BELLINGHAM — Whatcom County is planning for a dedicated severe weather shelter with on-call staff and trained volunteers this winter, as opposed to the last-minute efforts of previous years.
Early next month, Road 2 Home will begin hiring staff and registering and training volunteers who can open a shelter for about 30 people with 24- to 48-hours notice of an approaching cold snap.
“That will give them time to ramp up their programming ahead of time,” said Ann Beck, community health and human services manager.
“We will be able to get the shelter up on the fly,” Beck told the Whatcom County Council in a presentation Tuesday, Sept. 27.
Road 2 Home is a nonprofit group that is working with the Low Income Housing Institute to run the Gardenview tiny home community at Lakeway Drive and Woburn Steet.
Beck told the County Council that Health Department officials will be monitoring forecasts from the National Weather Service in Seattle this fall and winter and use their models for guidance about opening a shelter.
An overnight shelter will be opened in the locker rooms at Civic Stadium when the temperature is likely to drop below 28 degrees, Beck said.
“Man that’s cold,” said Councilwoman Kaylee Galloway, who asked if extra shelter space could open when overnight temperatures drop closer to the freezing level.
Whatcom County was being asked to fund the winter shelter efforts with $25,000 and the Bellingham City Council will be asked to provide similar funding at its Oct. 3 meeting, Beck told The Bellingham Herald.
Meanwhile, Beck said that the number of “unsheltered” people, or those who are living on the streets, made up a smaller number of Whatcom County’s overall homeless population last year.
“It shows that we have been making some strides and are sheltering more in our community even as homelessness increased,” she told the council.
Beck was referring to the 2022 Point In Time census of homeless people nationwide, a survey that was conducted on Feb. 24 this year.
It showed that 859 people were homeless in Whatcom County on that date, a figure that was down slightly from 2021.
Some 28% of those were unsheltered, a 17% decrease in people living outside from 2021, according to the report.
Whatcom County will have about 260 shelter spaces this winter season, plus motel vouchers for 40 to 50 families, a strategy that has been used in previous years, Beck said.
Shelter space will include Base Camp for about 200 people, which is operated by Lighthouse Mission Ministries in downtown Bellingham, along with an overflow shelter for 40 people that will be run by Christ the King Church on mission property at 1013 W. Holly St. in Old Town.
Five beds will be available at the YWCA in Bellingham, and another 12 beds will be available at the Ferndale Resource Center, Beck said.
