Norristown official wants to bus people living homeless to Villanova University

The head of Norristown’s municipal council said he plans to bus people living homeless in the borough to the Villanova University campus.

Thomas Lepera, the municipality’s president/councilman at-large, said he’ll offer $500 gift cards to everyone who boards the bus at the end of the month. The money would come from donations, Lepera has said. Norristown, the Montgomery County seat, has no homeless shelter.

Lepera is choosing Villanova because Stephanie Sena, an anti-homelessness advocate and anti-poverty fellow at the university’s Charles Widger School of Law, has been working on behalf of an estimated 160 people experiencing homelessness in Norristown. Sena also runs a homeless shelter in Upper Darby.

Sena said that Lepera called her an “ivory tower elitist” during a brief meeting last week to discuss encampments. The meeting included Eric Tars, legal director of the Washington, D.C.-based National Homelessness Law Center.

Sena said Lepera added, “Just so you know, I’m taking buses and shipping people to Villanova.”

Tars corroborated the account, adding, “Tom told Stephanie he’s ‘going to create a clown show on the Villanova campus by throwing needles and trash’ from Norristown encampments onto the Campus Green.”

Then Lepera ended the meeting by cursing at Sena and making an obscene gesture, both Sena and Tars said.

Asked for comment, a Villanova spokesperson said in a statement, “The work being done by Stephanie Sena is part of her personal advocacy efforts; it is not being done on behalf of, or at the direction of, Villanova University.

“… Villanova University has had multiple conversations with Norristown officials to clarify Ms. Sena’s role as being independent of Villanova.”

The university didn’t directly address questions about the busing.

In a brief phone call, Lepera, who is also political director of IBEW Local 98, declined to discuss the busing plan, or how serious he is about it. He denied hurling obscenities at Sena, then he cursed at a reporter and hung up. Lepera, a Democrat, was first elected to council in 2019, and took over the presidency in January 2022.

He later offered a statement that said, in part:

“When you have all the social services in one area, it draws in the homeless population. When you have a pandemic and flood [from Hurricane Ida in 2021, which destroyed low-income housing], your homeless population rises. When it rises, you have stuff called encampments.

“When Stephanie reached out as a representative of Villanova, I said, ‘How perfect is this? Because Villanova, with hundreds of millions in revenue, that prides itself on Catholic values and wants to help the poor, has a school now with empty dorm rooms. ...

“I couldn’t see a more perfect scenario as where to move the homeless encampments.”

Local advocates said they plan “rallies and demonstrations” against encampment clear-outs and Lepera’s busing proposal next week.

Lepera and other borough leaders have said that Norristown is a “magnet” for people coming to live in its estimated 20 homeless encampments. Other Montgomery County municipalities must pitch in, Norristown officials contend.

Norristown minister Mike Kingsley said Lepera told him he wants to be the “Norristown Gov. [Greg] Abbott” of Texas, who has bused immigrants from the Southern border to Philadelphia and other cities.

“I warned Tom of the optics of this, but he said he didn’t care,” added Kingsley, director of the Coalition to Save Lives, a nonprofit that does outreach work among un-housed people nationwide.

Lepera’s Facebook page includes a large Villanova logo with the phrase, “Very Much looking forward to the Villanova/Norristown partnership. More News to come shortly.” The post had garnered 131 likes and hearts as of Friday.

It accumulated comments such as, “I hope it includes busses” from Norristown Councilmember Heather Lewis.

In a text, Lewis said, “I may not 100% agree with Mr. Lepera’s plan, but I do 100% share his frustration” about the problem of homelessness that Norristown must shoulder. “Hence,” she added, “drastic times call for drastic measures.”

The comments also feature a GIF from State Rep. Greg Marcus Scott (D., Norristown), which depicts a person lying in a moving bus from the waist up, with their legs being dragged along the ground.

Scott’s office didn’t return calls.

A spokesperson for Delaware County, in which Villanova sits, did not have a comment about the proposed busing.

In a statement, Montgomery County Chief Operating Officer Lee Soltysiak said, “Homelessness is not an issue that should be addressed through theatrics. It is a serious matter affecting the lives of far too many people countywide, and we must work together to solve it.”

