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Families To Be Moved Out Of Rio Grande Shelter By July

Whittney Evans
A mural outside The Road Home shelter on 210 Rio Grande.

All Families living at The Road Home shelter in downtown Salt Lake City will move out of the facility by July if all goes as planned. Utah lawmakers on Tuesday approved that recommendation and some additional funding for The Road Home’s Midvale family shelter.

The State Homeless Coordinating Committee is in charge of administering funds lawmakers approved for homelessness and housing this year. The committee put together a plan last week and legislative budget makers signed off on it Tuesday. 

Kathy Bounous presented the plan. She’s with the Utah Department of Workforces Services. It includes roughly $750,000 to remove all of the families from the downtown shelter permanently with the help of motel vouchers and short-term rental assistance. Bounous says The Road Home has agreed not to refill those beds wants they’re vacated.

“It is taking them out of the shelter and working on getting them into a stable environment,” Bounous says. “So it’s not moving them from one shelter to another shelter but actually getting them into a stabilized environment.”

Bounous says case managers will follow up with families throughout this process. 

Lawmakers also signed off on funding for two more Unified Police officers at the Midvale Shelter, so it has 24-hour surveillance. Six million dollars will be directed to the non-profit organization Shelter The Homeless which will oversee three new planned homeless shelters. That organization is required, by state law to start construction on the shelters by June 1st 2018 or forfeit the properties to the state. The Road Home is slated to close in June of 2019.  

Whittney Evans grew up southern Ohio and has worked in public radio since 2005. She has a communications degree from Morehead State University in Morehead, Kentucky, where she learned the ropes of reporting, producing and hosting. Whittney moved to Utah in 2009 where she became a reporter, producer and morning host at KCPW. Her reporting ranges from the hyper-local issues affecting Salt Lake City residents, to state-wide issues of national interest. Outside of work, she enjoys playing the guitar and getting to know the breathtaking landscape of the Mountain West.
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