Salt Lake County homelessness can be licked in 10 years but it will take an extraordinary effort from federal, state and local governments to do it, the Salt Lake City Council was told this past week.

Significant help from the private sector is also needed if the Salt Lake County Long Range Planning Committee's 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness is implemented as it was presented to the City Council.

Former city Mayor Palmer DePaulis, committee chairman, gave the council a sneak peek at the draft plan Thursday and expects to present it officially to the Salt Lake County Council of Governments in June.

Commissioned in 1997, the planning committee is now set on developing a plan to end chronic homelessness within the county by 2014, as states have been ordered by President Bush's administration.

In researching the issue in Salt Lake County, the committee found 435 people in Salt Lake County who are "chronically" homeless. These are folks who seem stuck in a revolving door of homelessness. DePaulis said many are Vietnam veterans and are drug-addicted and have mental health issues.

"In one way or another they are very broken people," he said.

Most of the chronic homeless seek aid at a shelter, get back on their feet, leave the shelter, find temporary housing but then are back seeking aid at the shelter a short time later.

At Salt Lake City's largest homeless shelter, the Road Home, the "chronically homeless" make up only 11 percent of the people that come to the shelter but they consume 52 percent of the shelter's resources.

Getting this group into permanent housing, then, would "significantly reduce homelessness and the societal costs of homelessness over time," according to the planning committee's draft report.

Some of the key points set to be implemented in the first year include:

• Rapidly rehousing people who have become homeless within 90 days of their becoming homeless

• An end to discharging people into homelessness, ensuring that everyone discharged from jail, prison, a hospital or drug/mental health treatments centers has a place to live.

• Increase housing for people escaping homelessness by 1,200 units, including another 600 units of supportive, transitional housing with another 600 residential subsidy units becoming available by 2014. Those units will be surrounded by aid groups, like job placement, mental health and drug-addiction treatment service providers.

• Creating a database file that can be used to track the chronically homeless on an individual basis.