Prince George program has city staff doing downtown cleanup
Credit to Author: Lynn Mitges| Date: Fri, 04 Oct 2019 04:39:15 +0000
Cleaning up the garbage left from the homeless in the downtown core starts every morning at 7 a.m.
For the last year and a half, it’s been a pilot project to improve downtown safety and cleanliness that sees a pair of bylaw compliance assistants doing the dirty work
The program is now a permanent part of the city’s bylaw services department.
The two men, clad in Kevlar vests and using Kevlar lined leather gloves, who do the job wish to stay anonymous for their own personal safety. Both are former correctional officers and they say the skills they learned as jail guards transfers nicely to their current positions.
Since January, they have removed more than 31,000 pounds of garbage, including many five-gallon buckets of used needles, from Prince George’s downtown.
“And that’s just what we’ve done,” says bylaw services manager Fred Crittenden. “Parks and solid wastes will also pick up stuff, especially when we go into the big camps that are in some of the parks and open spaces.”
Every morning, the bylaw services pair fill a half-ton pickup with an eight-foot box covered with a highboy canopy after rousing the homeless and moving them along, as they take care of what’s left over.
The regulars who sleep in front of or near the downtown businesses have gotten used to the routine and often will ask for garbage bags to clean up their area themselves.
“Since the program started we’ve dealt with 1,500 squatting or camp calls,” Crittenden says. “That includes anything from sleeping in a vestibule in front of a building or in one of the parkades, to a full-blown tent city that might be hidden away in one of our parks or open spaces. In addition to that there was another 345 calls specifically to just go pick up needles that are discarded by intravenous drug users.”
Those numbers represent about 35 per cent of the bylaw calls for service, Crittenden adds.
Part of a homeless camp behind Lombardy Trailer Park.
“I think it’s important that the community knows what kind of resources are being used and the kinds of things the city is doing that if they weren’t doing it, who would be doing it? It’s all about trying to maintain the community’s livability.”
The bylaw services team has an extra task on top of its regular downtown duties with a tent city beyond the Lombardy trailer park. It was first discovered two days earlier and those living there had put up fences and attempted to camouflage the area while using generators operating at full steam with televisions and heaters working in the tents.
Revisiting the site two days later, they saw it was down to about half of what it had been and that was good progress.
One of the bylaw assistants says tent cities are popping up in the outlying areas more often because of how effective the project has become that moves the homeless out of the downtown core every morning. The other stresses that there is misuse of some of the items donated to the non-profits that help the homeless.
“In no way are we trying to dissuade people from making donations or helping out these organizations because they do wonderful things,” Crittenden says. “But it’s like anything and sometimes it’s not like people think it is.”
“People deserve to know the big picture,” says one of the compliance assistants. “And it’s a frustrating one.”
There are many resources where people can get backpacks, blankets and clothing.
“In a sense these people don’t really appreciate what they have,” notes the same compliance assistant. “They take it for granted because they know that if it gets soiled, if it gets left behind, they can just go around the corner or to the next street and they’ll get a new blanket, because somebody is going to drop it off. They’ll get these blankets, this jacket, the extra clothing and they’ll sleep it in, maybe they’ll defecate around it and put it on the ground and maybe it gets wet, frozen and instead of valuing what they’ve been given they just get up and walk away from it. It’s too much work to dry it out, too much work to fold it up, too much work to clean. They’ll just go back and get brand new stuff or dry stuff. We are enabling in that way because they take for granted what they’ve been given because it’s always there.”
With the recent designation of the RCMP Downtown Safety Unit, the bylaw assistants work closely with those six officers.
“In the last three weeks – month – that they’ve started at 7 a.m. it’s made a huge difference. They value us and we value them. I remember the first day the supervisor asked ‘you have to deal with this every morning?’ – the back talk and the lip, and even he was kind of surprised so now they’re there to back us up if they get out of line and we’re there to take all the stuff they normally wouldn’t know what to do with – we text back and forth – we’re here, we’re there, and it’s a team effort and it works amazing.”
When the assistants first approach people, it’s a routine everyone understands.
“We show up and there’s somebody sleeping and they are in behind carboard and we ask ‘are you OK? Time to get up and start cleaning up after yourself’ and they slowly come to.”
“We are also first point of contact,” says the other bylaw compliance assistant.
“And we’re there to see if they’re even alive,” the first assistant notes. “It’s something that’s always in the back of your mind.”
So far, they’ve been lucky.