City of Austin homeless camp cleanups

A city memo says from mid-May to the beginning of June, homeless encampment management teams visited 127 camps and removed 303 tons of debris. David Gray, director of Austin Homeless Strategies and Operations, says they wanted to have a consistent process for cleanups. One of the challenges that we identified is residents would call 311, the city would go out and clean an encampment, it would stay clean for a day or two, and then people would reappear. And from a resident perspective, it looked like the city was really doing nothing. Gray says they want to do this with compassion. Outreach will always happen before a cleanup. Data shows 35 people were connected to shelter. There was capacity for all of them. Nine accepted other non-shelter support services and 44 people did not accept shelter. Five camping citations and four criminal trespass notices were issued. There were no arrests. Cleanups are driven by 311 requests, of which there were 852. That does include duplicates for the same camps. The memo says the average time from a 311 request to site assessment is about five days. The memo says 28% of camps have people come back. So when we launched this new initiative, we launched it with the goal of revisiting encampments to try to keep areas clear. And for the large part, we're seeing that about three fourths of the encampments that we've addressed through this initiative have remained clear. There's about 25 28% that haven't. Back in April, we did a seven on your side story about neighbors who were concerned about a massive homeless encampment under the bridge at ST Elmo and Vincent. We came back out here today and it does look better, though there is still some trash, some personal belongings and at least one person sleeping under the bridge. The city told us in April they maintain the part right under the bridge and the train operator maintains the area right by the track, which still has a lot of trash. There's no estimate on how much the cleanup efforts cost yet that will be in the department's next update. Every department that participates in the initiative is using money from their operating budget to make this happen. And a lot of those dollars tied back to different parts of the city budget. So it's really important that we give the residents an accurate accounting of how much money is being spent on this initiative. A dashboard is still in the works so people can see where cleanups are happening.