Belongings of homeless to be stored

[RLF]

STEPHEN DEERE - 03/13/2010

ST. LOUIS — The unattended possessions of the homeless will still be picked up during routine city park cleanups, but they'll now have a way to get them back.

Mayor Francis Slay unveiled a new policy Friday mandating that city workers hand out to the homeless identification tags and silver bags for their possessions.

If city park rangers find unattended property with the new tags during cleanups, they will no longer throw the items away but instead bring them to a storage facility where they can be retrieved.

In November 2009, park workers discarded the belongings of two homeless men at Interco Plaza, at the corner of Martin Luther King Drive and Tucker Boulevard. Interco Plaza is next to the St. Patrick Center, which provides services for homeless people.

The city workers took tents, blankets, pillows and bags filled with belongings and threw them into a garbage truck. One of the homeless men tried to get the workers to stop, begging them to return his belongings. Some of his medication, as well as medication for the other homeless man, was destroyed.

"That simply cannot happen again," said Slay, who held a press conference at Interco Plaza on Friday. "The city of St. Louis, specifically downtown, has the largest amount of homeless services in the St. Louis area. Homeless people come from all over the St. Louis area into downtown to get service."

The new plan, Slay said, would help keep the homeless safe and keep the city clean. It also gives the city another "important point of contact to some of our more vulnerable citizens," he said.

Bill Siedhoff, director of the city's Department of Human Services, said he met with the two men after the November incident and apologized. He said both came from Illinois and that people eventually donated $2,000 to help them replace what they lost. The city helped them find permanent housing, Siedhoff said.

"I can tell you that they are doing very well," Siedhoff said.

James Edward Goff, a 53-year-old homeless man who was walking through the plaza after the news conference, said he appreciated the city's efforts.

Goff said he was an unemployed painter and had only been homeless three days. He pointed to a duffel bag he was carrying, noting it was hard to find a decent place to store his things.

"That's a real good program," he said.

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/stlouiscitycounty/story/F51F47B8A1152E0B862576E5000F87E4?OpenDocument