photo by: Rochelle Valverde/Journal-World

Lawrence City Hall, 6 E. Sixth St., is pictured on Jan. 31, 2023.

With bitterly cold temperatures on the horizon, one City of Lawrence leader says that strategies like putting up unhoused individuals in hotel rooms or in chairs at the Santa Fe train depot are on the table if the Lawrence Community Shelter reaches its maximum capacity.

But at least as of Tuesday night, it’s not clear how soon those strategies might come into play, or whether they’ll ultimately be contingent on the shelter’s capacity.

The discussion about overflow plans at the shelter was added late to the agenda for Tuesday’s Lawrence City Commission meeting at the request of Commissioner Amber Sellers. Homeless Programs Coordinator Misty Bosch-Hastings shared some possible solutions to getting people experiencing homelessness who are currently living outdoors into safe shelter during the ongoing winter storm, which dumped 6 inches of snow on Lawrence overnight Monday and will turn into subzero temperatures by Friday night.

One of them was that starting Thursday, Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center will have access to Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services funding to place unhoused individuals in hotel rooms when there isn’t space at LCS. And more overflow space — enough for about 50 people, according to Parks and Recreation assistant director Mark Hecker — will apparently be available at the Santa Fe depot in east Lawrence as a “sit-up” shelter, staffed by city employees.

Commissioners didn’t take any action related to those strategies, however. Sellers spoke critically about how they seemed to have been presented as an option only in the event of overflow and not in addition to the shelter, especially as LCS works to onboard a new executive director, and said she would have motioned to open the Santa Fe depot with immediate effect had she thought any other commissioners would also vote in favor of it.

“I don’t like the fact that we have an ‘if-then’ — we need to do better,” Sellers said.

Tuesday’s meeting was the first time either of those strategies had been discussed publicly by city staff. The same goes for “sit-up” sheltering, which Bosch-Hastings said there’s also some space for at LCS. That type of sheltering doesn’t provide a bed for those in need, just access to a shelter and a chair to sit in to safely wait out the weather.

The nightly capacity at LCS, according to its funding agreement with the city, is 125. The shelter’s website notes that during cold weather, the maximum capacity will be expanded to 140 beds, and guests won’t be required to exit during the day as long as temperatures remain below 40 degrees. Bosch-Hastings said the shelter has been near that nightly capacity lately.

But even including those 140 spaces and the potential “sit-up” spaces, Lawrence would need well over 100 slots beyond that to accommodate the estimated tally of Lawrence’s homeless population. A point-in-time count conducted by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development at the beginning of 2023 found that there were 351 people who were homeless in Lawrence and Douglas County on a particular night.

A couple of dozen community members shared public comment during Tuesday’s meeting expressing their concerns about how the city was responding to the inclement weather. Many of that group specifically mentioned the death of a 31-year-old woman at Sandra J. Shaw Park that Lawrence police were investigating Tuesday. Law enforcement officials had yet to publicly name the deceased individual as of Tuesday evening’s meeting, but many of those commenters said that the individual was unhoused.

Quite a few of the commenters also called on the city to open the Community Building, 115 W. 11th St., for overnight sheltering as soon as possible. For the past two winters, the city has operated a winter emergency shelter out of the building, generally from December to March. But the city said it had no plans to do so again, and the Lawrence Community Shelter on the eastern outskirts of the city would be offering that service instead.

Commissioners Brad Finkeldei and Lisa Larsen cited a desire to avoid straying away from the city’s ongoing plan to address homelessness, and both said whatever is in it in regard to winter-weather sheltering is adequate.

“… We might open Santa Fe tomorrow, we might open Santa Fe tomorrow night, we might open Santa Fe this weekend,” Finkeldei said. “What I’m not willing to do is make a motion to order staff to open it tonight.”

Finkeldei continued on, saying he believed the city had a good plan in place, but was interrupted by commenters on the meeting’s Zoom call. Neither Vice Mayor Mike Dever nor Mayor Bart Littlejohn expressed an opinion in either direction.

In other business, commissioners:

• Conducted a public hearing and unanimously adopted an ordinance that vacates utility easements along the north-south property line between 1201 W. 19th St. — the KU Chabad House — and 1103 W. 19th St.

That action is related to an expansion project for the KU Chabad House. As the Journal-World has reported, KU Chabad has filed plans to replace the existing duplex on its current property with a new, 7,200-square-foot building. KU Chabad plans to fund the project to build that space, which would be about 60% larger than the current building, through a $5 million capital campaign.

The City Commission’s action on Tuesday, assuming the group grants the ordinance final approval at a future meeting, is part of the puzzle in allowing KU Chabad to demolish the two existing homes located on each lot and combine the lots.