Teen-agers who hang out downtown drove merchants to the Bangor City Council seeking relief.

The result, a police officer assigned to a beat downtown, moved but did not solve the problem. Mary Anne Chalila, director of the city’s department of health and welfare, said that gangs which used to hang out downtown just moved to the city park on Second Street.

“They don’t have homes. They don’t have families. They don’t have somebody who cares for them,” Chalila said.

Recognizing that the problem was larger than loitering and panhandling on the downtown streets, the City Council has formed a committee to look into the problem and has named Chalila to head it.

“As a group, we’re going to try to force those that have responsiblities to face up to them — state bureaucracy, families, the city,” she said. “We are a community and these kids are part of that community.”

On any given night in Bangor nearly 50 teen-agers are on the street, homeless or runaway, according to Holly Stover, who runs Atrium House and Project Streetlight two programs that work with troubled adolescents.

“The problem is we have a group of people who have no place to go. If they gather downtown as a group, it’s because they have no place to go,” she said. “They only have each other.”

In and of itself, the new committee is a first. “No one’s ever addressed the problem before,” Stover said. “We’ve never noticed it was there — the collective `we’ being the city. In the social services we’ve known about it for a long time.

“I think it’s a big step toward progress,” she said. “Previous to this there’d never been a collaborative effort between providers (of care) and the city. And this addresses the problem although there’s probably no solution.”

The meeting of the Community and Economic Development Committee of the City Council was “very upbeat,” said Councilor William England. “Things are going awfully well downtown. But we still have the issue of people who live on the streets. We had a good talk about what we can look at in the future and addressing potential problems.”