City begins sweeping homeless RV residents off Ensign Road
At least six RVs were displaced Thursday morning from a section of Ensign Road that bumps up against the entrance to the Providence St. Peter Hospital emergency room.
It was the first phase of a two-part sweep; the second phase is scheduled for Jan. 12 and will remove dozens more RVs extending down to Woodard Creek.
For over a year, Providence has been asking the city and county to remove the sprawling vehicle settlement, which has grown steadily northward to cover much of Ensign Road.
A planned sweep of the entire settlement was called off in October 2020. In September 2021, Providence asked the county to remove just the northern half of the settlement near Lilly Road, which they say is blocking ambulance access to the emergency room.
“Because the city and Providence has allowed this to grow, we are impacting more people now than if this had been done two or three months ago,” said Darrin Goss, CEO of Providence St. Peter Hospital.
Providence had offered $100,000 to support a planned RV parking site on Carpenter Road, which was abandoned by the county last month. Goss said Providence is asking for that money to go to supporting displaced RV residents.
The Olympia City Council voted earlier this week to purchase a 5.9-acre property where it plans to open a sanctioned RV parking site, but there is no timeline yet for that facility.
On Thursday, city workers loaded up bike parts, shopping carts, tables, and other possessions from an RV whose occupant had left earlier. The city compensated the RV resident $2,500 for the vehicle and a small boat that was parked in front, according to homeless response coordinator Kim Kondrat.
Kondrat did not know where the displaced RV residents went.
The RV and boat were the only vehicles towed, Kondrat said. The others had moved on their own prior to the Thursday morning deadline set by the city.
On Thursday morning, orange drums were visible along the curb, along with a-frames that read “no parking.”
The people who left this week were among the more recent arrivals to the settlement. The second part of the sweep in January will affect RV residents who have lived on Ensign for longer and are engaged in case management, according to Olympia Mutual Aid Partners (OlyMAP), an outreach group that is contracted to provide support through Thurston County’s “scattered-site” encampment support program.
Of the three encampments OlyMAP is contracted to work with — including Deschutes Parkway and Wheeler Avenue — Ensign Road is the second to be swept.
“Even though we had built it into our scope of work to follow residents where they go, we really expected to follow them into housing,” said Becca Chrisler, who works with OlyMAP as the site support coordinator for the Wheeler Avenue camps.
“A sweep really impacts that work that we’re able to do and it severely impacts the progress that people make for themselves as well as with us,” she added. “And so that’s what is really hard.”
This story was originally published December 16, 2021 at 12:35 PM.
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