Shelter

Jenkens & Gilchrist, once a high-flying Texas law firm with a national reach, will shut its doors for good and pay the Internal Revenue Service a $76 million fine as part of a deal announced yesterday with the Justice Department over questionable tax shelters. Jenkens & Gilchrist, only six years ago among the largest, highest-earning law firms in the nation, becomes the latest casualty in the government's growing crackdown on aggressive tax shelters. The agreement is also likely to bolster a wider criminal investigation by federal prosecutors into the web of firms and individuals that made and sold aggressive shelters from the late 1990s through recent years.

The dining room at Sarah's House once was a nondescript room with yellow cinderblocks and bent blinds in the windows. Residents of the homeless shelter at Fort Meade sat at long tables and fed their children from sometimes-rickety highchairs. They pulled their plates from precarious stacks on open shelves above a plywood countertop. The room in the converted Army barracks has undergone a slow transformation since Thanksgiving. A wall mural has become the room's focal point. It depicts a shadowed stone wall overgrown with purple-flowering vines.

Grassroots Crisis Intervention Center has resumed operation of its cold-weather shelter program for homeless people in Howard County. This year, 14 churches are to provide shelter for one or two weeks from now through March 16. Church volunteers will also provide meals, transportation, clothing, medicine and laundry services for those in need, including families, who are unable to get into the Grassroots shelter because it is full. Grassroots provides the county's only shelter for homeless people.

Glenn Dale-based TVI Corp., which makes products and decontamination shelters for emergency workers, named its interim head as its president and chief executive officer yesterday, and reported a loss of $14.8 million in the second quarter. Shares dropped 22 cents to close at 38 cents - a 37 percent fall, continuing a slide that has followed financial and management problems. TVI shares traded at just under $3 as recently as October. TVI named Harley A. Hughes president and chief executive.

After today, Steven Johnson will be living on the streets again. The 54-year-old former construction worker says he has had Parkinson's disease for five years and has been unable to work or get federal disability income for the past few years. That is why he was one of more than 20 homeless people sleeping on slim mattresses amid their plastic bags and clothing on the floor of St. John Baptist Church in Columbia last week. But, like seasonal operations in other parts of the region, Howard County's annual winter shelter program is coming to an end. With the county's permanent Grassroots Crisis Intervention Center shelter full, more than a dozen religious congregations take turns hosting the nightly shelter for one or two weeks from November through late March.

THE PROBLEM -- The bus shelter on St. Paul Street near Penn Station is in disrepair and has no directional map. THE BACKSTORY -- Douglas Manger of Pikesville wrote an impassioned complaint to Watchdog about trying to take the bus after getting off a train at Penn Station during a recent rainstorm: "Imagine your excitement visiting Baltimore for the first time. You step off the train and on a whim decide to take the city bus to gain a feel for the urban landscape. The porter directs you to the St. Paul side of the station.

City is taking steps to help homeless Street homelessness is the most visible and disturbing form of extreme poverty in Baltimore ("City's homeless get frozen out," Dec. 6). Two winters ago, the city opened a small overnight emergency shelter only on nights when the temperature dipped below freezing. Last year, in an important step forward, the winter shelter was open overnight all season. This year, for the first time, Baltimore has opened a 24-hour shelter where the homeless can receive critical services, including help finding permanent housing.

SALEM, Mass. -- If Carolina, a reddish canine with pointy ears and an affinity for nose-crinkling, could speak her mind, perhaps she would talk of her wretched living conditions in Puerto Rico and her dramatic airlift to safety.All of 20 pounds, the starving mutt was plucked from the streets of San Juan in September, nursed to health, flown to Boston and delivered to a shelter here to await a new home.For Save A Sato, the nonprofit group that saved her, it was one victory amid much sorrow.

ON SOUTH EDEN Street, which is not the same as North Eden Street, there is now a muddy hole in the ground where there used to be a grubby little stop for the poor and the homeless. In such an hour, we can curse the idiocy that brought us to such a condition, or we can do what we normally do, which is to wish the poor would go away.Or we can say thank you to the Lancers Boys Club, for prodding our collective conscience on such matters.The boys are putting together a Nov. 7 Walk for the Homeless, a heartfelt project they commenced even before this week's news of the latest fumble by the city's Housing Authority.

The woman in her 60s had only the clothes on her back, a few bags of belongings, a tiny apartment without much in it. But to her they were precious possessions she wanted to make legally certain would go to a cherished friend.She pulled up a chair next to lawyer Patsy McGowan and made out her last will and testament at the Beans & Bread soup kitchen in Fells Point, leaving everything she had to a social worker who had helped her in her struggles."She had been wanting to get it done for a while," McGowan said.

