Mayor John Whitmire
The City of Houston spent about $6.5 million as the January winter storm brought freezing temperatures and snow to the region.
Mayor John Whitmire’s chief of staff, Chris Newport, told the city’s resilience committee Thursday that the 10 warming centers at their peak were filled with about 1,300 people.
“We feel that the activations went well,” Newport said. “It certainly met a need. We’re confident that lives were saved because of the city activating these warming centers.”
By contrast, the city did not initially open centers during the shorter freeze in early January. The Office of Emergency Management pointed to city policy calling for centers to only open when temperatures drop to 24 degrees for at least two hours, but Whitmire said he “worked around” those rules to eventually open centers.
During the snowstorm, two people died from exposure to the elements — one man with dementia who wandered from home and a woman who was found in a parking lot.
Pointing to vulnerable populations, like homeless people, who refused shelter, Newport said the city’s biggest challenge was “breaking through … to convince them that you can trust the offer that we’re making.”
“That’s the biggest life-saving, life-and-death stakes type of situation that will be the biggest challenge that we have,” he said.
After Winter Storm Enzo, Whitmire repeated his calls for a crackdown on the presence of homeless people sleeping on Houston streets.
“We’ll deal with that population effectively in days to come by making sure that they’re safe, secure, and let people know you can’t sleep on the streets of Houston as current ordinance allows,” Whitmire said at the time.
The main point I want to make here is just that there are always unexpected expenses in the operation of any enterprise, from your household budget to a business to the government. Stuff happens, and you need to have the capacity to deal with it. In the category of weather and climate-related expenses, you can expect them to have an upward trend; hopefully, a gently sloping upward trend, but with the real danger of spikes at any time. Ideally, this is where the federal government, with its much greater capacity to fund emergency expenses, will step up and step in to keep local and state governments afloat. Unfortunately, that’s not such a good bet right now. I’ll just say again, we better hope for a quiet, uneventful hurricane season. The downside is looking mighty scary.
The City of Houston (COH) spent $6,500,000 to provide shelter/meals to 1,300 people? That’s $5,000 per person. Perhaps the COH could accomplish the same objective in a more cost-effective way by partnering with local churches, non-profits, and philanthropist business leaders to provide the needed warming centers. Through those partnerships, the COH could pre-deploy portable emergency generators, heaters, fuel, MREs, bottled water, etc. as needed and, as a winter storm approaches, reassign some existing COH employees to help provide support. Anyway, the COH should be able to figure out a way to provide warming centers/meals for less than $5,000 per person.
I think that figure is what they claim they spent, not what it may have cost. I believe all public places would have been heated regardless of whether anyone was there. I’m not sure how much the water would have cost or the not-so-healthy food would have cost, but they had quite a bit of those items left over at one of the community centers.
Is the cost bloated? It would not surprise me, especially if they try to recoup some from the state or federal government.