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On the west side of Salt Lake City, on a patch of industrial land, state leaders want to build one of the largest homeless service campuses in the Intermountain West.

They're hoping it will be a solution to a fractured system.

The facility is supposed to cost about $75 million to build another $34 million a year to operate. And lawmakers

have committed some of the money. The governor is asking for more. Officials are looking to

Washington to fill the gap. Critics have called it an internment camp. They see it seems more

like detention than shelter, which gets us to another part of the story. More than five

months after the site was announced, there is still no final operating plan, no clear public

consensus about how this place will actually function, like who will be sent there, whether

certain people could leave and under what conditions?

Jose Davila IV, he's a reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune, he says this moment has revealed a new ideological split about how to address homelessness in the state.

On one side, there's the concept of housing first, which has been around for a while. It's the idea that you have to start by giving someone permanent housing with no preconditions. You stabilize them first, then address their issues later. But there's now a new concept that's being promoted by what Davila calls a new wave of thinkers.

This has come to be called treatment first or civil commitment. It's the idea that for a

certain segment of the homeless population, those who are deeply addicted or in the grip of

psychosis, housing alone just isn't enough. So you have to detain them and take care of

them before any real change is possible. It's the Utah Homeless Services Board that's going to have

to decide which approach to take. And Davila took us back to where that story began last year.

So the board chair is a man named Randy Shumway.

He's a consulting CEO.

He was made the board chair after the 2024 legislative session that saw a lot more business types kind of be added to the board and the board's size shrunk.

Independent of the board, he went before a legislative committee earlier in the fall to

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