Year-round operation of warming shelter, tougher camping enforcement get go-ahead from Assembly
- Mark Sabbatini
- 23 hours ago
- 6 min read
Keeping homeless facility open until June 30 instead of closing April 15 passes unanimously; vote also means year-round funds will be included in next year’s proposed budget
By Mark Sabbatini
Juneau Independent
Keeping a homeless shelter in Thane open year-round and tougher enforcement of public camping restrictions got conceptual approval from the Juneau Assembly on Monday night.
Assembly members unanimously approved an ordinance extending the operation of the shelter, scheduled to close April 15, until the end of the current fiscal year on June 30. The ordinance also states City and Borough of Juneau staff will include year-round operation of the shelter in the proposed budget for the coming fiscal year "and consistently enforce existing CBJ code to prevent dispersed camping."
Enforcement will be focused on "highly visible areas where we have received a lot of complaints," City Manager Katie Koester told Assembly members at their meeting Monday.
"We are a complaint-driven organization when it comes to all sorts of rules and regulations that we enforce," she said. "So the number and the diversity of complaints for any dispersed camping would influence how quickly and aggressively the need to respond to that dispersed camping. We also look at the public impact — not just who's complaining, but what that impact is to public health, and we would prioritize enforcement when those two things are high."
A dispersed camping policy was approved two years ago by the Assembly following the closure of the city-sanctioned Mill Campground in October of 2023, due to reports of a surge in illegal activity including assaults and drug activity. However, the new policy resulted in a flurry of complaints from residential and business property owners near where people set up makeshift camps, as well as the campers themselves who said they were subject to harassment and threats.
The cold-weather shelter at a city-owned warehouse in Thane was open from mid-October to mid-April during its first two years of operation. Officials with St. Vincent de Paul Juneau, contacted as the operator by the city, said in previous years they didn’t have the staffing for year-round operations, but that issue has been resolved.
The ordinance allocates $208,487 to keep the shelter open between April 16 and June 30. Keeping the shelter open during the coming fiscal year is expected to cost about $1.1 million, according to a memo by Deputy City Manager Rober Barr.
Mollie Carr, SVDP Juneau’s acting director, began her remarks to the Assembly by referring to a person who came to the shelter last winter "after days of sleeping outside, cold, exhausted and struggling." The person, she said, prior to that was caught in a cycle involving Bartlett Regional Hospital, a sobering center and the Juneau Police Department.
"Each system did its job, but no one could offer what they truly needed: a safe, consistent place to be," she said. "Without that option people often create encampments in areas of concern without sanitation or basic services, impacting both their health and the surrounding community. At the shelter something simple changed. They got warm, they slept, they stabilized and they had a starting point. That's what the warming shelter provides."
Keeping the shelter open year-round is cost-efficient because it will prevent such people from needing more costly services such as police intervention or emergency medical care, Carr said.
"At times we do have to trespass for various violations to the rules of the shelter," she said. "We don't have any permanent trespass, so everyone is pretty respectful and understanding the rules. We do have to at times provide a two-day, or a week, or at times even a month (trespass), depending on the severity of the situation. Generally, when they have the opportunity to come back there's quite an adjustment for behaviors."
The number of people experiencing homelessness in Juneau isn’t known since a point-in-time count is still being compiled, said Dave Ringle, co-chair of Juneau Coalition on Housing and Homelessness and a past SVDP Juneau executive director. He said the count was 219 in 2020, rose to 324 in 2024 "and I suspect we’ve plateaued."
Ringle, who was in charge of SVDP Juneau when the Thane shelter opened in October of 2023, said sending people staying there away with no place to go the following April turned out to be a mistake.
"Two years ago I sat here and was grilled on dispersed camping, and we agreed to take a chance at it," he said. "I was wrong and I think we learned a lesson."
City ordinance states a person can camp in a public area for up to 48 hours "and then they are prohibited from camping in that location for the rest of the entire summer," Koester said. However, people the past two years have been allowed to stay for months at some locations where clusters of tents and makeshift shelters have been set up, including the victinity of the Glory Hall on Teal Street and a riverside area near the Brotherhood Bridge.
Some people experiencing homelessness at a campsite near Juneau International Airport during the past weekend said they aren’t likely to stay at the shelter due to its limited hours — 9 p.m. to 6:45 a.m., with a curfew of midnight to 5 a.m. when the doors are locked — and other restrictions.
Camping by people experiencing homelessness has existed for many years in Juneau and won’t go away if the shelter is open year-round, Ringle said.
"The difference is it'll be a choice, it's not because there's nowhere else to go," he said. "And for every person that might choose to camp we might have nine or 10 people who choose to come to the shelter, even if it's one to three nights a week."
Concerns about the impact of people camping out and staying at the warming shelter have been expressed by property owners near those areas.
Jim Erickson, co-owner of Alaska Glacier Seafoods, said about 25 of his 200 employees work at a company facility on Teal Street a short distance from where people have been camping in large numbers the past two summers. He told Assembly members last year about problematic encounters with campers and on Monday said the situation has gotten worse since then.
"With the onset of our season coming I'm really worried about the safety of my employees coming and going from work," he said. "Just last week I was challenged by an individual who I assume is (from) one of the dispersed camp areas around there. It was probably the first time I've actually really been personally frightened for my own safety and that was just last Thursday."
His company hired a contractor last fall to install fencing, at a cost of $150,000, but work has been delayed because about one-fourth of the fencing was stolen, Erickson said.
Vandalism and other illegal activities are also a worry among owners of businesses surrounding the Thane shelter. Dawn Wolfe, co-owner and operator of Gastineau Guiding Company, located near the shelter, told the Assembly she reluctantly supports keeping it open year-round, despite a break-in to her office and some others nearby.
"What I do ask for (is) I did hear the city manager saying that they were going to have an increased police presence," she said. "I thought she was referring to the dispersed camping. But I also hope that there is an increased police presence down in the whole rock dump area, especially when individuals aren't allowed to go in the shelter because they're belligerent or whatever."
An argument about the success of facilities such as the shelter — and related services to aid people who are struggling — was offered by Logan Henkins, who said he’s now a homeowner who works to help such people after he got assistance from places such as the Glory Hall and Southeast Alaska Food Bank.
"Just because people are poor and homeless, or work in social services, does not mean that they do not deserve a safe place to live and work," he said. "We all deserve a safe place to live and work. The warming shelter extension is not perfect, but it is the only doable thing we came up with. Not allowing dozens of tents on Teal Street is not a violation of people's rights. It is bringing order and safety to people's lives. It is doing what a city is supposed to do."
The Assembly’s vote came on the same night numerous social service officials made pleas during an open public testimony period not to have their funding cut in next year’s city budget.
City leaders say they are facing a loss of about $12 million in revenue due to tax-cut measures passed by voters last fall and one of the possible resulting actions may be a cut in community grants, with 30% cited as a possible figure. However, the actual amount of any such cut is still undetermined about two months ahead of the Assembly’s deadline to finalize a budget.
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at editor@juneauindependent.com or (907) 957-2306.
