The Agenda with the Missoula County Commissioners

The Reserve Street Bridge encampment: Cleaning up before springtime runoff

• Missoula County Commissioners • Season 2 • Episode 12

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The encampment under the Reserve Street Bridge has been a topic of concern for both residents and County officials, especially with spring runoff on the horizon having the potential to wash garbage and other waste downstream.  

 Last week, Missoula County Public Works crews and equipment assisted with trash removal under the Reserve Street Bridge after Commission Chair Juanita Vero declared a state of emergency to enable the County to join community volunteers to remove trash that’s accumulated under the bridge due to people living illegally on the property for years. 

In this episode, the Missoula County commissioners explain the history of this issue and its current complexities: how the encampment at one point had around 140 people and what the County and City of Missoula, in cooperation with many community partners, have done so far to address this problem, such as standing up the Temporary Safe Outdoor Space and Authorized Camp Site. They explain why it’s an environmental and safety problem to continue to have people living under the bridge, and why, because of the Martin v. Boise court ruling, neither the County, City nor the Montana Department of Transportation have been able to simply remove the campers from under the bridge if there is no alternative to send them. 

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Thank you to Missoula's Community Media Resource for podcast recording support!

Commissioner Strohmaier:

Well, welcome back, everyone, to Tip of the Spear with your Missoula County commissioners. I'm Dave Strohmaier, and I'm joined today by my fellow commissioners, Josh Slotnick and Juanita Vero. Today, we are going to discuss something that's been on folks minds throughout the community for I would hazard to guess literally years, actually. But certainly it's been on folks top of mind as of late, and that is the Reserve Street encampment. We have gotten a lot of questions from the public as far as what the County's role is in all of this, what the County is doing about it. And we thought we'd just take a few minutes today to share with folks what we know. So to kick things off, Josh, do you want to talk at all about just some of the context and background of this location?

Commissioner Slotnick:

Yeah, thanks. Thanks for asking, Dave, and you teed this up just right. This is something that is on the forefront of a lot of people's minds, not just because the problem has been with us for a long time, but because of the situation we're in right now with spring runoff. So a bit of history. People have been camping under the Reserve Street Bridge for many years when COVID hit and really was peaking, the Poverello Center cut capacity to half, folks were trying to find places to live and a lot of people found refuge underneath the Reserve Street Bridge. And it's worth noting that efforts working with people had really shown some success. Pre-COVID numbers were about as low as they had ever been with folks under the Reserve Street Bridge, and then everything went upside down. So, we responded to a population of nearly 140 people under the bridge by standing up the Temporary Safe Outdoor Space out by Buckhouse Bridge in partnership with Hope Rescue Mission and United Way. And we found some real success in creating a service rich environment. And nearly 50% of the people who are at the Temporary Safe Outdoor Space graduated to housing, and interestingly enough, not because we were able to get them Section 8 vouchers, and they found open rentals in the tightest housing market in the country, but that service-rich environment allowed people to engage in what Jim Hicks has called"relationship repair," and they found housing with family members. Other piece that happened here is that we partnered with the City in standing up the Authorized Camp Site which is over by Garden City Compost. Lower barrier than the Temporary Safe Outdoor Space, but again, really found success in that people wanted to live in these spaces. And we have all, the collective we, have found that when we create places for people to be, they generally are not where we don't want them to be. Folks don't want to be breaking the law and really appreciate the safety and security and cleanliness that are available at the Temporary Safe Outdoor Space and at the Authorized Camping Site. There's a bit of background.

Commissioner Strohmaier:

Yeah, no, that's excellent background. And part of the back story also is the land itself.

And some of the questions we get relate to jurisdiction:

who owns the land, and why is not one party or another taking action? So, Juanita, I know you've been dialed into a lot of the conversations out there swirling around Reserve Street. Could you talk just a little bit about whose land it is out there, and why is it that it was not that long ago when it seemed like there were no individuals camped out there after a full court press to try to find alternative locations that people could move to, but now there are folks who've kind of drifted back in; any insight on either of those?

Commissioner Vero:

Sure. For the first part, Montana Department of Transportation owns the land on either side of Reserve Street Bridge area and then also the City of Missoula further to the west. Most of the encampments are on either side of the bridge, so it'd be Montana Department of Transportation and the City. And then the second part of the question, why are people returning? Well, once ACS, Authorized Camp Site, was stood up, the emergency winter shelter was still in place. And so, I mean, there's about 80 people or so that were without a place to go when that closed or had to close in April, because it was just for emergency winter shelter, and those folks didn't have any place to go. The Authorized Camp Site was full, and this place is an attractive place to camp if you have no place to go, because there's access to shade, water, fuel sources, services such as the highway, Reserve Street itself. I mean, it's just a place that if you needed to live somewhere and have your basic needs met, this would be a place to camp. Unfortunately, what makes it really difficult is the terrain is such that it's really difficult to manage and keep clean and to access. And so, this is the problem that we're running up against. What was your other part of your question, Dave?

