Last week, Chairman of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners Skip Alston announced that he was going to start a county task force on homelessness and related issues – and it didn’t take long before a special meeting was called to begin discussing solutions and changing things up.
On Monday, Sept. 26, the Guilford County Board of Commissioners announced a meeting for Wednesday, Sept. 28 at 5:30 p.m. in the Carolyn Coleman Conference Room – formerly known as the Blue Room – on the first floor of the Old Guilford County Courthouse in downtown Greensboro.
The official stated purpose of the special meeting is “to discuss a resolution to amend the Joint Cooperative Agreement for Greensboro/Guilford/Burlington/Alamance Housing Consortium and conduct any other necessary business.”
The meeting will be open to the public and also live streamed.
Alston told the Rhino Times that he wants Guilford County to use $8 million in federal American Rescue Plan (ARP) funding to go toward addressing the problem of homelessness and he said the problem needed more resources from others as well. He said he realized at a meeting last week that various community partner groups were all over the place but a coordinated effort was badly needed instead.
Alston also said he planned to move fast on the issue because it’s very serious and pressing.
Those interested can watch the meeting over Zoom by visiting:
https://www.zoomgov.com/j/1602210432, completing the webinar registration and selecting the option to join from the confirmation email before the start of the meeting.
The meeting will also be livestreamed on Guilford County’s Facebook page.
Copies of the agenda will be available for review prior to the start of the meeting at https://guilford.legistar.com/Calendar.aspx.
Those with questions should contact Deputy Clerk Ariane Webb at awebb@guilfordcountync.gov.
I am in no way a fan of Skip. But I believe he is right on this that a problem as complex as homelessness needs coordination if any long-term impact can be made.
You are right. But I am not over-expecting. Whether you are on the right or the left; why would anyone expect a solution from the very people who made the problem worse?
With 8 million dollars you could build each one a tiny house & get mental help for them would help solve the problem!! Keep throwing money is not the answer..that’s been done for years & never improved.
Great point! But the taxes would kill em.
Has anybody ever heard of getting a job? That might help get a place. Setting around depending on the government to support you is getting out of hand.
Why chris if that’s true why hasn’t skip been concerned before. As long as he’s been a commissioner doesn’t seem to have been a priority before
He went to Washington to get his plan for advancing himself?
The b@$+@rds throw more money at the Casa De Earl & Skip. You know, the “civil rights museum?” Skippy’s shrine to barstools. If you want to fix homelessness, or inflation for that matter, put Libertarians in office. Most things will fix themselves if you keep the government out of it.
Oh boy…Skip returns from Washington and the pixie dust starts to fly. I ponder who hooked him while he was rubbing elbows with all his fellow Democrats. Betting he comes up with some bobble head additional taxes required program that will show zero results and be another expensive Biden boondoggle. You got what you voted for…enjoy.
Maybe people are homeless because they can’t afford their Property Tax bill…
Don’t start something that can’t be continued. There are plenty of jobs right now. Use this money to help people find work. Business are closing because they can’t find employees. There are no free lunches.
hahhahaah They need jobs LOL! The downtown homeless population do not want jobs. They are openly snorting and shooting up drugs, the fire department is regularly sent there to distribute Narcan, they are violent, they urinate in the open, they leave their junk strewn all over the place, and best of all, they have destroyed what was – if I recall – something like a 10 million dollar park in Center City park. Way to go Greensboro
First of all, any entity that gets government/taxpayer money to address homelessness needs to have to present quarterly numbers on how effective they are ant addressing homelessness. And that does not mean some hazy Cure Violence type numbers. They need to present names and bios of people who’s homelessness has been ended by their efforts. If an entity is not ending homelessness for at least a few individuals every quarter, then they have no business being in the business of ending homelessness.
Secondly, “homelessness” is not one issue. You have a range of causes of homelessness spanning from extreme mental illness to someone who is simply down on their luck. The former cannot be solved by simply throwing money at it. The latter may in fact be that simple. The range in between involves substance abuse, criminality, and other iterations of mental health problems. Either way, there is no one simple solution for anyone other than those who just need a short term leg up. Address those people first as they are the simplest to solve then tackle the rest.
I would point out though, that if you keep decriminalizing criminal behavior under the premise that homeless folks don’t need to obey the law, then your downtowns and intersections will continue to be rife with bums doing low level criminal things, along with the occasional serious assault and homicide. All this criminal justice reform has gone way too far the other way and now we are seeing the ramifications of those decisions. Maybe the third time Slim Biggums takes a dump in the street, he should not get a written promise to appear so he can squeeze that fourth dump on the mayor’s doorstep.
Really skip. Go to another concert you are a true dumbocrat. Useless. Why now are elections coming soon. KARMA a$$hole