Newsom’s order to clear homeless encampments worries advocates, but local officials say little is likely to change

Sonoma County advocates for people who are unhoused reacted with alarm to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Thursday executive order to California agencies to remove homeless encampments from state property |

Sonoma County advocates for people who are experiencing homelessness reacted with alarm Thursday to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s same-day executive order to California agencies to remove homeless encampments from state property.

North Bay officials, meanwhile, said they were analyzing the local implications of the order but suggested that Newsom’s directive would not immediately produce any changes in how they are currently trying to address encampments and homelessness in general.

The order follows closely the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 28 Grants Pass ruling that local governments can enforce anti-camping regulations meant to curb public homelessness, even if people have nowhere to go. On the heels of that decision, advocates for homeless people said Newsom’s order was another major setback.

“The Supreme Court just ruled basically that it's illegal to be unhoused. This is not going to help out the situation. It's only going to make things worse,” said Alicia Roman, a Santa Rosa-based California Rural Legal Assistance attorney who has worked on local cases challenging official efforts to clear encampments.

Newsom’s executive order is directed to state agencies and departments, ordering them to “adopt humane and dignified policies to urgently address encampments on state property.”

An estimated 180,000 people were homeless in California last year. Since July 2021, the state “has resolved more than 11,000 encampments,” the governor’s office said Thursday.

“The state has been hard at work to address this crisis on our streets,” Newsom said in a statement. “There are simply no more excuses. It’s time for everyone to do their part.”

The order does not say local governments must follow the state’s lead and Newsom cannot force them. But it strongly suggests they do and makes explicit mention of billions of dollars the state has directed to counties and cities to address homelessness.

The order said local governments are “encouraged” to “adopt policies consistent with this order … to humanely remove encampments from public spaces, prioritizing those encampments that most threaten the life, health, and safety of those in and around them.”

That will pressure county and city officials to follow in the state’s footsteps, Roman said Thursday.

“I think that the local governments will follow with whatever the state is doing,” she added. “The state provides funding, not all the funding, but a lot of funding, and if Newsom wants sweeps to happen, local agencies may follow the lead.”

At the same time, however, officials said the number of large encampments is already down significantly. For example, currently in Santa Rosa, said Police Chief John Cregan, there are no encampments of more than five tents or RVs.

“In the short term, the city is going to continue on its current path,” said Santa Rosa Vice Mayor Mark Stapp. “The city is well aware that we need to continue to be able to provide services to the individuals who are unhoused, otherwise, this becomes an exercise in simply moving people around Santa Rosa or into other cities, right?”

‘Benefit to working with the state’

Stapp said the city is reviewing it but the question of how state funding might or might not shape new policy in the order’s wake “is certainly something we'll be evaluating. We don’t know immediately whether that actually comes into play or not.”

He added: “Presumably, the governor's office is going to be releasing more details about exactly what they intend with this order, and what other carrots or sticks they intend to bring to bear we will be paying close attention to.”

Santa Rosa in 2023 received a three-year, $3.8 million state grant to address encampments. Other than that, it has not received recent state homelessness funds, said Kelli Kuykendall, the city’s housing and community services manager.

Other local officials said state funds are being applied effectively, and there are fewer encampments now than in past years, meaning Newsom’s administration would have less reason to apply financial pressure.

The county — not including its nine cities — received $12.3 million in state funds for homelessness services in the 2023-24 fiscal year, and expects to get about the same this year, said Sheri Cardo, a spokesperson for the county Department of Health Services, which includes the Homelessness Services Division.

“Sonoma County is not one of those that is not putting that money to good use,” said County Supervisor Chris Coursey, a board member of the Sonoma County Homeless Coalition, a consortium of local governments, nonprofits and other participants that coordinates local homelessness policy and doles out millions in grants for homelessness services.

“We’re not foreseeing any changes to how we do things in Sonoma County based on the governor’s order as it pertains primarily to activity on state property,” said James Alexander, the county’s new director of homelessness services.

