Lost in all the politics of the past month, it is easy to forget that the questions surrounding the emergency homeless shelter started as an internal debate among parishioners at St. James Episcopal Church.
Earlier this year, the church formed a committee to study the feasibility of keeping the shelter that St. James had hosted for three years. The committee was set to report to the church rector Michel Belt in September. But with astonishing speed that private debate has become the city’s, quite public, open wound.
“We need to slow this horse down,” said Barry Runyon, a member of both the St. James and the city’s Homelessness Working Group (HWG), last week. “It never should have been brought to this level of attention.”
The homeless question, instead, has become one of the most sensitive and emotional issues the city has dealt with since the salad days of Fort Trumbull.
Runyon said the internal discussion at the church is still ongoing.
“In a perfect world, that process would have been allowed to finish,” Runyon said.
Instead, a few members of St. James contacted Councilor John Maynard, who has received both praise and criticism as the lead council voice on the homeless matter, for help.
The St. James shelter was supposed to close on April 30.
“They approached me, and I said I’d look into it,” he said. “It’s what I said I’d do when I got elected.”
But Maynard said last week he was “not 100 percent” on whether the shelter was successful in its mission prior to the issue’s first public airing at the June 24 City Council meeting.
Councilor Rob Pero said last week that he got “the sense that the shelter was not working.” Pero noted he has visited the St. James shelter in the past week.
According to statistics published by the Homeless Hospitality Center in June, 62 out of the shelter’s 116 unduplicated guests stayed less than 10 nights; 25 stayed between 11 and 24 nights; and 29 stayed more than 25 nights.
The report states that the emergency shelter is the earliest and most consistent point of contact with the homeless.
But whether or not the shelter was working has now become a moot point.
In the past week, the City Council voted to force shelter workers to administer Breathalyzer tests to random people seeking admittance to the overnight shelter; those who blow a .08, the state’s legal limit to operate a motor vehicle, will be refused entrance.
The motion was made by Maynard, as a corrective to an earlier law passed by the council requiring the shelter to become “dry” by Aug. 1.
But, initially, the council did not clearly define what it meant by “dry.”
With no set standard, Catherine Zall, the executive director of the Homeless Hospitality Center (HHC), which oversees the shelter, implemented a policy—to allow intoxicated people to spend the night, with the understanding that they would not be allowed in if they arrived at the shelter drunk again.
But as is so often the case in relationships, it’s not what you say, but how you say it.
The council learned of Zall’s interpretation of the “dry” standing by reading about it in the Aug. 2 edition of The Day.
“That was bothersome,” Maynard said.
In the Aug. 4 meeting of the HWG, Zall apologized profusely for not informing the City Council. She said she had returned from a two-week holiday the day before the “dry” deadline and was working to come up with a response.
The Breathalyzer policy, Maynard claims, was adopted to elucidate any confusion over what “dry” means.
The motion passed 4-3, with Councilor Michael Buscetto joining Republican Councilors Pero and Adam Sprecace in the affirmative.
Democrat Margaret Curtin called the policy “an intrusion of privacy,”
“We are picking on a class of people,” she said, and doubted the measure’s legality.
The council voted against sending the proposal to the law director before its adoption.
Deputy Mayor Wade Hyslop called the vote “a step in the wrong direction.”
“We should allow the working group to make a determination,” he said.
Pero was particularly irked that the HHC defied the council’s directive. “The will of the city cannot just be ignored,” Pero said.
Pero said that the Breathalyzer policy will be a stop-gap measure in anticipation of the HWG’s final report to the City Council due at the end of September.
Zall disagreed with the ruling.
“Everything should be on the table, but we should use the working group to talk about these issues,” she said.
David Hayes, a resident and frequent public speaker at meetings, strongly disagreed with the motion.
“Where are people going to go?” he asked.
Also, last week, members of both the HWG and the City Council said the dry issue should affect a small percentage of people who use the shelter.
Milton Cook, a HWG member who is the director of the Montauk Avenue soup kitchen, said, “We are talking about 10 people.”
Runyon, who is also involved in New London Main Street, said that whatever decision the HWG arrives at, he hopes city leaders see the homeless question in the context of other issues in the city.
“Part of the problem in New London is that we tend to look at issues in a vacuum,” he said. “The homeless issue has to be part of a common and shared vision—a set of strategies and goals.
“We’ve got to have that vision,” he continued. “It’s like we have a baseball team with no coach and all the kids want to be the pitcher.”