The Galveston County Daily News

GALVESTON — Each morning the men and women set out on their migration across the island, toting beaten plastic shopping bags or ratty rucksacks containing their possessions.

Some take a morning meal at the Salvation Army, 2228 Broadway. Others seek sustenance elsewhere.

But between breakfast and dinner, when the doors of the shelters are closed, police say some of the homeless fall asleep in residents’ yards, urinate in public and commit petty crimes.

As the sunshine intensifies, the men and women with no place to go set off down 23rd Street or other thoroughfares to seek out the haunts and crags of the island and wait out the day. Some beg for money off tourists. Some just cross the street and wait for the Salvation Army to reopen.

The homeless long have been at odds with businesses and homeowners, but after Hurricane Ike, with social programs only partially reinstituted, the problem is more obvious, Mike Winburn, executive director of the Gulf Coast Center, said.

The center is the designated mental health authority for Galveston and Brazoria counties.

But a new partnership between police and the Gulf Coast Center may yield a day shelter for the homeless.

In recent months, police received numerous complaints about homeless people damaging property and intimidating residents in the San Jacinto neighborhood, near the Salvation Army, Galveston Police Chief Charles Wiley said.

Wiley sent more patrols but realized that wouldn’t be enough. He decided to approach Maj. Elda Flores, the Salvation Army’s director.

Flores told him her facility had neither the space nor the resources to provide a place for homeless people to stay during the day.

So Wiley contacted Winburn, and the resulting partnership between the police department and the Gulf Coast Center helped get grant money for a planned day shelter for the homeless.

Winburn said the center maintains teams of mobile outreach crisis workers who respond when residents call concerned about friends or family members they believe to be mentally ill.

The workers are trained to assess individuals, take them to the hospital or, if need be, call the sheriff’s offices’ mental health officers.

With the new partnership, these workers will be able to ride with patrol officers who frequently come into contact with homeless people suffering from mental illness.

“It just makes sense for us to partner with a patrolmen on the street who patrol high-risk areas,” Winburn said.

The partnership plans to begin a day shelter for homeless people so they have a place to escape the elements, take showers and watch TV.

Wiley said the Gulf Coast Center recently committed $80,000 of a larger grant to the day program but has not found a site for it.

The center plans to contract with another agency to be the site of the shelter, Winburn said. The money will be disbursed as part of a block grant coordinated by the Houston-Galveston Area Council of Governments, he said.

He said the proposed shelter would be manned by two employees. Mental health professionals would be on call.

Winburn and Wiley pointed out that there are different types of people who find themselves homeless. Among them are those who need services and seek them out, and those who want a place to live but don’t care for the services.

A day shelter would allow workers to determine more accurately the needs of their clients, Wiley said.

Ultimately, there is another benefit to having a safe place for the homeless during the day, Wiley said.

“We can’t have them hanging their dirty clothes on a fence near a major intersection,” he said.

With an economy based in part on tourism, first impressions have dollar values tied to them.

Wiley said the situation needs community-based policing solution. The essence of community policing is to address problems in neighborhoods that affect quality of life, he said.

When an appropriate system, like the day shelter, is set up, police can clamp down on enforcement to the extent that the jails allow, Wiley said.

“This is the perfect resolution to a problem that has impacted us for a long time,” he said.