(Today’s Northumberland file photo)
By Cecilia Nasmith/Today’s Northumberland
Chance Brown returned to Northumberland County council’s Social Services Committee meeting Wednesday to complain of harsh treatment in the county’s overnight warming room.
Brown compared it to visiting grandma, where he had to keep his room clean and submit to inspection.
“I should be able just to be there in peace,” he said.
Brown admitted he’d been ejected from the warming room in the past, his biggest issue being the inability to sleep. He related the struggle to keep his eyes wide open, and the troubles he encountered if he tried to stretch out on the floor or put two chairs together “to create a bedlike surface.”
Rather than calling police, he said, “there should be on-site management teams for occurrences like this.”
Brown also was dismayed by seeing people with pets refused admittance, “being asked to leave the property with nowhere to go.”
He recalled a night he set his socks on fire to wave and flag down a police car to get help for such a lady, who did not want to surrender her pet but had nowhere to go.
Brown said he had seen warming room operations in several provinces, and found that the one in Calgary was worth mentioning. He described it as “a round table of support – medical, health, well-being, legal, physical health, job placement, debt consolidation, even housing, all in one little spot, hosted by an organization we’ve had in this town for many years, the Salvation Army.”
The situation can only get worse, Brown warned. For example, the closing of the Post plant put 127 people out of a job. “Eight to 10 months from now, a big percentage of those could be without housing.”
Meanwhile, he renewed his call to let people sleep in the warming room, set up cots, or even be allowed to stretch out on the floor.
Earlier in the meeting, Associate Director of Housing and Homelessness Rebecca Snelgrove had said that they have limited facilities for the temporary care of the pets of people entering the warming room, but there are two problems – sometimes those facilities are already full, and sometimes the people refuse to be separated from their pets.
