Dispute with Henderson drives nonprofit outside city to feed homeless

For the last 17 years, Walter Kwasniewski spent his Thursdays and Saturdays feeding members of the homeless community at a park in east Henderson, but now will take his efforts to Clark County after Henderson said his actions violate city code.

Kwasniewski said he and other people from the nonprofit organization NextStep Ministries, where he is president, have been feeding homeless people at Russell Road Sports Complex on Thursday and Saturday mornings for almost two decades. He said that over the years he has not had many negative interactions with the city, police or the people he and his colleagues feed.

But at the end of July, Henderson Code Enforcement shut down one of Kwasniewski’s events, saying that his operation violated city code. Kwasniewski said the city allowed NextStep Ministries to hold one more event the following Saturday to tell the community it would not be back the next week.

Kwasniewski said Ian Massy, Henderson’s public response manager, said he would need a food handler’s card and permit to keep holding the events at the park.

Massy later told the Review-Journal that NextStep Ministries violated the city code for parks by bringing a privately owned grill to the park to cook food. In addition, he said NextStep would need to provide bathrooms closer to its site than what was publicly available at the park.

There were bathrooms near where NextStep held its operations, but Kwasniewski said the city started locking them in recent years. Massy said the closest bathrooms are reserved for those renting out the nearby baseball fields.

Kwasniewski did not know using his own grill violated city code until a meeting with city staff in late September, after he submitted a design application that would allow the organization to feed homeless people in the park.

Kwasniewski also said he found out after getting a food handler’s card that nonprofit programs providing food for no charge do not need those cards due to the Good Samaritan Law.

The September meeting was for city employees to answer questions about NextStep Ministries’ application for permits to continue work at the park as a mobile pantry and discuss clarifications from staff. Kwasniewski brought two colleagues with NextStep Ministries and invited a Review-Journal reporter to also attend.

City employees did not let the Review-Journal reporter into the meeting and Kwasniewski said he and his colleagues were told not to record the meeting. City spokesperson Madeleine Skains said Henderson kept no records or transcripts of the September meeting with NextStep Ministries because it was “not a public meeting.”

“It was a totally unproductive meeting,” Kwasniewski said. “To my surprise, they did not allow any recordings, they asked us to make sure our phones were not recording … I didn’t understand the secrecy of it.”

Kwasniewski said city employees told him and his colleagues that the city received many complaints about NextStep Ministries’ operations at the park in the last few months.

According to city documents obtained by the Review-Journal, only two documented complaints submitted to the city from the area surrounding the Russell Road Sports Complex with the keyword “homeless” involved NextStep Ministries’ operations to feed the homeless. One of those complaints was Kwasniewski asking the city to open the nearby bathrooms in 2019. The other said people feeding homeless people at the park led to an encampment there in 2014.

On Tuesday, Henderson officially denied NextStep Ministries’ design application.

Kwasniewski has moved his operation to Sunset Park in unincorporated Clark County, where he said getting the proper permits and reserving space to feed homeless people was night and day compared to Henderson. He said the next time he’ll go out to feed the homeless community is in early November.

“(Henderson) didn’t make it illegal for me to be there,” Kwasniewski said. “But they have made it impossible for me to operate.”

Contact Mark Credico at mcredico@reviewjournal.com. Follow him on Instagram @writermark2.