Census, tracking systems for area homeless planned

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2004 | 8:55 a.m.

Two projects to count and then keep track of homeless men and women in the Las Vegas Valley are closer to becoming a reality, a county official said.

A census of the homeless population will be paid for by federal funds administered by Clark County, said Shawna Parker Brody, a county analyst, at a Tuesday meeting of agencies that work with the homeless.

County Manager Thom Reilly will ask the valley's municipalities to pay the initial costs of the other project, a computer system shared by nonprofit groups.

Both projects are required by the federal government to keep Clark County competitive for up to $4 million in grants in 2004. The region had a disastrous showing last year, when more than $3 million was sought and only $1.6 million awarded -- in part because of the lack of a census and a computer system.

But the two projects are also vital for future planning, Reilly said.

"Our short-term focus is on getting the (Housing and Urban Development Department) application with these two elements," he said.

"But they also serve as building blocks for a larger, regionally coordinated effort."

The idea behind both projects is to learn more about a population that is controversial and by most estimates growing, in order to help reduce the the number of homeless people and, in many cases, save lives.

A census of the homeless was done in 1999 by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas sociology department, with $50,000 in public funds. The homeless population then was estimated at 6,707. From 1999 to 2003 the estimated overall population in Clark County went from 1.3 million to 1.6 million -- a 22.1 percent increase, according to State Demographer Jeff Hardcastle.

The new census will cost only about $26,500, Parker Brody said, since it will be done in less than two months instead of the six it took four years ago, and will not include as much analysis as the earlier effort.

The UNLV sociology department and volunteers will also do this year's census, she said.

As for the computer system, Reilly hopes to convince the valley's municipalities to share its start-up costs of about $110,000 during an upcoming meeting of the Southern Nevada Regional Planning Coalition, a body that includes representatives from local governments.

The system should be in place by October at about a dozen local agencies that work with the homeless and would help track who uses services and whether or not the services achieve their goals.

Reilly said he hoped the information from the census and the computer system would be used by local governments to coordinate their planning and funding of homeless services The goal would be to avoid duplication, instead of the current, piecemeal approach, which Reilly said was "totally out of control."