County to explore converting senior center to homeless shelter

Tribune Record Gleaner The Clark County Board of Supervisors has approved repurposing the Neillsville Senior Center as a homeless shelter, in order to more effectively use a space that has been a net loss to the county for the past few years, and after hearing about the significant need for transitional housing in the county and the inability of county departments to handle the growing number of requests for assistance by homeless individuals.

The Neillsville Senior Center at 602 Oak St. has served as a congregate meal site for elderly individuals and as a social gathering place, but has been used less and less in recent years.

“With a heavy heart, the ADRC (Aging and Disability Resource Center) committee made the decision that we can no longer afford it. For the the last three years, we have continued to go into debt,” said Lynne McDonald, ADRC director, at the Aug. 17 county board meeting.

The building ran a deficit of $11,802.71 in 2021, $2043.79 in 2022 and $1,735.90 in 2023, with a net running loss of $3,017.96 as of July 31 of this year.

“We’ve had the building since 1978 and we really don’t want to see the building sold,” said McDonald. “A lot of hard work has gone into maintaining the building.”

The property has had $30,250 in grant money invested in it since 2018, with grants coming from the Adler-Clark Community Commitment Foundation and the Marguerite Listeman Foundation. A large part of that, $20,000, was used for siding the building and another $7,242 went toward new windows.

McDonald said that for the last year, one group has used the building to play cards for four hours a week and the rest of the time it has sat empty. The public property committee made the recommendation that the property be used by the Clark County Housing Coalition to address homelessness and be turned into some type of homeless shelter, to be run by an outside nonprofit or for-profit agency.

“We would need to do contracted services, because no department has the manpower to take that on,” said McDonald.

She said there were several possible organizations, such as Catholic Charities, C.C. We Adapt and the American Red Cross, and she already had a couple of leads for potentially interested parties. With contracted services – whether it was an emergency shelter, transitional living center or something in between – the liability would be put on the contracted partner. The partner would be responsible for enforcing the rules of the home, so it would be hands-off for the county once the client was put in the care of the home. The services received by the clients would be billed to Medicaid or whatever applicable service, so those costs would not fall back on the county.

Jessica Clark, county social services business office manager, spoke to the need for a homeless shelter in Clark County. Currently, the only county shelter is the House of Mercy in Loyal, which is for women and children and has limited openings. She said the county’s resources were inadequate to meet the “very rapidly growing problem.”

She said in one recent week, she had five families contact her looking for housing assistance, with five to seven kids per family.

“The clients we are seeing are of varying demographics. Homelessness truly affects every age and background. When people come to our department and they’ve been displaced or evicted, they’re a victim of domestic violence or whatever the situation may be, they have nowhere to go. We are a resource desert. We have extremely limited options,” said Clark.

She said her department can give out hotel vouchers from the Salvation Army, but those are only available if the person can prove they have a family member or friend to stay with after two or three nights. She also said the homeless shelter in Medford, for example, was experiencing an influx of people, so they are only wiling to take people from their own county, not referrals from other counties. The larger shelters, including Wausau, La Crosse and Eau Claire use a lottery system because they only have so many beds per night, so each person waiting in line receives a number and if their number is called, they get a bed; otherwise they are turned away. Clark also said that many of her clients don’t have any mode of transportation to travel to a shelter or to work.

She said any form of homeless shelter would provide another option to help people, even if on a temporary basis, while the county looked for a longer-term option.

“If we had a building, somewhere we could allow temporary assistance, say, an emergency shelter, when they come to our office and it is 4 o’clock on a Friday or 4 o’clock on a Thursday and it’s a holiday weekend, and I have people that have been displaced and have nowhere to go, a building would allow us 30 days, 60 days, 90 days and we can transition them from their dire, drastic need or situation to kind of help put them on their feet and move them along and keep them moving forward,” said Clark.

She also said it would be a cost savings for the county, because county workers were spending a lot of time trying to help homeless individuals on top of their regular, full-time jobs.

