GREEN COVE SPRINGS – The Clay County Board of County Commissioners voted unanimously Tuesday to outsource county homeless stabilization to the nonprofit Mercy Support Services, a $100,000 agreement.

Funds will come from the county’s State Housing Initiatives Partnership program, a pot of money separate from the county budget padded with state appropriated funds derived from mortgage document taxes.

The board’s move signals a transition in the county from predominantly passive strategies to curb homelessness to more active measures.

The three-year contract allows Mercy to provide funds for both rapid rehousing of individuals who are homeless and residents who are imminently in danger of eviction.

“The SHIP program is really not setup to handle [those programs], we don’t have enough staff to do that,” said SHIP Coordinator Theresa Sumner. “Mercy does this already, so we’re trying to help them take their program to the next step. They would have the case managers to follow through, to make sure these people are on the up and up, that they really do need help.”

Caveats exist, however. The program has safeguards to ensure against abuse. According to Clay County’s Local Housing Assistance Plan – the county’s list of strategies over the next three years – the SHIP program’s eviction prevention help will not exceed six months. Rapid rehousing funds will pay no more than $10,000 per household and no more than $900 per month for help with low-cost rent, utilities and deposits on homes for only the county’s most at-risk and low-income individuals.

“I’m very excited about it because there’s a huge need for this in the county and I think if we can catch these problems and fix it, then the whole family unit doesn’t just go to pieces,” Sumner said. “When the tragedy happens to a family then all kinds of things can happen. It greatly benefits the community to help them at this level and keep them from getting any worse.”

Homeless prevention initiatives save communities money further down the calendar by reducing the strain on social safety nets such as food assistance and medical services.

Mercy’s role would also be to provide services to the people they housed, and offer case management to ensure the funds are going to a family or individual that will eventually grow out of the services instead of subsist on their own

While in the program, individuals could receive financial management services or addiction recovery classes to ensure the individual or family can grow to self-sufficiency.

As proposed, SHIP’s funds would go towards reimbursing Mercy for its expenditures towards the program.

“We don’t have funding for those at this point, so that would increase the amount of services we can offer to those that call in, because there are quite a number of people who call in for housing,” said Patrick Hayle, Mercy Support Services chief executive officer. “If we can help them we help them.”

Mercy currently has eight apartments and plans to buy more to the extent they have the funding to do so.

Currently, there is not an emergency shelter for the homeless here. The deficiency of affordable housing in Clay County is clear, however, the county is slowly migrating towards more affordable housing units. On June 13, the BCC will continue public comment on a zoning variance that would allow developers to build 40 affordable housing apartments on 2.8 acres along Cleveland Avenue near Orange Park.

The SHIP program will continue to run its housing rehabilitation program that helps the elderly modify their homes with updates such as walk rails among others.

Two years ago, the state legislature wrote provisional language that allowed the SHIP program to adopt rapid rehousing and homeless prevention programs, and recently voted to permanently adopt the amendments.

Once Mercy has reviewed and signed the contract, the agreement will take effect and a previously unmet need in the community could slowly begin to be filled.

I want to “work myself out of a job,” Hayle said. “I believe that we have to find a way to get beneath this and find a way to identify what the symptoms are and try to work on those rather than always try to cure a problem that is already there. I think we need to work past curative and get to preventative.”