TRAVERSE CITY: City kept Safe Harbor negotiations mum

Mar. 3—TRAVERSE CITY — When city officials disclosed in mid-January that they had drafted a memorandum of understanding to explore the feasibility of keeping the Safe Harbor homeless shelter open year-round, it appeared that the MOU would be the beginning of a community discussion.

But documents obtained by the Record-Eagle show that city officials, the Northwest Michigan Coalition to End Homelessness and others had already been deeply engaged in under-the-radar statecraft since last fall.

Working in secret, the documents show, they hired consultants and lined up financial support for a 12-month shelter that is currently prohibited by Safe Harbor's Special Land Use Permit.

Conversion to a year-round shelter also is prohibited by Safe Harbor's articles of incorporation, which state that the shelter is intended to operate only "during winter months."

Those efforts blew up on Friday, when Safe Harbor's board chairman, Christopher Ellalasingham, announced that the board would not submit a modified Special Land Use Permit. If approved, it would have permitted Safe Harbor to operate year-round.

In a press release and letter to city and county officials, Ellalasingham said keeping Safe Harbor open during the summer was "a decision that the community at-large and its elected officials need to make."

A cache of emails and other documents pertaining to the effort to keep Safe Harbor open this summer were obtained by the Record-Eagle on the condition that the sender not be identified. The information they contained was corroborated by others involved.

The Record-Eagle also filed a FOIA request on Feb. 22 for records pertaining to the proposal to keep Safe Harbor open year-round, but the city has not provided those records and, on Thursday, requested a 10-day extension.

The records show that interim City Manager Nate Geinzer began discussing the necessity of a 12-month shelter as early as last July. However, it was not until September that city officials and Ashley Halladay-Schmandt, director of the Northwest Michigan Coalition to End Homelessness, explicitly stated that their goal was to keep Safe Harbor open year-round.

In a six-page document dated September 2023 and titled "Opening Grand Traverse Summer Shelter," the executive summary says, "Because of the immediate crisis in The Pines and the current lack of PSH (permanent supportive housing) units, it is time to reconsider modifying Safe Harbor's Special Land Use Permit (SLUP) to allow year-round operation of temporary emergency shelter on this site."

The document identifies the "project hosts" as the city of Traverse City, Grand Traverse County and the Coalition to End Homelessness and says they "should begin preliminary conversations with potential funders who may be willing to support summer shelter operations beginning in April '24."

By that time, Blue Orange Consulting, a firm on Front Street headed by Leah McCallum, had already been assigned to the project by Halladay-Schmandt, who said she hired McCallum for a sum that she could not recall. Communications from McCallum show that she helped draft the "Opening Grand Traverse Summer Shelter" document.

It also shows that Rehmann, a Traverse City-based advisory firm, had already been retained to provide accounting and financial design services. Halladay-Schmandt said the city and county each chipped in $10,000 and that Rehmann was paid an undisclosed sum from that $20,000.

Halladay-Schmandt also recruited Sakura Takano, the CEO of Rotary Charities; Dave Mengebier, the CEO of the Grand Traverse Regional Community Foundation; and Kathy Huschke, executive director of the Oleson Foundation, to provide funding for summer operations at Safe Harbor.

"We will need your support to operationalize this emergency shelter early next year," Halladay-Schmandt wrote in an Oct. 12, 2023, email to the trio. "For example, there is no air conditioning at the existing Safe Harbor facility ... There will be staffing, food and general operations costs, and we'll need your help ... early next year."

Asked about the secretive nature of the discussions to convert Safe Harbor into a year-round shelter, Halladay-Schmandt said she didn't know "what level of transparency is required to the public from city staff." She noted that she runs a private nonprofit organization that is not bound by law to make the same public disclosures "as the city is required."

'It creates distrust'

Megan Wick, president of the Boardman Neighborhood Association, has read the city email traffic. She said she and other members of the association were stunned to learn the Memorandum of Understanding that city officials trotted out on Jan. 16 was not the beginning of the discussion about Safe Harbor, it was closer to the end of the discussion.

"The story that we have received publicly through the (city) planning commission, the city commission and the county commission meetings is that the MOU in January was the start of a conversation," Wick said. "After reading these documents, it's clear that there has been quite a robust plan in place since about last fall, at least.

"It's a bit disheartening to know that our government is not being transparent. ... It's disappointing and it creates distrust between the community and the municipality."

City Manager Liz Vogel, who succeeded Geinzer on Jan. 3, said she is sensitive to the perception that city officials were not candid with the public.

Vogel said it was her decision to publicly disclose the MOU because she was concerned that the discussions about keeping Safe Harbor open all year had occurred behind closed doors.

