Shelter at MASH Village is shut down

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Wednesday, Aug. 14, 2002 | 10:55 a.m.

MASH Village, which has the Las Vegas Valley's only shelter for homeless families, closed its last beds today, two weeks earlier than planned.

The final 18 residents of the transitional living program, which housed both families and older women while providing them job training and other services, were moved today to low-rent apartments or other shelters. The program stopped accepting new residents last month.

"It's a pretty sad day for us," program manager Wanda Bonillas said this morning. "It's hard to walk down the halls and not see the children or hear their laughter."

Only the Crisis Intervention Center, a one-stop clearinghouse of social services for the homeless, remains open at the once sprawling complex.

At its peak the Transitional Living Center housed 225 people and the Crisis Intervention Center helped from 3,000 to 5,000 people a month, Bonillas said. Additionally a tent opened during winter months the past five years gave emergency shelter to 250 single men.

The shelter was shut to allow the city of Las Vegas, which owns the building and the 10 acres it sits on, to move in and determine whether to take on much-needed repairs before another agency replaces the shelter's current operator sometime after Oct. 1.

MASH Village Executive Director Ruth Bruland described the closure, which leaves 26 employees jobless, as both frustrating and a relief.

"Would the families like to have stayed longer? Definitely. But would a few more weeks have made a big difference to them in terms of finding alternatives? Not necessarily," she said.

"As for the staff, they have been under so much pressure lately that the decision comes as a sort of relief as well."

The pressure came after San Diego-based Father Joe's Villages announced in March that its seven-year run managing the shelter would end Oct. 1 due to lack of funds.

Since then the city has had to find a new agency to run the shelter, as well as determine repairs the building needs.

It is still unclear if anyone will take over the building even if the repairs are done. Catholic Charities has told the city it is interested only in running the Crisis Intervention Center, not the shelter for families.

But the city wants to evaluate the building anyway. It will move in during the coming days to do a weeklong study on the foundation, at a cost of under $6,000, Betsy Fretwell, deputy city manager, said. Two other recent studies cost a total of $13,458.

Work on the foundation and other areas of the building, if carried out after the study, could cost up to $150,000, Fretwell said. Work also needs to be done to get rid of potentially dangerous mold. The cost is still unknown.

"Once we knew we had to do a structural test on the building's foundation, given that the test can be disruptive to people living and working in the building ... and in order to get the building in the shape ... we decided it would be better to ask people to be out of there as soon as possible," Fretwell said.

Bonillas, like other homeless advocates in recent weeks, wondered about the future of the building. "It will be interesting to see -- are they going to fix it or bulldoze it?"

Bruland said that at least one of the families in the shelter had to split up because no other shelter houses intact families. The mother, together with another single mother and her children, will now be at the Shade Tree shelter. The father of the first family will stay at Salvation Army. Other families found housing with the local nonprofits, Economic Opportunity Board and Women's Development Center.

As for the employees, many are sending out resumes, while some have already found work at newly opened agencies run by Catholic Charities across the street from MASH Village.

Bruland said she is also relieved that the issues surrounding the building may be one step closer to being resolved.

"We know there are a lot of problems with this building so it's only right to do this before anyone else moves in," she said.

"In my heart of hearts I wanted to close on a Friday and have someone take over on a Monday, but that's not going to happen. Still, at least we hope to see this building fixed up once and for all."