Olympia enlists new management at downtown homeless mitigation site
The city’s homeless mitigation site in downtown Olympia has new management as of Wednesday, the city announced. Catholic Community Services (CCS) took over for the Olympia Union Gospel Mission (UGM), which had managed the site since it was established in December 2018.
Under the new one-year contract, the city is increasing staffing and support at the site with the goal to connect more people staying there with the resources they need to transition into housing or access more support more quickly.
Some people who arrived the day the mitigation site opened remain there, according to the city’s Home Fund Manager Cary Retlin. The goal of the city and county, he said, is for anybody’s experience with homelessness to be “brief, rare, and one time.”
“One of the things we learned in our first year was that we started that project staffing it as if it were a campground,” Retlin told The Olympian. “This year, in this contract, it’s going to be staffed much more like a shelter.”
The city set up the temporary designated campsite in a parking lot at Olympia Avenue and Franklin Street Northeast in response to a dramatic increase in visible homelessness over a short period of time and a federal court decision that said cities can’t prosecute people for sleeping on public property when they have nowhere else to go.
Under the previous contract, Retlin said there could be as few as one staff person at the site during the day and two at night. No staff members were dedicated to helping with housing searches or housing support services. Instead, the city relied on other systems and services to do that work, Retlin said.
CCS already manages the Drexel House campus on Olympia’s east side, where there’s a 16-bed emergency shelter and 86 permanent supportive housing units. It provides case management, referrals, transportation, and supportive services.
And the city contracted with CCS in 2018 to staff a grant-funded program that matches “high utilizers” of emergency services with peer navigators, according to The Olympian’s previous reporting. It also manages the Community Kitchen program in the Salvation Army building downtown.
The peer navigator program, called Familiar Faces, involves staff who check in with clients regularly with the goal to cut back their use of emergency services and guide them toward permanent housing and other resources they need, according to Gabe Ash, program manager for all of CCS’s local homeless adult services.
Navigators have been going to the mitigation site regularly to work with clients already, Ash said.
“By having a provider on this site who is connected to other service systems, it’s going to help us quantify who is there, what services they need, and how quickly are we connecting them to our services,” Retlin said.
Union Gospel Mission will still manage Olympia’s Secure Storage program, which provides storage options for unsheltered people, and some UGM staff will now work as outreach workers under CCS, according to the city.
The new management will staff the site with two trained outreach workers 24 hours per day, seven days per week. Those staff members will be supported by case workers and “other professionals,” according to the city’s announcement of the change.
A site supervisor will be working 40 hours per week through CCS, Retlin said, and a Medicaid-funded case manager will provide housing search, support, and placement services for people living there.
“The other piece is, we have learned in the last year that the mitigation site is home to some of our most vulnerable folks in our community who have a lot of barriers for housing,” Retlin said. “And so, this is a bigger investment in helping those folks transition to housing.”
That investment translates to a bigger price tag: The original contract for management of the site was just under $100,000 per year, then the city amended the contract last May and monthly costs with UGM rose to about $23,000 per month, Retlin said, which would equal about $276,000 per year.
The new contract with CCS is for just over $547,000 for the year — just under twice the cost of the amended UGM contract. Most of that money is slated for staff salaries and benefits.
Some of the funding comes from the Home Fund and some from utility tax revenue, Retlin said.
He says this sort of investment actually saves the community money long-term. The sooner people find housing, the sooner their health improves and behaviors like substance use decline.
“Ultimately, helping folks get housed and shelter: One, it’s the right thing to do and it’s part of our values in our community,” Retlin said. “And, in the long run, it also saves the community money in terms of emergency room visits and other costs like that.”
The COVID-19 public health crisis has added challenges to staffing and launching the site, said Ash, but it’s fully staffed and CCS is consulting Thurston County Public Health and Social Services in its work to screen people at the site and keep them safe.
“This work is something we’re excited to do, it’s in line with our mission to serve those who are most vulnerable and most in need,” Ash said. “We’re just excited to partner with the site participants who are staying there, to help them connect more into services and provide some support staff on site 24 hours per day.”
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