Despite emotional testimony from charity supporters and several clients, city leaders upheld staff’s ruling that the charity cannot give groceries to its clients.
SARASOTA — The nonprofit Bethesda House must stop giving away groceries to clients and close its food pantry, a city panel hesitantly decided Wednesday afternoon.
The drop-in community center in Gillespie Park is run by St. Martha Catholic Church downtown to provide numerous support services for people with HIV/AIDS, including nutritional counseling and weekly groceries to some clients in need.
But that food pantry-style assistance is no longer allowed on the property due to new zoning regulations approved in April, when the Caritas Pantry, also run by St. Martha and four other downtown churches, moved to the property, city officials contend.
Those agreements specifically prohibit the operation of a soup kitchen or food pantry on the property. But the Bethesda House appealed, unsuccessfully, to the city’s Board of Adjustment, contending that its service doesn’t qualify as a food pantry because of its specific clientele.
The dispute left the board arguing semantics and struggling to find ways that city codes could allow the respected charity to continue. Despite emotional testimony from charity supporters and several clients during a three-hour hearing, board members begrudgingly and unanimously agreed city codes force them to uphold city planners’ decision.
“Nobody could help but admire what the organization is doing; we all do, I’m sure of that,” said Alan Freedman, vice chairman of the city’s Board of Adjustment. “The question is location.”
The argument boiled down to the city’s literal definition of a “food pantry.”
Bethesda House requested a formal interpretation of the definition of food pantry from city staff over the summer. The officials crafted a definition based on the entries for the term in common dictionaries, as required by city codes, and concluded that Bethesda House’s operation did qualify, said Gretchen Schneider, general manager of Sarasota’s planning and development department.
Attorney Dan Bailey appealed that decision on behalf of Bethesda House and tried to cast the service this week as a “food fulfillment program,” designed to provide nutritious food to those battling a physical illness, not just to serve those in need. The program is less a food pantry and more a supplement to counseling and other services clients receive there, he argued.
The city’s prohibition of traditional food pantries in the downtown area was intended to avoid creating large groups of homeless individuals gathering in one location, Bailey argued. Bethesda House serves 258 clients, but only 14 visit the center on any given day and only three are homeless, charity leaders said.
“The purpose of the prohibition is, for better or worse, to keep large concentrations of homeless people out of where we don’t want them,” Bailey said. “And that’s just not what this is.”
Although Bethesda House has operated at the Fourth Street property since 1991, city officials argue there are no formal records that it was ever approved to operate there, throwing another kink into the argument.
That was discovered last spring when Caritas planned its move to the property and led to the zoning approvals that specifically prohibit food pantries and soup kitchens. Without records of its initial approvals, Bethesda House’s food pantry cannot be “grandfathered” into the new rules, Schneider said.
City leaders were quick to add their interpretations are not against the work the charity does, though.
“I can say that it couldn’t be further from the truth,” Schneider said. “City staff was supportive of both conditional uses for Bethesda House and Caritas. Unfortunately, what we can’t do is allow something to operate that is not a permitted use.”
The charity has other avenues to potentially allow its food pantry services again, but all involve lengthy legal or City Commission processes.
The group could press the City Commission to pursue a zoning text amendment that would add a new land-use classification that would permit the Bethesda House food pantry in the downtown area, Schneider said. They could give vouchers to clients to seek food assistance elsewhere or can appeal the Board of Adjustment’s decision to the Circuit Court, Deputy City Attorney Michael Connolly said.
Or the house could relocate to a zoning district that allows all of its services.
Any and all of those options could take more than a year to complete, during which time the charity is not allowed to give groceries to its clients in need, Bailey said. Charity leaders and officials from partner organizations all expressed their disappointment after the vote.
“When patients can find a refuge, a safe refuge such as Bethesda House, physicians are quite eager to refer them there,” said Dr. Stephen Nicholas, chief medical officer of the Community Aids Network. “If we lose this resource, our invaluable resource, many of our marginalized patients will be more marginalized and we could lose them.”
