Ocean County commissioners to end 14-year opposition to a Homelessness Trust Fund

TOMS RIVER - After more than a decade of resistance to the concept, the all-Republican Ocean County Board of Commissioners is expected to establish a Homelessness Trust Fund as soon as next month, Commissioner Gary Quinn said Wednesday.

Under a 2009 state law that was last amended in 2019, counties may impose a $3 to $5 surcharge on each document recorded in their county clerk’s offices for the purpose of funding a homelessness housing grant program. Some New Jersey counties have reported revenues of up to $450,000 each year from the trust fund, while smaller counties have generated about $50,000 per year.

The grant program can be used to construct housing projects for the homeless or for those at risk of becoming homeless, provide rental assistance vouchers or subsidies for residents in affordable housing units, fund supportive services for the homeless or services to prevent homelessness. A $5 surcharge would mean that a percentage of the revenue would also be used for local warming shelters in the winter months.

Previously, the county’s governing body had opposed implementing its own program on ideological grounds — arguing that the surcharge was tantamount to levying a new tax on the public.

The news from the commissioners comes just days after the Asbury Park Press reported that the county Board of Social Services last year paid $1.5 million to the estate of a 29-year-old homeless woman who was murdered in a Seaside Heights motel room the agency had placed her in 2021.

Alecia Perreault, 89 pounds and disabled from rheumatoid arthritis, had begged her social worker to move her from the crime-ridden Offshore Motel, according to emails between them which were obtained by the Press.

Related: Ocean County homeless 'dehumanized' living among grime, crime and bugs in motels

Ocean County’s government has been criticized for decades over not having a full-time shelter or transitional housing facility for the homeless. On average, about 114 people are placed in some form of emergency housing each night — mainly low-budget motels — that the county government contracts with. Between 2016 and 2021, that amounted to a cost of millions of dollars in taxpayer money.

Longtime Commissioner Jack Kelly said Wednesday he would now support creation of a Homelessness Trust Fund after he received assurances from his colleagues that the fund would not be used to build a county-operated homeless shelter. However, Kelly said he has no objection if the fund were to be used to support a privately-run shelter in the future, as long as a reputable charity took ownership and operated it.

“We can donate money to somebody else that wants to build one,” Kelly said, speaking after an agenda session of the commission on Wednesday.

During a budget presentation in February, Kelly had defended the use of motels to shelter the county’s homeless, saying: “We do take care of the homeless and we take care of them in a very responsible way.”

That comment outraged Perreault’s mother, Rachel Lopez, and frustrated homeless advocates throughout Ocean County. Jim Lowney, development and communications manager for Family Promise of the Jersey Shore, which provides assistance to local homeless families, is now a fixture at weekly commission meetings.

Later, Kelly said he had been unaware Social Services had paid out a settlement to the Perreault estate, but that he stood by his initial comment.

Related: 'I don't feel safe': Ocean County ignored slain homeless woman's pleas; paid estate $1.5M

Paul Hulse, whose charity Just Believe operates a warming center in Toms River and is building a transitional home in Little Egg Harbor for men, particularly military veterans, who are trying to overcome addiction, said that any additional revenue to aid the county’s homeless was welcomed but he wants details. The proposed trust fund is still a work in progress by Commissioner Barbara Jo Crea, who is the commission’s principal liaison to the semiautonomous Board of Social Services.

Quinn said Wednesday that Crea hopes to bring a proposal before her fellow commissioners sometime in June.

More than half of New Jersey’s 21 counties have established trust funds, including Bergen, Camden, Cape May, Cumberland, Essex, Hudson, Mercer, Middlesex, Passaic, Somerset and Union.

“I just feel they’re behind the times,” Hulse said of the commissioners. “But I applaud them for continuing to move in the direction of solutions. Government doesn’t move as fast as Just Believe.”

Hulse said the commissioners have been vocal — both in private and in public — in their support for his organization and for others helping the homeless in Ocean County, but he insists that only government has the power to effect real change on this issue.

“Everybody tells us what a great job we’re doing,” Hulse said. “We don’t want the credit, we want cash. Without the funding, we can’t do more.”

Contact Asbury Park Press reporter Erik Larsen at elarsen@gannettnj.com.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Ocean County to start grant program for housing NJ homeless