Council greenlights Superstition Springs shelter

Jul. 27—Just before the Mesa City Council went into recess on July 11, members made a big decision amid conflicting opinion.

During the study session before the July 11 meeting, Council directed staff to begin the process of purchasing an 85-room hotel near the Superstition Springs Center to be used as an emergency overnight shelter for unhoused individuals.

Staff will start the process by sending a letter of intent to purchase to the owner of the Sleep Inn at 6347 E. Southern Ave. City Manager Chris Brady described the owner as a "willing seller."

Brady said the move is just the beginning and the project would come back to Council several times before it is completed.

The green light to start the purchase came over strong objections from Councilman Kevin Thompson, who represents the district where the shelter would be located.

"I won't support this project moving forward," he told staff and his colleagues.

Thompson's objections were countered by statements of support from a majority of Council, who viewed the purchase of the hotel using American Rescue Plan Act dollars as a way to save the city money long-term and strengthen the city's current emergency shelter program.

Currently, the city leases 85 rooms in a hotel in District 2 in central Mesa for its Off the Streets emergency shelter services. The city partners with nonprofit Community Bridges to operate the program.

With the purchase of the Sleep Inn hotel, the city would stop leasing hotel rooms and transfer the program to the city-owned hotel.

The change would help the city fix its costs on the program, staff told the council. Mesa currently pays $1.75 million per year to lease hotel space.

In recent months, the council has also expressed an eagerness to identify ARPA projects like this, since there's a fear that the federal government may try to recover unspent recovery funds in the future.

"I guess I'll be the lone NIMBY on council," Thompson said before describing his concerns with the project, referencing the acronym Not In My Back Yard.

Thompson's objections boiled down to two issues: first, he thought converting the hotel to a shelter could lead to the decline of the Superstition Springs Mall, which might require investment from the city to revitalize the area later on.

He referenced the defunct Fiesta Mall in east Mesa as an example of what the city should try to avoid at Superstition Springs.

On a more philosophical level, he objected to the city assuming responsibility for sheltering homeless people.

"I don't know when it became government's responsibility" to house people, Thompson said. "Homeless people in our community seem to have more rights than our own citizens when it comes to park space that they've paid for, but yet we can't evict somebody off of."

Mayor John Giles said the city needed to provide emergency shelter in order to remove campers from public property.

"Any of us that have traveled recently, to California certainly, but anywhere — Texas, Back East — tents are ubiquitous in public rights-of-way and encampments, and not so much in Mesa," Giles said.

"We do enforce urban camping law in Mesa," Giles continued, "and the reason we legally can do that is because we're providing emergency shelter."

Giles was referencing the 2018 U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decision in Martin vs. Boise.

In that case, the court ruled that the city of Boise violated plaintiffs' Eighth Amendment rights against cruel and unusual punishment by citing individuals for sleeping on public property on nights when the city's homeless shelter was full.

The court found that the practice essentially criminalized not having a place to sleep, which violated the Constitutional prohibition on excessive bail, fines and punishment.

The ruling has been widely interpreted to mean that in order to remove homeless people from public property, cities must have emergency shelter available.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of the decision in 2019.

On the issue of the shelter impacting the Superstition Springs Mall area, Thompson said he was skeptical of some of the "good neighbor" measures staff proposed for the shelter.

City staff described many tactics for harmonizing with the surrounding area.

The city said the shelter would not take walk-ups and would operate on referrals only. There would be a police presence on site and the facility would have rules against hanging out in the parking lot.

The city would also set up a community line for nearby businesses and residents to call in with questions or concerns.

Thompson took the most umbrage with the promise of "trespass enforcement for surrounding businesses" listed in staff's presentation.

"I drive the area right now and there's homeless people all along Southern Avenue," Thompson said.

"They're hanging out in the Walmart parking lot. They're hanging out in the Taco Bell parking lot," Thompson continued. "There's not a single officer that's out there patrolling to trespass them unless I text or call the lieutenant ... and so I'm not sure that the trespass enforcement surrounding businesses is actually a real thing."

The city manager's response to Thompson's concerns was that the Off the Streets program has not had problems with the surrounding community at its current location.

"We wouldn't even be able to have this conversation if the current Off the Streets program wasn't working today, right? We wouldn't want to replicate it," Brady said.

City staff pointed out that since the inception of Off the Streets in 2020, 575 people have been through the program and ended up staying off the street, a 74% success rate.

Councilwoman Julie Spilsbury, whose district would lose the shelter if it's moved to the Superstition Springs location, seconded Brady's praise of the current program.

"This current program is in my district, and I'm actually sad to lose it because I've heard really great things from the neighborhood around it — that crime has gone down and it's safer with police presence there," Spilsbury said.

"I think it's money well spent. I think it's filling a need that we have," Spilsbury added.