CORONAVIRUS (COVID-19) RESOURCE CENTER Read More
Add To Favorites

How Olympia's plans for an RV safe lot fell apart

Olympian - 3/28/2021

Mar. 28—Six months after a planned sweep of an RV settlement along Ensign Road was called off at the last minute, Thurston County is no closer to finding a home for more than 130 vehicle residents, and plans to create a safe parking lot for RVs have been shelved.

The joint city-county plan to address vehicle residency has morphed significantly since the Board of County Commissioners approved a one-time grant of $530,000 to the city of Olympia last October, largely to deal with the Ensign Road site.

It has changed so much, in fact, that the new plan, which county staff are calling "scattered-site management," was unrecognizable to the board in a briefing last Tuesday.

"This is a completely different program than what we've talked about or contemplated," said Commissioner Tye Menser of the proposal presented Tuesday.

The new "scattered-site" idea, which was developed by the Regional Housing Council over the past several months, would fund dedicated case managers assigned to three sites: tent encampments at Deschutes Parkway and Wheeler Road, and the Ensign Road RV settlement.

It also would pay for sanitation efforts such as regular garbage collection, RV septic pump-outs, portable toilets, hand washing stations, and keeping streets clear. The case manager would work with residents to get them into Coordinated Entry (the county-wide system that sorts people for housing assistance based on their level of need), obtain identification cards, and work with residents to create codes of conduct and self-governance mechanisms.

What it wouldn't do: create a place where the dozens of vehicle residents parked along Ensign Road could legally park their RVs.

"When the commissioners authorized $530,000 for an RV site, that was to deal with RVs and getting them off of Ensign Road and Deschutes Parkway, because we all agreed those were terrible locations for the RVs," Menser said on Tuesday. "Those are the two goals: get the RVs somewhere out of a really bad location. This doesn't do that."

According to Keylee Marineau, the county's Homeless Response Coordinator, the plan would meet two other goals: getting people into the services pipeline and alleviating community concerns around RVs dumping waste, as well as trash and debris piling up and general disorder around tent encampments. Last October, the city said that RV residents on Ensign were dumping sewage into the nearby wetlands.

The total price of the new approach would be similar to the county's original allocation of $530,000 for six months, but the proposal brought before the board on Tuesday figured on a year-long pilot period that would cost as much as $1 million.

What else the plan wouldn't do, according to the staff proposal: significantly reduce the number of people in tent encampments or RV settlements, or get a large number of those people permanently housed.

All three commissioners appeared displeased with the turn the plan has taken, each for different reasons.

Commissioner Gary Edwards, who voted against providing the $530,000 in October, said the public should have input before a plan is agreed upon. He also expressed familiar desires to condition services on mandated drug treatment or other more stringent law enforcement measures.

Commissioner Carolina Mejia called the plan a "band-aid," saying she would prefer "something more long term put in place."

Menser's concern was simple: the plan didn't address the original problem of having an RV settlement next to Providence St. Peter Hospital, where the city of Olympia and Providence don't want it.

"I assumed that [the "scattered-site" pivot] was RVs in one consolidated site to RVs in two or three different sites," Menser said. "It sounds like what we're talking about is dealing with all of the camps, not just the RVs, and secondly, we're not talking about moving them anywhere, we're talking about basically institutionalizing the bad location that the whole authorization for doing something was designed to address."

Menser added that he was open to the scattered-site plan, but that the board needed time to ponder such a radical departure from what was initially approved.

"It may be the right thing to do, but I agree with Commissioner Edwards, we have not seen this, this is completely different from what we authorized funding for, and frankly I don't think we should be held to any funding decision that we made because this is not what we agreed to fund last fall," Menser said.

How a safe lot became 'scattered site' support

The roots of the county's new "scattered-site" proposal lie in an escalating standoff between the city of Olympia and RV residents parked near Providence St. Peter Hospital last year.

The most recent Point-in-Time count located 128 people living in vehicles or RVs in Thurston County, but given the limitations of the count's methodology and the fact that large swaths of the county were not surveyed, that number is almost certainly an undercount.

Last October, between 40-50 RV residents were parked along a stretch of Ensign Road that had previously served as an access road for ambulances. The growing RV settlement prompted emergency responders to reroute to Lilly Road, the city said, adding several sometimes-critical minutes to each trip.

At the time, city officials cited ambulance access, as well as a litany of other challenges — sewage dumping, the proximity to a "Class 1" state-designated sensitive wetland, and the need to be able to land a helicopter in the field adjacent to the RVs in the event of a natural disaster — as reasons why all the vehicles needed to be gone by the end of October.

