Gainsville City Commission Candidates Split Over Soup Kitchen Meal Limit

The city of Gainesville, Florida recently served up a 130-meals-a-day limit to area soup kitchens, forcing providers to cease offering food to the hungry once the facility has reached the absurdly inhumane cut-off.

Fortunately, some of the candidates running in the upcoming Gainesville City Commission elections are voicing their opposition to the restriction, an encouraging sign that this cruel and unjust rule is headed for a change.

To find out where they stood on important local issues, including the soup kitchen meal limit, The Gainesville Sun posed a series of questions to the City Commission candidates. Of the thirteen candidates aiming for the three available positions on the March 15th elections, four of them spoke out against the meal limit, while five believe it should remain (the rest are presumably playing safe politics).

Robert Krames, who is running for the District 2 seat and opposes the 130-meals-a-day rule, offered a thoughtful response in support of autonomy for service providers:

"The city should immediately remove the meal limit. Nonprofits that serve our city's hardest-hit citizens know their own budgetary limitations, and should be allowed to make decisions based on actual need and available resources. The increase in local job loss and foreclosures means this issue reaches far beyond the homeless."

As Krames emphasizes, a broad spectrum of people face the challenges of hunger and poverty on a daily basis. Establishing arbitrary limits on service or creating divisions between groups does nothing to serve the community as a whole, nor does it help "protect the integrity of inner-city neighborhoods and businesses", as candidate Jimmy Harnsberger, who supports the meal limit, would have us believe. If Harnsberger was truly concerned about the "integrity" of Gainesville, you'd think he would insist upon removing a meal limit that denies a basic human right. By the sounds of his reasoning, Harnsberger seems to wish the issue would suddenly be whisked away to someone else's backyard, just as candidate Lauren Poe believes that "the burden of providing services should not be placed solely on the shoulders of downtown Gainesville."

James Ingle, a candidate in favor of eliminating the limit, points out that if those who are hungry are turned away from downtown facilities such as St. Francis House, one of the providers hampered by the rule, their options are extremely limited:

"The meal limit is immoral and ineffective. It is unconscionable in this economy to mandate we turn away the hungry when there is food to spare, and it does nothing to disperse the homeless population from downtown because there are few services for them in other areas of the city."

Of the candidates who support the 130-meals-a-day limitation, Richard Selwach, wins the award for most callous and misinformed about the issue based upon his reply to The Gainesville Sun. Not only does Selwach incorrectly assume that everyone who is in need of assistance from hunger relief programs is a "transient", he uses the archaic and trivializing term "bum" when describing Gainesville's homeless and hungry.  He then goes on to blame Gainesville's churches for "not doing their jobs", despite religious and secular groups alike doing their best to help despite impositions from the city.

Kent Vann, Executive Director of the St. Francis House soup kitchen, is currently working to alter the wording of the 130-meals-a-day ordinance to limit the time food can be served as opposed to the number of people, which could work as a clever compromise. While the City Commission elections are just around the corner, it's vital that we keep up the pressure on the current members to overturn the meal limit. And for those living in Gainesville, be sure to support those candidates (including Ozzy Angulo) that are in favor of repealing the meal limit.

Please sign and share our petition demanding that the city of Gainesville feed all who are hungry.

Photo credit: Valerie Everett