Homeless bed down in shelter without water

With no running water inside the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless shelter Monday night, resident Palmer Harlan came prepared.

“I have three or four empty plastic jugs I keep for an emergency,” the 55-year-old Atlantan said as he faced a night without working bathroom facilities.

For Harlan and the shelter, the situation is dire.

The task force lost its water service Monday morning after falling behind on its bill. As of June 28, it’ll owe the city $22,984.62, said Janet Ward, spokeswoman for the Atlanta Department of Watershed Management.

That left as many as 600 men served by the shelter without a place to shower or use the bathroom. Temperatures in the mid-90s Monday only exacerbated the discomfort.

Tuesday morning, lawyers representing the Peachtree Street shelter will petition a Fulton County Superior Court judge to get the water turned back on. In the meantime, staffers were making do, passing out a diminishing stash of donated bottled waters.

“The water’s going fast,” said shelter employee Willie Williams.

Without an adequate supply of water, the county’s health department could shut down the shelter, though task force director Anita Beaty is confident that won’t happen.

“If we can get [the city] to take their foot off our neck, we can meet our obligations,” she said. “They interfere with our donors, telling them not to give to us because we’re going under.”

The city blames Beaty’s direction for the shelter’s problems.

“The reason their funding dried up is because of the lack of results — for years, years and years,” said Debi Starnes, a former city councilwoman and Mayor Shirley Franklin’s homelessness czar. “There is no excuse for why people should languish in the shelter for years.”

Harlan has been an inhabitant of the facility off and on over the past 12 years — “headquarters,” he calls it.

“It’s good to know there’s somewhere I can go,” he said. “In here, it’s safe. Outside, it won’t be.”

The bathroom situation was of immediate concern.

“They don’t want guys like us coming in there,” Harlan said of neighboring establishments.

Tuesday’s court date will be the latest in a long line of showdowns between the city and the shelter. On Dec. 2, the department shut off water service for nonpayment of a $160,000 bill. Shortly after, a judge ordered the service restored to the shelter and gave the task force a deadline to pay a portion of the debt.

Those deadlines have been missed, and a court order can’t be negotiated, Ward said.

“This could happen again and again,” she said, noting that a last-minute attempt by the shelter to negotiate a partial payment with the city was rebuffed. “The court order doesn’t allow for that.”

Beaty said the shelter is prepared to pay $15,000 Tuesday. If turned down, “we have backup plans that aren’t permanent at all,” she said.

All told, the shelter owes the city roughly $170,000 — the current balance of $22,984.62 plus an outstanding debt of $147,382.39 owed for a separate meter at the building that was shut off last winter.

The task force had placed its 96,000-square-foot building up for sale in March, asking for $10.5 million, but Beaty said it’s since been taken off the market.

— Staff writer Alyse Knorr contributed to this article.