JONESBORO -- City and county officials will convert a former nursing home into a homeless shelter and a facility to serve as a mental-health crisis center, Mayor Harold Perrin said Thursday.
It's the first time the Craighead County town of 71,551 has had a shelter for the homeless in more than 20 years, the mayor said.
The facility will be in the 24,700-square-foot former 83-bed Ridgecrest Health Care nursing home along Arkansas 141 on the northern edge of town. Reliance Health Care Inc. donated the building to the city, Perrin said.
"This is a blessed day for the city of Jonesboro," the mayor said. "This is the most loving and benevolent city I've ever lived in."
The project is a collaboration between the city and a private church-based organization. Perrin said the city created a commission to study homelessness in Jonesboro and to find a suitable shelter two years ago.
Murl Smith, director of the nonprofit Homeless Ministries of Jonesboro LLC, also was looking for a shelter, and the organization originally bought land in south Jonesboro for a facility. But the cost of providing water and sewer to the property was too much, Smith said, and the idea was stalled.
When he heard the city was looking for a shelter, he and Perrin met.
"Wheels got to rolling," Smith said of the collaborative effort.
Perrin said he was at a Nettleton High School football game when he received a call about the donation from Reliance Health Care.
"I was sitting in front of another member [of the homeless committee]," Perrin said. "He asked me what the call was about. I told him, 'You're not going to believe this, but we got the building free.' I began tearing up there."
Craighead County Sheriff Marty Boyd also was looking for a building to treat mentally ill people whom law enforcement officers come in contact with while on duty. He realized he, Smith and Perrin were all looking at the same building.
"This goes hand in hand on so many levels," Boyd said of the proposed facility.
Boyd advocated for Craighead County to be a site when Gov. Asa Hutchinson granted $1.6 million to four host sites under Arkansas Act 423 of 2017, which called to increase effectiveness of monitoring probationers and parolees and to help those with mental impairments.
The governor also chose "crisis stabilization units" in Pulaski, Sebastian and Washington counties in August.
Boyd said the former nursing home will include a 16-bed unit to assess and treat mentally ill patients. The unit will be separate from the homeless shelter.
Those staying at the facility will not be charged with a crime, the sheriff said.
"They would be people our officers come in contact with on the streets," he said. "They could be a danger to themselves or to others. Now, our only solution is to put them in jail.
"The jail is a catch-all," he said. "That will change. We will no longer be treating mental illness as a crime."
Perrin said he doesn't know when the facility will open. Workers must renovate the former nursing home, which closed in 2015 when it moved to a new location on U.S. 49.
State Desk on 09/29/2017