Questions Raised About CARES Accountability

Tom Darby

RENO, Nev. — The Nevada CARES Campus was to be a visible, bustling hub of emergency shelter, treatment, and transition to housing. Instead, many visitors now report long stretches of near-silence with sparse foot traffic, empty common areas, and little sign of the scale of need used to justify tens of millions of dollars in public spending.

That disconnect is no longer anecdotal. County data shows declining utilization even as large sums of state and federal money remain allocated, unspent, or locked into multi-year plans with limited public scrutiny.

Washoe County received $91.6 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds, with approximately $49 million steered toward homelessness and housing security. A substantial portion of that money is tied directly to the CARES Campus, yet nowhere in county reporting is there an accounting that reconciles current daily activity with the size of the investment.

The largest CARES-related line item is campus capital infrastructure. What began as a $16.3 million project has grown to more than $24.6 million.

As of mid-2025, the county reported the project as “98 percent complete,” with the remaining funds budgeted through 2026. Despite that near-completion, on-the-ground activity frequently appears minimal.

Meanwhile, there is no disclosure of cumulative expenditure totals available, and public dashboards do not explain why a nearly completed facility often looks underused.

Operational funding raises similar concerns. Nearly $8 million has been allocated for CARES Campus staffing, including case managers and behavioral health personnel, through 2026.

The county reports the addition of 28 staff positions, but provides little accessible data showing how those staff correlate to daily client volumes, active caseloads, or outcomes at the campus itself. The county describes performance as “reducing recidivism” and “housing exits,” without tying results to real-time occupancy.

Other grants, including $4.4 million for Safe Camp, $250,000 for HMIS case management, and $5.6 million for permanent supportive housing operations, are listed as complete or ongoing. None are flagged as underused in official documents, but “not flagged” is not the same as “fully justified.”

What the county does report clearly is a declining demand. Homeless service clients averaged about 800 per month in mid-2025, down from roughly 1,300 per month in 2024.

Department of Social Services data at the CARES Campus shows monthly changes in benefits being accessed, with lows of just 75 clients in both January and May 2025.

The January 2025 sheltered Point-in-Time count recorded 1,389 people across all county shelters, filling about 85 percent of available beds. That figure does not break out CARES Campus occupancy, leaving the public unable to determine how full or empty the campus is.

County officials attribute the drop in utilization to success, with more than 1,100 permanent housing placements since mid-2023 and a reported 53 percent decline in unsheltered homelessness. The outcomes are easy to understand, but they do not automatically explain why a facility built and funded for constant, high-volume use now appears quiet for weeks at a time.

There have been no audits alleging misuse of CARES Campus funds. However, several million dollars in ARPA allocations remain unspent or delayed, officially explained as “multi-year projects.”

That explanation grows thinner as utilization falls and as new federal housing rules threaten future funding.

Since demand has dropped this significantly, why is the spending structure unchanged? Why does a campus designed for crisis-level volume still command crisis-level funding without an understandable adjustment to scale?

Supporters argue the quiet is proof the system is working. Critics see a shrinking problem propped up by a budget built for peak crisis, insulated from course correction, and shielded by broad metrics that avoid hard, site-specific accountability.

The CARES Campus promised transparent solutions to homelessness and numbers that match what the public can see with its own eyes.