Where will they go?
That’s the question on top of mind for Cole Meckle, pastor of Centralia’s Gather Church, as Lewis County commissioners are entertaining an ordinance prohibiting homeless encampments.
Gather spent over 20 months running a housing program for the county, serves weekly free meals and works toward harm reduction for those struggling with substance abuse.
Through these ministries, the issue of homelessness in the area has become familiar to Meckle.
Just estimating, Meckle believes there are over 100 people in Lewis County who are homeless and living outside. Count the number of seniors living in their cars but too ashamed to tell anyone, couch-surfing kids or families living in one house with four other families, and Meckle said he’d be shocked if the total number of unhoused folks in the county wasn’t in the thousands.
“Where are we expecting them to go?” he asked.
With the same vein of Meckle’s concerns, that question was asked to the board of county commissioners on Monday morning by Eric Eisenberg, Lewis County housing and infrastructure specialist. He brought it up during a conversation about the potential disbandment of the encampment at Blakeslee Junction in Centralia.
The ordinance, which was brought to his seatmates by Commissioner Sean Swope last week, outlines a process where county staff and law enforcement would try to get folks out of encampments on county land and into a night-by-night shelter or connect them with other resources whenever possible.
“If they don't take that opportunity and don't want to go to the night-by-night shelter, the options are pretty limited for them,” said Meja Handlen, director of Lewis County Public Health and Social Services, in response to Eisenberg.
Meckle said he can list “25 reasons” the night-by-night shelter isn’t a viable option. There’s currently just one in Lewis County at the Salvation Army in Centralia, and it has only been used as such a facility for a few months. Besides issues getting the building itself up to snuff for people to stay there, Meckle said his primary concern is that because folks have to pack up their stuff and leave the shelter each day, many will choose to remain outside throughout the night. There, at least, people without shelter may have a sense of privacy and personal space.
“Encampments break my heart. We go there daily, somebody out of our 40 some staff members, and they break my heart. This is by no means something that I would ever want anybody to have to live in,” he said. “They're folks that have lots of need and desperation, lots of trauma, significant behavioral health struggles, you know, substance use problems. I mean, it's not one size fits all. So many different things, right? But in order to address those issues, we have to have some place where people can go.”
Lewis County does not have transitional housing. The point was noted by Eisenberg on Monday as well.
Meckle said he’s heard rumors the county is looking into establishing something, be it through buying a hotel or another “creative solution.” He said no officials have stated this publicly and if it’s true, that would be an important part of the equation to bring forward before passing an ordinance. Though, transitional housing doesn’t cover all his concerns.
If being unhoused becomes illegal on county land, Meckle said, people will move to land on property owned by one of the several cities in the county. If cities make similar ordinances, he said people are likely to move to undeveloped private property.
“Well that now becomes a criminal trespass charge. Where do we go from there? Are we going to actually think that we could incarcerate everybody that’s currently trespassing on people’s lands?” Meckle asked.
If the goal of these ordinances is to get people to leave Lewis County, he said, ultimately the rules passed are booting “Lewis County people” from their community.
“Despite what people want to believe, at the Blakeslee Junction camp, almost everybody there is from Lewis County,” he said, adding that many out-of-county unhoused people he’s spoken to are fleeing domestic violence situations.
Furthermore, Meckle questioned the foundation of the proposed ordinance.
Several times in the last few months, Swope has made speeches on the brokenness of government in relation to homelessness. He’s said the county has spent $22 million from the Department of Commerce since 2020 on the issue, which he’s used as a soundbite for the argument that the government is enabling unhoused people by providing them resources instead of holding folks accountable and making them earn services through benchmarks such as getting a job.
But Meckle said that $22 million has been misrepresented. Through over 50 hours of staff and volunteer time, he and others from Gather compiled all the grants from Commerce the commissioners have signed off on since 2020.
Firstly, he noted those dollars have been allocated for the issue, not spent on it. Because many of the contracts expire in 2023, the actual total of dollars spent won’t be known for some time.
The team found $16.8 million of the 22 were allocated from the COVID emergency solutions grant. Some $500,000 of that includes covering costs of Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) for businesses and others in the county.
While it’s true that $15 million was allocated for homelessness, Meckle noted this came in the form of an eviction prevention grant, which kept people housed when their eviction was imminent due to the loss of job, loved one or other COVID-related problem.
Many of those eviction prevention dollars went to landlords whose livelihoods depended on collecting rent.
Read the breakdown of these dollars Gather compiled with public records at https://reports.lewiscountyhub.com/2022-homeless-housing-grants/.
When Swope first raised the topic in the summer, he suggested having meetings with the contracted service providers, such as Gather and the Salvation Army. Meckle said staff anticipated these meetings happening and worked to prepare for them, but the day never came.
While Meckle’s work is informed by his faith, he said, there’s a very simple, universal argument in favor of these grants: they help keep people alive.
Take the case of a society-altering event such as shutdowns due to a pandemic, if those funds had to be crowdsourced and fundraised rather than fast tracked by the government, he said, “the number of people that would die in the meantime would be astronomical.”
Though on a lesser scale in non-shutdown times, the case remains true all the time in regards to the dollars that help people stay sheltered and fed.
In closing, he suggested the county should consider a cost-benefit analysis of what it would take to enforce the ordinance if it were passed, adding money spent on clearing camps isn’t coming from the Department of Commerce, but from county taxes.
The Board of County Commissioners has a public hearing on ordinance scheduled for Oct. 25 at 10 a.m. in the Commissioners’ Hearing Room at the Lewis County Courthouse in Chehalis.
