Pressing concerns
Truro Homeless Outreach Society requests special meeting with town
The Truro Homeless Outreach Society has requested an emergency meeting with town council to discuss individuals who are falling through the gaps of available services.
“It’s a complex issue, it’s a complex problem. There’s no simple solution,” said Dick Cotterill, the society’s treasurer and member of the executive committee.
The most pressing matter involves an individual who has recently been sleeping behind the Hub House shelter on Prince Street.
Shelter officials are reluctant to discuss the man’s particular issues because of privacy concerns. However, the Truro Daily News has learned he is originally a New Glasgow resident with mental health issues who will not agree to all the conditions that would enable him to sleep in the shelter.
Shelter staff try to help where they can but they are limited at what they can do without further compliance on his part.
Cotterill recently even went so far as to rent a porta potty, which was placed behind the shelter for the man’s use. That had to be removed, however, because of town bylaws which stipulate that porta potty’s are only permitted in the downtown commercial zone for temporary use during special events or construction projects.
After raising the issue at Truro Town Council on Monday, Mayor Bill Mills said he and the CAO Mike Dolter agreed to meet with shelter officials on Tuesday afternoon.
In an interview with this newspaper, Mills said he has been approached by a number of people within the downtown core who have expressed concern about problems they are having with homeless individuals, including the man in question who has also been sleeping outside the town library.
In emailed communication between Mills and shelter officials last weekend, the mayor said that at “first glance” the apprehen- sions of some downtown business owners may be perceived as the NIMBY (not in my back yard) syndrome. But he said the increase in expressed concerns are growing because of regular occurrences of “panhandling” and “crude remarks” to downtown shoppers.
“If these were not happening hence we would not be having the discussion,” Mills wrote.
Cotterill said that since opening last November, the shelter has provided more than 1,000 bed nights of shelter and more than 3,000 free meals for home- less people, without any core funding from any level of government. And those numbers are not decreasing.
“The homeless problem in Truro is not going to go away,” he said. “As much as we’d like to solve it, all indications right across the country is, it’s just going to get bigger. Halifax shelters are full, they’re sending people our way. Like, they’ve got 200 beds down there. We’ve got 15 and we’ve already had to set up cots some nights because we don’t have enough beds.”