Calling it “the elephant in the room,” Muterspaw said 75 percent of the city’s homeless are not from Middletown.
“They are from other cities, counties and states. Nobody knows more than our officers, who deal with it daily,” he wrote.
He praised the various nonprofit organizations that help the homeless in the city.
Mutterspaw said the city has “a huge problem with other cities (they know who they are), dumping homeless people here because they don’t want them in their city. Many times our officers respond to a person wandering around downtown only to find they were given a voucher for a cab from another city and sent here, even though they have never been to Middletown. Others are brought here by other cities police agencies and dumped in front of the Hope House or bus station, even late at night when they are closed.”
In his post, Muterspaw recounted a recent incident in which a Brown County woman who had been in an area hospital the day before, but was given a cab voucher and dropped in front of the MidPointe Library. He said the woman had never been to Middletown before and had no money and no place to go here.
“People are not objects, you can’t just discard them because you think they make your community look bad. I wish some cities would take care of their own as well as we take care of their own,” he wrote.
Muterspaw wrote, “We have made incredible strides as a city the last 5-6 years. This trend of dumping homeless people in Middletown has to stop. Cities should do everything they can to help them, not discard them.”
Muterspaw and City Manager Doug Adkins were unavailable for comment today.
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