LEGAL

BY ELLIS ARNOLD EARNOLD@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM

Following news that Douglas County could form its own health department soon, Arapahoe County confi rmed that Arapahoe and Adams counties have also been contemplating splitting away from Tri-County Health Department in its current form.

By October, commissioners in both Arapahoe and Adams counties will be provided with fi ndings from a transition team to inform a decision on a new structure for public health services, according to a statement from Arapahoe County.

Both Arapahoe and Adams County have been a part of TriCounty Health since the agency was founded in 1948.

Consultants are examining the scenarios of a two-county health agency or creating single-county health departments, said Luc Hatlestad, spokesperson for Arapahoe County.

“We set this up in the spring (or) summer,” Hatlestad said, adding that the study was initiated once it became clear that Douglas wasn’t going to stick with Tri-County Health.

Douglas County’s consideration of leaving the agency -- which at press time was to come up for action on Sept. 7 -- came amid a rift with Tri-County Health over the agency’s pandemic safety policies and its decision not to let counties opt themselves out of its mandates.

But Douglas County commissioners back in July 2020 announced they would eventually leave TriCounty Health, citing a wish for more local control over public health orders. That plan was put on hold under an agreement with Tri-County allowing counties to opt out of public-health orders. But the agency’s board voted on Aug. 30 to no longer allow opt-outs.

An Arapahoe County spokesperson emphasized that the county’s consideration of leaving Tri-County Health isn’t because of disagreement with the health agency.

“We began looking at other public health agency options after Douglas announced its intentions to leave Tri-County last year,” Hatlestad said. “We did not initiate this because of any dissatisfaction with Tri-County — we’ve actually worked extremely well with them since the beginning of the pandemic.”

Douglas County exiting the health agency would potentially create fi nancial or budgetary problems for the other two counties, Hatlestad added.

Tri-County Health has been working with Adams and Arapahoe counties over the past several months to develop a transition plan, Hatlestad said earlier. Since the process began, Adams and Arapahoe started to include the possibility of singlecounty public health agencies in the process.

Meanwhile, Arapahoe County Attorney Ronald Carl, in a Sept. 3 letter to his Douglas County counterpart, Lance Ingalls, said Arapahoe County was considering possible legal action if Douglas County “chooses to proceed” with its withdrawal plans, citing the “suddenness of this planned action” and that state law requires a oneyear notifi cation before a county can pull out of Tri-County. The letter was disclosed by Douglas County Commissioner Lora Thomas in a Sept. 5 email to constituents.

The Arapahoe County Administration Building on South Prince Street in Little-

ton. PHOTO BY ELLIS ARNOLD

Study: 1st-time homelessness doubled in metro Denver over past year

BY KYLE COOKE ROCKY MOUNTAIN PBS

Every year, the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative conducts a “Point in Time Count” to determine how many people are experiencing homelessness in the Denver area.

This year’s report found a “drastic increase” in the number of people in the Denver metro area experiencing homelessness for the fi rst time, a surge that surveyors attributed to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

You can read a snapshot of the report online at tinyurl.com/MetroDenverHomelessness. The full MDHI Point in Time report for 2021, which will include individualized data for Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Broomfi eld, Denver, Douglas and Jefferson counties, will be published this fall.

“In 2020 there were 1,273 people in shelters that were experiencing homelessness for the fi rst time,” said Matt Meyer, MDHI’s executive director. “This year, that number doubled to 2,530 demonstrating the devastating effects of COVID-19 on the stability of our neighbors.”

This year’s survey was conducted on a single day in February. MDHI found that in the Denver metro area, 5,530 people were staying in shelters, about a 1,000-person increase from last year’s study, which was conducted before the pandemic started.

Benjamin Dunning with the advocacy group Denver Homeless Out Loud (DHOL) told Rocky Mountain PBS that the true number of people experiencing homelessness is probably even higher.

Dunning explained that the pandemic made counting the number of unhoused people diffi cult, and that because the results of the Point in Time survey are self-reported, many unhoused people do not respond to the survey and are therefore not counted.

This year, MDHI did not include the number of unsheltered people in their study because of COVID-19. In 2020, there were 1,561 people experiencing unsheltered homelessness in the Denver metro area. Advocates believe that number has increased over the past year.

“The number of folks ... that are out on the street probably tripled,” Dunning estimated.

Nearly three-quarters of the people experiencing sheltered homelessness were staying in emergency shelters. MDHI said individual sheltered homelessness increased by 27 percent over the last year.

“Unlike other parts of the country where shelter space was decreased during COVID-19, our community worked diligently to meet this challenge and stood up additional shelter spaces to help ensure the safety of those who needed it most,” Meyer added. “We are incredibly grateful for the hard work and dedication of our providers in responding to increased need while crafting creative solutions to meet the demand for those experiencing homelessness.”

Recently, the City of Denver’s Department of Housing Stability released a fi ve-year plan to address problems surrounding housing and homelessness in the city. One of HOST’s 14 main goals is to reduce unsheltered homelessness by half.

“While the 2021 (Point in Time Count) did not include a count of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness, due to the circumstances related to the pandemic, job loss experienced during the public health emergency increased the number of people living in unstable conditions and losing their homes,” the HOST plan reads.

The HOST plan also shows that there were more unsheltered homeless people in Denver last year — nearly 1,000 people in Denver County — since at least 2014.

“We know that unsheltered homelessness has become a more visible presence in Denver even as we are sheltering more people nightly than ever before,” the authors of the plan wrote.

You can read the full fi ve-year plan online at tinyurl.com/Denver5YearPlan.

This story is from Rocky Mountain PBS, a nonprofi t public broadcaster providing community stories across Colorado over the air and online. Used by permission. For more, and to support Rocky Mountain PBS, visit rmpbs.org.