Richmond County Marshal’s Office lays out efforts to address homelessness

AUGUSTA, Ga. (WRDW/WAGT) – The Richmond County Marshal’s Office held its latest data dump Wednesday, which happens once every two months.

Inside the meeting, the marshal’s office laid out a few efforts of how they’ve been engaging with the community recently, but homelessness was the main topic.

Part of the Richmond County Marshal’s Office’s duties includes clean-ups, evictions, citations, and more, which often leads them to interact with the county’s homeless population.

They showcased how a few of their clean-up efforts on Fenwick Street, Boy Scout Road, and Elkdom Court led them to homeless encampments they were eventually able to clean up.

“We are not a homeless shelter, we are not a mental health facility, and so many times those are the two biggest needs,” said Mary Margaret LeRoy, the Kids and Outreach Pastor at Vineyard Church.

While Vineyard Church of Augusta serves more than 300 people a month on average with their weekly food pantry on Mondays, they say people experiencing homelessness nearby have been overwhelming.

“There have been times when I see people in our dumpster, and they’ll be looking for things, and sometimes I’ll go take the trash out over there, and someone has set up a home inside the dumpster,” said LeRoy.

After the Richmond County Marshal’s Office cleaned up Elkdom Court a few weeks ago, they tallied up around 60,000 pounds of belongings in that area.

They say waste is a good indicator that leads to homeless encampments, an issue with increasing visibility.

Corporal Shawn Rhodes with the Richmond County Marshal’s Office presented in front of a tracking map saying, “Where are these encampments moving to? Up over here, where are they going? This is important data to help us get in front of this problem instead of always staying behind it.”

Also in attendance were several city representatives including realty owners, the Savannah Riverkeeper’s office, and the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office.

Lieutenant R. Silas spoke on behalf of where the sheriff’s office is coming from with addressing the issue as a county-wide problem, but also with their latest Washington Road and I-20 initiative.

He says it’s a problem that started when Housing and Urban Development’s hotel housing program eventually exhausted its funds, finding those same homeless individuals back on Washington Road. The program, funded by the CARES Act due to the pandemic, started with $2 million in 2021 but eventually ran out in 2022.

Silas also mentioned that from a “Pit Count” in February of 2023 of the 173 homeless they talked to, 98 percent were not from Augusta.

With Augusta’s available resources, he says the sheriff’s office finds homeless people being brought in by other agencies from cities as far as Macon and Savannah, even sometimes across state lines.

It’s also why a “Sister Duty Agreement” between Augusta and Savannah was canceled.

Silas mentioned the initiative brought in homeless people from Savannah to Augusta starting back during Hurricane Katrina. After Hurricane Ian, he says it’s been too many homeless for Augusta to continue to take in.

To finish off the meeting, the Richmond County Marshal’s Office laid out a county-wide map of where they’ve been addressing homelessness dating back with information as far as 2018.

It shows concentrated clusters of activity in the downtown area and the Washington Road and I-20 corridor. Some stats included pinpointing 178 homeless encampments and about 1,280 arrests from 2020 to March of this year.

The Richmond County Marshal’s Office says the key to addressing this is combining inside city department efforts, as well as other outside organizations, to properly clean up litter, and reaching out to the homeless by directing them to resources like the Salvation Army Center for Hope and CSRA Economic Opportunity Authority’s Marion Barnes Resource Center.

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