Amid growing concern that the new $63 million homeless resource system in the Salt Lake City area doesn’t have enough beds, a Utah official said Tuesday that the state has set aside a shuttered liquor store and adjoining warehouse to potentially take homeless individuals out of the cold.
Mattresses have been brought into the two state-owned buildings located within Salt Lake City’s Ballpark neighborhood, Jim Russell, the state’s director of facilities construction and management, said — noting that he’d been directed to reserve the space about a month ago in a request the Department of Workforce Services had passed on to him.