After a four-hour special meeting on Jan. 12 debating emergency warming shelters at community centres, the city and Vancouver Park Board general manager maintain the discretion to keep overnight shelters open to marginalized people in extreme cold weather.
In what was only the second such meeting in at least seven years, six Park Board commissioners and 22 speakers addressed a motion brought forward by the NPA’s Sarah Kirby-Yung to close two existing warming centres and not open them again until ensuring such decisions be made only with approval of elected members of the board.
Read more: Park board debates future of warming centres
A vocal gallery added drama to the meeting and, although debate was heated, partisan and sometimes disjointed as Green commissioner Michael Wiebe ran his first meeting as chairman, the motion was always likely to fail at the feet of a deadlocked board since Vision’s Catherine Evans was out of the country and the remaining six members split evenly along ideological if not strict party lines.
Indeed, after various amendments and amendments to those amendments on Kirby-Yung’s initial motion, the three NPA commissioners voted in favour of immediately closing the warming shelters until staff has more training and support in serving vulnerable, high-needs populations such as drug users, addicts and people with mental disabilities. While the remaining three commissioners agreed the immediate need to serve the city's most vulnerable was more important than the short-term autonomy of the board.
The two Green Party members, Wiebe and Stuart Mackinnon, along with independent commissioner Erin Shum, voted to maintain the status quo and empower the general manager to decide what park board assets are available in emergency situations until the issue can be further researched by staff and protocol determined by the elected board.
On Jan. 13, the park board decided to reopen the West End community warming centre as of 10 p.m. It had closed earlier in the week. In a press release, the board said community services will be supervising the program, supported by park rangers and security staff. Other warming centres that remain open include Britannia Community Centre, Carnegie Centre, Evelyn Saller Centre and the former Quality Inn on Howe Street.
"A decision on continuing the operation of the West End community centre will be made in consultation with city colleagues over the weekend, pending the Extreme Weather Alert update," the release added.
West End Community warming centre will reopen TONIGHT 10 pm w/@CityofVancouver & Park Rangers working w/ @WestEndCC to provide warm refuge pic.twitter.com/6qlStnwFo8
— Vancouver Park Board (@ParkBoard) January 13, 2017
The city is paying for the trial warming centres and between Dec. 17 and Jan. 5, spent roughly $40,000 on operation resources and staff costs, according to the city.
Creekside, another park board-operated centre used as a warming shelter, closed earlier in the week. Britannia, which remains open, is operated by an independent association that has housed now more than 2,000 people in nearly 20 nights of freezing weather.
The vast majority of speakers pleaded with commissioners to keep warming centres open. Among them was housing advocate Judy Graves, representatives with Pivot Legal Society and the Carnegie Community Action Project, a physician and a rabbi, both of whom volunteer in the Downtown East Side, former park board commissioner Aaron Jasper, and the neighbourhood’s NDP MLA, Spencer Chandra Herbert.
“I really hope we don’t lose any lives tonight while we are sitting here debating,” said West End resident, Drew Dennis.
Graves fought back her emotions and said, “There is a lot of trauma on my soul form people who have died,” before she recounted seeing an “obviously newly homeless man with six suitcases” sleeping on Denman Street.
“I know they are in the first two or three days of homelessness because by the time they’ve been out there for five days, most of those suitcases will be stolen,” said Graves. “They won’t own anything anymore.”
Jessica Hannon, the executive director of Megaphone magazine, said civic institutions have a public responsibility to serve all people and if they don’t meet those needs, the park board needs to find out why.
“Understand that when you talk about shutting down warming centres, you talk about putting the lives of my friends at risk,” she said.
Community centres were not given any warning before their doors were opened at the request of the city on Dec. 17 as emergency winter shelters, a shortcoming that might have prevented their sudden closure this week, said the president of the West End community centre association.
Dave Pasin said community centres do include homeless people among their regular patrons and would have continued to shelter them overnight during this prolonged cold snap, but because no protocol existed and not enough resources were available, he said staff were overwhelmed, felt unsafe and were ultimately burned out. Opening the community centres so suddenly was a “knee-jerk” need that otherwise should have been discussed and planned for in anticipation of such a crisis.
Pasin said needles were found popping out of garbage cans and that a person had urinated in the corner of one room. He also said staff was subject to verbal and physical altercations.
“There is nobody that would disagree with the fact that such a facility is needed in a time of extreme weather, however,” said Pasin, “I was never informed that our centre would be used as a warming shelter. The issue is with procedure.”
Problems escalated with the return of regular programming after the holiday break.
“The city has to provide the appropriate people at each and every centre,” he said, listing security, addictions counsellors and staff trained to support the mentally disabled. “You cannot have a great group of despaired people with a great group of ailments come together and expect them so sing Kumbaya.
“I regret we had to close our centre, but it came to the point where our staff was burned out,” said Pasin, the only representative to speak on behalf of the city’s 24 community centre associations.
