photo by: Nick Krug

Lawrence City Hall, 6 E. Sixth St., is pictured on May 3, 2016.

With more than 100 homeless people currently living outside, city leaders have voted to create a temporary winter shelter program that uses hotels, and they’ve also approved additional funding to allow the program to house more people than initially proposed.

As part of its meeting Tuesday, the Lawrence City Commission voted unanimously to approve a city-led program that will use hotel rooms to provide shelter to homeless people over the next 90 days. Under the initial proposal for the program, however, dozens of people would still have been left unsheltered, so the commission also voted to allocate an additional $50,000 to the program so that it could help more people.

Mayor Brad Finkeldei proposed the additional funding, and other commissioners agreed. Finkeldei said it was important to get the expanded-capacity program up and running now, and the city could assess the program and potentially seek other grants to help fund it in the coming weeks.

“I certainly don’t think it will get us through the winter, but I think it will get us to a point where can see how the program is working and come up with a more consistent model,” Finkeldei said.

Last winter, volunteers operated temporary shelters in local churches, but because of the risk of spreading the coronavirus in those settings, city staff is not recommending any temporary congregate shelters this year. Commissioner Lisa Larsen said she was in favor of moving forward with Finkeldei’s proposal given the circumstances.

“Obviously given the situation with the pandemic, it basically has changed the entire dynamic of the cold shelter needs we have because we have to work toward noncongregate sheltering,” Larsen said.

Specifically, the commission voted to authorize the city to make agreements with the local homeless shelter and at least one hotel to provide the program. The commission authorized $300,000 total to the program, $250,000 of which will come from federal coronavirus aid distributed via the Emergency Solutions Grants Program. The city has applied for an additional $50,000 grant, and given the large number of unsheltered people, the commission authorized the $50,000 in additional spending even though there was no guarantee the city would receive a grant to reimburse those costs.

The $250,000 of COVID-19 aid will pay for 51 hotel rooms for 90 days through an agreement with the Econo Lodge University hotel, 2525 W. Sixth St. City staff estimates the 51 rooms will be able to house up to 80 people on any given night. The new program, which will be led by the city and run by the Lawrence Community Shelter, will replace a hotel voucher program run exclusively by the shelter that is currently housing 65 to 70 people, meaning that only 10 to 15 additional people of the more than 100 living outdoors will initially be sheltered with those dollars.

There was not an estimate for how many people the additional $50,000 would allow the program to house, but Assistant City Manager Brandon McGuire said that in the short term, it would allow the city and its partners to set up an overflow program at additional hotels. The current hotel voucher program has been funded through coronavirus aid distributed by Douglas County and will end Dec. 30, and the city-led program will begin after that.