City councilors agreed this week that they need more time and more information before they decide whether to act on proposed ordinance amendments intended to address the homeless population’s impact on private property and public rights of way.
“Hang tight,” Councilor Phil Lakin said Wednesday at the end of a lengthy discussion on the subject. “We’ve hit the pause button; we have got a lot more work to do.”
The City Council had planned to take up the proposed ordinance changes in September but shelved that plan Wednesday and will instead establish a working group to study the issue and report back to the full council later this year.
“There are a variety of ways to handle this,” Lakin said. “We just need to make sure we try to handle it in the best possible way so that we don’t cause these people to be too involved in the justice system but that we also are able to use our rights of way and keep people from abusing private property.”
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City Council Chairwoman Lori Decter Wright said she has asked Councilors Jeannie Cue, Crista Patrick and Lakin to join her on the working group.
“What I heard was that all of the councilors are not ready to go to a vote because they want more input from all of the stakeholders,” Wright said.
She said she expects the working group to hear from multiple stakeholders, including Housing Solutions, Mental Health Association Oklahoma, Tulsa police and the 988 suicide and crisis hotline.
City leaders began tackling the complicated issue in May, when Mayor G.T. Bynum proposed amending the city’s ordinance pertaining to obstruction of public rights of way, including sidewalks.
Bynum said he was acting at the request of the Police Department and in response to increasing complaints from across the city about homeless people blocking sidewalks and entrances to hotels and other businesses.
The proposal called for first-time offenders to be punished by a fine of no more than $100 plus court costs, or up to five days in jail, or both. Subsequent convictions would be punishable by a fine not to exceed $200 plus court costs, or up to 10 days in jail, or both.
Police would be required to provide a warning the first time they engaged a person violating the ordinance.
Wright, meanwhile, has proposed eliminating the possibility of jail time from the mayor’s proposal while putting more teeth in the city’s trespassing ordinance. Wright’s plan would increase the financial penalty to up to $500 and up to 10 days in jail for repeat offenders.
But councilors on Wednesday seemed to agree that the measures, while well-intentioned, would not necessarily accomplish what the city desires: to protect property rights and residents’ access to public rights of way without complicating the homeless problem by dumping homeless people into the criminal justice system.
Critics of the proposed ordinance amendments argue that it is much more difficult for a person experiencing homelessness to receive government housing assistance if they have any kind of criminal history.
In fact, the city is working with local service providers to put together another program to provide support so people don’t end up homeless. The program, called the Just Home Project, also focuses on providing housing for homeless individuals who are having problems finding a place to live because they have been in the criminal justice system.
“I just am afraid this isn’t going to do what anybody thinks it is going to,” Patrick said of the proposed ordinance amendments. “This isn’t going to be something that you can call the police and they will come remove somebody from your property. That is not what this does.”
Patrick said she and her constituents in District 3 aren’t out to punish homeless people but are concerned about the “transitory predators” — many of whom are not homeless — who prey on residents.
Police, due to no fault of their own, often can’t respond quickly enough or often enough to ensure that the people inflicting “little abuses” on residents daily are held accountable, Patrick said.
“The likelihood of that person being willing to call the police the third time or the fourth time or the 17th time gets less and less and less, and the people in my district are about one incident away of shooting people,” she said.
Tulsa World Opinion podcast: Homelessness is a heavy issue
There is a major housing shortage and shelters are "nearly maxed out." How can we help homeless people not fall through the cracks and not just change a city ordinance to allow police to remove them from streets?
