Sherrie Blisko is used to getting the cold shoulder.

After working as a social worker in Broward County for 10 years, she understands the illogical red tape that stymies programs that help the poor, the homeless and the mentally ill.

But since Blisko recently began helping several local agencies unravel the red tape, she’s been stunned by the fear and loathing that grips government officials when she asks them to help groups that help the downtrodden.

Her latest cause is a prime example. Since she last month began trying to help Sean Cononie find a new home for the homeless shelter he runs in a rundown apartment complex in downtown Hollywood, she has become accustomed to getting doors slammed in her face.

"Try to get into Coral Springs," Blisko says of her efforts to find Cononie’s operation on Lincoln Street a new home in friendlier territory. "Try to even get into a conversation with the city manager. And the other cities — Miramar, Dania, Lauderhill, Tamarac, Pembroke Pines, Sunrise — the people there say they are not interested, even denying they have a homeless population. I have clearly had the door slammed in my face from seven cities.

She never got to meet any of the elected officials, instead her attempts were rebuffed by city bureaucrats who all gave her the same answers to her pleas for help.

"I don’t even get close enough to even look at [the city commissioners], I just get someone from City Hall saying the city commission is not even going to be entertaining this issue," she says.

Cononie, who last month was told his 3 1/2-year-old shelter that serves about 140 people a night violates city zoning laws, says Blisko is butting up against what he calls "Broward County’s 11th Amendment."

"Thou shall not help the homeless," Cononie says, weighing his words carefully. "It’s so difficult talking about these people, but I’m to the point that no one will give me grants anyway."

Cononie, other charity organizers says, is only partially right. Besides turning their backs on the homeless, South Florida government officials have crafted complex zoning restrictions to prevent nonprofit groups from finding places to operate. Agencies that feed the poor, treat the mentally disabled and turn around drug addicts and alcoholics have been told time and again that their services are not wanted.

Using the power of zoning regulations, city after city has told charity after charity that there is no room for them.

And when the charities won’t back down, local governments would rather fight them in court, spending countless thousands in legal fees, than strike a compromise.

Fort Lauderdale has been fighting Arnold Abbott for years, threatening him with arrest, simply for feeding the poor and the homeless at the picnic sites dotting the city’s beach as part of his Love Thy Neighbor program.

So the feisty retiree sued the city, claiming that the regulations they are using to push him out of town violate his civil rights.

"I was told by one commissioner that we ought to let them starve to death for their own good," Abbott says angrily. "Mayor Jim Naugle has called me a menace to society, and that’s the attitude that they have about this work."

The worst part, Abbott says, is that government officials aren’t the only ones with that attitude. He can’t count the number of times since he began feeding the homeless nine years ago that he’s asked local churches to support his cause. All but two of the dozens of churches in the city have ignored his pleas to do what he calls God’s work.

It’s enough to make policy planners from local universities wonder how communities have become so heartless.

"Some call it the erosion of our moral values," says Jerry Kolo, director of the Center for Urban Redevelopment and Empowerment operated jointly by Florida Atlantic and Florida International universities. "I call it a degradation. We are systematically chipping away through our legal system the strength of those powerful institutions.

"Our value systems have changed," he says, "and I don’t think that anyone would disagree with me that it hasn’t changed for the better."

In the 1920s and1930s, during the nation’s worst economic decline, giving to charities was considered a patriotic endeavor, Kolo says, simply because so many people were in need of financial help. There were nationwide campaigns for clothes, food and shelter for the poor, backed by President Franklin Roosevelt’s belief that if everyone worked together poverty could be eliminated.

Now, residents complain about programs and institutions that were once lauded. They complain about parks being built in their neighborhoods just because they may include basketball courts, which God forbid, may attract local kids who want to spend a few hours shooting hoops. They fret when a church plans to move near their homes, whining about how church services, meetings and get-togethers will clog their streets with traffic.

And politicians, caving in to those demands, have rewritten their zoning regulations to red-line such humanitarian efforts.

