At the end of June, the United States Supreme Court issued a ruling in the Grants Pass v. Johnson case, clearing the way for cities to enforce bans on public camping.
Spokane voters had already approved one such prohibition, Proposition 1, in November 2023, but things remain muddy a month after the high court's decision.
Proposition 1 bans camping within a thousand feet of a school, park or licensed daycare — conditions that cover much of the city. It wasn’t enforced before the Grants Pass ruling.
But now that that legal hurdle has been taken away, Councilmember Jonathan Bingle, along with downtown business owners, said it’s time to carry out the law.
“I happen to be representing a group of people who are increasingly frustrated by the fact that they don't believe that Prop 1 is being enforced," Bingle told SPR News.
Last week, Bingle and fellow council member Michael Cathcart introduced a resolution urging the city of Spokane to enforce Prop 1, but the measure was killed by the city council before it could even come to a vote.
"The allegation that laws are not being enforced is simply false," said Mayor Lisa Brown.
According to Brown, her administration is not standing in the way of Prop 1, which was approved by 75% of voters.
“We certainly enforce laws related to unlawful camping, such as Prop 1, and other ordinances passed by the City Council that regulate public camping and other ordinances such as pedestrian interference, open drug use laws,” she said.
The Spokane Police Department tells a slightly different story.
“We have to get the proposition and the code into our system so that when officers cite someone, it has some place to go,” said Julie Humphreys, the department spokesperson.
She said it takes time to implement laws, especially ones that couldn’t be enforced for months and needed to go through legal scrutiny.
“We're in the process of implementing it," Humphreys told SPR News. "So the holdup is not that we don't want to, that we don't appreciate this tool, that we are not following the will of the people.”
Councilmember Bingle said he doesn’t buy the excuse of waiting for legal approval.
“This is not something that snuck up on us. This is something we knew was coming," he said, referring to the Grants Pass ruling. "And so the fact that we don't have something ready to go is, again, a failure of leadership.”
Still, Humphreys said that officers are enforcing the existing ordinances on public camping.
“They can already enforce illegal camping in other areas, so it's not like this great big new piece of legislation that they're trying to digest," she said. "But there are nuances to it that we have to get right, so we're making legal arrests and making legal citations.”
Councilmember Paul Dillon, who opposed Prop 1, said some of the people who argue the initiative isn’t being enforced aren’t necessarily doing so in good faith.
“Saying Prop 1 hasn't been enforced, when in reality it has? It's constantly moving goalposts,” he said.
When it comes to moving forward, all parties have said they want to make progress on homelessness.
According to Mayor Brown, focus should be on the deeper causes of the issue.
“We're working upstream. I declared an emergency related to the fentanyl crisis, so we could deploy additional resources," she said. "We need to expand affordable housing, mental health and substance use disorder treatment.”
For Dillon, part of the response needs to focus on teaching the public what the ordinance actually does.
“When it was 106 [degrees], I was getting some complaints about camping," he said. "Well, there was a person that was unhoused that was cooling off under the shade of a tree in a park.
"That's not illegal. That's not camping. They're not staying there overnight. And so I also think there's a lot more citizen education that needs to be done.”
Bingle agreed that getting the right information out there is a big part of the city’s task.
"There's also a way to educate those who are committing the offense,” he said. “‘Hey, did you know this new law exists? This is where you can't be; here are places you can go,’ something like that for people committing the offense.
"That way, again, it's very clear to the public what the law is and the way that we're going to be enforcing it.”
But for the moment, the Brown Administration and certain members of the council and the business community disagree about how best to tackle this issue and what enforcement of Prop 1 actually looks like.
