MORGANTOWN — Social media posts showing city employees removing a homeless camp below the South High Street Bridge on Tuesday resulted in some impassioned, if unplanned, discussion during Morgantown City Council’s regular meeting later that evening.
About a half dozen members of the community, and one member of city council, called the city out on the decision to seize the personal items, including tents, blankets and sleeping bags.
“It’s 35 degrees tonight and raining. It’s going to be 32 degrees tomorrow,” Liira Raines said, recalling the city of Charleston’s removal of a tent city along in the Elk River in January 2016 that resulted in a lawsuit settlement that included, among other financial and policy considerations, $20,000 for property lost in the raid.
Mollie Kennedy, the community outreach director for the ACLU of West Virginia, snapped the photos and later shared them on Facebook.
Kennedy said all West Virginians, regardless of housing status, should be treated with dignity.
“I don’t think the morality of what we’ve done here is particularly debatable,” Kennedy said. “A gentlemen I spoke with asked me ‘How does anyone expect us to recover,’ and I think that’s a fair question.”
Kennedy said the dismantling of tent cities infringes on the Constitutional rights of free speech and the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, as well as potentially constituting cruel and unusual punishment.
“It constitutes a criminalization of homelessness itself,” she said, explaining tent city residents are entitled to the same or similar due process as someone being evicted from a property.
Rayna Momen explained that she was formerly homeless and considers the city’s actions no better than stealing, “a crime, if you will.”
“If you’ve never slept on a rooftop, in a car, on a park bench, especially in the dead of winter, bundled in too few clothes, struggling to feel your extremities and freezing no matter how much you move or how many things you try to bury yourself under … then you have little business making decisions about what to do with people who are homeless,” Momen said, concluding “There’s no place like home, and when we all do better, we’ll all do better.”
Councilor Zack Cruze said he’d spent much of the day upset over the posts.
Cruze spoke about how he slowly lost all his possessions as a young man living homeless.
“What’s the difference from me then to me now, where now my belongings matter,” Cruze asked, his voice shaking.
“I’d like a report. I want to know why these camps were torn down when it’s going to freeze tonight. I’d like to know what our policy is on this.”
A number of councilors said they were not aware of the situation until the public comments were shared.
As a board member of the Mon River Trails Conversancy, Councilor Dave Harshbarger said encampments along the trail, like the one removed Tuesday, are a reoccurring problem that have been going on for years.
“It’s a safety issue for the trail users as well as the people who are out this time of year in this weather,” Harshbarger said. “It is the symptom of a larger problem, but I think letting it persist is also not the answer.”
Mayor Bill Kawecki agreed the problem isn’t new and said the Morgantown Police have always been “tolerant and charitable,” in the way they’ve handled such encampments.
“They’ve not gone in and simply acted like commandos and ripped everything out. They’ve gone in first and warned them that they were trespassing and they needed to gather their things and move on,” Kawecki said, adding that the root of the problem is systemic and leaves cities with options that amount to “triage.”
“It’s a matter of human dignity and it’s a matter of trying to find a balance,” Kawecki said. “And we are trying.”
According to information provided to The Dominion Post, people in the dismantled camp were warned that they needed to move starting about a month ago and as recently as Monday.
BOPARC maintains the portions of the rail trail that run through the city.
According to city code 941.05 (c) under Parks and Recreation Facilities, “No person shall establish or maintain any camp or other temporary lodging or sleeping place within the park without the written consent of the Manager.”
