May 19, 2025
City of Eureka Mayor and City Council Members,
I was dismayed to learn that the Eureka City Council was bringing Bill No. 1040-C.S. back for a public hearing before what I and many others understood was an amount of time needed to explore other options for addressing homelessness in Eureka.
At the March 18, 2025 meeting of the Eureka City Council, the end of a very long night as the minutes of the meeting state: “By consensus, the Council provided direction to staff to work on 8 points prior to agendizing the ordinance at a future meeting.” My perception of the idea proposed by Councilmember Castellano was that a working group would review these items and bring a report back to the council regarding how these other efforts are working and might constitute replacement “tools” for overcoming the challenges Bill No. 1040-C.S. was designed to address.
At the April 15, 2025 meeting of the Eureka City Council, Councilmember Bauer added consideration of Bill No. 1040-C.S. to the agenda of the regular Council meeting on May 20, 2025 with the support of Councilmember Moulton and Mayor Bergel. This is unfortunate. It appears that two Councilmembers and the Mayor do not believe that the “8 points” which were listed in the meeting (but not on the minutes for the March 18, 2025 meeting) have been worked on by staff or a working group in a sufficient amount to gauge their effectiveness as a replacement for Bill No. 1040-C.S. Rather, the two Councilmembers and the Mayor undid the previous action the Council had taken by motion and vote. They did this through agenda setting “by consensus.” If the two Councilmembers and the Mayor desired a date certain for staff “work” on the eight items to be completed and added to the agenda for discussion and review leading to a vote on Bill No. 1040-C.S., a discussion of how much time that would take could have been offered in the agenda setting phase. Instead, citizens were witness to an end run around the previous direction of the Council.
This manipulation of the process does nothing but increase distrust of government when (as all Councilmembers have stated):
1) we have made enormous strides at changing the methods of our police force in interacting with unhoused people,
2) we have done a recognized outsized amount of progress in actually confronting the causes of homelessness in our town via housing policy
3) we have as a community increased our ability to provide actual relief to those experiencing homelessness.
Important to all of this discussion is to acknowledge that despite our increased efforts and increased results, the problem is growing faster than we can address it. The cause of the increase in challenges related to homelessness are factors outside the control of City government and citizens of Eureka in a private capacity as well. We will be seeing more homelessness and more challenges related to it despite our best efforts. This does not mean that we must resort to tactics that contravene our values as a community.
We have a golden opportunity to show the community that we have the ability to evaluate the myriad tools offered to us as a city and to choose the ones that work and that do our best to guarantee dignity for all residents. The presented options of threaten imprisonment or do nothing is a false choice. We are doing many things right and can choose more options that will do right. The bill before you tonight is not one of these.
It is time for the City Council to continue to say yes to all the work the city does to help and to say no to using the threat of imprisonment as a tool to force people into city programs. Please vote to reject Bill No. 1040-C.S. and carry on with the work of finding tools that are in alignment with our values.
Solomon Everta
Solomon Everta 