That ultimatum was scuttled after the state Attorney General's Office sent a letter to the city advising that removing the vehicles could be a violation of Gov. Inslee's eviction moratorium, and the city called off the sweep.

Instead, city staff offered incentives such as car batteries and free gas for those who left voluntarily. Some did leave, though in several cases they relocated just a few blocks away or moved to other areas within Olympia, such as East Bay Drive.

As the situation escalated, the Board of County Commissioners took what Menser described as a major step in the county's homeless response, voting 2-1 to give Olympia$530,000 to create a "safe lot" where RV residents could park their vehicles for extended periods of time — though not permanently, city officials were quick to point out.

The question of how permanent this program was meant to be has dogged the planning process from the outset.

Assistant City Manager Keith Stahley told the Regional Housing Council in December that he envisioned the safe lot as a "short term" project for a number of reasons. One was that the identified site — a gravel lot off Martin Way and Carpenter Road in Lacey's urban growth area — is meant to be home to a city of Olympia solid waste facility in the next three years.

As preparations were made and the project became more real, so did the costs, which included fencing, grading to make the lot level, port-a-potties, rigging electricity for lighting, and 24/7 management through Catholic Community Services, the organization that runs Olympia's downtown mitigation site.

The total costs were estimated at over $700,000, including $100,000 for site improvements, for a one-year program that could serve a maximum of 30 vehicles.

"When we got into the details, it just wasn't going to work," Stahley told The Olympian.

So Stahley and county staff ditched that approach and pivoted to a new idea, to provide "scattered site" support to RVs on Ensign and several encampments.

Only one member of the Regional Housing Council (RHC) commented on the change of direction at a meeting in January.

"That's kind of a tough choice to make, especially because this is the second time we've sorta looked at this general area," said Michael Althauser, a Tumwater City Council member who serves on the RHC, likely referring to a sanctioned tent camping site that was proposed for an adjacent gravel lot. That plan was scrapped in October 2019, after cost estimates rose to over $1 million.

At the time, several Lacey City Council members voiced opposition to the project, as did some Lacey residents who showed up to a public hearing about the plan in May 2019.

"It's kind of disappointing because we want to make sure that we can try to get these services out and get them out quickly and we've had two plans that felt pretty good and that the numbers just weren't there and just didn't work out," Althauser said.

Despite his disappointment, Althauser said he thinks the scattered-site proposal could still be effective, adding that he believes case management is critical to getting people housed.

Both Marineau and Stahley said that a primary reason that the safe lot idea was tabled was because they couldn't find a site. According to Stahley, the county's Geographic Information Systems (GIS) team assembled a list of more than 200 possible sites, but none were viable within a short timeframe.

"We're continuing to evaluate other properties, but there are none that are immediately available, owned by the city or the county, that are easily transferable into a safe parking situation," Stahley said. "And of course buying a piece of property is generally not a speedy or inexpensive route to meeting this objective either."

Marineau said that the Carpenter Road property was the only viable property, in large part because Olympia and Thurston County are the only jurisdictions willing to host an RV safe parking site. So once the Carpenter site was jettisoned, the RV safe lot plan went with it.

"If we were to wait to find a property to accommodate this program as it was originally intended, it could take a year or more just to get the political will and the public will up to speed on that actually happening in that location," Marineau said. "So in lieu of that, this is what we came up with."

At the Tuesday briefing, Housing Program Manager Tom Webster said that finding a long-term safe parking site is still a priority for the county.

The future of Ensign Road

Stahley noted that while Ensign Road is still a "challenging location" for an RV settlement, the city is powerless to move them because of the governor's eviction moratorium, which was recently extended through June 30.

"With the guidance that the state Attorney General provided us, we are going to need to continue to provide services to that area," Stahley said. "And that's what the proposal does."

Stahley did not say what will happen to the RVs on Ensign Road after the eviction moratorium ends, but the proposal identifies Ensign Road as a location for services over a year-long timeframe, and forcing the RVs out without an alternative location would appear to be counterproductive to the program's primary stated goal to "assist those living in vehicles or encampments to successfully move into permanent housing solutions using trauma-informed and harm-reduction principles."

Part of the proposal includes the LOTT (which stands for Lacey Olympia Tumwater Thurston County) Clean Water Alliance sending a vehicle out to Ensign Road to pump out RV septic tanks, similar to a program that exists in Seattle. LOTT also offers RV dumping at its downtown Olympia location that is free to use, Stahley said.

The Board of County Commissioners, which ultimately has to approve funding for the scattered-site proposal, plans to reconsider it in two weeks.

___

(c)2021 The Olympian (Olympia, Wash.)

Visit The Olympian (Olympia, Wash.) at www.theolympian.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.