LOVELAND — The city of Loveland needs to deal with a growing vagrancy problem, members of the City Council agreed at their meeting Tuesday night, and the issue is complex, they said.
The topic came up during public comment time, before the council started work on its regular agenda. Later in the meeting, the council voted unanimously to spend almost $60,000 this year to transfer the Loveland Reporter-Herald archives to the museum.
On the topic of vagrancy, Clay Caldwell, owner of Mo’ Betta Gumbo, listed the problems he sees outside his downtown restaurant: “Vagrancy, panhandling, loitering, vandalism, theft, doing drugs. We have open urination, open drinking. And this is just on my corner.
“I’m past mad,” Caldwell said. “I’m to the point now where I want to be part of the solution.”
Caldwell said he’s afraid someone will be hurt in an encounter with some of the people he sees hanging around downtown.
“Is it a police issue? There’s a slice of that. Is it a community issue? Yes. Is it a city issue? Yes. Is it a faith issue? Yes,” he said. “It has to be addressed.”
Caldwell said he is willing to contribute his own money to help address the housing issue.
Loveland resident Richard Bastian followed up Caldwell’s comments to say he sees two groups in town: truly homeless people and panhandlers who aren’t trying to improve their situations and are just looking for handouts.
Bastian said he believes the community needs to be compassionate toward people who are homeless, but the disruptive behavior needs to addressed.
“The downtown development is just a wash if you don’t fix this issue,” he said.
Mayor Cecil Gutierrez said the council has made it clear that it wants to work with the community of the issue.
Council member Troy Krenning, a former police officer, asked Police Chief Bob Ticer to bring back to the council a request for a supplemental appropriation to pay for two officers to walk a foot beat in downtown on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights.
Councilman John Fogle noted that the Police Department will have an office in The Foundry development downtown 18 months from now, but he wanted to know if the chief could increase the police presence immediately.
Ticer said his department is reviving a program to put officers on bicycles but could add the foot patrols immediately. He added that he has put in the budget the purchase of two all-terrain vehicles to help officers get into the “creek bottoms” where homeless people sometimes spend time and where problems can arise.
He said his department is using data and mapping to figure out where crime and traffic problems are concentrated.
Immediately following the discussion of vagrancy and homelessness, resident Olivia Lowe went to the microphone to ask the council what it is doing about detoxification and mental health facilities.
Lowe said she believes the police would have less to do with disruptive people if the detox and mental health problems were addressed.
She was told that the city didn’t have a specific plan but that city officials had just met with Larimer County and Fort Collins representatives to discuss the problem, and the county has created an office of behavioral health.
On yet another related topic, the council approved a resolution granting affordable housing designation to the Habitat for Humanity neighborhood under construction in the Sierra Valley development in south Loveland.
Council member Steve Olson asked Habitat representative Vince Neely to talk about the work the nonprofit does in Loveland, and several council members expressed their gratitude for the organization’s efforts to deal with the lack of accessible housing in the area.
The question of whether to approve a supplemental budget appropriation this year to move the Reporter-Herald’s paper archives into the Loveland Museum/Gallery’s new storage facility also prompted extensive discussion from the audience and on the dais.
The new offices in Berthoud that the Reporter-Herald moved to this year don’t have room for its bound newspaper copies that go back into the 1800s and its files of clipped articles, photographs, negatives and microfilm. Prairie Mountain Publishing, the newspaper’s owner, asked the city if it would take the archive under an “enduring records deposit” arrangement.
That arrangement would leave the Reporter-Herald as the owner of the archives and the copyrights but give to the museum the responsibility of housing, preserving, organizing and making them available to the public.
Managing editor Jeff Stahla answered questions from council members about how often members of the public ask for information from the archives — often — and then gave an impassioned appeal for the council to preserve the priceless record of the community’s history.
Council members expressed concern at the ongoing cost, estimated at $60,000 a year, to catalog and preserve the archives and wondered if the city would incur any liability in holding crumbling newspapers that belonged to someone else.
Then each one of them voted in favor of the request in a 9-0 vote.
Craig Young: 970-635-3634, cyoung@reporter-herald.com, www.twitter.com/CraigYoungRH.
