Addressing homelessness, property damage, and needle safety concerns
Asked by Anonymous · 21 days ago
Are you going to do anything about this homeless situations in this town . What ideas do you have to help this matter . The residents of Alliston are feed up with their properties being damaged and personal items being stolen, and the fear of our children picking up discarded contaminated needles and we all know what can happen with that . Action needs to be taken now , we have had enough .
Laurie Mortimer's answer
Yes. We need to do more, and I think we need to be much more proactive.
I share these concerns personally. My grandchildren have encountered discarded needles in our parks. My mother has told me she doesn’t feel as safe downtown anymore. We shouldn’t be finding drug paraphernalia in public places or seeing people injecting drugs on our sidewalks. Residents should not be expected to simply accept that as normal.
I believe in compassion and helping people. Homelessness is not always addiction, and people struggling with homelessness, addiction or mental health need real help. But compassion does not mean ignoring public safety.
I also want to start asking tougher questions. How many people are actually homeless in New Tecumseth? How many are being housed? How many are repeatedly using emergency services? How many complaints are we receiving about needles, theft and property damage? How quickly are discarded needles being removed? What programs are we funding, what are they costing, and most importantly, are they working?
We already have the Town, County, OPP and numerous agencies involved. The Nottawasaga OPP Detachment Board also gives our municipalities a forum to raise local policing priorities and review information from the Detachment Commander. I want those organizations sharing meaningful local statistics, setting measurable goals and reporting the results back to the public.
And when something isn’t working, we need to be willing to change it rather than continuing with the same approach.
People who need help deserve a path off the street. Residents deserve safe parks, safe streets and a downtown they feel comfortable using. I don’t want to measure success by how many programs we have. I want to measure it by whether the situation in our community is actually getting better.
Create a very simple needle-response standard. One phone number or reporting method, location logged, rapid pickup, and monthly public reporting of where discarded needles are being found. If particular parks or downtown locations repeatedly show up, deploy cleanup/outreach resources there instead of waiting for residents to keep reporting the same problem.
Connect people with serious addictions directly to treatment. Simcoe now has a HART Hub system combining addiction treatment, mental-health care, primary care, housing and case management, and an additional 13-bed supportive-housing program is planned. A practical question for New Tecumseth is: How many of our residents are actually getting into it, and how quickly? A service in Barrie isn’t much of a solution if somebody living on an Alliston sidewalk never gets through the door.
Separate the populations instead of treating “the homeless” as one problem. Someone who lost an apartment because rent became unaffordable needs a very different intervention from someone with severe addiction or complex mental-health needs. Simcoe’s rapid-rehousing program is specifically designed for lower-risk, situational homelessness, while HART is aimed at people with more complex addiction/mental-health needs.
