A4
THE ASTORIAN • SATuRdAy, NOvEmbER 6, 2021
OPINION
editor@dailyastorian.com
KARI BORGEN
Publisher
DERRICK DePLEDGE
Editor
Founded in 1873
SHANNON ARLINT
Circulation manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN
Production manager
CARL EARL
Systems manager
BEHIND THE NEWS
‘Solutions really are somewhat elusive’
F
ederal court rulings have made
it harder for cities to prohibit the
homeless from camping in pub-
lic places when there are no shelter beds
available.
The rulings are rooted in the Eighth
Amendment, which protects against
excessive fines and cruel and unusual
punishment.
In Oregon, a new state law requires
that local regulations
against sitting, lying,
sleeping or keeping warm
in public places must be
objectively reasonable
to people experiencing
homelessness.
With the law set to
DERRICK
take effect in July 2023,
DePLEDGE
some smaller cities are
looking at year-round
homeless shelters.
“I do think there’s a need,” said Astoria
Police Chief Geoff Spalding, who leads
the city’s homelessness solutions task
force. “I’ve come to that realization after
some time that every community should
be doing something like that, because if
we’re the only ones doing it, it has the
potential to bring more people here that
we’re not going to be able to help.”
Spalding, who had retired as the police
chief in Beaverton before taking charge
of the Astoria Police Department in 2017,
has been involved with the task force
since it was created four years ago.
In an interview, Spalding talked about
the challenges the task force has faced,
government restrictions on bad behavior
and crisis response calls to police.
Q: The homelessness solutions
task force has been effective at bring-
ing people together to discuss options,
but there has not been a lot of concrete
action. What is your vision for the task
force going forward?
A: I would agree with — I’ll call it
criticism — because there’s actually been
some people that have felt that we’re not
accomplishing a lot.
One of the things I’ve always said is, to
me, one of the biggest values of the whole
solutions task force is the fact that we’ve
built relationships with the different social
service partners, which we would have
had otherwise, but maybe not to the extent
we do.
Everybody in that group now feels
very comfortable picking up the phone
and calling somebody else and having a
conversation and sitting down. I wouldn’t
have had the same good relationship with
CCA (Clatsop Community Action) as I
do as a big part of that meeting, or CBH
(Clatsop Behavioral Healthcare) or any of
the other three-letter groups.
To me, if we’ve accomplished nothing
else other than the building of some really
important relationships, we’ve really
made our mark.
Probably in our first meeting, when we
were even discussing what do we want to
call this group, I think one of the members
threw out, instead of just homeless task
force, we want to call it the homeless solu-
tions task force. We want to come up with
solutions.
And, I think, after having done this for
four years now, solutions really are some-
what elusive.
We are in a rural community with very
limited resources. Even communities that
have lots of resources are still struggling
Lydia Ely/The Astorian
Geoff Spalding is the Astoria police chief.
with this challenge. We’ve seen the arti-
cles — Seattle that spent a billion dollars
on the issue and the problem got worse.
So money is not always the solution.
It’s challenging. We’re having a hard
time finding housing for new employees
that want to come here. Can you imagine
how hard it would be for someone that’s
unhoused to find housing? And so it’s just
a tremendous challenge.
In the meantime, how do we address
the individuals and make sure that
they’re getting the appropriate care they
need on many levels? I would say that
out of everything that we have accom-
plished, probably one of the most signifi-
cant is bringing forward the two homeless
liaisons.
Q: The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals ruling in Martin v. City of
Boise and Oregon law restricts cities
from prohibiting homeless people from
camping in public places if there are
no adequate shelter beds available. Do
you think Astoria should pursue a year-
round homeless shelter?
A: I think somebody should.
Whether it’s Astoria, whether it’s a
county function, whether it’s a private not-
for-profit entity, I think in order for us to
be able to — like you said, with Martin v.
