CRANSTON — Six months after the Welcome Arnold shelter closed to make room for a new state police headquarters, advocates for the homeless say they’re asking Governor Carcieri to explain why the project hasn’t begun and to request more money to care for people dislocated by the shelter’s closure.

“I’m trying to have clarified if the state intends to build a state police barracks there or just has it on hold,” said Jim Ryczek, executive director of the Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless. Several calls to the governor’s office have gone unreturned, he said.

“I’d like an explanation because we were told we had to get everybody out [of the shelter] by the fifteenth of March for the project to move forward, and if that’s not the case, I’m not pleased,” said Ryczek. “We could have done more planning over the summer.”

The governor’s office will say only that the new headquarters project — which voters first approved spending $48 million on five years ago and whose proposed location has moved at least three times as its price has risen — is under review.

“The state is facing yet another budget problem and the governor has been meeting intensely with department heads to find a way to save money,” said Carcieri spokesman Jeff Neal.

As part of that discussion, Neal said, two questions are being asked: whether the new headquarters is “absolutely necessary to allow the state police to fulfill their mission” and “is there something we can do to help the state police facility issue that would be less costly for taxpayers?”

Neal insisted that no final decision about a new state police headquarters has been made: “Nothing has changed but everything is on the table for discussion about whether we should move forward.”

In 2002, then superintendent of the state police, Steven M. Pare, appealed to voters to approve a referendum question authorizing the borrowing of money. Pare explained that six of the seven state police barracks were more than 40 years old — including part of the Scituate headquarters, housed in a 200-year-old farmhouse.

Voters responded affirmatively, though the location of a new headquarters remained uncertain.

By 2005, the headquarters appeared headed for 18 acres in West Greenwich that formed an edge of the 8,000-acre property once earmarked for the planned Big River Reservoir.

The plan, however, sparked controversy among environmentalists and others who objected to land that had been given to the state with the assurance it would remain as open space being used for the facility.

Carcieri, surprised by opponents’ vehemence, abandoned the plan in June 2005.

That fall, focus shifted to property in Cranston on the western edge of the John O. Pastore complex. State officials had said they would use eminent-domain powers to cancel a lease with owners of the Mulligan’s Island golf complex along Route 2.

But the state shifted gears again when state officials realized there were a number of years remaining on the golf lease.

That’s when the proposed location changed for a third time: to the other side of the Pastore campus on land occupied by the Welcome Arnold Shelter, the state’s largest shelter for the homeless, housing about 100 people nightly.

Ryczek, of the coalition for the homeless, said advocates didn’t object to the closure of the large warehouse shelter. “We objected to a lack of a plan to fulfill the governor’s pledge to accommodate all the folks who regularly used it. We thought closing it on March 15 was premature … which turned out to be exactly accurate.”

With mostly state money, the state, nonprofit groups and advocates for the homeless worked to locate 95 more beds in several smaller programs around the state after the closure of Welcome Arnold and its subsequent demolition.

It hasn’t been enough, contended Anne Nolan, executive director of Crossroads Rhode Island, a Providence agency that finds permanent housing for the homeless and offers them several kinds of services, including job training and medical care.

Crossroads is not a shelter. But in the wake of the Welcome Arnold closing, it did build 20 bunk beds to support some of the people it knew would be dislocated.

Now, each night those bunks are full, Nolan said yesterday, and 40 more people are sleeping on the floor.

“And it’s only September.”

Noreen Shawcross, director of the state Office of Housing and Community Development, referred questions yesterday to the governor’s spokesman.

Nolan said from what she has heard about the state police project, “It’s done. It’s dead. And I’m pretty annoyed. I don’t quite understand what the rush was. They were in such a hurry to get the shelter closed. It was hurry, hurry, hurry, and then, bang, nothing happened. They tore the building down and now we’re stuck with a huge problem.”

Nolan said caring for the additional homeless “is costing us probably $150,000 and we didn’t budget at all to do this. We don’t have a reserve or an endowment.”

With reports from Journal staff writer Amanda Milkovits

tmooney@projo.com