Pinellas homeless count results won't be released this year

Pinellas County's homeless population apparently remained stable this year, but the official count will not be tabulated because an offer of help that went awry.

The Pinellas County Coalition for the Homeless, which uses volunteers to conduct the count every January, relied on a research class from Eckerd College to analyze the data, coalition director Sarah Snyder said Tuesday.

The coalition stood to save several thousand dollars, Snyder said, because the Eckerd group offered its services for free.

"But there were huge problems with the data," she said, and after several months of discussions, the coalition recently decided against publishing this year's results.

Federal regulations require full counts every two years if advocates for the homeless hope to collect assistance from Washington. The Pinellas coalition produced a report in 2009 and will do so again in 2011, Snyder said.

An unofficial examination of this January's count indicated that Pinellas County has roughly 7,000 homeless people — about the same as last year, she said.

Next year those numbers could rise because federal law is liberalizing its definition of "homelessness" to include families that bounce around from temporary housing to temporary housing, often crashing with friends and family.