A new program in Cottonwood helps put homeless people in hotel rooms when the temperatures drop below freezing.
While Arizona can certainly get hot, the Verde Valley is no stranger to cold winter evenings.
This winter is on track to have more than 50 days that see the mercury dip to freezing temperatures, said Joy Mosley, a volunteer with the Verde Valley Homeless Coalition.
Mosley was citing data from the National Weather Service in Flagstaff, noting that this year’s El Niño weather pattern is likely to have a particularly chilling effect on the winter weather.
“As we’ve seen already,” Mosley said.
The program is called One Person, One Night and is being administered through Catholic Charities, which already works dealing with issues of homelessness in the Verde Valley.
The Cottonwood City Council voted last week to give the program $2,000 in emergency funding, while recognizing that tackling the larger issue of homelessness in general is going to take a multipronged approach.
Mayor Diane Joens said she had already been meeting with groups to look at the problem, including Catholic Charities and the Old Town Mission.
“We were discussing several issues about homelessness and panhandling,” Joens said.
She said that the Cottonwood Police Department had been working with Flagstaff to help address the problem.
The issue is also something that needs financial support from the public, Joens said, including faith-based groups.
Volunteers are also working on trying to get an accurate count of exactly how many homeless people there are in the region.
“I’ve talked about getting the mayors in the Verde Valley together,” Joens said. “This is not something we can do alone. We all have the homeless in our midst.”
Six hotels in Cottonwood have agreed to help out with the program, said Cynthia Strom, another volunteer who works with homelessness issues.
Some of them have donated rooms, Strom said, while others are charging their regular nightly rate.
Joens said that one possible long-term option would be something like a Community Development Block Grant, federal money that is given to projects that benefit people with mid-to-low incomes.
Joens said that perhaps eventually a homeless shelter could be established in the Verde Valley, noting how the Verde Valley Senior Center was helped by bringing funding together from many different sources from around the area.
Cottonwood City Manager Doug Bartosh said that beyond this $2,000 approval for emergency funding, any future assistance from the city might require a public hearing and a work session.
“We just didn’t have that much information,” Bartosh said.
Future efforts might require things like checking with applicable laws and things like fire codes when it comes to spending public money on a program that directly affects people.
“The need to protect our citizens, especially our homeless population, who is at greater risk of illness or injury due to the cold weather, is imperative,” Bartosh’s office reported. “This program temporarily fills that gap in providing safety from the elements to those in need.”
Since the program started, it put 23 people in hotels in November. So far this month, it has assisted 27 people.
