PORTLAND, Ore. — The Interstate 205 multi-use path is one of 50 to 60 homeless camps in Portland that the city said are a challenge to keep clean and clear.
Earlier this week Bike Portland posted a video to social media which showed the difficulty cyclists experienced while navigating through trash and tents.
“This is one of our challenging sites that we just have to keep visiting and cleanup on a regular basis,” Senior Management Analyst Heather Hafer said.
Crews were back at the site Wednesday morning into the afternoon clearing it for the second time in less than a month. In late February it took two crews four days to clean the site. It cost the city $4,485. The average clean-up costs $600, according to Hafer.
“If we don't clean up these sites on a very regular basis the costs and time to clean them up rise exponentially,” Hafer said.
A man living at the site tells KGW that he and his wife, who uses a wheelchair, were unsure of where to go next. That man called the newsroom later to tell KGW that he had planned to move his tent back near the site that afternoon.
The effort to clean up these sites is facilitated through the Homeless Urban Camping Impact Reeducation Program (HUCIRP).
A city audit released on Wednesday, sent teams to experience the process first hand.
Performance auditor Kristine Adams-Wannberg tells KGW that the conditions see-saw were horrendous.
“It was pretty eye-opening,” she said. “You have needles, you have trash. You're looking at waterways where you're seeing toxic substances getting in the waterways.”
The program started as a pilot program about four years ago. Since then attention and money given to the program from the city have increased, according to Adams-Wannberg.
HUCIRP takes complaints, analyze campsite conditions and removes trash, but its clean-ups sometimes displace people from those sites, according to the audit.
The audit found that the program improves public health, safety and living conditions in and around the camps. It is estimated that the program removed 2.6 million pounds of garbage from campsites in the Fiscal Year 2017-18.
However, several improvements are needed. That includes improvements in communicating about cleanups and using data to manage the program.
“What started as a temporary response to people living outside has evolved into a program spending more than $3.6 million annually. Demand for services has pushed the program past its capacity,” the audit stated.
The audit’s recommendations aim to improve the program’s public information, data and internal policies.
Communication:
While experiences varied, most of the people auditors interviewed said that crews were respectful and explained what was happening when notices were posted. Those forced to move from a site were unhappy about the disruption but understood the need to clean the area.
“People living in camps wanted more specific information on when the cleanups would occur,” the audit stated.
Homeless camps are given a window of about ten days notification before cleanup begins, but posted notices are often torn down. The lengthy period also left people in the camps unsure and anxious about when exactly the needed to pack up.
The audit also found the time frame increased the chance that people living at a campsite may be gone during the cleanup and may lose their property.
“They wanted more information about when the cleanup crews were actually coming,” Adams-Wannberg said. “They wanted to know more about, ‘Are you coming within these two days, or Thursday/Friday’ so that they could have enough information of when they really needed to leave.”
The audit states that there is nothing that prevents the city from giving more precise information about when a cleanup occurs. Program staff said providing more specific information would be difficult because workload and location priorities can change quickly.
“The cleanups are actually a good thing because they help the health and safety of the neighborhoods of the folks who are actually living in the camps,” Adams-Wannberg said. “But folks need to know a little bit more about when the camp cleanup is actually going to take place because it gives them a lot of anxiety in terms of when they have to move.”
“More specific information and more durable notices, however, could help campers keep the property they need to survive outdoors,” the audit stated.
The audit also said the city needs to provide more specific communication about complaint status. It recommends that the city give people filing a complaint a status update.
The city aims to do that with a new app that will help people better record and understand HUCIRP, according to Hafer. It could be released as soon as April.
Protecting Property:
The audit recommends the city to do more to protect the property of people who experience homelessness.
“Sometimes it was hard for people to get their property,” Adams-Wannberg said. Those were some things where we thought they need some more policies and procedures in the program.
As part of a lawsuit settlement in 2012, the city agreed to inventory and store personal property for 30 days after a clean-up, so it could be retrieved, according to the audit.
Contractors should also have a common understanding of what the city considers personal property and ensures that they improve storage policies and procedures. This includes an extra safeguard for sensitive property.
Tracking Complaints:
The city receives anywhere from 200 to 700 complaints of homeless camps a week. While some of them are duplicates the audit found it could not compare risk factors or their priority because the program did not have a comprehensive database to track complaints and actions taken through the entire process.
“What they need is to be more integrated so that they can tell overall how their performance is. Are they getting to camps in a timely manner, what camps are being done more often?” Adams-Wannberg said.
The audit recommends the program “establish a data system and procedures that improve data quality and reduce manual processes, such as by assigning a unique identification number to assessments and automating workflow.”
It also said data should be used to analyze and improve the effectiveness, efficiency and timeliness of cleanups.
Assessment Criteria Need and Clarification:
The audit found that HUCIRP may not be identifying the camps that are the “highest priority” to clean because of “unclear assessment criteria and inconsistent scoring and documentation.”
The audit recommends the program “clarify the assessment risk factors and scoring, identify what risk factors require photographic documentation, and establish a common understanding of the criteria among the crew who carry out the assessments.”
“We weren’t surprised by any of the results of the audit. In fact, all of the findings that the auditor recognized were issues that we were actually in the process of [addressing] and we were proceeding with those,” Hafer said.
Read the full audit and recommendations here.