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Local Task Force Develops Temporary Warming Shelter for Aroostook County to Address Rise in Systemic Homelessness
By: David Deschesne
Fort Fairfield Journal, November 30, 2022
A homelessness task force for Aroostook County was created by the board of directors of the Aroostook County Action Program (ACAP) in September. The goal of the task force was to explore options for additional emergency sheltering of a growing population of individuals who are experiencing homelessness in Aroostook County.
Trey Stewart, from Presque Isle was appointed the chair of the task force which included a number of people across Aroostook County, agencies and organizations such as: ACAP staff and board members, Homeless Services of Aroostook (HSA) staff and board members; the County Commissioner's office; City of Presque Isle leaders and the city council; Parish of the Precious Blood; Northern Light Health; Cary Medical Center; and the Aroostook Area Agency on Aging.
“Our focus was on keeping Aroostook's homeless population safe and warm during the winter months and the task force itself explored over twenty vacant facilities and spaces since its convening,” said Stewart. “We had discussions with municipal leaders, zoning officers, the governor's office, Maine housing, and the State Fire Marshall's office and identified options to consider in choosing a space.”
HSA, the current provider of homeless shelter services, and ACAP, current provider of resources and referrals to individuals experiencing at risk housing situations, have joined together to present a solution to the crisis. The plan to establish a warming center was presented to the Aroostook County Commissioners last month. Through the ARPA funding [editor: that is, “free COVID money” in layman's terms] that the County of Aroostook received from the feds, it was established and approved that the County Commissioners will work with HSA and project partner, Aroostook County Action Program to provide warming center services to individuals experiencing homelessness from November, 2022 through April 1, 2023.
As a result of the work done by the task force, the following plan was developed to provide temporary warming shelter services to individuals on a first-come, first-served basis. The details of that plan are:
- HSA will continue to first fill vacant beds within their homeless shelter and then when all the beds are filled, HSA will activate the warming center at the Sister Mary O'Donnell homeless shelter for up to ten individuals needing a warm place to sleep as temperatures drop.
- The warming center hours will be from 7pm to 7am, seven days a week.
- ACAP will continue to operate the Hope and Prosperity resource center Monday through Friday 8am thru 5pm offering support to access support for employment, housing, health care, and other community services.
- ACAP will also open an overflow warming center when HSA has reached a capacity of ten individuals and there remains an additional need. That overflow center will be able to provide a maximum capacity of 25 to 30 additional people. ACAP will also activate extended hours of operation at HPRC to include Saturday and Sunday 8am to 5pm when individuals are accessing HSA warming center on the previous nights.
“This was a very high stress situation for everybody that was involved here, from local officials to different board agencies and members,” said Stewart. “We set out with this goal in September when we realized this problem wasn't going anywhere and we had to do something before winter came.”
Lisa McLaughlin, HSA CEO explained during a recent ZOOM meeting how the homeless shelter is experiencing greater use on a continuing basis than in the past. “We're consistently running between 32 and 37 people. The most that we have had in the building was 45,” said McLaughlin. “When the Task Force came together, I offered a solution of using our dining area from 7 o'clock at night to 7 o'clock in the morning. This is unchartered territory for our shelter. We're using our dining area where we will fold up our tables and we have purchased bed rolls and sleeping bags so people can come in and not just sit in a chair for 12 hours but actually be able to rest and they will get a one dish meal and be able to have access to the showers. We will hire a couple more staff - we're grateful and thankful for the County Commissioners for helping us be able to do this because as a small organization as we are, we're limited on our funding.”
Ryan Pelletier from the Aroostook County Commissioner's office said the commissioners approved just shy of $192,000 for the operational support request and also includes additional funds to provide two meals a day for anybody in the shelter who needs the warming center services and also a one-time payment of $3,900 to cover the cost of some additional security cameras because of the location of the entrance. “[The commissioners] plan to cut an up front payment of around $20,000 to HSA to get started and then there will be demographic information collected each month and submitted to us for reimbursement, so it will be on a reimbursement payment process going forward until April,” said Pelletier.
Mr. Stewart pointed out that HSA is the only homeless shelter north of Bangor, serving one of the largest counties, by land area, east of the Mississippi. “Their task is monumental in terms of the geography that they serve and that's certainly a challenge regardless of what part of the County you're from,” said Stewart. “I just hope folks are aware of that point because it is an important one. Folks are coming from all over Northern Maine to go to HSA so, to the extent that we can support them in that effort, I think we are serving County-wide clientele in that regard.”
According to Heidi Rackliffe, ACAP's Director of Programs, most of the increase in use of our local temporary homeless shelter services are from Aroostook County and other parts of Maine with very few being logged in as coming from outside of the state. “We very quickly found that there was the assumption that the influx of individuals experiencing homelessness were from away because we didn't have that within the county,” said Rackliffe during the ZOOM meeting. “So, we very quickly started grabbing that data to educate the community, to let them know that that actually wasn't the case.
After reviewing the data, Rackliffe said they found less than 10 percent of the individuals were from outside of the state of Maine and nearly half of them are from an older generation who, for various reasons have fallen on hard times under today's current trying economic conditions. “Gone are the days of what the 'assumed' individual experiencing homelessness looks like,” said Rackliffe. “Now we are seeing individuals that are experiencing homelessness for the first time because [the cost of] everything has increased, including rents that landlords have to increase, rightfully so. But our individuals on fixed incomes don't have that funding source to keep up with the inflation that's existing. Their income is not increasing; their expenses are increasing. We have a huge population that are actually elderly and disabled. There's not enough elderly/disabled housing in Aroostook County to meet that demand. So there is genuinely a 'perfect storm' of why homelessness is increasing and it's not a one answer, it's a multitude of situations and reasoning for that.”
Ms. McLaughlin agreed and expanded on Rackliffe's points, reflecting on HSA demographics. “I went back and checked our census from last year and it was quite different. We had a lot more younger people that were [experiencing] homelessness in 2021. This year we have 37 people in our shelter right now and 14 out of the 37 are 50 years of age and above. That's astonishing to me and eye-opening. When you see people that are that age, you think there are multiple reasons, some are addictions, some are mental health some of them can't afford - they lost their apartment, they lost their job, connected to other health concerns, maybe disability, they live on a very small income. It is very concerning that we're having people 50 and above seeking shelter at our homeless shelter.”
The warming center is a very short-term solution that is based upon a first-come, first-served protocol which serves a very limited number of people for a limited period of time. As dire economic conditions, caused by errant and misguided politicians on both sides of the aisle continue, coupled with an ever-increasing amount of regulatory laws, enforced by the Fire Marshal's office and local code enforcement officers, which have been designed to decrease risk to unattainable and unrealistic near zero, Utopian levels in housing and zoning codes, a serious long term solution will need to be developed that, by sheer necessity, will have to either ignore or dismantle the financially untenable political, monetary and zoning infrastructure that is collectively, cooperatively and unwittingly exacerbating the homeless problem today.
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