City Councilor Brian Batson has thrown himself and his fellow Health and Human Services Committee members under the bus. People experiencing homelessness, Bayside residents and Portland taxpayers could go under with him. And Mayor Ethan Strimling is driving that bus.

For almost two years, Batson has actively participated in the proposal for a single emergency shelter. Now, he proposes “flipping this proposal on its head” (as he wrote in a July 10 Press Herald op-ed). Why? The proposed location is in his district.

Suddenly his perspective as “a health care professional” tells him he’s been wrong all this time. “Smaller shelters distributed throughout the community” are the way!

Batson kept these thoughts to himself for the past year, and now he and Strimling continue to waste precious time orchestrating a diversion toward a tack the city has explored and rejected multiple times.

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”

Proponents of the “scattered shelter model,” foremost Mayor Strimling, persist in ignoring the obvious economies of scale that prove its lack of feasibility. Costs for multiple separate buildings eat up a lot of money that could otherwise pay staff to help people find housing and gain independence, meaning Portland taxpayers fund real estate instead of housing assistance.

If Batson really wants to “rebuild the trust between the people of the city and its government,” as he claims, he will drop this politically motivated obstruction, so the urgent and challenging work of finding a feasible location for a single shelter can continue.

Stonewalling on progress in Bayside is nothing new. A previous local obstructionist infamously said “to delay is to destroy.” But that was just an apartment building. What could be destroyed in this case is people’s lives, and the future of a community. Mayor Strimling and Councilor Batson, stop the insanity.

Laura Cannon

Portland

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