Homeless

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Just sat on a long board of supervisors meeting talking about homeless solutions for our county. Back in August, the Sheriff had spoken up about the possibility of a managed homeless camp by the jail. He had "lit a fire" (unfortunate expression) under the board due to the fact that a homeless person had accidentally, but literally, lit a fire in a dangerous area. Unfortunately, his proposal went on the back burner after an actual large fire (the Caldor fire) started and caused a lot of destruction before it was put out after over two months. Anyway, today the Sheriff's proposal was re-visited, and it was pointed out that if we accept his proposal, it would lose the county a large sum of Federal money because his plan wasn't compliant with regulations. So there was a lot of back and forth about how we could tweak his proposal so that we could keep the grant money but also move forward with some kind of temporary housing for our 600+ homeless people. It was also pointed out that county legal counsel should look into whether the plan was in compliance with the Boise decision, which states that you cannot arrest homeless people for camping unless you give them a place to stay. Not sure a camp qualifies, and we don't want our county fighting lawsuits if we force homeless people into a camp that doesn't meet the necessary conditions. Mainly though, we just want to get people sheltered before winter weather hits (we're almost there, it's raining today), get them into programs that will help them deal with whatever their issues are and get them into housing. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this will be in place for this winter, so we are back to using churches and motels as temporary housing for now.