Tucson Considers What To Do About The Homeless--Again. By Dave Devine SITTING ON A street median near the Tucson Auto Mall, a large bearded man begs for money. He rotates several signs, all asking for help. While sharing a cigarette with a newspaper vendor, he makes more in handouts than the other man does selling papers. An old, gray-haired man accompanied by a young, infirm companion solicits money at the intersection of Kolb and Speedway. In 30 minutes they receive six donations, including two bills. Near St. Mary's Road and I-10, beggars occupy every possible corner as if they're attending some odd convention. After receiving a donation from a passing motorist, one of the beggars enters a nearby Burger King to buy food. He passes underneath a sign that reads, "Now Hiring." FOR MANY YEARS a "homeless corridor" has contained most of the complaints about street people in Tucson. This path stretches from the Casa Maria Soup Kitchen at Third Avenue and 25th Street, through Santa Rita Park on 22nd, and up to Armory Park on Sixth Avenue. Then it passes the city's homeless feeding site on Toole Avenue near Stone, and ends at Catalina and DeAnza Parks, located south of Speedway and near the Salvation Army's Hospitality House. Even before the Toole feeding site was opened a few years ago, this corridor was the site of most of the city's homeless problems. Prior to Toole, homeless people were fed outside on the north side of City Hall, which was picked because a private soup kitchen in downtown's Armory Park neighborhood had been closed by a lawsuit. Area residents had complained the feeding site was creating unbearable nuisances in their neighborhood, and the judge agreed. When the City Council moved the program to Toole, it placed certain conditions on the operation of the facility, including limiting the number of people to be served daily to 250 and requiring user registration. Despite these provisions, complaints about the Toole site surfaced immediately. People who lived and worked near the building complained of crime, litter and other problems associated with the feeding program. This criticism mounted until the City Council, in October, ordered a review of the operation. City staff said they would return with a proposal within two months. To develop a plan, the city's Community Services Department formed a committee made up of all the usual sources--the Salvation Army, which operates the Toole program, other homeless service providers and neighborhood representatives. These different factions have debated the issues for many years on committee after committee without resolving the problems. But now, well past the deadline, the committee and city staff are still far from agreement on what to do at Toole. The issues under discussion include actually beginning the mandatory registration requirement which was never implemented. Another suggestion is to institute a work-for-food program among the users of the Toole site. Also being discussed by the committee are further limiting the number of people who use the facility and protecting the surrounding neighborhoods and businesses from the problems attributed to the site. One likely recommendation to address this issue will be to hire off-duty police officers to patrol the parks and other areas in the homeless corridor. Patrol costs would be covered by homeless-service providers and the Community Services Department. This idea is criticized by some as a Band-Aid solution, while others say it merely amounts to admitting defeat in dealing with the homeless. Karin Uhlich, executive director of the Primavera Foundation and a member of the committee, says members looked at a wide range of options for the Toole facility, from making it the grandest multi-service site in the country to closing it down. Bob Lane, a resident of the West University neighborhood and also a member of the committee, believes a mandatory work program must be a requirement at the Toole site. The food delivery service, according to Lane, should be used to motivate people to improve their lives. But, he says, the social service agencies who work with the homeless disagree, calling the idea "slave labor." Lane would like to see the never-implemented registration program finally put in place. Registering users, he says, would allow officials to determine whether the people eating at Toole are taking advantage of the social service programs available to them. Mitch Sternberg lives near Santa Rita Park. A frequent critic of the city's homeless programs, he says, "Our city government...has made no effort to identify who are the homeless folks wanting and deserving help, and who are the transients adopting a footloose lifestyle." Sternberg favors requiring those who receive food at the Toole site to participate in a "get-a-meal, give-something-back-to-the-community" program. He says he'd like Tucson to show compassion for the homeless, but adds the Toole feeding program should act as an incentive for people to get their lives together. The Salvation Army's representative on the committee, Gless Roth, manages the Toole site. She says she resents critics who blame her operation for all of their problems. Some on the committee, she complains, are telling her how to run the program without knowing the reality of the situation or without ever having been in the building. Roth said the program tried a voluntary registration program, but it failed. Not a lot of the people who eat at Toole want to go into the social-service system, she says, adding the mandatory work requirement would also fail. "You can't make a man work," she says. The program at Toole, Roth maintains, is succeeding now: It's feeding people to keep them alive. Dispersing feeding locations throughout Tucson, she adds emphatically, won't work--it was tried years ago and failed. It will be several weeks or longer before the committee makes a recommendation to the City Council. Meanwhile, there's talk among downtown neighborhood activists of the need to use the court system to require more accountability among homeless service providers. Either through a nuisance suit, similar to that used in Armory Park years ago, or through small claims court, some downtown residents are looking at the legal system to do for them what their elected leadership hasn't. ON A SUNNY Saturday afternoon, Santa Rita Park is populated by dozens of men, alone or in pairs. Two men throw a large knife into a tree, playing a game. Nearby, someone's clothes are drying in the sunshine on a picnic table. No one else is in the park. The grassy area around downtown's main library has become a hangout for dozens of homeless people. Inside the library, homeless men in every condition take up many of the chairs throughout the building. After the City Council recently voted to increase police presence in Catalina Park, a patrol car sits in the center of the playground. It looks as if the facility is under arrest. No children play there.

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