- April 25, 2024
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What to do with the homeless? From the tireless volunteers who work at the church shelter on cold nights, to the residents who are fearful of drugs and crime in their neighborhood, the Bunnell community clashed on the answer to that question on Monday night.
At a previous Bunnell City Commission meeting, a resident voiced complaints about the Sheltering Tree, Bunnell’s cold-weather shelter, and so the commission added the topic to its April 8 agenda, ultimately recommending that residents fight for greater support at the county level for the homeless. It can’t just be a Bunnell issue, commissioners concluded.
The Sheltering Tree opens at the First United Methodist Church in Bunnell on nights when the forecast is colder than 40 degrees. Residents and business owners surrounding the church recently wrote a letter of complaint to the city and included a petition with 19 signatures.
The letter says the shelter is causing a blight to the community by attracting homeless people who loiter around the property and beg for money. Many of these people are using drugs, stealing and harassing people or sleeping in the woods behind homes and businesses, the letter says.
“This must be stopped immediately or moved to another location out of our neighborhood so residents can return to a normal life, not living in fear every minute, and sleep,” the letter reads.
The letter also accused the church of letting homeless people sleep on the property on nights when the temperature is warmer than 40 degrees, although the Rev. Beth Gardner of First United Methodist said that is untrue.
Sidney Nowell, city attorney for Bunnell, said the church is not permitted to run a fully operational homeless shelter, but because a cold-weather shelter is by nature temporary, that is permitted (the church’s attorney has questioned that interpretation of the code).
Commissioner W. Jenny Crain-Brady works near the church. She said she watches a group of homeless people outside her office begging for money and “hanging out at convenience stores.” Then, she watches that same group go to the First United Methodist Church. She said that she commends those who work with the homeless, but that it has created a problem for the city by lowering public safety and property values.
“To improve the lives of the homeless, we’re reducing the quality of life of the people who have lived in the city of Bunnell for 30, 40 (or) 50 years,” she said.
Mayor Catherine Robinson criticized the Sheltering Tree’s habit of taking buses to Daytona Beach and other nearby cities to pick up homeless people and bring them back to the shelter, saying that adds to the city’s homeless population. But residents said that any person bused in to Bunnell at night is bused out the next morning. The people seen begging on the streets or selling drugs are locals, they said.
“The homeless people don’t appreciate the people who live around the church,” Robinson said. “It’s not the fact that you have a homeless shelter; it’s what the people do when they’re not at your shelter.”
But to the people who packed the commission chambers to speak at public comment — all of them there to support the Sheltering Tree — that was exactly the point. The homeless have nowhere to go, and they’re not going away.
Carla Traister, the shelter’s director of operations, asked the commission not to demonize the homeless. Some of them may be criminals, she said, but others are recently divorced, veterans, those suffering crippling medical expenses and students choked by the cost of tuition.
“To be homeless is to be a criminal in our county,” she said. “You don’t want them on the corners, you don’t want them at the store — where do you want them? Where do they stand? Where do you want them to be?”
More than a dozen people spoke in support of the Sheltering Tree and some suggested that the city find a large building for a permanent shelter to keep the homeless off the streets. Robinson said she liked that idea.
The commission said it will try to arrange a workshop meeting with the Flagler County Board of County Commissioners as well as the governing boards of Flagler’s other cities, and encouraged residents to speak to those boards themselves and ask for help.
“We have to make it more than Bunnell’s problem in order to get funding,” Robinson said. “(The homeless) need a facility; they need a place to go. We’ve talked about that before, but it’s a matter of putting the feet to the fire and getting funding in place.”
