Morgantown Council goes back home, hears a familiar message

May 8—MORGANTOWN — A crowd of onlookers filled Morgantown City Hall's foyer and spilled out onto Spruce Street Tuesday evening as the city commemorated the reopening of the historic municipal building with a ribbon cutting ceremony.

In addition to comments from Mayor Jenny Selin, Deputy Mayor Joe Abu-Ghannam, Morgantown Historic Landmarks Commission Chairman Michael Jones and Morgantown Area Partnership CEO Russ Rogerson, attendees were offered tours of the facility, which has been closed for the better part of two years to undergo a $3.5 million renovation.

"Today is significant for so many reasons. We have transformed this incredible facility in a way that honors those who came before us and that will inspire those who fill our shoes in the future, " Selin said.

The evening concluded with Morgantown City Council's first meeting in their rightful chamber since July 2022.

But while the surroundings were different, the meeting itself was a repeat of recent history as the meeting chamber overflowed with spectators there primarily to keep the area's homeless crisis top of mind.

A group of attendees held signs with messages like "What are you waiting for ?" and "Inaction is action, " as Cassidy Thompson opened public comments by reading a list of 39 names—all, Thompson said, are deceased individuals "failed by our city's response to homelessness."

One of those individuals was Pastor Shirley Robinson's cousin.

Robinson said her cousin made her own choices in life. She also said life circumstances have a way of forcing choices on everybody.

"We need to try to come together—our local pastors, the community, and try to combat this problem. We've talked about community. The rich are our community, the middle class, our homeless, they are our community, " Robinson said, adding "Working together works ... a house divided cannot stand."

This is the third consecutive regular meeting in which council has heard from individuals pushing for action from the city.

The urgency has been ramped up significantly in recent days as it's now known Bartlett Housing Solutions will collapse without urgent financial help. The nonprofit's emergency shelter in Hazel's House of Hope hasn't accepted a new intake since March 15 and is already set to close by the end of next month due to financial constraints.

Councilor Danielle Trumble said Morgantown Community Resources, the board the serves as landlord for HHH, is "in active discussions " with organizations experienced in operating shelters that could potentially step in to do so here, at least temporarily.

Trumble also echoed Robinson's call for a unified front. She said all area municipalities and the county must be at the table.

"Everyone wants to think that homelessness is a Morgantown problem, but I can tell you Granville has panhandlers and campers just like we do. People are everywhere, " she said. "The other municipalities simply cannot look to us as if we're going to do everything on our own. I would love to see a little bit of commitment, or at least a little bit of concern coming from any of them, frankly."

Both Trumble and Councilor Brian Butcher said they would also like more direct action from their colleagues on council.

Butcher relayed his own experiences with homelessness, explaining that he spent a year living out of a vehicle due to circumstances beyond his control. He said it's hard for most to comprehend the pressure even mundane situations put on people without resources.

"When you're poor, having a tail light out and getting pulled over for it can spiral into very, very bad things in your life. There's a lot of things we don't address that we could be relieving pressures on, " he said.

Some of those things, he continued, would be providing a place for individuals to secure their items or simply communicating more effectively with social services to avoid jailing people on the verge of getting into housing for minor offenses.

According to Butcher, he's working with legal counsel on a homeless court program, a ban on source of income discrimination and other initiatives.

"Especially since the closing of Bartlett, the enormity of the stress on this system that's in the city has always been there, but it has gotten precipitously worse, " he said. "The people in here today who are service providers I know are probably feeling a lot more stress than I am."

The request for emergency assistance from BHS was among the issues council planned to take up in executive session following the meeting.

Also on Tuesday, council passed on first reading an ordinance repealing City Code Section 371.10—the "panhandling " law that recently made the city the target of a federal lawsuit brought by Mountain State Justice.