by Jeremy Morrison
A comprehensive online dashboard tracking the availability of local shelter beds is ready to go, but stalling out due to the lack of participation from local service providers that work with the homeless community.
“I talked to county staff yesterday, and it’s really just sitting there waiting to be used at this point,” said Ronnie Rivera, community relations neighborhood specialist for the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office.
Rivera was bemoaning the languishing dashboard during a Sept. 7 meeting of the Northwest Florida Homeless Reduction Task Force. The information that should be available on the new dashboard, he explained, is key when law enforcement encounters homeless individuals needing shelter.
“It’s sort of a challenge if you can’t get your hands wrapped around what beds are available where,” Rivera said.
Escambia County partnered with ECSO earlier this summer to create an online shelter dashboard, in coordination with state Rep. Michelle Salzman. At the time, the lawmaker painted the dashboard as essential to providing service to the homeless community: “How do we even take care of these people if we don’t know where to send them?”
When asked how providers might be incentivized to make use of the dashboard — “what is the stick that is going to get providers to use it?” — John Johnson, executive director for Opening Doors, suggested that access to public funding could be tied to plugging into the dashboard; providers, he said, have already been sent “soft letters” urging participation.
“The stick is, our funded partners, we could require that they participate,” Johnson said. “That would be the stick, to make sure that they participate.”
HUD Money & The Countdown Showdown
Also during this month’s meeting of the homeless task force, Johnson previewed an upcoming funding opportunity that could result in millions of dollars to use locally in addressing the issue of homelessness. Opening Doors, in its position as the lead agency for the Escambia and Santa Rosa counties Continuum of Care group, will soon apply a portion of grant money available from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Applications are due by the end of September for HUD’s 2022 CoC Program Competition. The local CoC, covering a two-county region, could see more than three million dollars, though as Johnson informed the task force, only 10 CoC’s per state receive funding.
“It’s extremely competitive,” Johnson said. “But we will try, we will give it the ol’ college try.”
A meeting is planned for Sept. 20, during which members of the local CoC will discuss the HUD application. A likely topic of discussion could be the best estimate of the local homeless population — a number that becomes relevant when discussing funding opportunities and particulars.
Johnson briefly addressed this issue during the recent task force meeting. Opening Doors, as the representative agency of the local CoC, is tasked with conducting an annual Point in Time survey of the local homeless population; the survey is conducted on one day during the last ten days of January.
“Really across the state of Florida we are seeing decline, we are seeing a decline in homelessness,” Johnson told the task force.
In Escambia and Santa counties, the CoC has likewise observed a decline in the number of homeless individuals. This is in line with a larger trend, Johnson said.
“Our homeless numbers are consistent with the other 26 CoC’s,” he said. “As a state, reporting declines in homelessness is very real.”
For this year, the local CoC count reflects 727 homeless people. That’s down slightly from the last few years, and a significant drop from 2015, when the count was above a thousand.
But this official CoC count — the count on which funding decisions are made — is currently being questioned. For example, as Escambia County Board of County Commissioners looks to spend a separate pot of federal funds allocated to address the issue of homelessness, officials are drilling into the wide discrepancy between the CoC’s Point in Time count and the more-thorough population tracking conducted by other organizations such as Community Health of Northwest Florida, which lists a growing homeless population that hit a high of about 7,600 this year.
“That’s very cloudy to me,” Commissioner Lumon May noted during a meeting earlier this month.