For most of the last three years, elderly and infirm homeless people in Grants Pass have complied with the city’s rule that they must relocate every seven days.
A local nonprofit, Mobile Integrative Navigation Team, or MINT, has helped homeless individuals with physical disabilities make the weekly moves, even though it opposed that requirement, said Cassy Leach, the group’s executive director.
Now, just a few months after the U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing Grants Pass to impose fines on and potentially arrest people camping in public places, Leach said her team no longer has the bandwidth to assist people needing to move within the small Oregon town.
Instead, she said, they have provided their patients with medical notes explaining their disability and need for accommodations under the federal Americans with Disabilities Act. About 24 people with a range of conditions, including heart disease, severe scoliosis and an amputation, got the notes in early September, Leach said.
Leach, who is a nurse, said she informed the city multiple times that, beginning in September, MINT would no longer be able to help with the weekly moves. She wanted the city to either help disabled residents move or allow them to stay in place without punishment. Instead, Leach said many of her patients have since been cited for trespassing or refusing to move and assessed $50 fines none of them are able to pay.
“Us moving them every Saturday masked the injustice,” she said.
To her knowledge, no one has been forcibly moved.
Unsheltered homeless residents in Grants Pass have been limited to staying in two city-approved camping locations since the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the city’s favor this summer. In a six to three ruling, the nation’s high court ruled that cities have a right to regulate camping regardless of their ability to offer shelter.
One Grants Pass site is on the edge of town and features about two acres of grassy field, according to Leach. She said 100 to 120 people stay at that site, which is reached by climbing over some boulders on the edge of the property. The other site is about a half acre and is about a mile from the larger site. It’s more of an empty lot, according to Leach, and can accommodate about 20 people.
Leach and the statewide legal advocacy organization Disability Rights Oregon argue the city is violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by illegally fining people for being unable to follow a city ordinance due to a documented disability.
“Grants Pass continues to cite and fine people in wheelchairs, people with one leg, people with serious medical conditions,” reads an October 3 letter from Disability Rights Oregon to the city attorney and police chief of Grants Pass. “These people with serious disabilities are being fined and threatened with arrest for having disabilities and for having no home.”
Leach also says the rule is nonsensical on its face because it requires a group of about 100 people to periodically move to a site meant for about 20 people.
“I think the idea was that people would just move on to the next city,” said Tom Stenson, deputy legal director of Disability Rights Oregon. He said he thinks Grants Pass officials figured “they would create an environment that is so inhospitable that people would just move on. People are not doing that.”
Grants Pass’s attorney, Mark Bartholomew, said in an email to The Oregonian/OregonLive that the rule requiring unhoused people to move every seven days is allowed under state law. He did not offer further comment or respond to follow up questions about federal disability protection laws.
At a press conference announcing progress on homelessness Thursday, Gov. Tina Kotek responded to a question about the situation in Grants Pass. She said she was not up to speed on the latest in the city, but that the law in Oregon was very clear. Municipalities can regulate where people sleep but must provide ample notice when they ask people sleeping outside to go somewhere else.
“We have cities who are following the law here in Oregon,” Kotek said. “(They) are doing everything they can to maintain objective standards of where folks can be and also trying to meet the needs of folks who need to be in different places when they’re sleeping outside.”
Overall, Kotek said, the state is at least 80% of the way to its goal to rehouse 650 households experiencing homelessness by June 2025 and at least 24% of the way to its goal of preventing 11,856 people households from becoming homeless by that same deadline. This progress is part of the second phase of the governor’s emergency homelessness response. The first phase concluded in early January. Statewide data through June 30 on progress towards the new goals are now publicly available.
Back in Grants Pass, Leach said stable housing is the end goal, but for now she just wants the city to communicate with her and her patients.
Stenson, the Disability Right Oregon lawyer, said he wants to talk with Grants Pass leaders so that he can work with them to come up with a better solution for disabled homeless residents.
He said he has reached out to the city three times since Sept. 13 to let them know they may be in violation of federal law. He heard back from Bartholomew by phone on Sept. 19 and was told that Grants Pass police have sole discretion as to how to enforce the city’s camping laws, including what to do with doctor notes regarding disabilities.
Stenson said he had not heard a response to his Thursday letter by late that afternoon.
“We need to come to a solution together,” Stenson said. “That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to open a dialogue with Grants Pass. They’ve not engaged me on this to this point.”
©2024 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit oregonlive.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
