PHILADELPHIA — In the wake of a controversy about how Norristown, Pennsylvania, officials are treating people in homeless encampments, a small and quiet group of protesters gathered at a borough council meeting Tuesday night.
Some of them, subdued but pointed, were critical of Council President Thomas Lepera, who has told people he’d planned to bus individuals living homeless to Villanova University. The campus is the workplace of an anti-homelessness faculty member who said Lepera had cursed and castigated her during a brief meeting in late May to discuss some 20 encampments in Norristown.
Lepera has denied being belligerent with Stephanie Sena, an anti-poverty fellow at the university’s Charles Widger School of Law, who’s been working on behalf of an estimated 160 people experiencing homelessness in Norristown.
Sena, who has said that Norristown officials have considered “sweeping” by late June all those living homeless in the borough, also runs a homeless shelter in Upper Darby. The clear-out was to coincide with one being planned by PECO, which said it was removing “hazardous waste,” according to officials. An encampment of 12 people currently live on a patch of the utility’s property in Norristown.
On Tuesday night, Lepera said his position has been “misrepresented,” and that he never expressed a desire to bus people who are un-housed to Villanova. He added that Norristown officials have not considered a full-borough sweep of those who are homeless.
Busing indigent people without homes would be “immoral,” Lepera told a group of around 50 community members and anti-poverty advocates in the council’s meeting room. “I’m not trying to start a war with poor people,” he said. “I’m not anti-homeless.”
He added that his true intention was to place “myself and friends on buses” and travel to Villanova as a protest to “see how long it’d be” before police arrested them.
“He’s lying,” said Mike Kingsley, a Norristown minister, in an interview on Monday. “He flat out told me several times that he’s busing the homeless, and he told other politicians, too.
“Him saying he never said it is completely ridiculous.”
Kingsley is director of the Coalition to Save Lives, a nonprofit that does outreach work among un-housed people nationwide. He was at the meeting Tuesday night.
Last week, Kingsley said Lepera told him he wants to be the “Norristown Gov. [Greg] Abbott” of Texas, who has bused immigrants from the southern border to Philadelphia and other cities.
Both Sena and Eric Tars, legal director of the Washington, D.C.-based National Homelessness Law Center, said Lepera told them about busing people living homeless. And they referenced a GIF that had been posted on Lepera’s Facebook page by State Rep. Greg Marcus Scott (D., Norristown) that depicted a person lying in a moving bus from the waist up, with their legs being dragged along the ground. The image, now deleted, seemed to underscore a hostile attitude toward those who are homeless, Sena and Tars said.
During the Tuesday night meeting, Jane Pekol, 36, of Norristown, who works in a local frame shop, referenced the busing and told Lepera, “The bonds of trust have been broken.”
She later said she was “horrified” to hear about the busing plan. “If it were me, I would resign,” she said about Lepera. “He’s not solving housing.”
Defending the council president, John Fennell, 42, of Norristown, and the chief of staff for state Rep. Napoleon Nelson (D., Montgomery County), said outside the meeting, “Tommy’s a good guy. He shouldn’t have said what he said. But his frustration has boiled over with the homelessness issue. Mine has, too.”
Fennell, who stressed that he was not speaking for Nelson, said homelessness shouldn’t be the exclusive province of Norristown, and that there are more than 60 municipalities in Montgomery County that should be helping those who are un-housed. He added that many people in town, “though progressive,” are fed up with incidents like the one he endured, in which a bucket of feces from an encampment was dumped on his property.
On May 25, the Community Justice Project (CJP), a Harrisburg-based nonprofit legal aid program that represents low-income Pennsylvanians, sent a letter to borough officials calling for an immediate cessation of “all current plans to sweep or to clear homeless encampments in Norristown.”
The letter expressed concern that any sweep might result in people’s possessions being destroyed or disposed of without being stored for residents to retrieve later.
Some key factors have exacerbated homelessness in Norristown, 21% of whose population of about 35,000 live in poverty.
In 2021, flooding from the remnants of Hurricane Ida damaged a low-income Norristown apartment complex with about 100 units, forcing tenants to evacuate.
Last year, a 50-bed homeless shelter in Norristown was closed after the state conferred the land on which the facility sat to the borough. County social services agencies petitioned to extend the lease of what had been the only local shelter, but Norristown officials declined.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” for Norristown to build something that generates tax revenue, Lepera said in late May.
Outside the meeting Tuesday night, protesters carried signs that read, “Sweep out Tom, not tents,” and “Experiencing homelessness is not a crime.”
Bill England, 60, of Cheltenham, an advocate for people in poverty, said he showed up to remind people to “tamp down the inflammatory rhetoric about the homeless before innocent people could be hurt for sleeping on the street.”
Liza Meiris, 37, a teacher and social justice activist, said she’s tired of hearing about “stunts like busing,” and that Norristown and the county should concentrate on the lack of affordable housing in the area.
“I hope we could solve problems, and not villainize people,” she said.