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VOLUSIA

Daytona Beach News-Journal

• Daytona Beach's First Step homeless shelter had employee tension before whistleblower complaints were filed in June.
• One First Step Shelter employee exchanged things of monetary value with shelter residents. Another employee was accused of making his own rules.
• First Step Shelter is entangled in whistleblower complaints and a civil lawsuit brought by two of the whistleblowers.

DAYTONA BEACH — In the earliest days of First Step Shelter, there were power struggles between board members and the city government, and in the summer of 2020 Catholic Charities of Central Florida abruptly decided it no longer wanted to run the facility and walked away.

Executive Director Victoria Fahlberg took the reins of the nonprofit, and the comprehensive shelter for homeless adults gradually grew to a 100-bed refuge that has helped get nearly 900 people into housing.

But early last year, tension between First Step Shelter leadership and a few employees began building, threatening the operation's hard-fought progress and calm.

Fahlberg was becoming increasingly aggravated with Patrick Smith, the shelter's director of philanthropy and community engagement. Smith had become disrespectful and hostile toward her, she wrote in notes she put in his personnel file.

She was also concerned about the behavior of another employee, Housing Coordinator Pamela Alexander, who reportedly borrowed a resident's...

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