Report up for review during Aug. 5 City Council study session

By Morgan Rothborne, Ashland.news

A master plan tailor-made to guide the city of Ashland’s approach to homelessness was unanimously approved Thursday evening by the final committee standing between the plan and a review from Ashland City Council. 

“We did not have a comprehensive strategy for dealing with homelessness. It’s a huge challenge everywhere. The city has a challenge to figure out what we can and cannot do, and that’s what this document ultimately will be for, those decisions,” said Echo Fields, chair of both the Homeless Services Master Plan Subcommittee and the Housing & Human Services Advisory Committee. 

The subcommittee began work on a plan assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the city of Ashland’s homelessness landscape at the direction of council in January, she said. The full 180 page report is intimidating when printed, said Jan Calvin, one of the architects of the report. Would-be readers should take heart; some of the size is due to the many graphics and charts included to render a forest of data navigable. 

“What you’ll see in this report is data based and data driven. It goes beyond opinion and emotion and feeling to as good of data as we can get,” Fields said. 

Data surrounding homelessness is often characterized as “Swiss cheese,” Fields said. Some data is not accessible due to failures of databases while other forms of data, “just doesn’t exist.” Some data is also potentially misleading without context. By the numbers, it would appear Jackson County has a faster growing homeless population than the rest of the state, but the Almeda Fire is a contributing factor. Eviction cases that go to court in this county also lead to eviction more often than the rest of the state, Calvin said. 

To fill in gaps and create data specific to Ashland, the subcommittee conducted surveys of entirely open response questions directed at four groups: homeless people, business owners, frontline workers and the general public of Ashland.

The surveys were compiled alongside data from regional, state and federal sources. Organized into four main chapters concluding in bulleted “takeaways” sections, the report includes a glossary explaining myriad acronyms frequently used in housing and human services. Also in the appendices is the full content of all survey questions and answers.

Fields warned some of the comments are “spicy,” particularly from the 282 respondents in the general public survey. A couple had to be redacted due to the threatening tone of sentiments directed at city employees. There was also a discernable “sense that south Ashland is the red-headed stepchild,” she said. 

Councilor Dylan Bloom asked if this was a sense, or a fact? Fields responded that, as a good social scientist, she would make cautious statements. 

Business owners — the majority from the south side of Ashland — aligned with homeless people in highlighting fundamental unmet needs. 

“Things that are attributed to people who are homeless and can’t take care of their own trash, there isn’t a ready place. There’s not enough access to bathrooms so we have consequences of that. … It’s ‘what are the services that can help these people that must need help because what we see is disturbing,’” Calvin said. 

Deb Price, a subcommittee member who conducted many of the business owner interviews, underlined a plea to better support law enforcement. Some said they wanted to see “kind hands” or skilled social workers that could respond with police officers. 

“When a law enforcement officer rolls up, if he does everything he can, then he needs to be able to call someone who has the special skills and that party needs to be able to transport the person to a place where they can be cared for,” she said. 

Homeless people highlighted a lack of bathrooms and a desire for help with other basic needs such as the ability to charge devices and have access to transportation, Calvin said. Without a charged phone or other device, accessing services is almost impossible. 

Services offered in Ashland are scant; most agencies operate elsewhere in the region. The most robust service in town is free meals, Fields said. Frontline workers and those managing programs offering services hoped for a change in the current financial landscape. Government bodies offer the most funding overall, but that funding goes to “a couple of key players,” leaving many organizations to operate almost exclusively on donations. 

“Coordinations, collaboration, communication comes up constantly in this data and it comes up constantly in every conversation we have in this committee as a whole about affordable housing strategies,” she said. 

Ultimately, how the city chooses to leverage the information the report provides depends on how it wants to respond to homelessness. 

“The actions you choose or recommend are based on your objective. … These are some possible objectives for city council to consider. If you want to triage and manage homelessness. … verses if you want to maximize resources, there’s different actions to do that,” Calvin said. 

Any action taken from potential actions outlined in the report would be better than the current situation, she said. 

At the close of the meeting, the committee voted unanimously to approve the report. A review of the master plan is scheduled for the Aug. 5 council study session. 

Email Ashland.news reporter Morgan Rothborne at [email protected].

July 27: Link to full report updated, second link added in pull-out box.