Hillary Seeger: Should local homeless people be first option for State School?

To The Daily Sun,

On the heels of news that LRGH has furloughed 600 employees, comes a possible proposal from the state to house the homeless, Covid-19-positive patients from Manchester and Nashua in a building on the State School property in Laconia. I can’t be the only one who thinks that there are myriad reasons why this is not a good idea. Shall we review?

In the middle of a pandemic and an opioid epidemic do we really want to increase the homeless population by bringing, from the large cities in our state, an influx of residents, many of whom suffer from mental illness and substance abuse issues? Don’t we have enough people with those same issues who we are barely able to take care of? How long is the wait for subsidized housing? Where are they supposed to go should they decide to stay? The parks? The woods? The WOW Trail? Where? And who’s to take care of them?

The shelves in our food pantries can’t keep up with the demand. Our hospital and health care systems are already hemorrhaging money and can’t even take care of the daily and chronic patients they have now.

This is not an unkind not in my backyard response. If the state wants to use that building to house Covid-19 homeless patients, I’m sure we can use those 50 beds to house the at least 50 homeless people in Belknap County who are sure to contract it. Shouldn’t they have that option first?

Hillary Seeger

Alexandria