'Camping' debate explodes upon passage, 1 arrested
See the arguments for and against that got everyone so heated.
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The Saratoga Springs City Council meeting erupted into arguments among the council’s four board members, the mayor and the members of the public, Tuesday night July 1.
One arrest was made, and at least three people were told to “leave now” by the mayor for speaking loudly, out of turn from the gallery, and with the mayor calling for a five-minute recess of the meeting — twice — over the course of more than three hours of the public hearing portion of the meeting.
The meeting started with the public hearing on the city’s proposed “camping law” that lasted so long that the woman who was arrested just before 10 p.m. was back at the microphone attempting to continue her speech at about 11:15 p.m., in front of a surprised mayor who was trying to push through the vote on the ordinance. (She held the microphone for 30 minutes despite his warning her three times for talking past the allotted three-minute time period.)
The public hearing had officially ended just after 10 p.m.
In the end, the ordinance passed, with the mayor and Commissioner of Public Works Charles “Chuck” Marshall and Commission of Public Safety Tim Coll voting for the measure, and Commissioner of Accounts Dillon Moran and Commissioner of Finance Minita Sanghvi voting against.
(The woman arrested goes by the name Dio Kaufman. She was issued an appearance ticket for disorderly conduct and will go to court July 17.)
The camping law makes it illegal to sleep or lie or sit on or in any city property, or in any doorway that is adjacent to a public sidewalk; to place camping materials on any city property, lie across any public bench on any city property, sit on any curb of any street or landscaped area, or place any item or items of personal property within any landscaped bed of any city property.
The law creates carve-outs for people who break the rules due to a medical or other emergency; for people who sit on a curb during a parade, demonstration, exhibition or other lawful event designed to attract the attention of the public; for chairs, tables or other items used for approved outdoor dining or commerce; and any person who sits on any public benches on city property.
With just one public hearing on the law that was proposed only two weeks ago, it passed just in time to affect the annual track meet that starts this weekend. Proponents say this was not taken into account, but detractors found the timing so coincidental that they fear the homeless will be taken from the street to keep Saratoga Springs tidy during the meet.
The vote came after more than three hours of public discussion, with the vast majority of the dozens who spoke arguing against the measure.
Many said they understood that something has to be done to help the homeless population of the city, but felt the law as proposed would not help and asked the council not to hold the vote but to keep working on a better version of the law.
What follows is a summary of each side of the debate surrounding the issue.
The argument for the camping law
Although Coll said during a presentation before the public hearing that the rules would apply to all who broke them — offering the example of student protestors in the city — and that the ordinance was not aimed at the homeless population of the city, nearly all of the examples he used to highlight the need for the ordinance dealt with the homeless population and the ways in which the city would handle them.
The process, according to Commissioner Coll, would ask the Saratoga Springs police to give a two-week notice to a person before he or she is issued a first ticket. The ticket is a civil, not criminal, penalty, with a first offense set at $100. Tickets thereafter are $250. He said most people would go before the city’s outreach court, previously known as the homeless court, led by Judge Francine Vero and administered by RISE, a homeless advocacy group. The judge would have leeway about how to handle the charges.
“The goal would be to connect those folks who need services to those services, whether substance abuse issues or mental health,” Coll said. “The outreach court does that routinely and does that all the time.”
He cited a homeless man who died after he passed out on south Broadway and was hit by a car.
Coll said the homeless man was run over “and he got killed during the winter, during one of those foggy nights. So my position is, it's not humane as a society for us to let those folks continue to live that way. And there's also a balance. How do you think the couple who ran that person over accidentally feels as well?”
At the time of the vote, Mayor John Safford offered a prewritten statement:
“This local law is a necessary and responsible step to keep the public spaces safe and accessible to all. It is simply not made to allow people to live and sleep out on the streets without intervention. We have strong support systems in place across the city and county, and this law helps connect individuals to the services they need. Turning a blind eye is not compassion. Action is. I've dedicated most of my life as many people to know, to help the less fortunate, and I will continue to do that for the rest of my life.”
The argument against the ordinance
Commissioners Moran and Sanghvi led the charge against the ordinance with arguments that the ordinance made too many assumptions about the homeless population and the ability of the city to handle a lot of new cases brought to homeless court. They cited a study that put the homeless population at 529 people in Saratoga, Warren and Washington counties.
Sanghvi cited a number of jurisdictions nationwide that have enacted the ban to no avail; the number of homeless people on the streets did not decline and there was no appreciable rise in public health. Fining people does not help them out of homelessness, she said. In short, the ordinance will not produce the results that Coll espouses, she said.
Moran said that the law will be so biased against people of color, and that the application of it will be so uneven against people of color, that the city is likely to be sued, lawsuits he believes the city will lose. The longer-term problem with that is the inability of the city to maintain insurance coverage, which means the city will have to self-insure at a price that is millions of dollars per year more than the city is spending now. He also argued that the federal-level cuts being made to social services such as Medicaid will force more people into local social services, and he argued that the city will not be able to handle the load.
Sanghvi directed one question at the mayor’s statement.
“And do you think that the amount that the county spends, considering we are 62nd in the state of New York of 62 counties, is adequate, and that's what you would call ‘strong support systems,’” she asked him.
“That’s my statement,” he said.
“Okay, I just wanted to make sure that we are all on the same page,” she said, “because I fundamentally disagree that we have strong support systems. If we have strong support systems, we would have people not camping on the streets. If we had strong support systems, we would have more affordable housing.
“If we had strong support systems, we would have low barrier shelters for at least 1% of our county residents. And we are woefully short. We are in the process of building a code blue shelter, not a 24/7 homeless shelter, [a] code blue shelter, which only will house the unhoused population in the winter months, in the evenings, because it's mandated by New York State law, and that is not adequate or strong.”
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-end-homelessness-except-build-more-homes
Catch me outside on the sidewalk with my tent! Great article.