Group questions city’s methods in search for new MASH director

Wednesday, June 12, 2002 | 9:14 a.m.

An umbrella group representing 70 private and public agencies that work with the homeless questioned the city of Las Vegas in its search for someone to run the region's largest shelter when the shelter's current operator leaves in October.

"We're concerned about whether or not what is being asked is really reachable," said Gus Ramos, chairman of the Southern Nevada Homeless Coalition, after the group's monthly meeting Tuesday.

Some of the group's members even questioned if the city is really looking for a replacement for San Diego-based Father Joe Carroll's SVDP Management at MASH Village -- or whether it wants the search to fail in order to put the land and the buildings on it to another use. SVDP has managed the site for six years.

"Anyone who's even suggesting such a thing is suffering from a rare form of paranoia," Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman said.

At issue are such details as the amount of people that must be served at the site and whether the different services would best be administered by several agencies, instead of one. These details are contained in the city's Request for Qualifications, issued May 29, with a deadline of July 15.

According to the request, 300 people would be housed in what is now called the Transitional Living Center, for example. But members of the coalition pointed out that the center has served less than half that number for more than a year.

"We're not sure what agency can meet this sort of qualification," Ramos said.

The group's chairman said the city could have sought the coalition's input during the drafting of the request, in order to discuss these and other points. He said a representative from the city hasn't attended coalition meetings during the last two months.

"They could have consulted with us and maybe cleared up some of these issues," Ramos said.

But Goodman said it was the coalition that had been incommunicado.

"Any one of them could have picked up the phone and we would have gotten back to them in a New York minute," Goodman said.

Ramos also said that at least one local nonprofit, Living Well, had formally withdrawn from the application process in the last week.

Ruth Bruland, executive director of MASH Village until October and also a member of the coalition, met with different agencies that provide services at the site's Crisis Intervention Center after Tuesday's meeting.

"I told them that the way things are going, come October 1, there may be no one to pay the light bills, just so they're prepared," she said.

More than one member of the coalition suggested possible motives behind making the process so difficult.

"There's a general feeling out there that there's something political behind this," said Father Lloyd Rupp, chairman of Friends of the Desert, a nonprofit that feeds the homeless.

"If they're intending to turn the land into some other use, then why don't they come out and say so?"

Rupp said several coalition members have wondered whether the city may be considering putting the site to a less controversial use, such as a senior citizens center.

"Everybody would vote for that; it doesn't offend anyone," Rupp said.