Multnomah County says although their temperature threshold of 25 degrees may seem low, that's not the only factor they consider when deciding when to open warming shelters.

At the Multnomah County Central Library Monday we found many people inside who were just trying to stay out of the cold.

“We usually spend a couple hours here," said Irida Wren.

He says he and his partner have been sleeping in a tent on Portland streets for months now, waiting to get into affordable housing.

“We’re on some waiting lists for housing, so we’re just waiting on that to come through, hopefully,” Wren said.

The library closed at 6 p.m. Monday, meaning the people staying warm inside had to spend the rest of the night on the street.

Multnomah County opened several overnight warming shelters through the weekend and housed around 340 people Sunday overnight. But the county closed those shelters Monday morning.

The county's temperature threshold for opening warming shelters is 25 degrees, which can seem low.

We asked county Emergency Management Director Chris Voss whether that number should be reevaluated.

"It’s something we do revisit periodically. So even this year, we work with the health department in saying, Hey, where should we be? And so, there were some subtle changes as well to the threshold this year," Voss said.

He says they made some changes in regard to amounts of precipitation and wind speed, which were more of a factor in the decision to open shelters this weekend than temperature alone.

“So Saturday night actually did not reach the 25-degree threshold. It actually was 27. But there were actually some other factors that we considered, and the reason why we opened. So those factors included, one, there was significant wind chill. So if you remember, there was a good 20 to 25 mph wind for most of that evening, and it brought the wind chill down into the teens, and so that was something that was a concern,” Voss said.

But even when they do open shelters, many people don't use them.

Wren went to a shelter in December when conditions were really icy and says they got robbed while they slept.

"We had three quarters of our stuff stolen, and they couldn’t do anything about it,” Wren said.

We asked Voss what they can do to make people and their belongings safer at these emergency shelters.

“One of the things we did at one of our locations today, we actually improved some of the lighting, specifically outside and in the parking lot, to make that sort of safer,” Voss said. "We do actually have a security team too, where they’re looking to say, Hey, what can we do? So I think more people, better lighting, more people with some specific training as well that have a significant amount of experience dealing with some people who might come into our shelter. I think these are all subtle improvements that we are making and hopefully that will help us.”

Although the county closed its warming shelters, the Joint Office of Homeless Services did work to distribute extra cold weather gear to people and worked to link "higher-risk individuals" to a limited number of overflow beds at some existing shelters.

Wren says usually they can get winter supplies from the county if they need them.

"Thankfully, the county has been pretty good about getting that stuff distributed out, but I still have seen like four or five people without shoes. Just today, they work on limited supplies, so it’s always iffy on if we’re going to be able to get an extra blanket like if one of ours gets too wet or something,” Wren said.