Sonoma County human rights panel condemns homeless camp sweeps

As a chilly winter storm swept into Santa Rosa, the Sonoma County Commission on Human Rights denounced the city’s treatment of homeless people camping illegally on public property, citing the sweep on Monday of an encampment with no more than a few days notice to residents.

The denunciation, which had the strong backing of homeless advocates who are frequently critical of local actions to clear encampments, came Tuesday in the form of a unanimous resolution asking Santa Rosa to “immediately cease all actions that violate the fundamental human rights of the unhoused residents of our county.”

“Our options for shelter for those who are unhoused in the county are woefully inadequate,” said Jerry Threet, an attorney who chairs the human rights commission and formerly served as the county’s independent law enforcement watchdog.

The commission’s meeting Tuesday followed Santa Rosa’s action on Monday to disband an encampment of at least 20 people living along the Prince Memorial Greenway near Olive Park on the western side of Highway 101.

Threet and other activists noted the timing of the enforcement action — hours before local temperatures plunged below freezing Monday night and a day before a heavy, multiday rainstorm that hit Tuesday evening, accompanied by flash flood advisories spanning much of the Bay Area.

The clearing also came three days after the city resumed intake at its largest homeless shelter, Samuel L. Jones Hall. It marked the end of a brief pause on encampment enforcement that local officials had put in place due to a COVID-19 outbreak at Sam Jones in late December.

Homeless advocates criticized the city for sweeping the Greenway encampment with little or no notice, but Kelli Kuykendall, the city’s housing and community services manager, said the city informed campers of the impending action and offered them shelter placements ahead of time.

“Outreach was provided to individuals on Friday and over the weekend in advance of Monday’s operation,” Kuykendall said.

Santa Rosa is required to provide adequate notice as well as offer shelter and storage options to people camping illegally on public property under a 2019 court order that stemmed from a lawsuit filed by homeless advocates in early 2018.

Of the 20 homeless campers the city “engaged,” nine expressed interest in relocating to shelter and were offered a space at either Sam Jones, the Sandman hotel where the city leases dozens of rooms, or the county-run Los Guilicos Village camp ahead of the current storm, Kuykendall said.

The city is planning to disband a much larger encampment on Industrial Way north of Piner Road as early as next Monday, when space for up to 60 people opens in a temporary tented structure next to Sam Jones. The shelter usually has 213 beds but lost substantial capacity due to social distancing requirements that called for the shelter to provide more distance between its beds.

“With shelter intakes resuming over the weekend within the existing facility, we were able to move forward with the encampment along the (Greenway),” Kuykendall said.

The commission’s resolution echoes a report from 2018, when the panel asked the county and the city to create and fund safe camping areas as a way to address complaints that local homeless people were not having their human rights respected.

That call largely fell on deaf ears in 2019, when a massive encampment became entrenched for months along the Joe Rodota Trail, a county trail running through west Santa Rosa. Last year, the city set up a temporary outdoor encampment near the Finley Community Center due to the COVID-19 emergency, though that site lacked anything resembling a roof and was closed ahead of the rainy season.

A city spokeswoman said top officials were occupied Tuesday evening with the City Council meeting and readying their response to the storm and had not had time to review the commission’s new resolution, approved on a unanimous 10-0 vote.

Members of the 15-seat Human Rights Commission are appointed by supervisors. Though the panel’s actions can be influential in county policymaking they are advisory in nature.

Another facet of the issue — the role of police officers in encampment enforcement — arose at the Santa Rosa council meeting Tuesday in which council members were going over a presentation about the Police Department’s staffing.

Police officers are an integral part of Santa Rosa’s encampment enforcement efforts. However, as Chief Rainer Navarro told the City Council on Tuesday, the task of ordering campers to leave an illegal campsite is sapping department resources and draining morale.

That’s part of the reason the city is looking into a new model of sending unarmed social workers to calls involving mental health, substance abuse and homelessness, which could divert up to 5% of the calls for police service, Navarro said.

“We’re hoping we can be in that same area,” Navarro said of potential to offload some enforcement work. He cautioned that the actual effect in Santa Rosa wouldn’t be clear until the city was able to set up its own version of the program. “We’re trying to identify how we get it started and how do we grow it.”

You can reach Staff Writer Will Schmitt at 707-521-5207 or will.schmitt@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @wsreports.