Mayor Backus to put together a roundtable on homelessness

Published 5:02 pm Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Auburn native Brocc Snyder recently asked the Auburn City Council to renew the City’s homeless ordinance, which he said would allow local homeless advocates to set up a tent city somewhere inside City limits.

It’s about keeping the homeless safe, he said.

In the 10 days since Snyder, an elder of Calvary Presbyterian Church in Enumclaw who ministers in Auburn, made his plea, the greater Auburn community has started to respond.

Councilmembers said they have since received letters and emails from residents, some supportive, others adamantly against anything smacking of a tent city.

Given that response, Mayor Nancy Backus said Monday night she will call together a mayor’s roundtable on homelessness.

What shape solutions may take, if solutions there are to be, is anyone’s guess.

Councilmember John Holman said the kernel of the coming conversation will be finding the most humane way to deal with one’s fellow human beings.

Homelessness, Holman said, is a regional, not just an Auburn, issue. That being true, whatever the City does must work in conjunction with what other communities are doing, and it must balance various competing internal interests, including where best to allocate the City’s limited funds, he said.

“It’s a tenant of a lot of our own personal belief systems that we care for those who are less fortunate. But the other part of this balance is that if we make ourselves the most attractive city in the county for dealing with homelessness issues, we become a magnet, or a dumping ground, however you want to paraphrase it, for other cities,” Holman said.

And if Auburn puts in a tent city and some other city closes its own, Holman argued, this community would see its homeless population expand in a nanosecond.

“I’m not sure we even have the resources to expand our homeless population beyond what it is. The City already spends upward of $2 million a year on the disadvantaged in the City of Auburn. We’re very generous, and that applies to the generosity of our residents. We’ve got the Auburn Food Bank Empty Bowls fundraiser coming up. But there is a balance between funds that we have available and funds for things like patching roads.”

Holman summed up the letters he has received.

“Some have said that if we continue to advertise that we are helping the homeless, we’re going to bring in people with drug problems from other communities. Others have said it would degrade their business, and ‘if you do that, I’m going to move my business.’ We’ve had that level of response. We’ve also had the exact polar opposite, people saying, ‘we need to do more, we need to take our abandoned houses and open them up to the homeless.’ Some have even offered suggestions that are not even legal in this state … To them we have to say, ‘your heart’s in the right place, but we can’t do that.’ Finding that sweet spot, that balance, that’s what we are looking for with homelessness.”