BOISE, Idaho — Since August, Gerri Graves has spent most of her time in downtown Boise's Red Lion hotel room, either writing or sewing.
"It's enabled me to write a lot; I write a lot for the paper," she said. "It's also enabled me to keep sewing, which is a good distraction, especially if you have depression problems and with your body giving out on you."
Graves is just one of 15 medically fragile people living in Interfaith Sanctuary's Red Lion hotel shelter. A dozen or so homeless families also call the shelter home, at least for the time being.
However, funding the hotel shelter, which opened in 2020 because of the pandemic, hasn't always been easy. Until Tuesday night, those people weren't sure they would still have a roof over their heads.
City councilmembers voted to approve $1.8 million to keep the shelter open for the next year after Ada County recently denied the city's request to extend its funding.
It has been a long, controversial back and forth between the city and the county. Jimmy Hallyburton, council president pro tem, said the city initially helped pay for the shelter through federal COVID-19 grants.
He said once that funding started to run out, they partnered with the county, which gave $697,000 in American Rescue Plan Act money to help cover the shelter's costs for four months. That money runs out in mid-April.
The city initially asked the county for $2.6 million in October. Hallyburton said he and other city officials were disappointed in the county's decision not to extend its funding.
"All of city council, and I know that the mayor expressed her disappointment as well," he said. "We really see this as a partnership with the county because this isn't just the city of Boise issue, and if the city of Boise is the only one trying to solve it, we're not going to be able to do it."
But the city didn't want to push everyone in the hotel shelter out on the streets, so Hallyburton said they approved the nearly $2 million since "this is the biggest need we have right now."
Hallyburton said the money will hopefully come from leftover federal COVID-19 allocations. If not, it will come from the general fund.
Because of all the unknowns around funding, Interfaith executive director Jodi Peterson-Stigers said running the shelter has been fairly stressful, especially the past few months.
"This has been a very nerve-wracking ride, kind of being bounced from funding stream to funding stream, but always understanding that there was this gap in service and there was this need to be able to serve this group of people and there was no space in our shelter," she said.
Peterson-Stigers said they've purposefully kept numbers at the hotel shelter low since they were afraid they'd have to shut down. But now that funding is secured, they will be moving more people in.
There are 87 total beds at the hotel shelter, she said. The money should keep the shelter open for the next year, going toward the monthly lease and staff wages.
Hopefully, by the time the money finally runs out, Peterson-Stigers said Interfaith's new homeless shelter will be open, and everyone at the hotel shelter will have a space there.
Graves said she's grateful for the city's decision to provide money and hopes the community realizes the people living at the hotel shelter all have impactful stories and that, in many cases, the shelter means the difference between life and death.
"There's people that have cancer, there are people that are dying," she said. "If they didn't have this option, they would be on the street dying, and that's unacceptable."
Hallyburton said he is still hopeful county commissioners change their minds and provide some sort of money to the hotel shelter going forward. KTVB reached out to the county but did not receive a response.
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