MASH Village may have been doomed from start

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Monday, April 1, 2002 | 10:51 a.m.

The eight-year run of MASH Village -- the city's largest provider of shelter and other services to the homeless -- was troubled from the start, say those associated with the nonprofit agency.

Father Joe Carroll announced from San Diego Friday that the shelter's parent company, St. Vincent de Paul Management, would pull out of Las Vegas in six months, catching many who work with the homeless by surprise.

But others said a look at the shelter's history shows that the move was bound to happen -- the only question was when.

"MASH Village started out rocky, and it stayed rocky," Ruth Bruland, executive director since 1999, said.

She and others said that the nonprofit's troubles included poor relationships with other shelters in the so-called "homeless corridor" downtown, a weak board of directors lacking pull with local fund-raising sources and competitiveness with other nonprofits for government money, leading to a duplication of services.

"Unfortunately, MASH was always seen as an outsider by the other agencies working with the homeless from the beginning," said Linda Lera-Randle El, the shelter's interim director in 1994 -- before Carroll came on board to run the program a year later.

Lera-Randle El said that the city of Las Vegas' decision to hand the new program to an out-of-state charity created bad blood with the other agencies in the area, including Catholic Charities and the Salvation Army -- especially when the move came with a total of $5 million in subsidies from the city and Clark County, spread out over five years.

"These other charities scrimped and scrapped to get by, and seeing the city and county support MASH Village with an amount of money unheard of at the time was kind of hard," she said.

Doug Bell, a manager with the county's finance department for the past two decades, was involved in the 1995 decision to hand the shelter over to Carroll and its subsequent funding by the city and county.

"The biggest challenge for them has been to find a permanent and predictable revenue stream -- especially since local government's backing was only for a limited time," Bell said.

"They never built a board of directors that could raise funds locally, which is key for any charity. Instead, they relied on one charismatic figure -- Father Joe Carroll -- who was in San Diego, and didn't build relationships here."

Carroll's homeless shelter in California has an annual budget of $22 million, more than five times that of the Las Vegas agency.

Bruland described the charity's board as "weak, small, and not very active."

"Really, it was never empowered to do very much, and so it was hard for it to be successful," she said.

This was supposed to change in the coming months, as a new board with full rights and responsibilities was to be developed after the city transferred 10 acres of land to MASH Village.

The land deal, which is now unlikely to occur, was a bone of contention between the nonprofit and the city in recent years: MASH Village sought possession of the land, but the city questioned the need for building up the "homeless corridor" and the agency's financial capacity to manage the land.

The longstanding friction between MASH Village and neighboring agencies surfaced again with Brenda Dixon, the director of the neighboring women's shelter, Shade Tree, asking as recently as a month ago, "At what point will MASH officials be stopped from holding the city hostage to its perceived entitlements?"

The lack of strong ties locally also hurt MASH Village when it came to deciding what programs to develop, some advocates said.

"They never really studied the homelessness issue enough locally at the beginning, and this plus their competitiveness with other agencies led to a certain duplication of services," Lera-Randle El said.

The former interim director cited the example of building a medical clinic at MASH Village, when Catholic Charities and Nevada Health Centers provided similar services nearby.

"It almost seemed as if MASH tried to reproduce what they had in San Diego, and grew too fast because of this," she said.

While homeless advocates were surprised by Carroll's Friday announcement, they also began looking at next steps. The city has until October to take the agency over or find another operator. An emergency meeting of the Southern Nevada Homeless Coalition was called today to address the issue.

The coalition -- which includes the region's major shelters and other agencies that work with the homeless -- will try to consider how to help the 120 or so families now housed at MASH Village, as well as those who use services there ranging from food stamp applications to health care.

Bell said the situation should be seen as an opportunity to learn from the past, especially since a regional task force led by Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman has yet to finalize a plan to address homelessness.

"It seems we should see now that the 'big We' has to be involved in this plan in order for the problem to be solved, as it hasn't," he said.

"This means the entire community working together -- including the business community, private citizens and the state of Nevada."

Lera-Randle El agreed.

"Everybody's going to have to sit at the same table now, as they never have before."