Visalia City Council votes to ban overnight camping in city parks

Visalia City Council passed an amendment to the city’s municipal code to ban camping and storing property overnight in city parks and on city trails.

The amendment restores city ordinances that were in place before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ 2018 ruling that public camping could not be restricted if people did not have “access to adequate temporary shelter.”

However, the Supreme Court overturned that 2018 decision in June by ruling that “generally applicable laws regulating camping on public property” did not violate anyone’s constitutional rights.

The first reading of the proposed amendment on Aug. 5 was approved by the city council as “an urgency ordinance.” As the result of the 4-1 vote on Aug. 12, it went into effect immediately.

Mayor Brian Poochigian stated that he believes children in Visalia "deserve safe parks."

“They shouldn’t have to worry about needles in our parks, and I think this ordinance accomplishes that," he said. "We have people coming here constantly saying that I don't feel safe having my kids in the sports park at night practicing.”

Addressing homelessness in Visalia

The amendment itself does not mention the city’s homeless population, but everyone who spoke about the amendment at the meeting focused on the homeless.

“We are in support of this ordinance change,” Visalia Police Chief Jason Salazar said. “It gives us another tool to take enforcement where we need to throughout the city to address the issues that we have.

“Obviously our parks are a concern, though this is certainly not the answer to the problem (of homelessness),” he added. “We will continue to work with our partners to try and offer outreach and services as much as we possibly can and continue to work towards another solution.”

Councilmember Emmanuel Hernandez Soto asked Salazar where he expects people “kicked out of parks” to go.

“It’s hard to say where they're going to go, but they'll go somewhere where they think that we can't find them,” Salazar said. “There's a lot of speculation that they could go to the business district. They could go to another park. They tend to be fairly creative. Really, it’s survival mode. They’ll find a place where they're probably not going to be bothered, but sometimes you see them just out in the wide open. It's hard to say where exactly they will end up.

“We tend to end up playing this game where you move them from one spot to another spot, and then you can come to that spot and they're back to the original spot,” he continued.

“That’s the frustration with how we deal with this, and obviously it speaks to the need for more resources and places for them to go," Salazar said. "One of the challenges moving them from A to B, or B to C creates is that it makes it more difficult for some of our partners who are out there trying to offer services to stay consistent and find people.”

Soto said he also wants parks to be safe for families, but doesn't believe the ordinance change will do that.

“An emergency drop-in shelter would be more effective in a lot of the scenarios where we've received complaints from our constituency, so I won't be supporting this," he said. "I hope that we can talk about funding to open an emergency drop-in shelter in the future.”

Councilman Steve Nelsen said he doesn't believe homelessness can be solved with a one-size-fits-all approach.

“The governor spent billions of dollars and his policy was ‘housing first,’” he said. “We're going to ‘put them in a house,’ but he never addressed the root causes. During that tenure where you spent billions of dollars, the actual population of homelessness in the state of California has increased. It shows that housing first isn't a catch-all.

Nelsen also addressed Newsom's threat to without funding from municipalities that do not follow the encampment mandate.

“(The governor is) putting the onus on counties and cities, and under the veiled threat of losing funding, which is not a good solution to what we’re trying to deal with,” he added.

Nelsen talked about the facilities in the city that offer housing to the homeless, as well as two projects about to open, Salt + Light’s The Neighborhood Village and the Visalia Navigation Center, a low-barrier facility to be managed and operated by CSET.

However, the current facilities, along with those about to open, are only able to accommodate a fraction of the city’s homeless population, which Nelsen estimates at 1,600.

“All we're doing is reverting back to the original ordinance,” said Nelsen, explaining his support for the amendment. “We're not changing anything.”

Vice Mayor Brett Taylor pushed back stating that the amendment is a "tool to incentivize" unhoused people.

“If they're in a park and our police officers go up to them, they're not just going to say, ‘Get out of the park,’ they're going to say, ‘Would you like services?'" Taylor said. "Hopefully these people take the opportunity to take those services to get better.”

This article originally appeared on Visalia Times-Delta: Visalia City Council votes to ban overnight camping in city parks