OUR VIEW: Taxpayers may pay homeless motel bills (vote in poll)

To continue keeping the homeless in motel rooms, the executive director of Homeward Pikes Peak wants $50,000 in taxpayer revenues from the city and $50,000 from the county. He hopes the $100,000 will pay the bill for three more months. In recent months, the homeless have lived in motel rooms with a generous $100,000 private grant from the El Pomar Foundation.

Public money for motel rooms will thrill taxpayers who have been told that their hard-earned tax dollars aren’t enough to keep streetlights on or trash cans in parks.

But taxpayers and their elected servants may have little choice when it comes to motel room for the poor. If city leaders want to enforce their new camping ban, and they want to impede a private campground for the homeless, they might have to pay motel bills for the foreseeable future. It’s the least they can do.

The city’s camping ban cannot be enforced if the city cannot ensure shelter for each homeless camper. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2006 to uphold the rights of individuals to sit, lie and sleep in public. The court struck down the Los Angeles camping ban because the number of homeless campers exceeded the beds available for them, and the homeless have a right to sleep.

It makes common sense that courts won’t allow government officials to remove people who are sleeping on public property — land owned by all human beings — if they aren’t willing to accommodate them. We can’t outlaw the right of one class to live life, which includes sleeping.

The El Pomar grant has been used to house three people to a room, mostly at the Express Inn, with each room costing an average of $792 a month. Robert Holmes, executive director of Homeward Pikes Peak, said 74 people who were camping have obtained jobs and are on their way to independence. An additional 96 have been put on buses and sent away, purportedly to relatives.

Holmes believes the city was home to about 550 campers before the camping ban. He believes about one-third are the chronic homeless, who may never be reformed.

That sounds a bit like an optimistic view. But using only the Holmes estimate, the city will remain home to something like 200 chronically homeless individuals who will refuse to take advantage of opportunities to clean up, dry out and lead more conventional lives.

The chronically homeless will always want to live free. They won’t obey the sobriety and treatment requirements of most homeless shelters — that’s why they’re chronically homeless. Some of us may not like it, but they have rights that are upheld by law.

(Please vote in poll to the right, in red type. Must vote to see results. Thanks!)

What the chronically homeless need is a place to camp. To fill that need, a private-sector solution emerged right after the camping ban became law. Developer Paul Koscielski announced plans to reopen a KOA campground on South Nevada, where the homeless would pay nominal rent for RVs or could choose to camp for free. Plans included electricity, running water and waste management.

Holmes — along with city and regional planners and some South Nevada businesses — opposed the camp. Facing no support and ample opposition, Koscielski scrapped the idea.

“I just didn’t see it as realistic,” Holmes said, explaining his opposition.

Some concerns were legitimate, but an enthusiastic spirit of cooperation could have resolved them. Perhaps nothing will resolve the apoplectic reactions some people have to allowing the homeless to forego the conventional trappings of life and camp peacefully — even on private land, privately managed and funded.

As such, taxpayers of Colorado Springs may be stuck with motel bills. It’s one price of indulging excessive community control over private property and the lives of dysfunctional individuals.

— Wayne Laugesen, editorial page editor, for the editorial board

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