Thurston County abandons RV safe lot plan again
A county plan to open a short-term safe parking site for 20 RV residents appears to be dead after a key official withdrew her support for the project last week.
Thurston County Commissioner Carolina Mejia is the decisive vote on the three-member county board. She confirmed Friday that she considers the site, located at Martin Way and Carpenter Road just outside Lacey city limits, to be off the table.
Mejia initially supported the plan but abruptly reversed course last week, voting to strike an agreement from the agenda that would have moved forward on a partnership with the city of Olympia to run the site.
Mejia told The Olympian that her opinion changed after she discovered that permits for the temporary site issued under the county’s emergency housing ordinance could be appealed.
“There are some permits that can be appealed and others that can’t, and so I was under the impression that since this was on a temporary basis, it couldn’t be appealed,” Mejia said. “After reviewing it closer with both our staff and the director of community development, just how the timeline would play out when it’s appealed, it just didn’t make sense for staff to be going through all this effort.”
Mejia says her change of heart had little to do with the dozens of angry neighbors and business owners who opposed the site, but rather about the logistical problems posed by a legal challenge that could knock several months off an already short six-month timeline.
The safe lot is needed because the large number of RVs parked on Ensign Road are clogging access to Providence St. Peter Hospital’s emergency department. The 20 RVs would be moved from Ensign into the new, temporary lot.
How would an appeal work?
Vehicle parking sites and homeless encampments can be permitted under the county’s emergency housing ordinance, which first passed in 2019 and was amended most recently in May 2021 but has never been used. The ordinance allows many code requirements to be waived, with a few exceptions for fire safety and sanitation requirements.
The county applied for a site permit on Oct. 25. That permit will still be evaluated and either approved, denied, or approved with modifications, according to Joshua Cumming, Director of Community Planning and Economic Development (CPED).
If the permit were granted, the county could begin moving RV residents in immediately. However, if just one person decided to appeal the decision to grant a permit, the county would have to stop moving new RVs onto the site while courts decided the merits of the appeal, which could take months.
Mejia thinks an appeal is guaranteed because of neighborhood opposition. An online petition called “Oppose the Carpenter Road Encampment” had garnered over 1,000 signatures as of Monday.
Mejia also raised the prospect of an appeal from the city of Lacey, saying she heard from City Council members there who opposed the project. She declined to name specific council members she spoke to, but said “they’ve shown their lack of support throughout this whole process.”
“They’re not in support of it, and they’re going to try and do everything to stop it,” Mejia said.
Lacey Mayor Andy Ryder would not say if the city was considering an appeal.
“I felt like we were still so early in the process that that’s a question that is pretty hard to answer,” Ryder said.
Lacey sent a letter to the county on Nov. 3 outlining their conditions for how the site should be managed, including 24/7 security, case management, limited site improvements, capping the site’s use to six months, and a prohibition on drug use. Those details were included in the county’s plan.
“If that site wouldn’t have been a managed site as laid out in our letter to the county, we would have a lot of concerns,” Ryder said.
The letter went on to prescribe Lacey’s preferred vision for a homelessness policy countywide. It focused on enforcing anti-camping ordinances, protecting private property from trespassing, and enforcing “existing rules, standards, and regulations” on public property and rights of way.
What’s next for Ensign Road?
Ryder said he recognizes that the Ensign Road situation is “an emergency” and an RV site is needed. If a site was located in Lacey, he said the council would support it if it were “properly managed.”
Mejia still supports opening a longer-term RV safe lot at a property the city of Olympia plans to buy on Franz Anderson Road. There is no timeline for that project.
In the meantime, it’s unclear what the county will do about the situation on Ensign Road.
Providence CEO Darin Goss said he is disappointed in the decision but will keep working with the city and county to find a solution. Providence had offered a $100,000 contribution to the RV site, and those funds remain on the table for future projects, Goss said.
“We’ll continue to collaborate with the city and county on the longer-term solution, but I don’t know if that will be a reality as well, given our experience with the short-term solution,” he said.
Mejia said she was “already looking for other options” for a temporary RV site but declined to offer details about what those other options were. The Regional Housing Council reviewed more than 200 sites before recommending the Carpenter Road site.
This story was originally published November 17, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
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