The Salvation Army’s contract to operate TRAC, the city’s largest homeless shelter, will expire on December 31, but the Spokane City Council pulled a vote to approve a contract extension just hours before tonight’s meeting. With the deadline inching closer and council taking next week off, that leaves very little time to reach a decision on the future of the shelter.
TRAC is the only overnight shelter in outgoing Mayor Nadine Woodward’s legally mandated emergency shelter plan, and the lives of 400 unhoused people who use it to escape the cold every night hang in the balance.
The council continues to be hung up over a botched request for proposal (RFP) process that saw Jewels Helping Hands (JHH) beat the Salvation Army to take over shelter operations starting January 1, only to have an appeal filed by the Salvation Army drag the process out indefinitely. According to Neighborhood, Housing, and Human Services division Director Kim McCollim, who has been overseeing the RFP process after Community Housing and Human Service Director Jenn Cerecedes departed in September (and hasn’t been replaced yet), there was no formal appeals process that McCollim was aware of. Without an appeals process, the appeal ground the contracting process with JHH to a halt.
This leaves the city with few options, none of which council members like, and none of which include — at least not yet — actually awarding the contract to the organization that won the RFP process. Without clarity on a path forward, with winter bearing down and time on the existing contract running out, the council has been working to buy time.
As of last Friday, some city council members were under the impression that they would be voting tonight on an amendment to update the Salvation contract viewed by RANGE that would cost $3.7 million — which would have paid the Salvation Army through April — and which also came with an option for the city to cancel it at any time. But the amendment listed in the council’s consent agenda, as of this morning, had reverted back to an original solution proposed by McCollim at a Study Session meeting on November 16. This original amendment would cost more (nearly $4 million), had no cancellation clause built in, and had already seen significant criticism from council members across the political spectrum.
Per the council’s decision at today’s briefing session, the vote will be delayed until Thursday, December 14. A couple different iterations of the contract have floated around, but Council President Betsy Wilkerson and freshman Council Member Paul Dillon were optimistic that the version advancing to a vote would include the cancellation clause.
Neither version had a plan for what to do about Revive Counseling, the service provider working to connect the residents of TRAC with resources, whose contract with the city was also expiring at the end of December.
Around 1 pm today, Councilmember Zack Zappone forwarded RANGE yet another draft of the budget amendment proposed for tonight’s meeting. This third version reverted back to the cheaper $3.7 million price tag and kept the cancellation clause. The packet also included a proposal to renew the contract with Revive for four months at a rate of $50,000 per month. Per city council rules, council members could have moved to substitute this new version at the briefing session held directly prior to the 6 pm legislative session.
Instead, the agenda item was yoinked altogether.
“We pulled the TRAC agenda item because there were more questions than answers,” Wilkerson said, adding that council members had asked for greater specificity about the Salvation Army’s indirect service fee, funding sources to continue to contract Revive and cancellation clause in writing. The council has learned its lesson to have all the details ironed out and in writing first.
Wilkerson concluded, “We're not going to play the cleanup game afterwards.”
