MORGANTOWN — Frustration. Anger. Acknowledgement that there are no ready or easy solutions.
Less than 48 hours after 23-year-old Rebecca Colgan overdosed and died at the now mostly abandoned Diamond Village homeless encampment, the second meeting of Morgantown City Council’s Special Committee on Addressing Unsheltered Homelessness was held.
Comments from Micah Mason-Mileto, a volunteer at the encampment, opened the session and set the emotional tone for the first portion of the meeting.
“I can’t call you guys murderers, but I can definitely say that was your fault,” Mason-Mileto said of the death, referencing the city’s efforts to clear the encampment, which has been on city property in lower Greenmont since mid-July. It was previously located on a piece of adjacent private property.
Milan Puskar Health Right Executive Director Laura Jones said the rate of overdose has increased by 38% in West Virginia during the ongoing pandemic.
Scattering the unhoused across the city will only lead to more overdose deaths, Peer Recovery Coach Dani Ludwig added. It was previously reported that by mid-summer, nearly four dozen people had been administered Narcan for opioid overdose at the encampment, where the drug was kept on ready supply.
Deputy Mayor Rachel Fetty said the city’s goal is to get people into housing. She also recalled that the encampment’s move onto city property came with a list of demands.
“What seemed to happen was the camp became established on city property against the wishes of the city as a mechanism to try to force the city into a position to have to do something we’re not equipped to do,” Fetty said. “This committee’s purpose is to help us figure out what we have the capacity to do.”
The city laid out a plan to address the encampment in August. It registered 25 inhabitants of Diamond Village and began the effort to provide housing offers to those individuals. Thus far, eight have been housed, according to the city. Many others simply left the camp, are incarcerated or haven’t met with case workers.
On Oct. 20, city officials, including police officers, told unregistered individuals at the site that they needed to find other arrangements. Since then, numbers at the camp have dwindled to a single individual as of Tuesday evening, according to Liira Raines, who has worked closely with the encampment.
While the city’s special committee wasn’t formed specifically to address Diamond Village, it was the focus of Thursday’s meeting. The discussion highlighted the fact that the city is engaged in a highly complex, life-and-death issue about which there currently appear to be far more questions than answers.
“Absolutely, making the camp go away doesn’t make the problem go away,” Mayor and Committee Chair Ron Dulaney said, explaining that the city has been involved in exploring how best to address the issue since June. “So here we are four months later, five months later, and we’re kind of in the same place that we were then.”
Thursday’s meeting ended with an agreement that the committee participants would divide into working groups in order to address specific issues.
