Last night, city and county officials unanimously recommended that a temporary camp for unhoused residents at Reindahl Park continue.
The proposal, authored by Alder Julianna Bennett, was considered by the City-County Homeless Issues Committee, and it would allow the camp at Reindahl Park to remain until another solution is found. The resolution now heads to Madison’s common council for further deliberation.
City leaders initially planned to evict about a dozen Reindahl park residents on May 9th. But, according to community development director Jim O’Keefe, city staff has taken a non-enforcement approach while it considers alternate camp locations and resources for the Reindahl residents.
“I can’t tell you how much time has been devoted in trying to identify sites that could work for encampments,” O’Keefe said at yesterday’s meeting. “They’re just very few and far between. So we’re pursuing all of those different alternatives.”
One of those potential alternatives is another temporary encampment at Starkweather Park, near the Madison Metro east Transfer Point.
These encampments, including Reindahl and Starkweather, are temporarily allowed under an emergency order issued last May by Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway.
In late February, the city shut down a similar camp at McPike Park, but that one was never condoned by the city.
The proposal to relocate Reindahl Park residents to Starkweather Park drew strong backlash from community members and some committee members. Alder Bennett, who does not serve on the Homeless Issues committee, says that most of the property is essentially a marsh.
Bennet’s proposed resolution would set new standards for temporary encampments — inspired in part by the issues at Starkweather.
“When this was first presented to me and other alders, Starkweather Creek was presented as a great option, with acres of land,” she says. “And I went around the location, and it’s a damn swamp! In a forest! With no lighting! Starkweather Creek is not a solution, it’s an insult.”
Other members of the public said Starkweather presented other issues, like leaving campers vulnerable to ticks or access issues for emergency vehicles.
Some advocates criticized city staff for not engaging unhoused campers about what would work for them. But O’Keefe says city staff and outreach specialists have been in touch with Reindahl and Starkweather residents, and are relaying information back to city leaders.
Brenda Konkel, co-President of Occupy Madison, says the city needs to remove the middlemen. Konkel also serves as the Executive Director of MACH OneHealth, an outreach service for unhoused residents.
“There’s been a complete communication breakdown between people in the community and people at the city,” Konkel says. “We need to cut out all the middle-people and everyone else just needs to get out of the way. It just feels like a huge mess with this situation.”
Occupy Madison operates two tiny house villages — the group’s second village was recently approved by the City of Madison. Konkel says that the operation, which has existed for more than seven years, was born after other solutions for unhoused people were shut down by city ordinance.
She says tiny houses exist because Occupy Madison found a loophole in the city’s zoning policies.
Says Konkel: “The reason we ended up with tiny houses is because we exhausted every single solution that there could have possibly been where somebody could sleep where they were not in a shelter under the current city statutes… we can’t get zoning to do anything, except for our tiny houses, because we kind of created a loophole where they’re portable shelter units. Those portable shelter units have to be on wheels and then we can build our tiny house units.”
Konkel endorsed Bennett’s resolution, and says that the only other option to continue the camps would be a complete overhaul of city zoning policies. Pre-pandemic, camping was forbidden in all city parks.
The resolution to preserve the Reindahl Park camp will be before the common council at its virtual meeting on Tuesday, May 18.
(PHOTO: WORT News / Flickr)
