County OKs Funds for Winter Shelters

Orange County supervisors on Tuesday approved spending $170,000 to provide food and shelter for at least 250 homeless people this winter at two National Guard armories.

Supervisors hope that with additional state and federal funding, the program will be able to shelter the homeless for 120 days, beginning in December. In past years, the county scrambled to keep the shelters open as long as possible.

The cold weather shelter program, administered by Shelter for the Homeless, a private nonprofit agency in Midway City, houses about 250 people at the armories. Collectively, the armories and other shelters are able to help just 10% of the estimated 15,000 homeless people in the county.

The shelter costs at the armories alone run $384,000 a year. The county is trying to get remaining funding from state and federal sources so the shelters can stay open for four months.

“Our goal has been to remain open for 120 days during the winter,” said Pam Leaning, a spokeswoman for the county’s Housing and Community Development Department. “But the federal source of our funding is questionable.”

The county has applied for $174,000 from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA is not expected to decide on the application until December, Leaning said.

The county also is seeking $40,000 from the state Emergency Housing Assistance Program.

Supervisor Cynthia Coad urged county housing officials to bolster funding sources and eliminate the uncertainty in the cold weather program.

“I want them to find three years of predictable funding,” Coad said after the meeting. “What they do now is year by year, and there was also talk of eliminating armories as the shelters. We need a full review to take the uncertainty out.”

Coad is surprised that FEMA bases its annual funding for the shelter program on the county’s unemployment figures, not its homeless population.

“Orange County consistently has a low unemployment rate, yet it has a large homeless population and that’s not fair,” she said. “I want to talk to FEMA and try and come up with a better way of addressing this issue.”

In other business, Supervisor Jim Silva announced a town hall meeting on Thursday in Huntington Beach to address water pollution and beach closures. The meeting, organized by Assemblyman Scott Baugh (R-Huntington Beach), will discuss solutions to urban runoff.