Homeless people must be gone from Central City Park by Monday, mayor says

There’s a city inside of Macon.

It’s made of tents pitched along the banks of the Ocmulgee River downtown. Homeless people have been bedding down here, largely hidden from view, for years.

But now Macon-Bibb County officials say the tent city has to leave Central City Park by Monday.

Jennifer Morrow lives on the river side of the levee with her dog, Blue, at the end of a little footpath that ends at a river bluff, not far from the new athletic fields and skatepark. She hasn’t lived there long.

“My boyfriend's the one who committed suicide by train. Back in September,” she said. “Me and Blue had been homeless ever since.”

Homeless and, she said, in advanced heart failure. Morrow has a daughter nearby who she doesn’t want to burden, so she's been sleeping on the river.

“It sucks because it's right before Christmas,” Morrow said of the deadline to move. “And there's not a lot of other places to go that are safe. That's my concern. I don't want to get raped out here.”

As Morrow was preparing to leave earlier this week, Macon-Bibb Mayor Robert Reichert and others were celebrating at nearby Luther Williams Field, one of the country’s oldest baseball parks.

“It is pretty easy to get excited about baseball coming back to Luther Williams Field,” Reichert said at Monday's announcement of renovations of the aging ballpark. A new summer collegiate baseball team, the Macon Bacon, will take the field next summer.

Macon-Bibb is pumping $2.5 million of special purpose local option sales tax money into the ballpark. It’s part of more than $15 million being spent on big ticket renovations in surrounding Central City Park.

As the new amenities draw people back to the park, Reichert said some aren’t comfortable with the homeless living there. There are youth football games at the foot of the levee, for instance. And there’s the Ocmulgee Heritage Trail, the city’s greenway.

“People are having a hard time even using the Heritage Trail because of the sanitation issues where the homeless don't have facilities to use for the bathroom at all,” Reichert said. “That provides a public health hazard for them and for us.”

Reichert is working with a task force of service providers like the Salvation Army, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and others for a long-term solution to the homelessness problem at the park. But so far there’s not one.

“On the 18th of Monday, we're going to pick all of your stuff up,” Reichert said.

So where should people go?

“They can endure more cold weather,” Reichert said of the homeless. “They will find a way to find some shelter, and they are able to manage to get by in a lot of circumstances where you and I probably couldn't.”

In her office at the Daybreak Center right outside Central City Park, Sister Theresa Sullivan was not so sure.

“Well I would say I'm a nurse, and we all have neurons,” Sullivan said with a laugh. “So we all feel the cold.”

At Daybreak, Sullivan and others help the homeless do laundry, get a shower, maybe get a Band-Aid. She said she understands Reichert’s drive to make the park seem safer.

“I have crazy days here, so I go to the park,” she said. “And by walking on that path, and by the water, it calms me down, and it helps me to pray, to be close to God.”

But Sullivan also doesn’t want the homeless run out of the park without another option for housing. She is on Reichert’s homelessness task force, and they have something they are ready to try.

“We're launching this coordinated housing program with all of us working together with an assessment to try to get people housed,” she said.

It will be one big database of Macon’s homeless population that the agencies on the mayor’s task force can use together to quickly house people.

But that won't launch until Jan. 25, a month after the tent city comes down. Sullivan said that’s frustrating.

“I understand the mayor's wanting public parks to belong to the public,” she said. “I wish we had more time.”

This story was originally published December 13, 2017 at 11:44 AM with the headline "Homeless people must be gone from Central City Park by Monday, mayor says."