‘Bad stuff’ leads to push for total ban on Fargo homeless camps

After just a few weeks of trying it out, Fargo’s plan to give homeless individuals with nowhere to go a break from the city’s recently passed ban on encampments in public areas has been declared a bust. The threat to public safety that Fargo Mayor Tim Mahoney saw firsthand at some of the makeshift camps convinced him once and for all of the imperative for a complete ban, according to The Forum.

“We’re going to stop camping. We’ve learned from it,” Mahoney said. “For any people in the room that don’t know, we went down to the campsites. We took four dump truck loads of junk out of those areas — a lot of needles, a lot of bad stuff.”

The Fargo City Commission passed a ban on camping on public property in September but built in temporary exceptions for people with nowhere else to go. After the campsites were cleared by the city at the end of October, the city came back the next week and there were 30 more people there, Mahoney said.

“It was just a recurrent, recurrent cycle, so we realized that didn’t work,” he said.

As an alternative, Mahoney wants city commissioners to consider his proposal to open a hub with a wide range of social and medical services under the umbrella of the Fargo Community Care and Deflection Center. The ambitious proposal was recently unveiled to numerous community groups that assist the homeless and will be presented to city commissioners on December 23.

“So, a police officer picks up somebody with a mental health problem, they can spend three to six hours with that person on the street trying to deal with it,” Mahoney said. “Deflection centers, if you have them, the officer can take that person right to the deflection center, and they’re taken care of.”

Rather than people being arrested and taken to an already at capacity jail, they could receive mental health treatment or be transported to an emergency room or hospital.

The center would serve clients throughout the community and would not be a shelter, Mahoney told The Forum.

Many of the details remain up in the air, including a location and the proposed service providers.

A full list of proposed services will be shared at the Dec. 23 meeting, he said, but the Southeast Human Service Center — a state-run agency that provides behavioral health services — has been in talks about providing mental health care at the center.

The city is looking at areas near downtown to locate the center and is considering several sites, Mahoney told The Forum. He declined to name specific locations.

Mahoney says funding for the estimated $12 million deflection center would come from a variety of sources, including $2.5 million from Fargo taxpayers. It’s just one of the many questions still to be answered in the city’s most far-reaching proposal yet to deal with homelessness.