Volunteers regularly feeding homeless people in Esther Short Park over the winter have run into questions about food handling and safety from Clark County Public Health since their story hit this newspaper and other media a few weeks ago. But because the group is informal and essentially leaderless, those questions still haven’t been answered satisfactorily, according to a health department official.
Clark County is “leaning” toward asking the “Free Hot Soup (Vancouver)” group to get a food permit, Joe Laxson, public health program manager, said.
Meanwhile, the group also has run into the park’s busy season — when it hosts festivals, concerts, special events and the popular weekend Vancouver Farmers Market — and the group has moved over to the nearby Turtle Place plaza, perhaps permanently.
“Actually, we like it over there,” said Shelly Gaylor, one member of the informal group, which spun off from a grass-roots Portland effort and is coordinated largely through a members-only Facebook page. Gaylor said a recent Saturday drew 70 hungry people to Turtle Place — more than had been usual for the park — and she wondered if that’s because of the growing controversy over free food and leftover litter.
“Some have been saying they know they’re not welcome in the park,” she said.
The city of Vancouver recently finished adding new center supports and arm rests to all park benches that didn’t already have them. That effectively blocks using the benches as beds — which is one of several reasons why this will be the “new standard” for all Vancouver park benches, Parks Director Julie Hannan said.
Neighbor Daniel Mitchell, who has spearheaded an effort to crack down on littering and bad behavior in and around Esther Short Park, had one word for that: “progress,” he said.
‘Public affair’
If the Free Hot Soup group is regularly preparing and handing out homemade food to the public, Laxson said, the county will likely ask them to get a food permit.
“We still need to connect. We have not had sufficient communication with them,” Laxson said. The health department routinely monitors the Vancouver Farmers Market on Saturdays, but last weekend an official who approached and questioned the Free Hot Soup group “got a lot of mixed messages” about their activities, Laxson said. Officials will be back this Saturday, he said.
The agency’s interest is making sure nobody gets sick, he said. Homeless people can be more “highly susceptible to health complications” than the generally better-fed and fortified public at large, Laxson said. “Foodborne illness can be especially severe in this demographic. We want to be able to control that,” he said.
That doesn’t mean Public Health opposes the effort overall, he added.
“We are very supportive of your vision,” he wrote on the group’s Facebook page. “I know you want to keep your operation simple and we should be able to respect that desire. However, due to the fact that the group is cooking food and feeding the public, our priority is to educate your group about proper food preparation and distribution.”
Attempts to deny or redefine what they’re doing as a private affair among friends won’t fly, Laxson said.
“The soup group is trying to say they are just having a picnic with their friends and they are decentralized,” Laxson said. “But they’re at least somewhat coordinated, and they do come and offer food to people they don’t know. That’s serving the public. It’s a public affair.”
There are ways of feeding the public that wouldn’t need a permit, he said — like redistributing prepackaged food that was prepared by an approved source, like a restaurant or supermarket.
“But once you move into doing your own food prep, we get concerned. We want to be involved,” Laxson said. “If you are heating and cooling it, changing the temperature or doing extensive prep work, that really increases the chances of contamination.”
Laxson pointed out that another regular group, called the Stone Soup Community Meal, recently started serving lunch monthly at Turtle Place from 1 to 3 p.m. on the last Sunday of each month. But that effort is anchored by a permitted food business: caterer and Vancouver Farmers Market vendor Jo Foody’s Catering. Jo Foody’s got a permit “early on” for what’s become a large monthly event, Laxson said.
Reasonable rules
Some members of the Free Hot Soup group recently consulted attorney Peter Fels, who volunteers at a legal clinic for the poor every week and also is president of the board of directors of nonprofit agency Share Vancouver, which provides food, shelter and services for the hungry and homeless.
“I don’t see anything illegal in what they’re doing. They say they’re just sharing food with friends,” Fels said. As far as littering in the park goes, he said, that’s a societal problem, not something to be blamed exclusively on homeless people.
“People ought to be able to feed people in the park,” said Doug Honig, spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, based in Seattle.
The ACLU has no problem with rules that are genuinely intended to protect public health and keep parks safe and manageable, Honig said. It’s when rules are really veiled attempts to discourage people from exercising their rights that the ACLU objects.
“When you’re putting restrictions on activities relating to homelessness — when you’re making it criminal to aid the homeless — then we’d be very concerned,” he said. “If you had regulations that were not designed to protect public health but if they were really meant just to stop people from feeding people, we’d be concerned.” Honig said the ACLU hasn’t heard from anybody (other than The Columbian) regarding this issue in Esther Short Park, but “in Washington state, we’ve seen periodic efforts by various government agencies in various cities to pass laws or policies that we think interfere with the rights of homeless people. We’ve opposed ones that we feel are not reasonable,” he said.
A few years ago, Orlando, Fla., was the site of a federal court case as the city and homeless advocates tussled over large-scale efforts to feed the homeless in downtown parks. In 2011, a federal appeals court found that while the homeless and their supporters have some protected free speech rights, the city may restrict weekly events to a “time, place and manner” that is reasonable.
In Orlando, that has meant requiring any group conducting a large-scale event where food is provided to get a permit — with only two permits per year issued for any given park.
