DEL.ICIO.USAtlanta shelter faces water bill deadline
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Monday, June 29, 2009
Gregory Wolcott said he wired big-box stores until his legs and arms started going numb last winter.
Three months ago, he landed in “the pine,” the massive Midtown homeless shelter, where he found not only a bed but assistance, including an MRI last week and getting signed up for disability payments Monday, Wolcott said.
John Spink/jspink@ajc.com
Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless executive director, Anita Beaty said the task force is raising the money to keep the shelter open.
JOHN SPINK/jspink@ajc.com
Tieree Malone, drawing a portrait of Michael Jackson with colored pencils, is a resident at the shelter and works in The Gallery daily.
“I’d rather be working. Sometimes I made $1,800 a week with overtime,” said the 50-year-old Wolcott, a talented painter who said the numbness comes and goes, making it dangerous to work on ladders. “They think maybe I had some small strokes in my sleep.”
Wolcott might lose that bed if the task force doesn’t pay a $15,000 city water bill Tuesday, which could mean a water shutoff. He is one of a few hundred men caught in the middle of a longtime battle between Anita Beaty, executive director of the Metro Atlanta Task Force that runs the shelter, and Mayor Shirley Franklin’s homeless czar, Debi Starnes, who first began tussling with Beaty as a councilwoman in the 1990s over how best to help the homeless.
Superior Court Judge Ural Glanville last week ordered the city to turn back on the shelter’s water but warned that if the task force doesn’t pay the $15,000 owed for April and May by June 30, and another $8,000 owed for June by July 15, and all future payments on time, he would be reluctant to come to the shelter’s aid again.
The task force has watched its budget dwindle to about $600,000 from $1.5 million because city officials quit supporting it for federal and state grants and lobbied private donors to withdraw support, said Bob Cramer, chairman of the task force.
Beaty said the task force is raising the money to keep the shelter open. “All we want from the city is that they take their foot off our neck because we perform a service for the city,” Beaty said. “The city wants this building and they want us to be quiet, and that we will never do.”
Starnes accuses the shelter of allowing the homeless to languish for months and years as guests rather than insisting they curb behaviors that result in living on the streets. She said the task force lost its grants because of poor performance — not because the city wants it closed to appease Midtown businessmen.
The city partnered with the United Way and the Regional Commission on the Homeless to start the Gateway Center to help homeless men, women and children find a way to move out of shelters and off the street. The center, which works in conjunction with other shelters, ties its assistance to the those taking steps to change behavior and help themselves get off the streets.
Men such as Wolcott will be taken care of if the shelter closes its doors even if it means overfilling other shelters past their capacity, Starnes said. “If a person has SSI [disability] payments, we can fairly quickly place them in permanent housing,” she said. “There is no reason for that person to be in a shelter, but there are people who get SSI who stay in a shelter for years.”
Beaty, who champions the causes of the poor from panhandling to urban camping, said the Gateway approach helps the people seen as “the deserving” homeless who are trying to straighten out their lives or get back on their feet financially, but it ignores the people who are more stubborn about changing their ways by doing such things as getting into a drug treatment program. Those “non-compliant” homeless will end up camping in parks and in doorways if her shelter closes, Beaty said.
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