Trying to limit widespread pollution and violent threats to their employees, board members of Silicon Valley’s largest water agency late Tuesday approved a new ordinance to ban camping along 295 miles of creeks in San Jose and other parts of Santa Clara County.
The Santa Clara Valley Water District’s board voted 6-1 to enact the rules, which take effect Jan. 2.
“Our employees have to have police escorts to do their jobs,” said Dick Santos, a retired fire captain and vice chairman of the board. “They can’t go into the creek areas by themselves. We’ve had gunshots, dog bites, needles. Criminals there are giving the homeless a bad name. And it’s increasing. We’ve had people pull knives on our employees, threaten them with machetes. What we’ve been doing hasn’t been working. We’ve got to stop this nonsense.”
The water district, based in San Jose, is a government agency that provides flood control and drinking water to 2 million county residents.
Under the new ordinance, the district will set up “water protection zones” along all 295 miles of waterways where it owns property or easements or has maintenance obligations. Those areas include the Guadalupe River, Coyote Creek, Los Gatos Creek and others. In those areas, it will be illegal to build encampments, shoot fireworks, possess firearms or ammunition, or create other disturbances, like cutting trees or playing loud music.
After being given a verbal and written warning providing 72 hours to remove an encampment, violators will be subject to fines of up to $500 and penalties ranging from community service to 30 days in jail. The new law will be enforced by local police and sheriff’s deputies, water district officials said.
The district, the wholesale water supplier to more than a dozen cities and private water companies, such as San Jose Water Company, is funded largely by water rates and property taxes. Over the year ending in July, it spent $3.4 million removing 15,050 cubic yards of debris — enough to fill 1,500 dump trucks — from Coyote Creek, Guadalupe River, Los Gatos Creek and other South Bay waterways.
The problem has worsened since the COVID pandemic. A growing number of homeless people have polluted creeks with hazardous materials, piles of trash and human waste, water district officials said at Tuesday’s meeting. Some have trapped endangered steelhead trout with shopping carts, cut down trees, started wildfires, left empty propane tanks, discarded needles and built makeshift structures in areas prone to winter flooding.
“We’re not trying to put people in jail,” Santos said. “But we get hundreds of complaints from neighbors. We have people playing loud music all night, starting fires, threatening neighbors whose homes are near the creeks and piling up garbage.”
The district estimates that roughly 700 people live along the creeks it oversees.
A coalition of eight environmental groups supported the rules, including the Sierra Club Loma Prieta Chapter, Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society, California Native Plant Society and Green Foothills.
“We believe that this ordinance is a vital tool in protecting our water resources and natural habitats, ensuring public safety, and upholding the values of environmental stewardship,” the groups wrote in a letter in July when the rules were first debated before the district board.
Homeless advocates, however, say the rules are unfair.
“Yes, we need to get the creeks cleaned up,” said Todd Langton, executive director of Agape Silicon Valley, a nonprofit group in San Jose that delivers food, water and clothes to people living outdoors. “But doing it right in the middle of the holidays in the rainy season is not humane. There’s no place for them to go. The shelters are full. There’s not enough transitional housing. It’s whack-a-mole. It’s frustrating.”
Langton said multiple local and state agencies need to work in a more coordinated way with nonprofit groups to build more transitional housing and other facilities. He said other cities, such as Dallas, do a more efficient job.
The water district has been working with the city to to build a supervised temporary housing site with 96 tiny units on 2 acres the water district owns at Cherry Avenue near the Guadalupe River and Almaden Shopping Center.
The new water district ordinance follows efforts earlier this year by San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan directing the city to do more to clear encampments on creek properties the city owns after state water regulators threatened the city with millions of dollars in fines because the encampments violate water quality, trash and pollution laws.
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The stepped-up enforcement, which mirrors challenges faced by cities across California, from San Francisco to Los Angeles, received a major boost this year from the nation’s highest court.
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court gave local governments more power to break up encampments, and arrest and fine people sleeping outside who refuse to move or accept offers of shelter beds or other assistance. In Grants Pass v Johnson, the justices ruled 6-3 to overturn lower court rulings that said to do so violated constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
Gov. Gavin Newsom praised the decision that day.
“This decision removes the legal ambiguities that have tied the hands of local officials for years and limited their ability to deliver on common-sense measures to protect the safety and well-being of our communities,” Newsom said in a statement.