Ned Lamont launches new approach to homelessness in CT

With the announcement Friday of a new interagency council on homelessness, Gov. Ned Lamont highlighted Connecticut’s many individual programmatic successes in caring for the unhoused and its failure to establish a cohesive system.

The initiative in the second year of Lamont’s second term comes as resources are shrinking, homelessness is increasing and community providers are complaining of bureaucratic obstacles to services.

“We know how to do this,” said Sarah Fox, a long-time executive at the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness. “We must all come together.”

To outline the new effort, the Democratic governor came to a drop-in center run by the Friendship Service Center in downtown New Britain, a city of 73,000 with a Republican mayor and an experimental, holistic approach to social service.

Its police department has three officers who are trained counselors, staffing a unit that takes 911 calls involving individuals who might homeless or in need of addiction or mental health services.

“They can assess somebody right there and say, ‘We’re not throwing this guy in jail. This guy needs a bed. He needs a sober bed.’ Or they sit down and do intake services with them at the PD,” said Erin Stewart, the mayor.

Friendship Service Center was one of the local providers that stepped forward when the state’s 211 housing and shelter hotline was unable to meet demand and local organizations took a larger role in triage and coordination.

In the aftermath of that failure, Seila Mosquera-Bruno, the commissioner of the Department of Housing, joined with top officials from the Department of Social Services and Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services in a listening tour in October.

“One consistent suggestion raised in these meetings was that our agencies must work together to provide holistic services to families in need,” Mosquera-Bruno said. “Many residents are touched by services from several agencies either at once or over a time period. And it can be challenging to navigate them.”

Caitlin Rose, the executive director of Friendship Service Center, is familiar with the challenge. She hosted the governor and others Friday at a drop-in center the group opened a year ago in a refurbished storefront, where the homeless can get warm, shower, do laundry or confer with case workers.

“What we’re seeing is that if a person comes to us with a complex need, it’s really difficult to get resources unless it’s from the Department Mental Health and Addiction Services or Department of Housing, because we have contracts with them,” Rose said. “Right now, for example, there are all of these workforce development programs that are really difficult for us to get someone into.”

Mosquera-Bruno said the interagency council will produce a strategic plan in August for knitting together programs offered by myriad agencies with different, if overlapping, clienteles, including veterans, the elderly, the formerly incarcerated and the addicted.

“I think one thing we’ve learned about homelessness — I have — is that it’s more than a roof on the head. It’s also the extra support that you need,” Lamont said.

Inter-agency efforts to address homelessness are not new.

Eight years ago, Connecticut was one of two states certified by the federal government to have effectively ended chronic homelessness of veterans. Over the past year, the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services ran a pilot program with the Department of Transportation to assess and help people taking shelter at bus and rail stations in Hartford, New Britain and stops in between.

“Because of the success of this program, the department is excited to be expanding the program into southern part of Connecticut this winter, providing additional outreach and support in New Haven and Stamford areas,” said Colleen Harrington, the deputy commissioner of DMHAS.

An additional benefit, she said, was better inter-agency communications.

“The answer is streamline — streamline, streamline, streamline,” Stewart said. “You have so many agencies that offer the same program. And that’s what this is. Our complaint is, why do we have to go to the Department of Labor to get the same service that DSS provides, to get the same service that Department of Housing provides? Combine it, and make more money available.”

Danté Bartolomeo, the commissioner of the Department of Labor, said better services at a lower cost are necessary as the era of plentiful federal aid and state surpluses are coming to an end.

“When it dries up, it leaves a hole,” Bartolomeo said. “So we’re all struggling with budgets and things. And we all have different programs that we bring to bear. So now we’re focused on getting together and determining how we can not recreate the wheel, but utilize what maybe another agency is funding already for this.”

The current budget provided $45.8 million in additional funding for emergency shelters and services, including $6.4 million for regional hubs providing walk-in services for the homeless in a dozen cities, including New Britain. But Lamont offered little hope Friday of proposing additional funding in the next fiscal year.

The State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition, which represents most unionized state employees, issued a statement commending the inter-agency effort while complaining of the governor’s refusal to seek changes in the state’s fiscal guardrails that limit spending.

The labor group said that stance will prevent the new council from offering any real solutions. “Solutions require services and services require spending,” the group said. “But with the governor’s strident application of the spending cap, he’s failing to invest in Connecticut’s future.”

Mark Pazniokas is a reporter for The Connecticut Mirror (https://ctmirror.org/ ). Copyright 2023 © The Connecticut Mirror.