A church in the Blenman-Elm neighborhood is hearing from a law firm about the congregation's services for indigent guests.
Grace St. Paul's Episcopal Church has been assisting low-income residents for more than two decades, but more recently, there has been a large increase in the number of guests seeking assistance, according to Rev. Steve Keplinger, the rector at the facility.
“We've actually been providing services for 25 years, but in the last two or three years, our numbers have just really increased. They've more than doubled over that time period, because of the stress in Tucson with not a lot of housing available for folks," says Keplinger.
In addition to those numbers, the church is also facing a challenge by way of residents who are not happy with some the more than 100 people who show up for assistance every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at the church.
There have been reports of fires set in the neighborhood, yelling, littering, and defecation in the community which is located northeast of the University of Arizona and close to the Arizona Inn.
Rev. Keplinger says the church and its lawyers have met the attorney representing unnamed residents who want the church to move the programs to a park or another off-site location.
"The individual neighbors that are concerned at this point, the only thing that they say we can possibly do to make them happy is to totally shut down or move what we do to some other location outside of the neighborhood," he says.
Rev. Keplinger says the church wants to be a good neighbor.
It has people who canvass the block to pick up litter when services have finished, and bathrooms won't just be open when the ministry programs are open for business.
"Recently, we decided with them that we would leave restrooms open 7/24 on the [church] campus. We talked about whether that would encourage more people to be here. But the idea was to to avoid defecation in the neighborhood, etc so we decided to open the bathrooms with their request," Keplinger adds.
However, shifting to another site is a different matter.
"With the four-pronged ministry that we're doing and the people that are here, we cannot come up with a physical way to make that happen. We've spent many years setting up this system so that we had a place here on campus to have a shower ministry and be able to do social services and be able to use all of the church facilities to do this."
Rev. Keplinger says the situations with unhoused populations, the poor and other needy residents should be part of a dedicated local, state and national conversation.
"The systemic issues that have created this level of poverty and this inability to care for people with mental health issues and all of the corresponding things have just made this so difficult for everyone, and that's why the numbers have increased so much. We really have been attempting to deal with those systemic issues on a broader basis," he says.
"And we would love to get to the place where we could just shut down, where we didn't need to be caring for anybody any more but unfortunately, it's just doubled over the last couple of years."
AZPM reached out to the law firm about this issue but a representative said Friday morning that the attorney is traveling and away from his office, but will speak to us next week.
