Edgewood approved new homeless encampment removal policy. Will it change anything?

The Edgewood City Council recently passed an ordinance altering the city’s procedure to address the removal of homeless encampments on public property. However, the new policy is not expected to increase the amount of encampment removals that occur, and instead will dictate who conducts the sweeps and how they will be done.

Edgewood previously relied on Pierce County and the region’s overarching policy to address and remove unauthorized encampments. The county’s policy dictates a multi-step process that includes an initial documentation of the site, a schedule of removal, a notice to vacate the encampment, a removal by a contractor, the storage of personal property and maintenance of the site if necessary.

“It was recognized that the city does not have its own policy, so thus, here we are with this policy,” Edgewood Police Chief Jason Youngman told the city council during his briefing of the ordinance on Aug. 20 . “The goal of this is to address those encampments in a fair, consistent and lawful way, where we are treating people equally each time we go out to deal with one of these.”

Youngman said the policy is designed to balance the need for public safety while also aiming to offer assistance and services to those living in the encampments.

Under the new policy , the city’s Public Works department will be responsible for organizing the removal of encampments on public property owned by the city. The policy allows for the city to utilize sub-contractors for the clean-up of camps.

The policy dictates encampments be prioritized and addressed in the order of highest priority with input from the Edgewood Police Department.

According to the ordinance, prioritization of encampments takes into account the encampments proximity to moving vehicles and steep slopes, criminal activity, quantities of solid waste and other active health hazards to occupants or the surrounding neighborhood, imminent work scheduled at the site for which the encampment will pose an obstruction, size of the encampment, damage to environmentally critical areas, the proximity of homeless individuals to uses of special concern, including schools or facilities for the elderly, and complaints received.

Before the Edgewood City Council unanimously adopted the encampment removal ordinance during their Aug. 27 meeting , it was noted how similar the ordinance was to Pierce County’s, which the city previously deferred to.

Youngman said the ordinance was modeled after Pierce County’s, and was designed to give the city its own authority and procedure to address encampment removals on public property on their own.

Edgewood Mayor Dave Olson told The News Tribune the policy was a “housekeeping” measure that had been on the city’s “to-do list” for several years.

He said the policy was “customized for Edgewood,” with one of the major discrepancies between the city’s policy and the county’s being how personal property recovered during encampment removals are held.

The policy allows the city to hold on to personal property recovered at encampment removal sites, when previously the county would have been responsible for holding it.

It maintains the city should “should maintain a record of personal property removed from an encampment that reasonably identifies the location of the encampment from which it was removed. They should keep each personal property item until the personal property is recovered by its owner, or the property is disposed of, or forfeited, as provided herein or by law.”

Individuals have 30 days to recover the property before the city can dispose of it.

Certain items such as firearms or medication may require proof of identification to be claimed.

While the policy mentions that those occupying an encampment that will be removed “must” be informed of services such as housing or shelter programs in the city and county, Olson said the city has limited resources and homeless outreach staff so they will typically defer to the county’s resources and staff.

Olson told The News Tribune that there has been no increase in encampments in Edgewood.

“In fact, not only has there been no increase, I am not aware of any encampments at all currently within our city limits, let alone on city owned property,” he wrote in an email.

“We’ve been fortunate not to have any of the large encampments that you have probably seen like the one in Fife, or you see some in the Parkland/Spanaway area,” Youngman told the council on Aug. 20. “We’ve been fortunate enough to avoid those, ours have been more one-or-two-person size encampments.”