A divided Sacramento City Council on Tuesday gave its top bureaucrat the sole power to open sanctioned homeless campgrounds — without council approval.
The 5-4 vote gives City Manager Howard Chan the authority to spend up to $5 million on temporary shelters known as “Safe Grounds.” The vote follows years of council plans that have failed to produce shelters, often due to community opposition and a lack of political will, amid the region’s deepening homelessness crisis.
Mayor Darrell Steinberg proposed the change.
“I think we’ve got to give the city manager the binding authority because if we do not, the process will get bogged down through good intentions and too much community and council involvement,” he said before the vote.
Steinberg along with Council members Katie Valenzuela, Rick Jennings, Caity Maple and Eric Guerra voted in favor. Meanwhile, Council members Karina Talamantes, Mai Vang, Sean Loloee and Lisa Kaplan opposed the plan. They said they feared the Safe Grounds, which include sanctioned homeless camping and parking sites, would be heavily concentrated in low-income neighborhoods in north and south Sacramento.
"If you decide that 'I'm going to pick these sites,' and let's say three of them fall in my district, that becomes, again, an over-saturation,” Loloee, who represents North Sacramento’s District 2, told Chan.
Talamantes and Vang issued a joint statement after the meeting. It reads, in part: “We value the input of our constituents and community too much to give all of that decision-making power to someone Sacramento residents didn’t elect.”
Chan tried to allay those fears, saying he would meet with council members before deciding on new homeless sites. He said he would use city-owned lots and would not place them in the central city.
Steinberg said he hopes to see sites selected by Chan up and running over the next several weeks.
Representatives from several Sacramento business associations supported the mayor’s proposal. They also advocated Tuesday for a related plan to speed up enforcement of the city’s existing homelessness ordinances, including a law that bans encampments from blocking sidewalks.
That effort, which the council also approved, allows Chan to pay city workers overtime to respond to and clear encampments. Sacramento has been slow to enforce recent measures intended to restrict camps along public property, including voter-approved Measure O.
Several business leaders, including Michael Ault of the Downtown Sacramento Partnership, said public safety and the city’s economic future is at stake. “We are losing the downtown core. We are losing our perception, we are losing the reality that this is a safe place to be,” he told the council.
In another move to restrict encampments on Tuesday, the council agreed to add courthouses and government law offices to its list of “critical infrastructure.” Homeless camps are banned within 500-feet of any government buildings on the city’s list, which includes schools, hospitals, jails, levees, police and fire stations, among other facilities.
Additionally, following this winter’s severe wind and rain storms, the council voted to expand criteria for opening “weather respite centers” beyond hot and cold temperatures.
The criteria now includes “any National Weather Service extreme weather events, including (but not limited to) wind, flood, or rain events,” according to a city staff report.
Contact CapRadio reporter Chris Nichols at [email protected].
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