Cape Girardeau City Council rejects funding for sheltering homeless in winter weather

Cape Girardeau City Council members declined Monday, Nov. 20, to fund a portion of a United Way-led program to provide shelter to homeless people in extreme cold weather.

At a council meeting earlier this month, Elizabeth Shelton, executive director of United Way of Southeast Missouri, asked for $10,000 of the project's estimated $45,000 cost. The project, in conjunction with the local Salvation Army and other not-for-profit organizations, would provide hotel rooms when overnight temperatures were forecast to be below 28 degrees or during certain forecast winter weather events.

The measure council members considered at their meeting Monday would have used casino funds (of which the city receives about $3 million annually and designates for specific non-recurring uses).

Council members Mark Bliss, Robbie Guard, Tameka Randle and Nate Thomas voted against the measure, while Mayor Stacy Kinder and council members Dan Presson and Shannon Truxel voted for it.

Those who voted against it said the project falls outside the purview of municipal government.

"I don't personally believe we should be getting involved in this," Guard said.

Randle said funding such a request would take away focus from infrastructure, public safety and Parks and Recreation projects.

Bliss suggested approving the request could lead to more such requests in the future.

"Down the road, we could be putting more and more money into this," he said. "There are charitable groups and federal projects. This is just not something that I think as a city we can do."

Kinder and Presson noted examples of damaging fires started by homeless people trying to stay warm.

"This is how the (former) Broadway Theatre got into a situation," Presson said. "I think this is actually a really good investment."

Kinder agreed.

"I have come to see this as a public safety issue as well," she said, noting the funds would not involve taxpayer dollars, but funds generated by those patronizing Century Casino Cape Girardeau. "When the homeless are out in winter conditions, they are more likely to trespass, more likely to start fires to stay alive. That is where our public safety forces are acting. I have come to see this as assistance to our public safety forces."

Truxel's argument to support the spending leaned more toward a humanitarian perspective and said the city's churches and business community have not been able to fill the need.

"We have how many churches and how many banks in this city, and no one is coming to help. I hope there is someone coming to help," she said.

In other action, council members read for the first time and unanimously approved ordinances to accept 16 acres from the William E. Walker Revocable Trust for a park near East Cape Rock Drive and pursue a license agreement with the state Highways and Transportation Commission to install a monument at the roundabout located at the intersection of Route W and Lexington Avenue.

Sherry Rust, widow of Rex Rust, former co-president of Rust Communications who died in January 2022 after a battle with cancer, said the 13-foot-tall stainless steel, LED-lit monument -- titled Dance of Life -- would represent "the beauty of relationships we have throughout our lives, whether they be in marriage, business, friendship or our own family; this is what life is really about".

Presson praised the project.

"What a fitting opportunity the city has to showcase a life well lived and a life that really loved the community," he said.

Council members also read for the first time and approved ordinances accepting the record plats of Boyce Church, Brick and Ivy and Winter Field subdivisions; a sanitary sewer easement west of Bloomfield Road and south of County Road 208 for a single-family residence; and housekeeping items dealing with no-parking zones and stop signs on a recently renamed portion of a street on the Southeast Missouri State University campus (Smallwood-Williams Way).

The group reappointed Claire Kneer to the city's Golf Course Advisory Board.