On WCOA this morning, Pensacola Mayor Grover Robinson said he would try to get the Downtown Improvement Board officers and homeless advocate Mike Kimbrel to the negotiation table to discuss the homeless issue and the charges the DIB has filed against Kimbrel for allegedly cutting a lock on a port-a-potty near Martin Luther King Jr. Plaza on North Palafox Street.
However, he wasn’t optimistic about the discussion, saying that he has tried to get Food Not Bombs to move its weekly food distribution from MLK Plaza to Pensacola City Hall.
The mayor said, “I’ve met multiple times with Mike and said, ‘Why don’t you move this? And if you move it to down to City Hall, we put in some benches…I’d put in a restroom.’ We do whatever we need to create less conflict. That’s not what Michael wanted. He’s had that opportunity. I mean, that’s been there, standing offer.”
I pressed Mayor Robinson to try and bring both sides to the table. Last week, a meeting scheduled between the DIB officers and Kimbrel and his attorney fell apart with the attorney got delayed in court.
“Well, I’ll be happy to do it,” said Robinson. “I’ve done it multiple times–so, always trying to figure out those solutions, and I’ll reach out to Walker and I’ll reach out and see what I can do to help them get to that point.”
He continued, “But I mean, at the same time, once they get to the table, somebody’s got to be willing to work. It can’t just be one side working.”
Thank you for staying on top of one our most pressing city and personal problems of homelessness. I too support Mike Kimbrel in all his endeavors and would also buy a box of locks and support a unisex bathroom open 24/7 downtown. Mike Kimbrel has the homeless as his main concern and should be rewarded and supported instead of being arrested for cutting a lock so a woman could use a restroom already in place for the next day’s event.
So well said, Talon Burr.
It is the height of ridiculousness that all Grover can think to do is take a page out of Ashton Hayward’s playbook and move everything he doesn’t have the skills and desire to successfully negotiate over to the City Hall holding pen.
So Grover, would the homeless then suffer the same fate as the Occupy Movement, who was convinced to move there as a sign of compromise and then evicted, and the food trucks, which seem to have been pushed out for a pile of construction materials? (What’s up with that, anyway?)
The best part is, on an email string Grover is pretending that he doesn’t know that a previous suit pertaining to Plaza Ferdinand ALREADY ENDED IN A LEGAL COMPROMISE SETTLEMENT. It has always been my understanding that part of the settlement identified which parks could have feedings, and that MLK was one of them. I’ve never seen the document, though. JJ Talbott made a public records request for it, so now Grover is claiming in his email response that he can’t fulfill public record on the documents because he doesn’t know anything about all that. And assuming that I’m a “client” on the request.
While Grover obviously lies on what he does and doesn’t know, it still amazes me just how much beyond his ignorance tactics that he truly doesn’t get.
However, his subservient role to the DIB has been fulfilled with this absurd red herring, in an attempt to take the focus off the fact that if the DIB doesn’t drop the charges against Michael Kimberl, then at the very least Michael Carro should be fired by City Council. Better yet, council should clean house on that board entirely.
Better still, the DIB has long since passed having any real role or utility per the designated purposes for which the special district was originally created. They don’t even fulfill their function of mobility or parking any more, and shoved that back onto the City. Do we really need to maintain a special district because it has a non-profit attached where wealthy entities can put through their grease money as “donations”? Dissolve the special district, and I’m sure the elite organizations and agencies downtown can find another way to continue to pay for their power.
The mayor removed the benches from MLK plaza in the first place. Food Not Bombs has been providing free meals there for over a decade. The mayor wants them to move and is offering benches in a new location (after he took the other ones). After Food Not Bombs said they didn’t want to move (in part because they also want to bring awareness to income inequality in a public place), the mayor offers nothing more and the DIB gets more aggressive. That’s not a negotiation, in my opinion, when one side is being asked to upset a decade-long practice of charity and the other side is making unverifiable claims about a once-a-week meal in the park destroying businesses. This combined with all these statements about Food Not Bombs bringing crime to the area… it’s borderline bullying. Certainly misinformation.
It’s a public park. Coming in and slandering non-profits because you don’t like the visibility they bring to the issue of homelessness is uncivil, I think — especially when the whole thing is being pushed by the same downtown business group (the DIB) that wasted the city’s money and time pushing an unconstitutional panhandling ordinance. But, of course, Grover has to make the people with tattoos look like they’re the ones who started the problem. The word’s out: Pensacola has a homeless problem because the city only takes punitive solutions seriously. Why not listen to the science everyone knows by now: provide homes, provide a place of rest free of harassment. Instead they hire Marbut twice, who designs shelters with “penalty boxes.” For the same price they could have constructed a dozen or more homes. The mayor needs to stop acting like he’s the civil one. Look at how the city’s handling this: like the homeless are animals. Sorry for the strong words but I find it appalling.
A final thought: honestly, why trust Grover to deliver these benches and a restroom? Social work offices and the gulf power bill paying office were moved away from city hall years ago for the same reason they want Food Not Bombs out of the park. My suspicion: they won’t ever let up, so why pretend they will.