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State saves few of belongings called out in policy
He lost everything in Feb. 23 sweep
Real Change vendor Jeremy Irons, 34, had been living in a tent in Seattle's Sodo district until state Department of Transportation cleared and dumped his tent and belongings on Feb. 23. State Department of Transportation guidelines call for storing belongings for 70 days.
It was a bright spring morning and the sun was glinting off two white pickups parked at an industrial supply company off Airport Way South. In the back of one were personal belongings that state workers had cleared from a site under Interstate 5 where Jason Irons camped for a year and a half.
The site is called the Jungle, and on Feb. 23, Irons came “home” to it and discovered that everything he owned was gone; removed, he later learned, by the Washington State Department of Transportation.
Agency guidelines say WSDOT is to store belongings for 70 days, but peering into the truck bed on March 15, Irons wasn’t warmed by what he saw:
A half-dozen sleeping bags and one backpack, all bagged and dated in clear plastic, none of them his. No red tent. No bear-skin blankets. No DVD player, flashlight, pillows, books or clothes. What was in the truck, says Irons, a Real Change newspaper vendor for seven years, was all that was left of at least 30 other tents that had occupied the site.
“Where’s my red tent?” he asked one of three WSDOT workers leaning over the truck bed. “It’s probably gone,” one of them said – meaning it went to the dump with the three or four cubic yards of material that Maintenance Supervisor Ed Simpson says was removed from the site on Feb. 23.
After WSDOT posts its warning, anything that’s left is garbage, Simpson says. But Irons, 34, a disabled Seattle native who struggles to earn enough money to feed himself everyday, says he never saw a notice or heard anyone at the campsite speak of one before the sweep, which has left him on the streets with nothing but his knapsack.
That’s a violation, Irons says, of WSDOT’s own “Guidelines to Address Illegal Encampments,” which lists tents, tarps, bedrolls, storage containers and a number of other items that the transportation department is supposed to store for up to 70 days. But the operative word, the workers and WSDOT Regional Administrator Lorena Eng say, is “guidelines.” It’s a judgment call, they say as to what will and won’t be kept.
It’s the second time in two months that homeless campers have reported WSDOT’s disposal of belongings. Real Change vendors Darcie Day and Merlyn Parker say WSDOT took everything they owned on Jan. 13 (“Sweep of I-5 camp leaves couple with nothing,” RC Jan. 27-Feb. 2).
The WSDOT employees who met with Irons on March 15 say it’s a matter of their safety and staff limitations. The guidelines specifically prohibit them from opening any backpacks, tents or other belongings. Because these could contain drug users’ needles or other dangerous items, they say, they must be discarded.
The guidelines were adopted in 2008, a year after a homeless man named Isaac Palmer was killed in Seattle by a WSDOT contractor’s brush-clearing tractor. In addition to the notice and storage policies for clearing encampments, the guidelines outline steps that employees and contractors may or may not take, at their discretion, to ensure no homeless persons are at a site when work begins.
Encampment sweeps, however, are conducted not by WSDOT personnel, but prison work crews that Eng says are supervised by employees. It’s the employees, she says, who are supposed to pick out what to save. But, once put to work, Simpson says, the crews go at it pretty fast.
After an encampment is swept, a homeless person must make an appointment, as Irons did, to see what goods may have been saved – there is no public site, Eng says, where people can come to get their belongings. The agency doesn’t have the resources to staff a site, she says, and, says Simpson, “we don’t want to run some kind of store.”
“It’s garbage, for Christ’s sake,” Simpson says of what’s left at encampments, including the mountains of rubbish he says the crew cleared on Feb. 23. “One policy is a safe working environment,” he adds, and “there’s feces, there’s guns, there’s crime.”
Irons says a gang of drug dealers had moved into his area of the Jungle in the past few months. But that’s no excuse, he says, for WSDOT taking his belongings without warning and not following its own policy to store and return them.
“They’re full of it,” says Irons, who survived a drive-by shooting at 12 and later aged out of foster care to homelessness. Simpson “said most of it ended up in the dump. He admitted they violated their own policy.”
Comments
If the people who are homeless started to revert to Indian life styles. Could our dictaters do this. I would be interisting for a group of Indians to locate to the shores of Seattles waters. And live as they did a thousand years ago. What basis could our government take when this tribe owned the land.
Let’s start with where they post the notice. If the policy were to post the notice on the Intertnet, also, and to mail it to a listserv that we could sign up for, then “interested parties” could attend the sweep, and observe, photograph and video the WSDOT workers doing their “jobs.”
WSDOT needs transparency and oversight. These sweeps are obviously planned and scheduled. Those documents are subject to open records requests. If “guidelines” aren’t respected, then they need to be made into policies and procedures. Supervisors need to be held accountable. Who decided al backbacks are likely to hold uncapped needles? Why would any drug user endanger him or herself with a sharp. It’s just wrong on so many levels.
I thought the City of Seattle was going to work with Nickelsville to find a more permanent place where people could camp in safety with access to toilets and dumpsters. What’s up with that?
This article is heartbreaking and infuriating for the lack of concern on the part of WSDOT and its employees.
“The agency doesn’t have the resources to staff a site, she says, and, says Simpson, “we don’t want to run some kind of store.” “
Unbelievable!
The guidelines are clearly not being followed and the State needs to make them into policies and procedures that are REQUIRED to be followed.
It’s disgusting the way these people are treated. And the apparent callousness of Ed Simpson is really sad. Garbage, eh? The belongings that people who have nothing else rely on for survival and comfort?
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