$25K per guest: Why using a Pierce County hotel for COVID-19 shelter was so expensive
When Pierce County stood up its isolation and quarantine center inside a South Tacoma hotel for people infected or exposed to COVID-19 in early 2020, the agreed upon price of a room was $124 per night.
By the time it wrapped up in July 2021, the 15-month operation had concluded with a staggering cost: More than $25,000 per guest.
So how did the county’s temporary care center at a Holiday Inn get so seemingly expensive? For starters, expenses went well beyond room rent, including a wide range of services that signaled this was no ordinary hotel stay: nursing, ambulance transportation, health care administration, multiple daily meals and weekly laundry, among them. That’s according to records obtained by The News Tribune through public disclosure requests.
But ultimately, county officials overestimated the demand for the $17 million operation.
Not nearly as many people as expected wound up using the hotel as a safe place to recover from the virus or to wait it out after being exposed.
There were indications early on that the hotel was underutilized. Three months into operating, the center, which was one of more than 80 possible locations reviewed by officials for use, had served only 65 people with nowhere else to go and cost more than $1.6 million to run.
After renting all 124 rooms from the hotel’s private operators in late March 2020, the county chose two months later to renew its 60-day lease but significantly scaled back to 60 rooms, with options for more if they were needed. That term remained unchanged through the duration of the operation, which officials reviewed every 30 days, according to copies of the contracts.
Ultimately, the temporary care center on South 84th and Hosmer streets served 696 people, who stayed an average of nine days, between April 2020 and July 2021, according to Pierce County Emergency Management spokesperson Mike Halliday.
That tally accounted for more than 6,200 room nights, leaving roughly 25,000 room nights paid but unused over the life of the county’s contracts with hotel operators, Tacoma South Hospitality and Kent South Hospitality, according to a News Tribune analysis that assumes there was no waiting period between guests.
“In hindsight, would I have done it all over again? I think we would have started with it,” Pierce County Executive Bruce Dammeier said. “I would have pushed harder to end it sooner than we did. I think that’s what the big difference would be.”
Most reimbursement yet to come
Dammeier noted that the United States was nearly a year away from vaccine roll-outs at the time the shelter was stood up, and, with COVID-19 cases growing in Pierce County, interrupting the transmission of the virus was critical to save lives and keep people out of the hospital.
Public health officials advised the county to maintain the facility, he said.
Although he agreed that isolation and quarantine space was necessary, Tacoma Rescue Mission executive director Duke Paulson questioned the cost.
“For $25,000, I could have rented a home and have people rotate through and stay there for the year instead of a hotel,” Paulson said.
Dammeier said that because the hotel operation is expected to be reimbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, under aid for the sole purpose of non-congregate sheltering, the funds could not have been spent elsewhere. The county, which initially allocated CARES Act funds toward the project, was able to instead push more of those dollars directly into the community, he added.
For instance, the county directed $15.5 million in CARES Act funds toward boosting housing stability, which Dammeier said was intended to prevent homelessness. That portion also bankrolled emergency homeless sheltering, and $3 million went toward additional isolation and quarantine efforts, according to county spokesperson Libby Catalinich.
While the county saved CARES Act funds by turning to FEMA, it could take a long time to recover all costs from the federal agency for the temporary care center, which was paid for by the county’s taxpayer-fueled general fund.
The county has thus far received only $526,000 for the project, according to Catalinich, citing a staff member with the county’s Department of Emergency Management who filed the claim.
Every single expenditure is reviewed several times before FEMA determines whether it is eligible for reimbursement, and the county “often” has had disaster claims open for more than a decade before receiving a final payment, the staff member said.
County officials anticipate another round of reimbursement by the end of the year.
How the money was spent
Speaking to Tacoma city lawmakers in February, Dr. Anthony Chen, the director of health for the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, acknowledged that the temporary care center, while providing a community need, was “not very cost effective.”
Financial records show how each dollar had been spent. Half of the center’s total cost went to the hotel operators, including close to $7 million for rent and other fees, such as a nearly $500,000 payment to cover a portion of the period it took the hotel to transition back into a normal business, and more than $260,000 in incentive pay for hotel staff.
Multiple daily meals per guest cost more than $1.2 million, averaging $16,500 per week. Roughly $223,000 was spent on cleaning and damages, including $110,000 to replace linens and $3,200 for burnt microwaves, according to an itemized list of expenses. Another $21,000 was directed toward weekly laundry services.
The biggest non-rent price tag was attributed to nursing services, for which the county incurred a $6.3 million cost, expenses show. It also paid $836,000 for program management and oversight; $485,000 for ambulance transportation; $308,000 for security; and $284,000 for janitorial services.
Not everyone accepted
The county’s Department of Emergency Management had anticipated as many as 800 people from homeless shelters would need temporary shelter due to the COVID-19 outbreak, director Jody Ferguson wrote to FEMA in March 2020, as the county sought approval to establish the temporary care center.
“Even with expanded shelter options, non-congregate sheltering will drive down spread of disease in the population, and the impacts to our current shelter systems both in the short and long-term,” she wrote in an email obtained by The News Tribune, one of many that provided background into the setup of the temporary care center.
Halliday said that the county did not track how many unhoused individuals stayed at the center because guests were not asked about their living situation, but the “intent was to be as low barrier as possible.”
The operation faced scrutiny during its 15 months as people shared difficulties placing vulnerable COVID-19-positive people in the hotel.
Homeless service providers told The News Tribune last year that those with mental or behavioral health illnesses faced difficulty getting in the door. The county said that the facility was not able to serve those with acute mental health conditions, vitals outside of acceptable ranges, and drug use within the last 72 hours.
Chris Gleason, a spokesperson for Comprehensive Life Resources, a Tacoma-based nonprofit mental health agency, said that the hotel could not support the clients that agency serves.
“Some of the most vulnerable people in our community who had no other options for isolation or quarantine could not access the facility,” she said in an email. “That includes people who are unhoused and/or with behavioral health challenges. Without this low-barrier capacity, we ended up spending a lot of pass-through funding from the City of Tacoma to secure hotel rooms for our clients who needed to isolate.”
The county has dedicated resources to vulnerable populations. It provided isolation space for five months to individuals with behavioral health issues at a facility in Fife, Halliday previously said. In April 2020, the county also directed $1.8 million in state grants and county funds toward homelessness, including to expand shelter capacity.
Since the temporary care center’s closure in July 2021, the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department partnered with Tacoma to provide 12 beds at the Lighthouse Senior Center from September to mid-November, health department spokesperson Kenny Via said. Local health officials also contracted with four adult family homes for isolation and quarantine.
Now a year after the hotel operation dissolved, when asked whether the county had learned anything from standing it up, Dammeier said officials had to act quickly under unprecedented circumstances when no one knew the extent of the crisis. He noted that he preferred now to be fielding questions about having had too many resources, as opposed to too few.
“When it comes to emergencies, or things like this,” Dammeier said,” we need to be prepared.”
This story was originally published July 19, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
