Grants Pass’ new mayor and councilors scaled back housing efforts as most residents can’t afford rent

Update: Grants Pass won’t enforce its new camping ban policy until at least Jan. 24. Read more here.

About a week after attempting to hold a meeting before they were sworn in, Grants Pass, Oregon’s newly elected mayor and councilors reversed course on the city’s campsite program and grants that would have led to the creation of the city’s first low-barrier shelter.

On Tuesday, the council scaled back the campsite program to one overnight campground and canceled two grants to homeless services provider Mobile Integrative Navigation Team (MINT) during a lengthy meeting held with 24-hour notice at 3 p.m., preventing people who were working or in class from attending. Councilors also reallocated $1.2 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding from a pool renovation project to equipment for the police and fire departments.

The meeting drew high turnout, with council chambers at capacity and residents listening to the meeting in an overflow area. But several community members and Councilor Rob Pell expressed concerns that holding the meeting with such short notice didn’t allow the public to fully weigh in on the slew of policy changes.

Pell argued that although the council technically followed Oregon’s public meetings law by posting the agenda online 24 hours before the meeting, many residents would have learned about it just three hours earlier if they find out about public meetings from the Daily Courier, which publishes at noon.

“To me, the intent of the law wasn’t even close to being followed for everything that’s on the agenda today,” Pell said. “There are reasons to have special or emergency meetings. There’s nothing on this agenda that had to be acted on in three hours—nothing.”

The council opted to cancel the grants, pare down the campsite program and shut down three advisory boards, including the Housing Advisory Committee, on 5-2 votes, with Pell and Councilor Rick Riker opposed and Councilor and state Rep. Dwayne Yunker voting with the four new councilors. (Councilor Joel King was absent.)

After Yunker’s votes helped ensure the measures passed, he resigned from the council to focus on the state legislative session, with his council seat listed as vacant on the city’s website as of Thursday.

The council banned camping during the day despite concerns from residents, who worried the plan would leave unsheltered people with nowhere to go, and Interim City Attorney Mark Bartholomew, who said he hadn’t had time to review the proposed changes to ensure they would meet requirements in the state’s law restricting camping bans and sweeps.

“I would not be comfortable with any changes made tonight, and that’s just strictly from a risk management perspective,” Bartholomew said.

Council cancels MINT grants as most Grants Pass renters can’t afford housing costs

During a Dec. 4 meeting, councilors approved two grant agreements with MINT that would have provided the nonprofit with up to $660,000 to buy two properties—218 and 220 Redwood Highway—where the nonprofit planned to start a low-barrier shelter, campsite and provide 20 pallet shelters.

Mayor Clint Scherf and Councilors Victoria Marshall and Indra Nicholas, who voters elected in November but wouldn’t take office for more than a month, spoke in opposition to the grants during public comment at the December meeting.

“I believe you guys are doing this in haste,” Scherf said. “You can read into that what you want, but you need to step back and ask more questions.”

[ Read more: Why some employers are building their own workforce housing ]

According to the council’s resolution canceling the grants on Tuesday, the decision was based on inspections of buildings on the property, which found exposed wires, a waste line problem and mold.

MINT Executive Director Cassy Leach said during the December meeting that the nonprofit had about $200,000 to invest in improvements for the buildings.

During Tuesday’s council meeting, Leah Swanson, chief operations officer of MINT, said the nonprofit has been making repairs at the buildings, adding, “The city and fire inspectors have returned to our buildings several times now and the work has been approved.”

In the background of the canceled grant agreement are rents that keep outpacing sluggish income growth. Most renters in Grants Pass are cost-burdened, spending 30% or more of their income on housing costs. In 2023, 59% of Grants Pass renters were cost-burdened or severely cost-burdened, spending half or more of their income on housing, according to the most recent data from the US Census Bureau.

Cost-burdened renters spend less on food, healthcare and other expenses and are less prepared for financial emergencies.

“It makes people more vulnerable to homelessness because it diminishes the potential savings a renter or even just a homeowner can build to have on hand for emergencies,” Amber Neeck, housing and neighborhood specialist for the city, said during a December public forum on housing costs in Grants Pass. “When those emergencies hit, all of your bills get pushed behind, and you fall into this negative cycle.”

Grants Pass is banning daytime camping with no plans to give unsheltered residents another place to go

After winning the most influential Supreme Court case on homelessness in decades last summer, Grants Pass restricted camping to two city-owned campsites.

[ Read more: In Steamboat Springs, Colorado, where rent’s twice the national average, voters rejected an affordable housing development ]

A dirt-and-gravel lot in an industrial neighborhood and the future site of a water treatment plant, 755 SE J St. has been the main campsite since the campsites opened in August. In October, councilors voted to replace the city’s second campsite on 704 NW Sixth St. with a lot next to the police department, which is about half the size. 

Unsheltered people and service providers said at the time that the lot wasn’t large enough to hold everyone staying at the J Street site.

“There’s like 90 some-odd tents at J Street right now,” Rayne Bird, who works with MINT, said in early October. “Just half that would fill the Seventh Street site. So there’s not enough room.”

Last year, the city received at least two letters warning that a requirement for people to move every seven days from one camp to the other put the city at risk of a lawsuit under the Americans with Disabilities Act, according to reporting from Streetlight and Portland street paper Street Roots.

