Indy council OKs new protections for the homeless; is panhandling next?

It falls short of the full-fledged "Homeless Bill of Rights" debated a year ago, but an ordinance approved Monday by the City-County Council will offer new protections and assistance to the city's homeless population.

The proposal, approved by a robust 23-2 margin, is the latest in a string of legislative victories for Indianapolis homelessness advocates, one of whom said the city has made more progress on this issue in the past year than in the seven years before that.

But don't expect the subject — and the divisive debates that have often followed — to fade any time soon. The recent progress on the issue, Republicans say, could offer a chance to reboot a contentious discussion on panhandling that they think has been unfairly cast as an attempt to kick homeless people out of Downtown.

Barring an unexpected veto, the ordinance approved Monday would require the city to offer help to homeless people it displaces from camps. The sponsor, Democratic Councilman Leroy Robinson, said it was a direct response to police breaking up a Davidson Street homeless camp in August 2013, displacing its residents.

The camp was shut down because of public health issues, but Robinson says the city didn’t treat those who were kicked out "fairly, adequately or sufficiently."

Under the new ordinance, the city would have to offer to store a person's personal items for up to 60 days in a 96-gallon container — the same size as the city's residential trash bins. The belongings would be stored on the second floor of the Arrestee Processing Center, where the city is establishing the Reuben Engagement Center for the homeless.

The city also would have to designate organizations to help each person find transitional housing and other services, such as drug or alcohol rehab or mental health care. And, barring emergencies, the city would have to provide camp residents 15 days notice before closing a camp, and its nonprofit partners would have to find transitional housing before a homeless person could be removed from public property.

Although the proposal offers no guarantee of long-term shelter, Bill Moreau, an attorney who has worked on homeless issues for more than a decade, called it a "very, very important piece of legislation."

"It will cause this community to pause before displacing these people from these camps," Moreau said at a committee hearing in January. "It will create a moment where the eyes of the community will be on all of us to ask the question, 'are we properly providing services and more importantly housing for our homeless neighbors?' "

Between Monday's proposal and the authorization last year to create an engagement center, Moreau said, "it was actually in one year more progress than we’ve made in the previous seven on this issue.”

The Robinson ordinance, scaled back from an earlier version introduced more than a year ago, was remarkable for its bipartisan support and lack of contentiousness. The next debate on the subject likely won't be.

Republicans said they might look to bring back an anti-panhandling measure in the coming months, though they insist there is a distinction between the city's vulnerable homeless population and many of the panhandlers who operate in the heart of Downtown.

"The two really should not be confused," Minority Leader Mike McQuillen said. "They’re two separate issues."

Downtown business and tourism groups have singled out panhandling as a major complaint of visitors, who said it was a nuisance and a safety concern. "I had one say that they were afraid they were going to get mugged," Chris Gahl, Visit Indy's vice president of marketing and communications, said in a recent interview with IndyStar.

Republican Councilman Jeff Miller, who has been a vocal advocate for homeless assistance in the past, said the timing of the last panhandling proposal was poor, in hindsight.

Now, he said, "we're making it clear that homelessness is important to us. I think in the grander scheme of things, we can now go back and say the panhandling (ordinance) never was about trying to suppress the homeless and push people out of Downtown."

But McQuillen said those discussions haven't developed beyond some in the minority caucus. And there's no indication Republicans will have any more success than last time when they reach across the aisle to Democrats, who control the council and the mayor's office.

Unless there are significant changes from the last proposal, Council Vice President Zach Adamson said, he wouldn't support any new attempt to restrict panhandling. The 2013 proposal died amid pushback from artists and street performers who said the ordinance would bar them from performing Downtown for tips.

“There’s no real way to limit panhandling without saying they can’t do it, either,” said Adamson, a Democrat.

Moreover, he said he's not interested in being a part of a "Band-Aid solution" for a societal problem that affects virtually every big city in the country.

“We’re constantly dealing with the superficial symptoms of a larger problem but not really concerning ourselves with what the larger problem is,” Adamson said. “I understand that a lot of these people aren’t homeless, but a lot of these people are at least very, very poor.”

Call IndyStar reporter Brian Eason at (317) 444-6129. Follow him on Twitter: @brianeason.