Boise or with the Grants Pass decision and
now the most recent House Bill 3115 —
it’s all driving us in that direction, where
if we want to be able to enforce home-
less camping, then we are going to have
to have alternative locations for somebody
to go to.
In the Grants Pass case, they were
pretty specific that it has to be basi-
cally within the confines of the city lim-
its. I think we’re small enough here that it
would be considered probably mostly the
county would qualify.
I do think there’s a need. I’ve come to
that realization after some time that every
community should be doing something
like that, because if we’re the only ones
doing it, it has the potential to bring more
people here that we’re not going to be able
to help.
Q: Before the coronavirus pandemic,
Astoria was considering chronic nui-
sance and exclusion zone ordinances to
discourage bad behavior from homeless
people. What happened to those ideas?
A: First, what I would like to say about
that is —and I tried to make this very clear
when we first presented this to council —
this is not about homeless individuals. It’s
about behavior.
And I truly mean that, because there
are other people that are doing some
things that are inappropriate, that are qual-
ity-of-life-type crimes, that aren’t home-
less. We don’t want to target homeless
people. We just want to target the bad
behavior.
So in answer to what happened to
it, I would say, probably, like you said,
pre-pandemic — the pandemic happened
to us. It’s a big part of why this did get put
on the back burner.
There’s a lot of other agencies, a lot
of cities, that have actually instituted
either a chronic nuisance ordinance or an
exclusion zone-type ordinance. There’s
been pros and cons. We wanted to make
sure that we did the appropriate amount
of research and make sure that this was
going to work for our community.
It’s not so much the pandemic itself,
it’s the extra load of work that that put on
everybody. So it’s been a challenge ...
Q: Each year, the behavior of a small
number of people accounts for hun-
dreds of calls to Astoria police. Many
are crisis response calls linked to issues
such as homelessness, mental illness
and substance abuse. How should the
city respond to this challenge?
A: It’s not just a city problem. It’s a
social service problem.
Again, I think the biggest thing that
I’ve found is everybody is dealing with
limited resources.
The crisis response team (from Clat-
sop Behavioral Healthcare), I would call
it, on some level, a limited success, simply
because it’s one more tool that we have.
I’m hearing of specific incidences where
we’ve been able to get hold of some-
body — sometimes it will simply be just
by phone because they’re down in Sea-
side at the time, sometimes they’re able to
respond — but, again, if they don’t have
the ability to house somebody, some-
where, there’s only so much they’re going
to do.
The threshold is so high in this state
in order to commit somebody. It really
takes almost — unfortunately — a serious
event before somebody can be committed.
Everybody is kind of putting their hands
up and saying, ‘How can we help these
individuals when there’s no resources?’
I guess the bigger picture here is like
we started the conversation with, is that,
as a police department, we’re kind of
stuck in the middle a little bit.
We have people pulling at us from both
sides. We have one side of the community
that is tired of the behavior that they’re
seeing, the feces, the cat-calling, the loi-
tering, which isn’t illegal, of course —
but that’s what people see. The perception
of feeling unsafe, which came out of our
survey.
So they’re seeing those kind of prob-
lems, and they don’t want to see this ele-
ment in our community.
And then we have the other side of the
community that wants to make sure that
we’re housing some of these individuals,
we’re getting them the help they need.
And so we’re stuck in the middle. We
get the calls.
When the whole ‘defund the police’
argument came out, I was actually in
support of it, from the perspective that I
believe social service agencies should be
handling most of these calls and not law
enforcement. I always looked at it, at least
Astoria, anyway, we’re already under-
funded. So at least keep the funding at
the same level, but let’s find solutions
to getting assistance for some of these
individuals.
And that’s part of the discussions
we’re having right now with the homeless
liaisons. Are we going to get to a point
where, perhaps, somebody can call in, and
our dispatcher can actually call CCA and
they will send out a homeless liaison and
they can deal with a low-level-type thing
— maybe someone sleeping in the door-
way of a business, not something a law
enforcement person needs to be involved
in?
