Head said he did not know how the council would respond to Anderson’s request to reconsider the zoning issue and give the shelter more time to operate.

“When he asks for extensions, essentially we’re being asked to ignore the law,” he said.

Several residents, including McLeod, said they felt safer staying inside the shelter rather than sleeping outdoors.

“We have smoke alarms and we have fire extinguishers,” he said.

Anderson also said his attempt to purchase a downtown Joplin church for $600,000 as a new home is unlikely to be completed.

Members of the First Baptist Church on May 7 voted 132-18 to sell their building to Anderson, but Anderson says he was only able to raise about $2,000 toward such a deal.

“That’s probably passed,” Anderson said. “We’ve been talking to the owner of this building (the warehouse) again, and if we could somehow get a rezoning in this building, we’d probably elect to just purchase this facility.”

Joplin Mayor Gary Shaw said the city had no plans to house or provide services for the residents who have been staying at the Refuge.

“We don’t have anywhere to shelter or house them,” he said. “All we’re doing is trying to protect those people from harm.”

Another summit

Joplin Mayor Gary Shaw said he expects the city to release additional information about another summit on homelessness sometime next week.

“We’re in the process of forming the next level of a committee to work with the information we received from the first summit,” the mayor said Friday. “We’ll be naming those individuals in the coming days.”

A meeting July 8 at Memorial Hall was conducted as the first step toward formulating an organized approach to addressing the problem of homelessness in Joplin.