photo by: Eric Ayres

Wheeling Councilman Ben Seidler speaks during Tuesday's council meeting.

WHEELING — Members of Wheeling City Council seem to be exploring new avenues to tackle issues surrounding the city’s homeless community, but questions have arisen about whether effective incentives are in place to actually reduce the number of unhoused individuals in town.

Or, as one councilman posited during Tuesday’s meeting, has homelessness become a multimillion-dollar industry in Wheeling?

The ongoing dilemma has been characterized as “a statewide and nationwide problem that is looking for a local solution.” Some city leaders this past week asserted that assistance from the federal and state government is oftentimes based on the number of homeless individuals that are served in a community — creating a situation that basically de-incentivizes efforts to reduce the unhoused population.

A stirring view of this concept was voiced this past week by City Councilman Ben Seidler, who has worked directly with members of the homeless population in recent years and continues to work with city leaders to address the issue.

However, Seidler raised eyebrows Tuesday when, before a lengthy public forum about homelessness unfolded, Seidler alleged there were entities in Wheeling that are capitalizing on the presence of homeless people in the city.

Several residents came to speak out about a proposed camping ban in the city — legislation that would basically make it illegal to sleep on public property. Opponents of the legislation — which is still pending with promises of amendments to allow “managed camps” — described the ordinance on its face as a cruel and unconstitutional effort to “criminalize homelessness” in Wheeling.

“It’s abundantly clear to me that homelessness is a big business in the city of Wheeling, and some of these individuals who are accusing the city of criminalizing the homeless over this public camping ban are some are the same ones who are clearly monetizing the homeless population to cover their own salaries,” Seidler said at one point during the meeting.

Wheeling Mayor Glenn Elliott later in the week said a number of federal and state programs that provide assistance to local organizations seeking to address homelessness are well-intentioned programs, but questioned their potential for results.

“In my experience, the people who implement these programs are all well-intentioned as well,” Elliott said. “But many of these programs, like the Continuum of Care Program, the Youth Homelessness Demonstration Program, the Basic Center Program and others base their funding criteria in part on either the number of homeless people in a community or its poverty rate. Collectively, this results in a situation where the more success you have in reducing homelessness, the less likely you are to get a grant in the future.

“This is a perverse incentive structure. We should be rewarding those who are solving the underlying problem.”

On Friday, responses to these assertions were sought from heads of more than a half a dozen local service agencies that assist the homeless. Three of them were reached to provide comments on the issue.

“That formula is definitely not true,” said Mark Phillips, president and CEO of Catholic Charities. “If we were profiting off of homelessness, we would not have to rely on donor support or contributions from foundations.”

Phillips praised Seidler for his personal efforts in helping to feed unhoused people in the community and his continued work in the city to help partner with local agencies to address the needs of the homeless. However, Phillips indicated that local service agencies are certainly not showered with more funding that they need – in fact, most are struggling to cover all of their costs and to pay for vital services they are trying to provide to the most needy and vulnerable people in the community.

“There are minimal shelters in the city right now, and no low-barrier shelters in the city,” Phillips said.

Suggesting that service organizations are “profiting” off of the individuals they serve is an “irresponsible” and unproductive approach, Phillips said. He likened the concept to accusing a mechanic of making sure your vehicle breaks down or assuming a HVAC technician is rigging your furnace to break down so he can get more business from a customer.

“Our goal is to move people through a situation of homelessness into a situation where they’re able to be productive members of society,” Phillips said. “We really appreciate the work that Councilman Seidler has done and is engaged in. I do think that he’s probably relying on bad information from a third party. When it comes to the notion of ‘monetizing’ homelessness, I think he knows that’s not true.”

Phillips said emotions have run high in the wake of controversy surrounding the issues involving the homeless population, but the city and local service organizations need to continue working together toward common goals of tackling these problems together.

Kate Marshall of the House of Hagar said their organization is working in the trenches with those in the community who need help the most. She said they are not making money off of these efforts – in fact, they’re often operating in the red, but are driven by passion and the internal rewards for what they do.

“As a small nonprofit, we invest significant amounts of time, energy and resources accompanying community members experiencing homelessness towards sustainable housing and futures,” Marshall said. “My staff and I do this work at a financial loss to ourselves, but believe this investment of our lives into our community leads to priceless gains. Frankly, any one of us could make more at Sheetz than at our current jobs, but we do it because we love our community and dear neighbors.”

Jill Eddy, interim CEO at Youth Services System Inc., agreed, noting that their funding is set by a budget each year.

“We do apply for funding and submit a budget based on projected expenditures,” Eddy said. “Our funding for runaways and homeless youth programming is always money that goes right back out to our clients and the services we provide for them. There are costs of staffing – shelters are required to have supervisors there. These are children, so we’re responsible to provide support, treatment and supervision.”

The notion of “incentivizing” a sustained crisis by awarding funds based on numbers was also disputed by Eddy.

“It doesn’t work that way,” she said. “That is not the case for us at all. The last thing we want to see is a child to be homeless.”

Phillips also noted that grant funding received by Catholic Charities is used for programming services, while contributions from foundations are used to pay for staff salaries.

Eddy reiterated the statement made during Tuesday’s council meeting on behalf of agencies that are part of the Northern Panhandle Continuum of Care – including YSS, Project HOPE, the YWCA, NAMI of Greater Wheeling and several other agencies opposed to the proposed camping ban in the city.

“Long-term solutions require investments by cities in safe, affordable, low-barrier housing, permanent supportive housing and mental health and addiction services,” the group said in a statement read by R.J. Konkolesky. “We the board of the Northern Panhandle Continuum of Care recognize that camps are not a solution to homelessness, but they do serve as an interim solution to address the immediate conditions of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness.”

The group invited all city leaders to meet with the Continuum of Care to and use them as a resource as parties work to tackle issues involving the homeless.

“The bottom line is that we need a universal solution for better mental health care and better substance-abuse rehabilitation programs,” the mayor said on Friday. “Cities are not equipped to deal with these issues on the macro level, but we are being left to pick up the pieces resulting from failures at the federal and state levels. It is safe to say that a considerable percentage of Wheeling’s homeless population suffers from either mental illness or substance abuse, or both. And based on my conversations with mayors from across the state, the same applies elsewhere as well.

“We can and must do our part to get people the assistance they need, but there are too many existing cracks in the system for people to fall through right now.”

Phillips added that the city of Wheeling is capable of making big things happen, and he indicated that he has faith that parties can work together to solve this issue.

“We need to have real conversations and strong partnerships to help achieve a common goal,” Phillips said. “The city is building a new parking garage downtown. How much did it cost? About $17 million? That’s getting done – to house a couple of hundred cars. But they wanted this project to happen, and they found a way to do it.”