Audit shows flaws in city’s plans for cold weather shelters

An audit presented to the City Council Audit & Finance committee last week says the city is not keeping up with planning for cold weather shelters and that city staff have not received sufficient training in dealing with people seeking shelter during extreme cold. In addition, the city does not appear to be consistently following its own rules on when to open the shelters. The audit says because the city has not always opened cold weather shelters when it planned to, some people “may have suffered from freezing and subfreezing temperatures.”

Currently, employees with Public Health, Homeland Security and Emergency Services, and the Parks and Recreation Department are working together to prepare for very low temperatures forecast for Thursday through Saturday. They may also receive assistance from the Austin Police Department and the Austin Public Library system.

A city spokesperson said via email: “Following the arrival of Covid-19, Austin’s network of community-operated cold weather shelters for people experiencing homelessness was disrupted and no longer able to provide the support it had in previous years. The city responded by adapting to fill in the gaps, leaning on city facilities and employees to provide the necessary support for our unhoused population.”

Although the city budget for 2022-23 includes a new $1.2 million for APH to contract with an outside entity to manage the city’s cold weather shelters, that contract has not yet taken effect.

As the spokesperson noted, in November, Council “approved a contract with the Austin Area Urban League to provide shelter operations during future cold weather activation periods. This winter, AAUL will support city of Austin cold weather shelter activities, with a plan to assume full responsibility during the 2023/2024 winter season. In the meantime, the city has updated its plans to make clear when shelters will be activated.”

But members of the audit team and the committee were not privy to the updated plans last week and it appears that the plans had not been disseminated.

The audit, presented by senior auditor Henry Katumwa, showed that the city opened cold weather shelters on 17 nights from January through March 2022, sheltering a total of 2,469 people and 24 animals. Although city rules indicate that shelters are supposed to open when the predicted temperature is at or below 32 degrees – or below 35 degrees with rain or high winds – the city failed to open those shelters on four nights meeting that criteria.

The audit said, “On two of these nights the forecasted and observed temperatures were in the 20s, well below the city’s cold weather triggers.”

Likewise, the city did not open cold weather shelters on the night of Saturday, Dec. 17, even though the temperature was 31 degrees at Camp Mabry and 22 degrees at the Austin airport. Staff members apparently do not check the weather at the airport, even though it is frequently colder there than at Mabry.

Jen Samp, spokesperson for Austin Public Health, told the Austin Monitor via email, “We didn’t meet the threshold for activation Saturday night after checking the (National Weather Service) Camp Mabry location weather forecast that morning (9 a.m., 12/17/22), as the forecast temperature at Camp Mabry was 35 degrees without precipitation or wind chill. Note that we make the determination early enough to give us time to mobilize the vast resources required to activate.”

As the audit explained, the city apparently had not updated its plan for operating cold weather shelters since Covid-19 forced so many changes in city operations. Auditors also found there was not sufficient oversight of shelter operations, nor was there sufficient security or contingency plans in case of an electricity outage.

According to the audit, both the cold weather shelter operations plan and a special operations plan for heat emergencies are supposed to be reviewed and updated annually. However, auditors found that the cold weather plan was last updated in 2019, and the plan for heat emergencies was last updated in 2020.

The majority of the city’s cold weather shelters are operated by the parks department and most of the staff working to keep those shelters operating are PARD employees. More than half of those employees interviewed by the audit team said that they were not trained to operate the shelters and had received no information about shelter procedures.

The audit also found that the city had not consistently tracked expenditures for cold weather operations by department. As a result, the city may have difficulty budgeting for future cold weather events.

Juan Ortiz, director of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, told Mayor Pro Tem Alison Alter that the new cold weather shelter plan was ready for his signature. “What we failed to do was have a way of notating that the review was taking place,” he said.

Alter and Council members Kathie Tovo and Vanessa Fuentes sought assurances that the city would be ready for forthcoming cold weather. With temperatures predicted to dip into the teens and wind chills into the single digits toward the end of this week, it won’t be long before they get an answer to some of those questions.

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