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The only homeless shelter in rural Somerset County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore closed with little warning over the summer after an audit identified improper spending, including covid relief dollars spent on an employee’s Jeep Compass — leaving the state’s poorest county without a shelter as homelessness spikes.
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The nonprofit Somerset Committee for the Homeless Inc. shuttered the Princess Anne, Md., facility one day after receiving news that its state contracts would not be renewed, following the previously unreported audit by the county health department and the state housing agency. Twenty-three people who were staying in the Lower Shore Shelter had to move to hotel rooms temporarily, and just three landed in permanent housing, Danielle Weber, a health officer at the Somerset County Health Department, told The Washington Post. The rest moved to other shelters in neighboring counties, with 10 remaining homeless after the hotel stays ended.
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“The decision to shut down the shelter was a heartbreaking one, as it is the only shelter in Somerset County, and our committee and staff have worked diligently to maintain it since its opening in December of 2017,” Richard Scott, president of the nonprofit that ran the shelter, said in an email. He did not respond to requests for an interview and did not answer questions about the details of the audit’s findings.
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Weber said the health department is searching for a new service provider to reopen the 24-bed shelter, which property records show was sold to the county for $0 in June.
The audit prompted the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) to cut off grants in mid-June that had provided $887,627 in funding over three years to the nonprofit that ran the Lower Shore Shelter. State and county officials listed 11 findings of deficiency that warranted corrective action and an additional six that inspectors found troubling. They found that shelter operators improperly used state dollars to make payments on a vehicle used for a staff member’s personal transportation, to purchase snacks and sodas for staffers and to pay administrative salaries for the executive director and other workers that were improperly billed as emergency expenses.
Inspectors also raised concerns that some shelter policies infringed on the rights of clients, including a curfew inspectors deemed “not respectful of clients’ rights.” In another finding, the audit criticized a savings plan that required shelter occupants to place any income — from wages, child support, disability payments or other sources — into a fund for permanent housing to stay in the facility. The audit also raised concerns that the shelter was failing to connect clients to services, with two-thirds of people living in the Lower Shore Shelter returning to homelessness after their 90-day stays ended.
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One of the largest improper expenses was $11,000 in covid relief dollars used to pay several monthly payments for a Jeep Compass that was purchased in a shelter staff member’s name and the nonprofit’s name. Officials initially approved payments on a vehicle to be used for client transportation, but the audit found the Jeep was instead used for the employee’s personal transportation. (The employee’s name was redacted in a copy of the audit obtained by The Post.)
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A DHCD spokeswoman said that the state recouped the $11,000 spent on the Jeep by denying later requests for reimbursement that would have otherwise been paid out to the nonprofit. Most of the other improper expenses submitted by the nonprofit were identified and rejected before reimbursement payments were made, said Allison Foster, a spokeswoman for the state agency.
Scott said in an email that the nonprofit was “given no opportunity” to meet with state inspectors to refute or correct problems identified in the audit.
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“They came to their conclusions without any review of records that would have refuted their findings,” he said.
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The audit, however, said that the majority of violations cited in June were repeat offenses that had been identified in a monitoring report from the 2018-19 fiscal year. The nonprofit had been presented with corrective action plans, according to the audit, but the 2023 audit found that the organization was not able to execute those plans or prove compliance with federal and state grant requirements.
Scott did not respond to questions about specific findings in the audit, including questions about the $11,000 used for the Jeep payments, nor did he address the findings that the audit said went unchecked after the 2018-19 monitoring report.
The shelter’s closure reduced the number of critically needed individual and family shelter units in a region already short on emergency shelter space. Homelessness in the tri-county Lower Shore region hit a record low in 2021 but swiftly rebounded this year to its highest level since 2014.
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Somerset County has the state’s highest poverty level alongside the city of Baltimore, with 20 percent of residents living in poverty, according to 2020 census data. The county also has the state’s lowest per capita personal income of $32,531, which is more than $10,000 less than the next lowest county. Neighboring Wicomico County has the state’s fourth-highest poverty rate and the third-lowest personal income.
As federal coronavirus relief dollars ran out this year, local governments and nonprofit groups struggled to keep up with an increasing number of calls for assistance with housing, utility payments and food insecurity. Service providers in the region that encompasses Somerset, Wicomico and Worcester counties say they have been inundated with calls from people in crisis, but on a typical day, the region has no available shelter space.
“If there’s a family unit available in Salisbury today at 9 a.m., it’s going to be filled by noon,” said Jennifer Trager, program manager for the Seton Center at Catholic Charities.
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Maryland’s social safety net has been increasingly strained as pandemic-era funds ran out this summer. At the same time, state leaders are eyeing a different approach to address homelessness with a sharper focus on quickly getting people into affordable housing rather than relying on an overburdened shelter system. In July, Maryland Housing Secretary Jake Day announced a $7.1 million investment aimed at accelerating permanent housing placements to reduce the need for emergency shelter space across the state. The Department for Housing and Community Development also said it would comprehensively review all of the shelters that receive state dollars through that program to ensure that they are compliant with grant requirements and are prioritizing getting people out of homelessness.
“With these funds, we’re making sure that we accelerate the process of getting our most vulnerable Marylanders experiencing homelessness off the streets and into a secure, dignified place to call home,” Day said in a July statement.
But those efforts have not replaced the robust, but temporary, coronavirus relief. The end of rental assistance programs and eviction moratoriums that kept people in their homes during the pandemic has put many families on the brink of homelessness. When they call service providers for help, there are few resources to fill the gaps left when the covid-era programs ended.
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In that strained environment, the sudden closure of the Lower Shore Shelter has left a struggling region with even fewer resources to meet an unrelenting demand for emergency shelter this summer. On the morning that the Lower Shore Shelter closed its doors, Trager’s team at Catholic Charities stepped in to assist the county health department in temporarily relocating the 23 clients to a nearby hotel. But connecting those people to long-term solutions has been a struggle.
“People don’t get to move out of those [emergency] shelters because there’s no affordable housing to move them into,” Trager said.
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