Clark County may yet help the city of Vancouver pay for a planned homeless shelter in the Van Mall neighborhood. The county’s previous refusal to commit funds caused a rift between the county and the city, which is currently paying for the shelter without outside help. City staff have said people from outside Vancouver would not be allowed to stay in the shelter if the county did not help fund it. On Wednesday, Clark County councilors — including two recently elected newcomers — said they will consider investing about $2 million in the shelter. The county may tap mental health sales tax dollars and settlement money from opioid distributors for marketing practices that helped fuel the opioid epidemic in Washington. City officials say they need the county to commit funding by February, when the concept design for the shelter is expected to be finalized. The city expects to open the shelter in mid-2026. Without outside funding, the shelter will have to be smaller than the 150 beds originally planned, city officials said.

“Currently, everything we have to pay for this shelter comes from local city dollars,” said Kevin Kearns, the city’s project manager for the shelter. Much of that will come from a 0.1 percent business and occupation tax on retailers specifically for the homeless shelter to begin collection as soon as Jan. 1, 2026. The shelter is a key part of the city’s plan to address homelessness since declaring a civil emergency in November 2023. Acquiring and building the shelter will cost about $16 million. Operating it will take another $6 million to $7 million per year. The county has flip-flopped on whether it will help the city fund the shelter, which would be the largest in the county.

In May, the city approached the county for quick help acquiring a building using money from the mental health sales tax collected throughout the county. The county council denied that request and required the city to go through the same process as other projects (although the county has made exemptions to that requirement in the past). The city moved forward with purchasing the building at 5313 N.E. 94th Ave., the former home of Naydenov Gymnastics, for $6.29 million in December. Still, the city went through the regular process for mental health sales tax grants in hopes of receiving help funding shelter operations, which would include on-site medication-assisted drug treatment to get people off of opioids, such as fentanyl. In a closed door meeting, a county committee that oversees the mental health sales tax fund denied the city’s request in October due to a lack of detail, according to Jordan Boege, senior policy analyst for the Clark County Council.

Since then, two new county councilors have replaced Gary Medvigy and Karen Bowerman. Matt Little and Wil Fuentes, who now sit on the dais, have expressed support for addressing homelessness. On Wednesday, city officials presented their case to the county council and pointed out that about a third of the homeless population in Vancouver is from other areas in the county. Several councilors, including Little, Fuentes and Glen Yung, expressed support for finding funding for the planned homeless shelter by February so the city could increase the shelter’s capacity. “We need to support this project and stop pretending that this isn’t a critical issue,” Fuentes said.

The county has about $4.2 million in mental health sales tax dollars, but County Manager Kathleen Otto said she doesn’t recommend using all of that. Yung suggested using a combination of the mental health sales tax and opioid settlement funds, which could potentially be used for the drug treatment aspect of the shelter. Councilor Michelle Belkot questioned the legality of the council making a decision on how to use opioid settlement funds, expected to total $22.3 million over time. (The county has received about $3.57 million so far.) A contract among Southwest Washington governments shows they agreed the Southwest Region Opioid Abatement Council has full discretion over the use of funds. “I just want to have the background before the council agrees to anything,” Belkot said.

If the city were to receive mental health sales tax dollars before the concept design phase ends, that would once again have to happen outside of the usual process for evaluating requests, which occurred around fall last year. “This is a decision that needs to be made at the council level outside of the normal process,” Yung said. Originally, the city asked the county to contribute about 30 percent of the bridge shelter’s cost, which would have been a maximum of $6 million upfront for creating the shelter and about $2 million a year for operations after that. County staff said they will come back with funding options for providing the city about $2 million for operations before the city’s deadline in February.

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