Center in crisis? Funding for facility that helps homeless runs out June 30

By Timothy Pratt

Monday, May 5, 2003 | 11:06 a.m.

Seated on a wooden bench at the Crisis Intervention Center on a recent afternoon, Dan Young was applying for food stamps and facing the end of his unemployment benefits. He lost his job as a security guard in October and has been staying at Catholic Charities on and off since November.

"I'm out looking for work in the day and I don't have time to run all over filling out forms, so it's good to find all these things in one place," the 58-year-old said. "A lot of people use this center."

The downtown Las Vegas center helped 3,012 people in April, the highest monthly tally in the last seven months, officials said.

But the number could drop to zero soon. The center's funding runs out June 30.

Beth, a woman who was staying at the neighboring Shade Tree shelter recently, said closing the Crisis Intervention Center would be a bad idea.

"When there's something that works, why does it have to stop?" she said.

Faced with an uncertain future, one of the center's first directors said it may be time to "cut losses" and come up with a plan to keep the center's remaining agencies downtown.

Linda Lera-Randle El, who directed the pioneering one-stop center that once housed more than 40 public and private agencies to help the homeless from 1994 to 1998 and now runs a nonprofit called Straight from the Streets, said that if keeping the center open isn't possible, keeping the eight agencies downtown that it now houses should be a priority.

"Enough is enough of this ongoing bickering," Lera-Randle El said.

"Maybe it's time to talk to the other agencies downtown and put money into relocating these services."

Funding for the center became controversial in recent weeks, after Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman said in a letter addressed to Clark County Commissioner Mary Kincaid-Chauncey that the city would no longer fund the center if North Las Vegas and Henderson didn't contribute.

"I want elected officials to stand up and take responsibility as a community," Goodman told the Sun on Thursday. "This is a valley; this is a region."

The center is the last remaining building open on the former MASH Village campus near Main Street and Foremaster Lane after the San Diego-based Father Joe's Villages pulled out of Las Vegas last year.

Lera-Randle El suggested the agencies be split between neighboring nonprofits, which include Salvation Army and Catholic Charities, the two largest nonprofits serving the homeless, and the Shade Tree.

Catholic Charities has been running the center since last October. Frank Richo, director of residential services for the nonprofit, said he thought relocating the remaining agencies downtown was a good idea.

"It the alternative is closing, of course you want to keep the services downtown," he said.

Richo also said he has been thinking along the same lines, and has spoken to officials from Nevada State Welfare and the Veterans Administration -- the two agencies with the most clients -- about "finding a place to work from" at Catholic Charities.

Charlie Desiderio, spokesman for the Salvation Army, said the idea "could be a solution ... but the logistics would have to be worked out."

"If four or five agencies could operate out of each facility in order to keep the services available, that might work," he said.

Goodman said the idea would depend on the other nonprofits downtown. "(But) it is not important to keep the services downtown, just that they be available," he said.

"If you put the services in Henderson, the homeless will go there, too," he said.

Maurice Silva, a social worker for the Southern Nevada Adult Mental Health Services -- one of the remaining agencies at the center -- said the idea sounds good, but may be hard to carry out.

The social worker said funds for the center should be found "or more people will end up in jail and in emergency rooms, which will cost the community more in the end," he said.

Gary Peck, executive director for the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, is working with other nonprofits to persuade local municipalities to support the center.

"I think it's premature to be talking about alternatives to the center, and we should be focusing all our energy on doing whatever we can to encourage local governments to step to the plate and commit whatever resources are necessary to keep the center open," Peck said.

A patchwork of funds kept the center operating from October to February and the city and the county each gave the center $80,000 to keep it open from March until the end of June.

Richo said in an earlier interview he could continue to operate the center for $40,000 a month. But two proposals floated by Las Vegas at a February meeting put the cost at $50,000 a month for Catholic Charities to continue running the center, or $60,000 if the county were to take it over.

In the proposals, each of the local municipalities would commit funds proportional to its population.

The proposals "never made it past" the technical committee of the Southern Nevada Regional Planning Commission, after the committee voted not to put the issue on the commission's agenda, said Sabra Smith, senior management analyst for the city and its point person on homelessness.

The issue is also not on any other agency's agenda, Smith said.

"Every time the subject is brought up, everyone has said, 'What an important project,' " Lera-Randle El said.

"So the fact that it's still the subject of so much interlocal bickering, after so many years, is mind-boggling."