Guerneville homeless debate heats up

A frustrated crowd some 400 strong voiced discontent and resentment Monday night over county policies that many believe have allowed a growing homeless population to run roughshod over residents and business owners along the lower Russian River in recent years.

Citing substance abuse and drug dealing, public intoxication and harassment, vagrancy and litter, one speaker after another told a panel of county officials at a forum in Guerneville that they had fallen short in their duties to deal with threats to the business climate and quality of life the struggling communities are trying to achieve.

“The homeless are degrading our community,” retired sheriff's deputy John Schubert said.

“In the last 2½ years, things have drastically changed here,” resident Tom Niclaes said.

Monday's meeting was sparked by an unusual spate of fires in Guerneville and the Russian River area, including two cases of possible arson that gutted a closed inn and a health clinic.

Some in the town have blamed homeless people, although there is no evidence of who started the human-caused blazes or why.

Some attendees cited reports that they say come from homeless people themselves of being bused into Guerneville from inland cities.

Others said they believe the area's transient population is drawn by services that enable homeless people, rather than help them get off the streets.

Some speakers chastised public officials for plans to create a comprehensive homeless service center at a shuttered inn and restaurant east of town, saying the problem already is so out of control.

“This community is broken, badly,” Russian River Fire Protection District board President Mark Emmett said. “It's disgraceful, and we have four months before the tourists come in ... frustration is boiling over.”

Residents vented their ire particularly toward Sonoma County Sheriff Steve Freitas and District Attorney Jill Ravitch, saying street deputies reported being restrained from making arrests by upper-level management and a county's chief prosecutor who won't press charges.

Freitas denied that deputies have been told not to enforce the law.

“I have never given anyone instructions not to enforce the law against the homeless,” he told the crowd.

But he and Ravitch expressed their own frustrations over changing laws that made it increasingly difficult to prosecute and incarcerate low-level offenders, given changing law enforcement priorities.

Freitas and his staff also repeatedly informed those in attendance that homelessness and loitering themselves are not criminal acts, and that deputies do not possess the tools to do anything about it.

Decriminalization of many nuisance crimes under Proposition 47, passed by California voters in 2014, won support from about 70 percent of Sonoma County voters, he noted.

“Whether you believe in it or not, that's the law,” Freitas said.

The two-hour town meeting in the Guerneville School multi-purpose room was hastily pulled together last week by Russian River Chamber of Commerce President Debra Johnson and other community leaders in the wake of a flurry of seven structure fires in the downtown core of Guerneville, including at least two that are considered suspicious, fire officials say.

Uncertainty over the various fires - one of which destroyed the Russian River Health Center - and rumors that vagrancy might have played a role stirred up already-significant concerns in the Guerneville area about a ballooning homeless population and the resulting problems.

Some of those at Monday's meeting attempted to moderate rancor in the crowd, including one who reminded the audience of Guerneville's longtime claim as a “hate-free zone.”

Another, Carolyn Epple, warned of a sense that the meeting could “become kind of hate-mobby.”

“The homeless themselves ... are human beings, and we need to sort of bring down the tenor here,” she said.

But many said their frustration with the situation was only growing as the weeks and months continued.

“Our perception of how things are going in this community is very different than yours,” Armstrong Woods Road resident Nance Jones told the panel of officials, to loud applause.

“We don't have a sense that, whatever the laws are, that they are being enforced, and so it just feels lawless,” she said.

Jones said she lived for nearly 10 years in Guerneville without ever having to call law enforcement but in the past year called four times because of problems around her home.

“It really says that something has changed,” she said, “and my sense is that if people really did feel that if they broke the law something would happen, it would start to change.”

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan at 521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MaryCallahanB.