On Feb. 1, a group called the Poor People’s Union set up camp on the corner of Capitol and Columbia streets to protest Olympia’s new Pedestrian Interference Ordinance and its impact on the homeless. The law makes it illegal to sit, lay down, sell goods, or panhandle on downtown sidewalks within six feet of a building.

Organizer Rob Richards says police warned the group last week that it could be evicted at any time. So on Thursday, the Poor People’s Union got permission from the pastor of Olympia’s Unitarian Universalist Church to move the camp to the church’s lawn. The campers and the pastor informed the city of the plan.

Still, police may not have gotten the message: The next morning, a group of about 20 officers surrounded Camp Quixote, roused its 45 or so campers and told them they had a half hour to leave, says Richards.

Because they’d been planning to go anyway, the move went smoothly. “Everything was fine,” he says. “The police were very respectful.”

The new Camp Quixote has about half the campers, he says, but the fight isn’t over. The Poor People’s Union wants the city to help it buy a permanent campsite, using some of the $200,000 that the Olympia City Council set aside for homeless services at the time it passed the sidewalk ordinance.

The group is also calling on the city to create a review board to oversee missions and other service providers, and wants homeless people to sit on it as well as on other city committees that deal with the poor or social services.

The camp and the demands are a response “to the line of thinking that pushing people off the sidewalk is a better alternative than building community around them,” Richards says. “We don’t want to see the domino effect start in Olympia of these ordinances being called solutions.”

“Downtown is having some problems,” he says, and “when businesses start failing, people look for a scapegoat.”

Robert Ross, co-owner of Last Word Books in downtown Olympia, says the council passed the ordinance under pressure from the Olympia Downtown Association, whose members “see the homeless as being a detriment to their business,” Ross says.

But, as far as panhandling downtown goes, he says it’s the business association that’s always got its hand out asking the City Council for more money.

City Councilmember Jeff Kingsbury, who co-sponsored the sidewalk legislation, insists the ordinance was not aimed at the homeless, but at “a group of bullying teenagers who were intentionally blocking our sidewalks and not allowing people to pass.”

The city, he adds, “is not interested in creating a permanent tent city. We’re interested in removing homelessness.”

That includes supporting Thurston County’s 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness and building transitional housing, with Kingsbury pointing out that 40 new units are slated to open at month’s end.

The city plans to make the church get a conditional use permit for Camp Quixote, but city spokesperson Cathie Butler says Olympia’s municipal code doesn’t allow tents to be dwelling units and there is no property zoned for camping within the city limits.

But churches, she says, do have a constitutional right to use their property to minister to the poor, as Seattle’s tent cities have proven in court.

“We’ll be sorting through those issues in the next few weeks,” Butler says. But Camp Quixote “really isn’t part of the 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness.”