From the late evening into the early morning, Anthony Rand mans the front desk inside the only emergency warming shelter in northern Maine. He watches the security cameras, cleans the building and answers questions from residents riding out cold winter nights in the 15-bed facility.
Rand’s mother calls him a “people collector.” Helping the shelter’s clients is his favorite part of the job. He’s able to connect with them because he understands their situation. He lives next door in the Sister Mary O’Donnell Shelter in Presque Isle.
The 34-year-old came to the homeless shelter in August with three changes of clothes. He was addicted to drugs, had run out of money and lost custody of his children.
Nine months later, Rand is building his life back. He has a car, a job and is regularly seeing his kids. He’s close to leaving the shelter, and he’s seen its programming help more than a dozen others. Eight people moved out of Sister Mary O’Donnell into permanent housing in January alone.
“If you really do focus on everything, you can get out of here fast with all the help that they have,” Rand said.
But Homeless Services of Aroostook, which runs both programs, is under severe financial stress. One-time emergency state funding last summer stopgapped the problem, but the organization is facing a revenue shortfall just shy of $200,000, almost 30% of its total budget.
A bill currently before the Maine legislature, LD 2124, would permanently increase state funding by redirecting 2% of real estate transfer tax revenue to shelters. It would mean an estimated $150,000 in additional subsidies to Homeless Services of Aroostook.
Without that money, it’s likely the shelter will close.
“It’s probably 49% to 51% [that we would close],” executive director Kari Bradstreet said. “It’s teetering on that.”
It’s not a standalone issue. As costs have increased, state and local subsidies have largely not, leaving organizations across Maine’s lean homeless shelter system to make up the difference.
In western Maine, Oxford County’s only shelter is at risk of closure. The only shelter in York County closed last year, pushing more than 220 homeless residents into shelters in Cumberland County, according to Maine Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) data shared by a shelter official.
The new legislation, which is headed to the Senate after passing the House on Monday, is a result of aggressive lobbying by shelter directors and social service advocates who fear the sustainability of the shelter operations is at a cliff.
“It’s going to be the difference between shelter beds staying open or shelter beds closing, which is really not hyperbole, it is the truth,” said Molly Feeney, the executive director of Homeworthy, a homeless services agency on the midcoast.
‘It’s like blowing smoke in the wind.’
There are 1,209 beds between the 37 shelters that receive funding through Maine Housing’s Emergency Shelter and Housing Assistance Program (ESHAP).
Maine’s current homeless population, according to HMIS data, consists of more than 3,000 people.
Nonprofit organizations that operate shelters do not have the resources to scale the number of beds to meet that need. It took Brunswick’s Tedford Housing a decade to raise the capital to expand its shelter capacity by 60% — to 24 adult beds and 10 family units — last fall.
But the facility draws people from a geographic area that includes parts of four counties. It can’t accommodate everyone.
“Tedford’s turnaway data show that we’ve been turning away hundreds of people every year seeking shelter,” Andrew Lardie, Tedford’s executive director, said.
The downstream effects of additional shelter closures likely will push that number higher and put greater strain on other public safety resources, directors say.
“What is that going to mean for municipalities and counties for emergency services like police, fire, emergency rooms, hospitals?” said Terence Miller, the advocacy director for Preble Street, a homeless services organization that runs shelters in Portland and Bangor. “This is going to have a catastrophic impact financially and otherwise.”
It costs roughly $102 per day to house a person in a homeless shelter, according to a Maine Housing cost study. State funding for shelter operations — which has not increased since 2016 — covers $7.16 of that total. Counties and municipalities collectively pick up 82 cents of the tab on average.
The lack of public funding irks those who run shelters, who see their services as an integral public service.
“I think the function of shelters in the well-being of society is a lot like a hospital or a fire department,” Lardie said.
“Fire departments, people have decided, deserve to be locally funded and sustained. We can’t get by without one. [But] somehow when it comes to keeping a safety net for a person who’s from your town to allow them to bounce back when something awful happens, we’ve just decided culturally that that’s just for the do-gooders to handle, and if we don’t have it, oh well.”
If a person slips through the cracks in the shelter system, it only burdens taxpayers more. A night at a county jail costs approximately $150. At a hospital, it may be $1000 or more, according to data compiled by the Portland nonprofit Community Housing of Maine.
So this legislation, to Lardie and his colleagues, is a no-brainer, and a crucial step toward increasing public understanding of how their programs help people in a cost-effective manner.
“We have to help people not be afraid of the problem and try to push it away, because it just bounces right back at you,” he said. “It’s like blowing smoke in the wind.”
Inside the Sister Mary O’Donnell Shelter, there’s an acute awareness that the bill is a lifeline for the facility.
Carl Harrison, a staff employee, rode out a scare in 2025 where funding shortfalls forced the shelter to reduce staff and cut hours. He considers himself a “die hard” shelter employee. He lived there for seven months after his apartment building was condemned in 2023.
The shelter helped him stay sober. And now he helps others do the same. After all he’s seen the facility do, he can’t believe that permanently funding it is a question.
“There is money that is there for other things that I feel are less important than homeless shelters,” Harrison said. “This is a necessity. It’s something that we cannot be without … there’s no reason, in my opinion, that we should even being having this conversation right now.”