Mark Boorse, director of program development at Access Services, a nonprofit that runs a homeless outreach program in Norristown, said in an interview, “Reasonable people will see this for what it is: a stunt without a solution.”

Boorse, who said he knows the names of the people living homeless in the borough, added that as soon as the $500 gift cards are spent, “people will be back because they’re connected to this community. What’s being proposed is a complete misunderstanding of the complexity of homelessness.”

Tars said he’s unaware of anyone in the nation trying to bus people experiencing homelessness to a specific location, such as a university. “Instead of moving out undocumented asylum seekers as Abbott has,” he said, “Lepera is relocating American citizens. The last time we saw anything like this was with Japanese internment camps during World War II.”

Asked about the potential busing, Crandall Jones, Norristown’s municipal administrator, said, “That’s a conversation for Mr. Lepera. I’m not involved at all.”

PECO recently announced that individuals living in tents on 3,000 feet of land owned by the utility along the Schuylkill River Trail in Norristown “will need to relocate” at an unspecified time so “hazardous waste and trash” can be removed from the site. Advocates say about 12 people live there.

Sena said she was told by Jones in late May that Norristown would use police to conduct a full-borough sweep of those living homeless in the borough to coincide with PECO’s clear-out.

Sena recalled that Jones also said the borough has no plans to store people’s belongings. That’s a fraught issue; often, individuals lose identification documents, medications, and other possessions when their property isn’t stored during sweeps.

In an interview, Jones said Sena’s assertion that a borough-wide sweep was being contemplated is “a lie.” He added that he never said officials wouldn’t store belongings. Jones said the borough may dismantle only one encampment, and that the municipality was in the process of discerning whether it sits on borough property.

Sean Kilkenny, solicitor to the Norristown Municipal Council, also denied that a full-borough clear-out was in the works.

In response, Sena said, “I have no doubt about what Crandall [Jones] told me.”

A person at a May 9 meeting about the PECO clear-out, which was attended by representatives of the utility, the county, and the borough, said Norristown officials discussed the idea of “clearing all encampments in town.” They worried that those living in tents on PECO property would relocate to other encampments in the borough, said the person, who asked not to be identified because they’re unauthorized to comment.

On May 25, the Community Justice Project (CJP), a Harrisburg-based legal aid program representing low-income Pennsylvanians, sent a letter to borough officials calling for an immediate cessation of “all current plans to sweep or to clear homeless encampments in Norristown.”

The CJP has partnered with the National Homelessness Law Center and Legal Aid of Southeastern PA, and was writing on behalf of their client, Maurice Jefferson, an un-housed Norristown resident. The letter addressed “Norristown’s legal exposure for its law enforcement practices” against unsheltered Norristown residents.

The document referenced Norristown adopting an ordinance last year prohibiting a person from being in a park or recreation area “except between sunrise and sunset.” This could lead to residents being charged “for being homeless,” the letter said.

The letter questioned how PECO, Norristown, and the Norristown Police Department will determine what constitutes “hazardous waste.” By trying to cart it off, authorities may instead “destroy or dispose of all property remaining at the encampments, without storing such property for residents to retrieve later.”

Such acts violate the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which protects property rights, the letter went on to say.

It cited other potential constitutional violations of the rights of people experiencing homelessness, laying out a case for a possible lawsuit against Norristown.

Carolyn Johnson, chief counsel of Legal Aid, said she expects that “as a good corporate citizen, PECO, will make sure people camped on their property are properly dealt with.” A PECO spokesperson said this week that the utility “will ensure any unsheltered individuals on our property are treated with dignity and respect.”

Sena said she plans to place Apple AirTags, which allow an item to be digitally tracked, in the belongings of encampment residents to see whether any confiscated property is discarded rather than saved.

Lepera referred to the CJP document as a “clown-show lawsuit,” said Tars, who added that Lepera initially asked for the meeting with Sena and him on a patch of grass at Villanova.

“He made multiple requests to be there, where he wants people who are homeless in Norristown to be moved,” Tars said.

“It’s clear he’s thought about this busing thing a lot.”