At a recent Sparks city council meeting, Sparks Police Chief Chris Crawforth and City Attorney Wes Duncan addressed the homelessness issue in the area. The creation of new ordinances that city staff presented to the council was requested via the police department’s HOPE (Homeless Outreach Proactive Engagement) Team in hopes of improving the public health and safety while decreasing the abundance of the unsheltered population within city limits.
“We as a community want to be a leader in this space in not only connecting people to services but realizing that when we try to connect people to those services and there’s a resistance to that then there’s also enforcement to the law,” Duncan says.
Duncan went on to propose six major changes to the existing ordinance, which include:
- Reducing the defined size of oversized vehicles from 25 feet to 15 feet.
- Adding a provision prohibiting “human habitation” or people from living in their vehicles on public roadways.
- A provision that prohibits blocking public sidewalks, right of ways and streets.
- Prohibiting the obstruction of traffic to solicit drivers in roadways for safety reasons.
- Barring open fires on public property without a permit.
- Prohibit camping in the Truckee River corridor out to 1,000 feet of the river.
Police Chief Crawforth then reaffirmed that while the HOPE Team can help many homeless people in their first few points of contact, there is a need for the HOPE Team to have more tools for the unhoused people who refuse service, and their efforts will not diminish if the new ordinances are passed.
“We will absolutely continue a resource-first approach. Most people who want those services accept those services and now we’re at a point where our residents and business owners leave frustrated because we cannot do much more for them because of the barred ability through our codes,” Crawforth says.
Crawforth and Duncan then explained how the misdemeanor fines would be processed to hopefully help the issue without people getting “wrapped into our jail systems”, he says.
Some of the safety issues that were presented in the meeting included photos of RV fires, sidewalks blocked.
Crawforth shared how removing oversized vehicles from other properties takes a lot of manhours and equipment that is at the cost of taxpayer dollars and presented a photo of an RV with overflowing black water, much of which is being drained into the streets and makes its way into the river. Other photos showed pathways blocked by storage causing pedestrians to step into traffic to get around it, generators set up in water on Veterans Parkway, a case of hypodermic needles by the river, and the tent city by the railroad. In the 2023 Fiscal Year, there have been eight RV/trailer fires, 21 dumpster fires, and 70 medical calls to treat unhoused people.
“The City of Sparks takes a compassionate and innovative approach to the homeless by connecting them to services and will continue to do so after the passage of these new laws,” says Duncan. “However, these ordinances were necessary to protect public health and safety and the families and businesses that call Sparks home. The City of Sparks will continue to strike the right balance between trying to help those in need and enforcing the law against those who would make our community unsafe, and these ordinances will help law enforcement and prosecutors in my office to do so. I commend the HOPE Team for requesting these changes to code. In terms of homelessness, we will not let Sparks become San Francisco or the many big cities that do not enforce the law at the expense of public safety and health.”
Chief of Police Chris Crawforth urged passage of these ordinances by stating, “citizens and business owners in our city were becoming frustrated over the Sparks Police Department’s inability to fully assist them with homeless encampments that were leading to public health and safety risks and concerns. The passage of these new ordinances will allow us to assist our concerned citizens while still maintaining a resource-first approach with our unhoused population.”
The Sparks City Council unanimously approved the proposed changes that come into effect September 1, 2023.
“The HOPE Team is doing great work so now we have to do our part to help support them,” Sparks City Councilmember Paul Anderson added.