Dear Council Members,
I am pleased to see the wording of agenda Item 7 (Recreational Vehicle Parking Ordinance) for this week’s meeting and urge you to vote this ordinance into effect as is and to apply these rules as soon as possible.
By enforcing this ordinance we will encourage our county to rely less on local city and town band aid ad hoc solutions to transient camping, and also to guide illegal RV street dwellers towards accepting the specific county help and resources available to them.
There may be issues with campers migrating to unincorporated areas of Sebastopol immediately beyond the city limits once this parking ordinance is on the books and being enforced, particularly on our north west side. We therefore need to urge our county to be ready to act more responsibly in consistently applying their existing rules and regulations to keep local thoroughfares clear and presentable.
Given that our county has budgets exclusively devoted to funding projects which supposedly help the homeless that are well over 10x the entire annual City of Sebastopol municipal budget, CoS council representative pressure is urgently needed to obtain county data that proves the efficacy of their approaches to date.
The county owns significant areas of land and infrastructure that could very quickly be utilized for safe parking sites, tiny home communities and communal spaces.
City of Sebastopol citizens have been paying more and more out of our tiny city budget for homeless services, arguably due to county failures: port-opotties, garbage pick up and a $72k pa FTE homeless outreach coordinator who helps register transient vehicles and connects people with appropriate county services are just recent examples.
The City of Sebastopol is currently significantly overburdened with providing a disproportionate amount of resources dedicated to these problems in comparison to other Sonoma County localities, and our councillors are in turn spending a disproportionate amount of their time on band aid temporary local fixes for county and state scale problems.
Our county needs to step up and play a much larger role in this vacuum, addressing the various root causes of homelessness with a coherent strategy and approach we can effectively contribute to at an appropriate city and personal level. (I do not mean by this just inviting volunteers to take part in point in time (PIT) homeless counts that then justify future county budgets and staffing for opaque tactics).
City of Sebastopol’s overnight parking ordinance actions in 2022 are consistent with current California political realities: 64,000 citizen Santa Cruz is passing an ordinance banning oversized vehicles from parking on Santa Cruz streets from midnight through 5 a.m. restrictions citing health and environmental issues as an example. I have previously shared with council over a dozen existing examples of parking ordinances. https://www.santacruzsentinel.com/2022/01/06/new-santa-cruz-lawbanning-overnight-rv-parking-inches-forward https://lookout.co/santacruz/civic-life/story/2021-10-27/santa-cruzhomelessness-city-council-passes-ban-on-oversized-vehicles-despitecommunity-outcry As a nation, as a California state, Sonoma County and our tiny City of Sebastopol are coping with an unprecedented drug and mental health epidemic, a huge wave of homelessness, very uncertain economic times and working families who are struggling to make ends meet.
We need to address these issues at scale as other California counties are doing and end ad hoc local solutions, replacing them with appropriate consistent regulations, budgeting and measurable outcomes.
The Parking ordinance is a step in the right direction and I fully support it, but also urge greatly increased pressure on our failing county board of supervisors to solve the larger issues for everyone.
Oliver Marks
Downtown City of Sebastopol