Marti Forman, director of the Cooperative Feeding Program in Broward County, has spent nearly half her annual budget, about $150,000, trying to find a piece of land that would allow her to expand her outreach operation. And it’s a large one. She feeds hundreds of meals to the homeless each week, tries to find jobs for the unemployed and helps the disabled work through the byzantine government bureaucracy to get the services they are due.

Yet when she went hunting for a spot to build a 6,000-square-foot office building for her program, she says she was strung along by county officials for a year before she got her final answer: You are not moving your operation into our borders.

"There are probably 18 different issues which makes trying to run an outreach program so overwhelming," Forman says. "But I probably can narrow it down to one issue and that’s the new god, and that is money. What’s going on is a war on the poor."

Before looking for land in the unincorporated area, Forman tried for 10 years to find a place in Fort Lauderdale, where many homeless and poor congregate, to expand her operations. Instead of renting rundown office space throughout the county she hoped to find land where she could consolidate her operations and build one central outreach center. She says the center could work with government programs and other nonprofit agencies that take care of the disenfranchised to streamline services for quicker response.

Instead, Fort Lauderdale’s bureaucrats, backed by city commissioners, business leaders and homeowner’s associations, swatted down every plan.

Thoroughly disgusted, Forman switched her focus to the unincorporated area, hoping her plan would get a more welcome response from county commissioners. But first, she met with county zoning officials to explain her plan and gauge their reaction. She thought county officials would be amenable to her plans because they had been giving her money to help run her operation for years.

County planners told Forman that she could probably find a suitable location in the county, but they couldn’t tell her for sure until she picked a specific site.

After much research, Forman selected a small piece of property along a rundown stretch of West Broward Boulevard just east of U.S. 441. She thought it was a perfect location because the area is so blighted and many of the people she cares for live nearby.

Forman says she got a tentative OK from county planners to use the land for her center, so she bought the property, razed a dilapidated building on it and paid for the installation of expensive groundwater monitoring wells.

"We worked with all these different county people for a year," Forman recalls. "And it wasn’t until the final meeting — we were ready to break out the champagne — when we were told that we couldn’t move there because of zoning problems."

Now the land is dormant, the only thing prospering on it are the weeds and wasted potential. And Forman’s bitterness.

"The county said we created our own hardship," Forman says. "They said, ‘We worked with you and worked with you, but you should have checked with the zoning department first.’ Well, that’s the first thing we did is go to the zoning department. I’m to the point now, that I really believe they just strung us along for as long as possible, hoping that we would just go away."

Like Abbott, Forman has heard politician after politician tell her that her services aren’t needed in Broward County, even though Forman gives out 400,000 meals each year to the needy. But politicians and bureaucrats discount her efforts because they fear that charities like Forman’s become magnets for the area’s homeless.

Yet those same officials won’t acknowledge that without groups like Forman’s and Love Thy Neighbor, many homeless would be clogging jails after committing desperate acts to get food or filling up hospitals beds after falling ill from malnutrition.

"Let me give you an example of how ludicrous this is," Forman says. "They say the problem with our programs is they enable the poor and homeless by giving them something for nothing. They say instead of teaching people to fish, we just give them fish. But when we wanted to start a culinary arts program to help teach our clients job skills, it was approved by a citizen’s board, but it got knocked out of the running on the commission level. And they complain about us not wanting to teach a man to fish."

Forman has learned the hard way that neither the county nor any city in Broward County recognizes human service organizations as permitted uses in their zoning regulations. That means that unlike other businesses, from bars to strip clubs, human service agencies can’t just buy a piece of property and move in. They must first ask government officials for permission. And once word gets out in a community that someone wants to use land or a building to feed the poor, house the homeless, or help the mentally ill, all hell breaks loose.

"Social services are not a permitted use anywhere," she says. "It’s conditional, which means if you have a business or residences as neighbors, they can kill the plan with their complaints."

She’s not just pointing fingers at Broward County’s civic and political leaders, because she says what is happening here is happening throughout the nation.

Human service agency officials across the country are complaining they are being prevented from offering social services in their communities. In short, they are being zoned out of existence.

In South Florida, Delray Beach has been struggling with not one, but two plans to help those in need and both have been killed by outpourings of complaints from local businesses and homeowners.

