" As part of their push to curb the rise in shootings and homicides, city leaders embraced a novel approach last spring that would not require additional armed police officers: Spend $1.4 million for around-the-clock foot patrols by two dozen new park rangers.
Critics, including some longtime city park rangers, quickly panned the plan as misguided.
Police bureau figures show extremely few shootings occur in Portland parks — about 3%.
And while rangers wear uniforms and have the authority to enforce rules in and near public spaces, they are armed only with pepper spray and receive minimal public safety training.
Almost none of these park rangers hit the streets last summer, during the season that sees the most gun violence in Portland each year.
By the end of August, the city had hired just two of the 24 new positions.
That number increased to 17 by the end of December, according to parks bureau officials, meaning 30% of the positions remain unfilled."
"
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"Carmen Rubio's chief of staff, Jillian Schoene, is the wife of Kevin Looper of People for Portland."
And Rubio runs the Park Rangers.
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"Two bills curbing camping regulation clear Oregon Legislature"
By Dirk VanderHart (OPB)
June 9, 2021 4 p.m.
"The bills require local governments to give more notice before clearing encampments and set limits on anti-camping policies."
" Local governments throughout Oregon will be required to give at least three days’ notice before clearing homeless camps, under a bill headed to Gov. Kate Brown."
" The House of Representatives passed House Bill 3124 by a 40-18 vote on Wednesday morning, adopting tweaks passed by the Senate and putting the final legislative stamp on the bill.
Not long after, the state Senate approved the final passage of another bill dealing with unsheltered homelessness:
House Bill 3115, which sets state restrictions for how cities can enforce anti-camping laws."
" Together the bills add more uniformity to how camping is regulated in a state that has one of the highest rates of unsheltered homelessness in the nation.
HB 3124 extends by two days the notice local governments must give before clearing out homeless campers and their belongings.
State law currently mandates notice be posted at least 24 hours in advance of a sweep. If Brown signs the bill, that would increase to 72 hours."
" The effort in this bill is only to add a little bit more dignity and respect to individuals who find themselves homeless when it becomes necessary to remove or move the camp,” Rep. John Lively, the bill’s chief sponsor, said of the proposal last month.
HB 3124 has been supported by homeless advocates, who say it would give people more time to gather their belongings and talk to social service providers before their camp is cleared."
" This is a small step forward that will really mitigate the struggles of our clients who have no other option,” Sybil Hebb, executive director of the Oregon Law Center, testified in May. Hebb added that the law center, which advocates on behalf of homeless Oregonians, had “grave concerns” about camp sweeps in general.
Besides requiring more notice, HB 3124 requires that governments collect valuables left at a campsite, and store them for at least 30 days at a site within the “same community” from which they were collected. In Multnomah County, such facilities must be located within six blocks of a public transit station.
" The bill saw little pushback, but did spur concerns from the City of Portland, which said in March that the 72-hour requirement “would create challenges by preventing us from intervening in severe circumstances.”
The city also bristled at a proposal, later scrapped, that would have required cities to store collected belongings for at least 90 days.
Portland officials face a class-action lawsuit accusing the city of flouting current laws around storing belongings collected when camps are dispersed.
After HB 3124 passed on Wednesday, a spokesman for the City of Portland suggested the city’s concerns over the bill had been allayed. The city already provides 48-hour notice before clearing camps.
Portland “will adjust operations to provide a minimum of 72 hours notice before removing high-impact campsites,” spokesman Mark Alejos said
" This additional day of notice will not affect our work to protect community health and safety. Our focus remains on reducing the impacts of homelessness by providing services such as resource referral, garbage clean-up and hygiene access.”
Last month, the city announced it was adopting “a more assertive approach” to dispersing problem campsites, after slackening enforcement at the outset of the pandemic."
" HB 3115, introduced by House Speaker Tina Kotek, requires local governments around the state to adopt policies that are “objectively reasonable” in regulating when, where and how people can live outdoors, as the state’s housing crisis grows direr. If cities enforced more restrictive measures, impacted homeless people could sue.
HB 3115 provides far less protection than an outright ban on anti-camping policies, which some lawmakers and advocates for the homeless have sought in recent years."
" It would instead require that local laws addressing “sitting, lying, sleeping or keeping warm and dry outdoors on public property must be objectively reasonable … with regards to persons experiencing homelessness.” The bill does not offer guidance about what “objectively reasonable” means.
According to advocates and government representatives who developed the bill, HB 3115 is meant to ensure that cities and counties comply with a series of recent federal court rulings that governments cannot criminalize camping or issue fines if people have no other place to go.
cannot criminalize camping or issue fines if people have no other place to go.
“This bill is one piece of a much bigger effort to address Oregon’s housing crisis by increasing the state’s supply of affordable housing, supporting Oregonians who are experiencing homelessness, preventing evictions and foreclosures, and reducing housing disparities for communities of color,” Kotek said in April when the bill passed the House.
" This bill is one piece of a much bigger effort to address Oregon’s housing crisis by increasing the state’s supply of affordable housing, supporting Oregonians who are experiencing homelessness, preventing evictions and foreclosures, and reducing housing disparities for communities of color,” Kotek said in April when the bill passed the House.
HB 3115 passed the Senate on an 18-10 vote, largely along party lines."
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.opb.org/article/2021/06/09/oregon-legislature-bills-camping-regulations-encampment-policies/%3foutputType=amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.opb.org/article/2021/06/09/oregon-legislature-bills-camping-regulations-encampment-policies/%3foutputType=amp
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Once they are up and running, only about 180 people, all of them referred by park rangers, social services providers, and other case workers, will be able to move into the three sites, which will feature individual “sleeping pods,” plus on-site toilets, showers, laundry rooms, and kitchenettes, in addition to access to on-site social service caseworkers.
"City Commissioner Dan Ryan, who has spearheaded the effort, did not give an exact date for when the three sites will be up and running, nor did he specify when three more promised sites will be announced.
The goal is to have them open by January 1, 2022"
https://www.pdxmonthly.com/news-and-city-life/2021/09/what-are-safe-rest-villages-homeless-portland
" If the city is going to make a huge investment into organized camping, does this become a justification or ability to then criminalize homelessness?”
asked Marisa Zapata, an associate professor of land use planning at Portland State University, who directs the school’s Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative...
"A federal court ruling, Boise v. Martin, makes it illegal
in nine Western states for cities to enforce anti-camping rules
unless they have enough shelter beds for all campers.
Now, Zapata and others say they are concerned that opening the sanctioned camping spots is just a ruse to make it easier for the city to sweep campers out of areas like Laurelhurst Park,"
Or Forest. Park. For. Example.
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"I know elected officials are lost and confused. But I also know most of them want to comfort themselves with discussions about how hard it is, and have a cup of tea with the cat on their lap. We don’t have time for that.
If you approach this from the right, you hear a lot about how people don’t have the right to sleep in public spaces and parks, and they should be swept out.
And if you approach it from the from the left —and we saw this in our polling—there’s an appreciable number of people in Portland who think we don’t have the right to tell people where or how to live."
https://www.pdxmonthly.com/news-and-city-life/2021/09/dan-lavey-kevin-looper-interview
" we have more resources than they literally know what to do with at the state and city level,” Looper says.
___
" Republican consultant Dan Lavey of Portland worked with Looper on two projects, an unsuccessful 2012 initiative to allow
a private casino in east Multnomah County
and a study of the tax system financed by business and labor. "
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.opb.org/news/article/kevin-looper-democrat-oregon-politics/%3foutputType=amp
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