“We had an individual that was transferred here from out of county unexpectedly and it took myself, Shauna (O’Keefe, social services director) and Lynne (McDonald) two full days. So you have three benefitted, salaried positions that literally spent two full days trying to assist one individual because of the high level of needs and care that individual needed, and we had nowhere to put them and nowhere for them to go,” said Clark.

She pointed out that often times it’s not just housing, but food, water, clothing, medical/dental services, transportation and employment all need to be provided.

Clark couldn’t emphasize enough the homelessness problem the county was facing. Between May 2022 and Dec. 31, 2022, the county saw 24 individuals (not including family members of those individuals) who were displaced or homeless. But that doesn’t account for all the people who don’t seek help formally.

“We have had numerous reports of people that are living in our county parks and forests right now, in tents or campers. We have people living in hunting shacks. We have people couch-hopping. We have people sleeping in the bushes behind IGA. There’s people living under bridges. They’re all over; they just don’t want to be seen,” said Clark. “The big difference here versus say when I lived in Madison, in Madison there’s tents and sleeping bags up and down by the capital where it’s visible; here, everyone knows everyone, so they don’t want to be seen. It’s very easy to be more secluded in rural America when you have wooded areas, hunting shacks and campers and your auntie’s couch to sleep on.”

Although they recognized the need, county supervisors had a few questions before they were willing to throw their weight behind Resolution 22-8-23, “Approving the repurposing of the Neillsville Senior Center.”

County supervisor Butch Trunkel asked how many families Clark thought the Neillsville building could hold. Clark said it would depend on how they wanted to set up the facility, whether for temporary emergency housing or months-long placements for individuals who would take longer to reintegrate into society. But, she said, if they put down cots, it would maybe hold five families.

Supervisor Randy Sebesta said it would cost maybe $50,000 to $60,000 to remodel the house to make it fit for a homeless shelter, and asked who would pay for that. McDonald said there were numerous grants available through the state homeless coalition, so if approved, they would join that.

“So no county dollars would be used?” asked Sebesta. “That would be the plan,” replied McDonald. County finance manager Terri Domaszek pointed out that the county had been losing money on the property the last few years anyway, so county levy dollars had been spent to help keep it functional. In 2019, the Fund 250 levy was used to redo the roof for $22,900.

Sebesta also asked why the county couldn’t just sell the property to the organization that was going to be running the shelter, if they were going to be providing all the services, anyway. McDonald said she would rather not, because she wanted the county to retain some control over the property and ensure it’s being used to help county residents.

“It’s not the best option (to sell) because we’ve put probably $75,000 of grant and county money into that property that we’re probably not going to get back if sold,” said McDonald. “We don’t want to blow $50,000 of our Listeman money. We wouldn’t want to upset our donors.”

Supervisor Fred Schindler asked if the property were to become a homeless shelter, how much control the county would have over who would be there.

“Will we have people that are accountable?” he asked. “The housing committee would have to come up with the parameters for who would be eligible to stay there,” said McDonald.

Clark said one option would be to make Neillsville be a short-term site before a client moved to transitional housing in Eau Claire, for example. She said that at least one contractor they were looking at had other housing partners in place.

McDonald also clarified that by the supervisors voting for this resolution, they were by no means declaring it a done deal, but rather were showing their initial support to move the project forward. The property committee would still need to come back to the board before renovations were made to the property, financial agreements were put in place or before entering into contract with an organization that was going to run the shelter.

“Social services, community services and the ADRC — they all came to the human services committee with the exact same problem,” said supervisor Joe Waichulis. “By approving this resolution, it lets us get a jump start… It lets the committee get started at looking into grants so we can get off the levy money and onto grant money.”

The county board passed the resolution 24-2, with three absent. Sebesta and Duane Boon voted against it.

McDonald said the next step will be for the public property committee to reconvene as a group, after which they will take the project to the City of Neillsville and determine if the property meets zoning requirements. McDonald has already met with Neillsville Mayor Dewey Poeschel and Neillsville Police Chief Jim Mankowski. She said they were in support of the idea.

“We have at least 12 people in Neillsville that are living on the streets, not counting squatters in homes and couch surfers,” said McDonald. “If we can’t get the zoning for a shelter, even a resource center would help. Our responsibility is to try and get resources to the people who need them.”