Officials create plan to aid homeless

Newton officials recently met with state and county officials to discuss how the town can improve its ability to handle its homeless population.

Town planner Jessica Caldwell will be hired to help the town work with houses of worship, nonprofit organizations and the county to learn best practices from how other communities deal with homelessness. She would be paid about $15,000, with half of that coming from the county, said Newton Town Manager Thomas Russo.

Caldwell will work with consultant Barry Dreger, who will meet with the homeless population to determine their needs and work with houses of worship to find hospitality suites among other issues. The contract with Dreger’s firm would be for $40 an hour.

“Traditionally, this is not something we managed,” said Russo, who took part in a Sept. 17 meeting with county and state officials on the matter. “The nonprofits did their thing, and the county or state did their thing.

“We are creating something where the town is active in oversight in the form of meetings twice a week, daily reports from our Police Department, interacting with population to understand where they are coming from, their needs and so on. These actions in the near term will allow us to create a lasting plan of action that enables us, as a town, to immediately deal with and assist someone once we become aware of them.”

Changes on the Green

Jill Space, deputy director of the Sussex County Board of County Commissioners, said the county is making immediate changes to the Newton Green, a county-owned park, which is a popular place for the homeless to gather.

“The benches at the park were temporarily removed in order to add dividers to them so people sit on them, not lay down on them,” she said. “We will be passing an ordinance officially making the hours of the park dawn to dusk and installing signs stating any belongings left in the park will be removed by the county.”

Space said she and three other commissioners have been to Newton to meet with members of the homeless population and the nonprofit community.

“Many of the people in this population in Newton are not from Newton,” she said. “One thing I think the state’s Department of Community Affairs (DCA) will do is identify the ZIP Code of an individual’s last address so if someone is in Newton but from South Jersey and wants to be housed, they will be housed back in South Jersey.”

While the county is allocated state funds to find temporary housing for individuals, they often are not enough, she said.

“The county has money to buy hotel rooms for individuals, but we are regulated by the state to only $45 a night per room. We cannot get enough rooms at that rate.”

Russo and others will be working with the office of Mike Callahan, director of the DCA’s Office of Homelessness Prevention.

“Mike Callahan will be reaching out to Zufall Health, Family Promise and Mental Health Association along with the Samaritan Inn to get everybody on the same page because the state guides a lot of the operation of how this works in the nonprofit world,” Russo said.

“In the next few weeks, he will start getting us staffing from the state level, maybe two people half days four days a week, to help us with plan implementation. They will work with me, with Barry, with the county to create an ecosystem where the town oversees this more directly than ever.”