Fresh Loaf

Anita Beaty is right about one thing: City officials would love to shut down her enormous shelter at the corner of Peachtree and Pine streets.

Yesterday morning, the city cut off the water service to the former warehouse building occupied by Beaty’s Task Force for the Homeless. By evening, however, a judge had ordered the water turned back on. But unless Beaty is able to pay off a $160,000 water bill, the shelter may soon be forced to close down for good.

Anita Beaty

“It’s very serious right now,” says former Atlanta Councilwoman Myrtle Davis, who serves on the Task Force’s board of directors. “This is part of a concerted effort by the city to shut us down.”

Arguably so, but that doesn’t change the apparent fact that the Task Force owes $160,000 in outstanding water bills. Fulton County Superior Court Judge T. Jackson Bedford ordered the shelter to come up with $6,000 by Friday and another $3,000 or so by next Wednesday, and to develop a reasonable plan for paying off the rest of the bill.

“If they miss either payment, the water goes back off,” says Debi Starnes, another former councilwoman who now serves as Mayor Franklin’s Homeless Czarina.

(Photo by Joeff Davis)

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Mayor Shirley Franklin was joined by Police Chief Richard Pennington, Councilwoman-turned-Homeless Czar Debi Starnes and a cast of dozens Wednesday to kick off the city’s latest effort to put a stop to rampant downtown panhandling.

Right away, this program seems to benefit from greater support from and coordination with the business community. And its clever slogan, “Give change that makes sense,” is sure to appeal to visitors and residents already reluctant to hand their coinage over to aggressive beggars.

Part of the initiative is a citywide marketing campaign whose goal is to get people to quit giving money to folks who accost them for spare change. There’s even a new website, stoppanhandlingatlanta.com, that directs the generous among us to instead give donations to local social service agencies via the United Way’s Regional Commission on Homelessness.

Starnes put it succinctly: “We want people to understand the difference between the homeless and hustlers.”

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