Several attendees at Tuesday’s Boulder City Council meeting lambasted a staff proposal to increase the number of city employees who sweep encampments of people experiencing homelessness and to install boulders and steep grading to prevent further camping.
The proposal, which staff estimated could cost somewhere between $600,000 and $950,000, was one of several an interdepartmental group of city staff suggested to combat a perceived methamphetamine problem in the community.
Resident Evan Ravitz said Boulder has adopted the model of the Drug War in responding to homelessness, and $900,000 would be better used to build tiny homes rather than for the surveillance and criminalizing of people experiencing homelessness.
You’re torturing them to death,” he said during public comment at Tuesday’s meeting. “Stop”
More than a dozen audience members waved signs, including ones that read “Stop The Attack On People Experiencing Homelessness.” Those signs were provided by Safe Access For Everyone, or SAFE, a self-described coalition of community advocates and people with lived homeless experience advocating for adequate shelter services in the city.
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