photo by: Eric Ayres

Volunteers and homeless individuals packed up personal belongings and valuables on Monday at Wheeling’s exempted homeless camp. The city had given six weeks notice that the camp was closing at 5 p.m. Monday.

WHEELING — Volunteers scrambled to help residents of Wheeling’s exempted homeless encampment pack up valuables Monday as the city’s 5 p.m deadline for the camp’s closure approached.

Representatives of Street MOMs, House of Hagar and other local social service agencies brought vehicles, U-hauls, shopping carts, luggage, storage totes and other gear to help homeless individuals who were being displaced by the closing of the city’s only camp along Wheeling Creek near the Peninsula Cemetery.

“A lot of people are here to help,” said Dr. William Mercer, vice chairman of The Life Hub, noting the National Weather Service had already issued a winter weather advisory calling for two to five inches of snow overnight. “If they’re displaced tonight, especially with the snow — that could be a disaster. We’ve dealt with frostbite before. They don’t know what they’re going to do.”

Mercer was at the camp Monday afternoon while volunteers helped people pack up valuables, some of them stored in numbered totes.

“The totes are for their most important possessions — not everyday items, because it’s not going to be accessible every day,” said Ryan Ewing of the House of Hagar, “but things like their paperwork, mom’s ashes — whatever they can save.”

Ewing said the people there were basically in survival mode — “flight, fight or freeze” — in anticipation of the camp’s closure and dismantling.

While the gates were not locked at 5 p.m. as expected, around ten large roll-off dumpsters were brought to the camp’s entrance last week and have been looming there since. City police and operations personnel are expected to coordinate the clearing of the camp and removal of all items left behind beginning this morning. Some took to social media claiming the camp had remained “open” Monday night, but city leaders confirmed that the site was closed. However, no one who remained was expected to be arrested as people continued to vacate the premises.

photo by: Eric Ayres

Volunteers and homeless individuals packed up personal belongings and valuables on Monday at Wheeling’s exempted homeless camp. The city had given six weeks notice that the camp was closing at 5 p.m. Monday.

With people coming and going from the camp all day on Monday, volunteers could not give a solid headcount of how many individuals had remained at the camp when the deadline came. Some estimated that around two dozen or so were still living there and were expected to be displaced.

Representatives of Ohio Valley Mutual Aid, House of Hagar and Ohio Valley Cares staged a “tent triage” outside the City-County Building on Chapline Street downtown Monday night at the same time the camp closure was scheduled. The group collected blankets and supplies, sang Christmas carols and helped direct displaced people from the camp to emergency resources. They also provided a voice for their homeless neighbors, they noted.

“Everyone at the camp is getting kicked out,” Ian Hostottle of OV Mutual Aid said. “Our whole deal is trying to get direct aid to people that need it. There’s no people that need direct aid more than people getting kicked out of a homeless camp. We want to try and help them out, support them as much as we can and maybe show council that what they’re doing is wrong.”

Those on hand at the camp on Monday had expected city authorities to come lock the gates at 5 p.m., the deadline as stated in the notice that had been posted at the camp six weeks ago. By 4:30 p.m., some residents of the camp had already begun walking away and rolling luggage toward downtown, where The Life Hub provides around 50 shelter beds.

photo by: Eric Ayres

Representatives of Ohio Valley Mutual Aid and other local organizations sing Christmas carols Monday across the street from the City-County Building in Wheeling. The group set up a temporary triage for displaced homeless individuals, collected blankets and other supplies, and helped direct people in need to resources in the wake of the scheduled closure of the city’s homeless camp.

Hopes to reopen the Salvation Army’s 16th Street facility for additional shelter beds remained in limbo Monday night. An 11th-hour green light to open the previously closed shelter was secured literally 15 minutes before the deadline. However, staffing is not expected to be put in place until tonight.

“Tomorrow (Tuesday) morning at 10 a.m., we have the health and fire inspection of the facility. We don’t foresee any issues. They have passed it in the past before we even did all of the renovations of the building,” Lt. John Lawrence of The Salvation Army in Wheeling said Monday evening. “We look forward to opening tomorrow night. The Life Hub is putting together the staff for it, so if everything works out, we will have it up and running tomorrow evening.”

The Salvation Army had closed its men’s shelter earlier this year, but the facility has remained available.

“We closed our shelter based upon the fact that we had no financial backing for it,” Lawrence explained.

Three weeks ago, Mercer and other representatives of The Life Hub, the Salvation Army and others developed a proposal to reopen the beds at the Salvation Army in light of the city’s pending closure of the homeless encampment. The city subsequently provided $75,000 in funds from its opioid settlement money from the state to help pay for staffing at the facility.

