HOMELESSNESS
Mayor Reeves gave his takeaways from today’s joint workshop on homelessness.
Why this matters: The region has lacked a coordinated strategy for dealing with homelessness. Dr. Joe Savage presented the federal government’s “All In” strategic plan at the workshop
- ALIGNMENT: The mayor said, “I think the goal is to build critical mass around an alignment between plans at the county and city. How do we get in alignment? I thought that was a great start today with Dr. Savage talking about the federal strategic plan.”
- MOTIVATION: He said, “It was made very clear today that this federal strategic plan will be a key indicator in our ability to get federal support to try to reduce homelessness here. It’s plenty motivating to make sure that we do have alignment and work together.”
- GREAT FIRST STEP: Mayor Reeves later added, “I’m a believer in getting out in traffic on things. And it doesn’t mean that I believe that we have to do a carbon copy of the entire plan, or it’s not successful if we all look each other in the eye in this community and say here are the one or two things that we could focus on, knowing they are federal priorities and that’ll help us fund it. That’s a great first step.”
CRIME UPDATE
The City of Pensacola reported increases in calls and arrests in the city’s portion of Operation Brownsville.
Why it matters: Operation Brownsville is a multi-governmental effort to clean up an area bordered by Kirk, Avery, A and Jackson streets over six weeks, from April 24 to June 16. Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves announced the Pensacola Police Department and Code Enforcement statistics for the first two weeks.
- Mayor Reeves reported, “We have last week’s activities: 249 calls for service up from 233 the previous week. We made six arrests in the area. We have nine code enforcement cases pending, and we had 28 offense reports.
- The charges include driving without a license and non-moving traffic violation (Cervantes & T streets); trespassing and resisting an officer without violence (W. Moreno St.); two child neglect, one with drug paraphernalia (Pace Blvd); possession of control substance without a prescription (Cervantes St.) and simple assault and battery (Gonzalez St.)