NWH Director, Anton Preisinger, composed the following letter and sent it out to dozens of recipients to argue against the sweep planned against residents at Veterans Memorial Park on April 29, 2022.

Northwest Hospitality is sharing the following information and data to support the position that Kitsap County has not met its responsibilities nor fulfilled the requirements outlined in its own Response Policy to justify following through with the planned sweep of Veterans Memorial Park in Port Orchard, WA on April 29, 2022. The response to the encampment at Veterans Memorial Park since the installment of the new HEART (Homeless Encampment Action Response Team) Coordinator has not been consistent with past responses to unauthorized encampments in Kitsap county; coordination between agencies has been lacking as people in the park have not been able to access the resources that should have been made available to them; and following through with a sweep after the inadequate efforts to date would not be at all compassionate as most of our neighbors have shared plans to relocate to new encampments rather than housing prospects. Thus, the benchmarks of a “consistent, coordinated, and compassionate response” as outlined in the County’s Unauthorized Encampment Response Policy on County Property, Resolution 215-2021 have not been met, and the plan to evict the residents from Veterans Memorial Park should be canceled and reconsidered from the ground up.

According to clause 7.2 of the Kitsap County Unauthorized Encampment Response Policy on County Property, “The primary goal of the Encampment Response Plan is to identify appropriate housing and social services options available to the residents of the unauthorized encampment and help the residents connect with and receive these housing and services.” Northwest Hospitality feels very strongly that our experience and the evidence shared below clearly demonstrate that this primary goal has not been accomplished, and therefore, the planned sweep should be postponed or canceled until the residents can actually be connected with and allowed to receive the housing and services that they need and deserve. Northwest Hospitality volunteers have no doubt that the key aspects of the county’s primary goal, highlighted in italics above, have not been offered to a reasonable degree - there has not been time or staffing and the resources that could be counted as appropriate are not available. Putting a person on a housing waitlist does not qualify as providing appropriate resources.

Northwest Hospitality proposes a more appropriate Response Plan, based on how things currently stand at Veterans Memorial Park. Allow the residents to remain in place while the county and service providers continue to offer the “health/safety measures” detailed as options in the Response Plan’s description of its secondary goal, which have already been established on the site and have been shown to be successfully addressing the health and safety concerns, most notably trash accumulation and human waste, raised by the City of Port Orchard and Parks Department. Allowing the residents to stay in place and continuing to connect them with appropriate resources - an option allowed by the Response Plan as it was ratified by the commissioners under the secondary goal defined in clause 7.2 -  is the best chance any of the park residents have at finding the support they deserve and it’s the only chance the county has to conduct a successful response to this encampment based on the definitions provided by the Response Policy.

Pursuant to clause 7.3 of Kitsap County’s Unauthorized Encampment Response Policy on County Property, it cannot be said that the outreach conducted to date has been compassionate. Through no fault of outreach staff who have made a valiant effort with completely inadequate resources, the people residing in Veterans Memorial Park do not feel compassionately treated and have not had the opportunity to follow through with caseworkers or find better accommodation. People have been assisted to complete housing applications that put them back on waitlists that many have already been on for years. People have been told to enroll in drug and alcohol treatment programs that they have been through before and do not end in housing opportunities. People have been told they’d be given a hotel voucher one week and at subsequent meetings been told simply to go to Salvation Army with no thought given to the beloved dog that prohibits entry. For an entire week of the month during which the eviction notice was posted the outreach team was unable to respond to phone calls because, as a newly-formed team, they were consumed with meetings. There are several people in the park who still have not received a response to numerous phone calls to the number posted for people to find “shelter, housing, or other social services.” Vacate notices were posted less than one month prior to the date of the scheduled sweep, and service providers have not been able to be out at the park often enough to meet the needs of the 20-25 people who have been calling the park home. This does not comprise a compassionate outreach response.

Clause 7.4 of Kitsap County’s Unauthorized Encampment Response Policy on County Property states that “The Response Plan should consider a full range of options in a stepwise, progressive fashion. Closing an encampment is generally undertaken after earlier interventions have been tried.” The HEART Team, having been formed immediately after its inaugural Coordinator was hired in March, 2022, has had no opportunity to progress to the decision of closing the encampment at Veterans Memorial Park. By committing blindly to this foresworn action, the HEART team is violating its own mandate and the very document that called them into existence. The idea of closing the encampment at Veterans Memorial Park was foisted upon the HEART Team before they’d even officially begun. One of the HEART Coordinator's very first official actions seems to have been to post the notice to vacate on April 6. The HEART Team must be allowed to attempt other solutions to the problems associated with the encampment at Veterans Memorial Park. Only when more reasonable and realistic measures have been attempted, if they are shown to be unsuccessful, should the closure of this encampment be considered.

