Sacramento approves new law to clear homeless from levees, but not streets or other areas
Sacramento will soon start clearing homeless camps from sections of riverfront levees, but will not ban encampments on downtown streets or outside public buildings – for now.
An ordinance approved unanimously Tuesday by the City Council bans camping within 25 feet of riverfront levees in the city.
Sacramento city staff last week recommended the City Council pass an ordinance to prohibit homeless camps within 25 feet of riverfront levees, hospitals, bridges, police and fire stations, pump stations and other public facilities. The move aimed to protect the city’s infrastructure and prevent serious wildfires and floods.
Between May and October of 2019, there were at least 1,009 fires in the city caused by encampments, a city staff report said. Some homeless have dug into the levees so deep that it has taken months to repair, Assistant City Manager Chris Conlin told The Sacramento Bee. The holes are often covered by tents, prohibiting inspectors from assessing the levees.
Since September 2018, police in western states have not been able to issue citations to homeless people for sleeping in public places unless a shelter bed is available. That’s when the controversial federal court ruling in the Martin v. Boise case was issued. But the Sacramento city attorney’s office say a footnote submitted by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit lets them prohibit campers from certain areas to “protect the public health, safety and welfare.”
After seeing the map of riverfront areas where the law would apply, Mayor Darrell Steinberg said he did not believe the proposed ordinance was a “work around” to allow the city to get around the Martin v. Boise court decision.
Officials said public infrastructure would mainly include hospitals, police and fire stations and pump stations. But activists raised concerns that the ordinance language would allow the city to later expand the law’s reach into other areas deemed “critical infrastructure” without another council vote.
The ordinance says the city manager can designate what locations, public or private, would be considered “critical infrastructure,” civil rights attorney Mark Merin pointed out.
“Everything depends upon the designation of critical infrastructure,” Merin said. “That is not stated in this ordinance.”
In response, Steinberg suggested the council remove the ability for the city manager to designate other areas, for now. The other council members voted to approve the ordinance with that amendment.
“I don’t want that to go into effect until the manager comes back with an actual list of critical infrastructure that will circumscribe the ordinance in the right way,” Steinberg said. “It’s too broad of a discretion to give to even as good of a city manager as we have here, in my opinion.”
Homeless protected on river levees
Ginamarie Fleming, who is homeless, said camping atop the levee itself provides some safety because of its height. It gives her and her friends ability to see if threats are coming. At night, the men in her community take turns keeping watch, she said.
“It is safer. When I go out, I go out during the day until dark because of everything going on, like the rapes. They make sure we’re safe,” Fleming, 45, say of the men in her group who keep watch.
Others end up on the levee because they run out of other options.
Betty “Bubbles” Rios and her group of about a dozen people have tried camping in several places before ending up along the Morrison Creek levee, she said. They spent nearly a decade at the Stockton Boulevard site where the San Juan Motel used to sit, and then on a site along 65th Street in south Sacramento. Police and sheriff’s deputies asked them to leave both locations, she said.
“If we have to move 25 feet, we’d be back where we were,” Rios said. “We’re wondering where we go now if we have to leave the levee.”
The city has a large shelter open in the Capitol Park Hotel downtown and plans to open large homeless shelters in North Oak Park and Meadowview this spring, but on any given night, no shelter beds are available. There are more than 5,570 homeless people living in Sacramento County on any given night, mostly in the city, a count done in January 2019 found.
The levee ordinance goes into effect in 30 days.
This story was originally published February 25, 2020 at 4:58 PM.
