Bunnell cold-weather shelter to open Monday, Tuesday nights

BUNNELL — With temperatures expected to dip below 40 degrees overnight Monday and Tuesday, volunteers with The Sheltering Tree, Flagler County’s lone cold-weather shelter, spent Monday preparing to welcome the homeless and displaced.

Doors open at 5:30 p.m. Monday, according to Sheltering Tree chairwoman Sue Bickings. The Bunnell shelter will also open Tuesday eveing, when forecasts again call for overnight lows in the 30s.

Guests who need a ride to the cold-weather shelter can call The Sheltering Tree at 386-437-3258 ext. 105 for transportation.

The shelter, which is housed on the First United Methodist Church campus, 205 N. Pine St., has opened three nights in December and once earlier this month on Jan. 5.

Bickings said it drew about 14 overnight guests each of those nights.

Last year, the shelter opened its doors 19 nights.

“It is an unusually mild winter so far with only four nights open,” Bickings said.

The shelter begins serving supper for guests at 6 p.m. and two volunteers stay awake to monitor the premises through the night. Visitors are served breakfast in the morning before the shelter closes shop.

Bickings said potential volunteers interested in helping can come to the shelter to get a firsthand taste of the operations.

The Point-in-Time, or PIT, count, an annual gauge of the homeless population begins at noon Thursday and ends noon Friday. The annual 24-hour census is part of a national effort required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that tasks volunteers to estimate the number of homeless people in their respective communities.

The Sheltering Tree will partner with the Volusia-Flagler County Coalition for the Homeless to conduct a PIT count in Bunnell. The shelter plans to invite area homeless to First United Methodist from noon to 4 p.m. for pizza and a movie.

Sheltering Tree has been a refuge for Flagler’s homeless and displaced for the past 11 years, offering them warm beds on frigid nights when temperatures fall below 40 degrees. But last year, the shelter came under fire from city officials and residents in the surrounding community who complained that guests weren’t being properly monitored and were slipping away through the night.

Those complaints helped fuel a crackdown by Bunnell’s zoning board, which denied the shelter’s request for a city-issued special exception in May, a move that effectively shut down the shelter’s operations. Sheltering Tree officials appealed the zoning ruling, but city commissioners upheld it in July.

That prompted an appeal to federal officials and the U.S. Department of Justice notified the city in October that it was investigating claims that Bunnell violated federal religious discrimination laws in denying the shelter’s zoning variance.

The Bunnell City Commission voted in November to delay enforcing those zoning restrictions while the DOJ investigation remains open.

There was no word from the Justice Department on the status of that investigation Monday. But Bickings said shelter officials began working to reach an agreement with the city in December that could possibly keep the facility operating but at a different location.

“We have met with the city and we are working on an agreement about the cold-weather shelter,” she said. “So really the DOJ thing sort of has nothing to do with us at this point. I mean, we don’t need to get anything from them. They’re working with the city of Bunnell. It’s on them to (deal with) the city of Bunnell on that stuff. We’re just looking to the future so that we have a cold-weather shelter in Flagler.”