Bangor city councilors on Friday decided to hold off on closing the homeless encampment near Washington Street in a special morning workshop meeting.
The city will not move forward with the deadline it initially set for people to leave the encampment, Dec. 19, but it has not yet set a new deadline.
“The 19th is not going to be feasible,” City Council Chair Susan Hawes said.
The move comes amid mounting pressure from critics, including encampment residents, community organizations and some city officials, to delay the closure because the city has no alternative plan for where people can go.
The encampment has already shrunk significantly, with City Manager Carollynn Lear reporting that about 20 people are now living there consistently — down from more than 40 when the City Council first began discussing the site in the last week of November.
The encampment is spread out along the railroad tracks beside the Penobscot River, with some tents sitting on railroad property and others on city property. The railroad company contacted the city last week saying it didn’t want people staying there, Lear told councilors earlier this week.
It might be feasible to allow encampment residents to stay past the deadline by moving onto the city-owned parts of the land, Lear said at the meeting Friday, although she added that city staff may need more time to determine whether this could be a workable short-term solution.
Geoffrey Low, Bangor’s fire chief, said Friday that he’s still concerned about the safety risks that come with having an encampment so close to the train tracks, although having fewer people there reduces the risk.
Mark Hathaway, the city’s police chief, also noted that the location is difficult to access from nearby roads, which can lengthen response times for medical emergencies.
In their discussions over the past three weeks, councilors have acknowledged that the railroad site is unsafe, but also that displacing encampment residents will only result in new encampments forming elsewhere, since there are limited options of other places people can go.
“There’s been a practice of sort of managing a particular location until it has gotten out of control,” Lear told the Bangor Daily News, describing encampment closures in the past. After previous camps have been shut down, new ones form and “repeat the same pattern,” she said.
Of the 20 people still living at the site, six have housing vouchers and are searching for housing, according to Gunderman. About four others don’t yet have vouchers but are in the process to get one, she added.
Councilor Michael Beck noted that vouchers can effectively be “keys to doors that don’t exist,” since many landlords are unwilling to rent to tenants with a history of homelessness.
“That’s the hardest part,” Jennifer Marshall, who currently lives in the encampment with her boyfriend, said Thursday of their search for an apartment.
Marshall recently obtained a voucher, and “our case worker’s doing the best that she can as far as advocating for us to landlords so that we can hopefully get into a place before the [encampment] shutdown,” she said.
Hope House, the only low-barrier homeless shelter in the area, is currently at capacity, according to a Friday memo to councilors from Jennifer Gunderman, the city’s public health director.
Councilors have weighed the idea of establishing a sanctioned encampment space somewhere in the city, although Lear told the BDN she doesn’t expect councilors will have time to dig into this proposal when they meet next, on Monday.
Whether the council decides to let people stay on the city-owned land near the railroad or establish an outdoor location somewhere else, Lear emphasized that the city will need to provide resources onsite in order for it to be successful.
Those resources would need to include a bathroom and garbage pickup, she said, as well as some kind of perimeter and check-in system to manage the flow of people, because of concerns that setting up a sanctioned outdoor camp would attract large numbers of people and become difficult to manage.
City councilors will aim to set a new deadline for people to leave the railroad area during a special government operations committee meeting Monday evening, and they’ll talk more about the possibility of allowing some people to stay on the city-owned portion of the site.
Even without sticking to the initial Dec. 19 deadline, “we need to keep our foot on the gas,” Hawes said.
