The following commentary is written as a private resident of Albany. I do not claim to represent the views of the former Homeless Task Force or any other public or private body of which I am part.
There have been people living in improvised shelters on the Albany Bulb ever since it was closed as a landfill in the mid-80s. In recent years the increasing impact of these residents has drawn the attention of many Albany citizens, who have reported it to their representatives on the City Council and its appointed committees. A Homeless Task Force was formed to determine how our City can best apply existing efforts to end homelessness—particularly those of the umbrella organization for Alameda County, EveryOne Home—to the population living on the Bulb, as well as to homeless individuals seen about town. On May 6 the Task Force (to which I was appointed) was scheduled to present an interim report to the City Council, and we expected to receive guidance on “preferred options” for further refinement as specific strategies for recommendation by the Task Force, strategies which would be finalized by its targeted end-date of fall ’13 – winter ’14. Instead, the City Council listened to our presentation and then voted to initiate actions that were far beyond what any of us on the Task Force—and most of the public at large—could expect.
Did you ever have that experience back in school where everyone else in the class was reading from a place in the book different from where you thought you were supposed to be? That’s what it felt like as a Task Force member at that City Council meeting. After we presented the necessarily very general survey of approaches to “end homelessness in Albany” that we were in the process of considering, there began in the public comment section a pre-scripted verbal assault against the homeless encampment on the Bulb, launched by a bevy of our local shoreline enviros. Listing the many laws broken by Bulb residents and the presumed environmental impacts of their existence, the shoreline park activists were uniform in calling for a 45-day notice for the eviction of the people living there. After a pause for some spontaneous push-back from Task Force members and incredulous bystanders, the Council closed the comment time and continued with the script. Vice-Mayor Joanne Wile, reading from a document, immediately moved to: (1) dissolve the Task Force, (2) put out a $32,000 Request for Proposals for “outreach and engagement services” for homeless individuals in the City, (3) ask the Albany Police to enforce the no-camping law on the Bulb starting in October (generously giving more than 4 months instead of 45 days), and (4) work with the State Parks and the East Bay Regional Park District to develop the Bulb into an appropriate segment of McLaughlin Eastshore State Park. True to the script, all five Council members quickly voted “yes” after some brief, listless discussion.
Vice-Mayor Wile’s motion may seem like a reasonable plan at first glance and it is worthy of discussion, but there are several troubling issues with the action the City Council took by voting upon and approving it. The primary one is that the Homeless Task Force and the public at large were not given the script beforehand—as legally mandated by our state’s open meeting laws. However, the partisans of the Citizens for Eastshore State Park (CESP) and Citizens for the Albany Shoreline (CAS)—identifiable at the meeting by their fluorescent green “Save the Bulb” lapel stickers—clearly were. (Indeed, it appears to me that CESP and CAS wrote the script.) Specifically, the Council voted on one action, item (3) above (setting a date for police eviction at the Bulb), that was clearly not on the agenda. Therefore, all commentary provided by non-CESP-allied speakers prior to the vote was given without knowledge of the possibility that any such action might be taken. The City Council knows quite well that it would have been a very different public comment section if they had properly announced the nature of Vice-Mayor Wile’s proposal beforehand.
The published agenda for the City Council meeting on May 6 included a report from City staffers who had been working with the Task Force. The action item for this part of the agenda—item 7-1A under “Unfinished Business”—, the staff recommendation, reads in its entirety, “It is recommended that the City Council discuss whether there is a consensus on a preferred option. If there is a consensus on an option, it is recommended that the Council: (1) direct staff to issue a request for proposals for outreach and engagement services; (2) request report back on implementation of preferred option; and (3) provide direction on next steps for the Homeless Task Force.” Later in the report, city staff again state that if the Council finds consensus on a preferred option (a consensus it appears they found before the meeting), “it is recommended that the Council direct that staff return with an operational plan for implementation, including interim measures and milestones for key tasks.” To me, this document—part of the official agenda—is asking the Council to decide if there is a preferred option, and if there is, then the Council should ask staff to report back with information about what it would take to implement that option, including the determination of a realistic timeline. The staff report did not ask to be directed to actually begin implementation of an option—especially one that includes a deadline for enforcement—nor did the agenda indicate that the Council would or could do so. Accurate agendas are legally required to be published before public meetings in order to ensure the public gets a chance to comment on whatever is being considered by their elected representatives. If the Council’s vote of May 6 is not a technical violation of the Brown Act, then it is surely at least a violation of the spirit of such open meeting laws. The issue of enforcing the no-camping ordinance on the Bulb should be re-agendized as a properly announced item on a future City Council meeting.
