Bid to open shelter should to be at end

The people have spoken, so to speak. Perhaps they will be heard. On Monday night, the Pine Bluff City Council voted down yet another request to place homeless families in an apartment house at 304 W. 16th Ave.

This is, count ’em, the fourth time the proposal has been nixed by a city body. Can that be enough, at least for a while?

The first attempt was in September when the request from the city’s Economic and Community Development office went to the city’s Planning Commission, which rejected the idea. Then that thumbs down was appealed to the council, which voted it down.

Then the proposal was taken back to the Planning Commission, which voted it down — unanimously.

And there it was on the council agenda on Monday night, where once again, it was rejected, with the issue in all of these forums being that the neighborhood is struggling to survive and that the introduction of a homeless shelter is more likely to cause problems than to solve them.

Perhaps there is nothing stopping the community development office from taking this back to the Planning Commission and then, upon getting a no, on to the City Council, ad infinitum. And if that’s the case, there oughta be a law, as they say.

Kudos to the Planning Commission and council members who listened to the arguments for and against so many times, and also to the neighbors who who had to organize and show up time and again to speak against the homeless shelter. But enough is enough.

Even those who did oppose the proposal said they worried about those families. Pine Bluff, by many accounts, needs a homeless shelter, with one participant saying the community has a “moral obligation” to provide relief. We agree wholeheartedly.

That said, as Matthew Pate, who lives in the area, put it, “… (T)his proposal puts the interests of a few people up against that of an entire neighborhood.”

Larry Matthews, director of the office of Economic and Community Development, said his office has been trying to expand the city’s shelter space for awhile now and that this apartment house seemed like a good opportunity to do just that.

No doubt, it seemed like it on the front end.

Matthews said his office couldn’t look for an alternative until this plan was voted on. Now that this is off the table, perhaps when he finds another possible site, he will conduct meetings with the neighbors to get their input on the front end, something that was not afforded this proposal.

We’re thinking if that had happened this go-round, this whole backand-forth affair could have been avoided.