California cities: Caltran’s response to homeless camps

From Marisa KendallCalmness

This story was originally published by CalmattersS Register about their ballots.

Governor Gavin Newo ordered State agencies to clear stray camps from their properties last summer, holding the California Department of Transport as an example of how it should be done.

But for more than nine months since then, cities up and down the state complain that Caltrans is not doing enough. City employees and employees say that the State Agency is slow, sometimes it takes months to respond to their demands for clearing a camp. They complain that the agency does not tell them consistently when it plans to clear the camp. At least in one city, employees have no idea whether Caltrans offers services to homeless people who start their land.

And for their bigger part, city workers are forbidden to go to Caltrans property to do the job themselves.

“The way it is currently created does not work,” says Jogle Chavez, Mayor of Bell Gardens, a city with nearly 40,000 on the outskirts of Los Angeles. “It’s too long. People are disappointed.”

A bill that makes the way through the legislature seeks to change this by pushing Kaltrans to cooperate better with cities. Senate Bill 569 It will require the State Agency to hire a connection to communicate with the local authorities and to expose the deadlines that give clarity when Caltrans has to react after the city wants to clear the camp.

The bill will also make it easier for cities to go to Caltrans property and use their own resources and staff to eliminate camps and offer services. This would allow, but it does not require Caltrans to restore cities for these efforts.

Caltrans declined to request an interview and did not answer email questions about his process of working with cities to clear the camps or the Senate bill. The Agency has not approved publicly or opposed the bill.

The bill comes against the background of a state impetus to Remove the bearings for homelessand sometimes arrest People in them, despite the widespread shortage of housing and shelters. Newsom on Monday summoned cities and counties to accept a Modeling ordinance This would camp in one place for more than three days illegally.

USA Supreme Court Last year, he found that cities could do illegally sleeping in a public place, even if there was nowhere else to go. Since then, more than two dozen California cities and counties have accepted prohibitions on new campsThey returned old prohibitions or made their regulations more invalid.

As the cities are pushing people who are not from their sidewalks in the city center and outside their parks, people often resort to sleeping on Caltrans’ land – along with the highway on and outside the ramp, medians or underwear. Sleeping so close to cars playing, carrying their own risks, but it can buy them time as Caltrans tends to take more time than cities to clear the bearings.

In the meantime, Caltrans is in the midst of an sometimes executed transition from an agency loaded with the construction and maintenance of highways to an agency, increasingly loaded with the difficult responsibility for humane disassembly of stray camps and assisting UNHOUSED residents to have access to scarce shelter. In 2020, the agency agreed to pay $ 5.5 million to arrangement Claiming that he illegally destroyed the belongings of homeless people living on his land. People who are crazy and workers in Caltrans mourn For cruel treatment and chaotic conditions during cleaning. A homeless woman was struck by machines and killed During Caltrans Camp in Modesto in 2018.

National Health Care for the Homeless Council has found The Met Camp There may be adverse effects on the health of displaced residents, expose their safety at risk and undermine their efforts to enter homes.

Senator Catherine BlexpirThe author of the Senate was also a Democrat from Encinitas, stated that her goal is not to move undeniable people from one place outdoors to another, and that she acknowledges the need to build more timely and permanent homes – something that her bill does not address. But people who live in public spaces, especially to speeding up traffic, is a “real disaster,” she said.

“I just want Caltrans to deal with the problems in her property,” she said. “But it doesn’t happen.”

“We just keep going to exchange -back”

In July, NEWSOM signed an Enforcement order The requirement of state agencies to adopt policies to clear camps on their properties – and maintain Caltran’s efforts as a model of success.

Since then, there has been a permanent drum of complaints from city leaders, said Caroline Grinder, a legislative defender of public services for the California City League. There is no universal model on how Caltrans should include city staff when clearing a bearing, so the process varies greatly. Some cities say their relationship with the State Agency is great.

“It is a real challenge for other cities to make Caltrans react and it is difficult for them to work with them to deal with the camps,” Grinder said.

