Homeless center now offering less

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2002 | 9:37 a.m.

One week into its new ownership, what was once the Las Vegas Valley's largest one-stop center of social services for the homeless is either up and running or barely limping -- depending on whom you ask.

Called the Crisis Intervention Center, the building is all that is left of what until Oct. 1 was MASH Village.

A week ago today management of the center shifted from the San Diego-based Father Joe's Villages to the local Catholic Charities under an agreement with the city of Las Vegas. A clinic, an emergency shelter for men and the shelter for families had all closed down in the preceding months.

Homeless men and women crossed the threshold of the freshly cleaned building, surprised to find that some things had changed.

When Jerry Smith, 44, showed up to use the center's phone bank and computers on Friday, he was told there were none.

"I used to use the phones to call my mom, for work, for medical appointments," Smith said. "I used the computer to look for work.

"Now there's none of that. That place was a lot better before," he said, rolling a cigarette while sitting in front of the downtown building.

But Frank Richo, director of residential services for Catholic Charities, said the phones and computers were the property of Father Joe's Villages and replacing them would be too expensive.

The city's agreement provides almost $227,000 to run the center for the next five months, including almost $160,000 in federal funds that MASH did not use, $25,415 from United Way, $15,000 from Clark County and $40,000 from Las Vegas.

"All we're trying to do is keep the doors open ... clean the building, and keep a safe environment for the clients and the providers," Richo said.

He also doubted if the phones, computers and photocopier in what was called the center's resource room were the best use of funds in the first place, since they were intended for job searching and often got used by the homeless for other purposes.

But Linda Lera Randle-El, the first case manager for the center in 1994 and now director of a nonprofit agency called Straight from the Streets, said that she sent dozens of homeless men and women to the resource room over the years for everything from job-related messages to court document photocopies.

"There's no service to replace that room now," she said.

Another loss felt by the center were the files of hundreds of homeless men and women that MASH officials took with them to San Diego.

"There were about 300 boxes of files that got trucked away," Anna Poling, program administrator for Catholic Charities, said. The files belonged to MASH Village and are protected by confidentiality laws, Richo said, so they cannot be retrieved.

New files will be started for the homeless people the center serves, Poling and Richo said, but Lera Randle-El said it's not that easy to replace them.

"Over the years, many people left the originals of their birth certificates or veterans' papers in those files, since it was the safest place to keep them," she said.

"Others even left family photos. Now what are they going to do?"

The bulk of the center consists of public and private agencies that set up shop there on a daily, weekly or other basis, including welfare and Southern Nevada Adult Mental Health.

At one time there were more than 30 agencies at MASH, but the number had dwindled to four by the final weeks of September.

"Many agencies were unsure of what was going to happen," Richo said. "Now some of them have come back, after finding out we opened up."

But several haven't confirmed if they will continue to offer services under Catholic Charities, including the Economic Opportunity Board, a nonprofit offering housing and rental assistance, and the Employment Security Division, a state employment agency for veterans.