Staff photo by C.B. Schmelter / Hamilton County Sheriff Jim Hammond, shown in this March 8, 2021, file photo, appeared before the county commission on Wednesday to ask for more funding for the FUSE program.Hamilton County Sheriff Jim Hammond asked the county commission recently to accept a $28,000 donation to the sheriff's office and for permission to apply for a $125,000 grant intended to help the Frequent Users Systems Engagement housing program.
The money is being donated by the nonprofit Aegis Law Enforcement of Greater Chattanooga Inc., a foundation that supports area police agencies, and would be used to purchase "needed items" for the department, according to Hammond.
He said he would return before the commission at a later date with specific individual requests for those items.
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Then at the Oct. 13 meeting, Hammond requested permission to negotiate and submit a Continuum of Care grant application to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for $125,000 to engage a "housing navigator" - an employee responsible for facilitating and placing homeless individuals and families into housing - and to provide funding for other costs associated with securing temporary and permanent housing for those participating in the local FUSE housing program.
The Continuum of Care federal program provides funding for efforts to quickly rehouse homeless people, youth and those fleeing domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault and stalking while "minimizing the trauma and dislocation caused by homelessness," according to the program's website.
"It's a competitive grant and will come up again every year, so we have the opportunity to receive these funds every year," Hamilton County Sheriff's Office Chief of Staff Gino Bennett said at the meeting. "It's basically designed to work strictly with the homeless and that's where a majority of those funds will go, for a housing navigator and additional expenses that go along with getting people into housing temporarily or permanently."
Temporary housing, Bennett said, includes stays in motels or hotels. The goal of the FUSE program is to get folks out of those temporary situations and into more permanent housing, which he defined as having "a lease with a landlord."
District 2 Commissioner Chip Baker asked what the resources for permanent housing are right now and whether there are multiple available options through the FUSE program.
"That's a difficult question," Bennett said. "Housing is more difficult to obtain these days than it was even five years ago. COVID has had a huge impact on housing availability."
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Despite the challenges of the pandemic, Bennett said, the goal of the FUSE program remains the same: to find permanent housing for the homeless, not a temporary fix.
District 5 Commissioner Katerlyn Geter questioned whether or not there might be other funding opportunities out there that would bring back more money to put toward permanent housing units that could be used by the FUSE program and its participants.
"Housing is the crux of how these people can get on and be successful in their lives, so that's why I'm asking about that," Geter said.
Sheriff Hammond said "a little over a billion, yes a billion, dollars of grant money" will be coming in the next several months and that he will be "very aggressive" about pursuing it.
The request for more funding for the FUSE program comes nearly a month after Hammond and others from the Hamilton County Sheriff's Office briefed the commission on how the program was going. At that time, program manager Janna Jahn said 10 people were participating. Seven of those 10, she said, had already been placed in permanent housing.
"We still have three we're working on," Jahn said. "In the three years prior to these 10 folks being enrolled in the program, they had 68 arrests and 4,208 days in the county jail. Since they have been in our program, the number of arrests have dropped to 11 arrests and 150 days in jail."
Monetary costs associated with jailing those people have also decreased. In the three years before the program's current participants got involved with the program, Jahn said, $315,000 was spent on jail costs for them. Since then, only $11,250 has been spent.
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The commission will vote on both of Hammond's requests on Wednesday.
Contact Kelcey Caulder at kcaulder@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6327. Follow her on Twitter @kelceycaulder.