A year-round Santa Clarita homeless shelter will cut costs and make several local nonprofit service providers eligible for more funding, city officials said Tuesday.

Santa Clarita City Council members unanimously passed the recommendation to hand the Drayton Street property over to Bridge to Home for a year-round homeless services facility for the first time in city history.

“This really kind of represents an evolution of my understanding of homelessness, and I think that of the community, as well,” said Santa Clarita Mayor Cameron Smyth.

Bridge to Home volunteers and staff, who’ve operated what is right now considered Santa Clarita’s Emergency Winter Shelter, due to its seasonal status, have fought for years to find a permanent home for a homeless shelter. Part of the challenge in the past has been community pushback on the location.

Whether it was the evolution of the understanding of the homelessness problem, as Smyth pointed out, or a new county policy that would have defunded all non-year-round shelters, which would have denied the city significant funding to address the concern, service providers for the homeless noted the situation represents a unique opportunity for the city, and the culmination of years of effort.

Measure H, a sales tax L.A. County voters passed in November that raises about $3.5 billion over 10 years to fight the homeless crisis, is a significant funding opportunity for solutions.

“We worked hard to try to find a permanent location,” said Hunt Braly, chairman of the board for Bridge to Home, noting the previous plan for moving the location around every three years, versus establishing a permanent, year-round shelter, was akin to “sharing the pain.”

“The share the pain now should be that you don’t want homeless people in the wash, and you’ve spent lots of money to clean out the embankments in the wash; you don’t want them panhandling in the back of stores; or sleeping in the paseos. It’s a public safety issue. It’s a humane issue,” said Braly to the dais, shortly before the council approved the item.

By providing not just shelter, but programs, counseling and related services, such as Feed it Forward, Braly felt Santa Clarita could do what other communities have not been able to — eradicate most or all of the homelessness in the Santa Clarita Valley.

The move also coincided with a mandate from the Los Angeles County agency that funds homeless services in the region.

All new funding for shelter programs will be for organizations operating 24-hours and 365 days per year, according to LAHSA. The requests for services are due in October, when care providers are expected to seek out funding.

Bridge to Home has operated their temporary emergency winter shelter at the Drayton Street location, which was was found in 2007 by a city task force,  since 2011.

Giving Bridge to Home permits to operate year-round also would shave about $180,000 off the cost of relocating, if another shelter is needed, said city officials, noting the resource for the homeless has had several locations.

In February 2007, the City Council approved a recommendation made by the Task Force to site the winter shelter at three different locations in the Santa Clarita Valley over a nine-year period. The locations approved by the City Council as recommended by the Task Force included the City-owned Golden Valley Road property, City-owned Drayton property, and Peter J. Pitchess Honor Rancho in Castaic (Los Angeles County Jail), which is owned by the County of Los Angeles

Bridge to Home was operating a shelter from the Monday before Thanksgiving, which, this year, is November 20, and the end of March.

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