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There is an interesting article in the Saturday, February 24, 2007 edition of the Denton Record Chronicle. It seems that the President of a local motorcycle ministry group, Sons of Thunder Motorcycle Ministries, has been cited by the Denton Fire Marshall for allowing a dozen homeless people to stay at a downtown location after a recent warning against this from the fire marshall.

You can find the entire article on the Denton Record Chronicle’s web site here. A few snippets are included below.

“It is the city’s position that we are charged with protecting the lives of our citizens, and that includes any of those individuals that are staying in this homeless shelter,” Cabrales said. [John Cabrales, city spokesman]

“Through inspections, we have determined that the warehouse contains numerous code violations, one of the more egregious being there is only one front door to this facility. Should a fire break out in the middle of the night, there’s a good chance that anyone asleep in the back of the building could perish in that fire,” he said.

… Despite Thursday night’s citation, Carswell [Ben Carswell, president of the Christian ministry ]said he is still reluctant to force the homeless from his shelter, which the ministry originally opened in 2005 to house hurricane evacuees from the Gulf Coast.

Let’s see here, we have a city spokesman saying that it is the city’s responsibility to protect the lives of their citizens. So let’s kick them out of a shelter and make them sleep on the sidewalk. Which should be ‘fine’ since the overnight low in Denton should only reach 57 degrees or so. Or at least the City of Denton would appear to think so.

Oh, and I guess it was ok to allow all those hurricane evacuees from the Gulf Coast to stay there in 2005 because they were not ‘citizens’ of Denton. So the city didn’t necessarily see a need to protect them.

Last month, Denton Fire Marshal Rick Jones ordered the ministry to immediately stop accepting all-night guests after an inspection turned up fire code violations, including a lack of sprinklers and too few exits.

Denton Mayor Perry McNeill said the fire marshal is doing the right thing by looking after people’s safety.

“You can’t selectively enforce laws and ordinances,” McNeill said. “The fire marshal is charged with the protection of the people, and I think all he’s doing is what he’s supposed to be doing in any location in the city.”

If you can’t selectively enforce the laws and ordinances, then why was this not brought to anyone’s attention in 2005 when the hurricane evacuees were there?

Some City Council members have questioned whether a shelter would fit in with the city’s plans for an arts corridor on Hickory Street, but the issue has not formally come before the council.

McNeill said he was unaware of any effort to actively block the ministry’s efforts.

“I have no evidence that that’s true,” he said. “I hope we’re uniformly enforcing our codes and ordinances.”

Ok… Now it is all starting to fit together…

The City of Denton wasn’t worried at all about the safety of hurricane evacuees in 2005. After all, those people were not ‘citizens’ of Denton. So the city really didn’t have to look out for their welfare. But now that there are plans in place to revitalize the area, all these problems start to pop up.

Interesting the way that works, huh?

Homeless shelter cited [Lowell Brown via Denton Record Chronicle]

bikers get fine for trying to do right [hurdd via Biker-Events.com]

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 at 8:48 am and is filed under Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.