Bangor city staff are planning to add a police detail and reduce park hours in response to a flood of complaints from the public about a growing group of homeless community members who have been gathering in Peirce Park outside the Bangor Public Library.
The park has become a flashpoint this month after the city closed its four winter warming centers, which left many people without a place to go during the day or at night. It’s one of many areas in the city where informal gatherings or encampments have sprung up as the city struggles to address a homelessness crisis.
The city is also considering funding a daytime center where homeless people could congregate during the day and receive services.
Staffing a police detail primarily focused on Peirce Park would cost up to $680 per day, City Manager Carollynn Lear told city councilors in a workshop Monday.
“I think the challenge is that we’re really trying to preserve access to our public spaces to everyone,” Lear said, including homeless residents, “while at the same time maintaining a level of safety and comfort for others who would like to use those spaces as well and currently feel like they aren’t safe.”
City staff plan to add hours for one police officer per day indefinitely to supervise the park and temporarily reduce the open hours of parks where the city is monitoring issues to reduce the cost of the police detail, Lear said. Parks are currently open from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.
She wrote in a memo to councilors that staff are managing behaviors like drug use and smoking, camping on city property, improper needle disposal and litter including human waste in the park, saying the situation has reached “a [crisis] level.”
Ideally, the police officer would correct behaviors that violate city ordinance without kicking people out of the park, Lear told councilors Monday.
The plan received little debate from councilors but faced some criticism during public comment at Monday’s meeting. One resident called it “another example of expensive, reactive policy that fails to address the root of the crisis.”
The increased regulation of the park comes about a week after the city directed St. John’s Episcopal Church to shut down a small encampment the church was allowing on its property.
The council also voted unanimously during Monday’s workshop to instruct city staff to issue a request for proposals for daytime shelter space. This process would follow the model used to fund warming centers in the winter but would likely be more expensive, Lear said.
Jennifer Gunderman, the city’s public health director, told councilors a dedicated daytime space like the Heart Center that closed two years ago would not only offer shelter and cooling in the warmer months, but would also give service providers a go-to place to meet clients and help people who have recently found housing but may be lonely or need help adjusting.
The city’s winter warming centers hosted up to about 120 people at a time on the coldest nights this year, Gunderman said.
Councilors were in favor of exploring the addition of day space funding, although some also reiterated larger concerns about the city’s reactive approach to homelessness and its failure to devise a long-term plan to address the issue.
“It just seems like we keep putting Band-Aids on it,” Councilor Carolyn Fish said.
Councilor Michael Beck noted that even with a day space, he worried about where homeless residents could go at night.
