A ceremonial groundbreaking in North Scituate on Jan. 29 marked an important milestone in a lengthy and complicated process for the Rhode Island State Police, who have been trying for at least two years to build a new, state-of-the-art headquarters. Slated for completion in less than 24 months, the 56,384-square foot facility will house administrative, detective and uniform personnel, according to a statement released by the state police last week.
Construction of the headquarters, which will include a 911 call center, is likely to support nearly 100 jobs.
But the lofty plans for the facility haven't been met with unanimous excitement. Advocates for the homeless in Rhode Island are ambivalent about the process leading to the new police facility.
The new headquarters will be downsized from the initial proposals, which called for them to be located in Cranston on property that earlier housed Welcome Arnold, the state's largest homeless shelter. The state spent $3.8 million in March of 2007 to tear down the shelter, before deciding first to scale back on the police project and then to relocate the headquarters to North Scituate.
Describing the $3.8 million as "wasted" money, Jim Ryczek, executive director of the Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless, said though the state police "deserve their barracks," the Welcome Arnold issue needed "better planning."
"With that kind of money, we could have housed everyone who had been displaced (by the shelter's closing) and then some," he said.
The demolition of Welcome Arnold has been a "point of contention" between the state government and local advocates for the homeless, Ryczek said, adding that the former shelter housed 100 beds available on a "night-to-night" basis.
One of Ryczek's main concerns is that advocates weren't included in the planning process, he said. According to him, it was only after advocates "invited themselves to the table," proposing a plan to care for those displaced by the shelter's closing, that the state took notice.
A state police official declined to comment on the issues surrounding Welcome Arnold's demolition and directed inquiries to the governor's office. Representatives of the governor's office could not be reached for comment for this article.
In November 2007, Gov. Donald Carcieri '65 told the Providence Journal that "the state took the advice of the homeless advocates. … The state replaced every single bed that was available at the Welcome Arnold shelter with new beds in other, smaller facilities. In fact, we even added some beds."
But Ryczek said the replacement of beds didn't necessarily help the nearly 200 people his coalition estimates used Welcome Arnold each month. He said it is "naive" to think that scattering an equivalent number of beds in other night-to-night shelters was the same as providing for those who used Arnold's services.
Two years later, the need for those services continues to grow. In the last 18 months, the number of homeless Rhode Islanders has nearly doubled from 571 to 1,080, according to data released by the coalition.
Moreover, since the demolition of Welcome Arnold, local advocates have realized that night-to-night shelters may not be the best way to support the state's homeless. Ryczek said that by exploring new programs the coalition has realized that it would "never want to reopen a facility" like Welcome Arnold.
Shelters are only effective at "protecting people from freezing to death," he said, adding that closing down large shelters and replacing them with subsidies like Housing First or the Neighborhood Opportunities Program is more cost-effective.
