Clarksburg petitioners want camping ban reconsidered

Weeks after the city of Clarksburg passed a law aimed at homeless people camping in public, a group of residents is asking city council to reconsider the law, or put it to a city vote. The group submitted their petition to the city Monday.

By the city’s charter, referendum petitions must be filed by a five-member committee, which must also submit a number of signatures equal to at least 10% of the total number of registered voters at the last city election. In this case, the petitioners had to submit a minimum of 1,020 verified signatures, said Tracy Brady, one of the five committee members.

Clarksburg City Council approved the law Nov. 7. The law prohibits camping on streets, parks or trails, public property and private property without permission. It also prohibits storage of personal property in public areas. Penalties for violating the ordinance are fines of up to $500 for a third offense, but do not include jail time.

Brady said she sees the camping ban as a humanitarian issue. The city has a temporary cold weather shelter, but no year-round emergency shelters for homeless people.

Rev. Chris Scott, another of the committee members, said the ordinance is an effort to make something unreasonable and callous seem reasonable and compassionate. Supporters of the ordinance have said the city would use it to engage with the unhoused community and connect people with resources, he said.

“But when you don’t have a full time shelter, when you don’t have any direct overnight resources available for people, to me, it just seems unreasonable and uncaring, despite some of the rhetoric that some people, some of the proponents have been putting out,” Scott said. 

Brady said she’s hopeful that if the committee can successfully repeal the ordinance, it will give the city time to work with organizations providing homeless services and perhaps with those in other West Virginia cities to develop a network for placing people in services. 

“Also something that provides wraparound services to help these people,” Brady said. “You can’t just drop them outside of city lines, and there you go. Problem solved. It doesn’t work that way.”

According to the law, a person can be given substance abuse or mental health treatment in lieu of a fine.

“I’m sorry, but not everybody you meet on the streets or in the woods is going to need rehab,” Brady said. “Some of these people are just citizens. They lost their home. They’re mentally ill. I mean, there’s a whole slew of other reasons. The city wants a blanket approach to it, and a Band Aid approach, rather than ‘Let’s get to the root of this.’”

Councilman Marc Jackson, who proposed the camping ban, did not return an email seeking an interview for this story. City attorney Richard Marsh also did not return messages asking for details about the referendum petition. 

At the city council’s October meeting, when council heard the first reading of the ordinance, Jackson said he was suggesting the ordinance because of about 50 to 75 people “wandering around our city who may be unhoused.”

“Those individuals are moving around and they’re getting in and out of things,” he said. “I’ve been in some of these places. When we hear ‘camping’ this isn’t like your camp up on the Tygart River. I’ve gone in there. You have to go in and see the mess that is created. They go in and they take all this garbage, these clothes. It’s one outfit off, one outfit on. Whatever they’ve eaten. Whatever they drink, whatever drug paraphernalia.”

Scott said he was “appalled and surprised” by the process of the city passing the bill, which he said did not include much public access or input. During the first reading, there were no paper copies of the bill dispensed at the meeting, he said. There wasn’t a version of it posted to the city’s website until the day before the final vote, he said. He had to call the city clerk to get the bill, he said.

Jackson hosted a community forum about homelessness and addiction. 

“They talked about transparency, how important that was,” Scott said. “And then you get this bill that was pushed through, ordinance that was pushed through without any sort of real the bare minimum of public notice.”

According to Jesse Rabinowitz, communications and campaign director for the National Homelessness Law Center, a D.C.-based organization that advocates for policies to end homelessness, at least 114 cities in the United States have passed camping bans since late June, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a similar ban in Grants Pass, Oregon. 

“The only thing that these laws are going to do is make homelessness worse,” Rabinowitz said. “We are concerned that cities are focusing on the absolute wrong thing. Throwing someone in jail or giving them a ticket for being poor, for not having a place to live, doesn’t help anybody. It further pushes people into a cycle of poverty and homelessness. Instead of passing these backwards, simple minded, ineffective laws, we need our elected officials to do their jobs and focus on making sure that everyone has the housing services that are proven time and time again to solve homelessness.”

Morgantown also passed a camping ban earlier this fall. The future of that ban will be decided during a city election in April 2025 after residents petitioned for it to be reconsidered.  

Brady said the city told her they must have at least 1,020 “clean, verifiable” signatures from residents in the city. 

Thirty people have been canvassing the city, asking people to sign on to the petition. The effort has been door to door as well as through social media and with personal contacts. 

“[We have] several hundred that I know of so far,” Brady said Friday. “I’m still in the process of collecting packets from folks.”

According to the city charter, the city has 20 days to verify the signatures and, if the petitioners are found to have met the minimum number of signatures, certify the petition. If the petition is certified, the city council can either repeal the ordinance, or put it on the next city election for voters to decide.

Clarksburg’s camping ban was planned to be effective Jan.1, 2025, but according to city charter, the ordinance is suspended when a referendum petition is filed and will remain suspended until a final determination that the petition is insufficient, petitioners’ committee withdraws the petition,  Council repeals the ordinance, or until 30 days after a vote of the city on the ordinance.