Anchorage Assembly passes new rules for homeless camps

Anchorage metropolis workers posted signs adjacent Mountain View’s snowfall dump successful 2023 informing campers they’d beryllium backmost to clear nan encampment. and astatine Davis Park informing that they’d beryllium backmost to clear distant nan encampments. (Jeremy Hsieh/Alaska Public Media)

The Anchorage Assembly has approved caller rules for bum campers this summer. 

Assembly personnel Felix Rivera introduced nan measure, which prohibits campsites wrong a half-mile of a shelter and limits campsites to nary much than 25 tents. It besides reduces nan magnitude of announcement officials request to springiness to clear camps — a process called abatement — from 15 to 10 days. 

Rivera says nan measurement passed Tuesday nighttime is simply a “light touch” version of an ordinance from Mayor Dave Bronson that nan Assembly rejected successful April. 

“We aren’t really adding caller powers aliases responsibilities,” Rivera said. “We are simply saying, if we are going to beryllium doing abatement this summer, which is simply a large if, present are immoderate of nan argumentation priorities which are critical.”

Assembly members debated nan ordinance until adjacent to midnight. Several expressed concerns complete whether nan changes would make a sizable dent successful addressing homelessness, and immoderate doubted if nan mayor’s management had a coagulated scheme for abatement.

Ultimately, nan ordinance was passed by a 9 to 1 vote. Assembly Chair Chris Constant was nan sole nary vote. He says he doesn’t deliberation nan caller limits will do thing to thief bum group and residents surviving adjacent ample encampments.

“We do everything arsenic a metropolis and a society, it’s a bigger rumor than Anchorage, to protect nan comfortable and inflict nan suffering,” Constant said. “That’s what this does much of, I think. And truthful I wish we could fig retired really to reverse nan curve and protect nan weak. But this doesn’t do it.”

The Assembly besides voted to proceed nan expanded capacity of 200 group astatine its bum shelter astatine nan erstwhile Solid Waste Services building until mid-October.