Despite opposition from dozens of residents, Chatham-Kent councilors voted Monday to move ahead with a plan to establish a new emergency homeless shelter in the former Victoria Park Public School building.
The municipality will be entering a lease agreement with a group of local investors to provide an emergency shelter at 185 Murray St. in Chatham. The agreement involves a nominal fee of $1 while the municipality would be responsible for paying for necessary renovations, insurance costs, utilities and maintenance until May 31, 2025.
While there was an attempt to defeat the vote – Coun. Michael Bondy entered an unsuccessful motion asking the report be referred back to staff until public consultation is completed – municipal staff said a looming deadline would make that difficult.
April Rietdyk, general manager of community human services, said staff had already “exhausted” all other possibilities for an interim solution. She said officials at Travelodge, which currently provides emergency shelter space, didn’t want to extend the municipality’s least, which expires at the end of May. There were also no opportunities to use other motels in the city, Rietdyk noted.
The John D. Bradley Convention Centre, the municipality’s shelter earlier in the pandemic, is also unavailable after being booked with a number of events this year, Rietdyk added.
Without securing shelter space in the next two-and-a-half months, Chatham-Kent’s homeless will need to be turned away, she warned.
“They will be on the streets,” Rietdyk said. “We will see them in encampments. We will see them on benches because they have nowhere else to go.”
The vote came after councilors heard from more than 20 deputations, most in opposition. Many of those who addressed councilors were upset about a lack of communication from the municipality.
Jeff Piche, acting as a spokesperson for the neighbourhood, said he only heard about the plan to have a shelter operate at the former school from a media report last Friday evening.
“We basically had no time at all to even allow this to sink in or respond to this,” Piche said in an interview before the meeting.
Mohammed Khaja, another neighborhood spokesperson, said he’s uncomfortable about the way the proposal came to council on the first Monday after March Break.
Claiming the “completely unethical” process was being rushed with little community consultation, Khaja said the municipality “wanted to bring and dump it here (and) then we have to deal with it.”
While Bondy has long touted the former school site as an ideal site for an emergency shelter, he said he did support the residents’ request to defer the report.
“We’re elected by people to react to their concerns,” he said. “I think the reactive decision tonight is to allow these people to be heard. The residents from the neighborhood and beyond.
“We didn’t listen to the residents. Not because we didn’t want to, or they didn’t want to speak, there was just no forum for it, so I think that was a big miss.”
From the numerous emails received prior to the meeting, Bondy suggested not everyone in that neighborhood opposed the proposal. Some in the neighborhood just want some answers on such topics as policing and hours of operation, he said.
Piche, however, said people in the neighborhood “are saying, ‘No’ and there’s legitimate reasons why.”
He said he didn’t believe proper research was conducted on the choice of location, adding there are vulnerable people, including students, long-term residents and pre-school children, living in that neighbourhood.
“It was reckless, fast planning,” Piche said. “These are by definition vulnerable people – the elderly and the young.”
Khaja said he feels insecure about a shelter in the neighborhood since his children and others often play in the streets and at the school property.
He said neighbors have already experienced some insecurity with break-ins and drug activity in the area.
If council does approve the site as an emergency shelter, Piche said his next step will be filing for a provincial court injunction.
But Rietdyk stressed there will be public meetings for residents and partners to help address concerns.
“We want to be good neighbours,” she said. “I agree with some of the deputations. This has all happened quite quickly, but that doesn’t mean that the team hasn’t done a significant amount of work.”
Chatham-Kent Police Chief Gary Conn was also open to hearing from the community and pledged his support.
“There will probably never be a consensus for an ideal location,” he said. “That is a given. That being said, I do support public consultation, (and) we will complete a thorough and robust crime prevention though environmental design analysis, as well as target hardening.”
Some councilors who spoke before the council meeting acknowledged the difficulty of finding a shelter location that everyone agrees on.
count. Marjorie Crew said the municipality would prefer everyone be housed and safe, noting a number of recent factors, including skyrocketing housing costs and the COVID-19 pandemic, significantly increased homelessness in the region.
She said some have a misplaced belief that everyone who is homeless is “a bad actor.”
“That’s not the case,” Crew said. “We have families that are in the shelter that are homeless.”
She said this large facility has the potential to do a tremendous amount of good in the community.