MASH to close medical clinic, emergency tent

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Thursday, June 6, 2002 | 9:32 a.m.

MASH Village plans to permanently close its emergency shelter tent, which provides beds for up to 250 single men, on June 14, and its medical clinic for low-income people four days later.

The announcement came Wednesday in a press release issued to "clear up ... misinformation" surrounding the nonprofit company's pullout of Las Vegas.

Father Joe Carroll, president of Father Joe's Villages, announced April 1 that his nonprofit would end its six-year contract with the city of Las Vegas to manage the region's largest homeless shelter.

The group, which plans to leave Las Vegas by Sept. 30, also will stop accepting new people into its transitional housing program on July 15 and focus its efforts on finding new places for the residents, according to the announcement.

The three-page memo, addressed to the Las Vegas media, came from Carroll's S.V.D.P. Management Inc. in San Diego in response to criticism over its application for the renewal of a federal Housing and Urban Development grant that begins in February, months after the planned pullout.

Questions also have arisen over whether any money from the current grant would be available for whichever group takes over management of the city-owned shelter.

The release said that no federal grants made to MASH Village could be transferred to Father Joe's projects in other cities, as HUD rules prohibit such transfers. Regional HUD officials have said a grant renewed for MASH Village could be used by another local group to run the shelter.

Carroll also said that he expects to "use the total amount ..." of the current grant "... well before the end of the calendar year."

As for the shelter itself, Carroll said that a full inventory has been taken, and that all property belonging to the city of Las Vegas will be returned.

Ruth Bruland, executive director of MASH Village, said the emergency tent has been sheltering about 220 men recently, a drop due to the rise in temperature. "It gets to be more than 100 degrees at 4 p.m. in there, and that's hard to bear," she said.

The clinic receives from 400 to 600 patients a month, 40 percent of whom are homeless and the rest of whom come from low-income populations such as undocumented immigrants.

"Now an earache is going to send a lot of these people to emergency rooms throughout the Las Vegas Valley," Bruland said.

The residential program currently houses 78 people. Bruland said that number could go up a little in the coming weeks, but closing the door several months before October is necessary to relocate the residents.

"We have some clients who are fairly difficult to place, like single women over 65," she said.

"Our plan is to leave none of them on the street, and that's going to take some time."