Federal judge extends Santa Cruz homeless camp to weigh civil case

Ruling expected in coming week on San Lorenzo Park closure

SANTA CRUZ >> Wednesday was set to be the day by which the City of Santa Cruz had cleared the San Lorenzo Park grounds of a large homeless encampment present throughout the coronavirus pandemic.

Instead, a federal judge extended by one week — to Jan. 13 — a temporary freeze on the park’s clearance while she continued to weigh arguments in a civil lawsuit against the city.

During a more than hourlong hearing Wednesday conducted via remote video teleconference from San Jose, U.S. Northern District Magistrate Judge Susan van Keulen questioned attorneys representing the City of Santa Cruz and plaintiffs including the Santa Cruz Homeless Union, Food Not Bombs and several homeless individuals on whether or not to extend or dissolve an emergency restraining order she set Dec. 30.

The suit stems from a Dec. 17 executive order issued by Santa Cruz City Manager Martín Bernal that would empty San Lorenzo Park in staged closures — a closure set to extend through the end of the month. An organized community protest at the park Dec. 28 temporarily halted the city’s closure efforts, with the civil lawsuit filed close on the protest’s heels.

Plaintiffs’ attorney Anthony Prince argued during Wednesday’s hearing that the city’s planned park closure would disperse an unknown number of people living there into the community and increase health risks for both the homeless individuals and the greater public. Attorney Cassie Bronson, for the city, argued that the camp, which has been located at the park throughout the coronavirus pandemic, had swelled to unmanageable size and nuisance impacts after a Santa Cruz County-run camp relocated out of the park in November.

“This case arises obviously against the background of long-term issues of a municipality managing its homeless population and it arises in a community known for its passion and its compassion on both sides of the issue,” van Keulen said during introductory remarks.

The judge said that she did not believe it was in dispute that the suit came amidst a deadly pandemic and at a time when there were insufficient alternative shelter beds available in Santa Cruz County for those sleeping in the park. She said she wanted to focus initially on whether the plaintiffs had a legal right to stay in the city park or not. While the 14th amendment does not provide a fundamental right to housing for all, she said, it is recognized that governments have liability for placing a person in a position of known danger with “deliberate indifference.” Van Keulen asked attorneys for both sides to explain what services were specific to the San Lorenzo Park site and was told by the plaintiff that community donations were centralized at the camp and the site offered safety protection for its members. The city’s attorney said outreach services were available at other sites, such as Housing Matters on Coral Street and that Food Not Bombs delivers its daily free meals downtown and not at the park.

“The question that I have been trying to work through with the facts and law that we’ve been discussing is, why now? Why does the city issue this order now, Dec. 17, when we can only hope it’s the height of the crisis,” van Keulen said. “We are in the middle of the winter. Why now. There is a vaccine on the way, there is an end in sight, we’re not sure when.”

Bronson, for the city, said it is unclear when the pandemic will be over, the vaccines widely distributed — it could even be another year or two. She added that the city “tried its best to make the encampment work” by attempting to separate the tents from each other, bring the county in to manage a camp and more.

“After the county’s managed camp moved, conditions just deteriorated day by day by day and eventually it just reached a point where the situation was just unmanageable for the city and it reached a point of crisis,” Bronson said. “On the issue of virus spread, the city has dispersed encampments during the COVID crisis and we haven’t seen any sort of virus spread related to that dispersal.”

Van Kuelen questioned Bronson on how well the city had been tracking any potentially increased infection rates after previous camps dispersal and was told that county officials had been watching. She later asked Prince, for the plaintiff, what would happen if she were to allow the encampment to stay until the end of the pandemic crisis.

“It has never been our position that the city is obligated to provide housing as a general proposition, even though the CDC guidelines recommend if you’re going to break up a camp, then you should provide housing,” Prince said. “After COVID-19, we’ll be faced with the ongoing problems that we face and we’ll try to address them in a cooperative manner. We are in earnest about this.”

Bronson speculated, were the camp allowed to remain for additional months, that it would become a further “magnet” for homeless individuals and could swell in size to many hundreds of occupants, causing further parkland destruction, criminal activities and diminished general public access.