KCK mayor shuts down homeless shelter just before weekend freeze. What’s he thinking?
Just days before killer cold arrives Saturday, Mayor Tyrone Garner not only shut down a planned Kansas City, Kansas, emergency homeless shelter, but abruptly walked out of a meeting with the professionals working on it.
A demonstration is planned for noon Thursday at City Hall to encourage Garner to back off his insistence that the shelter be moved from its planned location at North Fifth Street and State Avenue. Moving it now, after it was ready to open as early as Tuesday night, would be a logistical nightmare, if not an impossibility — and certainly couldn’t be accomplished by Saturday’s predicted below-zero wind chills.
Rob Santel, director of housing solutions for the project’s lead agency Cross-Lines Community Outreach, said they told the mayor in a meeting Wednesday morning that Cross-Lines would have to pull out of the project if the location was changed at this late date.
“And he said, ‘OK, I’m done,’ and he walked away. Walked out of the room,” Santel says.
The freshly sworn-in mayor’s show of pique comes after hundreds of hours of preparation and four months of work by nonprofits, city leaders and faith-based groups who scoured the community for the most appropriate site. Right now, the project is off — and the 40 homeless individuals who might have found shelter there will have to sleep elsewhere. With no other overnight shelter in the county, that likely means making their way over the river to the Missouri side.
“The mayor needs to be responsible and accountable for this,” Santel says. “The city has been nothing but accommodating to help make this happen. But it’s the mayor, specifically, that has stopped this.”
The mayor couldn’t be reached for comment, but Santel and Rachel Russell, Cross-Lines’ director of community engagement, said Garner is concerned about pushback from neighbors in the area.
OK, but is that enough to leave people out in the cold — where frostbite can happen in minutes? Why not open the shelter as planned and see how it works? It’s done just fine in other locations for the past six years.
“When we have heard the pushback and we know who it is,” Russell says, “we have said we will meet with them. We will talk about their concerns. We will do whatever it takes, so that people know that we have this under control. We got this.”
On the Missouri side last January, Kansas City officials opened up Bartle Hall as an emergency shelter after a homeless man, Scott Eicke, froze to death. Did Garner learn nothing from that tragedy?
“I wish we would get to a point where we were not reactive” when it comes to housing those with nowhere else to go in winter, Russell says. “I am hoping and praying that it doesn’t take someone’s life in order for us to get our act together.”
She might have told the mayor that, if he hadn’t walked out of the meeting Wednesday. But for her part, Russell isn’t giving up. She’s hoping the mayor hears the message from the community Thursday.
“This is literally a ready-to-go plan,” she says. “We’ll be right here ready to get things going if his mind changes.”
Here’s what he said at his swearing-in Dec. 13: “We must set aside our egos, remove our silos and be willing to work collaboratively to bring about the positive change so many desperately want to see. Let’s make it happen.”
Listen to yourself, Mr. Mayor, and follow your own fine advice.