We just want to make sure that we can
keep these people safe. It just gives us
another option and reduces our calls for
service. So getting back to one of your ini-
tial questions, ‘What’s my vision for the
homeless solutions task force?’ My vision
has always been, how do we reduce calls
for service, make it so our officers don’t
have to respond to as many calls?
You talked about earlier, with the ‘fre-
quent flyers.’ We’re getting some indi-
viduals that have racked up over a hun-
dred calls, just themselves, in a very short
period of time. And it’s just a tremendous
drain on resources.
Q: What is one thing you have
learned about homelessness you wish
more people knew?
A: That one size doesn’t fit all. Every
person is a unique individual with a
unique reason that they’re in the place
they’re in.
It’s either mental illness, it’s either sub-
stance abuse-related, it’s either they’ve
fallen on bad luck or simply a chosen
lifestyle.
And I think a lot of people really don’t
believe that there’s some people out there
that really want to live this way ...
That would probably be one of the big-
gest things. The other thing, too, is that
there’s just no easy answers.
We struggle with the same thing that
everybody else does. As a law enforce-
ment agency, we want the same thing that
most everybody else does, and that is get-
ting individuals help who truly want the
help.
derrick dePledge is editor of The
Astorian.
GUEST COLUMN
The fate of local news
T
he fate of local news in Amer-
ica may depend on what Oregon’s
senior senator, Ron Wyden, does in
the next few days.
In addition to all the other major tax
issues that have fallen to the Senate
Finance Committee, which Wyden chairs,
the panel is also consid-
ering a less expensive but
hugely important provi-
sion: a payroll tax credit
to help local newspapers,
TV and radio stations and
websites to hire and retain
local reporters.
JUAN-
This is essential
CARLOS
because local news is col-
MOLLEDA
lapsing around the coun-
try. Because the internet
has destroyed local news business mod-
els, there has been a 60% drop in the num-
ber of reporters since 2000. Thousands
of communities have no newspapers or
“ghost newspapers” that barely cover
communities.
Studies have proved what we know
intuitively: when there are fewer local
reporters, there’s more government waste
and corruption. Just as important, it’s
harder for neighbors to know each other
and for communities to solve their own
problems. Voting goes down. Participation
goes down. The information vacuums are
filled with misinformation and conspiracy.
As the Edwin L. Artzt Dean and profes-
sor at the University of Oregon’s School of
Journalism and Communication, I have a
front-row seat for the monumental changes
in local journalism. We send interns into
Oregon newsrooms every summer and
many of our graduates are employed in
local print, broadcast and internet news-
rooms. The COVID-19 pandemic, and
resulting advertising losses, only exacer-
bated economic fissures threatening the
flow of information to citizens.
Fortunately, Congress is right now con-
sidering a simple proposal that could save
local news. It provides a tax credit to pub-
lishers and stations to help pay the salary
of a local reporter.
It would infuse $38 million over five
years to approximately 113 newsrooms in
Oregon.
No one loves the idea of news organiza-
tions getting money from the government.
But this particular idea is constructed
in a clever, First Amendment friendly
approach. All news organizations – regard-
less of ideology – would be eligible for the
tax credit as long as they have local report-
ers. There’s no government bureaucrat
deciding what news organizations bene-
fit. That’s why it has strong bipartisan sup-
port: the original co-author is U.S. Rep.
Dan Newhouse, a Republican, from Wash-
ington state.
This provision is on the edge of being
included in the Build Back Better legisla-
tion. Because it’s a tax credit, its fate will
be decided by the Senate Finance Com-
mittee. Sen. Wyden is already a co-spon-
sor of the bill. He is in a unique position to
make it become law. It’s a small amount of
money compared to the $1.75 trillion bill
but it’s impact on saving democracy may
be profound.
Juan-Carlos molleda is a tenured pro-
fessor and the Edwin L. Artzt dean of the
School of Journalism and Communication
at the university of Oregon.
Local journalism is at risk across the country
because of financial pressures.