By Pauline Masson –
The city’s six-month slog to enact a law that makes it illegal to be homeless in Pacific moved a step farther last Friday.
The city Operatios Committee, chaired by Alderman Jerry Eversmeyer, met Dec. 6, with one item on the agenda: Bill 5156, AN ORDINANCE PROHIBITING THE OCCUPANCY OF STRUCTURES DEEMED UNFIT FOR HUMAN HABITATION, aka the “no camping” bill.
Eversmeyer, who described the meeting as a fact finding mission, noted earlier that no citizens would be allowed to comment. The only individuals who did comment about the controversial legislation during the eleven minutes long meeting were Aldermen Sara Gendron and Scott Lesh, and Police Chief Scott Melies.
When Chief Melies and Jones introduced the bill to aldermen last August, the first reading was made without protest, but when it came up for a second reading September 7, Lesh and Alderman James Cleeve said preventing property owners from allowing guests to sleep in an RV on their property was an assault on their property rights. They also thought property owners should be allowed to sleep in RVs on their own property during renovations or construction. The bill was sent to the Operations Committee for review and possible amendments.
At the mention of a review by Operations, Chief Melies said he wanted to be present when the committee met to explain what he and his department wanted to accomplish with the ordinance. Lesh and Cleeve asked for two reports to clarify the reason for the new law, one on the number police calls regarding homeless and a report from the building department on how it handles people sleeping in RVs on private property.
True to his promise on Dec. 6, Chief Melies said he believes it is, and should be, illegal for people to sleep in RVs on private property for more than three days in a row or in a 30 day period and his department wants to go after the property owners who allow temporary sleeping in tents, campers or RVs on their property.
When Gendron asked Melies for a summary of the bill, he said that he had numerous calls that required police action regarding homeless encampments or people using faucets at businesses to bathe.
He said he had put together a list of email complaints he had received over years from specific people complaining about specific situations, including the homeless interfering with their business, homeless interfering with church, property left behind in wooded areas and things like that.
“Those are specific complaints that I’ve managed to keep over the years – people being in city parks – stuff like that. So I do have a record of all those,” the chief said.
Lesh said in addition to asking for information on citizens complaints, he and Cleeve had also asked for a report from the building department on how they handled any complaints about people sleeping in RVs on private property.
City Administrator Steve Roth, Mayor Heather Filley and Eversmeyer tried to defray that request, saying it was a matter of city zoning, separate from the no camping law being discussed by the committee, but Lesh stood his ground, saying he wanted to hear from the building department.
“We want to hear from the building department to address the issues of people using RVs on their property – as just described – if someone pulls in and starts an RV and starts occupying it, does the building department have code, rules, whatever – can they just do that or do they have to get a permit, that’s the question we want the building department to address,” Lesh said.
Roth said that it was his understanding that if somebody wanted to use an RV for the weekend, he didn’t think there would be any prohibition on that. On the other hand he didn’t know that it is specifically pemitted either.
After an eleven-minute discussion on the proposed law and a three-minute review of possible future committee meeting topics, Eversmeyer asked for a motion to move the proposed law back up to the board of aldermen and the 14-minute meeting adjourned..
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The Marshal (Chief) says he needs this ordnance so he can quickly deal with a complaint or problem brought to the departments attention. He has stated that this ‘homeless problem’ has at times overwhelmed his ability to deal with it. Yet he was not able to produce for, the committee, a call log or response record for such calls. Did he hard-idly not pat himself on the back about a year ago for bringing a version of St. Louis County PD’s reporting system that was light years ahead of our older system. Seams strange that such an advanced call logging system was not able to produce even one recent call record supporting his statements that ” homeless encampments are taking over”.
Also, why, at a public meeting, did he not read some of the highlights of these enormously numbered e-mails, but rather slipped them into the record, never to be seen again.
Where was our building department, when there was need of clarification on the very type of rules that they deal with daily. Probably eating doughnuts and looking longingly in a mirror.
The committee was in a real hurry to push this forward, must have been the very strong pull of the puppet strings.
If this ‘no camping ” law was really needed I am sure a citizen would have brought it to the attention of the Aldermen. If the Chief had any smarts he would have had one of his many friends? bring it to the board, at least then he would not appear as he does now; a heartless fool.
Contact your alderman and be at the 1-17-23 meeting with signed speaker cards ready.
Police Chiefs don’t write laws.
Produce a list of CALLS requiring RESPONSES ordered by date and time, because this may not even be an issue.