The announcement - it said the Christmas Box House in this southeast Utah community would shut down by month's end - angered Grand County and Moab officials.

They launched a letter writing campaign and enlisted the help of state Sen. Mike Dmitrich and Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. to press DCFS to rescind the decision.

"It was just a mistake," Health and Human Services spokeswoman Carol Sisco acknowledged this week. "A person heard something different in a meeting and just made a mistake. There are concerns about the high cost of housing kids there because it is expensive.

"But the closing has been put on hold."

DCFS Director Richard Anderson said Wednesday that the agency is concerned about the cost of running the Moab facility, which, in 1998, became the first Christmas Box House to open. Since then, similar shelters, which take their name from the novel by Utah author Richard Paul Evans, were opened in Salt Lake City and Ogden.

The state provides funding and staffing for all three facilities, but the Moab shelter is by far the most expensive to run, Anderson said, costing an average of about $800 per day. That compares with about $140 per day for the urban facilities.

Last year, the Moab shelter served about 325 area children.

"I had asked for a plan to be submitted to me showing what we could do [to cut costs]. I was gone for a week, and when I returned I found out it had been announced they were closing the shelter," Anderson said. "That was premature."

Anderson plans to hold a public meeting in Moab sometime next week and hopes the community will help DCFS come up with cost-cutting solutions - while still providing shelter services to area children.

Solutions could include placing staff on an "on-call" basis, recruiting more families to house children on a temporary basis, or designing different ways to use the facility, he said in a letter to community leaders.

In the past, Moab has had difficulty recruiting a sufficient number of foster and shelter families to assist children.

Grand County Attorney Happy Morgan said the economic situation of many Grand County families makes it difficult for them to participate in foster-care and shelter-care programs, but that does not absolve the state of its responsibility.

"People here live on very tight budgets with both parents working. We're not going to have the ability to have a lot of foster families," she said.

Moab Mayor Dave Sakrison said he is "cautiously optimistic" that DCFS will find a way to keep the Christmas Box House open. The building, which also houses the Children's Justice Center and the Utah Foster Care Foundation, could perhaps house other offices or agencies, Sakrison said, or alternatives to full-time staffing could be a long-term solution.

If the Christmas Box House in Moab closes, local children who need help would be transferred to other areas where foster families or shelter facilities are available. Sakrison says that shouldn't happen.

"We need to keep these kids in this community. This is where they live; it's where they go to school," he said.

DCFS boss Anderson said he is "gratified" to see the level of concern among community members.

"I'm a person that believes someday we'll get to the point where child welfare is a community issue and not an agency," he said.

lchurch@citlink.net