SALT LAKE CITY — Both former Utah House Speaker Greg Hughes and the Pioneer Park Coalition, an organization that advocates for Salt Lake City's Rio Grande neighborhood, are sounding off concerns about delays of three homeless resource centers meant to replace the Road Home's downtown shelter.
They worry tricky spring weather impacting construction hasn't been the only issue causing delays, questioning why lease agreements between the centers' owner, Shelter the Homeless, and homeless providers haven't yet been signed — even now as the original, state-mandated June 30 deadline for the downtown shelter's closure has come and gone.
"I'm highly frustrated and a bit worried," Hughes told the Deseret News on Tuesday. "Whether it be the weather or construction, those are easily and understandably outside of everyone's control. But things like drafting documents, providing them for review, getting them executed, those are things … that could have and should have happened long ago."
State and Shelter the Homeless officials say operating contracts and leases have not contributed to the delays. Though they acknowledge work on the contracts could have begun sooner, they say everyone involved is working their hardest to get the homeless resource centers up and running as soon as possible.
"We have all the partners working at the table, meeting multiple times a week with the same goal in mind to get these resource centers open, and we believe we're going to do that," said Christina Davis, a spokeswoman for the Utah Department of Workforce Services, which is helping coordinate the transition to the new centers.
"Has everything gone exactly perfectly? Probably not," she said. "But we're in a good spot right now, and we're moving forward and we're working to meet those deadlines."
Hughes' comments come a day after the Pioneer Park Coalition circulated a newsletter stating "we are worried that the leaders you trusted to help the homeless community and your neighborhood have let us all down."
The statement indicated service providers "have not been provided executed leases, budgets or other operational documents" ahead of the homeless resource centers' openings.
Originally, the resource centers were slated to open by last month, but Shelter the Homeless has pushed back the openings several times, citing weather and construction delays. The 300-bed men's center in South Salt Lake was also delayed after it got a late start due to delays in the city's permitting process.
Davis called Pioneer Park Coalition's newsletter "frankly incendiary," and she said it "didn't seem like an honest effort to provide accurate information." She noted that information about the delays have been publicly available for "some time" and called statements about providers not being provided documents "inaccurate."
Davis said two out of three operational contracts between the state and the homeless providers (Volunteers of America and the Road Home) have been signed, but the third for Catholic CommunityServices has not yet been signed, but is currently in legal review. The two other contracts were signed June 19 and June 20, and went into effect Monday.
However, lease agreements between Shelter the Homeless and the providers are still in the works. Preston Cochrane, executive director of Shelter the Homeless, said Tuesday they should be ready "any minute," indicating they could be finalized in the coming days or week.
The timing of the contracts, which enable providers to solidify their budgets, hire and train staff, and gear up to move into the shelters, hasn't caused delays, Davis and Cochrane said.
"The lease agreements aren't slowing anything down at this point," Davis said. "I guess you could have said they should have been done before, but they're not slowing anything down."
The 200-bed women's shelter and 200-bed mixed gender shelters were on track, but last month Shelter the Homeless released an updated timeline. The women's Geraldine E. King Resource Center is now slated to open to clients in late July or into August, while the mixed gender Gail Miller's Resource Center will open in late August and into September.
The men's resource center in South Salt Lake is now slated to open at the end of September or into October, meaning the downtown shelter is not expected to shutter until this fall, as temperatures begin to cool and more people begin to seek shelter.
Hughes — who stepped into the city, county and state's efforts to overhaul Utah's homeless system last year, and was a big driver behind Operation Rio Grande before his term ended — said he didn't want to be "critical" because "we're all on the same team," but he said the June 30 deadline written into state code "wasn't arbitrary."
"It was meant to be done in the summer, when bed counts are lower and transition from existing shelter to new resource centers would give you the highest rate of success," Hughes said. "When you miss that deadline, it's not an emphasis on days or weeks, it's the time of the year we're talking about."
Scott Howell, a former state senator and member of the Pioneer Park Coalition, told the Deseret News in a recent interview he's concerned the pattern of delays could result in a failure to close the downtown shelter altogether.
"Why, if it is just about rain and construction, haven't those contracts been fulfilled and the money raised in order to support them?" Howell asked.
Tiffanie Provost, chairwoman of Pioneer Park Coalition's board of directors, and Dave Kelly, the board's vice chairman, also shared that concern.
"I don't think there's the same accountability and the same appetite to deal with a subject that is very emotional. But the total failure on this … is the craziest thing," Howell said. "We're not helping the homeless."
Provost added: "It's unfair to the homeless service providers and to the homeless" to leave the lease agreements and contracts to the final months.
In response to an inquiry for this story, a Catholic Community Services spokeswoman referred the Deseret News to state officials.
Davis said the state, which now owns the downtown shelter, is indeed going to close the facility, "and it's going to close after the three shelters are operational."
Cochrane said Shelter the Homeless' "primary concern" is to ensure the homeless centers are completed and "all services providers are fully operational to meet the needs of those individuals who will be transitioning from the downtown community shelter to the new homeless resource centers in the best way possible."
Cochrane said when Shelter the Homeless revised its timeline several weeks ago "it was no surprise to anybody that the timeline had been changed." He noted that the state's Homeless Coordinating Committee, the body in charge of dispersing funding to homeless providers, hadn't finalized budgets until May, which led to contracts being finalized in June and July.
"We're moving as quickly as we can to make sure we are cognizant of the time frame and sticking to the schedule as much as possible, but we don't want to jeopardize clients," he said. "We want to make sure we're doing it right."