Sacramento County Supervisor Patrick Kennedy to stay night at a homeless shelter with his dog

A Sacramento County supervisor and his dog will stay overnight at the county’s tiny homes shelter community this week.

Supervisor Patrick Kennedy — who represents south Sacramento, parts of Elk Grove and Vineyard — will stay at the Safe Stay site at the corner of Power Inn and Florin roads for 24 hours on Wednesday. His chihuahua, Fergus, will stay with him, according to a county news release.

“This is a place where people can come and get off the street in a dignified safe setting,” Kennedy said as he and his dog toured the site in August.

The Safe Stay community, which opened in June after being approved a year earlier, provides housing for 125 people in sleeping cabins. Each can either house one or two people and has the facility has shared bathrooms. Kennedy was one of three supervisors who approved the project. Sue Frost, who will not seek re-election in 2024, and Don Nottoli, who retired from the board in 2022, voted against the project on the former grocery story site.

Kennedy at the time invoked his religion in urging his colleagues to approve the site.

“If we continue to put this off, we are going to pick up the newspaper this summer and we are going to see people dying on our streets, in a civilized country, from heat,” said Kennedy. “We go to the winter, they’re gonna die from hypothermia. As a Catholic myself, I cannot just look at that and look the other way. We have to make sacrifices.”

The community allows unhoused residents to get access to long-term shelters, county-operated behavioral health services and case management, county officials have said. An estimated 9,300 homeless people are living in the county — roughly 25% of the 6,664 who are unsheltered are outside the Sacramento city limits.

This story was originally published October 9, 2023 at 1:03 PM.