A temporary shelter at the Portland Expo will not accept any more asylum-seeking families after Monday.
The change is being made now to ensure that everyone has left the site by a decommissioning deadline in mid-August.
The announcement is part of a memo from Portland’s health and human services director, Kristen Dow, that was included in an agenda for Monday’s City Council meeting.
Since first unveiling the plan to use the Expo as a shelter again in March, Portland leaders said that they would use the site until another space became available on Blueberry Road.
That property near the airport was supposed to be “developed and activated” on or after July, according to a March memo from then-interim City Manager Danielle West.
MaineHousing granted Developers Collaborative and The Center for Regional Prosperity $4 million for the proposed shelter.
The developer for the Blueberry Road site is looking at other options.
When asked about the situation, West said she was aware of the issue and hoped that something would come together, even if not at that location.
Since opening as a temporary emergency shelter on April 12, the site quickly reached its 300-person capacity. It has since remained at or close to capacity, according to Dow’s memo.
“Use of the Expo for emergency shelter was always intended to be temporary. With that in mind, a subgroup of the [Emergency Operations Center] command staff has begun discussing the decommissioning of the space, and has determined that Wednesday, August 16th will be the closing date of the emergency shelter,” the memo said.
That would allow for cleaning and restoration of the Expo before an event on Sept. 8.
The memo notes that this will leave about nine weeks for staff to find housing for all the families at the facility.
While not going into specifics about what the strategy will be, the memo said that a depopulation/rehousing strategy “was used effectively” the last time the Expo was used as a temporary shelter in 2019.
“We are hopeful that this will allow us time to have the same level of success through a variety of housing and sheltering methods,” the memo said.