Roscoe, a tan puggle, yelps plaintively from inside a crate, doing his best impersonation of a dog in need. He yips alongside a blue-eyed husky, a schnauzer named Scoobie and, across the room, a guinea pig and a ferret - all supposedly just rescued from a disaster. For the first time ever in the state, if there would be a flood or a tornado or something that caused a mass evacuation in Baltimore County, people and their pets have a shelter where they can stay together: Eastern Technical High School in Essex.

After a harrowing brush with thieves who took her dog and truck in West Baltimore, a woman was reunited with her pup Thursday morning in what shelter workers are calling "an impossible reunion." In town on errands, Amy Gaffney of Easton says she got lost Tuesday night in West Baltimore. The 46-year-old rolled down her window around Fulton Street to ask directions of some young men. "The next thing I know, his arm is in my car and he unlocks the door. I was so stunned, I didn't know what was going on."

Anne Arundel County Executive John R. Leopold is asking state officials to step up their watch on a facility for troubled youths after a firefighter who responded to a false alarm was hit in the face with a plastic pipe - the latest of hundreds of police and fire calls there. "We want to make sure these facilities are held accountable," Leopold said Tuesday. He said he was troubled by the assault on a firefighter responding to an intentional false alarm at the shelter and group home outside Annapolis, and believed the overall number of police and fire calls there - more than 500 in about three and a half years - was "inordinate."

Too bad the city was just breaking ground on a new homeless shelter and not opening it on Monday - with temperatures climbing into the dangerous range for the first time this summer, it was a reminder of how important it is to make sure all of the city's residents have proper shelter. Just two years ago, when Mayor Sheila Dixon first announced her ambitious, 10-year initiative to end homelessness in Baltimore, the goal seemed hopelessly out of reach. Neighborhood groups were dead set against the idea of having homeless people sheltered even temporarily in their communities, and the economic downturn made paying for the project seem dicey at best.

Mayor Sheila Dixon ceremonially broke ground on Baltimore's first permanent 24-hour shelter yesterday, the centerpiece of her 10-year plan to end homelessness in a city where more than 3,400 have no place to live. Dixon called the building, a former city Department of Transportation brick warehouse at 620 Fallsway in downtown Baltimore, a "gateway to independence" that is not meant to "warehouse" homeless people but will serve as a one-stop resource center where they can receive counseling and other help.

A new program that redistributes shelter animals has left the Humane Society of Baltimore County atypically flush with yipping, yapping and springing small dogs and puppies. This weekend, 31 pups arrived at the Reisterstown shelter from rural Tennessee. Because that shelter was overflowing with animals and was prepared to euthanize them, the Humane Society agreed to take in the dogs. According to Heather Hart, the Humane Society's animal center director, the swap is a new initiative aimed to bring dogs from crowded Southern shelters to the North, where they're more in demand.

Bridget McMahon - former vegetarian and current foodie - took red chard home for the first time last week. The very same day, Kelly Barner - homeless and so new to veggies that she calls asparagus a "prickly thing" - got her first look at the chard, too. The dark leafy greens with strawberry-red stems came to both women by way of a fast-growing program known as Community Supported Agriculture. CSAs, which number more than 12,500 nationwide, allow consumers to buy produce directly from local farms, and it's the farmer and the season that dictate which fruits and vegetables - and how much of them - are delivered each week.

Belly dancing classes Classes for beginners, intermediate and advanced dancers will be held 8 p.m. to 9 p.m., starting June 10 and continuing each Wednesday through July 29 at Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts, 801 Chase St. in Annapolis. Cost is $145. Call 410-263-5544 or go to marylandhall.org. Family activities Annapolis Recreation and Parks Department offers activities for children and families at the recreation center, 9 St. Mary's St. "Eight Ways to Protect the Bay": Learn about some of the Chesapeake Bay's biggest pollution problems and ways to be part of the solution.

City seeks new bids for homeless shelter 2 Baltimore's spending panel rejected all six bids to build an $8 million homeless shelter along the Fallsway, but the move will have little impact on the project's timetable, said Khalil Zaied, the head of the city's General Services Department. Two of the bids on the proposed 275-bed shelter were deemed too high, and the other four bidders did not properly fill out the bid forms, according to city attorneys. The city had initially asked for two proposals from each bidder - one showing costs for constructing the building within a nine-month time frame and a second with a yearlong time frame.

On May 8, 2009, Ann L. Fury Friends may call the family owned Ruck Towson Funeral Home, Inc., 1050 York Road (beltway exit 26A), on Thursday from 11 A.M. to 1 P.M. at which time a funeral service will be celebrated. Interment Loudon Park Cemetery. Family suggest contributions be made to an Animal Shelter of your choice.