DaytonDailyNews.com

DAYTON — The St. Vincent Hotel will be getting additional funds to offset the cost of sheltering an increasing number of homeless families.

The City Commission on Wednesday, Nov. 5, approved a $19,800 neighborhood grant for the homeless shelter.

Altogether, the city has passed through to St. Vincent's some $69,800 in Emergency Shelter Grant funds in 2008 from the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

John Gower, director of the city's Department of Planning and Community Development, said the grant will not increase the number of beds available at the shelter, but will help with operating costs.

The money will be used to improve the equality of existing shelters and provide social and support services to assist homeless individuals in becoming self-sufficient.

The funding was part of a previous allocation to the city from HUD that had not been tapped, said Amy Riegel, a community development analyst for Dayton.

In 2007, St. Vincent's provided shelter for 1,651 men, 726 women and 302 families with 428 children. There was an average of 231 people sheltered each night. The shelter projects that the number of families to be served this year will rise to 350, according to the grant proposal.

• In other business, the Commission wrote off $163,439 in uncollected accounts.

That doesn't mean the financially strapped city will give up on collections, but that the city has exhausted in-house methods to re-coup the money and will be turning over those bills to a collection agency, city finance director Cheryl Garrett said. "We do this a couple of times a year," she said.

The debt is owed by 21 customers to a number of city departments including sanitary sewer, street maintenance and water.

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2362 or

josmith@DaytonDailyNews.com.