City officials in Biddeford are scrambling to pay for renovations to a local homeless shelter, after a management error led to grant funding that was supposed to pay for the $1.2 million project falling through.

The City Council voted unanimously on Nov. 19 to pay $400,000 to cover work that has already been done. The city now needs to arrange funding to cover nearly $600,000 of additional work to finish the renovations.

Workers with Jim Godbout Plumbing started renovations earlier this year on Seeds of Hope on South Street, in order to expand the shelter to include a second floor of beds.

Vassie Fowler, the shelter’s executive director, said the renovations need to be finished, as the demand for beds will only get worse. Right now, she said, the shelter has on average between 36 and 39 people spending the night there. 

“We’ve been pretty lucky, right? November has been pretty wonderful weatherwise, but that will change because we live in Maine,” she said. “When that number changes those 36-39 will turn to 60 and I feel for the first time in the history of Seeds of Hope we will be turning people away.”

Initially, officials planned for a federal community development block grant to cover the renovations, but officials made a mistake in tacking on some additional costs not originally covered by the grant, making the entire project ineligible.

“The mechanism was somewhat hazy at the time. We thought we were going to be able to achieve it using CDBG funds,” City Councilor Liam LaFountain noted at the Nov. 19 meeting. “That ended up not being the case.”

Officials told the council on Nov. 19 that the company had stopped the work but had already run up a tab of more than $655,000, which the city now had no funding for. 

Godbout Plumbing told the city that if officials could pay $400,000, the company would engage in fundraising to cover the rest. Director of Code Enforcement Roby Fecteau told the council that it was company owner Jim Godbout’s idea, borne out of the concept that the shelter is a community project.

“This was not a city saying ‘Would you be willing to take this,’” Fecteau said. “This was a Jim telling the city that ‘I need $300,000 to $400,000, and I would do some fundraising for the rest.’”

The council approved the $400,000. According to city documents, $250,000 will come from the city’s capital improvement fund, which officials expect will be eventually replaced by more CDBG funding.

The other $150,000, officials said, would come from the city’s Fiscal 25 budget. 

Councilor Marc Lessard voted for the allocation, and said he supported both the work Seeds of Hope was doing, and the renovation project.

But he also blasted city management’s handling of the project’s financing.

“I expected (management) to be able to drive the car to manage this, and the car didn’t have a steering wheel on it, and that’s where we are today,” he said.

To finish the work, another phase of construction still needs to be done, which is expected to cost more than $586,000. According to documentation provided by Fecteau, this phase of the work appears to be eligible for other CDBG funding.