‘A monitoring tool’: City of Bend creating new ‘Houseless Fund’ in budget to track efforts to help homeless
(Update: Adding video, comments from city finance director, housing director)
BEND, Ore. (KTVZ) -- The city of Bend is creating a new Houseless Fund in its 2021-23 biennial budget -- not for directing more funds to the various efforts to reduce homelessness, but more to better track and focus those moves and their costs.
More than $7 million will be moved out of the city's General Fund and into the new, separate fund. City councilors will be holding a public hearing Wednesday evening to approve a supplemental budget and budget adjustments that includes creation of the fund.
City Finance Director Janette Townsend said Tuesday about $3 million has been spent by the city on homeless programs so far in the two-year budget cycle, leaving $4 million through the middle of this year.
"It's really more of a monitoring tool," Townsend said. "Right now, in the current biennium, we included the houseless operations in our General Fund."
City Housing Director Lynne McConnell said she believes the budget change will provide more transparency to the public.
"It takes a lot of work behind the scenes to pull those numbers together and make sure we're giving the correct information to the members of our public," McConnell said.
The $7 million in the Houseless Fund will be spent in part on providing temporary housing and access to resources. The primary funding source for programs to assist the houseless comes from state and federal grants.
"It has to do with supporting the operations of our two full-time permanent shelters, the Stepping Stone Shelter on Division, as well as the Lighthouse Navigation Center on Second Street, and any other related expenses having to do with that," McConnell said.
Townsend said the programs have evolved since the initial two-year budget.
"We didn't really have all of those funding sources kind of received and secured, you know, kind of at the beginning of the biennium as we worked our way through," she said. "We were able to record those, and now feel like they're substantial enough that they weren't pulling them into their own fund."
According to the city of Bend, a public hearing is required whenever funds will be adjusted by more than 10%.
Along with transferring existing funds for homeless-related programs into the new fund, the budget changes are happening to reflect recent activity in other areas as well, from Bend Airport upgrades to the addition of an Automated Parking Guidance System downtown.
