As complaints mount, Escambia seeking options to curb panhandling and vagrancy

William Van Horn is a longtime Warrington resident and business owner. He owns commercial rental property throughout Escambia County including several strip centers on Navy Boulevard and in Brent.

Both are busy, high-traffic areas that not only attract customers ready to do business with Van Horn’s tenants, but also many homeless individuals who camp, loiter and panhandle.

He said there’s a problem every day as a result, from complaints about vagrants running off customers to trashing the property.

“Our biggest expense right now on Navy is probably property cleanup and upkeep from homeless,” said Van Horn, of Van Horn Development. “They're the largest trash generator we found, because they'll go into dumpsters, dumpster diving into the restaurant ones and dump it, and it spreads throughout the parking lot.”

Van Horn said one homeless person even took the time to break a four-digit code on a padlock and snuck into one of his spaces and set up camp to live there.

In Brent, where hundreds of people are camping in the woods on county property off North Palafox Street, Van Horn said there are similar problems, and confrontations between vagrants and business owners sometimes become violent.

“I’ve had tenants get into fist fights with them and end up with their jaw broken,” Van Horn said. “We've dealt with our fair share of issues with the homeless in this area and certain ones you expect, but this public vagrancy has become a really big issue for everyone, and a lot of people don't really realize that it can touch them very fast.”

Van Horn lives in Escambia County Commissioner Mike Kohler’s district. He is one of many residents and business owners Kohler said he has heard from regarding problems stemming from vagrancy. In fact, Kohler said homelessness and panhandling tops the list of complaints from most of them.

For the past several months he has met with other local leaders, including Escambia County Sheriff Chip Simmons, about what can be done to curb some of the issues that come with vagrancy, like camping and panhandling.

They decided to take a closer look at county ordinances and determine if some could be changed.

“I'm going to sit down with the sheriff and County Attorney Allison Rogers and we're going to go through how we can strengthen either panhandling or some of the codes so that the Sheriff's Department can have a more appropriate response,” Kohler said.

Will stronger codes help?

Currently, there is no ban against panhandling or overnight camping in public right-of-way.

The last effort made to ban panhandling was in 2017 when the city of Pensacola passed an ordinance prohibiting people from asking for donations in much of downtown Pensacola.

The Americans Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit challenging the ordinance, saying it could violate free speech and due process rights of those impacted by the law. The city voted to repeal the ban and the ACLU dropped the lawsuit.

Escambia Sheriff Chip Simmons said he’s keeping legal challenges like that in mind as he discusses options with county leaders.

“The right of way is where it gets to be a little cloudy with regards to constitutional challenges,” Simmons said. “A couple of our ordinances like soliciting and panhandling, another one is unlawful to approach a motor vehicle being operated on public roadway, and then overnight camping. There are four of them that I know that our legal staff has highlighted, and they tell me that these are all in some manner under constitutional challenge.”

Simmons said if the county wants homeless campers off county property, he will remove them when asked, but when it comes ordinances like banning panhandling, he said the county will need to come up with language that they can enforce in the face of legal challenges.

“Being homeless is not illegal. Standing up in the right-of-way is not illegal. There are two things that I don't know that you can get around and you have to balance the humanitarian aspect of things with the business owners’ rights,” said Simmons. “We're getting reports that some rather despicable things are taking place and there's just some stuff that I don't think that business owners should have to deal with, but we can't be there at every waking moment.”

Simmons said the county needs a long-term plan and goals to effectively make a change in their approach to dealing with issues related to homelessness. If enforcement is the focus, he said more time and manpower would need to be devoted to it.

“If the Board of County Commissioners wants to provide me with some of that money, then I can create a homeless engagement unit and they can do nothing but spend time dealing with the homeless issue,” said Simmons. “If we catch them in the roadway, then we can cite them. If we catch them defecating or urinating in public, then we can charge them with that. There are a lot of things that are taking place that I don't think that a business owner or even a property owner should have to deal with, and we would like to be able to help out with that.”

What can be done?

City and county leaders have been struggling with how to address growing campsites like the one in Brent, as well as dealing with homelessness in general.

Opening Doors of Northwest Florida is the area’s Continuum of Care or leading agency on homelessness. The agency has just begun the process of creating a new governance board to align the organization with the federal government's strategic plan to reduce homelessness by 25% by 2025.

Incremental changes: Pensacola's lead homelessness agency takes 1st steps toward leadership reform. Here's why

Van Horn is also vice chairman of the Warrington Revitalization Committee and he said besides code enforcement, they’re biggest issue is with problems related to homelessness.

He said he would like to see a stronger CoC, as well as the city and county partner together to better tackle an issue that crosses city/county lines.

“Especially this past year,” Van Horn explained. “It was not typically an issue, but it has become one over the past year specifically ever since, the camps under the interstate overpass closed. After they cleared it out there, this encampment style of living kind of came to full fruition in that time.

“If the county and city were to do some sort of joint collaborative effort, I think would be the best-case scenario,” Van Horn concluded. “Something needs to be done.”

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Escambia County panhandling plagues business owners, roadways