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Has the tent city saved Victoria money? City hopes to find out

Victoria will try to get some hard data on whether the courthouse tent city has actually saved the city money.
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The tent city sprang up last year on the courthouse lawn.

Victoria will try to get some hard data on whether the courthouse tent city has actually saved the city money.

Councillors have endorsed a call from councillors Ben Isitt and Jeremy Loveday to have staff and police provide breakdowns of the resources devoted to outdoor sheltering in the past 12 months, including the location, frequency and nature of service calls and the estimated total costs.

They have also asked staff to try to get from the province its costs — actual and anticipated — for the tent city on the courthouse lawn since November. Staff are also to provide available data on changes in available shelter spaces over the past 12 months.

Isitt, an advocate of establishing a dedicated camping area near downtown, said he wants to know the impact the tent city has had on city costs associated with tenting in parks.

“I think we have to have a data-driven approach to decision-making,” he said.

“I don’t think we should be afraid of what kind of information this report will provide. It will just allow us to have a fulsome discussion of: Is disbursement of vulnerable people back into the park system desirable? Is that the best outcome we can hope for if this injunction process unfolds or are there alternatives we could consider?”

Loveday said the tent city provides an opportunity “to do some comparative analysis in our own park system.”

“I’m supportive of this motion because I want all the information we can [have] when we make decisions about sheltering and housing in our city,” Loveday said.

The provincial numbers are needed to get a fuller understanding of the situation, Coun. Geoff Young said.

“What’s important is that we not simply hear a report that says ‘This has been great. Our costs have fallen in our parks,’ without knowing that the province has been absorbing a lot of those costs,” Young said.

In 2015, city officials estimated that several hundred people were routinely overnighting in city parks and green spaces every year, leading to noise and nuisance complaints as well as destruction of ecosystems and the accumulation of mounds of trash that have to be hauled away.

At the time, officials pegged the cost at more than $600,000, including police, bylaw and parks staff time.

The city has been wrestling with the issue of campers in parks since 2008, when the B.C. Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional to prohibit someone from erecting temporary shelter in a park if there are no available shelter beds. That decision was upheld by the B.C. Court of Appeal in 2009.

In response, the city amended its parks bylaw to allow people to erect tents in parks between 7 p.m. (8 p.m. during daylight time) and 7 a.m. Bylaw officers and police routinely conduct patrols to wake people and move them along in the mornings.

But tenters discovered a loophole when they set up camp on the greenspace beside the courthouse. Because the provincially owned space is not a city park, campers were not subject to being moved along.

After taking steps to provide shelter options for 128 people, the province is now attempting to clear the courthouse property of campers through an injunction.

A notice of application filed in B.C. Supreme Court alleges the campers have compromised health and safety in the area by creating fire hazards, defecating in and around the camp, leaving used needles and syringes in the area, and engaging in criminal activity, such as drug trafficking.

bcleverley@timescolonist.com