The county was recently recognized by the National Association of Counties, or NACo, with its 2025 Achievement Award in the human services category for the Winter Response Task Force and operation of three warming centers, Utah County Government announced in a press release Wednesday.

The NACo Achievement Awards recognizes outstanding county government programs and services each year.

The organization has been sharing best practices between counties since 1970.

Rich Piatt, communications manager at Utah County Government, said the national honor came as a pleasant surprise.

“We’re very pleased to be recognized for our hard work, because this is something that we created from the ground up,” Piatt said. “It really is a reflection of the community as well and so we’re really pleased that a national organization recognized that.”

The Utah County Winter Response Task Force was established in 2023 after the state legislators passed House Bill 499, “Homeless Services Amendments.” The law mandates several Utah counties to annually prepare a comprehensive county winter response plan.

Since that time, Utah County, in collaboration with local mayors and groups such as Mountainland Continuum of Care, Community Action Services and Food Bank and United Way of Utah County, have opened warming centers that served hundreds of people between October 2024 and April.

This past winter the warming center rotated between three locations: the Provo Seventh Day Adventist Church, The Genesis Project church in Provo, and a Utah County-owned warehouse that came to be known as the “Red Warehouse.”

Between the three facilities, people experiencing homelessness had a warm place to sleep seven nights a week.

According to Community Action Services and Food Bank, the program served an average of 75 people each night, with the most people seeking shelter in one night was 113 people.

Commissioner Brandon Gordon, in response to the award, said the Winter Response Task Force along with its partners and stakeholders have worked hard to tackle a persistent issue.

“By partnering with the State Homelessness Committee, we’ve helped bridge gaps, save lives, and protect our community,” he said

NACo complimented the county’s efforts to address affordable housing and coordinate critical resources for the unsheltered.

As part of the release, the organization described the award with the following statement:

“As housing prices and the general cost-of-living have increased substantially in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, Utah County worked to implement a warming center program to shelter unhoused individuals during the colder months of the year. This opportunity focused on ensuring unhoused individuals would not freeze on the streets overnight and provided coverage for a critical gap that our nonprofits had been experiencing. The key outcome is ensuring the county’s unhoused population has a warm place to sleep during the colder, more dangerous months of the year.”

The Utah County Winter Response Task Force is preparing for year No. 2 of the program, by revisiting what has worked, what can be improved upon and how to meet the growing need for warming center beds in Utah County.

Formal plans for Utah County’s 2025-26 winter response must be submitted to the state by the end of August.

Piatt said at least one definite change to the warming center program will be tighter security measures at each facility.

The increased enforcement aligns with House Bill 329 “Homeless Services Amendments,” which was passed during the 2025 legislative session and creates a “zero-tolerance” drug policy at homeless shelters throughout Utah.

Piatt said the details on what that enforcement may look like are still being discussed.

“I think it’s a good idea to prevent something from happening, to have some kind of security measures in place just to make sure that everybody stays (safe) … the volunteers as well as the people that are staying there,” he said.

Utah County commissioners will be recognized in a presentation at NACo’s annual national conference happening Friday through Monday in Philadelphia.