By Crescenzo Vellucci
Vanguard Sacramento Bureau Chief
SACRAMENTO, CA – The Sacramento Homeless Union ratcheted up the pressure on its former unhoused ally Safe Ground Sacramento Wednesday, a day after filing a motion to stop SGS and city of Sacramento from terminating a lease for “Camp Resolution,” which the union said could soon dump scores of unhoused elder and disabled people into the streets.
The union said SGS “turned its back on Camp Resolution.”
SGS “has wrongfully terminated its Lease with the City of Sacramento for Camp Resolution…and given the green light to the City to close the camp…we feel it is also important to hold Mark Merin and Sacramento Safe Ground accountable and, even at this point, insist that they do the right thing and rescind their Notice of Termination of the Lease.
SGS officially notified the City of Sacramento July 23 it was terminating its ground lease agreement with the City effective Aug 10, said the union, because of an inability to “to fulfill its obligations as the leaseholder (lessee),” including supplying water, electricity and other vital services to the camp.
But, in a statement Wednesday, the homeless union charged just four months ago, “SGS Executive Director Mark Merin publicly declared that it was the City that was refusing to cooperate with his efforts to provide utilities to the Camp.
“What Safe Ground could have done then and should have done now before it terminated the Lease, was to notify the City that its failure to cooperate was a breach of the lease,” the union noted, maintaining the “City would have had an obligation to cure the breach by fully cooperating with SGS to bring water and electricity to the Camp.”
The union Wednesday added it has tried to convince “SGS to do just that but SGS refused,” adding, “This is not the first time that SGS has turned its back on Camp Resolution.
“Months ago, Safe Ground Executive Director Merin and Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg began hatching a plan to sell the property to Safe Ground, ‘temporarily’ re-locate the residents to shelters, bulldoze the property and convert it into ‘permanent’ housing without ever defining what that ‘housing’ would actually look like or how long ‘temporary’ relocation would last.”
The union Wednesday insisted “Camp Resolution was supposed to be a temporary staging ground that the City was required to keep open ‘until all residents were provided with individual, permanent, durable housing…not a ‘tiny home village,’ ‘garden sheds,’ pallet ‘homes.’”
“We have the right to re-join society, to be in neighborhoods like other people, not segregated forever in a homeless ghetto,” Camp founder Sharon Jones said in the Wednesday statement.
“And that is how everyone in Camp Resolution feels as shown by a unanimous vote in a recent general meeting of the residents,” noting the union, “by working directly with housing providers, has placed “16 of the Camp’s original residents in actual houses, actual studio units and actual one and two-bedroom apartments in neighborhoods and communities all over the Sacramento area.”
“(T)he Union has done what neither Safe Ground nor the City was willing to do,” added the union, claiming “Safe Ground Sacramento did not have to terminate the lease. It could have honored its agreement to support the residents. It could have worked WITH us to make the City keep its promises. Instead, by terminating the lease, Safe Ground has given the City the excuse they have been looking for to close the Camp and break its promise.”
The homeless union insisted Wednesday the “City has now directed Safe Ground Sacramento as the lessee to remove the residents and their possessions. Mark Merin has informed the union that Safe Ground Sacramento will not perform this function,” charging SGS won’t do it so “it can shield itself from the public spectacle of a so-called homeless advocacy group physically ejecting… primarily middle-aged and older women with disabilities.”
Promising the residents of Camp Resolution will “stand their ground,” the union predicted if SGS doesn’t attempt to evict people, it will be “small comfort to the residents if the City sends in the police to do the dirty work.”
The union emphasized Camp Resolution residents “fought to be here, they fought to stay here and they fought to make the City keep its promises, noting “the public has supported their fight with hundreds of community members, churches, students, professionals and neighbors bringing in water, food, clothing, blankets and sanitary facilities. Mobile medical units, shower stations, drivers taking residents to work, to doctor’s appointments, to the store.”
In reference to the court filing Tuesday, the union said it is hoping the “emergency motion for a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction to stop the City from closing Camp Resolution” will be granted by Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Jill H. Talley, “who has been assigned the case…which we would never have had to file if Safe Ground had not terminated the lease.”
When contacted by the Vanguard, SGS’s Merin did not respond in writing as requested.
