Clarification: 9:23 a.m., Aug. 23, 2024. The headline was updated to clarify that the meeting was an informational meeting and a vote has not occurred on the project.
Some of Glynn County’s most respected leaders appeared at Tuesday’s county commission meeting intent on breaking the bureaucratic logjams preventing the construction of more shelters for the area’s vulnerable and unhoused.
The president of the Sea Island Company and the head of the Community Foundation introduced a new fund to raise money for housing for the working poor, veterans and vulnerable women and their children. They described the urgent need in Glynn County for help. But the meeting ended without a vote on zoning changes needed to start building the first of those projects: the shelter that the local nonprofit Saved by Grace wants to erect on a four-acre lot at 5140 Blythe Island Highway.
Instead, commissioners told the community leaders that they needed to see more support from surrounding property owners before the elected leaders would sign off on the plan to aid the vulnerable communities.
“I believe the location is not going to be acceptable to the people that live around (there). I told you then and I still believe that if y’all want that location, you’ve got to convince the neighbors that it’s good,” said Wayne Neal, the chairman of the Glynn County Board of Commissioners.
The pushback from the commissioners is the latest roadblock that housing advocates have experienced in their efforts to expand services for low-income and vulnerable members of the county.
The Salvation Army is the only organization officially offering overnight services in Glynn County. There is a small-scale shelter that operates for women, as well as shelters for children, though there is not a place where families can go who may be involved in domestic situations. They often reside in extended stay hotels.
The fund unveiled by Coastal Georgia Community Foundation CEO Keeva Kase is called Under One Roof, and it has a goal of raising $10 million to support solutions to housing insecurity in Glynn County. Donors have already committed $6 million.
The initiative has three benchmarks to measure its effectiveness: obtaining approval for the Saved By Grace special use permit, establishing housing for veterans at Veterans Village, and providing housing for women with young children at the old Brunswick train station.
Saved by Grace, which wants to build a shelter for men who are gainfully employed but can not afford rent in Glynn County, has received more than $2 million in funding from private donors.
Business leaders like Scott Steilen, the President and CEO of Sea Island Company which has employed a number of Saved By Grace clients, explained that the fund’s subsidies are designed to help those who “need a hand up, not a handout.”
Saved by Grace is run by Donna Howard and Maria Gamble, who feel a Christian mission to help the homeless. They have spent months trying to fill the gap of services in Glynn County by building an overnight shelter for men. Their efforts have overlapped with blowback from Brunswick’s downtown business establishment about the location of homeless shelters there.
Back in June, the Mainland Planning Commission approved a permit for Saved by Grace with the condition that its building for an overnight shelter for working poor men would not be open during the day. It passed with a 4-2-1 vote.
County commissioners, however, put off a vote soon afterward about the zoning approval, citing the opposition of property owners near Saved By Grace’s proposed location.
In the background, senior community leaders had been finalizing the fund that would have private money solve the problem that public leaders have neglected.
On Aug. 20, the Glynn County Board of Commissioners met to hear Steilen, Kase and Alan Akridge, the senior pastor of St Mark’s Episcopal Church and the Saved by Grace leaders describe their proposed solutions.
“As a fund of the Communities of Coastal Georgia Foundation, the goal of Under One Roof is to manage donations and allocate funds to local nonprofits ensuring effective support for those facing housing and security, particularly those who are disproportionately underserved, including women and children,” said Kase with Communities of Coastal Georgia Foundation.
Pastor Akridge pointed out the underlying issues that cause housing instability.
“They lack only the family, educational, legal and religious connections that everyone in this room takes for granted. This is bad enough when it’s an able-bodied young man who loses his job because his transmission went out and he couldn’t pay his rent and got evicted,” Akridge told commissioners. “It’s even worse when that same person happens to have fought for our country. But it’s worst of all when it’s a mom trying to hold down two jobs with primary grandchildren.”
Howard, executive director of Saved By Grace, urged the Board of Commissioners to consider allowing the nonprofit to build on its proposed property, which currently has a decommissioned church on its premises.
Howard reiterated that the facility would have 24/7 security with a secured privacy fence, along with conceding day services and any walk-in services in favor of a new mobile outreach program that will assist men with helping secure legal documents, veterans benefits, Social Security benefits and other supportive services.
She also added that the nonprofit has considered other locations, but the Blythe Island property was most suitable for clients of the shelter, due to the easier access for work, as well as is seclusion from neighbors.
“The property offers a significant wooded buffer to the neighborhood behind it. An eight-foot privacy fence will also divide the property from the existing neighborhood. The price is right, and it’s immediately available. The seller is willing and very compassionate,” she told the commissioners.
The path forward
District 5 Commissioner Allen Booker expressed his support for the Saved By Grace facility, telling his fellow commissioners that the upside to the shelter should overcome any potential unease from adjoining property owners.
Booker spoke of the working men who would take advantage of Saved by Grace: “I would rather have them in this program than under the overpass or in one of the encampments in the woods where they’re desperate.”
Booker, however, was in the minority. Neal and At-Large Post 2 Commissioner Walter Rafolski led the opposition to granting the zoning change for Saved by Grace.
Rafolski dismissed letters of support brought by the shelter advocates, saying they did not encompass the attitudes of those who live in the neighborhoods adjacent to the proposed facility.
“You said there was community support, I haven’t seen that. I know of a petition against it with over 700 signatures. We saw, I don’t know, maybe 20-30, emails, and like Wayne said, a lot of them look like they were cut and paste. So, and I’m like Wayne, I voted when I when I ran, mine was to secure the safe neighborhoods and property values”, said Rafolski. “So if, if you can sell this to the neighborhood, I might be in support, but as it is now, I’ve had too many calls against it, and I agree that their mission is good. I mean, I live in River Ridge. I live behind where they were in the beginning, there was issues, but as it went, as time went on, there weren’t any. So, just to be truthful.”
At the meeting, Neal asked residents from the surrounding communities to submit questions and considerations, and if those conditions were met, whether it would change their minds.
The Board of Commissioners has not set a date for voting on the special use permit for Saved by Grace. If it is approved, construction is expected to last between six and nine months.
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