Bangor spent hundreds of thousands of dollars last year on a series of projects addressing the city’s homelessness crisis — and the City Council is poised to spend more next year without a clear strategy in place for how it will get people off the streets and into housing.
“It just seems like we keep putting Band-Aids on it,” Councilor Carolyn Fish said in a recent meeting.
The Bangor Daily News identified nearly $375,000 in spending last year for Bangor projects that were primarily homelessness-related, coming from a mix of local, state and federal funding sources.
The city’s public health department spent about $130,000 last year on two positions that directly address homelessness — the homeless response manager and the housing navigator, according to data obtained by the BDN through a Freedom of Access Act request. That money came from federal pandemic relief grants, although continuing the positions next year would require local money since ARPA funds expire at the end of 2026.
Bangor also spent about $119,000, mostly out of the city’s public works budget, to clean up the large homeless encampment known as Tent City, the BDN previously reported.
It also directed $120,000 in emergency grants to warming centers in the winter with special one-time General Assistance funding.
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The growing attention on taxpayer dollars being directed toward homelessness in Bangor comes as some residents say the city has failed to show any positive results, instead relying on a reactive approach that offers piecemeal stopgaps without long-lasting solutions. It also coincides with swelling municipal and county budgets as well as rising property taxes that are pushing residents’ budgets to the brink of affordability.
It’s difficult to quantify exactly how much the city spends on homelessness response, since there is no specific section in the budget for it, and it’s a complex issue with many indirect costs.
“I think there are many, many, many places where a portion of spending is directly attributable to homelessness,” City Manager Carollynn Lear said.
For example, Bangor’s fire department plays a significant role in responding to the healthcare needs of people living on the street, but there’s no line item in the fire department budget for homelessness response; it’s simply one part of firefighters’ day-to-day duties.
“The truth of the matter is, they’re the de-facto medical care for the homeless outside of some street medicine programs,” City Councilor Michael Beck said. Police also play a role in homelessness response.
The Streetplus downtown ambassador program, which cost the city $193,000 last year via downtown tax increment financing, is another that touches on the issue of homelessness. Part of these ambassadors’ responsibilities include clearing homeless people from places they’re not supposed to be and cleaning up small encampments.
Bangor has also spent opioid settlement dollars on programs that address the HIV outbreak and public drug use, two issues that are interrelated with the city’s homelessness crisis. Between an HIV case management program and a contract for syringe waste cleanup, the city spent about $37,000 in opioid funds in 2025, according to a state database.
The city is set to spend more on the issue in the upcoming year, including by directing $56,000 and $62,000 in local funds to the housing navigator and homelessness response coordinator positions, respectively.
Requests for the fire department to hire more staff and for the public library to keep its in-house social worker, a position that has been funded with ARPA money, could also cost local taxpayers.
“The work of the social worker is really really important and I don’t know what we would do without her,” library director Ben Treat told councilors at a recent budget workshop. The social worker made 220 referrals to services in 2025, and homelessness remains a persistent issue at the library, according to Treat.
The city is already spending up to $680 per day to staff a police detail in Peirce Park outside the library, which has become a flashpoint in the last month as many homeless community members have been congregating there. City leaders are also exploring funding a day space for homeless people to go and receive services, which could cost about $200,000, according to the city’s public health department.
Many residents don’t feel these scattered approaches are working.
“From the outside looking in, it appears that the majority of time, money, and effort from this council is largely spent on homelessness, drug addiction, shelters, assistance, needle use, methadone clinics. It’s evident that these problems just continue to snowball and to spiral and will continue to overrun our resources and our city,” resident Jacqueline Smallwood said at a City Council meeting last week.
Although community members are divided on how much money and effort the council should be dedicating to its homeless residents, many seem to agree that its current strategy has been ineffective.
“I think it is a fair question to ask, with the level of effort that the city has been putting in, why haven’t we seen results?” Lear said, adding that part of that difficulty comes from the complexity of homelessness across the country.
“Part of the reason the city hasn’t seen success is because it’s a pretty persistent, complex societal problem,” she said.
City officials have said they don’t know exactly how many people are living on the streets in Bangor, but anecdotally, Lear has reported that the police department’s community assistance team has been encountering more new faces in recent weeks. Maine’s statewide homeless count last year showed 312 homeless people in Penobscot and Piscataquis counties, including about 100 people living without shelter. That data does not specify numbers at the local level.
Beck said he sees a lot of the city’s recent spending on homelessness as “reactive spends,” although he emphasized that much of that money is coming from federal and state grants, not local taxes. He said he hopes the city’s new homelessness committee will be able to suggest more proactive measures that councilors could vote on in the next budget cycle.
Scott Pardy, who runs a network of sober living homes in the area, has frequently criticized the city’s approach to homelessness.
“It appears to me that everybody’s afraid to make a decision,” Pardy said.
He added that he worries more city spending and rising property taxes would force more people onto the streets, and thinks the most proactive thing the city could do in the short term would be to turn a vacant building into a shelter.
For months, the city has been working on putting together a homelessness and housing committee that leaders hope can establish a more strategic, long-term plan to reduce homelessness.
The slow process of forming the committee is likely preventing any major changes to homelessness spending in the current budget cycle.
“In many ways, I’ve felt hesitant to make recommendations that might be more meaningful or extensive just because I think that advisory committee creates a really unique opportunity to have a robust community conversation about what the appropriate level of support is from the city,” Lear said. For now, that means the focus is on maintaining existing positions and programs, not trying new ones.
City leaders have finished interviewing candidates for the committee and will likely approve a set of members at the May 27 council meeting, according to Lear. Those members will be tasked with figuring out the most effective way for the city to invest in solutions to the homelessness crisis.
“Just speaking for myself, I think we’re probably in for another reactive year, just because of where we landed and we haven’t quite finished seating the homelessness committee yet,” Beck said.
