MONTPELIER – The city plans to put a set of lockers behind the Recreation Center back into use, giving people experiencing homelessness a place to store a few personal belongings.
Created in 2022 with about $2,600 in city funding, the program operated for a few years before falling out of use. Now, the city’s Homelessness Committee is working through how to clear out the lockers and make them available again.
Repairs and clean up will happen before the program restarts. Four of the 12 lockers at 55 Barre Street have broken handles and are unusable, and the remaining eight have locks that need to be removed, possibly with items inside, according to Matthew Jelacic, the city’s community and economic development specialist who staffs the committee and spoke during its Sept. 14 meeting.
Members agreed to post flyers on the lockers, at community lunches and food pantries, and notify those who might have belongings still stored in the lockers to retrieve them by Oct. 1.
The city can no longer locate the spare keys or records of locker users kept under its locker use policy, according to City Manager Kelly McNicholas Kury and Communications Coordinator Evelyn Prim. The keys may have been lost when the city hall basement flooded in 2023, Jelacic speculated during the committee meeting.
The city’s policy says the locker program is to keep personal property, such as sleeping bags, dry and safe, and “to assist businesses and visitors by providing a cleaner, safer environment.” Users will have to re-sign an agreement every three months, which states the lockers can be searched by city staff at any time. Belongings left behind by those who do not re-sign the agreement are considered abandoned and held for 90 days before being discarded.
Committee member Dawn Little told the group there is a continued need for the lockers, citing what she said is an increase in theft among people experiencing homelessness as camping locations decrease and more people are centralizing in Montpelier.
Little, a street outreach worker with Good Samaritan Haven, said changes to the locker program need to be tailored to the realities of people living outside. A key-based system, she said, is not practical because keys can easily be lost or stolen, requiring the city to cut locks and replace them. The committee agreed to purchase eight new combination locks to restart the program.
City Councilor and committee member Cary Brown initially suggested the city start lending the lockers out again during an Aug. 26 city council meeting. She said the city should not overthink the program, and “the infrastructure is there, so it just seems like a real shame to not at least make it available.”
McNicholas Kury expressed concerns at that city council meeting about reactivating the lockers, including questions around who would clean them out every 90 days and generally keep track of them, and whether the added responsibility would be manageable for an already stretched city staff.
She also said there may have been an incident outside the policy’s requirements that raised safety concerns when a staff member accompanied someone to their locker. She was unclear on the details.
Montpelier resident Dan McCabe raised a broader concern at the Sept. 14 homelessness committee meeting, saying he wanted “something to be done about the homeless population” and questioning whether the committee’s approach was “just trying to make their lives as convenient as possible.”
“I’m not sure if you guys are helping these people as much as you’re enabling them,” he said.
The committee took a few minutes to respond to McCabe’s concerns, describing the obstacles people can face even when they are trying to move out of homelessness, including physical disabilities, mental health issues, and addiction on top of limited access to regular meals, showers, emergency shelters, housing, and employment.
“We try to support them so they can continue on the path to getting housing, and employment, or whatever they need,” Little said. “But it’s a very difficult thing, because there needs to be support for them to exist while they’re waiting for the things that they need.”
