|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
East Palo Alto Mayor Antonio López’s plan to clear homeless encampments and share regional resources for people who are homeless was denied at a city council meeting on Tuesday, with council members critiquing López for his lack of communication with council and community members.
At an Aug. 14 press conference, López announced a plan to clear out homeless encampments by giving people two formal warnings, then offering resources shared with neighboring cities, like shelters and permanent housing.
He officially pitched that resolution to the East Palo Alto City Council at Tuesday’s meeting, asking the group to approve his request to “compassionately clear homeless encampments,” collaborate with neighboring jurisdictions, provide updates to clearing encampments and provide budgetary suggestions toward the effort.
Council member Carlos Romero said he first heard about the resolution through the press.
“I’m not willing, at this point, to support what is an empty vessel of a resolution, that I think doesn’t address this issue and more importantly has not included the council,” Romero said.
The way forward, he said, was to agendize the issue for future discussion.
Council member Ruben Abrica criticized López for not acknowledging the city’s current and long-standing work to mitigate homelessness.
“The City of East Palo Alto knows what to do, we also did it with the RV encampments before anybody else in the peninsula,” Abrica wrote in a statement about his concerns, where he also critiqued the Weekly’s coverage on the topic, calling it “disturbing.” “And now we are going to have a Mayor, who did not have the respect to bring this to the Council before campaigning, teach the Council and staff how to do it?”
Council member Lisa Gauthier agreed and said that the City has already created a successful plan to address homelessness, which was demonstrated in Bell Street Park when it provided people who were homeless wraparound services like health care, food and transitional housing.
She called López’s current plan “a waste of staff’s time.”
“We don’t have to recreate the wheel at this time, and we can just acknowledge that there is already a precedent here in East Palo Alto,” she said.
Abrica also called the not-yet-developed plan’s media coverage preemptive, claiming López used the topic for political advancement.
“The way that I have followed the press, it seemed to me that you were partly using this as a campaign issue for your race for [San Mateo County] Board of Supervisors,” he said.
Abrica said he would not sign a resolution if it had the mayor’s name on it, adding that supporting the plan would be free campaign “propaganda,” especially considering fellow council member Gauthier is running for the same position.
While Abrica called the mayor’s plan a “calculated” campaign tactic, some members of the public discouraged campaign discussions within the meeting.
“I don’t find the language used today against Mayor Lopez by his fellow council members is productive or appropriate,” said Madeline Anderson, who is earning her Ph.D. in sociology at Stanford University.
López thanked the council and the public for its critiques and said it was not his intention to “virtue signal.”
“If I can take any silver lining from this, it’s that it’s an opportunity to perhaps flush out something more robust,” he said.
While city council members decided not to pass the specific resolution, City Manager Melvin Gaines asked council not to lose sight of the issue at hand: relocating people living in dangerous conditions during the winter based on the Bell Street Park model.
“Not because we’re trying to compassionately displace them, but because we’re trying to compassionately make sure that they’re in a safe environment where they won’t be in standing water or in the creek,” he said.
