the HEALTH BOARD, the picnic and a bunch of nutters. [guest starring valerie luthor king jnr] part I

[let me disclaim this post and say that nothing mentioned here is official ‘The Simple Way’ stance on these issues but rather my personal reflections and experiences]

so the situation is a little complex for those outside of the loop but in a nut shell, very simplistically as i see it, there are two issues [and you can see our well worded response, as The Simple Way, here.]:

the first was yesterday which was the health department passing some new regulation(s) related to serving food to people on the streets and the second was mayor Nutter of Philadelphia [actual name, somewhat unfortunate, unless you’re a nearby journalist or angry activist] advocating the banning of public feeding specifically in two places [which coincidentally just happen to be two major tourist spots as we head into tourist season, one of which is the site of a new museum which is about to open] [and by ‘coincidentally’ i mean ‘not coincidentally’]

now my beautiful wife Valerie was at the public meeting last week which was open to the public to receive comment on the health board stuff and it seems like that is where the mess happened because they only let 40 people in at a time and she waited 2 and a half hours and didn’t get in – so a lot of people clearly were not able to be heard the way they were expecting to.

but, as i understood it from the explanation given at the beginning of yesterday’s meeting, this meeting was public in terms of the public being able to sit in, but there was not space for comment from them – this was simply a board meeting where they looked over the proposed changes to the regulations based on public comment.

and [until the meeting was horribly interrupted and then pretty much shut down by the eloquence of the occupy philly members – see part III] from what i heard [realising that what they say and put into regulation and how those regulations are acted out can be two very different things] a lot of it made sense to me and seemed to be a really good thing.

the gist of the regulations are not about stopping outside feeding of people [as green shirt man shouted at one point] but rather trying to ensure that all food served to people on the streets of Philadelphia is prepared and served in a healthy fashion. there were one or two small things i wasn’t sure about in terms of what they shared, but for the most part it really seemed like they were doing what they could to make it easy enough and cost effective enough to serve food well to people on the streets.

for example, they are wanting one certified trained person to be there every time food is given out, but they are offering the training free of charge, at their venue or at the organisation/group’s venue that is giving out the food and even offered to train trainers so groups/organisations can train their own people. they asked for food to be prepared within four hours of being handed out. they backed off on the previous regulation which basically didn’t allow for someone to prepare food in their own kitchen and take it out. and some other stuff.

they worked through a 14 page document and i really didn’t hear any huge alarm bells in terms of things they were trying to pass that would make it specifically harder to serve food to the homeless and call me a traditionalist, but i don’t think it is the worst thing in the world to put things in place to try and make food given out regularly more safe and healthy for those receiving it.

as mentioned, the meeting was interrupted and so we never got to hear the end of it as the board [after putting up with a LOT of disturbance, some really rude and offensive, to me at least] left and continued somewhere else, which was a pity for those of us who were trying to hear what they were deciding upon.

for the part about the picnic, read here…