COVINGTON, Ky. — Covington Mayor Joe Meyer recommended the city perform a management audit on the Emergency Shelter of Northern Kentucky at last week’s city commission meeting, following complaints from Westside neighborhood residents and testimonials from former shelter employees.
In a statement at the end of the meeting, Meyer said that the city didn’t want to close down the Emergency Shelter (or any other shelter, for that matter) but instead wanted to ensure that the interests of the city’s most vulnerable were balanced with the interests of the residents.
“The city has a responsibility to our vulnerable populations to work with the health and social service agencies, in this case to ensure that people that don’t have stable housing are treated in a way that respects their dignity and helps them with their immediate needs,” Meyer said. “We can absolutely have that responsibility, but we also have an equal responsibility to our citizens at large to insist that agencies be good neighbors and that they do not drain city coffers by requiring city services far beyond what is reasonable and acceptable.”
RELATED: Former Emergency Shelter of Northern Kentucky employees seek investigation into safety concerns
The Emergency Shelter of Northern Kentucky, located on 13th Street in Covington’s Westside neighborhood, is one of the region’s most well-known homelessness service providers. It offers 68 beds for emergency overnight stays between November and March, and many in the community still refer to the organization as ‘the cold shelter,’ even though it offers services year-round. Other services the shelter offers include an on-site medical clinic and a work program for men during the summer months.
The shelter became a focus for the commission starting in August when a group of neighbors from the Westside neighborhood, Aaron Wolpert, Nicole Erwin and Fritz Kuhlmann, leveled criticisms at the shelter and its leadership. They pointed to instances of alleged harassment and other safety issues they argued were connected to the shelter and its guests. They also expressed concern with how the shelter was managing its money.
Wolpert is running for a seat on the city commission this year.
The city’s regulations of shelters are modeled after an ordinance from Louisville. It was crafted in a collaboration between elected officials, city staff, the city’s legal team, and local service providers over about seven months. It passed into law in 2020, but after the complaints from residents, the commissioners began reassessing the ordinance with an eye for enforcement. This reassessment included meetings between shelter operators and city staff at the end of last year. Those meetings were not open to the public.
On Tuesday, Meyer emphasized that homelessness was a regional issue and referenced a 2019 report from the Northern Kentucky Homelessness Working Group, which was formed by by Kenton County Judge/Executive Kris Knochelmann and Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport CEO Candace McGraw to study the issue in the region. The report expressed a need to improve the data collection around homelessness in Northern Kentucky. The Emergency Shelter of Northern Kentucky and several other regional service agencies contributed to the report.
In addition, Meyer referenced police, fire and EMS reports to the shelter’s address since its relocation from its original building on Scott Street, arguing that public safety issues in the Westside had increased since the move.
“Comparing emergency service calls for the impacted neighborhood from fiscal year ’21, the year before the shelter located there, and ’23, the first year after the shelter relocated there, shows stark changes,” Meyer said.
The mayor said there were 1,305 safety runs in the area of the shelter in fiscal year 2021. In 2023, that number had climbed to 2,050 in the same area, the mayor said. These numbers were high compared to incidents at other service agencies.
The mayor brought a spreadsheet summarizing the incidents to the meeting and shared it with LINK nky. Dated from July 1, 2022, to June 30, 2023, the sheet contained about 600 incident citations of various kinds at the shelter’s address. Incidents at surrounding addresses did not appear on the spreadsheet.
Meyer also referenced testimonials of the working conditions from two former shelter employees, Deborah Zepf and Anne Alig. Zepf and Alig spoke with LINK nky for a story about the emergency shelter and the issues surrounding it last year, but they both publicly shared their stories to the commission in the time between that first story and Tuesday’s meeting.
“The shelter’s unsafe,” Zepf stated during the public comment section of the Jan. 23 meeting, saying that police were called constantly to deal with dangerous behavior on the part of the guests.
Illness prevented Alig from speaking in front of the commission, but she made a written statement in a press release the neighbors sent to news organizations in late January.
“There is no real training offered at the shelter. We are understaffed. There is no security…,” Alig said. “[The shelter] is a sham. The building is a shell for a fundraising scheme to profit off some of our most vulnerable people.”
On Tuesday, Meyer recommended the city start with a management audit to review the shelter’s compliance with the city ordinance program operations and then “make recommendations for improving services to the homeless, reducing the demand for public services, and lessening the negative impact on the residents and the neighborhood.”
Commissioner and mayoral candidate Ron Washington agreed with bringing in an outside organization to better determine the truth.
“I understand the problems with the neighborhood, the experience the neighbors are having,” Washington said, “but I think it’s also fair to run the best homeless shelter possible for the people that are temporarily there.”
Meyer said he’d identified three consultants familiar with sheltering operations but declined to share them. He also stated that the process of auditing and investigating would likely take a long time, although he did not give specific expectations.
Representatives from the shelter did not attend Tuesday’s meeting, but a shelter spokesperson sent out a response to the commission’s discussion later in the week.
“The Emergency Shelter of Northern Kentucky is committed to working with the City of Covington to meet or exceed all permit requirements and have done so since the city started issuing permits,” the statement reads. “We have strong and positive working relationships with city staff, law enforcement and other community resources. We have invited our local elected officials, policy makers and city and county leaders for tours of our facilities and many have taken us up on the offer, seeing first-hand the life-saving and life-changing work we do here.
“We have not been contacted by the city with regards to a management audit. If and when they city reaches out about this or any other matter, we look forward to having direct discussions with them about their needs, just as we have in the past. Any communication between ESNKY, our counsel and the city will not be handled in the press,” the statement concludes.
The next meeting of the Covington City Commission will take place on Tuesday, Feb. 20 at 6 p.m. at Covington City Hall on Pike Street.
LINK nky is a media partner of WCPO.com.
