ATLANTIC CITY — Keeping the historic Boardwalk safe and clean is a 24/7 job, and now city workers have a Boardwalk Improvement Group behind them whose work is in full swing, Mayor Marty Small Sr. said during a Monday news conference.
“We’ve brought all the departments of the city together,” said Fire Chief and Emergency Management Coordinator Scott Evans. “The first time — I’ve been here 37 years — in my memory that we have every single department and outside agencies together working from a single playbook.”
Homeless encampments started a spate of Boardwalk fires in recent months, threatening its future as the city embarks on a $26 million Boardwalk rebuilding project.
City workers are not only clearing homeless encampments from under the historic structure, they also are clearing encampments out citywide, and encouraging those living in them to accept help. Outreach workers offer drug and alcohol treatment, social services, alternative housing and medical attention to those “sleeping rough,” city officials said.
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The news conference started at New Jersey Avenue and the Boardwalk, between the Ocean and Hard Rock casinos, where public works employees routinely clear up encampments and Health and Human Services employees and police regularly engage with the homeless.
Watching the news conference was “AC Batman” Curtis Douglass Bordley, who said he chooses to be homeless in the summer in Atlantic City, where he dresses as Batman and accepts donations from people in exchange for photos.
“I’ve had life-and-death encounters,” Bradley said of being attacked while on the street. “I’ve had my jaw wired, been hit in the head with a bike lock.”
But he said he now sleeps where there are cameras and he feels safer.
Atlantic City police are using greatly expanded patrolling on the Boardwalk to keep order this summer, Chief James Sarkos said during the Wednesday evening CitiStat meeting.
Small said a recent Supreme Court decision upholding municipalities’ rights to make sleeping on the street illegal will help. City Council will soon introduce an ordinance to strengthen city laws against sleeping outdoors, Small said.
The reporters took a tour via a city-owned bus to homeless hot spots like Kentucky Avenue between Atlantic and Pacific avenues, Renaissance Plaza at New York and Atlantic avenues, and a forested area between Brigantine Homes and the Atlantic City Expressway’s Brigantine Connector.
A woman living — apparently with the permission of the homeowner — under tarps on a property on Kentucky Avenue declined to be interviewed, and others scattered as the group arrived.
Two women, who identified themselves as Essence and Tanisha, said they didn’t know where they would sleep that night. They said city workers have offered them help getting clean, but were still making money on the streets and felt they could keep themselves safe.
“We’re trying to make a way, find a way, but it’s hard,” said Tanisha. “It’s really up to us to do what we’ve got to do first, we can’t just wait on you all to come help us. In Atlantic City there’s a lot of ways to make money you know? I make money.”
“There were people living here during the winter months. They had fires started and little apartments set up throughout this entire (area), and the trees were so high you couldn’t see it,” said Health and Human Services Director Jarrod Barnes of the encampments near Brigantine Homes. “There was a little pathway they would go through.”
The city has since cut down the trees and brush on several acres of city-owned land there, but now the homeless have moved to privately owned acreage and state-owned property next to it that is still forested.
Much of what the workers do is move people along, Barnes said. They offer drug and alcohol treatment and other help, but often people aren’t ready to accept it.
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“As frustrated as we are at times, we never let them see it,” Barnes said. “We push and push to get them into treatment, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Everyone deserves help.”
Public works crews also have to go into and clean up encampments in small, enclosed spaces such as far under the Boardwalk. So the city got them helmets, chaps, gloves and other protective equipment, said Assistant Public Works Director Ahmid Abdullah Sr.
“We also received the training we needed not to just go underneath the Boardwalk but to be healthy to go underneath the Boardwalk,” Abdullah said.
His workers have found mattresses, refrigerators, microwaves, hookups to electrical power and hypodermic needles, he said.
One campers’ group had found a way to tap into a beer tap at the LandShark Bar & Grill on the beach at Resorts Casino Hotel, workers said.
Barnes said the city is partnering with AtlantiCare, Volunteers of America, Jewish Family Service, Angels in Motion, Rising Tide, NJ Rise and the Hope Exists Foundation to provide outreach and services.
BIG was formed under the leadership of Atlantic City police Sgt. Brian Shapiro and with guidance from former state senator and Superior Court Judge Steven Perskie, policy adviser to Small.
Anyone who knows of a homeless person in need of help, or a homeless encampment, should call Health and Human Services at 609-347-5437, Barnes said.
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