Santa Cruz to revisit recreational vehicle law
Council hears updates on planned homeless service providers
SANTA CRUZ >> Even as Santa Cruz officials begin work to lay the groundwork for its new no-camping ordinance this month, longstanding shelters and homeless encampments are being shaken up around the county, a city official said late Tuesday.
Lee Butler, the city’s director of Planning, Community Development and Homelessness Response, offered the Santa Cruz City Council a wide-ranging update on the state of homeless response two weeks after it cast its final vote in support of the Camping Services and Standards Ordinance. He told the council that the countywide homeless
shelter beds, peaking at 883 during the coronavirus pandemic, will be whittled down to 370 as emergency funding begins to expire.
Citing Caltrans’ removal of large highway-side homeless encampments and the pending dissolution of major homeless shelter funding,
Butler said the city “could see more visibility of the homelessness problem, even as the city is making efforts to really expand what we’re doing through the safe sleeping sites and storage.”
Prior to enacting the new city ordinance, which disallows people from sleeping on public property except in city-sanctioned “safe sleeping” sites, the city will need to create space for at least 150 people to spend the night and a storage program for their possessions.
Butler told the council that five nonprofit community organizations to date had submitted their qualifications related to seven homeless-serving programs and that city staff were working on comparing between the various proposals are still being evaluated, as they each contain different services. He added that city officials were working with an outside consultant to get a better grasp on city homelessness-related costs.
No details were provided on which firm was being used or its cost, but the contractor will be tasked with compiling data from the various city and regional
homelessness-related reports conducted in recent years and would help assess how much the city is spending on staff time, expenses and other funding related to current homelessness efforts, Butler said.
The city also has been in talks with the Association of Faith Communities about a potential expansion of their Safe Spaces recreational vehicle overnight parking program from the parking lots of faith institutions and onto city streets, Butler said.
Councilmember Sonja
Brunner proposed the city look more carefully at updating its recreational vehicle ordinance, citing a 5-year-old effort that fizzled in the face of California Coastal Commission opposition. The original ordinance had proposed a ban on parking oversized vehicles overnight on city streets. Brunner asked that the ordinance be reworked to align with the new Camping Services and Standards Ordinance, that programming to support sanctioned parking program be investigated and that the law look at rules for time, place and manner of daytime and night- time camping use for recreational vehicles. She also
asked to hear an update in October on ordinance update efforts and about the process for going before the Coastal Commission for review. The motion passed unanimously.
Homelessness issues advocate Serg Kagno questioned the council’s desire to update the former recreational vehicle ordinance, calling it “very anti-homeless.”
“To use that as the template for making it something more useful without getting community input, it could have gone a little different way,” Kagno said.