CARBONDALE, Colo. — Carbondale's mayor stressed they have reached their limit to help unhoused migrants. Over the last few months about 125 people have arrived into town, many with no place to stay. The migrants increased the unhoused population by 500% when they began arriving looking for work.
A nonprofit initially created a shelter within a community center but since then plans have changed. Mayor Ben Bohmfalk said they do not have any more room for any additional migrants. He spoke to 9NEWS about their latest humanitarian efforts to keep people out of the cold.
What’s the latest on the migrant situation within Carbondale?
Bohmfalk: We’ve continued to shelter people at the Third Street Center, which is our community center, and that’s really been an effort of that organization as a nonprofit not directly a town government center. That facility has been really overwhelmed by the number of people. They’ve kept it to 50 and tried to get under that, tried to get a few people in, a few people out every once in a while but the Third Street Center is a nonprofit organization. Their board voted unanimously to wind that down as we open up some alternate sites.
Where we are now is we’re working to open up to alternate shelter sites just for the winter, just for the end of March so they can accommodate about 20 people each. One's the church, one’s our town hall, part of main public meeting room. We’re going to kind of close the partition wall there in the next week or two. The delay in really shifting to the model has been getting a contract with an organization who has expertise in running shelters. So we’re still in the final stages of that negotiation and we hope to have that once we have staff to manage the shelter, we’ll be ready to move into that next phase.
EARLIER REPORTING: Colorado mountain town says it can't handle 125 arriving migrants
About how many migrants are currently in Carbondale?
Bohmfalk: So it’s over about 125 total people kind of registered with the community group as they register when they come in and ask for support in some way but that’s not all at once, that’s the total of the last two months. It seems like there’s about 60 people in town at any given time.
There's also a parking lot where migrants can park and stay over night, correct?
Bohmfalk: Yes, so that’s also shifting from behind our community center to some vacant lots in the center of Carbondale that are actually owned by the town where we have affordable housing that we’re pursuing but it’s not under construction yet. So we’re going to allow people to park there and it’s really a place to park cars that might otherwise, if they’re unregistered, if they don’t have up-to-date insurance or registration or whatever it is, that they can park there and sort of not be disturbed.
What does the funding behind this look like?
Bohmfalk: We were really pleased to get the full amount we asked for with DOLA which is the Division of Local Affairs in the state of Colorado of a little over $220,000 in emergency funds to go towards this effort. So that’s going to make the town whole. So essentially so far this isn’t costing the town anything. It’s not competing with our other priorities in our budget. Town of Carbondale has about a $10 million general fund for our annual budget so it’s a really small budget and this would other wise be a pretty big chunk of that so we’re really pleased with the support of DOLA and appreciate that support.
We’ve also set up a fund with the Aspen Community Foundation so that we can manage donations and we’ve had people want to donate and sometimes those funds can go towards things that the DOLA Fund can’t. We’ve also heard from our three counties, we’re in Fork Valley which is partly in Garfield, which is where Carbondale is, but also Eagle County and then up valley towards Aspen is Pitkin County, all three counties have said that if we have a financial need we can come to them with our request and they’d be open to hearing that request. So we actually feel like the funding is pretty stable and adequate and the challenge has been the logistics, lack of technical expertise, lack of sort of a clear plan for how a small town responds to an influx of unhoused migrants and the staffing because you know the reason that people are coming here is because we have a labor shortage and a lot of unfilled positions but that also makes it hard for us to do things like find staff to run a shelter and help out with this.
I do think its important for taxpayers and people to understand that this is not -- this effort to have a humanitarian response to a bunch of unhoused people in winter is not impacting our ability to do our core work as a municipality. There’s no work that we’re not doing because of this. We’re still doing our other work.
What do you happens or does not happen in the future?
Bohmfalk: We’ve been trying to house like 50 people is the max of the current shelter, as that winds down our other two are going to have about 20 each so we’re actually going to be at a lower total number. We had a goal of housing up to 100 because that was the original number of people that showed up in Carbondale back in late October. So far we’ve been unable to meet that goal. So we’ve analyzed every facility in the Roaring Fork Valley and the Colorado River Valley reached out to all the churches and civic organizations and we’ve been really come down to just these two sites in Carbondale.
So we’re only going to be able to house 40 people through the winter and we can’t handle more than that so we don’t want people to interpret Carbondale’s response as an open invitation to come here because it’s just not—we can’t do more than that.
What I think is interesting is what I’m seeing in Denver and the Mayor of Denver reaching out to other large cities across the country and trying to put together a system of dispersal of unhoused migrants so that’s a smaller impact on each place and that’s kind of how I see this as the next phase for Colorado and western Colorado and the Roaring Fork Valley as well. Carbondale has done what it could do and I think it means that it’s going to be time for other communities to step up as well and kind of ask themselves, what’s their number? Forty people is about half of 1% of Carbondale’s total population so if you start to think along those lines, what’s about half of 1% of a place's population, can you accommodate that many people if their alternative is sleeping outside at night or going to the next town and hoping that their accommodated in some way.
That's kind of where we are. Is 40 is really our limit? We’ve explored all of our options and we’re not really going to be able to support more people than that through the winter.
It sounds like the town's people have really stepped up to help.
Bohmfalk: Carbondale has got a big heart and people have really had an outpouring of support just for the fact that people don’t have a place to sleep you know. So we’re really not trying to make this a political issue or an issue on your views of national immigration policy or anything like that, it’s just the simple fact that people have shown up in our community who are sleeping outside as winter sets in and what's our response to that. While some people don’t agree with our response I hear those concerns and I respect that disagreement. Some people think we should basically do nothing and say keep moving to the next town but there’s definitely support here for responding in a humanitarian way and I hope other towns will ask themselves those same tough questions you know, what you’re going to do if people show up in your town or city unhoused and that’s the key issue.
Our focus has been mitigating impacts on our town residents, mitigating the impacts on our budget through outside funding and mitigating impacts on the individuals. What we don't want is somebody dies of exposure under our watch this winter so we're trying to do what we can to prevent that from happening.
We’re doing our best. Some people still feel like we’re not communicating enough and they don’t know what’s going on but we have hired our former Superintendent of Schools as our project manager on this, then we’ve hired a volunteer, a nonprofit coordinator we’ve set up a dedicated email address, page on our website and we are having frequent meetings with all the impacted groups and interested parties. We’re trying to do this all in a very transparent and accessible way.
So when will these temporary shelters be shut down?
Bohmfalk: Our goal that we set at the beginning of this was to respond in a humanitarian way to help people get through the winter and so we established March 31 as the wind down because the facilities we’re using for temporary shelter are very heavily used facilities. Whether it’s the church or our town meeting room or our community center, they’re not long-term shelter sites so I think there’s a next phase that we’ll have to start working on. Hopefully not on our own, hopefully as a region, as a valley and maybe with the counties on what’s our response if an influx of unhoused people that will probably happen again next winter. What’s our response throughout the summer? How can we work on this collaboratively rather than individually? It's still kind of random that people have showed up in Carbondale, they’re here for jobs in surrounding communities so we’ll kind of try to build a system that moves past March 31 but the current plan is to help people shelter through winter which is March 31 and then wind down these temporary shelters.
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