State kept Cherry Street homeless shelter open for three more nights - what happens now?

Last week, Mayor Miro Weinberger chided the state for closing the homeless shelter it opened in a state-owned building on Cherry Street after just one week of operation, calling on Gov. Phil Scott and the Legislature to keep the shelter open indefinitely, given the unprecedented levels of "unsheltered homelessness" that Burlington has been experiencing.

As it turns out, someone in the state may have been listening. Last Friday, at about 9 p.m., Weinberger's director of communications, Samantha Sheehan, sent a "preliminary advisory" to local media, saying that as of 8:30 p.m. that evening the shelter at 108 Cherry St. was open and "accepting guests."

The next day, on Saturday, Sheehan sent out another advisory saying the shelter would accept guests on both Saturday and Sunday nights before closing, adding three nights to the original closure date of Thursday, March 21. Sheehan said the shelter was being operated with support from the Vermont Agency of Human Services and CVOEO (Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity), a Burlington-based nonprofit.

"The mayor saw the need to continue the shelter and advocated it stay open through the weekend," Sheehan told the Burlington Free Press in an email on Monday. "We are relieved the state finally came around and made it happen at the 11th hour. With the current and unacceptable rate of unsheltered homelessness, the mayor continues to believe the shelter should stay open and be improved."

More: Weinberger calls on state to keep Cherry Street homeless shelter open indefinitely

In addition to its short duration, Weinberger criticized the Cherry Street shelter for the way it was being operated in his remarks to reporters last week, calling it a "rushed, poorly planned, poorly executed effort." Weinberger cited the fact that there were no showers made available in the shelter, or space for storing belongings or weapons, adding that "many homeless people feel the need to carry weapons."

Weinberger: There are no 'alternate solutions' for Vermont's unsheltered homeless

For the first time, the state created four "short-term, transitional shelters," beginning on March 15 in Berlin, Brattleboro, Burlington and Rutland, according to a March 22 email from Eric Forand, the director of Vermont Emergency Management in the Department of Public Safety. The email last Friday was sent to inform everyone involved, including many state legislators, that "All shelter (sic) are now closed," which in the case of Burlington turned out to not be the case later that evening.

Forand said the shelters were opened to give "unsheltered individuals additional time to seek an alternate solution." But as Weinberger pointed out last week, there are no alternate solutions.

"I don't know where they're supposed to go in the current situation when you have almost no vacancies, no shelter capacity and social services are overwhelmed," Weinberger said. "We have a real problem and it has been durable for years now. We need more shelter capacity to deal with it."

Sheehan said in her email Monday that 12 people used the Cherry Street shelter in Burlington after it was supposed to close on Friday night. On Saturday night, the number of people using the shelter more than doubled to 26 people, followed by 38 people on Sunday night, more than tripling the number of people who showed up the first night the shelter was unexpectedly open.

The shelter closed for good after Sunday night.

Contact Dan D’Ambrosio at 660-1841 or ddambrosi@gannett.com. Follow him on X @DanDambrosioVT.

This article originally appeared on Burlington Free Press: Vermont keeps Burlington homeless shelter open three more nights