Residents blasted the Healey administration for ignoring their input and essentially strong-arming them into accepting a new 80-bed overflow shelter in their ritzy Seaport neighborhood, where migrant families will start living within the next week.

A day after Gov. Maura Healey confirmed that the United Way of Massachusetts Bay had chosen a private Fort Point office building as an overnight safety-net site, an administration official told neighbors at a heavily attended community meeting that the plan was moving forward, regardless of whether they were on board.

“This is going to happen,” General Scott Rice, emergency assistance director for the Healey administration, said Tuesday night in response to a resident who asked whether the neighborhood had a say in the matter.

“What you get to say and what you get to help us with is a tremendous amount of help to make this work and work well for you and for us,” Rice said.

The pronouncement went over like a lead balloon, with residents saying “that sounds like complete bullshit” and “a horrendous idea.”

Many residents cited concerns around “buses” that would be “going up and down” the dead-end street to transport sheltered families from 24 Farnsworth St., which lacks shower facilities, to two local YMCAs to shower each day.

“This is ridiculous,” one neighbor said. “This is a terrible location.”

“Why isn’t the governor here? How about we bus them to her house?” a woman shouted out in exasperation after another neighbor told Rice that the community has had it with emergency declarations over the past few years that prompt executive decisions that bypass residents and their elected representatives.

Others feared for their safety, pointing to incidents involving unvetted immigrants in other cities, particularly the killing of a 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia. One resident suggested tightening up security by only allowing entrance through the front of the building for the shelter space, rather than also using the back door.

Rice said the state vets migrant families before taking them into the shelter system, including overflow sites, and that while there have been incidents with “desperate” unvetted immigrants attempting to attach themselves to a family before being removed, there hasn’t been any criminal activity.

“Our track record has been very good,” Rice said.

Not helping matters was the lack of a definitive timeline, and the open-ended possibility raised by officials that a 90-day temporary certificate issued by the city allowing for such a shelter use could be renewed for as long as the governor’s state of emergency around the migrant crisis lasts.

“Can we continue to be extending 90-day occupancy for years?” City Councilor-at-Large Erin Murphy asked.

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Representatives from the mayor’s office said the Inspectional Services Department issued a temporary certificate of inspection on Monday, “for 90 days with an option to renew for another 90 days.”

“State building code allows this without requiring a permanent change of use,” Ricardo Patrón, a spokesperson for Mayor Michelle Wu, said in a statement. “Before issuing the temporary certificate of inspection, ISD is required to inspect the life safety systems.”

“The city has done this in the past such as during the pandemic and at the Melnea Cass site in Roxbury. The permanent use and occupancy of the space is not changing,” he added.

Residents stated that such allowance indicated that the shelter setup in their neighborhood wouldn’t be “temporary,” as described by the governor and United Way, which is working with the state to set up safety-net sites to relieve some of the overflow from a maxed-out emergency shelter system, via a $5 million grant.

Murphy noted that the safety-net site at Roxbury’s state-owned Melnea Cass Recreational Complex, which houses 100 families or roughly 400 people, came with a hard stop of May 31, to allow the swimming pool to open for the summer.

While Rice and United Way representatives said the plan was to open an overnight shelter for 25 families or roughly 80 people in the Seaport building by the end of next week or “maybe the week after,” no end date has been established.

Christi Staples, vice president of policy and government relations for United Way, said the nonprofit is working on providing an end date by a virtual community meeting planned for Friday night.

Thomas Ready of the Fort Point Neighborhood Association, which hosted the night’s meeting, told Healey and United Way representatives that they were “hearing the frustration from our community with regard to the lack of communication.”

“We were told tonight the decision has already been made,” Ready said, adding that his group expects answers to the outstanding questions it submitted weeks ago.

“We will quickly pivot if in fact this is getting forced down our throats to make the best of this and we will fully support them as they come into our community,” he said. “You have to give us a little bit of time to digest this because right now it doesn’t taste so good.”

Boston, MA – 24 Farnsworth St. (Nancy Lane/Boston Herald)