"Based on what I heard, we're looping Safe Harbor into a conversation that's already been happening with three other parties, and so the intent for me was to go, 'OK, let's slow things down. Let's explain to the public what we're trying to achieve.' And I think that's maybe what triggered the response (from the public) of 'What is this, what's going on?' "

Vogel said she was particularly alarmed by a nine-page memo that Geinzer sent to her and various other city and county officials on Dec. 18 as he was preparing to wind down his contract with the city.

Writing that "much more collaboration ... is needed regionally," Geinzer identified three new sources of revenue that the city could tap to address homelessness — excise taxes from cannabis sales, opioid settlement revenue and Community Development Block Grant funds.

Geinzer wrote that city revenue from cannabis sales — which he said had no spending restrictions — was projected at $828,000 for fiscal year 2024. He said opioid settlement revenue was projected at $33,480 ($416,677 over the next 18 years), but noted that the settlement did have spending restrictions. Finally, he wrote, the city could expect $372,000 in block grant funds, which also have spending restrictions.

Ignoring the fact that the county has not collaborated or cooperated with the city on several issues in recent years, ranging from enforcing a mask mandate at the Governmental Center to funding for a new Senior Center, Geinzer recommended that the city and county pool their cannabis and opioid revenues to support both the year-round operation of Safe Harbor and the purchase of permanent supportive housing units for the homeless.

"A lot of us were caught off-guard by that memo," Vogel said.

County: 'No concerns'

Although city records identified the county as a project partner, the county never signed the MOU. Nevertheless, the MOU identified the city, county, Safe Harbor and the Northwest Michigan Coalition to End Homelessness as partners in the effort to keep Safe Harbor open past its April 30 closing date.

However, city officials had reason to assume that the county was on board with the proposal because Deputy County Administrator Chris Forsyth had been in close communication with city officials, Halladay-Schmandt and McCallum from Blue Orange Consulting since late fall.

In an Oct. 13 email to McCallum, Geinzer and Halladay-Schmandt, Forsyth asked for an itemized list of costs to keep Safe Harbor open through the summer, including maintenance and planned capital improvements.

He also requested "documented complaints from adjoining businesses or residents."

By Jan. 8, Forsyth's concerns appeared to have been resolved. In an email he sent that day to City Attorney Lauren Trible-Laucht and others, Forsyth wrote that he had reviewed the proposed MOU and had "no concerns."

City and county officials may have had no concerns about the MOU, but members of the Boardman Neighborhood Association had plenty of them, particularly after learning how much time and effort had been expended on a project in their neighborhood that they knew nothing about.

In meetings held by city and county commissioners in February, neighborhood residents showed up in force, telling commissioners stories about harassment they and their children had endured from homeless residents.

They complained about drug use, vulgarity, trespassing and other disturbing behavior by Safe Harbor residents.

Some Boardman residents also expressed disappointment that their neighborhood had been pitted against the Central neighborhood. Central is the location of the homeless encampment at Division and 11th streets known as the Pines.

The Pines is widely regarded as a civic embarrassment that is both unsanitary and dangerous.

"I don't think we should be pitting neighborhoods against each other," Wick said. "But I think we can all agree that an emergency shelter where people are in crisis does not belong in the middle of anyone's neighborhood."

Negotiations

Most of the negotiations between the city, county, Safe Harbor and the coalition appear to have gone smoothly, with participants repeatedly congratulating each other for working hard to close the Pines and end chronic homelessness in the region by 2028 — the coalition's goal.

But the negotiations were not without controversy, including some tense exchanges between Geinzer and others.

In August, Takano, the head of Rotary Charities, a philanthropic powerhouse, wrote Geinzer to express concern about tree trimming the city had undertaken in the Pines, which was perceived by some community members "as a way to 'flush out' the people who are camping there in an undignified way."

Geinzer responded that Takano's use of the word "undignified" was "truly unfortunate and demonstrates the lack of understanding/experiencing, or willingness to understand/experience, the full context of what (city officials) have been facing over many years."

Takano responded in turn by thanking Geinzer for the detail provided in his response, reminding him that Rotary Charities "has invested over $2,800,000 in direct programs and services to addressing homelessness in the region."

After the Record-Eagle reported on a large city-led cleanup of the Pines in December — noting that there are no porta-potties there and that homeless residents were using their campsites and the wetlands near Kids Creek as public toilets — City Commissioner Tim Werner wrote Geinzer and asked: "What creative approaches have been discussed to enable ports-johns [sic] to be reintroduced to the Pines?"

Geinzer responded by telling Werner that he would not push to re-install porta-johns in the Pines, suggesting that doing so would encourage some homeless residents to remain there.

He also rebuked Werner for saying that the article quoted a city official as saying "it's too hard" for the city to provide porta-johns.

Geinzer pointed out that was not what the article said: "I continue to find your characterizations ... of our staff very troubling," he wrote, adding, "In no way would I advocate to put facilities out there. It undermines the work we are doing to move to a more permanent year-round shelter situation while we are working to build more permanent supportive housing."