Grants Pass ordinance would regulate homeless service providers in city parks

The Grants Pass City Council recently passed an ordinance limiting the amount of time homeless service organizations can spend helping unhoused people in city parks and on other public property. Service providers would have to register with the city and provide data on the number of people they serve. The ordinance still needs the mayor’s signature to become law.

Sara Bristol is the mayor of Grants Pass, and Cassy Leach is the executive director of MINT, a homeless services provider that serves Josephine County. They both join us to talk about the ordinance and the challenges facing unhoused people in the region.

Editor’s note: In an email to OPB on March 12, the mayor indicated she will veto the ordinance.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We start today in Grants Pass, where the city council recently approved an ordinance making it harder for organizations to help homeless people. Under the ordinance, organizations would have had to register with the city every four months, provide regular reports, and they could only spend a certain amount of time providing services in public places like city parks. Earlier today, Grants Pass mayor Sara Bristol vetoed the ordinance. She joins us now to talk about it. Welcome to the show.

Sara Bristol: Hi, thank you for having me.

Miller: Why did you veto this ordinance?

Bristol: I felt that the ordinance, some parts of it were unnecessary because they were redundant of ordinances that we already have. For example, it’s already illegal to use drugs or distribute drugs and drug paraphernalia in the parks, as well as propane tanks, which was part of the ordinance.

So, given that those things were already illegal, the purpose of requiring humanitarian groups to get a permit just seemed overly bureaucratic, it adds red tape. I feel that it singles out a certain type of use in the park that may cause some opportunities for litigation against the city. I think the purpose of it was just to create a hurdle for those groups to provide their services in the park. I feel that it missed the goal of what we need to be doing here in Grants Pass.

Miller: You think the purpose of the ordinance was to make it harder for humanitarian groups or service organizations to help people?

Bristol: Yeah, I think that was at the heart of how it came about initially, was to create a hurdle. It got watered down a bit from what the council had originally discussed, and so at this point, it was not super onerous. It was a $25 fee that could be free upon renewal, and it required them to keep some kind of basic data about who they were serving and how. So it wasn’t particularly onerous and yet at the same time, it’s like, why do we need to be doing this?

If you wanted to go to the park and meet up with your church group or a birthday party or an impromptu soccer or frisbee game, you wouldn’t need to get a permit. Why are we singling out humanitarian aid efforts?

Miller: Do you have an answer to that question? I guess this gets to the broader context of the politics around responding to homelessness in Grants Pass right now.

And, I should say, for listeners who aren’t familiar, part of that politics involves a recall attempt that you survived, brought by a Grants Pass resident who said that, among other things, that you hadn’t done enough to address homelessness. So, what do you see as the broader picture right now of the politics around responding to homelessness?

Bristol: Well, I think we’ve had a troubled history with this issue that dates back at least 10 years at this point, to when there was a vagrancy round table in the city of Grants Pass and some additional rules were put into place in order to, I guess, combat what city leaders at the time felt was a growing presence of homelessness. And eventually, that led to the Johnson versus Grants Pass lawsuit that’s now headed to the Supreme Court next month.

And definitely, the recall attempt last year was all part of this ongoing picture of Grants Pass not accepting that homelessness is an issue that we need to deal with at a level of housing and providing shelter for people. And instead, we keep dancing around the issue of how we can remove people from the parks, either by citations or by making it difficult for humanitarian services in the parks.

I think people want to believe that the homelessness problem is not ours and that the people will go to some other community if we make it difficult for them. That seems to be an ongoing story here in Grants Pass.

Miller: So if that’s what you’re saying some people believe, I guess what you’re implying there is that’s not what you believe. So, what do you say in response?

Bristol: Well, I think the first step for us is to admit that we have a housing problem. We do have some other problems: drug issues, mental health, lack of services. But ultimately, we have a lack of housing and shelter here in Grants Pass. And I think a lot of people want to believe that the homeless people who are in Grants Pass are not really from Grants Pass. So they think if we can make it harder by not providing shelter or not providing services, that the people will go somewhere else. And every time that I encounter homeless people, and I go to the shelters or parks and ask people...I try not to grill them but to just kind of casually ask how they came to be here. And they each have their own story, of course, but for the most part, people are from the area and they are local Josephine County residents.

As pretty much the only city of any size, we just have two cities here in Josephine County, and Cave Junction is 2,000 people. Grants Pass is about 40,000 people. So we are kind of this hub for people throughout the county, who might move from a different area of the county, to come to Grants Pass. So in that sense, they’re not necessarily exactly from Grants Pass. But, yeah, I think that the people are from here and that we need to accept that and we need to work on shelter and housing solutions to help people get out of homelessness, because I don’t think that they’re going to go away.

