Wausau and Marathon County are partnering to shelter the homeless

The move comes after Catholic Charities announced it would be ending its day service in 2025

Something caught me off guard later last month — The Marathon County Board passed a resolution approving spending up to $200,000 for a potential 365 shelter.

The money is meant to match what the city of Wausau would hypothetically put in. (Wausau has $400,000 over two years dedicated toward providing shelter to the homeless — more on that below.) The board passed the resolution Thursday. But what happens next? And how did the county get here?

Calculating the need

The idea came out of what Wausau Police Chief Matt Barnes laid out at a Joint City/County Homeless Task Force Committee meeting. Barnes said he calculated the need Wausau (and by extension, Marathon County) has for shelter. (And that stemmed from a decision by Catholic Charities to no longer operate a day shelter for homeless individuals, and that the Good Shepherd shelter is not funded at all past May 1.)

He calculated it this way: On a night when Community on Call was activated, and everyone was offered shelter in one way or another, he had officers go to all the usual spots where Wausau’s homeless population typically congregates. Barnes said they checked everywhere and couldn’t find one person. Because it was so cold, he said, even the most die-hard took advantage of the city’s shelters.

(During Community on Call, community groups provide their buildings as sites to assist in providing shelter — the most-behaved are allowed into the community buildings and the shelters house some of the more difficult homeless individuals.)

Satisfied all the homeless people of Wausau were in shelters, he counted those sheltered that night. The number came to 46. Adding in an extra contingency, Barnes told the committee that the city needed shelter for 50 individuals to adequately address the homeless population.

A new paradigm

At the board meeting last month, Barnes laid out the reason why. Previously Catholic Charities had been running the shelter, but council members told The Wausonian other services were not being made available to help those individuals get out of homelessness.

So the city plans to put out a request for proposals to search for a new contract that includes specific measurements around services designed to help transition homeless individuals out of homelessness.

The city’s $400,000 — which came from American Rescue Plan Act funds and is spread out over two years — was controversial when it was moved around last October. The resolution the city council passed back then allocated the money to the police department for this very purpose, and that made some council members nervous.

Catholic Charities then announced in December that it would no longer operate the day center past that month, saying it had staffing issues. Catholic Charities leadership said the temporary funding through April the city offered was too short term to attract staff to operate at the shelter.

Since the end of the year, the center has been closed during the day while the night center still operates.

Barnes explained that the new shelter is designed on the La Crosse model of treating homelessness.

The La Crosse model

The La Crosse model is based on the Functional Zero model, which aims for homelessness to be “rare, brief and only happens the one time it occurs.”

Called Pathways Home, the platform has its own dashboard for the program that was started last year. (The La Crosse City Council approved the plan on Jan. 8 of last year.)

The results so far? Mixed. The number of homeless individuals on the dashboard’s metrics has been rising over time, from 232 in July to 268 in January. But the average number of days of those experiencing homelessness has dropped from 570 to 428.

And, in that same time frame, 107 people were housed in that time.

Wausau and Marathon County leaders have been looking closely at what La Crosse is doing.

“It’s one of the better programs I’ve seen, that has a likelihood of success,” Barnes told the committee. “The fire we need to put out before we can proceed with anything is stable emergency shelter that addresses the things we learned over the last two years in providing emergency shelter. It didn’t have benchmarks, which you will see in this resolution. It didn’t have accountability for the people using these shelters.”

But Barnes was clear about one thing: With adequate shelter in place, chronic homelessness would not be tolerated. “I don’t support resources for the homeless in this community that enable them to stay in homelessness. I think those resources should empower them to leave homelessness.”

Did the chief have a sense of whether providers would respond to the request for proposals, asked County Board Member Stacey Morache?

Barnes said he was confident Catholic Charities would respond with a proposal, and he said other organizations have expressed interest as well.

He also said it could be a number of providers filling the need instead of just one.

The Wausonian reached out to Barnes late in the afternoon for comment on whether the request for proposals had gone out and what the timeline is. The Wausonian will update this story if Barnes responds. (Granting leeway for the fact that I am using a new email at the present.)

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