Two months ago, residents living in tony enclaves along State Road A1A learned that a place called the K Kove, which everyone thought was a high-class hotel was really a beachfront drug rehab center. And everyone went bonkers. Wealthy residents crowded into city meetings, demanding that the operation be shut down. They talked about their fears of a crime wave from the residents at the treatment center. City officials explained that the center is geared toward well-heeled addicts, willing and able to spend between $21,000 and $65,000 for a 90-day treatment program. But the residents didn’t want to hear any of it, intractable in their demands.

Police reports show that officers have only responded to problems at K Kove three times in the past 18 months. All the calls were to help the center find patients who had left unexpectedly. None of the reports mentions any crime problems.

K Kove officials did not return repeated calls for comment, but the owner apparently has given up the fight. He recently put the property up for sale.

At the same time the K Kove controversy was swirling, Frank McKinney, who builds multimillion-dollar beachfront mansions and works with dozens of charitable organizations in the city, came up with a plan to buy a rooms-by-the-hour motel on Federal Highway and turn it into the first homeless shelter in southern Palm Beach County. To achieve this goal, McKinney joined forces with the Junior League of Boca Raton and Christians Reaching Out to Society, among others, who planned to buy the motel for $400,000 and spend another $100,000 to spruce it up.

The day after the plan made the local papers, McKinney says he his unlisted phone never stopped ringing.

"Once the word got out, the [city’s] Community Redevelopment Agency was against it, the businesses were against it, the residential communities were against it," says McKinney, who was more than a little surprised at the reaction. The city’s Planning and Zoning Board recommended that his group ask for a zoning variance to operate in the rundown commercial district.

But instead of fighting the bigotry and fear, McKinney and his group voted last week to scrap the plans for converting the rundown motel into a first-class operation for the poor.

"I believe that everyone involved in this are angels," he says. "And each one of these angels wakes up with a limited supply of time and energy and it’s just better not to waste everyone’s time."

To Kolo, the way communities scream "Not In My Back Yard!" to groups like McKinney’s, Forman’s and Abbott’s, is more than a little scary. Broward County has documented at least 5,000 homeless people, and another 1,300 homeless children who are enrolled in the school system. Palm Beach County has an estimated 3,000 homeless. Yet neither county offers more than a few hundred beds to help them out.

"I just read a story in the New York Times last week on the growing NIMBY-ism that said people are no longer saying Not In My Back Yard, but rather Nothing In My Back Yard. And it contradicts our own sense of civic and moral accountability.

"We don’t like to admit it, but property rights nowadays are more important than human rights," he says.

"This is proven," Kolo says, "because the violations have become more harsh for operating a social services program than if I punch you in the face. Yet the people who are trying to meet the needs of the community are not breaking any laws, but in fact are playing civic roles more than anyone opposed to what they are doing."

Kolo has realized that the problem is fueled by lack of leadership, not just from politicians but from residents and business owners who refuse to consider the benefits of reaching out to the impoverished in the community.

But politicians and government officials say that is just not true.

Hollywood City Commissioner Sal Oliveri says that cities struggle every day to weigh the balances of human service programs with the fears of nearby residents and businesses.

"The reality is like everything else," he says, "everybody will tolerate these things, but don’t let it affect me and my life and that’s human nature."

Oliveri touts Hollywood’s record for helping the down-and-out by pointing out that the city commission allowed the Miami Rescue Mission to building a 90-bed homeless shelter in an industrial area. Opened in 1997, the Broward Outreach Center offers the poor free meals and the homeless a temporary place to stay. When the city approved the center, residents in nearby areas were outraged.

"I think the problem is people’s fear and they have the perception of what a homeless shelter is and what it could turn into," Oliveri says.

He used Cononie’s shelter as an example. He says that he tips his hat to Cononie for trying to find housing and food for people who have neither. But he also questions how Cononie, who calls his organization Helping People in America, raises the $20,000 a month needed to keep the center operating.

Cononie’s shelter is one of the few in the county that is self-sufficient and will take in anyone who asks without question. In fact, Cononie says that while most of the government officials don’t want him operating within their borders, they often call him for help. That’s because other government-supported shelters, like the Broward Outreach Center and the year-old Homeless Assistance Center on Sunrise Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale won’t take in just anyone. The mentally ill, substance abusers and those who will probably never be able to turn their lives around are routinely turned away from those shelters.

