As temperatures drop, focus turns to warming centers for people who are homeless

As colder nights make themselves felt, advocates are urging authorities to team up earlier with service providers to inform people who are homeless about Sonoma County’s emergency plans for when temperatures drop into dangerous territory.

Some advocates are also calling for cities to reassess their policies about warming centers’ hours, and keep them open longer.

“It's very important that what it feels like being outside is understood by the people making these decisions,” said Gerry La Londe-Berg of Homeless Action!. "Then once the decisions are made, the people who are outside need to hear about it and know where to go. That's the primary thing we want, for the system to tell people very clearly where they should go.“

A list of recommendations that Homeless Action! released Friday also proposed that warming center protocols should take effect at between 42 and 45 degrees, rather than when there is a forecast of three nights below 32 degrees, a current threshold for the county’s emergency operations plan to kick in.

“Thirty two degrees might be workable for people in houses, it’s certainly not for people outside,” the proposal said.

The director of the county’s homelessness services division, Dave Kiff, said “during extreme temperature events, there is a lot of collaboration and communication” between law enforcement, mobile support teams, emergency officials, staff in cities where shelters are operating, and service providers “to share information about the weather event and where warming centers will be open.”

“That collaboration is part of the emergency operations plan,” Kiff said in an email. “These early-response officials interact most closely with persons who are unhoused, and have up-to-date information with them as they interact with our unhoused neighbors.”

He said that “while we respect what Homeless Action! is suggesting, it isn’t feasible” ― in terms of staffing, funding or the availability of shelter sites ― to operate warming centers during temperatures in the 40s.

Funds for warming centers

Meanwhile, two county supervisors have recommended that funds from a discretionary pool of money raised through tourism lodging taxes be steered toward Sebastopol and the Sonoma Valley for operating warming centers this winter.

“We’ll continue to fight for a long-term solution but in the meantime, we will try to use some of those discretionary funds to provide this critical resource for the community,” said 5th District Supervisor Lynda Hopkins, referring to herself and 1st District Supervisor Susan Gorin.

Hopkins has apportioned $10,000 to Sebastopol while Gorin has directed $25,000 to Sonoma.

Sebastopol Mayor Diana Rich said the city has $8,000 budgeted for warming and cooling centers. With that set aside, Hopkins’ funds ― plus contributions from the Sebastopol Community Center, volunteers, and homelessness services nonprofit West County Community Services ― the city will be able to run a facility this winter, although the plans are not final yet, Rich said.

“This isn’t a sustainable arrangement, but I have confidence in this town’s ability to make the most of what we have, to do what’s right, as we always do,” she said.

In Sonoma, Annie Falandes, founder of Homeless Action Sonoma (which is unrelated to Homeless Action!), said she declined to run a warming center to be set up in a city building on First Street because she doesn’t think only opening from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. when overnight temperatures fall to 32 degrees for three nights in a row is reasonable.

“By seven o’clock at night it's dark. If you're homeless, you have found your nest for the night. I mean that's like the most important thing you do all day is find out where you're going to spend the night,” Falandes said. “And to not know when the shelter is going to be open, to leave your nest and walk to it not knowing whether it's going to be open or not. They're not going to do it.”

Response to grand jury

An around-the-clock winter shelter her group operated last year in donated office space drew 20 to 40 people per night, depending on the weather, Falandes said, many more than the average of seven people a night who visited the city’s center on the eight nights it was open last year.

“I don’t think that these shelters are being opened the way they are because of bad intentions,” she said. “I think it’s just not understanding the homeless condition.”

La Londe-Berg said that Sonoma County responded well to a 2022-23 grand jury report that said it lacked and needed to develop and implement “formal policies and procedures for protecting unhoused people ... during cold weather emergencies.” But further steps can still be taken, he and others said.

“What we're asking is that their current plans get out to the street level. Soon,” he said.

“Ahead of time,” added Cheryl Rood, a former outreach worker with homelessness services provider Sonoma Applied Village Services, or SAVS, who still works with people who are homeless.

Hopkins agreed there is a need for earlier and more effective communication about the emergency plan protocols and warming center locations.

“Oftentimes, unsheltered individuals are not reading our county press releases, are not following the county's Facebook page,” she said. “And so the best way to get information to our most vulnerable community members is to work with those nonprofit organizations who are serving them. I do think that closer collaboration will help us.”

She added: “We often run into problems of silos in county government and just being able to have those real-time communications to let folks know what's going on. I think that we can tighten things up and make sure that we're working with our partners.”

You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 707-387-2960 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jeremyhay