“The other night, one of the guys came in,” Jeanne Edwards recalled. “He said, ‘There’s a girl laying on the steps going down to the ramp.’ OK, so I took my coat, went out there. I looked. Twenty-eight-year-old female. You know, she told me it was alcohol. It was too much of something. I said, ‘OK, let’s go. You don’t belong out here.’ And she came in here. She took a shower. She got some nice warm clothes. She laid down. She slept. Peaceable.”

Wrapping up her final month as alder representing the 4th District for the Kingston Common Council, Edwards is the assistant director of Ulster County’s warming center in Kingston. She works seven days a week at the warming center. Fifteen-hour shifts, she says, aren’t unusual.

“People from the county, they worry I never sleep,” Edwards says. “I d

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