The other troubling aspect of the vote was that the Council ignored virtually everything written and said by the Task Force they had created. They then promptly dissolved the Task Force with not a word of warning to its members (except what was buried in that staff report to the Council, available online 3 days beforehand). I find this response to my public service truly a discouragement to any further volunteering of time to Council-led initiatives. However, I will keep the more important goals of addressing the issues at the Bulb in mind and contribute in any way I can toward mitigating what will surely be a social-justice and public-relations disaster if the plan is carried out as currently approved.
Had the Council read the Task Force’s report, they would have seen that any approach to house such a population as that on the Bulb will take a very long time to complete. They would have seen that less than 5 months is a wholly unreasonable period of time to get every one of the 50 or 60 individuals living on the Bulb into appropriate housing, housing which currently does not exist, and that $32,000 is a pittance toward what it will cost. The Council would therefore see that calling for enforcement of the no-camping law in October will surely cause some residents to either resist eviction and get cited (and be physically removed—are we ready for that?) or they will simply escape the persecution by moving elsewhere into the streets and parks of the East Bay, having not received housing. Every authoritative source on dealing with homeless encampments—even those from law enforcement bodies—states that the employment of law enforcement personnel is the last thing you do in the process of housing folks from a long-standing encampment—one, we should remember, that has been tacitly allowed by the City to live out there for most of the past quarter-century. Our Police Department knows this, yet the City Council called them in to do the dirty work after a mere five months of “outreach.”
It is clear that $32,000 of “outreach” and evictions by Albany Police officers will not create one new unit of housing, in Albany or elsewhere. The proposed plan is therefore destined to fail (remember: the plan, as advertised, was to “end homelessness in Albany”). However, as we proceed in the countdown toward October, there are steps that can be immediately taken to mitigate what are the acknowledged problems with the current situation. As the outreach effort gets underway, communication and engagement with the Bulb residents can lead to better cooperation in order to overcome the issues of refuse removal, uncontrolled dogs, and respect for the commons. Some activities and “claims” of territory by certain Bulb residents are clearly excessive. A portion, perhaps the majority, of Bulbanians agree with this view and would welcome an attempt to establish some form of self-governance or cooperation with city representatives in order to rein in such excesses.
It can be easily documented that sufficient housing will not be available for all Bulb residents by October—in Berkeley, Oakland, and all of Alameda County, much less in Albany. There arise then constitutional issues about enforcing a city-wide ban on camping on public land. It de facto makes it illegal to be homeless in the City of Albany, a situation which is precisely the target of the Homeless Bill of Rights (AB5) cleared for the state Assembly by its Judiciary Committee just last month. The Council’s deadline provides perfect timing for Tom Ammiano, AB5’s author, as well as the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP) to use our community as an example to promote the need for the Bill. Their tagline is “House Keys not Handcuffs.” Get used to hearing it, Albany.
The city of Albany is filled with good people who want to contribute to a comprehensive solution to the problem of people who cannot find alternatives to living on the Bulb. We seek an approach beyond that of simply forcing current Bulb residents out of their tents and shacks and into the streets, before they have been placed in adequate housing. The City Council’s deadline does not allow time for the humane process of intensive case management required in our unique situation on the Bulb. They should reconsider the subject as a properly announced item on their agenda at a future meeting and actually listen to the collective expertise of the former Homeless Task Force.
