When a group of big-hearted local citizens formed the Bangor Area Homeless Shelter in 1986, one of its intentions was to provide a secure environment for intact families who needed a temporary haven from life on the streets.

Back then, parents and their young children could find warm beds and hot meals until they were able to get back on their feet. With only one live-in staff member, most of the chores around the facility were done by board members who volunteered their time to help feed clients and keep the place clean.

Yet over the last 15 years, the picture at the Bangor shelter and others like it around the state has been so dramatically altered it bears little resemblance to its original mission. The shelter now has 11 paid staff members and operates on an annual budget of $325,000. Children under 18, in fact, are no longer permitted to stay at the shelter, which cannot guarantee the safety of youngsters anymore.

“We’re now running something that is part of a much bigger framework,” said Dennis Marble, the shelter’s director for the last six years. “In a given month or year, a solid 50 percent of the people who come here have a major mental illness or have been diagnosed with one or more mental health problems.”

Rather than catering mostly to temporarily displaced families, the shelter’s clients now are largely single adults. Although many face situational crises – divorce, for example, or the loss of a job – a significant number are mentally ill individuals who might have spent the previous night in another institution, such as a county jail or state correctional facility. Others might show up at the shelter after being released from hospital psychiatric units, where their conditions were being properly treated.

“I don’t think that the people who put this whole thing together had a vision that over time the shelter would become a de facto part of the mental health system,” Marble said.

Yet it has, in the same unfortunate way that our county jails have become our new state hospitals. According to a recent report in the Maine Sunday Telegram, the effects of the deinstitutionalization of the 1970s and the downsizing of state mental hospitals in the 1990s have created a logistical crisis among services that have neither the staff, skills nor money to accommodate the desperate needs of the mentally ill.

“We’re being pushed too far,” Marble said. “At times the shelter is supposed to be a nursing home, or we’re supposed to act as a supported-living center, or we’re seen as long-term care for the chronically ill or the special-needs population. We’re expected to house people whose ability to medicate themselves is highly questionable.”

The shelter gets no funding from the departments of Human Services, Behavioral and Developmental Services and Corrections. In fact, only half of the shelter’s funding comes from government sources. Yet the shelter is increasingly and unfairly burdened with the welfare of people whose ultimate survival requires much more than a hot meal and a bed.

“Sometimes it works out OK because of decent professionals working in a broken system,” Marble said. “Maybe someone’s coming out of jail who has no home, so the shelter may be good as a temporary home. Some jail administrators, social workers and probation officers will give us a heads-up that someone’s arriving. That helps. But what if someone leaves a psych bed and shows up here unannounced? It’s only workable if there’s a support structure for those people. The powers that be have not come together to determine exactly what we’re supposed to be.”

Tom Weber’s column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.