In The News - 6/21/2024
RangeMedia
What Spokane’s buying with the last of its ARPA dollars
Trash clean-up, getting homeless services out of downtown and criminal justice: A look at the 14 projects Spokane will get with the last $5 million of ARPA funding.
Property acquisition to reduce homelessness downtown
The largest chunk of the remaining funds — roughly $1.875 million — is allocated to “property acquisition for reductions of impact of homelessness in the downtown core and/or for contractual services for implementation of a new shelter model outside of the downtown plan area expanded south to 11 Ave between Maple and Arthur.”
This idea came from Brown’s eleventh hour press release at the end of March, where she asked the council to consider using $6 million of ARPA funds to help both Catholic Charities’ House of Charity and Compassionate Addiction Treatment (CAT) move their facilities out of the downtown corridor.
Moving House of Charity, which was one of Brown’s pledges in her first state of the city address, has long been a hot button issue in Spokane.
Back in 2022, then-Mayor Nadine Woodward made the same pledge — to move the shelter out of downtown — but made little progress. Catholic Charities released a statement in 2023, blaming Woodward and stating, “All three sites identified by Catholic Charities were shovel ready, zoned correctly, and viable for the project. Two of those sites were rejected outright by the mayor. The third site was determined to be too close to the end of the Spokane Airport runway to be an appropriate location to provide adequate care and human dignity.”
Brown has faced similar challenges in her first months in office, with controversy quickly percolatingas her administration continues to search for a new building for Catholic Charities to move into.
The ARPA funding most recently approved by the council could ease some of those struggles by streamlining the process to purchase a building, but it is not yet set in stone that the money will go to either Catholic Charities or CAT. The funding has to be awarded through a public Request for Proposals (RFP) or Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA), which will be posted and reviewed by Brown’s administration.