Miller: Are there shelter beds in Grants Pass right now for people experiencing homelessness?

Bristol: Not exactly. We do have some small and specific shelters for something such as the Women’s Crisis Support Team, where somebody can stay in a very specific circumstance. But we do not have just an open shelter in the city of Grants Pass.

Miller: I want to turn to that Supreme Court case you mentioned because some folks may not be familiar with that. We’re talking about a case at the United States Supreme Court that is based on your city, even though this is also based on all of the states that are under the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. But just as a reminder for listeners, in 2018 the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that people who are involuntarily homeless can’t be punished for sleeping outside if there are not enough shelter beds. Grants Pass and a lot of other cities and states and now attorneys general from a bunch of places, they’ve argued that that ruling has made it nearly impossible for jurisdictions to address homelessness. Oral arguments in this US Supreme Court case are scheduled for April 22nd.

What’s it been like, locally, to be a kind of test case for this appeals court decision?

Bristol: I think, here locally, because the case has been under appeal the entire time that I’ve been mayor, which is a little over three years now, we’d already lost the case and appealed it by the time I became mayor. So for the last three and a half years, I guess, I feel like we’re stuck, always waiting for the appeal. First, we were appealing to the 9th Circuit, then we were asking for an en banc hearing at the 9th Circuit and now the case is headed to the US Supreme Court. So without that finality of, this is the ruling, I think it’s made it a challenge for people to accept what our next steps need to be.

I don’t have any magic ball for what the Supreme Court might say, but we are anticipating an answer by the end of June. And I think, for me, having the finality of being able to move beyond this appeal, we can start to take steps to move forward.

Miller: Mayor Bristol, thanks very much. Sara Bristol is the mayor of Grants Pass. Earlier this morning, she vetoed an ordinance that would have restricted the way homeless service organizations can provide their services.

For another perspective on this, I’m joined by Cassy Leach. She’s the executive director of MINT. It’s one of the organizations that would have been regulated under that ordinance. MINT stands for Mobile Integrative Navigation Team. It serves Josephine County. Cassy Leach, welcome.

Cassy Leach: Hi. Thank you for having me.

Miller: Thanks for joining us. What went through your mind when you heard about this ordinance?

Leach: I was just frustrated. I didn’t understand the “why” behind it. And I was frustrated at the fact that I was going to have to potentially move through red tape and focus some of my time on administrative and money efforts as opposed to getting to the root cause of the problem and helping the people we serve.

Miller: What is it that you do? What are the services that you provide, and where?

Leach: MINT is a group of health care professionals and regular volunteers, and we go out to the park each Thursday and we invite other agencies in town that help serve the unhoused. We come together and provide wraparound services connection. We provide hot meals, medical care, groceries for the week, some clothing and then obviously mental health support, substance use support. DHS, AllCare [Health], our CCO [Coordinated Care Organizations], they all join us there too. So that way the unhoused have access to the services that they need in one stop.

In addition to that, we case-manage a variety of folks out there and help support them and get them engaged in services needed, providing medical care. And we also spend time on Saturdays cleaning up the park and helping the elderly and disabled move to make sure they’re complying with the ordinances and rules with living in the park.

Miller: What would this now vetoed ordinance have meant specifically for your organization in terms of everything you just described - your Thursday weekly activities?

Leach: Obviously, it would have meant that we had to get a permit and in addition to that, we would invite other agencies and now the other agencies would have that same burden of having to get permits. And so it would make it harder for us collectively to come together. But I think the part we were most concerned about was the more punitive side of things, where it really did give the city the ability to revoke us from being able to do services if they found that we left the park a mess afterwards or something along that nature.

And the reality is when we leave a park, we leave it just as clean as when we got there, but we don’t have control over what happens after we leave and what the people we serve do. So that was the biggest concern for us, that it could potentially prevent us from going in the parks at all.

Miller: Oh. So, say you gave somebody a coat because they were cold and you left, and then a day later they left a coat on a bench. This is just a hypothetical. But you’re saying that if somebody wanted to ding you and say, “hey, we want to stop MINT from operating,” they could say that it was messier after they visited.

Leach: Correct. And there’s a lot of people that already film what we’re doing and watch. They don’t love that we’re in the parks. So knowing that people come out and film us, they’re looking for opportunities to prevent us from being out there.

Miller: So you’re there providing healthcare or food or clothing or services to people who are homeless. What do you think the people with their cell phone cameras are doing? And why?

