The City of Cold Lake is looking at various ways to assist in the vagrancy, crime, and homelessness situations that are accruing in the city. A few of those ways are increasing bylaw officers to better patrol and execute city bylaws that relate to vagrancy, crime, and homelessness and creating a temporary shelter for individuals that are without adequate housing.

Combating Vagrancy and Crime

The city is investing money to increase bylaw officers and programming to combat vagrancy and crime, explained the mayor of Cold Lake, Craig Copeland in an exclusive interview with Lakeland Connect.

“The concentration at night for the bylaw officers will be the downtown crime,” Copeland explained that there have been many complaints regarding the correlation between the increase in vagrancy and the increase of property crime. “They will try to patrol the north and south equally,” the mayor said. Some areas of concern are 50th Avenue in the north, the landfill, and Tricity Mall.

Along with those measures, the city will continue its contract with the Cold Lake Regional Chamber of Commerce for Watch Dog Security for another year.

“We’ll have a big focus on dealing with vagrancy, crime and keeping more eyes on the streets,” Copeland said. The measures the city is taking are to help the RCMP, “it is, unfortunately, a busy detachment.”

Preventing Homelessness

The city is creating a temporary shelter, also known as a Mat Program, confirmed Copeland, “we just purchased an old drilling camp from an oil rig company and we’re going to retrofit it [into a temporary shelter].”

Copeland explained the program will be a partnership with the John Howard Society, “they’re going to have a Mat Program, which basically means people can get out of the elements and sleep on a mat for the night.” The building has a commercial kitchen and there will also be food available at the shelter.

Other supports include social workers on hand to assist people in finding employment, banking, or social assistance. The shelter will security on site.

“The best scenario is that we will have nobody show up,” Copeland said, “but unfortunately, as we’ve seen this summer, we were inundated with people.”

With the John Howard Society closing in the spring, due to leasing agreements and zoning issues, it is estimated there were 50-60 people living in tent camps in and around Cold Lake.

“These [tent camps] caused a lot of issues, problems in neighbourhoods with fires, and a lot of fires got out of control and the firefighters had to come put them out,” the mayor explained some of the problems with the tent camps.

The goal with giving people a safe place to stay temporarily is to eliminate the unsafe environments that come with tent camps.

“We don’t want anybody staying in the back alleys, camping or creating shelters at businesses’ property,” alternatively the mayor explained people will have the John Howard Society shelter to turn to.

Funding

“There’s an expectation on council and we’re going to support these programs, the RCMP, bylaw officers, and Watch Dog programs” mayor Copeland confirmed. “We don’t want [the issues] to continue, we will help in the enforcing, but also give people a hand up.”

The city has committed $100,000 to the John Howard Society and $625,000 to the shelter program.

To pay for these initiatives, the city will move money from reserves. Some of the reserves were allocated to the new pool build. Copeland said the city is confident plans for a pool will move forward even with the reallocation of some funds.

The John Howard Society is also looking for volunteer and members to join its board.