Dale Miller Attends the Homeless Congress

Our missing posters had some impact because County Councilman Dale Miller showed up to the Homeless Congress today.  He was generous with his time and listened to all the concerns of the residents of the local shelters including the many issues over the Women's shelter.  We took his missing poster off of our website, and thank Miller for attending the meeting. 

We gave out all the copies of the missing flyers that we distributed regarding other County elected officials.  Councilman Miller asked that everyone sign up to vote in the upcoming election to support the Health and Human Service's levy which are used to fund the shelters among other things.  This may not be persuasive since many of the women are very angry over the conditions at the shelter and the lack of oversight by the County.  Miller agreed that Councilwoman Conwell was a wonderful advocate, but disagreed that she favored shelter providers over homeless residents of the shelters. Miller did agree that every County Council person should meet with homeless people or the Homeless Congress and not just rely on one Councilwoman to interact with homeless people.  We had heard from another Council person that the County was so big and had so many issues with only a part time Council that they were forced to divide the problems among the 11. 

NEOCH staff criticized this isolation of problems associated with homelessness to one Council person.   There was concern that Councilwoman Conwell and the shelter directors did not believe what was going on at the women's shelter when residents report problems.  We talked about the seeing eye dog that was taken from one resident because of the poor conditions as emblematic of the problems.  Took the dog out of the unsafe facility left the human?   We also talked about how the shelter does not respond to written complaints from the Women's shelter and does not provide the public a summary of all the complaints filed by the women.  EDEN staff did attend to respond to some of the facility issues.  Elaine Gimmel of EDEN said that they would reassess the company hired to take care of the washers and dryers since they have been slow to respond and would get maintenance on the issue of the temperature in the bedrooms. 

We talked about the food meeting on Monday morning at Central Kitchen to discuss the food issues in the biggest shelters. 

Brian Davis

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