Whatcom County planning summer shelter for times of excessive heat and smoke
Whatcom County extended the lease of its severe weather shelter through the early fall months, allow the county to plan for a place where community members can seek refuge in cases of extreme heat or unhealthy air caused by wildfire smoke.
County Council members voted unanimously Tuesday to add $32,000 to the budget for the severe weather shelter that operated last fall and winter to continue through Oct. 31 in a former church at 925 N. Forest St., in the Sehome neighborhood of Bellingham.
Ann Beck, human services supervisor for the Whatcom County Health and Community Services Department, told the council that the lease extension doesn’t guarantee that the county will operate a shelter or cooling center in the event of a heat or air quality emergency this summer.
“I think it would be a much larger commitment from the community, I mean that smoke and heat don’t just impact people who are unhoused. This is just for us to have both a place to store our operations from the winter as well as an option (to operate a summer shelter) if needed so we could work with community members, the Department of Emergency Management, the city, things like that, to figure out how to use this space if it was needed,” Beck said.
Lutheran Community Services Northwest owns the building. The Health Department leased it for the winters of 2024-2025 and 2025-2026 and operated a severe weather shelter for people who were living outside.
It has space for 60 guests overnight in winter, according to previous Bellingham Herald reporting.
“We don’t yet have a firm plan on how and when we would operate a summer shelter. We’ve got a few months to be working on that,” the Health Department’s Chris D’Onofrio told the County Council’s Finance and Administrative Services Committee on Tuesday morning.
This severe weather shelter is separate from a daytime shelter that the city of Bellingham plans to open in the fall, D’Onofrio said. Keeping the lease on the building also lets the county store its winter shelter materials at the site, he said.
To extend the lease, the county will pay a reduced rate of $1,000 per month and a daily rate of $2,500 when the shelter is operating, D’Onofrio said.