Commissioner Strohmaier:

I think you kind of hit it as far as why folks are kind of drifting back into the location when at one point in time, a couple of months ago, there was zero folks.

Commissioner Vero:

The rest of it is just the straight up lack of stock of housing, soaring house prices. We all know about that. So, it's just very difficult to find housing, and if you're in a vulnerable position where your housing isn't very secure, homelessness, houselessness could happen really quickly, and I don't know, Josh, did you already talk about the Trinity development?

Commissioner Slotnick:

No, I didn't.

Commissioner Vero:

That's part of this when people are asking like what the County has been doing. So, back in 2019, we entered into the agreement with the City and partners to build the Trinity developments, and so that's also part of it. So, I guess what I get frustrated sometimes is people not understanding how long we've been kind of working at this and chipping away at this, and so this latest push of how do we get these, you know, a handful of folks out from underneath the Reserve Street or in that area and then be able to clean up? This is kind of the end of a two and a half, three year process. And I think it's easy for folks not to remember that or recognize that.

Commissioner Slotnick:

And at Trinity I think we're looking at 230 units of affordable housing.

Commissioner Strohmaier:

And 30 permanently supportive housing. But having said that, as recently as yesterday, I was fielding questions from folks about what's the big deal? This is a nice, shady area next to water. This may be the perfect spot. If I was wanting to camp somewhere to be, what's the big deal with people being down there, and why can't we just let them stay?

Commissioner Slotnick:

Dave you are hitting on it. Any camping in a place that isn't a campground means that all that comes from human life has to go somewhere that isn't where we would want it to be going. So, we have folks living by the river with no sanitation facilities, no garbage cans, not much of anything. They are living literally in the urban wild, and all that comes from life itself ends up being garbage. And now with rising water, we're in a situation where that garbage could be swept away. So that's a really big problem.

Commissioner Strohmaier:

It absolutely is. And it's not lost on us. The safety angle, I think something that folks might not think of, but certainly is top of mind for the Montana Department of Transportation, is the real threat to the infrastructure itself, to the Reserve Street Bridge. We just a couple of weeks ago heard from MDT officials about propane tanks under the bridge and juxtaposed next to people's campfires which is not a great deal. Moving forward, something that is also top of mind for folks is okay, what is Missoula County doing? Are we just sitting on our hands here doing nothing? From what we've described, there's a lot going on behind the scenes. But what are the challenges with a.) finding alternative housing for the folks who are camped down there and moving them out of there and b.) Just what it is that is our plan going forward at this point.

Commissioner Vero:

So, it's also, we haven't talked about this, but because of the Ninth Circuit Court ruling in Boise v. Martin that prohibits the criminalization of people without homes, Montana Department of Transportation and Sheriff's Department, they can't just remove people from under the bridge without an alternative place to send them. So, Montana Department of Transportation is seeking a court order, and this is what's in the papers and you guys are hearing about. And again, it's a process to provide the authority for the Sheriff's Department to be able to safely escort people who are illegally camping specifically in that area. And when you're an organization such as the County or the Sheriff's Department or the Montana Department of Transportation, you just have a lot more liability. And so to give the protection that's required, this is the process that we have to go through. And so Missoula County will enforce any order that results from this. And of course, the priority, again, is to connect people to services, whether this is helping you reestablish your relationship with family members, friends, with yourself, helping you get an ID, helping you find some security in your life so that you can move forward. And so, priority is getting people connected to those services and move ultimately towards permanent supportive housing, which takes a long time. And it's not just something that's going to happen overnight if you're going to get someone a hotel room, and just imagine that they, you know, that they're going to get their life together in 48 hours. We've got to be in this for the long haul. We proclaimed an emergency regarding hazardous waste entering the Clark Fork River, and

we did that around 6:

30 on Thursday night, which would allow our Public Works crew to be on site 8 o'clock on Friday morning. And they were plus a bunch of volunteers and folks spent the entire day Friday there until about 5 o'clock cleaning up trash and debris and hauling it to the landfill and then again on Saturday.

Commissioner Slotnick:

Friday and Saturday, not just Public Works crew, but really essential heavy equipment, multiple front end loaders, really big, articulating, front end loaders with buckets of probably six, seven, eight yards a piece, maybe ten yard buckets. They're really big and dump trucks. And the volunteers were absolutely essential. And that heavy equipment cut the time down considerably so we could get the bulk of this area cleaned up before the high water comes, which is Tuesday the 17th.

