Note: I wasn’t at this meeting, but I got a first-hand summary from someone who was.  I’m also friends with several of the attendees and am therefore not fully objective:

In today’s Brattleboro Reformer, there’s a piece by Howard Weiss-Tisman:

A public forum that was scheduled to answer questions about a proposed homeless shelter for downtown Bellows Falls brought out a large group of supporters for the project.

About 35 people attended the meeting, which was held at Our Place Drop-In Center.

And while there were some concerns about the funding and location of the shelter, most of those who spoke said they thought the village needed to have a place for people to spend the night during the winter.

A group made up of church and business leaders, social service workers and local residents wants to open the shelter at 33 Canal St. If the plan moves ahead, the shelter will be open from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. and will have up to 15 people spending the night.

The main village of Bellows Falls is one stretch of road– it encompasses a movie theater, a sporting goods store, an American Legion post.  On either end there are some gas stations.  There used to be other businesses on that stretch.  Sover.net got bought out and is no longer housed there.  Oona’s, a great location for music venues, burnt down a few years ago.  The hardware store is still there.  There’s a bookstore and a bank.

The proposed location for the shelter is right off of main street, on Canal street, which starts across from the movie theater and goes up along the canal, running opposite from the train station.

This is a very small stretch of land, and there are several homeless people whom you can see out in the area pretty much any day of the week.  Some of these homeless people are veterans who came back damaged enough that they just couldn’t make things work.  Some of them are just ordinary people who either took or got taken on a wrong turn somewhere.

There were a few people at that meeting last night who objected to that shelter, because of fears about what the homeless would do and whether or not they presented a danger.

The thing is, these aren’t people who are in Bellows Falls because of its amazing opportunities and potential for growth.  They’re there because after being ground up and beaten down, it’s just where life spit them out.  They’re in the town already, and winter in Vermont is pretty damned cold.  So we have choices.  We find a way to help them survive the cold and give them a chance to live another year, or we simply say that our fears are more important than that, that it’s worth it to let someone else die because we’re worried about what the nearby shelter might do to our sales revenue.

I’m probably being a little unfair here, so I should be clear: I don’t think anyone who argued against this shelter is a bad person.  I just think they’re blinded by their own fears and prejudices.

But I should also be clear about something: there are a lot of places where good people have room to disagree about something of consequence and that everyone has a good and valid point.  

This is not that case.

This shelter needs to be built.