Lawrence Community Shelter seeks immediate funds to avert drastic cuts

If the Lawrence Community Shelter can’t raise $200,000 in additional funding by July 15, it will have to slash its daytime staff and services in half, a leader of the city’s lone homeless shelter said Monday.

At a county budget meeting Monday morning, Trey Meyer, the shelter’s director of program development and operations, asked Douglas County Commissioners for $100,000 in immediate funding. The shelter has asked the city of Lawrence for $100,000 in immediate funding as well, and city commissioners are scheduled to discuss the request at their Tuesday evening meeting. Monday’s meeting was the first of three preparation sessions for commissioners to develop the county’s 2016 budget.

Since moving out to a newer and larger building at 3655 E. 25th St. about two and a half years ago, it has been difficult to properly plan for the organization’s expenses, Meyer said. In addition, the shelter has run into fundraising issues and problems with “donor fatigue,” he said.

“Moving out to a bigger facility has been a bigger management problem than we anticipated,” Meyer said. “We definitely need to improve our fundraising and grant-writing capacities, and we could just manage our enterprise better all the way around.”

The requested $200,000 in total would allow the shelter to maintain the “status quo” through the rest of 2015, Meyer said.

Currently the organization keeps about seven full-time employees on staff during the day, Meyer said. Those employees are largely responsible for housing, employment, mental health and substance disorder services offered to the shelter’s guests.

“(Without additional funding) all of them would go to half time, so we would only have three or four people here at a given time,” Meyer said. “We have 125 beds right now, and if we don’t have enough manpower then we’ll have to scale down the number to around the 80 range.”

In addition to his request for immediate funding, Meyer asked the county to increase the shelter’s annual allotment by $100,000 to avoid future budget gaps. If approved, the shelter’s total annual funding from the county would total $245,000, beginning in 2016.

Commissioner Jim Flory said it is clear the shelter’s immediate situation is “dire” but that he and the other commissioners need to discuss the matter further before making a firm decision.

If the county did commit any immediate additional funds to the shelter, that commitment would be contingent upon the city also setting money aside for the organization, Flory said. City commissioners haven’t yet discussed the shelter’s request.

“And I’m sure the commission is going to want to see what plans they can put forward toward either a reduction in population or a reduction in services that is more sustainable for the future,” he said.


Other requests

Throughout the rest of the morning, commissioners entertained funding requests from other area organizations, including one from Health Care Access for a one-time investment of $90,000 to hire an experienced chief executive officer, raise clinical salaries to the state average and help the organization prepare for a possible expansion of Medicaid in Kansas.

After the initial investment, reimbursements from the government and private insurance will cover the costs in future years, said Health Care Access Interim Director Kim Polson.

On Tuesday, commissioners will hear requests for funds from the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office, the District Court and Community Corrections and the City of Eudora, among others.

Commissioners will have further discussions on the budget on Wednesday, including tax rates needed to fund the budget.

“Depending on what kind of consensus we have it is conceivable that we’ll hammer out our compromises and reach an agreement on a preliminary budget on Wednesday,” Flory said.

A final hearing for the budget will be held in August, Flory said.

As part of Monday’s meeting, Douglas County Administrator Craig Weinaug presented a “starting point” budget that called for property tax rates to remain essentially at existing levels for the 2016 budget.