Commissioner Vero:

Absolutely have to give a shout out to volunteers for four Fridays prior. Since Earth Day, volunteers have been down there bagging and collecting anything that could go into the river. So, that work was absolutely essential because then by the time we could get heavy equipment in there to actually pick up those bags, so much of that handwork had been done. And I don't think people really appreciate how essential that handwork is, because of the terrain there. It doesn't allow for any heavy equipment to actually get into places where it needed to be. It needed to be people on foot and by hand.

Commissioner Slotnick:

And the heavy equipment played a humongous role in crossing that channel with buckets full of garbage. I don't mean five gallon buckets, I mean like a ten yard bucket on the frontend of a frontend loader.

Commissioner Vero:

Yeah, and smaller equipment couldn't get across that channel.

Commissioner Slotnick:

No way. Only big gear.

Commissioner Vero:

What I think people would be excited to learn is that, total, there's been 30.2 tons removed by the County and volunteers, so that's from Friday and Saturday combined. So then the volunteer group, starting from January, they've been down there, I mean total combined tonnage in spring of 2022 for that area is about 40 tons of garbage removed, and so grateful to, again, volunteers, Public Works, City staff and yeah, Republic Services.

Commissioner Slotnick:

And Republic Services donated $8,000 plus worth of tipping fees.

Commissioner Vero:

Fantastic. So grateful.

Commissioner Strohmaier:

Any other thoughts as far as the bigger picture related to either Reserve Street, houselessness?

Commissioner Slotnick:

Yeah, if I could throw some out, I mean, what we've been doing over the last couple of years has been absolutely necessary and very reactive. The absolutely necessary piece would be things like the TSOS, partnering and the ACS, helping Trinity get up and running, supporting the mobile support team. We'll be standing up a crisis receiving area, hopefully by the fall. All these things will help so that folks who are caught in houselessness don't end up there forever. We can hopefully spin them out into a better direction, but that still puts us in this reactive spot, and unfortunately upstream is out of our control. There will continue to be a supply of people without homes. As long as generally things are as they are, we are going to have to continue to fix this into the future until the greater economic context shifts. That may mean housing becomes more readily available in Missoula County. It may mean healthcare becomes more readily available in the United States. It could mean half a dozen other things. Though we are addressing this problem, the problem isn't going to go away.

Commissioner Vero:

And when you say upstream, you mean upstream in a person's life?

Commissioner Slotnick:

Correct? Yes. Thank you.

Commissioner Vero:

And also, I think it's important to to understand we're not pointing fingers. And I don't think it behooves the community to be pointing fingers at agencies or each other. I mean, this is a community issue and a community problem. So we need to collaborate and we are collaborating with Montana Department of Transportation, who've been patient working with service providers, working with environmental health. And so everyone understands that this is a community problem. It's not going to have just a slick bullet of an answer."We're just going to go in and move people out and magically this is all going to disappear." And that's just not the case. That's going to take dedicated years of working through people's immediate issues, like you're saying, but then also creating that upstream environment that Josh was referencing or using the metaphor of river cleanup, which we've talked about before, and restoring a river. You know, the metaphor that I think of in my head is the restoration effort that happened at the Blackfoot was successful because of the work done in the tributaries. And so if we can impact the tributaries of a person's life, we will ultimately impact the community downstream of a person's life. And so this is ongoing. It's complex and it's intertwined. The TSOS or Temporary Safe Outdoor Space out by Buckhouse, that's going to be moved this fall to hard-sided shelters to the Broadway Mullan site, next to Trinity. In addition to providing that service-rich environment, the new site will house residents in these hard-sided shelters. And also, this wasn't funded by Missoula County property tax dollars. This is funded by the Federal American Rescue Plan Act. And like you guys have both said, we understand, folks' frustration with the pace at which some of these solutions move. We share them. This is the process we're working through and we'll get there.

Commissioner Slotnick:

And the other thing I'm going to throw out just in the way of empathy and organizational cooperation, is to make sure this doesn't sound like we or anybody else are pointing fingers at MDT. MDT, Montana Department of Transportation, builds roads and bridges. They're not in the social service business or in the environmental cleanup business, and this has pushed them and stretched them far beyond what they're typically used to doing and have been very responsive when we've been trying to work with them.

Commissioner Strohmaier:

Yeah, we recently met with the director of MDT and the Montana Department of Transportation, and I'm very optimistic that we are on a good trajectory moving forward and they want to get to yes on this and figure out a pathway that addresses their current safety and environmental concerns, but also will mesh with our concerns to address a very real social problem in our community, which is folks who are unhoused and that need to be somewhere safe.

Commissioner Vero:

And we also need to remember that the City is part of this too, and we're working with the City as well.

Commissioner Slotnick:

Well said.

Commissioner Strohmaier:

Thanks, everyone.

Commissioner Vero:

Thanks, everyone.

Commissioner Slotnick:

Thanks, everybody.