Lewiston City Council’s move to bar people from sleeping on city property at night is drawing fire from homeless advocates.

“If they had a place to go, they wouldn’t be sitting on benches,” said Jeffery Padham, a member of the city’s housing committee, an advisory committee regarding housing issues including the needs of the city’s homeless.

The council voted 4-3 on Dec. 20 for what the agenda described as “an amendment to the Offenses and Miscellaneous Provisions Ordinance to prohibit loitering, camping, sleeping or remaining on city owned properties between the hours of 9 p.m. and 5 a.m.” 

The measure will become effective April 1, 2023.

During a public hearing on the night of the vote, speakers voiced opposition to the new change, including a homeless man who identified himself only as Randy. He lambasted the council for voting at a previous meeting in favor of the measure on first reading. 

“How could you sit there at the last meeting and vote ‘yes’ without thinking twice about us, the invisible people?” he said.

The housing committee, in a report submitted to the council on Aug. 11, indicated that “over 1,000 Lewiston residents have experienced homelessness over the past 12 months.” Padham told Spectrum News that most of them were local residents.

“They’re not homeless coming in from somewhere else,” Padham said. “They’re our homeless.”

The committee’s report counted five overnight emergency shelters citywide, with a total of 83 shelter beds. The report estimated shelters in the city are full for “91% of the year,” and as such the shelters are likely turning people away “20% - 70% of the time.”

Padham called the capacity of those shelters “inadequate” to meet the city’s needs.

City Councilor Scott Harriman, who voted against the ordinance change at the Dec. 20 meeting, noted that the move comes after the council first put a moratorium on building new homeless shelters in April of 2022, then extended it in September.

“I'm really disappointed in the general attitude of the majority of this council toward people experiencing homelessness,” he said. “Only a few days before Christmas, we've passed an ordinance that criminalizes people simply for not having anywhere else to go.”

Police Chief David St. Pierre told the council he wasn’t planning to use the ordinance as a license for officers to harass the city’s homeless population.

“As the chief of police, my primary responsibility is the safety of everyone,” St. Pierre said. “I don’t believe it’s safe for the unhoused to be sleeping in the middle of the woods. They’re included in that.”

St. Pierre continued: “This ordinance gives us a little more teeth to move people along that may be performing very unsavory behavior. We are not going to walk up to somebody that’s unhoused and say anything but ‘hello,’ if they’re not creating a problem or an issue, or there’s no valid complaints about what they’re doing being illegal and such.”

Efforts by Spectrum News to reach St. Pierre for comment were unsuccessful.

City Council President Lee Clement, who voted for the proposed change, also did not respond to requests for comment from Spectrum News. At the Dec. 20 meeting, he noted that merchants in the city have complained to the council about homeless people leaving “filth” and “needles” in front of their businesses. 

Clement also noted residents in one part of the city were on occasion “threatened” by homeless people.

“I recognize this not as a cleanup measure, but as a tool to give our police something that they can act on when the situation arises that requires it,” he said. “I don’t envision our police department going out there and checking every car in every parking lot, or kicking everybody along.”

Clement also acknowledged that the city needed to do more to help the homeless population, saying “We’re not there yet.”

During public comments, Randy told the council that without shelter, colder temperatures will lead to deaths among the city’s homeless.

“Just remember, every time you go home, and when it’s cold out, when there’s more deaths that happen to the homeless, the blood is going to be on your hands,” he said.