Year-round Warming Room plan

City council to consider $160K budget to keep Warming Room open year-round for homeless

City councillors are about to consider giving more money to help run all of Peterborough’s emergency shelters for the homeless – and they’ll also consider offer- ing enough to keep the Warming Room open year-round, at least until 2020.

Councillors start a week of budget talk son Monday night and a city staff report released on Friday urges them to think about budgeting $200,000 more for emergency shelters, starting next year.

The proposal would give more money to Brock Mission, Cameron House, Youth Emergency Shelter and the Warming Room.

In 2018, city staff suggests taking that $200,000 from a homelessness reserve fund, and then budg- eting for it in later years.

The Warming Room would get the largest boost: its funding would go from $85,000 annually to $160,000 (an increase of $75,000).

That’s expected to be enough to keep the overnight shelter open year-round, rather than only in winter.

While the Warming Room has traditionally been open from Nov. 1 until spring, the low apartment vacancy rate in Peterborough has put pressure on all emergency shelters in recent years.

The idea is to keep the Warming Room open year-round until April 2020– and then city staff would reassess all the shelter the services in Peterborough.

The plan would also give Brock Mission (a shelter for men) and Cameron House (a shelter for women) an additional $30,000 a year (bringing their combined annual total to $1,015,580).

The Youth Emergency Shelter would get an increase of $84,000 a year, bringing the city’s YES funding to $556,600 annually.

City councillors will be sitting as the budget committee on Monday night when they consider adopting the plan for more funding for homelessness.

It’ s expected to be part of budget talks, which begin Monday night at City Hall and continue through theweek.

Meanwhile, the same city staff report also mentions that the city is getting some new funding from the province for supportive housing.

The city’ s social services division is expecting $270,320 from the province for 2017-18, but in later years the funding increases quite a bit: Peterborough gets nearly $1 million for 2018-19, and the same sum again in2019-20.

The funding is expected to continue beyond 2020, the staff report states.

It’s meant to fund the new Home For Good Supportive Housing Program for youth and adults who are experiencing chronic homelessness (meaning they’ ve been homeless for six months of the previous year ).

The program offers services such as housing support workers, rent supplements and a nurse – all to be offered through facilities such as the Warming Room, YES and Four Counties Addictions.

“The funding is not time-limited and is expected to be ongoing ,” states the city staff report.

Livestreaming of councillors’ 2018 budget talks is available starting Monday night on The Examiner’ s website.

There will also be blogging and tweets from the meetings, which are scheduled to begin at 5 p.m. on Monday from City Hall.