| By Big Radio News Staff |
The Janesville City Council votes to sweep a homeless encampment out of the Hedberg Public Library parking lot.
At the same time, some council members are pressing the city to be more proactive about addressing the root causes of homelessness that seems to be stacking up in parts of Janesville’s downtown.
The council approved an ordinance Monday that will allow homeless people to sleep in vehicles overnight only at a city lot on North Jackson Street, just west of Janesville police headquarters.
The new ordinance bans homeless people from parking in the Hedberg Library lot and sleeping overnight there.
The change comes about four years after the city first began allowing homeless people to stay in their cars overnight at both the Hedberg lot and the North Jackson Street lot.
Residents, library patrons, local police and city officials have decried what they say is mounting drug use, vagrancy, panhandling, fights, and public defecation at Hedberg’s lot — all of which they say was lured by the homeless encampment.
An initial city rule allowing overnight homeless parking at the two downtown lots was never structured to give people permission to permanently encamp at the library or on any other public property.
Library officials have said overall library use is down. For that, they blame what they say is unsavory, illegal, and at times dangerous activity the encampment has drawn.
No camping
The council also unanimously voted to ban RVs, campers and camping on all public spaces. Homeless people would be required to leave the overnight city lot next to the police department by 7 a.m. daily.
That rule is a notch softer than the one initially proposed Monday; council member Richard Neeno asked that the morning checkout time be changed from 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. to give homeless people longer to get moving.
The city’s new rules mean the homeless people who have been living at the Hedberg parking lot would be made to vacate the library sometime next month. That would come after a grace period during which the police department will talk with homeless people at Hedberg about the new rules and options for getting help and access to social services.
The council OK’d the Hedberg encampment ban 6-1, with all council members saying they agreed the homeless camp must be removed from Hedberg.
Some residents and council members criticized the changes at a hearing Monday as being narrow, limited, or difficult to enforce.
Council member Heather Miller voted against the changes. She says they bundle downtown’s homelessness problems and dump them in the lap of the police department, requiring local cops to deal with it all as a law-enforcement issue.
Miller blames vagrancy, not homelessness, for most of the problems.
Former pastor Dave Peterson says he expects the city to do more than set up a single parking lot for the homeless. He asked the city to be proactive in finding longer-term solutions to a more complex problem.
Peterson points out the homeless who stay at Hedberg around the clock do so in part because they lack the resources to uproot and leave every morning. He says some cannot afford to fuel up their vehicle to travel elsewhere all day, and only return to at night to sleep.
Another man gave the city a list of buildings he says might be suitable place to assemble a halfway house or transitional living community for the homeless.
Matt Kealy, a downtown restaurant owner, supports the changes the city enacted Monday.
Kealy says the city must use public policy, ordinances and enforcement to get tougher on vagrancy. He says people deserve to be able to move about downtown without dealing with panhandling and public disorder in the streets.
Kealy says he’s tired of seeing picnic tables at the riverfront town square left filthy. He says he’s also sick of smelling urine in the stairwells at downtown businesses and in the city parking garage, and he’s tired of seeing the same “aggressive” panhandlers every day outside the library, and at the Five Points intersection on the west edge of downtown.
Kealy blames all those experiences on vagrants who he says make downtown a place less desirable for families to spend time.
Emergency tents for the homeless?
Monday night, Council Member Michael Jackson proposed an order for City Hall to spearhead a new homeless task force.
Jackson says the groups’ job would be to assemble a framework of national “best practices” to address homelessness.
The rest of the city council shot down Jackson’s idea. Some members said they didn’t know what a task force like that would cost the city. Others pointed out the city already works with a quasi-governmental, local homeless task force formed downtown years ago. It’s made up of local police, downtown business interests and social service non-profits.
City Manager Kevin Lahner agreed to work more closely with that existing task force to discuss the growing homeless enclaves downtown, and to learn the task force’s latest ideas.
Jackson also suggested the city could temporarily house some homeless in some of the emergency tents the city of Janesville bought during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The tents were intended to serve as a mobile field hospital if the pandemic surged and overwhelmed local hospitals. The tents have floors, heating, air conditioning, and restroom amenities.
Council Member Heather Miller says she likes Jackson’s idea. She says if the city has the tents and can find a suitable public property to place them, they could be used as stopgap shelters during a time when there’s too little transitional housing for a growing number of homeless people.
Lahner told Jackson the city might have gotten rid of a few of the tents, but he thinks they still have some of them.
A city spokesman tells Big Radio the city has 10 of the emergency tent units. They apparently remain under care of the Janesville Fire Department, the agency that would have helped manage the tents’ deployment in the event of a COVID surge.
The spokesman says some of the tent units are now earmarked to be given away or sold as part of an undisclosed “partnership” between the city and other undisclosed entities.
Big Radio has asked the city of Janesville for more information on what “partnerships” intend to use the tents, and for what purposes.
Big Radio reporter-anchor Neil Johnson gathered information for this report.
