Tick Tock Sheptock

The Committee to Save Franklin Shelter will host a MEETING TO "RECALL" (OUST) DC MAYOR ADRIAN FENTY The citizens of Washington, DC have more than a few reasons to want Mayor Fenty to be FORCIBLY removed from office early. His litany of offenses includes: 1 -- the fact that he is a flip-flop who pretended to care for the poor and homeless and has now been bought and paid for by the developers. 2 -- the fact that he ran on a platform of transparency and accountability and now heads a government that is plagued with scandals and is extremely secretive. (The amount of money lost during his term due to scandals exceeds the amount of money that has been cut from social services within the same time frame. The government could afford to care for the poor if we could get these scandals under control.) 3 -- his many broken promises which include: the promise to keep Franklin School Shelter open as a shelter, the promise to open ...

In Washington, DC homeless advocates tend to align their activities with the annual budgetary cycle. They know that the mayor began to formulate the budget for Fiscal Year 2011 in January 2010 and that there will be budget hearings from February to May. For these several months, advocates for the poor and homeless will do their best to have a sufficient amount of tax revenue put into the budget for the specific populations that they serve. As budgets are cut in the middle of the present fiscal year, many of the same people will return to City Hall to demand that those budget cuts be restored and that the social safety net be preserved. This has been the method to the madness for quite some time. However, that is beginning to change. The safety net is becoming a thing of the past. As indicated in a previous article of mine, DC Government tried to cut the budget for homeless services by 30% a few months ago. But, when Catholic Charities threatened to cease its shelter operations ...