$20M Tacoma shelter expansion may not have staff to open this year, director says
A $20 million expansion of Tacoma’s largest homeless shelter faces potential funding roadblocks for staffing in the upcoming year.
The long-awaited project will result in the addition of 24,000 new square feet to the Tacoma Rescue Mission’s men’s shelter at 425 South Tacoma Way. By the end of construction, TRM plans to offer 176 beds to the general population, adding nearly a hundred beds to the 80 it has now. The expansion will double its capacity for addiction recovery beds, from 25 to 50, and unhoused veteran beds, from 10 to 20. The women’s shelter will receive four more beds, increasing from 64 to 68. In total, the expansion will help the property shelter 314 people each night.
However, according to Executive Director Duke Paulson, acquiring the funding to staff the expansion looks dicey.
“It’s fascinating because so much of the infrastructure is already here, right? We already have a kitchen putting out meals. We already have a baseline of shelter staff for 100 or so people,” Paulson told The News Tribune June 19. “But I can’t expect the same staff to handle double the number of people.”
TRM planned to rely partially on funding from Pierce County’s Homeless and Housing Program’s funding pool to fill in the gap. For HHP’s 2025-2026 contracts, Pierce County Human Services awarded TRM a little under $2.5 million for the organization’s Adams Family Shelter, emergency services and outreach services. Although TRM will need an increased budget to staff the revamped shelter, the HHP funding stream is currently undergoing a structural transition. While that transition is underway, the county will extend preexisting contracts with providers, including TRM, for nine months, starting July 1.
For TRM, the preexisting contract will not be enough to fund the expanded shelter, Paulson said. Paulson shared that the last round of grant applications for HHP funding was two years ago. Including the nine-month extension, the shelter will have operated “33 months on a fixed budget,” Paulson said in an interview Tuesday with The News Tribune. In that time, operational costs have increased, Paulson said, and will increase further with the shelter expansion. He estimates that construction on the shelter will finish before the end of the year, months before the extended contracts end in April 2027.
Currently, the shelter has two people on shift at all times (24/7) to manage operations. Paulson shared that one more staff person would have to be added to the team to handle the expanded workload. Additionally, Paulson stated that the hospitality team of 1–2 people, which helps with “general problem solving and campus safety,” would also need to increase for peak times of the day. He also shared that the shelter would need three more social workers on the team.
“There’s a scenario where the space is done in December at some point, and we have our grand opening, and we won’t have a staff,” Paulson said. “We’ll just have to stay at current capacity.”
Structural changes to the funding process
The county’s HHP funding process has undergone structural changes in the past few years. In 2024, HHP funding switched from an annual application cycle to a multi-year contract with opportunity for further extensions. Community Services Acting Division Manager Devon Isakson shared that this change was implemented due to strain on providers to apply for funding yearly.
“We decided to do [multi-year contracts] to be more supportive to providers, so they weren’t applying for funds every single year, because it’s tough on them to complete those applications and submit them,” Isakson said over a Zoom call with The News Tribune on Tuesday. “It’s administratively burdensome for providers.”
Furthermore, the HHP funding process is competitive; not every provider who sends in an application will be awarded funds. Due to the competitive nature, Deputy Director of Human Services Megan Stanley shared that the yearly application for funds also created uncertainty for providers.
“With them competing once a year, it left this question mark for them,” Stanley said. “So this offered [providers] more stability and less administrative burden.”
Isakson said that for HHP funding awarded for the 2024-2025 year, providers were informed about the “possibility of a second year of those contracts” with the transition from annual to multi-year.
The nine-month extension starting July 1 will allow Pierce County Human Services to adjust the method of funding to “strengthen alignment between funding, performance, and program outcomes,” according to county spokesperson Kari Moore. In practice, funds will now be allocated to specific needs, or procurements.
“Instead of doing one large HHP, which we did previously … we would be doing targeted procurements by intervention,” Stanley said. “So family shelter, overnight shelter, homeless prevention, street outreach, coordinated entries, would all be their own procurements.”
Whereas the previous model listed one lump sum to various needs, the department will fix a set figure allocated to each need. Stanley shared that the department will arrive at a figure through a data-driven approach, using the county’s Homeless Management Information System which traces all interactions when a homeless person interacts with a homeless provider. That being said, Stanley also stated that not everything can be funded. For the 2025-2026 contracts, the department awarded approximately $15.8 million over 46 grants. Looking to next year, the county estimates to allocate just under $9 million for emergency shelter services, with procurements coming out in July 2026.
“Understand that it’s a constrained system,” Stanley said. “Even though we might say there is demand for something, there’s probably demand for something else. So we do have to make informed trade-offs.”
During the nine months that the county needs to implement the structural change, Stanley said that applicants will be able to see procurement amounts, which will start to go out over the summer, with award decisions and contracts in place for providers before the April start date. That funding would begin April 1, 2027 and end June 30, 2028, with options for renewal. For TRM, Moore wrote in an email Tuesday that the shelter organization, like all other providers, “will have to apply to a competitive procurement.”
Current funding
Various sources have contributed to funding the construction of the expanded shelter on South Tacoma Way. TRM Communications Manager Hayley Uliana wrote in an email Monday that the county contributed $5.5 million from the one-time American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA, funds to the project, alongside $5 million from the state Department of Commerce, $3.5 million from the city of Tacoma, and $4 million from the United States Department of Housing and Development (HUD). Uliana wrote that the HUD dollars were “a Federal appropriations request from (Representative) Derek Kilmer at the request of the City of Tacoma specifically for this shelter expansion project.” These funds were secured from 2022-2024.
Given the competitive nature of funding from the county’s HHP, Paulson declined to say how much more the shelter needs to adequately staff the expansion.
“I can’t comment publicly on an open bidding process,” Paulson wrote over text. “This includes amounts of funds requested because it’s a competitive process with lots of orgs in the community involved.”
He did share that TRM has a target of raising $750,000 in additional funds by November to “complete the fit and finish work for the shelter expansion.” This work includes the “custom beds, specialized mattresses, sheets, furniture, desks, chairs, computers, lights, lockers, and all the amenities that go into completing the facility after the construction is done.”
Homelessness rose by 11% in Pierce County in 2025. Out of 2,955 unhoused people counted by the county last year, 1,433 people were left unsheltered.
“We’ll move forward on construction — that’s been on the way for over a year — and we’ll wrap up at the end of this year …” Paulson said in an interview Tuesday. “I’m not sure what’s going to happen … it creates some uncertainty for our team, because if we don’t have the funds to fully staff it, I don’t think we’re going to open up and fully operate it at the potential space that we have.”
