Federal dollars might — someday — be directed toward nonprofits in the Mid-Willamette Valley to help people experiencing homelessness.
An intergovernmental continuum of care agreement was endorsed by the executive committee of the Mid-Willamette Valley Council of Governments at its April teleconference meeting.
If that sounds like official gobbledygook, Jimmy Jones said he understands why.
“It’s very bureaucratic and very wonky and doesn’t have a lot of relevance to people living on the street,” said Jones, the executive director of the Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action Agency.
He told Street Roots the agreement could eventually draw federal dollars to his agency and other organizations in Marion and Polk counties to actually help those individuals.
“It’s a long-term solution we’ll have to embark on for the next five to 10 years to make things better later on,” he said.
Jean Hendron, a Salem advocate for the homeless who lives in a camping trailer, scoffs at the very notion of a continuum of care for homelessness in the mid-valley.
“What continuum of care?” Hendren said. “They haven’t started caring, except for the few people they’re putting up in hotels because of the coronavirus.”
Many homeless people in Salem have been directed to sleep in Wallace Marine and Marion Square parks to distance themselves from the rest of the population during the coronavirus pandemic.
“That was because it was safer for the community, not for the people who are homeless,” Hendron said.
Jones said 123 people have been given shelter in local hotels at a cost of $70,000 per week, or approximately $81 per person per night. An additional 128 people remain on waiting lists. Money for the hotel comes from Jones’ agency through grants from the Oregon Community Foundation, PacificSource and Oregon’s State Homeless Assistance Program.
Combined, nearly 1,500 people experienced homelessness in Marion and Polk counties in 2019, according to the annual Point-in-Time count.
Meanwhile, Jones said, the Council of Governments’ action April 14 means very little.
Executive committee members authorized Acting Executive Director Renata Wakeley to execute the intergovernmental agreement between the cities of Salem, Keizer, Monmouth and Independence and the counties of Marion and Polk. Also included in the agreement are the Salem-Keizer School District and the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde.
All of the entities will work with the Mid-Willamette Valley Homeless Alliance. The stated purpose of the continuum of care agreement is “to establish the terms and conditions under which the member governments will coordinate to support the Alliance, through contracting with the Council of Governments to serve as the collaborative applicant” for funding.
Sal Peralta, who serves on the executive committee of the Council of Governments as well as the McMinnville City Council, told Street Roots the agreement may come across as bureaucratic. However, he said, it will prove important in the long run.
“It allows the mid-valley region to bring in more resources in terms of federal dollars and allows for greater cooperation between Marion and Polk counties and the Grand Ronde tribe,” Peralta said. “Unfortunately, Yamhill County didn’t join in. We’re going to be stuck in a continuum of care that doesn’t have a lot of partners.”
Yamhill County Commissioner Casey Kulla told Street Roots he advocated for his county joining the agreement, but he was outvoted by fellow Commissioners Rick Olson and Mary Starrett.
“The sticking point was that Yamhill Community Action Partnership was not yet on board with it,” Kulla said. “YCAP may be ready to join soon, and at that point, I will begin advocating again for joining.”
YCAP oversees a wide variety of programs addressing homelessness in Yamhill County.
“Some folks within the organization were concerned about losing local control of decision-making,” Kulla said.
YAMHILL COUNTY: Up against polarization and COVID-19, McMinnville homeless-service providers find a way
Peralta said he hates to see small communities such as McMinnville and Newberg lose out on any potential funds.
“Smaller communities don’t have the services,” he said.
Jones said Marion and Polk used to get $1 million per year from their own continuum of care agreement some 20 years ago. However, they found themselves in competition with rural Oregon counties and lost 68% of their funding.
“We were getting the short of end of the stick,” he said.
“We needed a government entity who would be the collaborative applicant,” Jones said. “Marion County didn’t want it to be Polk County, and Polk didn’t want it to be Marion, and neither of them wanted it to be the city of Salem.” That’s how the Council of Governments ultimately became involved.
This is the government equivalent of intermural sports at this point, Jones said.
“No one should expect to see any large influx of additional money,” he said. “This being America, homelessness has swelled to the point where it’s a crisis. We don’t commit resources to a situation until it’s too big for us to get a handle on.”
From Jones’ point of view, Salem provides an excellent example of how society responds to homelessness in general. People are bounced from one spot to the next. When problems arise at the next spot, they are bounced somewhere else. City officials seem at a loss about whether to help people experiencing homelessness or to keep using them in a human shell game, he added.
“They don’t have the patience to let possible solutions play out,” Jones said. “They bounce back and forth between those two extremes.”
Hendron said problems in the mid-valley continue to escalate.
“People are hungry,” she said. “We have people out here who haven’t showered in a month because there’s nowhere to go. And one of the precautions against spreading COVID-19 is showering regularly. It just goes on and on and on.”
She has little faith that the Council of Governments — or any governmental entity — will do anything to improve the situation.
“You don’t see anyone doing anything,” she said.
Brandon Luke, a 23-year-old man who lives in a tent at Wallace Marine Park in Salem, said he sees government officials doing things all the time. That’s the problem, he told Street Roots.
“It’s not that they’re not doing nothing,” Luke said. “What they’re doing is actually counterproductive. It’s just making it worse and making it harder on us — on purpose, quite literally on purpose.”
Pushing everyone to the park is only a temporary measure, he said.
“In time, where else are we going to go?” he said.
“I’m not sure what needs to happen, but there needs to be some kind of change — like bathrooms,” Luke said. “I’m not sure what the government is doing, but they’re trying to assert some kind of control over us. These are good people. These people are my family out here, and it’s messed up that people want to judge us. They want to get rid of homelessness. Like you can get rid of homelessness. You know what? The only way to get rid of homelessness is to put people in homes.”
Jones said the biggest problem surrounding homelessness is that people see it as a problem without a solution.
“It’s solvable,” he said. “It just takes a commitment across funding streams and governments and providers. It’s a generational problem.”