Commissioner Murman mentioned in this Tribune article on Homelessness:
By KEVIN WIATROWSKI | The Tampa Tribune
Published: May 16, 2012
TAMPA —
As they’ve done month after month, Tampa City Council members will make time on their schedule Thursday for a report on the city’s effort to help its homeless population.
For month after month, the city’s point man on the homeless issue, growth management director Thom Snelling, has filed a one-sentence report, in essence saying he has nothing to say.
That will change Thursday when Snelling offers an update on work by Hillsborough County Commissioner Sandra Murman’s Chronic Homelessness Solutions Committee, a public-private group working on a concrete effort to address homelessness.
“I think there’s some very valuable information that they’re going to hear,” Snelling said this week. He declined to offer specifics because he hadn’t finished his report.
Snelling and other city officials work with Murman’s committee, but elected city council members so far have been shut out, much to their chagrin.
Last month, city council members asked to join the committee. Murman will meet next week with Councilwoman Yvonne Capin to discuss adding a city representative.
Tampa may be the epicenter for the region’s homeless problem, but so far the city has been unable to create the kind of one-stop-shop homeless advocates say the city needs. Such a facility would give homeless men and women a place to go for housing and services in the city’s urban core.
But that kind of facility remains elusive.
Snelling laid out the reasons in January when he made his last official report on the city’s effort to help its homeless residents. The city has neither the land nor the buildings to do what council wants, he said.
“The reality is that nothing jumps up and says, ‘This is what we have available in the city,'” Snelling told council members then.
As it has for decades, the city continues to funnel federal grant money to nonprofit groups such as the Homeless Coalition of Hillsborough County and Metropolitan Ministries to provide housing, food and other aid to the region’s homeless residents.
But city council members are eager to do more, particularly after seeing how Pinellas County has provided its own one-stop facility in a former jail.
Last month, they tried to scramble onboard Murman’s Chronic Homeless Solutions Committee, which began working last month.
Coalition spokeswoman Lesa Weikel said her group remains optimistic that the public-private project will be more successful than its predecessors.
“They’re moving forward, and we would expect something to be the result,” Weikel said. “The goal has been to produce a service.”
In the meantime, the city council will continue to ask Snelling for reports on efforts to help the homeless even when he has nothing to say.
That’s OK, Councilman Harry Cohen says.
“We put this item on the agenda every other week specifically because we didn’t want it to disappear from public view,” Cohen said at last month’s council meeting. “I think everyone recognized we wouldn’t have anything new every two weeks.”
