The city of Santa Rosa is now ready to begin clearing out homeless encampments under Highway 101 after delaying the efforts for weeks.
The city initially followed CDC guidelines not to disperse camps so as not to spread the virus, but that delay created new problems.
“And now we’re at this intersection where the encampments grew to such a size that the health and safety of the encampments themselves we have to work on,” said David Gwine, the city’s director of housing and community services.
So by the end of May, city officials had determined that the camp needed to be broken up for the safety of the people living there. But then the protests over the death of George Floyd started, pushing that date back twice.
Then, just as the city was ready to clean up the camp after multiple delays, they hit another speed bump.
“We learned that two male adults who were released from county jail awaiting their test results, instead of going into their halfway house - the place they needed to go - they instead went under the freeway,” Gwine said. Those two men did turn out to be positive for the virus, “so we immediately did another pivot.”
The city brought in medical workers to do contact tracing and test the other residents before dispersing them. All of those tests have come back negative so far, so officials are once again planning to break up the camp.
Starting Wednesday, city workers will begin offering residents other places to stay, and will use a gift card incentive program to encourage residents to get another virus test in one week.