On Monday evening February 8th, there was a meeting of over 70 members of the congregations of JUST Pensacola. We reviewed past successes in other cities. In Tampa, the HOPE coalition spent 5 years working on affordable housing and met with final success when the city set up a $10 million trust fund to assist with affordable housing. In Jacksonville, the ICARE coalition has been working on civil citations. They were met with what seemed to be initial success and then broken promises and dreams. But they have continued working on the process and have managed to have the state attorney there get voted out of office when her opponent ran on the platform of increased use of civil citations.
JUST Pensacola had its listening tour with house meetings in each congregation. Ours was over a month ago. Out of that listening process among all the congregations, two areas of concern were identified for further concern and action. They are affordable housing and follow up for civil citations which reaped us commitments from the state attorney and sheriff last year. We have now entered the research and study phase of the process. In the case of civil citations, we will be following up with meet-ings with the state attorney and the sheriff to find out how things are going. Those meetings will take place in March. This is to prepare for a strategy meeting in April and a Nehemiah Action in May.
At this point JUST Pensacola is in the process of finding and hiring a new director. Aida Bone, who has been the organizer for us for the last two years has had to move to accommodate her husband’s em-ployment. The Rev. Kammy Young is filling in temporarily until a new organizer can be found. Due to this disruption, we will not undertake the new project of affordable housing until later in the year.
During this “pause,” we will continue to work to grow our network with more members and more congre-gations and begin individual conversations among ourselves and with our neighbors about affordable housing problems. If you committed to donate last year and have not yet done that, this is a good time to take care of that obligation.
We then turned to questions we would like to pose to our state attorney at our meeting in March. Among the questions were 1) Do we have the commitments in writing? 2) What was the status of the state attorney’s progress when you took over with regard to civil citations? 2) What steps have you tak-en to make changes? 4) What sort of timetable do you project for seeing results? 5) Are we following the policies and procedures set out in the law? 6) When will the next meeting of the steering committee for use of civil citations be held? 7) Are there enough diversion programs in place, and are kids given help in negotiating the processes? 8) If civil citation is not used when it could be, is the officer required to disclose why it was not used? 9) If a child who is eligible for civil citation is instead arrested, is there a process for reversal? 10) Are officers, students and teachers trained in de-escalation?
Dates to Remember:
Meetings with State Attorney and Sheriff are to be arranged.
April 12, 2021 – Rally and strategy meeting
May 3, 2021 – Nehemiah Action
June 14, 2021 – Celebration for another year of JUST Pensacola
For questions contact Paula Montgomery.