We received informal word on Tuesday, 5/8/18, from low-level people in and around government, that the approximately 70 homeless people on the Joe Rodota Trail will not be evicted in the near-term. We have no idea how solid this information is, not do we know what “near-term” means. Maybe we have a week or two, or a month. Maybe more.

This is how Sonoma county often works. They have put up undated eviction notices on the Joe Rodota Trail, but assure us via carefully planned innuendo they don’t mean it. It lets them make cruel, expedient policy decisions, and then either act on them when public attention wavers, or change policy in reaction to media attention. It’s a lawyer-infected approach that relies completely on backroom conversations kept secret from the public. Even officials sympathetic to our cause are pressured to be silent on policy discussions and direction, in the name of legal liability. They have perfected this approach since the slaughter of Andy Lopez by Deputy Erick Gelhaus in 2014 created tens of millions of dollars of liability for the county.

We have over 5 months of official silence on encampments by the county and Santa Rosa in all public meetings of our leaders. A half-dozen major evictions have occurred during that time, without a word in official public meetings that even acknowledges they occurred. During that time,  many, many furious discussions and many cruelties toward hundreds of people have been managed outside the public eye, all accomplished via this technique of avoiding legal liability.

Our officials mock the notion of democracy. We wait in vain so far for a single public official to stand and proclaims it as such.

As of late 2017, the encampment problem was no longer managed by the county supervisors or city council members, but by a small cadre of government lawyers and  consultant lawyers who meet in closed (secret) session with officials to get permission for their actions. Because of the occasional timeliness requirements, and inconvenience to busy, uninformed leaders, this practice has led over time to the odd need for us to work through these lawyers on the smallest of details, cutting leadership out entirely. We resent this mockery of democracy greatly, and are desperate to have these negotiations with our leaders directly, via agendized public discussion, the way intended by America’s system of government.

We are working exclusively with a county lawyer now to negotiate a portapotty for the 70 people on the Joe Rodota Trail, because no official in government we’ve contacted– county, parks, or city– has the courage or sense on their own to protect the park, the public, or the constitutional rights of those with no other legal place to live.