The Augusta Commission Task Force on Homelessness subcommittee is beginning to implement portions of its strategic plan after getting the green light from the full commission.
Commissioners voted unanimously on April 19 to receive as information and offer support to the plan in general and specifically to commit about $3 million of American Rescue Plan Act funds to develop 50 to 75 permanent supportive housing units. Two days after that vote, the task force held its regular, monthly meeting.
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District 1 Commissioner Jordan Johnson, who co-chairs the subcommittee, included a time limit on moving forward, particularly with developing the permanent supportive housing.
“The next step is that within the next 90 to 120 days, housing and community development will come back to the commission to present possible usages multimillion dollar expenditure for permanent supportive housing,” he said. “Once that’s presented the commission will move forward with all their necessary procurement and compensations that the commission would likely want to engage in.”
Hawthorne Welcher, director of the city’s Housing and Development Department, said his department will be able to begin drawing up a plan for commissioners to review step-by-step.
“We will move to move forward to provide you with a cost allocation plan that speaks to the type of housing, it speaks to the locality, it speaks to the total development budget, it speaks to the number of housing units we’ll be able to provide,” he said.
The resolution approved by the commission also called for creating the Homeless Crisis Response System Coordinator, someone who can manage the programs and continue to report to current, and newly elected commissioners and the mayor.
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The aim is to prevent a repeat of what happened with a plan written in 2004. It was widely praised, but little was done with it because elected officials changed, community leaders moved and stakeholders left.
“That homeless service coordinator is going to be so important, because their only job will be to make sure that the plan is carried out and that services are coordinated within our nonprofit world,” Johnson said.
The task force was formed in early 2021 after homeless veteran Willie Walker was found frozen to death on the street in December 2020.
The full strategic plan is 37 pages long. Johnson said the two specific steps approved by the commission are just the first in reaching the ultimate goal: to end chronic homelessness in Augusta.
“I’m proud of the task force members, proud of Lynda (Barrs, chairwoman of the task force’s action plan committee and Resource Development Director for CSRA Economic Opportunity Authority), proud of the commission and proud of our community because this has been something that we’ve talked about for quite some time,” he said. “We see our homeless brothers and sisters every day. It was not an easy thing to create this task force, it wasn’t an easy thing to manage. The task itself is not an easy task. I’m looking forward to seeing the work that we put in come to fruition.”
Dana Lynn McIntyre is a general assignment reporter for The Augusta Press. Reach her at dana@theaugustapress.com
