Acquiring and building the shelter will cost about $16 million. Operating it will take another $6 million to $7 million per year. The city asked the county to pay for 30 percent of those combined costs — a maximum of $6 million up front and about $2 million a year after that.

The county council denied that request and required the city to go through the same process as other projects (although the county has made exemptions to that requirement in the past).

The city no longer needs help acquiring the property for the shelter, but staff asked for help funding the shelter’s operations. (The shelter will have on-site medication-assisted drug treatment, according to Jamie Spinelli, homeless response manager for the city.)

The Mental Health Sales Tax Committee, made up of two county councilors, three court administrators, two community service department staff and the public health director, denied the city’s request for funding earlier this month in a closed-door meeting. The Vancouver City Council learned about the decision Monday.

The committee’s deliberations are confidential and unrecorded, according to Jordan Boege, senior policy analyst for the Clark County Council. How each member voted is not captured. There is no public list showing which projects were not selected to receive funding.

Boege said the committee did not select the project for funding because it lacked detail compared with other proposals, of which there were 25.

“The bridge shelter request, where they’re at in the planning process, I think isn’t fully baked,” he said. “I would say there’s definitely an opportunity for the county to provide funding in the future, but at this point, the board’s not recommending it.”

Boege said the committee was aware that people who live in the county but aren’t Vancouver residents won’t be able to go to the shelter.

Spinelli, who wrote the proposal and gave the committee a presentation, said she disagrees that the shelter plans lack detail. She originally wrote a 22-page proposal for the committee on the shelter, but the committee limited proposals to five pages.

“It’s disappointing because I feel like it would have been a really meaningful, collaborative project,” she said.

Without funds from the county, the shelter can allow only city residents, Spinelli said. That means someone camping in Vancouver who recently became homeless outside city limits cannot stay in the shelter.

A survey conducted by the city’s Homeless Assistance and Resources Team found 48 percent of homeless people living in Vancouver became homeless outside of the city. Most of those people came from other areas of Clark County, Spinelli said at a November city council meeting.

The lack of county funding jeopardizes the shelter’s potential plan to take in people released from jail with nowhere to go, Spinelli said. The Clark County Jail releases people at all times of the night. In June, about one in six people released between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. were homeless, according to the jail.

No county funding also means the Clark County Sheriff’s Office cannot make referrals to the shelter, Spinelli said. Clark County passed a camping ban last year that says law enforcement should determine whether there is available overnight shelter space for the person violating the ordinance.

The city of Vancouver will hold an in-person informational session from 10:30 a.m. to noon Nov. 16 at Walnut Grove Elementary School, 6103 N.E. 72nd Ave. People can sign up for an online session from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Nov. 19 on the city’s website.

“We’re still moving forward,” Spinelli said.