Lebanon — “This place actually gave us hope.”
Despite the couple’s many hardships, Jenny Bowley remembers feeling that way when she and her husband, Richard Bowley, moved into the homeless encampment in a vacant lot off Route 12A, near the Hannaford supermarket.
“It was beautiful and it was inspiring and you didn’t feel like you’re at the bottom,” said Jenny Bowley, who suffers from a neuromuscular disorder. She said she hasn’t walked in 20 years; Richard takes care of her.
The encampment came under public scrutiny in May, when news broke that city officials were in the preliminary stages of drafting an ordinance that would prohibit camping and overnight parking on city-owned land, such as the encampment where the Bowleys and several other homeless people were living.
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A hearing the following month drew more than 100 people from within the city and beyond. If city police were to fine people for sleeping outdoors, many asked, wouldn’t that be the equivalent of fining them for being homeless?
“They just wanted to drive everybody out,” Thomas Moore, who lived at the encampment until recently, said in a recent interview, calling it “a little bit discriminating.”
City officials said that their intent was not to criminalize homelessness.
“I think what the police chief was originally trying to do was give himself and his police officers some more flexibility so they could use more discretion to help people make some better choices,” Karen Liot Hill, a city councilor, said in an interview recently.
Over the past three months, the result of the proposed ordinance and the June meeting has been a coming-together of stakeholders from all sides of the issue: homeless people, advocates, city officials, police and residents — with several of them expressing a new appreciation of the challenges faced by homeless people, as well as the challenges in finding help for them.
“Our commitment moving forward is to when we recognize somebody might be homeless … is not just to say, ‘you can’t be here,’ displace them someplace else,” Police Chief Richard Mello said, “it’s to find out why they’re there, why they’re homeless, and then really try to match up the services that we can provide … to help them get out of that situation.”
Bev McKinley, who founded Silent Warriors, a group that gives tents to homeless people, said her work with the encampment over the past few months has led her to believe in a more structured approach to solving the problem.
“Originally, as I saw the encampment being highlighted, I was all for saying we need to help them there, it’s an awesome location … but after having so much publicity on them, more people came in and the dynamics of those people brought more legal issues,” she said.
Dianne Munson, a homeless outreach worker for Tri-County Community Action Program, agreed that in her years of experience in various regions, police would often think she was a danger, but recently in Lebanon, “working together is much stronger than before.”
Munson underscored the importance of the work ahead: “For all intents and purposes,” she said, “subsidized housing doesn’t exist in this state — there’s so little of it.”
“(Social Security Income) is $743 max in this state,” she said. “Do you know what a studio costs here? More than $743.”
McKinley noted that the challenges in finding affordable housing are exacerbated for single people or those who need handicap-accessible homes.
Some of the stakeholders, including Liot Hill, Mello, McKinley, interim City Manager Paula Maville and Lebanon Human Services Director Lynne Goodwin, are part of the city’s nine-person Task Force on Homelessness, which was born out of these discussions.
The group has submitted a revised ordinance to the City Council, which voted earlier this month to postpone a public hearing on it. Although the wording of the ordinance is similar to a version that was tabled by the City Council in June, the task force’s proposal sought to ease penalties for first-time offenders.
The council decided to further review the ordinance before setting a hearing.
James M. Patterson contributed to this report. He can be reached at jpatterson@vnews.com or 603-727-3230. Maggie Cassidy can be reached at mcassidy@vnews.com or 603-727-3220.
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