Discussions at this week’s Covington Board of Commissioners caucus meeting suggested the city and homelessness service providers were making headway on revisions to the local ordinance governing the operations of homeless shelters.
City Attorney David Davidson and the commissioners discussed a meeting between city staff and shelter operators in late November.
“We’re communicating here,” Davidson said. “We are also trying our best to engage with the neighborhood and the people in the neighborhood who are concerned.”
He then qualified his statement.
“There are competing interests here,” Davidson said, “and trying to come to terms with all of those competing interests on the homeless shelter and the effect that it’s having on that neighborhood is a tough nut, but we’re working on it.”
The November meeting he referenced was not open to the public.
Although the ordinance would apply to every homeless shelter in the city, much of the discussion has focused on the Emergency Shelter of Northern Kentucky, located in the city’s Westside neighborhood just across the street from Linden Grove Historic Cemetery and Arboretum on Holman Street.
Operating on a low-barrier model, the shelter provides overnight sheltering services with few barriers to entry, one of the few organizations in the NKY region to do so. Guests to the shelter do not have to undergo background checks or drug tests, for instance.
In August, a group of Westside neighbors brought some concerns about the shelter to the commission’s attention. They called attention to what they viewed as a spike in illegal or otherwise dangerous activity seemingly connected to the shelter’s residents, including several instances of alleged harassment in the area around the shelter as well as the cemetery. Several former employees have also spoken out against labor conditions within the shelter.
Tensions around the shelter’s effects on the neighborhood flared up again at a listening session between some Westside residents and the shelter’s leadership at the end of November.
Aaron Wolpert and Nicole Erwin, two Westside residents who initially leveled complaints against the shelter in August, reaffirmed their concerns to the shelter’s Executive Director Kim Webb and Board President Andrew Schierberg, especially regarding safety and security, at the listening session.
“The overall theme is not feeling safe,” Erwin said.
Specifically, Erwin talked about an incident from September in which Floyd Lee, a registered sex offender who lists the shelter as his address on the Kentucky Sex Offender Registry, exposed himself to a woman who was sitting in the cemetery. Police reports indicate that Lee was charged with indecent exposure, something Lee later admitted, according to the report.
Lee is one of three registered sex offenders who list the shelter as their address in the Kentucky Sex Offender Registry. The other two are Raymond Wilder and Amador Guzman.
The shelter allows guests to use the shelter’s street address to receive mail, apply for government documents, register to vote and apply for jobs, staff said, in hopes that it will enable them to become more independent over time. To protect their guests’ privacy, they said they could not share if and when Lee — or anyone else — was staying at the shelter.
The police report also redacted Lee’s address information, meaning that LINK nky could not with certainty confirm if Lee had been consistently staying at the shelter at the time of his arrest, despite the information on the sex offender registry.
In response, Webb said that guests are mandated to comply with law enforcement if they have an open warrant and the police are called to the shelter during their stay.
Moreover, Webb said, the point of the shelter is to be open to anyone who needs services, and adding additional security measures, like checking the sex offender registry for all of their guests, would undermine that mission.
“That is not a best practice for a low barrier shelter,” Webb said.
Another issue brought up during the listening session related to employee safety during the night. Webb stated the shelter always aimed to have at least three staff members in the building during the night and would cancel sheltering services if only one employee was available.
The city’s ordinance requires shelter operators “have a plan to minimize disruption or damage caused by clients’ behavior on properties located within two blocks of the facility,” which Davidson told LINK that the city has trouble enforcing, arguing it presented something of a double standard.
“We require bars and restaurants to maintain not only their bar and restaurant but the things around them,” Davidson said, “but not two blocks away.”
The ordinance also requires shelters to submit data on their services to the Kentucky Homeless Management Information System, a state database for tracking homelessness. Yet, multiple software platforms are available for such data collection, making centralizing the process difficult.
“One of the things on the data that we’re trying to capture is we’re trying to figure out where these homeless people are from,” said Commissioner Ron Washington, who first suggested the idea of revising the ordinance. “… There’s a feeling in our communities that our suburban partners and our cities should be also tackling this issue.”
A draft of the new ordinance did not appear at the meeting, and Davidson was hesitant to provide any timelines for when it might appear.
The next meeting of the Covington Board of Commissioners will take place on Tuesday, Jan. 9 at 6 p.m. at Covington City Hall.
