Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke delivers the State of the City address Monday at the Chattanoogan.READ MORECity Council: Chattanooga light rail study must be convincing
Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke signed an executive order Tuesday to create a task force to bring together community leaders, service providers and veterans to help “eradicate chronic veterans’ homelessness” by the end of 2016.
Prior to signing the order, Berke sought input from members of University of Tennessee at Chattanooga veterans groups on how to best address issues facing returning veterans.
“What we’re doing, essentially, is much more on the side of how do we as a city pull together the resources from the nonprofit side, from the counseling side, from our housing side, and put all those into one structured sensible experience, so that we can take the chronically homeless veterans and get them the support and help they need so they’re not living in garages downtown,” Berke said.
The Chattanooga Chapter of Veterans Affairs puts the number of homeless veterans in the Scenic City at about 150 at any given time, about 20 percent of which are “chronically homeless,” according to a news release from the Mayor’s office.