MISSOULA — The City of Missoula is taking another emergency action to help solve houselessness.
Mayor Jordan Hess announced a State of Emergency for houselessness and sheltering in Missoula. It's a decision that will allow the city to allocate emergency funds towards re-opening the Johnson Street Shelter.
The emergency winter shelter on 1919 North Avenue West closed on April 10, 2023. This past winter the shelter served almost 800 individuals, and at the time of its closing, 80 houseless people were still using the facility.
Closing the Johnson Street Shelter forced many people to sleep outside, as other shelters in Missoula are currently at capacity.
With a rise in people sleeping in city parks, the City of Missoula issued an emergency ordinance on June 5, making overnight camping on city land illegal. This ordinance will remain valid through the reopening of the Johnson Street Shelter.
Hess announced the houselessness State of Emergency at 12:15 p.m. on Friday during a press conference outside Missoula City Hall.
“We’ve been working for weeks, really a couple of months, to try and come up with a longer-term solution, and the state of emergency frees up some funding for us to reopen the Johnson Street Emergency Shelter,” Hess said.
The shelter will be reopened using city and county money, emergency mill levies and non-profit support. They will also use funds intended for this year's upcoming winter sheltering. Because the mill levies will be issued as an emergency, they will not be voted on by the public.
The city says this accumulation of money will not cover the entire cost of the shelter, and they are unsure how long they will be able to keep it open on these funds. The city, county and non-profit organizations involved will work to raise the money needed to maintain the Johnson Street Shelter through the winter.
The total annual cost to keep the shelter open is $2.1 million.
Hess emphasized that this is a very short-term solution, and the City of Missoula will need to continue to brainstorm ways to open a year-round, permanent shelter. The Johnson Street building will not last long-term without extensive renovations.
“This emergency declaration sets the stage for the work that we need to do in the short term,” Hess said. “It sets the stage for us to be able to take care of what is an acute problem. It does not deal with the medium-term to long-term problems, and we need to keep our eye on those problems, and we need to keep our eye on the solutions to these issues.”
Hess said the funding for long-term shelter will need community partnership between the city, county, non-profit and public sectors, “Together we will figure it out. Doing nothing is not an option."
Missoula County Commissioner Josh Slotnick also spoke at the conference, explaining that while the county is willing to support the City of Missoula through this issue, they will not be taking funds from other aspects of county government.
Still, Slotnick hopes to work together to find a solution.
“I’m proud that the county is going to stand with the city and our non-profit community to get the Johnson Street Shelter open again, get people a place to be,” he said. “Because by law, we cannot do enforcement of illegal camping unless we have a place for people to be.”
Hess said the city will help the Poverello Center hire new employees to staff the Johnson Street Shelter, but they will leave it to the non-profit organizations to run the new resources.
Missoula Economic Partnership CEO Grant Kier said at the conference that his organization will reach out to local businesses with stakes in this issue for donations and support. He said many businesses in Missoula will benefit from getting houseless people off of the streets.
“Ask them to deliver their expertise or funding to their capacity to support the programs to get this shelter open as quickly as possible and to get us on a path to a short-term fix.”
Poverello Center executive director Jill Bonny also spoke on Friday and said, as a non-profit, they are happy to help find a place for houseless people to sleep other than city streets and parks.
“We’re really excited to be a part of the solution,” she said. “Homelessness is not just a problem that affects individuals, it affects entire communities. It impacts public safety, public health, and the overall well-being of our city. When individuals are forced to sleep on the streets, they become more vulnerable, they’re also less likely to access healthcare, access to jobs, they can’t work with our homeless outreach team as easy, and that makes it more difficult for them to get back on their feet.”
Hess explained that a lack of attention from state and federal leaders on this issue has perpetuated houselessness in cities like Missoula. He exemplified Montana’s decision to remove mental health case management in 2017 as making “thousands of Montanans to be set up to fail.”
“Over the past number of decades, state and federal government have abdicated their traditional responsibilities to take care of folks living on the margins in our community,” he said. "We're facing an unprecedented humanitarian crisis in Missoula, throughout Montana, throughout the Pacific Northwest, and throughout the United States."
The city hopes to open the shelter as soon as possible, with a goal to do so within 90 days. Their first move on the building is to improve plumbing infrastructure.
Click here to read a letter that Hess sent to the Missoula City Council regarding the houselessness issue.
