The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado is back in town with boots on the ground to survey the state of homelessness in Durango.
A small team of ACLU attorneys and staff visited the city this week to meet with homeless residents, talk to organizations that are assisting the homeless, and gather information about the city’s movements – or lack thereof – on establishing a managed camp or other resources for the unhoused.
The ACLU chided the city of Durango in a September letter for its lack of action to shelter unhoused residents amid the closure of Purple Cliffs, an unmanaged camp south of city limits. It did something similar in 2018 when the city closed a camp behind the Durango Tech Center. In 2014, the ACLU successfully pressured the city to stop enforcing a loitering ordinance after it argued the ordinance is unconstitutional.
Annie Kurtz, an ACLU attorney who visited Durango this week, said the city is vulnerable to a lawsuit because it is enforcing camping bans without providing alternate shelter or places to go.
“It’s essentially a directive to leave town,” she said. “That’s not legal.”
And shelters that do exist cannot accommodate the number of unhoused people in the Durango area, she said.
She said the ACLU doesn’t discuss lawsuits before they are filed in court.
Tom Sluis, city spokesman, said the city hasn’t received any notice of intent to file a lawsuit from the ACLU.
He said the city always checks the availability of shelters or places for the unhoused to go before it issues tickets to the homeless who are illegally camping. If there isn’t available space, the city doesn’t issue a ticket. But invariably, there is always a place for them to go, he said.
“We’ve never been at a point where the homeless have said, ‘Well, I’m getting a ticket and I got nowhere else to go,’” Sluis said. “Our response is, you’ve always got somewhere to go.”
Typically, homeless residents don’t want to take advantage of services available, he said.
“We’re trying to give them help, but they invariably just refuse it because they want to live their life,” he said. “And so it’s like, well, what are you supposed to do, from a city perspective?”
Kurtz said it is disingenuous to say there is always a bed or a space available.
“The shelter that is available in the city is extremely high-barrier and the city knows that,” she said. “If there’s a particular person who is being criminalized for sleeping outside, then the question that matters (is) whether there’s anywhere in Durango where that person could be inside.”
Sluis said Kurtz is correct that there is a high barrier to shelter. He said pets aren’t typically allowed in shelters, people have to be sober, and mental breakdowns or episodes that require police intervention aren’t tolerated.
“It’s reasonable for our partners to have rules and regulations as a condition of providing services to the homeless, but often these rules mean the homeless have to give up a little bit of their freedom and behave according to someone else’s expectations,” he said. “Most of the time, they don’t want to do that. They don’t want to be told what to do because they view themselves as a community where they take care of each other and want to live their life unencumbered.”
He said it’s a balancing act between respecting homeless residents’ rights and providing services and not letting disruptive behavior fly.
The ACLU filed a lawsuit against the city of Boulder for similar circumstances – lack of accessible shelters – in which the city was banning camping but also had inadequate shelter space where homeless residents could go, she said. The ACLU sent multiple letters to the city of Boulder warning officials they lacked satisfactory shelter space and had issues with barriers to access before filing a lawsuit.
Boulder used to have a six-month residency requirement in which shelter access was denied unless residents could prove they had lived in the city for at least six months. After receiving a letter from the ACLU, the city axed the residency requirement, she said.
“They were also relying on the narrative that they had empty beds at the shelter in order to justify the criminalization they were doing under their camping ban,” Kurtz said. “But, lo and behold, they removed this extremely restrictive barrier from their program. And then winter hit. And all of a sudden you saw they didn’t have any available beds.”
The number of beds available in Durango shelters is far outweighed by the number of people who need somewhere to go and who were displaced from Purple Cliffs, she said.
cburney@durangoherald.com