Choosing to proceed with the eviction and sweep at this point in time would set a precedent clearly indicating that the true primary goal of the Response Policy is to enforce strict measures to make certain that people can be moved from their homes without providing appropriate alternatives. This action is not only in direct contradiction with the stated goals of Kitsap County’s Unauthorized Encampment Response Policy on County Property, but also defies the law which does not equivocate to the fact that it is not illegal to be homeless.

During the past two weekends of outreach (4/16/2022 and 4/23/2022), Northwest Hospitality volunteers have conducted surveys of the people in Veterans Memorial Park to determine what kinds of resources they have been offered, how well those resources meet the needs of the people there, and how prepared people feel for the impending sweep. The results clearly show that people have not been provided adequate opportunities to access housing or shelter resources in preparation for the eviction planned for April 29. They do not understand what to expect as they are asked to move, what will be done with their belongings, or how to access the resources that they have been told to expect. The figure below shows a summary of the responses to one of the questions asked in our survey, “How satisfied are you with the effort being made to get you the support and services that you personally need?” on a scale from zero to ten. The data is skewed by responses from a couple of individuals who feel that they don’t need anything because they don’t feel like they will be getting housing anyway so they are easy to satisfy. However, we have included all of the responses received for transparency.

Attached, please find the full survey responses, including several additional questions, from each anonymized individual.

We have already seen the following impacts from the decision to sweep the Veterans Memorial Park encampment:

1. People are scared and confused. They don’t know what to expect. They do not have faith that they will be taken care of or that their needs will be understood, let alone met. People do not have plans for after the sweep. Most say that they will “wing it” when they’re asked to move, which is traumatizing and not an effective or compassionate way to serve vulnerable people.

2. 4+ camps were abandoned in response to the sweep announcement, with the residents moving on to set up camps elsewhere before services even began to be offered. These people have now been disconnected from the social services they were receiving through contacts at the park, they left significant amounts of belongings and trash behind, and will already be damaging a new part of our environment and contributing to new health and safety concerns wherever they have decided to establish themselves because we can’t provide the same kind of mitigation that we had been providing at Veterans Memorial Park as people scatter into Port Orchard and throughout Kitsap County.

3. When the notices were posted at the park, Northwest Hospitality ceased our weekly efforts to fill the dumpsters on park property. We do not condone or support any sweep efforts and committing our volunteers to pick up litter where people are actively being forced to move is against our mission. Images are attached which show how effective our trash services had been at Veterans Park. As soon as we stopped providing these services, the trash began to pile back up again.

4. As people plan on moving and attempt to clean up their areas, they are relying on the best solutions available to them. Now, this means that a vast majority of the trash they’re working to get rid of before they’re forced to move is being burned in dangerous, open firepits throughout the park. When volunteers were onsite on 4/23/22 there was one large fire being fed by old shoes and clothes as well as parts of the building materials people had used to create their encampments. These are all hazards to the people and damaging to the environment. All of this could have been avoided with more time and compassion prior to asking people to move and actually providing them with the solutions and services they need to be successful moving forward.

Following through with the sweep planned for April 29, 2022, would be a devastating mistake with consequences echoing destructively throughout all of Kitsap County. The benefits of this sweep will be almost imperceptible, while the damage to our ability to serve vulnerable people efficiently and effectively - our only hope of ensuring homeless experiences are rare, brief, and one-time - will haunt our county for years. On the other hand, taking the time to revise the current plan with thoughtful consideration given to the goals and procedures as specified in the Unauthorized Encampment Response Policy on County Property, may well lay the groundwork for a very successful regional encampment response strategy. Northwest Hospitality encourages the County to adhere to the Response Policy instead of skipping to the final steps so we can show that a coordinated, compassionate social service effort can be successful. Our communities will be stronger, our neighbors will be better served, and Kitsap County could lead the improvement in encampment response throughout all of western Washington.