"We are the only shelter in the county that will take in the fully disabled and house them until who knows how long," Cononie says. "Everyone tells these people to get help, but mathematics don’t lie.

"There are only about 700-something emergency beds in the county, but the county believes there are 6,300 homeless. Well if that’s the stats, if everyone wanted to go get help, there wouldn’t be enough space."

Even so, when Cononie began looking for a new place to operate, city after city turned him down.

"Pembroke Pines didn’t want to allow us to do anything in the city, but they are the first to call when they need to help someone who is homeless," he says. "I went to one city council meeting and said well if that’s the way you feel, maybe I shouldn’t help anyone out from your city."

Cononie says city officials looked stunned. "They said, ‘What do you mean? You’re not going to help us any more?’ " Cononie recalls.

Cononie is still serving Pembroke Pines when it is in a pinch. But he says he’s doing it for the person who needs a helping hand and not to help the city.

Still, Hollywood’s Oliveri says he questions Cononie’s charitable bent. He thinks it’s important for governments to research human service agencies to make sure they are eradicating poverty not perpetuating it.

"What he is doing is very honorable and loving, but in our society it’s just not realistic for that to succeed for any decent area in the city [because] homelessness attracts homelessness."

Broward County Commissioner Norman Abramowitz says he uses a mental checklist to decide if a charity group fits the community’s needs and desires.

"No. 1, are they legitimate charity organizations?" Abramowitz says he asks himself. "I see people walking around with canisters looking for handouts for charities I never heard of. And they are taking away money from people from deserving and worthwhile charities. There has to be a place for everyone and everyone in their place."

But, human service officials say, government officials shouldn’t ban charitable organizations through zoning laws. Instead, they say, governments should be helping charities find places where they can operate without forcing them to jump through expensive, time-wasting bureaucratic hurdles.

"The issue is this," says Kolo, "in any society you will always have the less privileged. Some will call them the poor, the wretched of the earth, but whatever you call them they will always be with us. The question is how you view them and how you treat them."

Fort Lauderdale City Manager Floyd Johnson says that groups like Abbott’s Love Thy Neighbor program could scare tourists from the area if they are not controlled by government.

"What we always struggle with is what is going to do the greatest good for the people, and that not only includes our permanent residents," he says. "We also have an obligation to provide a positive basis for the 3 million people each year who contribute to our economy."

Johnson adds that Fort Lauderdale has been a leader in dealing with the homeless, approving the construction of the county’s $9.5 million Homeless Assistance Center.

As for the lawsuit Abbott filed against the city, which is tentatively scheduled for trial on Monday, Johnson declined comment saying that the city and Abbott are in the midst of negotiations.

Johnson, obviously preparing for yet another community assault on any compromise that could be reached, fears even mentioning some of the options discussed so far.

"I am reticent to try to even say where [Abbott would be allowed to conduct the feedings] for fear of people coming out and saying, ‘Not in my back yard.’"

But critics say it’s ridiculous for government officials to block their borders from charitable organizations that take a big load off governments that would otherwise be responsible to provide services to those who need help.

"It should be a cooperative effort so that what one sector cannot accomplish, the other sector can," says Thomas Auxter, who teaches classes on the philosophy of culture, ethics and politics at the University of Florida. "There has been a national trend toward decentralization of these programs, which assumes the community will respond, but it hasn’t."

And when politicians start pitting human service agencies against one another, it weakens the potential for help instead of strengthening it.

"They (government officials) are wrongly putting the burden of proof on the people who are trying to help," Auxter says. "But the facts are the charities are doing what government should be doing."

Blisko says that despite Hollywood’s notice that Cononie has to move his operations elsewhere, her talks with city officials continue. Hollywood officials appear to want to at least consider letting Helping People in America relocate instead of booting it out for good.

"We are finding Hollywood being much more receptive than the other cities I have talked to," she says. "They seem to be pragmatic in terms of looking to help us. With that hope we are looking for the city of Hollywood to keep its word."