Roosevelt Mission brings tough choices to city officials

By Mark Stalcup

Staff Writer

The Roosevelt Mission's troubled state offers no easy answers for civic officials.

The city of Linton's taken no official stance on the Roosevelt Mission's future, despite defunding of the homeless shelter and transitional housing facility by state and federal agencies.

The city hasn't attempted to close the shelter, though the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority (IHDCA) suggested it should be shut.

IHDCA deemed Roosevelt Mission unsafe in late May, urging residents to find emergency housing elsewhere.

The state fire marshal is also currently investigating IHDCA and inspector contentions the facility does not meet building codes, Linton Fire Chief Gary Tannehill said.

Mayor Patti Jones did order utilities shut down briefly amid allegations of gas leaks and electrical shorts, but restored service after city officials inspected the property.

The mission's director Jerry French has contended the problems are overstated.

Still, Jones was presented with a 40-page summary of extensive structural problems, and believes the city will be forced to deal with the mission soon.

Someone -- quite likely her successor, Mayor-Elect John Wilkes -- may face a hard call, determining if the 110-year-old former hotel stays open.

"It's going to have to be a safe environment, or it will unfortunately have to be closed," Jones said. "Do I wish that on anybody? No. But we can't have an unsafe building sitting in the middle of a city block."

Wilkes concurs.

"I think it needs to be checked out to find out if it is safe or isn't," he said. "I know at one time there were situations where the mayor acted and shut the utilities off. From the reports that she got, she did the right thing."

Wilkes hasn't been inside the mission for a few years, he said. However, if all the problems depicted in the engineering report are true, Wilkes said action should be taken.

Inspectors listed a litany of problems with the facility, from electrical wiring that does not adhere to code and gas leaks to insufficient safety measures such as exit signs and smoke detectors whose batteries are missing.

Grout needed to structurally support the building is also eroding

However, closing the mission without a suitable replacement also means putting about 60 people out on the street, and leaving anyone homeless -- especially during winter -- is a troubling prospect.

"I think it's a very sad situation," Jones said. "I don't want people out on the street. I don't want them to be homeless."

Homelessness seems, to many, like a big city problem -- but Jones knows it's here, too.

"We have homeless people in this city, and they're not all at the Roosevelt Mission," she said.

"We just don't see them as easily, because they're not as prominent and not as evident as they are in the bigger cities."

Some stay in empty houses and buildings. Others sleep outdoors when the weather's warm.

And as an economy worsens and Indiana encounters double-digit unemployment at times, the prospect of sending around 66 people into the streets if the mission's 11 apartments close is daunting.

"The problem is how big of a void it would open up within the community," city attorney Timothy Shonk said. "It didn't fall apart overnight."

Shonk's able to view the problem from two perspectives. As city attorney, he takes no stance until the city council and mayor decide what to do.

However, as a downtown businessman whose law office is due west of the mission, he's already fixed one leak in his roof he partially attributes to the neighboring mission's crumbling brickwork.

"It just crumbled," Shonk said. "There's nothing holding the bricks together."

Inspectors who visited the building concurred, finding that the structural grout that holds the bricks in place has decomposed. Further, the roof's webbing has weakened and is leaking, with the last cover apparently around 25 years old.

Complicating matters further, Linton's downtown district has been deemed historic properties, which preserves facades but also limits renovation work, potentially making repairs more costly.

However, the potential for gas leaks or electrical fires also concerns city officials, especially because of the age and interconnected rooftops of neighboring businesses.

"Another problem is, if one building catches fire, they all could go," Shonk said. "There comes a time and a point where they can't maintain it, and then it may be time to shut it down."

Jones issued a call to the community to work towards solutions.

"There's going to have to be community action," Jones said. "We can't leave (residents) there in an environment that puts them at risk, along with everyone else in the block."

However, with the loss of state and federal funds totally around $27,000 annually, and a recommendation the mission receive no more money from those agencies, Wilkes knows finding funding could pose problems.

"I don't know where they could even raise that kind of money," he said. "Maybe somebody will step forward, but it's going to take somebody with big bucks, and I suspect grant money's going to be hard to get."