Under a facility use agreement, The Life Hub will provide staff for a shelter to house women only at the Salvation Army’s facility for six months. The Life Hub is expected to secure another $75,000 to be able to make this happen.

The Salvation Army needed authorization from its headquarters in Atlanta to move forward with the arrangement, however.

“I actually was on the phone at 4:45 p.m. this evening with our territorial headquarters getting final approval,” Lawrence said, noting that because of the recent holiday, several pieces of the puzzle did not come together as quickly as everyone would have liked.

Authorization from the Salvation Army’s territorial headquarters was delayed, locksmiths to provide extra keys were unavailable, staff members from the health inspector’s office were out sick, insurance issues needed to be ironed out and other moving parts had to come together quickly.

“There have been several different cogs moving to try to get this together as quickly as we can,” Lawrence said. “We’ve been here since 1883 – we’re not going anywhere, and we want to be part of the solutions here. This is just one of those cases where we’re pushed up against a very tight window. We’ve been working on this together for three weeks now, and one of those weeks just happened to be Thanksgiving week.”

Officials from The Salvation Army of Wheeling and The Life Hub are expected to make a joint announcement about the facility’s shelter availability later this afternoon.

Because of the delay in opening the Salvation Army shelter, city officials were flooded with requests to extend the deadline to close the camp. Those requests were denied.

Wheeling Mayor Denny Magruder said city leaders stand firm with their stance that allowing people to stay in the homeless encampment is not helping them at all.

“We set the date, and we have to stick by the date. We established a time and gave six weeks’ notice,” Magruder said Monday. “They knew. I don’t want to see anybody stay out in the cold — and that’s a thing that still bothers me about the camp. The camp is not a haven from weather — it’s outdoors.”

The condition of the camp had become out of control, the mayor noted, describing it as an “unhealthy hellhole” with mounds of trash and debris everywhere – despite the availability of dumpsters and portable toilets.

“The community wants to help these people,” Magruder said. “It’s not a question of ‘if we want to throw them out.’ We want to see them get help. We want to see them get rehabilitated back into the stream of life, to get their treatment for their addiction or their mental health.”

Allowing them to stay in the camp is not helping, and people living there are not seeing any progress, Magruder noted. Some have been in the camp the entire time since the city allowed the exemption from its outdoor camping ban nearly two years ago.

“We want to try to force the hands of society to get these people the mental help and counseling they need,” the mayor said. “I realize that some of them can’t be counseled, but in society, there has got to be a set of rules. There are other people in society that we have to worry about and care for. We’ve heard their cries and their frustrations for the last six to eight months.”

Magruder said business owners and residents in proximity of the homeless encampment should not have to live with threats and fears stemming from problems associated with the camp.

“We want to do what’s right for the city,” Magruder said. “Letting people live in that camp is certainly not compassion — it’s just the opposite.”

While the mayor said some advocates and representatives of social service agencies may have differing views on how to handle the situation, he said they share the city’s desire to see homeless individuals break the cycle that keeps them on the street.

“It’s not a ‘we versus they,'” Magruder said. “We all want to see these people get help. Yet we have an expectation that they have to obey the law.

“My fondest wish is that in the end, these people will find and be provided the help that they’re entitled to long-term, and they’re not going to find it living on the creek bank in a hellhole camp.”

Magruder said city leaders have been honest and direct with the service agencies and want to continue working with them as the situation moves forward.

“I stand by what I said six weeks ago – the homeless camp has been a failure,” Magruder said. “It was worthy of an attempt. But it was a failure. Conditions are horrific, and we should never condone that. We as a city condemn places that aren’t as bad.”

photo by: Eric Ayres

Volunteers from Street MOMs and other social service organizations were on hand at Wheeling’s exempted homeless encampment Monday helping unhoused residents pack up valuables before the 5 p.m. deadline when the city planned to close the camp.

As the city of Wheeling experiences a renaissance with tens of millions of public and private money invested in the downtown and beyond, Magruder said the lack of progress with efforts to reduce homelessness in the city has become a problem that can no longer continue to worsen. Many have acknowledged that homeless individuals from outside the area have been relocated to Wheeling because of its availability of the exempted camp and abundance of social services, despite the limited number of available shelter beds.

“The city is moving ahead, progressing with pride and with development, but the growth of the homeless camp helps to hold us back, and we can’t let that happen,” Magruder said, noting that the closure of the camp will “force the hands of those who control social services” to take a new approach to addressing this lingering issue. “At the end of the day, we do want the same thing. We’ve put a lot of thought into this — not just for weeks but for the last several months. It was not an easy decision, but I believe with all of my heart and soul that this is the right one.