CT - 6000 Noise.WAV by Cosmo Garvin

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This week I talked to Dave Kempa, a reporter who has written about homelessness and housing for Sacramento News and Review and Sacramento Bee, he also teaches journalism at American River College. Dave thinks it’s time for the City to rethink the City ordinance, to scrap it, and focus on housing and services. Supporters of the camping law want to move past this fight and focus on housing too. But that housing is not coming anytime soon . And the question remains, where can the homeless go tonight.

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This week I interviewed Michael Ault and Dion Dwyer from the Downtown Sacramento Partnership.

This is one of series of interviews I did on Sacramento’s anti-camping ordinance, which is used to write tickets to homeless people for sleeping outside. I’m really interested in this law as a rights issue. You know, are we making criminals of a class of people, are we punishing people for doing things, like sleeping outside, that they have no choice but to do? Does writing tickets for camping actually help move anyone into housing, or make anyone more safe? What happens is we stop writing tickets.

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My guest this week is Ron Blubaugh, he’s a volunteer attorney with the Tommy Clinkenbeard Legal Clinic, which is on the Loaves and Fishes campus.

Ron, a retired administrative law judge who used to work for CalPERS, now spends his time helping the homeless people deal with tickets for riding the light rail train without paying the fare, and for violating the City’s controversial camping ordinance.

The no camping law is seen by many as an example of the kind of “criminalizing the homeless” that goes on in on lot of cities. Blubaugh says more so in Sacramento than other places, a mean streak that he thinks is “in the DNA” of our city.

I’m working on other interviews on Sacramento’s anti-camping law. The question I’m interested in is just this: Is Sacramento’s camping ordinance fair?

Supporters and detractors both say that housing and services are what is needed. Certainly, tent cities and trashing public space (and private space) aren’t long term solutions. But do the homeless people who keep getting the tickets, sometimes racking up ridiculous fines, actually have a choice other than to keep breaking the law? 

Is the law actually doing anything to prevent people from sleeping outside Here’s a story I wrote about the City’s crackdown on homeless campers in 2003. Here’s a piece by Nick Miller last year. In those dozen years, the number of camping tickets has gone up, but little else has changed. What has this approach accomplished?

Blubaugh thinks the law punishes people based on their housing status, which for the homeless can’t be helped. In other words, it punishes poor people for being poor. That sounds like a no win situation.

In the last interview we heard from Common Cause and the League of Women voters, about a set of ethics reforms that are working their way through Sacramento City Hall.

If you listened, you may recall this interview was very positive, very upbeat about the new rules proposed on the use of government email accounts, ending closed door ad hoc meetings of council members, and creation of a new commission to investigate and take enforcement actions against ethics violators.

Paula Lee with the League of Women Voters told me:

“This really is incredibly remarkable. An independent redistricting commission, a sunshine ordinance, a five member ethics commission with enforcement power. It’s worth waiting for.”

For this interview, a different perspective. I spoke with Craig Powell of Eye on Sacramento, a local government watchdog group which has also been pushing for ethics reforms, and really at times doing battle with the city to try and get public records.

After two years of little progress, Powell says the reform package is being rushed through without enough vetting. He says the proposed ethics commission won’t truly be independent, because commission members would be appointed by the mayor and the city council. The group is also proposing that the commission have the power to recommend removal of corrupt officials by the Sacramento Superior Court.

And Eye on Sacramento wants more aggressive disclosure of crime statistics and information about police wrongdoing. “The police department is notorious for being the least transparent department in the city. It’s just a culture they’ve adopted,” Powell told me.

The watchdog group also wants to “sunshine” proposed contracts with city employee bargaining groups.

This seems unlikely to me, in a city run by Democrats who are friendly to public employee unions, who in turn are not so friendly to the idea of doing labor negotiations in the public eye.

In fact, I don’t get the impression that Eye on Sacramento is going to have much luck getting these ideas onto the agenda in the next few weeks. It seems a shame they wouldn’t get some sort of public airing. Especially when we’re talking about creating a more open and transparent government.

There’s always the 2018 ballot, where Powell says EOS may try to get voter approval for a stronger set of reforms. No easy feat either.

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The Sacramento City Council will vote on a package of ethics reforms in the coming weeks, many of which are in response to the administration of former Mayor Kevin Johnson.

The proposals include things like requiring city employees to use city email addresses to do city business, putting an end to the practice of ad hoc council committees that do business behind closed doors, and creation of an ethic commission to investigate and take enforcement against ethics violations.

This week I talked to two people who have been pushing for these reforms for the last two years, Paula Lee, with the League of Women Voters, and Nicolas Heidorn, with California Common Cause. I should say at the time we recorded the interview, many of the details were still being worked, particularly on the ethics commission piece.

Nicolas and Paula give a good run down of the new rules, they make the case for why they are needed, they talk a little bit about where this ethics package could be improved.

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Read the full post, with lots o' pictures here: https://cosmogarvin.com/blazing-a-trail-in-south-land-park-fcc835d83219#.kolmon7ec

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This week’s interview is with Brian Ebbert, a South Land Park resident, and president of the neighborhood association there. 

We talked at length about a really interesting project called the Del Rio Trail, which would turn a 4-mile stretch of old abandoned railroad line into an urban trail and greenbelt that could connect several Sacramento neighborhoods and create some very interesting new public spaces.