Portland Weighs $900,000 in Opioid Funds for a Warming Shelter

Portland, Maine city councilors were asked Monday evening to take $900,000 out of the city's opioid settlement fund to operate a winter warming shelter in the Riverside Industrial Park — the same former asylum-seeker building where the city ran a shelter last winter and shut it during a February blizzard. The request is more than double the $350,000 appropriation the council read for the first time a week earlier, when the plan was still to put the shelter downtown.

The shelter proposal has to clear a vote that normally takes two separate readings. City staff asked councilors to waive the second reading and pass the item as an emergency, each of which requires seven affirmative votes from the nine-member council. The meeting was scheduled to begin at 5 p.m. and to be held virtually.

What moved the shelter off the peninsula

The original plan placed a nightly operation for 45 to 50 people in the basement of Preble Street's Elena's Way shelter in Bayside, with the Biddeford nonprofit Seeds of Hope running it. Zoning for the building limited sleeping space to the upper level and capped guests at 40, and city staff concluded that a temporary-use approval would contradict those conditions rather than override them. A city inspection this fall also found Preble Street was not following parts of its own management plan, including area safety monitoring.

According to a council memo described by the Press Herald, Seeds of Hope then told the city it was no longer willing to operate at Elena's Way "due to community resistance and regulatory challenges," and Preble Street declined to run the shelter itself. Staff reviewed city-owned buildings, contacted St. Vincent de Paul and First Parish, and returned to the Riverside site.

The move is expensive. The Riverside proposal is estimated at $1.2 million, roughly $500,000 more than the downtown version, and it depends on a lease agreement plus a transportation plan for shuttling people on and off the peninsula. The $361,000 that MaineHousing awarded to the original Elena's Way plan has been folded into the new budget.

A city that has run this loop before

Portland operated a warming shelter at 166 Riverside Industrial Parkway last winter with $400,000 in state funding, opening it on temperature and precipitation thresholds rather than every night. That approach drew sustained criticism, most sharply after the shelter stayed closed during a late-February blizzard because of a staff shortage. Local reporting at the time noted Maine Medical Center could not discharge two unhoused patients overnight because there was nowhere for them to go.

"It feels like I'm in a time loop, because this is what happened last year," Councilor Anna Bullett, who chairs the health and human services and public safety committee, told the Press Herald on Friday.

MaineHousing, meanwhile, has announced a record $2.72 million for 12 winter warming shelters statewide, funding 474 beds between November 15 and April 30. Portland's roughly three-week runway to opening night is the constraint that produced the emergency-passage request.

The eligibility question nobody has answered in public

What makes the Portland vote more than a local shelter fight is where the money would come from. The appropriation would draw on the city's Opioid Settlement Fund, the local share of the national settlements with opioid manufacturers and distributors, whose spending is governed by an approved-uses schedule attached to the agreements. That schedule covers housing-related services when they are tied to treatment and recovery for people with opioid use disorder — transitional housing, recovery housing, housing navigation — alongside a long list of treatment, harm reduction and prevention categories. It is not an unrestricted municipal fund.

Reporting on the first reading noted that the city has not publicly explained how a general winter warming shelter meets those terms. That is the question the council has yet to answer on the record, and it is not a technicality: settlement money spent outside the approved schedule invites challenges from the states that signed the agreements, and it is exactly what a wave of public audits of settlement spending in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia has been examining.

There is a defensible version of this spending. Overdose risk rises in cold weather and in congregate settings where people use alone, and shelter staff are a documented point of contact for naloxone distribution and referrals into opioid use disorder treatment. Whether Portland's proposal is built that way — staffed with harm reduction capacity, tracked against an opioid-specific outcome — is not visible in the documents described so far. The city manager's office has not said what share of the shelter's guests it expects to have an opioid use disorder, which is the kind of figure that would make the eligibility case in one line.

What the vote does not settle

Even a seven-vote emergency passage leaves the shelter's operating future open. The council is scheduled to take the item up again on November 2, when staff expect to have the location, financing and operating details in final form. The lease is not signed. The transportation plan does not exist yet in public. And no one has committed the city to nightly operations beyond this winter.

The deeper issue is that Portland is using a one-time legal settlement to pay for a recurring municipal obligation. Warming shelters are now an annual expense in a city where the previous two winters produced the same scramble, and settlement dollars are finite: they are scheduled to arrive in tranches over more than a decade and are already committed to treatment capacity, naloxone purchasing and recovery housing that cannot be funded any other way. Spending them on a general shelter buys this winter and borrows against the next one.

People who need help now can reach the SAMHSA National Helpline at 1-800-662-4357, and Maine's own referral line at 211 connects callers to shelter, detox and medication-assisted treatment openings in the state.