Progress reported toward opening homeless shelter in Bozeman

By GAIL SCHONTZLER Chronicle Staff Writer

With freezing weather approaching, it appears Bozeman may finally get a homeless shelter.

Paul Thomas, who has been feeding Bozeman's homeless community from the HIS Soup van for seven years, said this week that he is close to formally applying for a city permit needed to transform a house in the K-mart area into a gospel rescue mission.

It's not a done deal yet.

But Thomas, as well as city Planning Director Andy Epple and Jim Evans, an active member of the Southwest Montana Building Industry Association, sounded cautiously optimistic.

“I've been praying about it for 10 years,” Thomas said. “My goal is to open before Christmas.”

Thomas' hope is to create a place that offers meals, showers, laundry and access to local services that can help people find jobs, permanent homes or other assistance. It would offer temporary shelter when freezing weather hits.

“The No. 1 thing is our goal is to make it a positive in the community,” Thomas said, and to help homeless people get back on their feet, off the streets and into the community.

A mission would be a lot of work, he said, but “it's what God put in my heart.”

Local building-industry members are ready to help make it happen, Evans said.

“Paul has a vision and we're going to be a driving force in pulling this together,” Evans said of SWMBIA members. “We're pro-Bozeman. We want to give back to the community. ... We're very excited to be part of it.”

Thomas said that an out-of-state buyer has a contract to purchase the small house, but the sale is contingent on winning the city permit.

A mission would be allowed under the area's business (B-2) zoning; however it would need a “special temporary-use permit,” according to Epple. The planning director said he can approve the permit administratively if it is “required for the proper function of the community” or temporarily required to establish a permitted use.

“In my opinion,” Epple wrote in an e-mail, this permit “would meet both those criteria.”

Epple added he has been working with the police, fire, health and building departments and “so far feedback as been pretty favorable - most people comment that that's an area where homeless people tend to congregate anyway, so it seems a pretty appropriate site for the mission.”

The permit would be good for up to two years, “to give everyone a chance to evaluate how this use functions and fits into the neighborhood,” Epple wrote.

After that, to make the mission permanent, it would need to go through a formal site-plan review with the city's development review committee, and the planning director would need to OK the site plan. A public hearing before the City Commission wouldn't be required unless the mission needed a zoning variance or deviation, and Epple said he wasn't aware of any being requested.

The occupancy limit would be determined by the city's building division and Gallatin City-County Health Department.

While most large cities in Montana have had homeless shelters for decades, Bozeman has not, which has hurt the city's reputation around the state.

Many Bozeman residents were shocked last January when a homeless man was found frozen to death in a U-Haul truck on North Seventh Avenue, after temperatures plunged to 10 below zero. That rekindled interest in building a homeless shelter in Bozeman.

In the past dozen years, two major efforts to start a shelter here were started, but both failed.

Downtown Bozeman churches and the Salvation Army have traditionally given transients limited assistance, with food, motel vouchers and bus tickets. Eighteen months ago, local churches started Family Promise to help homeless families.

Thomas was working with a group of volunteers earlier this year to start a gospel rescue mission, but he ended up resigning. One area of disagreement, he said, was that he didn't want to seek government funds, which would bar preaching the Christian gospel.

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