WORCESTER—Councilors are asking for reports on the city’s plans to address homelessness, the impacts of COVID-19, and the feasibility of offering free admission to the city’s art museums to public school students, among other things, at their meeting Tuesday.
Councilor At-Large Thu Nguyen requested a report on COVID-19, specifically regarding its impact on areas identified as “hot spots.” Nguyen wants the report to include the patterns of peaks throughout the years since the pandemic started in 2020 and current efforts to address it.
Nguyen is also asking the city manager for a two to five-year plan to address the number of unhoused people in the city, specifically looking at creating and expanding temporary and year-long shelters.
They also asked for a list of the partner organizations that work with the city to house people experiencing homelessness and the funding and resources those organizations receive from the city with any funding from the American Rescue Plan Act distinguished as emergency, temporary support.
The city is currently experiencing a shortage of shelter beds. In December, the city announced it would be opening a 60-bed emergency winter shelter, but said that it would only cut down the city’s shortage of shelter beds from 197 to 137.
The city received emergency permission from the state to add 22 shelter beds to the emergency shelter following a politicized encampment outside of the former RMV building on Main Street that houses the shelter on Jan. 10.
Evis Terpollari, the city’s Homeless Projects manager, provided the city’s Human Rights Commission with an annual update on homelessness in the city at the beginning of December.
Terpollari told the commission that as of Oct. 23 the city had identified 131 chronically homeless individuals in 2023. That number marks a nearly 16 percent increase since the city established the Housing First Coordinating Council in 2018 when the city identified 113 chronically homeless individuals, according to Terpollari.
The overall unhoused population in the city includes 544 individuals who make up a combination of sheltered and unsheltered, and 791 children and adults who are part of families, Terpollari told the commission in December. Since Massachusetts is a right-to-shelter state, the family members are either living in shelters or hotels and motels.
The Housing First Coordinating Council was first established to address chronic homelessness in the city, according to Terpollari, but due to a rise in family homelessness, Terpollari said he wanted to share that data with the commission as well.
The “housing first” method to address homelessness focuses on providing permanent housing for chronically homeless individuals without requirements such as sobriety, treatment, or service participation.
Worcester Mayor Joseph Petty is responsible for raising the idea of offering free admission to major city museums to Worcester Public School students on a monthly or bi-monthly basis. The mayor included the Worcester Art Museum, EcoTarium, and Worcester Historical Museum in his list of the city’s major museums.
Other councilors are asking for reports on the 2023 crime statistics in the city and the master plan relative to the Worcester Common. Councilor At-Large Morris Bergman is also asking for a draft petition for residents of private streets asking for short-term repairs.
The meeting will take place on Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. at Worcester City Hall.
Kiernan Dunlop is an award-winning journalist who has spent the past five years reporting in Worcester, New Bedford, and Antigua and Barbuda. Her work has been published in Bloomberg, USA Today, Canary Media, MassLive, and the New Bedford Standard Times, among other outlets. She can be contacted at kdunlop@theworcesterguardian.org