In a recent study of cities in the California League, 40% of cities said coordination of state agencies was an obstacle to dealing with camps. They said it was the most big obstacle they face after lack of services and lack of funding.

“It’s up and down, in all different types of communities,” Grinder said.

Calmatters has asked Caltrans data to eliminate bearings in January that the State Agency has not yet provided.

Caltrans has funding for 30 “camp coordinator” that controls the bearings on their roads. Before removing a camp, Kaltrans must warn the residents of 48 hours in advance (unless the camp is considered to be an immediate threat to life, health, safety or infrastructure), according to the agency’s camp PolicyS Once the cleaning is launched, the people left in the camp must receive a “reasonable period of time” to remove their belongings, and Caltrans must store all the personal belongings left behind. The policy also points out that employees must contact service providers in order to request work in the camp.

In San Diego, the largest, the most visible camps tend to be in Caltrans Land, said Franklin Coopers, Deputy Director of the San Diego Environmental Services Division and the head of his pure efforts on SD. The city receives more than 300 complaints each month about the Caltrans camps. City employees cannot turn to them, so they tell residents instead to complete an online customer service form on Caltrans webpageS

It can take weeks or months in San Jose to allow Caltrans to remove a camp. In some extreme cases, the camps have linger for a year or two, said Mayor Mat Mahan. After Caltrans clears the site, people return immediately as they know that the State Agency will not return in three to six months, he said.

“The longer we allow people to remain in a highway camp or on a switch to turn on and off, the more the camp is established and people come to the place and get a significant accumulation of waste,” he said. This can cost between $ 50,000 and $ 100,000 to remove a long -standing camp, he said.

San Jose has a staff of 40 field staff and an attempt to prevent people from returning to camps, Mahan said. It would be more effective for everyone, he said, to allow San Jose to take over Caltrans’ and be restored.

San Jose is negotiating with an agreement with Caltrans that Mahan hopes to allow the city to clear certain camps on and outside the ramp in East San Jose.

Los Angeles has reached Agreement With Caltrans last year.

The Blackspear Bill, which Mahan supports, would facilitate other cities in California to create similar deals. This would require Caltrans to create a publicly available online database of these agreements (called delegated maintenance agreements) that other cities can use as a negotiating point.

Riverside is trying to negotiate such a deal with Caltrans since September, said Mayor Patricia Locke Dawson. Meanwhile, the city and the state agency are not always on the same page. Caltrans does not consistently tell the city when it will clear the camp, according to the mayor’s office, and the mayor’s officers do not even know if Caltrans offers people services before forcing them from their property.

As a result, people who have not bounced from Caltrans ownership, to the city’s property and back to Caltrans ownership without getting off the street, Lock Dawson said.

“We just keep going to exchange back -behind and it’s really ineffective,” she said.

Riverside has introduced more than 70 requests to remove Caltrans camps so far this year, according to the mayor’s office. It is usually necessary between two days and two weeks to allow the State Agency to clear these bearings.

Caltrans has spent more than $ 51 million, addressing the camps in the fiscal year 2023-24, according to an analysis of the BlackSpear Bill of the Senate Budget Committee.

If the bill passes, Kaltrans told the committee that it would cost about $ 200,000 a year to hire a “connection” charged with the supervision of communication between the State Agency and the local authorities. If the agency reimburses cities and districts to clearing camps, these costs can be ballooned in tens of millions of dollars a year, according to the committee’s cost analysis.

The recovery proposal is popular with city officials and employees.

“The game is not cheap,” San Diego Colesmith said. Its city spends about $ 675,000 a year for four workers in the field who are allowed to go to Caltrans Land and to offer shelter (if available) and other services before it gets away.

“Putting is not cheap,” he said. “Police, the discarding of the camp, all this costs money. We also have to ensure that if we work on all kinds of state property, we want to make sure we are compensated.”

This article was Originally Published on CalMatters and was reissued under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Noderivatives License.