Homeless tangle: Complex plan is frought with problems

Wednesday, Jan. 23, 2002 | 11:05 a.m.

Homeless plan The plan's five recommendations:

The ambitious plan, the work of the Southern Nevada Regional Planning Coalition's Homeless Task Force, tries to coordinate efforts of the Las Vegas Valley's municipalities and nonprofit groups to reach out to the homeless. The group includes city and county officials, homeless advocates and community and business representatives.

It will require teamwork unprecedented in addressing homelessness, local officials and a national expert say. That could be the problem.

"We all agree this is a regional issue," Henderson Councilman Stephen Kirk, a member of the task force, said.

"But there are going to be many obstacles to carrying it out. We need to have a plan that, when politicians change, the plan remains the same. And we need to avoid politicians taking ownership of the issue."

A 30-year veteran of the nation's oldest and largest homeless advocacy group lauded the regional approach, but noted it has yet to succeed in other areas where it has been tried.

"Thinking about homelessness as a regional problem makes sense, and this plan has a lot of the elements in place to work," said Michael Stoops, director of community organizing for the National Coalition for the Homeless. "Unfortunately, the idea has not taken root elsewhere, and there is no good example of a regional plan working.

"There's always a tendency for those involved to be saying to each other, 'You should be doing your share.' And so a problem of responsibility develops."

The homeless debate in the Las Vegas Valley has been characterized by such sniping among elected officials.

Last year County Commissioner Erin Kenny pushed for a county grant to open a winter emergency shelter early and challenged the valley's cities to kick in their share.

Many of those municipalities argued that they had already contributed through their residents' taxes to the county.

Similar differences started to surface last week in the aftermath of a task force meeting where the group decided to put off implementing its plan until it can be studied.

Kenny had presented an idea to create a master-planned community for the homeless, replacing the shelters and other services for the homeless in the so-called homeless corridor downtown.

"This campus would have transitional housing, social services, UMC Quick Care, job training and so on. It would be administered by the nonprofit," Kenny said, suggesting it could be located in unincorporated Clark County.

She added that her idea is the only way to develop the downtown area, one of Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman's primary goals.

At the meeting, Goodman said the issue of moving services to another location was "at least worthy of discussion."

But Ruth Bruland, executive director of MASH Village, one of the shelters in the homeless corridor, said after the meeting that Kenny's insistence on moving the services to another area would be cost-prohibitive, adding that more than $50 million has been spent in developing the area in the past decade.

"Instead, we could have the best of both worlds, improving what we have downtown and adding on services in outlying areas," Bruland said.

Focusing too much on one proposal could slow down the process of implementing the plan to reduce homelessness, she said.

"The whole process should not be reduced to either/or propositions if we are going to work together and make progress on this," she said.

Goodman, who set up the homeless task force in February, said after the meeting Kenny's idea doesn't have to be either/or.

"The diffusion of facilities is not inconsistent with keeping corridor facilities as they are," he said.

Another issue that could prove contentious for the task force is a group of 50 to 100 homeless men and women who have been sleeping on the sidewalks in front of MASH Village for the past seven months or so, attracting controversy as reports of drug and alcohol abuse and violence have been made public.

Goodman referred to the group of homeless who camp out around MASH Village during his state of the city address earlier this month, describing them as "robbing, raping and killing their own."

Some homeless advocates took offense and worried that the remarks would be misunderstood by the general public. The mayor explained in a public meeting afterward that he did not mean to paint all homeless people with a broad brush.

But the group is still camped out in the same area, and the question remains whether their presence could derail the implementation of a regional homeless plan.

"I certainly hope this doesn't happen," said Gus Ramos, who sits on the task force as chairman of the Southern Nevada Homeless Coalition, a group that represents 79 public and private organizations.

"If something should occur down there, and law enforcement is required, I just hope there's sufficient communication between elected officials and those who work with the homeless to deal with things in a sensible way."

"The thing is, how to deal with any problem immediately and effectively without violating people's constitutional rights," he said.

Another hurdle, Stoops said, is in the structure of the task force itself. The group includes four elected officials, one community activist, one homeless advocate and one business representative -- no homeless people.

"The homeless are not on the task force. Why? If this were a task force dealing with women's issues, no one would accept there not being a woman on the board. The homeless, plus the agencies, should be the central issue."

Then there is the cost.

"Even though everybody at the table may be saying this is a regional issue, no municipal government in the region has any money to deal with the issue," Bruland said.

Most members of the task force said any funding would have to come from federal or private sources.

"This presents a problem for many regional plans," Stoops said of the National Coalition for the Homeless.

"Most communities look to the federal government for funds while bragging about how much they're doing to solve the problem. There ought to be a formula based on each community's population, for example, that determines how much each contributes to the plan."

Still, Bruland remained optimistic about the future of the task force's plan.

"Las Vegas always dares to be different," she said. "So let's be different now, and get beyond politics. Nothing less than human lives are at stake.""