City Council Retreat: Fighting Poverty

from WSAV

Community Reporter Paul Rea is at the retreat this week with City Council leaders.

As a veil of fog began to lift over the Historic Jekyll Island Club, Savannah City Council began working strategies to lift the oppressive cloud of poverty that shrouds close to 30,000 of the city’s 128,500 residents.

The morning session of the council’s second retreat day began with an overview of where Savannah’s poor live. City Manager Michael Brown says many of them, almost 12,500 of them are living in government housing or rent assisted Section 8. Those are the families the city has an easier time finding and helping. Raising the rest to a higher economic level is a long term goal of both city staff and leaders.

The process starts with the expansion of the Step Up Poverty Initiative “We are dealing with hundreds of people in Savannah now,” Brown says, “we must see if we can expand that to the 28,000.”

Staff says so far the Initiative is providing direct energy assistance to the “working poor” helping pay for utilities. They are also offering financial and workplace education, teaching the value of banking and savings as well as job skills and readiness education.

Brown’s plan would use existing community centers in several neighborhoods as a one stop shop for all available government services, health, mental health, housing and other forms of assistance. It will take the cooperation of state and federal agencies something Brown says is slow in coming.

Mayor Otis Johnson volunteered to be Brown’s “big stick” in convincing those agencies to get on board. Saying he had nothing to lose because his political life is over in four years, Johnson said “Let me be the bad guy out there stepping on toes I’m willing to do that.”