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Mayor promises "a place [for every single person] to lay their head this winter"

A late-in-the-day report from the Bee's homelessness writer, Cynthia Hubert, quotes Mayor Johnson at a press conference at Trinity Cathedral saying "We're going to make sure that every single person in the city of Sacramento has a place to lay their heads this winter."

The press conference is preliminary to a Workshop on Homelessness Issues to be held at City Hall, tomorrow at 2pm.  Here, the 28-page agenda packet concerning the 'workshop,' at the City of Sacramento website.

Joan Burke, Loaves & Fishes' Advocacy Director, sent a missive to the nonprofit's Action Alert database of supporters, titled "City Council Workshop of Homelessness to Discuss SafeGround" trumpeting the workshop and possible subsequent actions by the city council as a SafeGround matter.  She used the term SafeGround five times in the text of her short 160-word email.

Burke wrote, "Your presence will show support for SafeGround. This is an opportunity for City Council members to discuss SafeGround in the context of a path out of homelessness and into traditional housing. It is consonant with our "SafeGround, Homeward Bound," motto and Sacramento Step's Forward's commitment to ending homelessness." [SafeGround was not mentioned in the Bee report. I'm sure reporter Hubert will get thumped for that.]

A quick scan of the Agenda packet showed nothing specific about SafeGround's core homeless folk frolicking at Hawthorn Suites Hotel for four months, again, this winter as they did last year, during which time a homeless man froze to death downtown. [Or, died during extreme cold, I should say. It was early December, 2009, and the nighttime temperature dropped to the mid-20s.]

UPDATE 10/26: Cynthia Hubert's story in today's paper mentions Safeground -- spelling it like that, as one word, no capital-G in the middle -- twice, at the end. One usage has the Mayor saying, "Safeground is just a small component of an overall strategy. At the end of the day, long-term housing is what it's all about." Ooooooo, Joan Burke's gonna be mad! For her, long-term donation-gathering for empire building is solely what it's all about.

Why am I interested in the term safe ground / safeground / SafeGround / Safeground!? Because the Communist contingent of homeless-services providers are using confusion for their polical ends, a la Orwell. See prior posts in this blog "What the hell is 'safe ground,' now?" and "Strategies of Confusion: Duckspeak in Homeless World and the Mayor's Office effort to misinform."
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