The way things are today, 160 people with nowhere to call home wake up from Aurora’s only overnight shelter just before 7 a.m. every day and grab all their stuff. They have to be out the door of the Comitis Crisis Center at 7 on the button, and then they head off in all directions — to get to work in Denver, to catch the bus to a probation meeting at the other end of Aurora, or just heading down East Colfax Avenue to find some food and shade.

“They have to kind of go and figure it out,” said Bob Dorshimer, chief executive officer of the Comitis Crisis Center. “It creates a real vulnerability for some folks.”

But now, after four years of work and an injection of $1.5 million in marijuana tax revenue, the city is preparing to open the yin to Comitis’ yang: a day resource center across the street from Comitis that opens at 7 a.m. and provides a place for people experiencing homelessness to get light medical treatment, meet their probation officer, take a shower and wash their clothes until 4 p.m., when it closes and Comitis opens back up again.

“It will be a seamless transition,” Dorshimer said. “Not currently having a day resource center and centralized services means that these folks have to jump through so many hoops to get to other appointments that they may just not do it. This will keep 160 people from having to trail all over Aurora to get their services because now, we can bring people to them.”

Aurora’s Homeless Day Resource Center is slated to open in June on the northwest corner of East 19th Place and Wheeling Street on the Anschutz Medical Campus inside the Aurora Police Department’s vacated, old training gym.

“It’s just a big, open gym — it’s perfect,” said Shelley McKittrick, Aurora’s homeless program director. “We’re going to leave it mostly open, too. We’ll furnish the interior and add offices and a locker room and sleeping bays, and we’re building a completely new shower and bathroom space … and that old handball court is becoming a classroom and computer lab.”

The nearly 10,000-square-foot space will also double as an emergency cold weather shelter. In inclement conditions, about 100 beds can fit in the space, ending the city’s annual cold weather shelter crisis, McKittrick said.

But regularly, the center will have just a dozen or so cots separated by heavy curtains where people can rest during the day. There will be washers and dryers, gender-separated showering stalls, a warming kitchen (with meals provided by a Comitis cook), and plenty of people to talk to about getting out of the cycle of homelessness.

“Our folks don’t have anywhere to go during the day,” McKittrick said. “We have far more homeless folks experiencing homelessness in Aurora than we have shelter beds. That means we’re not reaching everyone. This is a way to reach folks, give them a place to be during the day where they feel welcome.”

The Homeless Day Resource Center will provide housing resources, classes, resources for financial literacy and banking, credit repair, how to work toward or find an apartment, legal classes there, probation appointments, social service kiosks where people can apply for their benefits online and more.

Offices at the new center will be staffed by nonprofit representatives for homeless services currently based in Aurora and Adams, Arapahoe and Douglas counties, as well as 10 new hires from Comitis that will run the day-to-day operations at the center. Partnerships with nursing and social services department within the University of Colorado Hospital are also planned to provide services.

The money provided from pot sale taxes in the city will cover the complete facility renovation as well as operating costs and new employees. The City Council approved the use of those funds for the day center last year.

As the program manager of Aurora Mental Health Homeless Services, EJ Becker juggles a lot of programs.

“I run the street outreach program, drop-in services, transition-care services and some other homeless programs,” Becker said. “With the day resource center, we’re hoping to mesh those programs and expand them, and just bring comprehensive mental health services and more intensive housing services there for people to access in one place — one of the things that we note with our clients now is that our location is hard for them to get to. This will help with that.”

Becker said she has no doubt the new day resource center will expand the amount of people who are able to get resources, and that a larger space will be inevitably needed — something McKittrick is already planning for.

“This is meant to be an interim site until we can afford to build a permanent location,” McKittrick said. “We don’t know how long it will be that way — maybe three to five years, but we’re going to look for another site at some point.”

But for now, any kind of day resource center in Aurora will do.

“Comitis has been doing this in the Aurora community for 47 years, this is no heavy lift for us. It’s been Comitis’ dream for a long time to have a day resource center,” Dorshimer said. “It’ll reduce panhandling and hanging out, it’ll increase self-sufficiency and, really, be a very hopeful place for people because they can really start taking care of business and getting ready to move on with their life. That’s our goal.”