[S]HELBURNE — The town’s chief executive is seeking to bring public pressure on officials in charge of Harbor Place motel, an emergency shelter where police say a man recently used a machete to attack a Meals on Wheels volunteer.
Town Manager Joe Colangelo said Tuesday he had been stonewalled by officials at the nonprofit Champlain Housing Trust.
Colangelo gave reporters unsolicited copies of emails Tuesday morning between him and several officials and board members of the trust, which owns Harbor Place. In the messages, Colangelo asked for a meeting with CHT officials to talk about recent incidents at the motel.
“I’ve moved on; I’m not sure why CHT is unable to do the same and just have a regular professional relationship with Shelburne’s Town Manager,” Colangelo wrote to trust officials Tuesday.
Brenda Torpy, executive director of the trust, wrote back a little over an hour later, the emails show.
“There’s a lot of stuff in this message. We’ll discuss it and get back to you,” Torpy wrote. Colangelo then asked when. After not hearing further, he forwarded the message chain to reporters.
Colangelo is rushing Champlain Housing Trust officials, said trust spokesman Chris Donnelly, adding that they will consider sitting down with him.
“We barely got a chance to discuss it with him,” Donnelly said. “We told him we would talk and get back to him, and we will.”
“He didn’t even give us an hour,” Donnelly said.
Colangelo said he gets calls and messages from constituents about Harbor Place constantly and needs to keep an open dialogue in order to give them answers.
“I understand that I’m kind of opening up a wound here, but I can’t do my job for Shelburne,” Colangelo said. He said he has no ill will toward the trust and that the mission of Harbor Place is positive.
Colangelo said two recent incidents are driving his concern, which he identified as Friday’s machete attack and the discovery of a body at the motel Monday morning. Police say foul play is not suspected in the death.
Police visit Harbor Place for a variety of reasons, said Shelburne Acting Police Chief Aaron Noble. He wouldn’t reveal how often police visit, saying the calls ebb and flow.
“It runs from a vehicle lockout, to assaults, to disturbances, to what we dealt with on Friday afternoon, attempted murder,” Noble said.
“Things seem to go in cycles. We’ll be called there several times in a short amount of time, then we will go an extended period of time with no calls there,” he said.
After Friday’s attack, questions were raised about how the housing trust vets its residents. The organization can’t turn people away for simply having a criminal record, Donnelly said. The trust will turn away anyone on the sex offender registry and people who staff or police have good reason to believe are a potential danger to others.
“These are people who are receiving a public benefit, and so there really has to be a cause to deny them that public benefit, otherwise it’s discriminatory,” Donnelly said.
Many of the people who come to live in Harbor Place are referred by state agencies and programs, such as the Department for Children and Families’ Adverse Weather Conditions program, which will find housing for anyone who is homeless if the weather is bad enough.
With last week’s cold snap, more people were applying for shelter, said Deputy DCF Commissioner Sean Brown. Brown said that as a rule, the department does not check backgrounds.
“Our programs and eligibility are based on rules, and those rules do not require a background check for anyone applying for a benefit,” Brown said.
Brown declined to discuss Friday’s attack. He also declined to say if the suspect, Abukar Ibrahim, was referred to Harbor Place by DCF, citing laws protecting the identity of people using public benefits.
