During the meeting’s public comment period, downtown business owner Summer Hass told the council she is concerned about the closure of Lighthouse Christian Ministries and the downstream effects on local services and vulnerable people who used the facility.

Hass said she has worked with the Chelan and Douglas Counties homeless housing task force on a five-year strategic plan and that Lighthouse was “one of the community assets that we built this plan around.” She added the organization’s closure eliminates a daytime shelter and complicates outreach and service delivery by providers who relied on the site.

The nut graf: Hass asked the council to consider reconvening businesses, service providers and other stakeholders to identify alternatives and requested that, if possible, the council examine whether conditional-use permitting or other regulatory paths could be revisited to restore daytime services.

Hass described practical impacts she expects if no daytime shelter is available: greater pressure on Link Transit and North Central Washington libraries as places where people without shelter spend their days, and difficulty for service providers to locate and coordinate care for clients. “I’ve been working alongside the homeless housing task force… Lighthouse Christian Ministries is one of the community assets that we built this plan around, and I feel that we’re really lucky to have people of faith in our community showing up to serve individuals, in this way,” Hass said.

She offered to convene or assist with stakeholder meetings and said she has templates and experience from similar convenings in other North Central Washington communities. Her comments were made during the public comment segment; no formal council action on this topic was recorded at the meeting.