Charleston City Council members approved setting aside additional funding for the operation of overnight warming centers during the Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025, meeting of council at Charleston City Hall in Charleston, W.Va. (Lori Kersey | West Virginia Watch)
As bitterly cold temperatures continue throughout the region, Charleston leaders on Tuesday approved setting aside additional funding for the operation of overnight warming centers for people without shelter or adequate heat.
Charleston City Council voted Tuesday night to allocate $50,000 in one-time funding from a $6.2 million budget surplus to support the operation of warming and cooling centers. The city contracts with the Kanawha Valley Collective to run warming centers in the winter and cooling centers in summer at the Bream Neighborhood S.H.O.P. at Bream Memorial Presbyterian Church in Charleston, West Virginia.
KVC will use the $50,000 if warming and cooling center expenses exceed the $100,000 the city has already allocated to the centers.
The additional funding comes about a week after a homeless man was found dead near the Spring Street bridge. The night before he was found, three to four inches of snow blanketed the city, but KVC did not open the warming center. The man’s name and his cause of death have not been released.
According to the city’s memorandum of understanding with Kanawha Valley Collective, the agency opens the warming centers when the temperature drops to 20 degrees or below and the agency may request the city open warming centers when the weather conditions do not meet that temperature threshold.
Traci Strickland, executive director of the Kanawha Valley Collective, said the additional funding followed a conversation with city leadership about how many times the agency has operated a warming center already in January, as the cold temperatures and snowy weather continues.
“We’ve had more warming centers this year than ever,” Strickland said Tuesday. “We did 11 in 14 days, I think, and we’re doing another, likely, five this week, which would put us at 16 or 17 in 21 days.”
Earlier this month, Winter Storm Blair dropped several inches of snow and ice in the area, which was followed by cold temperatures. The National Weather Service in Charleston issued a cold weather advisory for Kanawha County and much of the rest of the state beginning at 7 p.m. Tuesday through 10 a.m. Wednesday. Wind chills as low as -2 degrees were expected. The warming center was open Sunday, Monday, Tuesday night and plans to open again Wednesday night.
Last year the warming center opened for an eight-day stretch during extremely cold temperatures, Strickland said. The Kanawha Valley Collective did not use all of the money that the city allocated last year, Matt Sutton, chief of staff for Mayor Amy Goodwin said last week.
Strickland said she assured the city that money would never be the reason that KVC does not open a warming center. The Kanawha Valley Collective and the Bream’s Neighborhood S.H.O.P. are dedicated to running the shelters, she said.
Strickland said she anticipates that KVC will exceed the $100,000 that the city originally budgeted for warming centers.
“Another thing to remember is this was money for both cooling centers and warming centers, and we had an extremely hot July,” she said. “If you think back, I want to say we did eight or nine cooling stations in the summer and those are definitely not as labor intensive, because they’re all things done during the day. But we did expend some funding on that, as well.”
Strickland said six or seven staff members work during each of two shifts per night. Volunteers from area churches and organizations also help with meals and coffee, as well as a sign in sheet, she said.
Strickland said volunteers and staff are helpful. Anyone who works at the warming must first complete training, she said.
“The more people we have to rotate in and out, the easier these long stretches are,” she said.
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