Darren Starnes, who is disabled, said in October he had received two citations while staying at the J Street site because he refused to move to the other campground.

“I’ve been pretty fortunate,” he said last year. “I haven’t been messed with by people, been threatened or had anything stolen from me, but other people, it’s an everyday battle. They’re constantly getting into fights with each other, stealing from each other, and now they want to just shove us all together where you don’t even have a choice as to who you’re around.”

Service providers have said moving from one campsite to another was time-consuming and posed a barrier to getting housing.

“If people are trying to get jobs and need to have somewhere stable to be,” Bird said in October, “it’s going to be darn near impossible if they’re constantly moving every week.”

[ Read more: Renters insurance doesn’t cover floods, surprising some tenants during climate disasters ] 

When the J Street camp closes, people staying at the Seventh Street lot will essentially have to move every day with the new requirement to leave each morning by 7 a.m.

Donna Wall is executive director of Dove Ministries, which provides drug and alcohol counseling at the campsites.

“Where will they go?” she asked during Tuesday’s meeting. “Stability is an essential need for someone who is experiencing homelessness. Don’t shut (the J Street campsite) down without a clear plan of where they are going to go.”

Julie Thomas, president of Partners Assisting the Homeless of Josephine County, echoed her concerns: “Barring a more viable alternative, there is no good that can come from scattering people throughout our parks and community spaces again, particularly now that many are actually receiving case management that they couldn’t before when they were out at our parks and moving all the time.”

Scherf and new councilors tried to call a meeting before their terms officially began

Scherf, who didn’t respond to an interview request, and incoming councilors attempted to call a meeting on Friday, Jan. 3—three days before their swear-in date on the following Monday. City Manager Aaron Cubic and Bartholomew told the elected officials they couldn’t legally hold the meeting, the Daily Courier reported, but the meeting made it through at least part of the scheduling pipeline, as Vanessa Ogier, who lost her council seat to Kathleen Krohn in November, said she received a notice for the meeting on Dec. 30.

A Dec. 31 email from Cubic to Scherf and councilors said the earliest they could hold the meeting would be Tuesday, allowing for the required 24-hour notice after the mayor and four councilors were sworn in.

On their second day in office, the council unraveled housing initiatives that had been years in the making, as well as a pool renovation project, the federal funding for which councilors redirected to radio and video surveillance equipment for the police and fire departments. 

“I certainly expected those type of priorities—dismantling, destructing, undoing—but I didn’t expect it with emergency expediency,” Ogier said. 

[ Read more of our housing coverage ]

Pell said during the meeting that on Monday he’d sent Scherf and the council two emails saying that he wouldn’t be able to attend the meeting after 4:15 p.m. due to a work obligation, but he opted to pay an employee overtime to stay for the whole thing.

“That didn’t have to happen,” Pell said. “This could have been done next week when the general public would have had enough time to think about it, talk amongst themselves and weigh in to council.”

Members of advisory committees getting the ax asked the council to consider the value of community engagement, expertise

On Tuesday, councilors shut down three advisory committees: the Housing Advisory Committee, Sustainability and Energy Action Committee, and the Collaborative Economic Development Committee, which included members from Josephine County and nearby Cave Junction.

Councilors who voted to sunset the committees seemed to question their use of city staff time and effectiveness. Yunker suggested the council examine all the city’s advisory committees and “push back on the CEDC a little bit more.”

“I see businesses leaving. I don’t see them coming,” he said, citing coffee chain Dutch Bros moving 40% of its corporate staff from Grants Pass to Arizona.

About 10 committee members asked councilors to keep the boards alive, citing their benefits as a resource for the council.

Kimberly Loe, accountant for the Josephine Housing and Community Development Council, said the Housing Advisory Committee had been instrumental in helping develop housing for low and middle-income workers in Grants Pass, which the city estimates has a housing shortage of about 5,000 units.

“Many families who are working in this community have three generations living in one home in order to afford to live in that one unit,” Loe said. “It takes at least three full-time workers at minimum wage to afford housing.”

[ Read more: Lack of shelter beds emerges as key issue in Supreme Court camping ban case ]

Several members of the committees on the chopping block said the groups help the council and city staff connect quickly with stakeholders and save time on research that committee members can do.

“You’re looking at, where can we save money? Where can we support public safety? I totally get that,” said Brad Converse, a member of the economic development committee and interim CEO of Grants Pass YMCA. “But also consider the value of having that many experts in a room. … I would love to hear some discussion around why we are getting rid of committees at an emergency meeting. What I would hope to see is that you would table this and give the committees a chance.”

Pell asked councilors what benefit they’d get from shutting down the committees.

“It would be to save a couple hours a month of staff time?” he said. “Is that the big advantage? Why is it that we’re doing this?”

“I think we’ve heard some of that already,” Krohn said.

The council posted another meeting notice on Wednesday, announcing a dinner with councilors and the city’s executive team on Friday night at The Haul. The notice says the dinner is a “team building experience,” adding: “City business will not be conducted during this event.”

Contact Streetlight editor Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@streetlightnews.org. Follow her reporting by joining our newsletter.

Streetlight is a nonprofit news site based in Oklahoma City. Our mission is to report stories that envision a more equitable world and energize our readers to improve their communities. Donate to support our work here.