photo by: City of Lawrence screenshot

Melanie Valdez, the Lawrence Community Shelter's interim director, speaks during the Lawrence City Commission meeting on Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2023.

Updated at 1:59 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 18

Lawrence leaders approved a number of actions related to operations at the Lawrence Community Shelter on Tuesday night, one of which added another $150,000 to the shelter’s funding agreement and another that appointed three new members of the shelter’s board of directors selected by Lawrence Mayor Lisa Larsen.

The actions also included approving a joint resolution with the Douglas County Commission that lays out the process for selecting members of the shelter’s board of directors under its new shared-governance structure with the City of Lawrence and Douglas County. The joint resolution and additional funding were approved unanimously at Tuesday’s Lawrence City Commission meeting.

The city’s appointees to the board were also approved, but not unanimously. Two of them —  Shannon Oury, the executive director of the Lawrence-Douglas County Housing Authority, and Elizabeth Keever, the chief development officer at Heartland Community Health Center — were approved by a 4-0 vote with Commissioner Amber Sellers abstaining. The third appointee, Free State Brewing Company owner Chuck Magerl, was approved by a 3-1 vote with Sellers again abstaining and Commissioner Courtney Shipley opposed.

photo by: City of Lawrence screenshot

Lawrence City Commissioner Amber Sellers speaks at the commission meeting Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2023.

“I appreciate the work that the current board of directors and the city and county are bringing to us,” Commissioner Brad Finkeldei said during Tuesday’s meeting. “As we all know, it’s a pretty common model — Bert Nash, health board, Housing Authority, LMH (Health) and so forth — where we have appointments to certain boards that we are major funding partners of. I think this is a good model going forward, and I think it’s a model that will help create stability for LCS for a long time, both having the city and the county being more directly part of the funding mechanism.”

As the Journal-World has reported, the shift to this shared governance structure came about two months after LCS Interim Executive Director Melanie Valdez told the Journal-World that the shelter’s funds were well short of the roughly $1.6 million per year it needs to keep running and the shelter was “just barely getting by.”

Assistant City Manager Brandon McGuire said Tuesday that the additional $150,000 in funding support should allow the shelter to keep operating through 2023. McGuire also said that the shared governance structure doesn’t turn the shelter into a city- or county-run entity, or the board of directors into a city advisory board.

New board members

There were “six or seven” people who submitted applications hoping to fill one of the three city-appointed seats on the new shared board, according to Larsen. However, there were two commissioners with concerns — one about the appointment process, and another about one of the appointees.

photo by: City of Lawrence screenshot

Chuck Magerl speaks at the Lawrence City Commission meeting on Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2023.

Sellers was the commissioner who worried about how the city handled its appointments. They’re traditionally picked by the mayor and then approved without much discussion by the full City Commission. But Sellers said she thought that approach sometimes left people and groups out of the process.

She pointed to one applicant who spoke at the meeting — Denise Ballard. Ballard said that she’d hoped her experience volunteering at agencies such as Just Food and Family Promise would make her a good candidate, but that Larsen never reached out to her about her application. Sellers noted that Ballard is a person of color, while the three board members appointed Tuesday are white.

“There is no perfect board appointee, and there’s nothing that says verbatim that … at least one person on the board needs to be a person of color,” Sellers said. “… It’s not even an issue of race — it’s an issue of due diligence.”

While Sellers said she had no problem with any of the appointees themselves, she did not want to cast a vote on any of them Tuesday because of her concerns about the appointment process.

Shipley, meanwhile, said she wouldn’t support Magerl’s appointment, citing past statements about the homeless population that she viewed as “disqualifying” him for the position. Magerl was part of a group of more than a dozen prominent business and community leaders who criticized the city’s management of homeless issues at a recent City Commission meeting.

“I stand strongly behind my appointees,” Larsen said. “I think they’ll do a very good job for our community, and I reviewed and spoke with each one of them individually. I also spoke with others in the community, not just those three about their thoughts on whether they wanted to be a part of that board.”

Under the joint resolution, the county also gets to appoint two board members, and two currently serving members will stay on the board. The joint resolution will be considered by county leaders at Wednesday’s County Commission meeting.

Additional funding support

As the Journal-World has reported, the addendum to the funding agreement establishes additional requirements on top of what’s in the base funding agreement, including entering all clients’ names on the county’s “by name list” of homeless individuals, maintaining a minimum capacity of 100 beds per night, and increasing its total shelter capacity when outdoor temperatures dip below 40 degrees.

It also requires the shelter to offer “day services … including but not limited to three meals per day,” and states that the shelter “will offer operational support to other emergency and temporary sheltering systems within the city.”

In response to a question from Sellers about the ambiguity of the provision about supporting other temporary sheltering systems and the provision related to expanded capacity in cold weather, McGuire said the city was “hoping” the Community Shelter would agree to operate the city’s winter emergency shelter. The emergency shelter has been housed at the Community Building in downtown Lawrence for the past two winter seasons, run by the city and staffed by volunteers.

But according to a group of Lawrence Community Shelter staff members who spoke at the meeting, those additional requirements are being imposed without the proper level of funding and staffing support to execute them, and $150,000 isn’t even enough to address the existing funding gaps at the shelter since it expanded its capacity from 50 to 125 spaces in March. And Valdez, who also spoke to commissioners on Tuesday evening, said some elements of the agreement — like its requirements for what day services the shelter is supposed to provide — aren’t defined clearly enough.

Along with the combined $592,000 the shelter receives annually from the city and county, the additional city funding approved Tuesday brings the shelter’s total funding support from local governmental bodies for this year to just under $750,000 — still well short of the shelter’s roughly $1.6 million annual operating budget. McGuire told commissioners the city would work with the shelter’s board and leadership beyond the end of the year to determine any future additional funding requests to help support additional staff and operational capacity.

Editor’s note: This story has been revised to reflect that Commissioner Shipley described Chuck Magerl as having made “disqualifying” statements about the homeless population.