It is hard to say what part of Interfaith Leap’s plan to open a homeless shelter in the middle of Chimayó has the shelter’s potential neighbors most upset.
They are infuriated that Leap signed a property lease with a Chimayó landowner for the new shelter without first telling the community of their plans.
They are petrified that their properties will abut a home for some of the Valley’s more transient and possibly unbalanced members.
And finally, they are exasperated that nothing in Rio Arriba County law prevents Leap from opening the shelter without their approval (see sidebar on page A4).
These sentiments were clearly, and at times loudly, stated in a tense public meeting that pitted about 40 Chimayó residents against Leap Executive Director Ray Chavez and Leap Board member Pastor Terry Brennan Nov. 13 at Leap’s facility in Chimayó.
One Chimayó man, who refused to identify himself, summed up how the community felt about the shelter.
“You are imposing the shelter on us,” he told Leap Board members.
This was one of many statements that followed a brief introduction by Brennan, who began the meeting by laying out his vision for the shelter, which would be located off of State Road 76 just east of Dan’s Liquor. He said the shelter would be modeled on the St. Elizabeth Shelter in Santa Fe and would house homeless men, women and families on a nightly basis. He said the shelter would serve homeless people who were based in Española and that every night and morning they would be transported to and from the shelter using the shelter’s two donated buses.
Brennan envisions the facility as more than a shelter. It would be a place where homeless individuals could secure public housing services, find a job and reconnect with their families. He and Chavez view it as a positive for the community and one that will not only help fringe members of society but regular people.
“Most people today, like it or not, live paycheck to paycheck,” Brennan said.
Residents responded to Brennan’s plea for support by launching into an hour-long attack on those same plans and how the shelter was being pushed onto Chimayó with little regard for what the residents’ thought. The group also presented Leap with a petition in opposition to the shelter that was signed by about 130 individuals.
One man even asked whom he would be able to sue if a homeless individual committed a crime against him or his property while staying at the shelter.
“How do you know they’re not sex offenders?” the man said.
Brennan said he didn’t believe the homeless would cause any problems. They would be given sobriety checks prior to getting on the buses and the shelter would have security guards. Also, he said the homeless would be inside the fenced-in property the entire time they were in Chimayó and if things ever got out of hand then they would call police.
One woman pointed out that no Rio Arriba County Sheriff’s deputies patrol the County overnight and State Police only have three officers assigned to the entire County during the same time period.
“If you call the State Police, you will be lucky if they’re there in two days,” Sarah Gomez said.
Besides safety concerns, the residents were particularly upset that Brennan and Chavez had signed a lease with Chimayó landowner Richard Martinez before ever presenting their plans to the neighborhood.
“Once you got the approval, then you called the meeting,” Chimayó resident Raul Martinez said.
“You are trying to slip it under the rug,” another man said.
Brennan said if Leap had been required to tell the residents and hold a public meeting prior to signing the lease they would have done that — but they weren’t required to do so, so they didn’t.
“It’s not about what is required, it is about what is right,” Chimayó resident Lucy Collier said.
One man asked why Martinez never went door-to-door in the neighborhood and why he wasn’t at the meeting that night. Chavez said he asked Martinez to come to the meeting, and he didn’t know why he wasn’t there.
Martinez said on Tuesday he did not go to the meeting because he knew the response would be exactly what it was — angry.
“I’ve had threats,” he said. “People they want to have a talk with me.”
As for not telling his neighbors about the shelter beforehand:
“I didn’t see any reason for me to tell them,” Martinez said. “I’m not doing the shelter (Leap is).”
Martinez would be an absentee landlord — he plans to move back to California this winter after living the last four years in Chimayó where he restored his family’s property which he said had been abandoned for more than 50 years.
“I thought I was trying to do a good deed,” Martinez said. “If the shelter doesn’t go through, the lease is null and void.”
Several Chimayó residents repeatedly asked what Martinez was getting out of the deal and even claimed he would get a new well and septic system paid by taxpayers since the shelter would be relying on federal grants. Martinez said Leap agreed to install a new well, but that was it.
“I’m not making any money on this,” he said.
Española City Councilor and Leap Board member Eddie Maestas said Leap is renting the three-acre property and a trailer from Martinez for $1 a year for five years.
While the land is cheap, maintaining the shelter could be costly. Brennan said Leap will need to find security guards, provide transportation for the homeless, hire a full-time manager, install a well, among paying other costs such as utilities for the two portable buildings it plans to move there.
Leap Board members would not reveal how much money they had to start the project, but they said it was not much. A lack of funds helped to force the group to abandon their last proposed location in El Llano because it would have cost too much money to survey a piece of land the city had offered to provide for the shelter, Maestas said.
After the meeting, none of the Leap Board members present would say whether the public’s backlash would halt their plans this time as it had two times previously. The Board planned to meet and make a decision by the end of the week, Maestas said. He had said before the meeting that he hoped the shelter would be open in December, now it is uncertain whether it would open at all.
If it does open, the homeless should not expect Chimayó residents to roll out a welcome mat.
“Chimayó is full of maggots. We don’t need no more,” said George Martinez, one of the shelter’s more vocal opponents at the meeting.
Why Chimayó?
George Martinez and other members of the audience stood up at points to emphasize their frustration with what Leap was planning to do. They couldn’t understand why Leap would want to remove the homeless from Española, where there are plenty of services, and move them to Chimayó, where there are few.
“To bring people to Chimayó is ludicrous,” Denise Martinez said.
County Commissioner Elias Coriz lives in Chimayó and is not supportive of the shelter’s proposed location.
“It would be another burden that the community would have to deal with,” Coriz said mentioning the town’s well-documented drug problem.
Coriz said that once the word is out about the shelter, drug users, who already use State Road 76 as a pedestrian way, would start walking up the dangerous road to get to the shelter.
Coriz and other opponents, many of whom are not totally against the idea of a homeless shelter, wonder why the shelter’s proponents just don’t open it in Española.
Several times during the meeting, residents asked Maestas why he didn’t open it on his own property. Maestas responded that he would.
But any shelter based in Española is likely to meet the same opposition that has developed in Chimayó. In fact, this is the third different shelter location proposed by Leap in the past year. Last fall, shelter supporters dropped the idea of a homeless shelter on Española’s west side after the shelter’s neighbors overwhelmingly opposed the plan.
The idea sat dormant until this summer, when Leap proposed placing the shelter on city-owned land just behind the Crisis Center of Northern New Mexico in El Llano. This plan also was dumped after vocal opposition from El Llano residents, and the city’s requirement to survey and assess the property would have cost Leap thousands of dollars.
The move to Chimayó is based on Leap’s convenience more than anything, the Board admitted. Richard Martienz offered the Board his property after he read about their struggles to find an appropriate site for the shelter.
This did not sit well with several residents.
“You are forcing it onto people who don’t want it,” one man said.
After the meeting, Chavez said he is used to the response he had just received. He said the problem of homelessness is in the community even if Chimayó residents didn’t want to admit it.
“Nobody wants anything in their backyard,” he said.