Aspen City Council discusses additional funding for domestic abuse facility

Aspen City Council unanimously agreed during Monday’s work session to continue conversations around providing additional funding for construction of the first domestic abuse center in the upper Roaring Fork Valley.

A vote will be made at an upcoming regular meeting to further support construction of the Halle Center, which will be run by local nonprofit Response. If approved by Council, the request for an additional $100,000 would be funded from the city’s tobacco tax, approximately $773,000 in uncommitted fund balance through the first 10 months of 2023. 

“I want to see this come to us again, I can’t think of a better way to spend tobacco tax money,” said Councilmember Ward Hauenstein.

The remaining fund balance of the tobacco tax takes into account funding for school district/Aspen Family Connections programming through the first half of 2024. Aspen currently provides up to $250,000 (minus a 2% admin fee) per year to Aspen Family Connections to provide services in line with their proposal to Council in 2020. 

Response’s mission is aimed at ending domestic and sexual abuse while supporting survivors in achieving safety and empowerment. While Response has already raised $9.1 million toward building the center, Executive Director Shannon Meyer explained that construction costs have steadily risen over the last year by roughly 30%, forcing a request for additional funds in order to complete the project, which Meyer said is currently $470,000 short of the targeted goal. 

Last year, Aspen granted $150,000 to fund a portion of the Center, along with $4 million from the Colorado Department of Local Affairs. Additionally, Response received a lead gift from the Diane and Bruce Halle Foundation, allowing for the property’s purchase at Basalt Business Center East where the shelter building is currently under construction. 

Meyer said the need for a new center has become more evident with each year. Prior to beginning plans for the Halle Center, she said Response only had three units that were considered shelter-equivalent housing that quickly became maxed out, leading to having 13 survivors turned away that year with an additional 22 the following year.

“The need has just been increasing so much,” she said. “We’re serving more survivors every year but of those people we’re serving, the need for housing, not surprisingly, has gone up and up. It’s hard enough for someone under normal circumstances to find housing in this valley and if they’re leaving an abusive spouse, going from a two-income family to one-income family, just being suddenly out on the streets without a lot of warning makes it really difficult.”

With ground being broken at the location last November and concrete poured earlier this month, Meyer said they’re still on track to open the facility during the first week of January 2025. G.F Woods Construction based in Aspen is currently under contract for the completion of the project.

Meyer said the shelter will feature seven efficiency units with the capacity for nine adults and 15 children. Response has stated that it anticipates housing 40-50 survivors and their children at the shelter each year. Additionally, the building will include office space, a food and clothing pantry, a caretaker unit, and a conference room. 

One of the more unique aspects about the center Meyer pointed out that sets it apart from other domestic abuse centers is that rather than being private, Halle Center for Hope and Healing will be public facing and not confidential. She said the facility was modeled heavily after the Bright House in Gypsum, the first public facing shelter in the Western Slope. Public-facing facilities are a model Meyer said most centers are starting to adopt throughout the country due to the added element of safety from community policing and community awareness.

“The reality is that with technology the way that it is, the fact is survivors really are not just going into a safe house and staying there, they’re going to work, their kids are going to school, it’s very easy for a perpetrator to follow them. If you have a confidential safe house, usually they weren’t built with security in mind because their security was being hidden,” she said. “You can imagine if you’re sending someone to a hidden safe house, there’s some shame around that, like you as the survivor have to be hidden away versus we’re going to have this beautiful welcoming trauma-informed space that’s very obvious to people so if people are coming in and needing shelter or are just coming in needing services, there are no stigmas around this.” 

To reach Jonson Kuhn, email him at jkuhn@aspentimes.com.