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A group of concerned homeless residents came knocking at the city’s door on Friday, asking officials to help them find a way to keep a temporary shelter at Oakland’s old Army Base open until the weather dries out and warms up. 

More than a dozen people gathered in a ground-floor conference room with Steve Barton, director of the city’s Housing Department, Andrew Wicker, a community support specialist with the Housing Department, and Cisco DeVries, aide to Mayor Bates, to ask the city to find a way to help them keep the shelter open. The group had earlier pleaded its case to Oakland officials. 

“We don’t want to point the finger, we want to help,” said Dwight Stallings who has used the shelter for most of the winter. Stallings said he and other called the meeting not to protest the upcoming closure but as a way to try and facilitate a way to find more money. 

“We need the housing, we’re people with skills and trades and we just need a little more time,” he said, adding that many of those at the meeting are trying to transition into more permanent housing. 

The Operation Dignity Temporary Winter Shelter, which has 100 beds and provides showers and two meals a day along with counseling and health services, usually stays open through or until the middle of April. It is now a victim of pending budget cuts. According to Alex McElree, executive director of Operation Dignity, the organization that runs the shelter, a $50,000 grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that came through in previous years was cut off for this year. 

According to McElree, as of Monday Oakland had proposed re-allocating $30,500 which will keep the shelter open until April 2. It costs the shelter $2,500 to per day to run operations. 

Andrew Wicker, from Berkeley’s Housing Department, said the city will not be able to contribute as much as Oakland, but will contribute almost $20,000 pending approval from the city manager and or the City Council. 

Wicker said the funds will come out of the Housing Department’s unused pool for emergency shelter vouchers for families or people with disabilities. That pool, he said, was not drained as much as expected this year. 

Berkeley contributed $56,000 to the Army shelter’s budget earlier this year because it serves large parts of the homeless community here in Berkeley that cannot get into other city shelters. The city also allocated $42,000 for travel vouchers on BART that the homeless can use to get to the shelter. 

“On the one hand the city should be responding to the concern of its citizens,” said Wicker. “We support their goals and I’m very impressed that they’re working to make things happen.” 

“On the other hand it’s frustrating that we’re scrambling to come up with resources.” 

According to McElree, the shelter serves a vital role for those who cannot get into other shelters, especially during the county’s rainiest and coldest months. He said the county only has 1,000 beds for an estimated 3,500 people. 

“We take the homeless who are hardest to serve, the people who will not come in from the rain, the most needy,” said McElree. 

McElree said the center is also a home base of sorts for homeless veterans. Operation Dignity runs a number of veteran services and veterans make up 22 percent of shelter residents. 

A young man who declined to give his name but said he had just returned from Iraq after serving with the 82nd airborne said the shelter was one of the only places he could turn because people had continually turned him down for jobs, fearing he might have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). 

“I spent 120 days serving, and I get kicked back on the street, that’s what I get, that’s my reward,” he said. “I’m hitting brick walls everywhere I go.”