Jefferson County homelessness stakeholders agree on cause but not action steps

By Andrew Fraieli, Colorado Community Media

The League of Women Voters of Jefferson County and the Jefferson Unitarian Church Community Action Network co-sponsored a virtual panel discussion on Feb. 28 to "explore what can be done in Jefferson County to ease the plight of the unhoused." This included the Mayor of Wheat Ridge Bud Starker and Jeffco Commissioner Tracy Kraft-Tharp along with various nonprofit, city and county representatives.

If there is anything that they all agreed on, it's that everyone needs to work together. But opinions on how that translates into action differed greatly, as do the consequences.

The current amount of people experiencing various forms of homelessness - from vehicular and couchsurfing to unsheltered on the street - is always changing, but even this varied in the panel.

 
Mayor Bud Starker said the city believes there to be only 250 people homeless across the county, whereas the 2022 Point-in-Time count for Jeffco, a count of people who have used shelters and are experiencing unsheltered homelessness on the first of January - considered an undercount by homeless activists as it's done in winter, among other issues - shows there to be about 500.

A month-long count in August of 2019 showed there to be, in more detail, about 1,000 individuals experiencing some form of homelessness in Jefferson County, with 93 in Wheat Ridge alone. Starker would not elaborate on where his stated 250 number came from besides not from the 2022 PIT count.

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This story is from Colorado Community Media. CBS News Colorado is a newsgathering partner with CCM, a network of two dozen newspapers and online publications serving eight metro-area counties on the Front Range.