Santa Cruz backs ban on other communities bringing homeless to city

Any person acting on behalf of another government who drops a homeless person off in Santa Cruz without coordinating with city officials could soon be charged with a crime, after the Santa Cruz City Council on Tuesday unanimously supported a new law banning the act. 

The council also supported taking a Santa Cruzans-first approach in offering its homeless services, prioritizing locals who become homeless here over those who travel to the city seeking help. Councilmembers are scheduled to take a second and final vote to pass the new law on Sept. 24.  

The move comes on the heels of a June incident with the city of Hanford, in which Santa Cruz officials allege that two plainclothes police officers drove a disabled homeless person more than three hours and dropped them off at the city’s Armory shelter. Santa Cruz officials said their counterparts in Hanford never reached out to them. The person experiencing homelessness, a woman in a wheelchair identified as Person Doe in city documents, said she did not consent to her relocation.

Hanford officials have since challenged that account, telling media last week that the woman had “repeatedly refused local homeless resources,” and that she asked Hanford police officers to help bring her to the Santa Cruz shelter. 

“At no point in time did Hanford Police Department officers suggest, encourage, or coerce the individual to go to the city of Santa Cruz,” Brian Johnson, Hanford’s community relations manager, said in a statement last week. 

For many in the community, the incident seemed to confirm what people locally have heard murmurs of for decades: Santa Cruz’s tolerance toward the houseless made it the perfect place for other cities to dump their homelessness problems. 

“Having this ordinance sends a message, frankly, in our county and outside our county, that this is not responsible behavior by governments,” Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley said Tuesday. 

Vice Mayor Renée Golder said she felt “taken advantage of” by the Hanford case, and called on every government agency to step up and do their part to address homelessness in their own communities. 

If the city council passes the law on second reading Sept. 24, it will create a new criminal misdemeanor charge for agents of government who transport a homeless person into Santa Cruz without prior coordination with the city. If the law was active during the Hanford incident, the two police officers who allegedly dropped the woman off at the shelter would have been charged, punishable by up to a $1,000 fine or one year in jail. 

Councilmember Sandy Brown, alluding to the city’s own recent homeless camp sweeps, said she was supporting the ordinance because “I am opposed to the forced displacement by an agent of the state. Forcibly moving a person is something to be concerned about.” 

Embedded into Tuesday’s vote was a resolution to prioritize the city’s homeless resources for people who became homeless in Santa Cruz, as opposed to those who travel here, already homeless, looking for services. Evan Morrison, executive director of People First, a homeless services organization that runs the city’s largest homeless shelter at the Armory, said upholding that commitment sounded logistically unlikely, and could do more harm than good. 

“If we’re prioritizing folks who become homeless in the city of Santa Cruz, there is a scenario in which people in other parts of the county suddenly have much fewer services,” Morrison told Lookout last week.

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