A long stretch of tents lining the Kelowna Rail Trail.
November 26, 2024 - 5:30 PM
Kelowna council learned this week more than half of the city's departments aren't tracking what is spent on the homelessness crisis.
During a five minute presentation at a meeting on Monday, city staff told council they don't properly track spending.
Earlier this year, council heard that the city spent roughly $20 million on addressing homelessness in 2023. At that time, councillor Mohini Singh said it was a lot of money for a municipality of Kelowna's size to bear but pointed out it was something the city had to do to keep the community safe and support people who are homeless.
The city spent approximately $20 million on issues related to homelessness in 2023, things like policing, shelters, cleaning and emergency responses.
Since more than half of the city’s departments aren’t tracking spending, and some costs like policing cover more than just the homeless community, staff had to make some estimates in its report in the summer.
Of the $20 million, roughly $10 million was spent on shelter, while $4.5 million was spent on community safety like police and bylaw officers. The rest of the money was spent on services, cleaning, emergency responses and security.
“We found that over half the departments either do not track costs related to the unsheltered community or they lack the resources necessary to do so. And without proper tracking, assessing performance is difficult and accountability for spending is reduced which may lead to poor decisions and improper resource allocation,” business performance and advisory services manager Shelly Little said in the presentation to council, Nov. 25.
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City staff has trouble coordinating between departments when it comes to efforts to address homelessness in Kelowna. Staff said there are informal groups that coordinate between departments but there's no formal structure to make sure the city is managing homelessness efficiently.
There's a plan to create a formal group to coordinate the city’s response to homelessness by the end of December.
“When we were discussing before about the city taking more responsibility to coordinate all the services available for those who are homeless, we recognized that out in the community, there's all these different organizations and... there wasn't really good coordination between them," councillor Rick Webber said. "And so that was one of our goals, but it sounds almost like it's the same idea within the city. All the departments have a bit of a silo in dealing with the various aspects of this.”
Little was unable to tell iNFOnews.ca which departments weren’t tracking spending.
City council has asked staff to report back on its efforts to increase transparency on homelessness spending and staff said they hope to have a method to track spending by June, 2025.
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