Clearing of Santa Rosa homeless encampment off to a slow start

The journey of a thousand miles begins, according to a Chinese proverb, with a single step.

The emptying of the sprawling, unsanitary homeless encampment on Santa Rosa’s Joe Rodota Trail began Sunday with a similarly modest feat.

Declared a homeless emergency by the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors in mid-December, the 2-mile long tent city was a muddy, rat-infested home to some 250 people. By sundown on Sunday, nine of them had upgraded to their own, private tiny house in a camp some 9 miles east.

At a command center set up in a parking lot behind the Goodwill-Redwood Empire, just west of Stony Point Road, Sonoma County workers processed nine people who’d been living in makeshift shelters on the popular hiking and biking trail between Santa Rosa and Sebastopol. The people who moved Sunday were put on buses that took them - and in some cases, their dogs - to a county-sanctioned camp at the Los Guilicos Juvenile Justice Center, just across Highway 12 from the senior community of Oakmont.

The new camp, which will cost $2 million, consists of 60 private, $4,500 houses that fit a bed, a heater and outlet to power devices in just 64 square feet. In considering which Rodota trail occupants would be the first to move in at Los Guilicos, officials gave priority to people at risk of death and exploitation, to seniors and those with severe or persistent medical conditions.

Joe Garcia checked a couple of those boxes. The 59-year-old had coronary bypass surgery two months ago, he said, and had been living on the trail for two weeks.

“This is going to be a big step up for me,” Garcia said before boarding the bus.

“I’ve been living on the outside for 15 years, and I’m getting tired. It gets old.”

He talked about how he would use his cooking stove to warm up in the morning.

But his friends aren’t coming with him.

“Half of these people don’t want to go,” said Garcia.

“We talk about it and they say, ‘Hell no!’?”

The sheltering plan at Los Guilicos, chosen by county officials as a stopgap measure until April 30, is widely unpopular with many Oakmont residents - and also with large numbers of those occupying the Joe Rodota Trail encampment.

Put Lisa Morris in that camp. The 47-year-old said she was among the first to set up a shelter on the trail, ?2 ½ years ago.

While she may be forced out, Morris said she’s not going to Los Guilicos. The fence around the place gives her a bad feeling.

“Come on,” she said. “We’re not animals.”

Instead, she’ll take her belongings to the Sam Jones shelter, a 200-bed facility run by Catholic Charities.

Tara Maclees has no problem with the extra security at Los Guilicos. She hoped to be taking a bus to that shelter later in the day.

“My boyfriend is packing up my stuff right now,” she said.

Asked what she won’t miss about life on the Joe Rodota Trail, she said: “The violence. The stealing.”

As if on cue, a man strode past, engaging in a profane, threatening conversation with himself.

“Stuff like that,” she went on.

Fifteen minutes later, 100 yards farther west on the trail, one man yelled into a tent, challenging its occupant. That man emerged from the tent, ready to fight. In the end, they exchanged insults and profanities, but not fists.

Monty, 61, isn’t going to Los Guilicos. He lives on the trail with his son, Robert, who recently spent three months in an area hospital “for observation,” he shared.

“They said he was a delusional psychotic schizophrenic. He thinks things are going on that aren’t really going on.”

“He’s kind of hard to deal with. I keep him over there,” said Monty, motioning to the eastern end of the encampment. “Away from people. He can get violent.”

Zayin Volkmuth and his girlfriend, Aurora Triliegi, made the move to Los Guilicos, but had mixed feelings about it. While he was grateful for the modest new abode awaiting them, Volkmuth said that he’d “been out here so long” - five months - “it feels like home.”

The move to east Santa Rosa, he added, would be taking them from “lot of people we’ve come to see as family.”

But the move also offers the promise of stability. Los Guilicos will prohibit drug use on site, will prohibit entry and exit outside of hourly shuttle service and will offer a host of health and housing services county officials hope will move people toward more permanent living situations.

The goal for county leaders is to clear the trail camp, which has long been considered a public health crisis due to cold, wet conditions, a rat infestation, fires and uncontrolled drug use.

While Volkmuth and Triliegi sat filling out paperwork before boarding the bus, a man sprinted in from the parking lot, shouting, “Does anyone have Narcan?” Someone had overdosed, he said, in the restroom of a nearby restaurant.

Back at the Los Guilicos site, officials restricted media access, and Santa Rosa Councilman Jack Tibbetts defended the seemingly low number of people who completed the move Sunday.

“This is a dynamic, fluid situation, and we’ve got a great team of staff and volunteers that are taking things as they come,” said Tibbetts, who runs the nonprofit Society of St. Vincent de Paul, which the county picked to run the Los Guilicos shelter.

The shelter will fill more quickly, he predicted, as word gets back to the Joe Rodota Trail that these new digs are very good.

He was encouraged, in the meantime, by Sunday’s progress, and spoke of a woman who’d been on the fence about Los Guilicos.

To ease her mind, Tibbetts and other officials gave her a tour, during which, he recalled, “her eyes teared up, and she said, ‘This is going to be my first step to recovery.’?”