By Dominic Abassi

Nanaimo Council approves $300K for Discontent City ‘closure plan’

Oct 3, 2018 | 8:50 AM

Nanaimo Council approved another expensive band-aid to mitigate the impacts of homelessness when Discontent City disbands.

During an in-camera meeting Monday evening, councillors voted in favour of a $301,000 package of initiatives recommended by staff. The funding will be pulled from the predicted 2018 surplus.

Mayor Bill McKay said interim chief administrative officer Jake Rudolph consulted with staff and asked what resources they expected would be needed when a Supreme Court imposed deadline of Oct. 12 forces people to leave the downtown encampment.

“It’s an absolute realization there’s going to be an impact to the outside community when that camp closes and we need to address it,” McKay told NanaimoNewsNOW.

In most cases the spending expands on services already in place, like needle pickup, garbage collection in parks, security and cleaning focused on the downtown core. Outside of the downtown area, it provides for additional custodians and employees to deal with an expected influx of people camping in parks.

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McKay said the reality is there will be some people in tent city who either don’t get or simply don’t want housing and support.

“We have to concern ourselves with the impact of those individuals living in the city.”

Nanaimo’s current shelter spaces are perpetually full and neither the province nor the City have proposed a tangible solution to the question of where the over 300 tent city residents will go once they are evicted.

The City and BC Housing held several meetings this week — including a planned in-camera session with Council Wednesday — to discuss plans around a piece of property offered by the City last week for temporary housing. No details have been released.

Since mid-2017, Council committed over $500,000 to a variety of programs designed to limit the impact of homelessness on the community. But many called them temporary band-aids which provided no actual solution to the root problems.

The initiative expected to have the most benefit was a daytime drop-in centre for homeless people to congregate and access services. Council committed $100,000 in “seed money” to allow staff to begin planning and leveraging additional senior government funding.

But more than six months after the drop-in centre concept was approved there has been no reported progress. The most recent update from staff estimated the cost had ballooned to $650,000 with no location identified.

The latest $300,000 spending package is on top of the previous funding and does not include direct costs associated with tent city, which at last report were over $150,000.

“I think I’m starting to really agree with the belief it makes financial sense to get homeless people into housing with wraparound supports,” McKay said. “However, that’s not a municipal issue. We need the provincial and federal governments at the table with us.”

dom@nanaimonewsnow.com

On Twitter: @domabassi