WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — A new Hartford policy aims to regulate homeless encampments around the town, while also providing resources to members of the homeless community, according to Town Manager Tracy Yarlott-Davis.
“This comes from a place of human caring. We don’t want people living in unsafe places or dealing with vermin,” Yarlott-Davis said in an interview Thursday, adding that the policy aims to balance the needs of the homeless community with those of the rest of Hartford’s residents.
The Hartford Encampment Response Policy, which Yarlott-Davis and her staff presented to the Selectboard this week, and which will be published on the town page by Tuesday, outlines “high sensitivity” areas of town that should not be home to encampments, including parks and schools, waterways, floodplains and critical wildlife habits, according to an overview of the policy published in the Selectboard packet this week.
During the board meeting, Yarlott-Davis also said part of the concern for having homeless camps near or in parks and schools has to do with members of the community with criminal records that prohibit them from being within a certain distance of children.
If that’s the case in an encampment near a park or school, the person staying there may be asked to relocate.
Yarlott-Davis previously worked as an auditor in Oakland and Berkeley, Calif., both of which have a large homeless population. She said the two cities have long worked on ways to help the homeless community, while also addressing the needs of other residents.
The policy also outlines what kinds of campsite conditions won’t be allowed, including those that have biological hazards, vermin, excessive amounts of garbage or outside fires.
Yarlott-Davis said the policy is “complaint-based,” meaning that the town doesn’t plan on keeping a list of the various encampments currently in existence, but they do plan to respond to a campsite if someone — such as a landowner or passerby — notices a site and calls the town.
In that case, she said police, fire, town officials and the health department will meet at the site to determine the best steps forward.
In some cases that might involve asking people staying at the site to clean up, but in others — especially if the site is positioned in a “high sensitivity” area — that may mean asking the person to leave the campsite and helping them find a place to stay, either in a hospital, a shelter, or with the state’s motel voucher program, Yarlott-Davis said.
Yarlott-Davis said she decided to implement the policy after town officials recently had to break up an encampment on Prospect Street without a set of standards for encampments and camp locations.
Former Selectboard member Simon Dennis, an advocate for the homeless, said he’s hopeful that the policy “could be carried out in a way that would give a preference toward not disturbing existing campsites.”
“I strongly feel that should be the approach of the town,” he said, adding that breaking up campsites can create an “enormous sense of disruption” to the people staying there.
Dennis, who currently sits with Yarlott-Davis on the town’s Committee on an Emergency Shelter to find another living space for the growing homeless population, said the problem of homelessness in Hartford has deep roots, and that there is a severe shortage of affordable housing in the Upper Valley.
“Breaking up a particular campsite doesn’t do anything to resolve the problem, which is systemic in nature,” Dennis said.
Yarlott-Davis said the ultimate goal of the policy is one of safety, and making sure people have a clean space to live in.
“That’s not always the case. People can get kind of stuck and not know that there are resources and people who care about them,” she said.
The Hartford area has seen a boom in the homeless population amid the COVID-19 pandemic, due in part to the state’s motel voucher program, which has brought more people to White River Junction, former Town Manager Brannon Godfrey said last summer.
At the same time, the pandemic has forced the closure of a popular seasonal shelter and forced the Upper Valley Haven — another adult shelter — to limit its number of beds to reduce the risk of transmission.
In an effort to combat the issue, the Committee on Emergency Shelter, which formed in January, has tried to identify spaces to set up a new shelter, that could include a handful of small, individual micro-dwellings.
The group met on April 15 to discuss the latest location they’re looking at off Christian Street, according to meeting minutes.
The group is currently awaiting a feasibility study on the property, and plans to talk to neighbors about the idea.
Anna Merriman can be reached at amerriman@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.