Three and a half miles south of where volunteers were caring for 44 unsheltered people at an emergency warming center in Newark, Heath City Council members voted unanimously and without discussion on Feb. 18 to ban “camping” on public property.
Inside the Heath municipal building, the temperature was comfortably warm. Outside, it was 12 degrees.
The ordinance approved by the Heath City Council, which allows for fines and jail time for people found sleeping on public property, is virtually the same as one approved on Oct. 21 by the Newark City Council, which heard protests from a packed house each time the ordinance was discussed.
The concerns raised repeatedly in Newark were that the ordinance would criminalize unsheltered people who have no money to pay fines and whose lives would be further damaged by a criminal record.
In Heath on Tuesday night, no one from the public spoke to the council about the camping ban or any other topic. But some council members said after the vote that their goal is not to criminalize homeless people but to help them.
Several of them said they were comfortable voting for the camping ban because the entire council attended the council safety committee’s meeting at 5:30 p.m. before the full council meeting at 7 p.m. and heard a detailed presentation by Assistant Newark City Law Director Melanie Timmerman, who did not speak during the full council meeting.
Adam Porter, the Ward 1 council member and head of the safety committee, said Timmerman spoke about a “HOME” court being created in Licking County Municipal Court to handle the cases of anyone who is picked up by police under the ordinances.
Porter said the name of the court stands for Housing Opportunities and Municipal Engagement Court. He was quick to add that neither Newark nor Heath police will enforce the new ordinances until the special court is activated.
Council member Deb Cole said that when Newark considered the same ordinance, “there were a lot of negative thoughts” because people “didn’t know what was going on behind the scenes” to create a new court to specifically handle cases involving unsheltered people.
The court was never mentioned while Newark City Council was preparing to vote on the ordinance, and details about the court didn’t become public until Heath Mayor Mark Johns posted a memo on the city’s Facebook page on Feb. 3 saying that he had been briefed on plans for the court, and that is what prompted him to support the ordinance making it a crime to sleep on public property.
Johns said after the Feb. 18 vote that “there is still work to be done, but I was particularly pleased with the number of organizations and agencies that are coming forward” to be part of the support system that will work with unsheltered people through the new court.
Council member Jim Roberts said the ordinance gave him pause until he heard Timmerman’s presentation and the goal of helping people rather than putting unsheltered people behind bars.
The ordinance, which does not mention the HOME Court, will make sleeping on public property a minor misdemeanor, punishable by a $150 fine. A second offense would be a fourth-degree misdemeanor punishable by 30 days in jail and a fine of up to $250, and a third offense would be a third-degree misdemeanor, punishable by up to 60 days in jail and a $500 fine. The maximum total fine would be $500 for a series of violations.
“In no way would I want to do what it looked like – putting homeless people in prison,” he said. “It’s one of those things you want to understand before you vote.”
Ward 3 Councilman Paul Moretti said, “This ordinance needed to be passed to give our police department some kind of teeth behind it to say, ‘You’re gonna be charged, and we’re gonna take you over to this homeless court.’
Council President Tim Keller said, “It’s similar to getting a traffic ticket. It says, ‘Come to this court and then they can give you help, depending on your circumstances. It sounds like a win-win, but I will be curious to see when it is enacted.”
Ward 2 Councilman Shawn Gallant said he “engaged with a lot of community members in Heath – different agencies, obviously our law enforcement division. Almost every single person I talked to was in support of it. As you start to understand the process, and some of the opportunities that it might provide to folks that we anticipate, it just felt like the right thing to do.
“You have to look at it two ways: There is the optics that people see, and then, I think, there is the understanding of the struggles that sometimes folks may have with having access to resources and a path forward to get them out of the situation that they are in, provided that they want that path forward,” Gallant said.
Porter said that Timmerman told the council during the safety committee meeting that the plan is for the HOME Court to meet on Wednesdays at 11 a.m., when representatives of social service organizations, homeless shelters, churches and governmental support agencies would be on hand.
And rather than assign a probation officer to someone cited into court under the ordinances, the defendants would be assigned case workers, who would help guide them toward programs and agencies that can help them “get back on their feet.”
One of the goals of the coalition of organizations working to support the new court, he said, is to create a “low-barrier” shelter that would take in unsheltered people with few conditions – accepting people who have pets or might be using drugs or alcohol. There is no such shelter in Licking County currently.
Porter said that Timmerman also told the council that the court and its coalition of support organizations would work to identify short- and long-term housing for people who complete the court’s program.
The so-called “diversion” program would also allow someone charged with a crime under the ordinance to leave without a criminal record if they fulfill the court’s requirements.
And if they aren’t successful in 60 to 100 days, as prescribed by a judge, a person making progress “but isn’t there yet, they stay in the program,” Porter said.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday night, it was cozy inside the Licking County Warming Center at Holy Trinity Lutheran on West Main Street in Newark.
Volunteers served up a dinner of barbecue sandwiches, macaroni and cheese, corn bread, and chocolate cookies, provided by Licking Memorial Hospital. At 7 p.m., The Dirigibles, a bass and guitar duo, played music for the more than 40 guests.
In the half-light of the sanctuary, a space reserved for families with children, the Rev. Deb Dingus, pastor of the church, told The Reporting Project that she is concerned about how the ordinances in Newark and Heath will affect a vulnerable group of people.
The city councils “feel this is what they need to do to keep people safe, however, it’s causing a lot of hardship for the unsheltered folks who are hiding and needing to find safe and secure places to be at night,” she said.
Guests have told her they are nervous to enter Newark because of the ordinance passed there. People are moving farther and farther out of the city limits, deeper into the woods, to avoid the possibility of being arrested.
Dingus said they “feel an extra added layer of desperation and hopelessness. Most of the folks who are coming here want to have a place to live – want to have housing.
“There’s no room at the other shelters,” she said, referring to the Salvation Army and St. Vincent de Paul shelters in Newark. “That’s why we’ve had three families with kids here. There’s no room.”
Alan Miller, Noah Fishman and Jack Shuler write for TheReportingProject.org, the nonprofit news organization of Denison University’s Journalism program, which is supported by generous donations from readers. Sign up for The Reporting Project newsletter here.