After years of waiting, those involved in building Iowa City’s new Shelter House say they are relieved to see the project in its final planning stages.

The transition from operating a homeless shelter in a building intended for a single family to a two-story facility with room for 70 beds has been long and difficult, said Crissy Canganelli, the Shelter House’s executive director.

Officials have spent much of the past few years trying to gain funding to build the Shelter House as well as figure out the logistics of Iowa’s new sex-offender law some thought would conflict with the new building’s location.

Now, officials can finally begin to think about the details of running the facility.

This past weekend, First Christian Church in Coralville raised $600 for Iowa City’s Shelter House at its Christian music fundraiser.

The money raised by the church will not go toward the construction of Shelter House’s new facility, but rather its day-to-day operation costs after it opens in October 2010.

The shelter received a $2.6 million grant in early September by the I-Jobs initiative, which covers the rest of the money needed to fund the construction.

Each year, the Shelter House has to raise its yearly operations budget, which is roughly $850,000.

Canganelli said they have been very fortunate in receiving revenue, but the variations in funding and sources of funding makes operating Shelter House difficult.

“There is so much volatility in our revenue stream,” she said. “Shelter House has no control over the funding we receive.”

Officials bought the new facility’s site in December 2004 after Shelter House received a special zoning exception. Neighbors appealed the exception, and the case eventually went to the Iowa Supreme Court, which decided in favor of the Shelter House in 2008.

And when Shelter House broke ground last July, community members expressed concern that it may be in violation of newly passed act which strengthened the state’s sex-offender law, which prevents registered sex offenders from being within 300 feet of places where children gather, such as libraries and daycares.

Despite protests from citizens, the city has said the shelter is clearly not in violation of the law.

Still, some community members don’t want the facility in their neighborhood.

“It is not likely [for something to happen], but it is a chance, but one chance in a million, you don’t welcome that readily,” said Joyce Barker, the president of the Waterfront Neighborhood Association.

The final challenge Shelter House faced was the recently resolved struggle of acquiring funding for the new building.

“It has been an incredible release to find ourselves abruptly at our [funding] goal has sort of sent a shock wave through us,” she said.

Canganelli said she is elated to have the project nearing an end and to be less constrained by the small facility.

“It is just an old house, an old single-family house,” she said. “We are going from working out of what was someone’s home into really going into a facility.”