A Nelson community group wants the City of Nelson to create policies about overdose prevention sites that have rules and consequences.
“We request a good neighbour policy be created for the sites,” Kari Kroker of Nelson Neighbourhood Network told council at its Oct. 25 meeting, “and that this policy have clear and real consequences akin to the Liquor Control Licensing Act that oversees standards for bars and restaurants and then lays out consequences for poor management.”
Kroker and fellow network member Mike Stolte gave examples of such “guardrails” that other B.C. municipalities have imposed, although some might not apply to Nelson: revocation of tax exempt status, defining a property as a nuisance property, terminating a lease, or creating zoning that is specific to safe use sites.
Councillor Rik Logtenberg, later in the meeting, referred to this approach as a “good neighbour policy with teeth.”
The network also asked the city not to allow any further overdose prevention sites until such services are equally spread out among all West Kootenay communities. There are no such permanent sites in Trail or Castlegar.
Nelson’s overdose prevention sites at ANKORS and at The Hub on Vernon Street are the only permanent sites in the West Kootenay, although ANKORS provides a mobile site for other communities.
None of these offers inhalation services, which Interior Health had intended to provide at the Nelson Friendship Outreach Clubhouse before public backlash scrapped that plan in May.
A record 13 people in the Nelson local health area, which includes Salmo and parts of the Slocan Valley, have already died of illicit toxic drugs this year through the end of August.
Finding a suitable site
The Neighbourhood Network was formed in the spring in response to gatherings of people in the yard of the Interior Health-owned Clubhouse at the corner of Vernon and Cedar streets. The yard had become a 24-hour hub of drug use and criminal activity that spilled over into neighbouring residents and businesses, causing what Kroker called “24 four hours a day, seven days a week, of chaos in our neighbourhood.”
Stolte and Kroker both live within a block of the Clubhouse.
The network was also formed around opposition to Interior Health’s intention, announced in April, to open overdose prevention site at the Clubhouse, which had been planned with no consultation with residents and businesses. Mayor Janice Morrison endorsed the network’s complaint at the time, publicly asking IH to be a better neighbour.
In the face of this opposition, IH abandoned the Clubhouse site, saying it would find another location. The gatherings in the Clubhouse yard ended when IH hired a security company to keep people out of the yard.
So far neither IH nor the city has publicly proposed any new location for a safe inhalation site.
At the Oct. 25 council meeting, Kroker and Stolte offered to help the city find a suitable site. Kroker said she and Stolte have toured the city at the suggestion of IH management to recommend sites that might work.
“We said we don’t want to move it to another neighbourhood, we don’t want to drop it in another neighbourhood,” Kroker said. “We offered them some (possible) places in the downtown core and in the Railtown district.”
She did not name those locations but she asked council for “authentic and open consultation around the location of the sites.”
‘Under siege’
Following the shutdown of the activity in the Clubhouse yard, a number of people took up outdoor residence during the summer on Edgewood Ave., across the street from the Scout Hall, still in Stolte and Kroker’s neighbourhood. In September, the city forced them to move from there, stating that criminal activity had been traced back to that group.
Stolte said he sees the events of the last six months as “a criminality problem as much as a homelessness problem.” He said he and his neighbours, through the past spring and summer, have felt they were “under siege.”
Groups like Neighbourhood Network have sprung up on other parts of the province and have recently amalgamated to form SOS (Save Our Streets.) The group wants stricter law enforcement and asks the government establish a set of measurable criteria that show statistically whether the streets and communities are getting safer or not.
At an SOS press conference on Oct. 30 in Vancouver, Nelson’s Tanya Finley, one of the founders of the Neighbourhood Network, addressed all levels of government.
“It is clear to me that you are not sweeping up after the victims day after day. It is obvious to me that your homes, your paycheques, your businesses, your sleep, your mental health are not being threatened. Your (properties) not being defecated on, ransacked or robbed.”
Finley said people are fearful when they hear news of plans for an overdose prevention site or any other service provided for homelessness or addiction.
“There is no way to know how we are going to be protected when we have to live beside this day after day. Saving lives and complete chaos should not go hand in hand. Compassion and love come with rules, boundaries and understood expectations.”
Stolte told council he has called the police 15-to-20 times in the last six months because of criminal activity in his yard. Through Freedom of Information requests the network found that between Stepping Stones, the Clubhouse and the Coordinated Access Hub at 521 Vernon St., there were 664 call-outs for police, fire and ambulance services in the past three years.
“I’m not a person who complains,” he said. “I’m a live-and-let-live kind of person. I’m very liberal in my views. But there was a really decreasing sense of safety in our neighbourhood.”
Stolte said he didn’t lock his doors for the first five years of his 20 years living in Nelson, and he now has several security cameras in and around his house. He says the cameras have helped him and the police in recovering items stolen from his yard.
Kroker said her neighbourhood feels more secure since the city cleared the Scout Hall site.
“That being said, my sense is that it’s been dispersed to the rest of Nelson. I know people (in Uphill) that are now installing security cameras because they’re dealing with incidents as well.”
An opportunity for leadership
Regarding the interrelated issues of homelessness, addiction, mental health and criminality, Logtenberg said the focus of IH and the city has been on the most vulnerable. But the focus should be on everyone, “as opposed to just those who are the most vulnerable, which I think does tend to create consequences for the rest of the community that weren’t intended.”
He called for an approach that is “more holistic.”
Stolte said a new approach is necessary in Nelson because, by his calculations, the city has a per capita rate of homelessness that is 40 per cent higher than Vancouver.
“We don’t have the same services. We don’t have the same opportunities to take people in and do the things that a Vancouver or Victoria might be able to.”
Stolte said there should be more conversations between city council, residents, the street outreach team, and various agencies that support homeless people with addictions, as well as with those people themselves.
“I think that we don’t have a full understanding of the picture,” he said. “I know it’s not necessarily in the purview of the City of Nelson to do this, but I don’t think anyone else will demonstrate the leadership. So there’s an opportunity here to show leadership on this.”
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