Thursday, Aug. 5, 2004 | 10:10 a.m.
By June 2005 the Las Vegas City Council should have a plan to end chronic homelessness in the city, Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman said Wednesday.
It will be the start of a 10-year plan to address the longstanding problem.
The council endorsed the effort after hearing Philip Mangano, President Bush's appointed leader of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, talk about Bush's 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness, which includes having the nation's 100 largest cities create 10-year plans to "end the national disgrace," as Mangano put it.
Mangano said homeless people need to be placed in their own homes and then get treatment for their problems.
City of Las Vegas Neighborhood Management Analyst Trina Robinson appeared to be fighting back tears as she delivered the city's commitment to formulate a 10-year plan to put homeless people in permanent homes.
"I really believe in my heart of hearts we can implement this," Robinson said, her voice cracking with emotion. "The city is changing the way of doing business" on the issue of homelessness.
But the 10-step plan she presented for the city to formulate its 10-year plan to end homelessness did not demonstrate a whole lot that is new. It included "convening working focus groups, gathering research data on homelessness, defining our community homeless problem and developing strategies to address the problem."
The point that much of that plan boils down to studying an issue that seemingly has been studied to death was not lost on Goodman.
"Do we have to start at scratch?" Goodman asked. "Can we start in at Step 8 (create an action plan to implement strategies)?"
Robinson said, "I believe that is possible -- the infrastructure is in place."
Goodman, saying he probably would be misinterpreted by "the stupid press," asked how the city would go about helping the homeless who are "service resistant" -- those who are "in their own minds happy on the streets ... without violating their civil rights or arresting them?" He said he was not sure that under existing laws the city could force such help, including free homes, upon them.
Councilman Gary Reese made it clear that he would not support any plan that dumped all of the homeless housing in his or Councilman Lawrence Weekly's older wards, which currently are popular haunts for street people.
"I'm going to stick up for my area," Reese said, noting that Clark County, North Las Vegas and Henderson also would be good sites to build housing designed to get people off the streets.
Paula Haynes-Green, Clark County's regional homeless services coordinator, and Robinson said other entities would get on board. But no one from any entities attended Wednesday's meeting to commit to invest in building homes in their neighborhoods for people who previously have shunned shelter.
Weekly agreed that his and Reese's wards have borne "a large brunt" of the homeless shelters and service-oriented businesses for the homeless and otherwise poor.
Reese and Weekly also asked Mangano where the money was going to come from to build all of these new homes and pay the rents and mortgages on them. Reese asked what would happen to the federal government's 10-year plan if Bush is voted out of office in November.
Mangano said the money is in the budget and would stay there regardless of who wins. He noted that before Bush came to office, the budget for homeless services was $2.5 billion and now it is $3.4 billion. Mangano said the more competitive Las Vegas' plan is to end chronic homelessness the better the city's chances are of getting its hands on some of that grant money.
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