Mayor Kirk Watson talks efforts to shelter homeless amid dangerous summer heat

AUSTIN (KXAN) -- KXAN's Grace Reader sat down with Mayor Kirk Watson Thursday to talk about a variety of topics from ARPA funding and the upcoming budget process to homelessness and the spectrum of services the city provides. Here's some of what you need to know:

Providing services this summer

Watson said the City of Austin is building on changes made last year including: how the city communicates with service providers and people experiencing homelessness, bringing water to encampments, having cooling centers and adding capacity at bridge shelters.

The city also recently announced that in partnership with nonprofit Urban Alchemy a parking lot in downtown Austin has been turned into a place where people experiencing homelessness can get reprieve and be connected to resources. You can read more about that here.

"And we'll probably be making an announcement of more of that sort of thing pretty quickly," Watson said.

Still, Watson pointed to the need for more emergency shelter beds.

"When I came into office, as mayor, one of the things that I thought was a failure -- it was one of the things that was broken in our system of addressing people living homeless -- was that that we weren't doing enough in terms of emergency shelter," he said.

Emergency beds going away: What next?

Austin City Council voted to extend its contract with the group running the emergency homeless shelter at Austin's Marshalling Yard -- but at the end of the year, that shelter will have to start turning away clients.

"I will tell you, I worry about that," Watson said. "As David Gray, our homeless strategy officer, has recently pointed out, we are in the process of looking for alternatives to the Marshalling Yard."

That initial contract for that shelter was approved in July 2023, and a short while after, the facility started providing shelter to roughly 300 clients at a time. That gap will need to be filled.

"I'm asking that be reported, for it be reported to us on a routine basis. Because we do not want to get ourselves in a situation where we're closing beds when we know we need those beds," Watson said. "All you got to do is walk outside to know how badly you need those beds."