MORGANTOWN — Bartlett Housing Solutions, the Hope Hill Sobering Center Board of Directors and Morgantown Community Resources appear close to ironing out the details of Morgantown’s winter warming shelter.
Monongalia County Commission President Tom Bloom, who serves as an HHSC board member, said he’s hopeful that despite the holiday, a memorandum of understanding can be approved this week that will allow the shelter to be located within the 5,100-square-foot sobering center space on the first floor of Hazel’s House of Hope.
According to information provided to The Dominion Post, the warming shelter will likely operate between Dec. 15 and March 31, 2024.
It will open when temperatures fall below 39 degrees, though circumstances like precipitation and/or wind will be taken into consideration.
Shelter capacity restrictions will be dictated by the fire marshal.
These details are all pending approval from the HHSC Board as well as Morgantown Community Resources, the nonprofit board that is essentially the landlord and facilitator of the hotel-turned-social services hub on Scott Avenue.
The warming shelter issue has been looming since last winter’s shelter closed its doors at Hazel’s House of Hope in March.
By all accounts, there were issues. The shelter opened every day. There were too many people. Not enough staff and no dedicated space. The low-barrier shelter, which averaged some 60 individuals nightly, was basically using the building’s entrance and lobby space.
When that shelter closed, MCR indicated HHH would not be a good fit for that use moving forward.
Despite efforts to find a new shelter location and an agency to run it, that’s pretty much where things sat until Nov. 3, when two individuals — Dani Ludwig and Jennifer Powell — stepped forward with a plan to supervise a shelter at Sabra United Methodist Church with Milan Puskar Health Right providing fiscal oversight and hiring assistance.
This proposal ultimately touched off so much backlash in the surrounding Jerome Park neighborhood that Ludwig said she no longer felt safe locating the shelter there.
Less than a week after many in Jerome Park made their feelings known in a loud and combative public meeting held at the church, news of a potential move back to HHH began to trickle out.
This time, it’s expected things will be different.
The shelter will be weather-dependent, operated in a dedicated, confined space in the building with the oversight of Bartlett House, which already runs a shelter at HHH. Bartlett House previously announced its existing shelter would be expanded by 12 beds, from 28-40, over the winter.
Both the city of Morgantown ($30,000) and Monongalia County ($10,000) have put up funding for the emergency winter shelter.
Representatives of both have gone on record in recent weeks to say HHH is the logical location to house these activities.
“My preference is that it would go up at HHH. That’s what that whole operation was created for, the population who is indigent or struggling to care for themselves,” Morgantown City Manager Kim Haws told The Dominion Post on Nov. 8. “Frankly, that’s where it should be.”
As for the sobering center space post warming shelter, Bloom said the HHSC board is in talks with an organization to potentially take over the space from March through October 2024, when the sobering center lease expires.
Due to a lack of community use, the HHSC board voted in August that it would attempt to find an agency to take over the space and dissolve no later than the lease’s end.
