- October 30, 2024
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The Sheltering Tree — the nonprofit cold weather shelter that for years operated out of the United Methodist Church of Bunnell before the city ordered it to stop — may now have a new home, and something else it didn't have before: explicit support from local government bodies.
"The difference with this now is that there is a cooperative agreement with the city of Bunnell; it is no longer an adversarial relationship."
— JERRY CAMERON, county administrator, about the Sheltering Tree cold weather shelter
The Flagler County Commission during its Feb. 17 meeting unanimously approved its end of an agreement to support the Sheltering Tree in a new location at the Church on the Rock, on U.S. 1 in Bunnell.
The agreement will also require the support of the cities of Palm Coast, Flagler Beach and Bunnell, but the county administration has already met with those cities' administrations and expects that support to be forthcoming.
"We approached the three major municipalities and secured an agreement with them that we would all share equally — because homelessness is not confined to one jurisdiction — and came up with an arrangement that we would underwrite the cold weather shelter in providing security and bus routes," County Administrator Jerry Cameron told commissioners at the meeting.
The county and the three cities would each contribute $250 per shelter night for a total of up to 24 nights, and a combined total of $24,000.
The county would use a bus to collect homeless people and bring them to the shelter before cold nights, then bus them back to the locations from which they came the next mornings. The shelter operates when the temperate is expected to dip below 40 degrees.
The Church on the Rock, Cameron said, meets the code requirements to serve as a shelter.
That had been one of the concerns that the city of Bunnell raised when it shut down the Sheltering Tree's operations at the United Methodist Church in June 2019, before the Department of Justice intervened and ordered the city to allow it to operate as the DOJ investigated whether the city, in doing so, had violated the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.
With the new proposal, Cameron said, "The difference with this now is that there is a cooperative agreement with the city of Bunnell; it is no longer an adversarial relationship."
"I believe that this represents a good beginning of arrangements with private parties creating public-private partnerships to address issues that are too big for either the nonprofits or for the county itself to address," Cameron said. "This is a step in the right direction."
Commissioners commended Cameron for coming up with a solution.
