A compassionate pause

The Fort Smith board of directors on Tuesday (Dec. 1) faces an appeal of a Fort Smith Planning Commission approval of the Community Rescue Mission’s 3,300-square foot dormitory-style housing for the homeless. The board’s No. 8 agenda item is more than just a simple vote. It will make public a recent and emotional effort to balance the delivery of charity and the development of commerce.

As is often the case, emotion makes difficult the solution-finding process and usually results in a situation more intractable for future generations to address. And no matter the board’s decision Tuesday, the problem will not only remain, but will remain with a greater emotional divide between key participants.

This essay does not offer solutions. Sorry. Instead, this is an attempt at observation; a moment to wonder aloud about our collective direction in this important matter.

On Sept. 1, the Fort Smith board of directors appointed a 12-member Homelessness Task Force to again consider how we best serve the poor and the property owners in a small area in downtown Fort Smith.

Less than two months into this process, Brian Hilts, director of the Community Rescue Mission, pulls out because he says the task force seeks only to transplant several downtown-based social service agencies to a unified campus somewhere else in the region. Hilts’ abrupt move gives the appearance of being unwilling to discuss in good faith a coming together of resources and organizations that may be of a more long-term benefit to the needy in this community.

On Nov. 24, Hilts granted an interview with me about his agency providing housing and other services to people transitioning out of a correctional facility. Hilts initially denied having any formal relationship with the Arkansas Department of Corrections, the Arkansas Department of Community Corrections or any other law enforcement/correctional agency. This denial was odd considering that on Hilts’ bookshelf was a certificate of appreciation from the Arkansas Department of Community Corrections to the Community Rescue Mission. After repeatedly asking different versions of the same question, Hilts eventually admitted the Mission does help those just released from jail, prison, on probation or in a drug court program.

Hilts sent the city board an e-mail Nov. 26 asking for a favorable vote on the dorm project. He acknowledged in the letter that the Community Rescue Mission assisted 13 “non-violent offenders” in 2009. He said it was a “small percentage” of the 674 non-criminals the Mission has helped in 2009. And then Hilts sought to box in the directors by suggesting a vote against his dorm project is a vote against the poor.

“But please remember a vote for us only helps the poor of the community and a vote against us only hurts the community and its poor. … Don’t let your decision be clouded by a few elite who oppose our project of compassion,” Hilts wrote in the letter to the board.

Hilts’ penultimate line in his letter is demagoguery at its finest: “We can choose to make a few people happy or thousands of people not homeless over the course of time together.”

Don’t you see? We must unequivocally come down on the side of compassion and the poor. There can be no other options. Those who suggest we can help the poor AND help adjacent business and property owners are elitists with hearts cold to compassion.

Hilts’ appeal is a classic move in which special pleading based purely on emotion — think, “We must do it for the children/planet/country” — is posited to counter a less persuasive but potentially more constructive rational argument. And in this particular case, the rational approach may be within the politically difficult effort to find a way to merge the best practices, financial resources and compassionate reach of the various downtown-based social service agencies. Furthermore, it would seem probable that true collaboration between the agencies might result in more efficient assistance — time, costs, amounts of care offered, etc. — to the needy.

Using Hilt’s “us-vs-them” approach, a compassionate city board will ignore restaurant owners who have to make sure they clean up human defecation because they never know when a health department inspector will arrive. Apparently, the board will vote against the community if it pauses to take some measure of compassion for downtown business owners who are forced to invest tens of thousands of dollars to protect property from vandalism and employees from uncomfortable or brutal encounters.

And let’s not forget, according to Hilts’ logic, it’s wholly compassionate for the city to encourage business owners and individuals to invest in downtown, and then do little to nothing to help protect their investment.

Silly, right?

But this isn’t silly. This is serious, and it’s certainly and ultimately not about what I think or what you think or how Hilts behaves. It’s about what we as a city do to develop the political and institutional will to continue the emerging revitalization of downtown Fort Smith while at the same time enhancing the ability of our fair city to help the least among us. We can do both. Let’s repeat: We can do both. Communities larger and smaller have done so. (Has the Homelessness Task Force studied what other communities have done?)

There are too many good people doing good things on all sides of this issue for our business, political and social leaders to allow selfish, turf-protecting actions to derail efforts at finding mutually beneficial long-term solutions.

The city board has the opportunity Tuesday to pause and give real, selfless and big-picture solutions a chance to emerge. Such a pause could give way to a true community rescue mission.