OUR VIEW: City should allow private homeless camp (vote in poll)

A businessman wants to provide space for the homeless. City officials plan to obstruct him. Sure, that makes sense.

Our city’s homeless problem should be viewed as a conflict between order and chaos. By understanding order and chaos and the compromises between the two, one has a better understanding of any sociopolitical dilemma.

Absolute order leads to tyranny; absolute chaos leads to anarchy. Freedom thrives somewhere in-between.

Those who advocate full chaos wanted nothing to change with the homeless in Colorado Springs. The homeless could continue living in shanties along the creeks — some drunk and/or stoned and/or mentally ill — surviving on donations from individuals and social services organizations.

Those who advocate full order think society should cure the homeless, getting them into homes and helping them with mental illness, drug addiction or other problems.

In-between people advocate neither full chaos nor full order. They understand society will never “cure” or eliminate the state of being homeless. Yet they believe the community should try, to varying degrees, to bring some order to camps populated by people who defecate in buckets.

Paul “Pak” Koscielski sounds like an in-between person. He knows a few programs aren’t going to get all of the homeless to live inside, stone cold sober, abiding rules of authority. It’s obvious he knows this because he is willing to invest capital and effort into a private camp for homeless citizens who cannot or will not enter a shelter or traditional housing arrangements.

Most people who live outside do so because they have never been willing or able to conform to societal norms. This trait usually cannot be altered permanently, and typically resurfaces after brief efforts at change.

Koscielski wants to buy, renovate and maintain a former KOA campground off South Nevada Avenue in order to provide free camping and low-rent RVs for the homeless.

It’s a private in-between solution to a conflict of extreme chaos and absolute order. It would provide a lawful, clean, safe space for people who cannot or will not conform.

One would expect city officials to make reasonable efforts to remove obstacles in Koscielski’s way. He offers them order in a way that doesn’t involve tyranny, taxation or a cost to the city.

Rather than assist Koscielski, city officials have thrown up obstacles — because they can.

Koscielski thought he could go forward with his plan without the time and expense of a city development plan, a neighborhood input process and meetings with the City Council and Planning Commission. He thought the site was approved for his desired use, because KOA’s 1982 development plan allows camping in tents and RVs.

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

Koscielski believes the KOA plan is valid, but Senior City Planner Ryan Tefertiller claims the plan expired. He wants Koscielski to jump through hoops. Koscielski said he can’t afford an extensive planning process, which also jeopardizes the project’s financing. Short of the planning process, Koscielski has the expensive option of going to court and challenging Tefertiller’s decision. He’s on the verge of scrapping the camp, which was viable only with a spirit of cooperation from city officials. They do cooperate with others, after all. When a business wants to relocate here, and it’s deemed a benefit to the community, city officials remove obstacles and offer financial incentives. Isn’t a managed camp for the homeless a community benefit?

This is an unconventional plan that stands little chance of making anyone rich. It’s a plan that might work if given reasonable breaks from conventional bureaucratic hurdles invented for traditional ventures.

Sure, the city’s planning department has the means and authority to present obstacles. It also has the means and authority to remove them — to cooperate with a man who’s taking personal risk to address a community problem.

City officials have no chance of fixing all problems of the chronic homeless. They have no chance of curing most alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness and the compulsion by some to live outside, free from a job or a mortgage. They have every chance to facilitate, rather than obstruct, a reasonable effort to create private outdoor space for the homeless. If they blow that chance, they had best not complain when the homeless — who city officials have removed from sight only temporarily — begin pitching tents in public again.

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

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