The Board of Directors of the Sioux City Warming Shelter announced they will close the doors on October 1st due to a lack of community support and declining resources.
Board member Dave Ferris says shelters in nearby cities get support from several sources. He says they received 50-thousand dollars from the city this year after asking for help for many years.”Well, we’ve tried everything. I’ve been on the board for, I don’t know, five years now, six years, and it’s an extremely expensive operation,” Ferris says.
The shelter was founded more than a decade ago to provide a place for the homeless during the winter, and has been open more recently in the summer as well. Ferris says it has been busy. “Wintertime, we’re averaging 125 to 135 people a night in there. And one of the saddest things is right now we’re closed during the summer. We’re only open for families and for the handicapped,” he says. “And you know, we got like 35 people in there. There’s like eight to 15 kids in there right now.”
Ferris believes the city will see more expenses with the shelter closing. “Oftentimes now the police will pick someone up off the street, intoxicated, drunk, drugs. They’ll drop them off at the warming shelter, and now they’re going to drop them off at Mercy Medical Center, Unity Point,” Ferris says. “Every time a police officer takes someone off the street to the E-R room, two police officers sit there for several hours and then if they wind up going to jail, okay, now we’re spending money on jail. What this will cost the city will be hundreds of thousands of dollars, I believe.”
Shelter staff will be working to help those residents transition to alternative housing and no new clients are being accepted.
(By Woody Gottburg, KSCJ, Sioux City)