Feb 3 – Tempe, AZ – Just before 5 p.m. on Sunday Tempe police arrived at the New Deal Meal at Moeur Park and gave an official warning to Rev. Dr. Tom Martinez, who was coordinating the private gathering, for violating the city’s Special Event ordinance. 

Numerous members of Tempe’s faith community joined the gathering on Sunday. One pastor who had not been to Moeur Park before noted after seeing how isolated the park was from the rest of Tempe, “I had a lot of questions for the city before, and now I have even more.”

Many of the supporters had signs such as: “I was hungry and you fed me.- Matthew 25:43,” “Sharing Food is not a Crime,” “Sharing Food is an Act of Love,” and “Food, Shelter and Love are Human Rights,”  and “Fining Compassion is where my tax dollars go?”.

What’s particularly shocking is that in early September Rev. Martinez had reached out as the convenor of the Tempe Interfaith Fellowship (TIF) to the city manager to discuss how the city could better work with the faith community to help address the challenges of homelessness, and in specific in relationship to using Moeur Park as a location to do so.

Faith leader meetings with the city manager’s team occurred in September, October and November. Faith leaders thought the city intended to work with them. When one faith leader who participated in those meetings heard that the city planned to now cite the Moeur Park gathering with a code violation his response was, “This is crazy – right in the middle of us talking to the City about how to resolve this situation, they decide to make this decision. It’s important that we do not allow this to happen without a response from us (TIF).”

Ironically, the city went ahead a couple weeks ago and scheduled a follow up meeting today at the library with faith leaders–but appeared to be completely tone deaf to recent developments. The invite noted: “Building upon a recent session with the Tempe Interfaith Fellowship,  … identify and prioritize ‘criteria of success’ for the Tempe community’s solutions for providing food to the unsheltered.”

The faith community has a pretty simple solution to that; stop issuing citations to community members who provide food to the homeless. 

As noted in prior releases, the New Deal Meal’s private gatherings include a thorough clean up of the facilities afterward as documented below. The area was swept, left over clothing donations picked up, and extra trash taken away.

###