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A Utah lawmaker wants less resistance to homeless shelters from neighbors. He hopes stricter rules for service providers help.

With Utah’s next legislative session just around the corner, lawmakers are preparing more bills focusing on homelessness.

After a year filled with high-profile fights over potential locations for homeless shelters in Utah, one state legislator wants to make the facilities safer and cleaner inside and out in hopes that communities will be more likely to accept them.

Rep. Tyler Clancy, R-Provo, is preparing legislation that would alter the licensure process for homeless service providers to explicitly prohibit drug activity in shelters and set specific rules around how staff deal with dangerous behavior.

Such guardrails are already common in Utah’s homeless shelters, but Clancy wants to enshrine them in law.

“Our shelters need to be safe and a good place for people to be who are in recovery. We know that a lot of our homeless neighbors are in some sort of recovery,” Clancy said. “... It’s important that, if we really care about these resources, to make sure that the people who need help can go there and not be in a compromised situation.”

Frustration with persistent problems

Clancy also wants to ensure illegal behavior — namely drug activity, public urination and unsanctioned camping — doesn’t happen in surrounding neighborhoods. How exactly new licensing requirements would obligate service providers and police to address issues outside the walls of the shelter is still being worked out, the Utah County Republican said.

Clancy, a detective who wrote a major homelessness bill in the most recent general session, believes that new licensure rules are only one piece of a more comprehensive homeless services system he hopes to build.

His concerns stem from 2017’s Operation Rio Grande — the state’s targeted effort to weed out camping near downtown Salt Lake City — and late 2019’s final move from a large centralized shelter to a dispersed model that relies on smaller homeless resource centers scattered across Utah’s capital and neighboring South Salt Lake. He said communities were promised that the new centers wouldn’t affect residents’ quality of life, but he now feels the state and host cities haven’t lived up to those vows.

State leaders’ frustration with homelessness enforcement in Salt Lake City has emerged as a sticking point ahead of the upcoming legislative session.

On Dec. 13, Gov. Spencer Cox, Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, and House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, sent a letter to Mayor Erin Mendenhall criticizing public safety efforts in Utah’s capital and instructing the mayor to come up with a better plan before lawmakers meet on Capitol Hill.

If the mayor fails to chart a better public safety path, Cox, Adams and Schultz pledged to pass laws allowing the state to play a bigger role.

Cementing shelter rules in law

Creating new shelters has sparked pushback from multiple communities this year. In Davis County, a church in Fruit Heights pulled out of hosting a temporary winter shelter after residents complained. Weber County still doesn’t have a winter shelter plan due, in part, to fears of public backlash.

Currently, guidelines for the operations of homeless shelters are worked out at the local level through a process known as conditional use permitting. Through this review, cities can place restrictions on how land is used and require owners to take specific measures to minimize harm to neighbors.

The Beehive State’s Office of Homeless Services also has a licensure process for service providers, but those guidelines are codified in administrative rules, not law.

Clancy’s legislation would not upend the conditional use permitting process but would cement stricter licensing requirements in law, ensuring they address safety inside and outside of shelters. He’s specifically interested in making shelters “drug-free zones” and requiring providers to have a plan for dealing with people who bring illegal substances into their facilities.

Other rules, Clancy said, could include more clarity on when shelter workers need to call police and when they can handle issues internally.

At least one service provider, Wendy Garvin of the nonprofit Unsheltered Utah, has questioned Clancy’s approach, telling KUER that shelters don’t have enough staff to enforce the potential new rules. Garvin does not operate a permanent shelter but has run a temporary facility on Utah’s coldest nights.

For his part, Clancy hopes new rules help make it easier to set up additional shelters.

“If we are not able to address the underlying public safety concerns around the shelters,” he said, “then we can expect continual resistance from communities as we look to expand [shelter services].”

Clancy said new licensing rules are only one piece of the legislative puzzle he’ll be looking to put together in the upcoming session. He’s also looking to match up people experiencing homelessness with individual caseworkers, break down silos between government agencies and build a more comprehensive homeless services system.