Life. It is all pomp and mitigating circumstance. It happens to you as much as you happen to it.

You've seen the bumper sticker with a terse message to that effect. It happens.

Last month, life and its circumstances conspired to deliver 70 wayward souls to Brenda Kriedeman's front door. Half of them had been there before.

She propped them all up and sent them on their way. Many have blended back into the workaday world. Success stories. But not that pesky half. Those 35 people that traveled the familiar path to the Salvation Army last month will be back again this month. And next month. They will drain more than their share of resources.

And that, Kriedeman said, is a problem. It's particularly noticeable in the Bismarck-Mandan area, which has the highest percentage of long-term homelessness in the state.

So, the mayors of the two cities have vowed to find a solution.

Soon.

On Tuesday afternoon - amid the population of homeless men at Bismarck's Ruth Meiers Hospitality House - the mayors and representatives of the North Dakota Coalition for Homeless People announced the genesis of a plan designed to eliminate long-term homelessness here. They said it could be done in 10 years, if the right people came up with the right ideas right now.

"I think the plan is to come up with real solutions, not to put a Band-Aid on the problem," Kriedeman, who works at the Salvation Army and also chairs the Missouri Valley Coalition for Homeless People, said. "Another shelter isn't the answer. That's short-term. We're looking at what we have to do to get these people off the streets, out of the shelters and into permanent housing. We need to fix it in a way that these people can then fix things for themselves. We need to change our way of thinking, and we need to change their way of thinking."

The effort is being coordinated by the Consensus Council, a local nonprofit group that was approached by the offices of Bismarck Mayor John Warford and Mandan Mayor Ken LaMont. The agency has invited 30 stakeholders to take part in four major discussions, where they will brainstorm ideas that eventually will form the 10-year plan.

The goal is to stem long-term homelessness.

"There's a difference between homelessness and long-term homelessness," Mike Anderson, director of the North Dakota Housing Finance Agency, said. "You're never not going to have people who are homeless. But the long-term homeless are the people who get into the system and can't get out. It'll probably never end, but you can create programs to minimize the effects for people, and help keep some people out of the system."

The state Coalition for Homeless People took a point-in-time survey in January that revealed 247 homeless people in Region 7, the 10-county area that includes Burleigh and Morton. Of those people, 243 were from Bismarck or Mandan. Eighty-three of them were children.

And 50 of them were long-term homeless, which means they have a disabling condition and have been continuously homeless for a year, or homeless more than four times in the last three years. Although those 50 people account for just 20 percent of the local homeless population, they regularly occupy 40 percent of the shelter beds.

"It's a very big problem," Sue Martin, director of the Ruth Meiers shelter, said. "Long-term homeless people use the highest percentage of the services. They come into the shelters and they leave the shelters, they come in and they leave. We need to help them get stabilized, help them have a better quality of life for themselves and at the same time help the shelters and the other social-service systems better manage their resources."

The first meeting of stakeholders will be held July 12 at the Salvation Army. Other meetings - all of which are open to the public - will be held Aug. 16 at Spirit of Life Church, Sept. 13 at Bis-Man Transit and Oct. 4 at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church.

Early ideas have centered on creating a larger number of affordable-housing units and better access to case managers, social workers and doctors, Kriedeman said.

When the plan is finalized, it will be presented to both city commissions for adoption. The hope is that the cities can use the plan to prioritize any possible funding for future projects related to homelessness.

The Bismarck-Mandan initiative is being funded by an $8,000 grant from the Housing Finance Agency, which is also providing money for similar projects in Grand Forks, Minot, Devils Lake, Jamestown, Williston, Dickinson and the state's four Indian reservations. An effort to curb long-term homelessness had already begun in Fargo last fall, Anderson said, and Bismarck-Mandan hoped to use that model as a guide.

Each of the strategic plans will be used to formulate a statewide plan, Anderson said.

Martin, from Ruth Meiers, said it would be nice if the plan didn't use all 10 years. Her agency served 150 more people last year than the year before.

Business is just as good, which is bad, at the Salvation Army.

"Anybody can become homeless - a lot of us are just a paycheck away," Kriedeman said. "It happens. But there are remedies for most people. Short-term homelessness isn't what this plan is about. We want to stop long-term homelessness, and that's what we're asking the stakeholders to do. We need to find out where the gaps are. Do we have all the answers? No, not yet. But we have a whole lot of good people trying to figure them out."

(Reach reporter Tony Spilde at 250-8260 or tony.spilde@;bismarcktribune.com.)