Spokane City Council shoots down resolution supporting enforcing homeless camping law

The Spokane City Council on Monday declined to take a position on whether the city should commit to enforcing a voter-approved law banning camping in much of the city.

Following last month’s U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing cities to enforce laws preventing the homeless from sleeping in public, two Spokane City Council members wanted to call on Mayor Lisa Brown to enforce law passed by voters last year banning camping from most of the city.

That resolution was killed Monday before it received a vote, however, with a 4-3 decision to “indefinitely defer” the resolution. Councilman Paul Dillon joined resolution sponsors Council members Jonathan Bingle and Michael Cathcart in voting against deferral, saying he would have rather voted no that evening than preemptively kill it in the afternoon.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled June 28 that laws preventing the homeless from camping on public property are not cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. This overturned the 2018 precedent set by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in the Martin v. Boise case, which prevented cities in the West from enforcing camping bans against the homeless if there were not enough available shelter beds.

Under former Mayor Nadine Woodward last fall, Spokane joined 20 other western cities in calling the Supreme Court to overturn the restrictions created by the Martin v. Boise decision, which they argued had tied the hands of jurisdictions trying to regulate the homeless populations.

Spokane voters last year overwhelmingly approved Proposition 1, which made it illegal to camp within 1,000 feet of a park, school or licensed day care, provisions which cover most of the city and nearly all of downtown. The measure had been opposed by then-candidate for mayor Lisa Brown and liberal candidates for City Council, who argued that it would be difficult to enforce and an ineffective response to the city’s growing homeless population.

Notably, Spokane Police Department officials acknowledged before Proposition 1 passed that it would not be possible with current staffing levels to enforce a camping ban on everyone sleeping on public property, though department spokeswoman Julie Humphreys said at the time that the law could be used as a tool on a discretionary basis.

While voters elected Brown and most of the council candidates that had opposed Proposition 1, they approved the anti-camping law by even larger margins. Brown’s administration had previously argued that enforcement was legally questionable pending a decision by the Supreme Court, but with that hurdle removed, calls for enforcement have intensified, particularly from major downtown business and property owners.

Bingle and Cathcart argued that a resolution by the City Council supporting enforcement would have helped assuage concerns that the city was not taking this issue seriously, they said Monday. Bingle added that he had offered to pull the resolution if the Brown administration issued a public statement committing to enforcement, which he said had not happened.

After Councilman Zack Zappone moved to pull the resolution from the evening’s agenda, Bingle accused him and the council majority of defying voters.

“This resolution…just says we are doing the will of the people and are enforcing what 74% of Spokane voters voted for,” Bingle said Monday afternoon. “All I can surmise from this is we actually don’t want to enforce Prop 1.”

In response, Councilwoman Kitty Klitzke accused Bingle and Cathcart of trying to imply through the resolution that city leaders were ignoring Proposition 1, arguing that this was not productive. Klitzke, Zappone and Dillon noted ongoing efforts to understand the cost and feasibility of enforcement and examine other aspects of the city’s laws on the homeless, most of which predate Proposition 1.

“We need to do this in a mindful and collaborative way, and governing by resolution doesn’t normally work that way,” Klitzke said.