Leach: I think a lot of them are people that live near the park and they don’t like the ruckus, and I can appreciate that. I don’t know what it’s like. I live within a mile of all the parks, but the park isn’t my front yard. And I think for a lot of them, they just don’t love that there’s people in tents in the parks and they don’t want people that are supporting them living in tents. I guess that that’s the main thing.

Miller: Do you think that they think that because you are there providing services, you are enabling people who are homeless to stay in the park?

Leach: Yes. That is their perception, when the reality is we are meeting people where they’re at, finding out what their barriers are, and helping them crawl out. A lot of what we do is assisting in activities of daily living. When they have to move tent sites every three to seven days, that’s a day they lose, right? Because they have to move their house, essentially. And then to be able to go do laundry is a trip to St. Vincent to get a voucher and then to the laundromat. That’s a day’s work right there. And what we do when we know someone’s really working on getting in control of their mental health or waiting for an in-patient treatment facility, we come alongside them and we help alleviate some of those activities of daily living burdens. And we’ll take them to help, get their laundry done and stuff like that because we understand that they’re trying to do the next hard thing, and they really need a safety net and support around them to be able to do that.

Miller: How much of a safety net or support is there? I mean, we heard from the mayor just now that, depending on your definition of a shelter, maybe there aren’t shelter beds in Grants Pass. I mean, how would you describe the state of services overall, in terms of the infrastructure that can help people get out of homelessness?

Leach: You know, it’s devastating because housing is a crisis, there is no housing and there are waits for in-patient treatment facilities, so those burdens weigh heavy on our hearts. What I do love about Grants Pass is there are grassroots peer-support folks that really want to do the right thing. You have HIV Alliance, Max’s Mission, Adapt, and Options [for Southern Oregon]. They’re out there every day supporting folks just like MINT is, and seeing all of them come together and collaborate is a beautiful thing.

What Grants Pass has going for it is a committed group of peer-support specialists really wanting to help folks in the parks. But housing and waiting for in-patient treatment is an exhausting barrier and it’s really devastating. I mean, we deal with hospital discharges. We had one yesterday and it’s awful to discharge a man in his 60s with disabilities to a tent, but there’s literally nowhere else in Grants Pass to put him.

Miller: What do you do? I mean, so somebody in his 60s with disabilities was discharged to a tent. Where do you even start, in terms of the services that you provide?

Leach: We continue to advocate for long-term housing through getting them set up with the Social Security hub, disability, Adult Protective Services. We advocate if they’re part of our CCO for alternative respite housing. We do have some options through Rogue Retreat in Medford. So that’s an option.

We do the best we can with what we have by getting them tents that accommodate their disabilities and cots so they don’t have to lay on the ground. But ultimately, we strive for that long-term solution and we have housed seniors and it’s a great experience and it’s always a huge win. But it is really hard to find affordable housing. We’ve got, I think four seniors in RV’s, because that’s been an alternative we can look for. But we do what we can, and we make sure that we’re engaging them with their primary care providers and trying to focus in on their health at the same time, trying to get housing because that’s really what’s going to solve their problem.

Miller: In a sense, we’ve been talking about two related things here in both these conversations with you now. But with the mayor earlier, both the challenges in providing services for people experiencing homelessness in Josephine County or in Grants Pass, but also the political realities that are a response to a very visible version of homelessness right now…and the ordinance is the meeting point of those. I’m curious if you see a pathway to have a more political understanding? In other words, if you see a way for the two sides in Grants Pass to come together?

Leach: I sure hope so. Some of the people that are really opposed to what we’re doing, I talk to them, we’re on friendly terms and I empathize with their frustration. I think that at this point, everyone agrees we need - whether it’s an urban campground or a low barrier shelter - alternative housing solutions. If we want people out of the park, we just can’t get around that.

We need navigation centers. We probably need more than one. We need resources readily available to these folks so they can get out of their difficult situation. And I do think that both sides are starting to come around on that.

Miller: What are your plans now that this ordinance has been vetoed?

Leach: We were ready to continue business as usual with the ordinance. We were just going to do our own before and after photos, and we’re going to continue on. We just signed a year-long lease on a property that’s right next to the parks that are most inhabited by campers. And we’re hoping to open up a daytime resource navigation center.

We’re doing emergency inclement-weather shelter there. And we want to be part of the solution. We want to come alongside other agencies and all of us with a common goal. Let’s get our hands dirty and do something, because we’ve been paralyzed for a while and it’s time for us to move forward.

Miller: Cassy Leach, thanks very much. Cassy Leach is the executive director and co-founder of MINT in Josephine County. That stands for Mobile Integrative Navigation Team.

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