“In fact, the county’s policies are aligned with the governor’s executive order and, in some areas, we are doing more than it requires,” Alexander said. “So we are going to continue to do what we’ve been doing to help unsheltered folks survive and move progressively into more permanent housing situations.”

Napa’s Deputy City Manager Molly Rattigan, who heads the city’s homelessness response efforts, said in a statement: “The executive order doesn’t place demands on cities and counties, however, we acknowledge that there is benefit to working with the state on this issue. We’ll continue our analysis of the Supreme Court decision and now the executive order to determine what opportunities may exist” for Napa.

Sweeps ongoing

In Sonoma County, other advocates for people who are homeless said law enforcement has never stopped conducting sweeps and has continued to since the Grants Pass decision.

“It's not even sweeping,” said Rebekah Sammet, co-chair of the Lived Experience Advisory and Planning Board, a group of people who have experienced homelessness and advise Sonoma County officials on policy. “They're not even waiting anymore. So people are getting kicked around and they have no place to settle.”

Without more services, shelter and housing, the Newsom order threatens to make things more untenable for homeless people who have already been shuffled around from place to place, she said.

“People do deserve better than to be living in encampments. That is true,“ Sammet said. ”But there definitely should have been, all along, more of a stepping pathway with outreach or peer support or case managers working together to get people out before this.”

Likewise, Roman, the CRLA attorney, said without a commensurate increase in services, increased attention to dismantling encampments will force people who are homeless into “more dangerous places.”

“There’s nowhere for them to go unless local agencies and or the state start opening up safe zones where people can go — because that's the right thing to do, instead of just evicting people that have nowhere else to go,” Roman said. “They don't even have anywhere to go to the bathroom … It's like you can't even exist, basically.”

Information about how many encampments Santa Rosa police have cleared since the Grants Pass ruling was not immediately available Thursday, but Cregan said in the past year 107 of 507 people who were homeless accepted a shelter bed when offered them by police officers.

Cregan said the department will continue to go out weekly to address encampments, and “police officers will continue to lead with compassion and we're going to continue to always offer services, whether it's a state mandate or not.”

Sheriff’s deputies cleared five encampments in the past month, said Deputy Rob Dillion, the Sheriff’s Office public information officer. He said the Sheriff’s Office will “utilize county (camping) ordinances only when absolutely necessary while continuing to be compassionate, and empathetic to the unhoused going forward.”

At Catholic Charities, the region’s largest homelessness services provider, CEO Jennielynn Holmes said since the Grants Pass ruling “a lot of individuals who are experiencing homelessness have been pretty worried and terrified. This is definitely going to add fear among those that we are serving.”

How the executive order is applied to non-state property “will be the piece that will be important to see how it evolves,” Holmes said. “Our goal is if people are going to be moved on any property, we want to be in touch with that. So we have the first chance, an opportunity to get them into a service.”

Catholic Charities’ homeless outreach teams work with Santa Rosa police and other city departments — including Code Enforcement, the Fire Department, Housing and Community Services, and Transportation and Public Works — to move people from the streets into shelter and to clean up encampments.

“I think they very much understand the philosophy that we're not going to arrest our way out of it. If you do something like that and they end up in jail, they're just going to be right back on the streets,” Holmes said. “So working with us is a much better option because we might be able to resolve their homelessness.”

On West Robles Avenue, just outside the southern Santa Rosa city limits, Gary Pedersen and his partner, Jennifer, who declined to give her last name, relaxed Thursday morning in their RV.

They’d been there a year, Pedersen said, but only recently had law enforcement officers started to kick them out.

Sonoma County Sheriff’s deputies made them move along the day before. Then Santa Rosa police had moved them again, Pedersen said.

“They’re not trying to help us,” he said. ”And it’s easier to move than to fight them.“

A Caltrans spokesperson could not say Thursday whether the agency has identified any encampments on state property in Sonoma or Napa counties that it will be clearing under the governor’s order.

Last November, about 75 people were moved out of an encampment that was dismantled on state property under a Highway 12 overpass near the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail transit trail in west Santa Rosa.

Staff Writer Edward Booth contributed to this story. You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 707-387-2960 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com. On X (Twitter) @jeremyhay