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LOCAL NEWS Rather than focusing its efforts on finding an area for an DENVER SWEEPS CAMP FROM ST. JOHN’S CATHEDRAL BY ROBERT DAVIS FOR THE PAST 12 YEARS, Ryan Taylor has been the pastor at Network Coffee House, an urban ministry focused on building relationships with Denver’s homeless community. After witnessing what he considers a coordinated effort to sabotage a homeless community camping on the lawn of St. John’s Cathedral, he has begun describing himself as an activist. On the morning of May 20, city officials dispersed encampments on the Cathedral property, supposedly to clean the campsite. The city had alerted campers of the cleaning the week prior and told them they would be allowed to return to the campsite once the cleaning was complete. Instead, campers returned to find the city had put up temporary fences around St. John’s and that the site was closed for sidewalk repairs. Housing advocates agree with Taylor that this act was just a disguised sweep rather than an actual cleaning. “What I witnessed was the most clear human rights violation I’ve ever seen,” Taylor told the Denver VOICE in an interview. “It was a ruse, a trick.” Many of the campers were regulars at Network, Taylor admits. He explained that some won’t go inside [shelters] because of traumatic experiences they endured in their youth, physical or sexual. Those experiences had driven some of them to hitchhike, train-hop, or join the military, all of which furthered the trauma. “When you get to know their backstory, you’re going to hear a story about trauma that’s led many of them to be afraid of being indoors. It’s a trigger for them,” Taylor said. Taylor said he has reached out to Mayor Hancock’s office and District 6 Representative Paul Kashmann about the incident but has not received any answers. Even though St. John’s was tolerant of the camp, Taylor said this act made the City’s intentions unequivocally clear. Denver area service providers have been working with the Mayor’s office since April to develop safe outdoor spaces for homeless communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Recently, Pitkin County dedicated the Brush Creek Park and Ride as a place where Aspen’s homeless communities can safely camp. However, Denver’s leadership has been reluctant to implement a similar plan. outdoor homeless community, Denver has been working to develop a temporary outdoor expansion plan for restaurants and bars that would allow businesses to expand into parking lots and sidewalks to accommodate social distancing requirements. There are 14 restaurants and bars within a quarter-mile radius from St. John’s, but none have been designated as a campsite for the homeless, who were displaced from their previous location at St. John’s. The few city officials Taylor has contacted have provided no clear answers to his requests for information about where homeless people can find essential services. In one instance, Taylor called the City to help a homelessman with cancer find resperatory care but was passed between different departments until the call dropped. “This whole ordeal has been very disappointing. These people [who were sheltered safely in the encampment] have nowhere else to go,” Taylor said. ■ CDPHE TO DENVER’S HOMELESS: YOU’RE ON YOUR OWN BY ROBERT DAVIS RECENTLY, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) argued in a court filing that the agency has no responsibility to protect individual members of Denver’s homeless population from contracting the COVID-19 virus. The filing is in response to a lawsuit filed in April on behalf of several homeless advocacy groups asking CDPHE to abide by its statutory mandate and provide housing for homeless in communities affected by the virus. “The Department is tasked with protecting the public at large,” the motion reads. “Because this is the case, the Department does not owe any of the plaintiffs an individual duty, much less a clean non-discretionary duty. The Department does not have housing, and providing housing is far outside its statutory mandate.” The agency further argued that the lawsuit would not survive judicial review because the petitioners failed to state a factual claim against CDPHE. However, since the petitioners filed a Writ of Mandamus – asking the court to force a state agency or government officials to properly fulfill its or their official duties or to correct an abuse of discretion – the petitioners simply have to show that CDPHE is not abiding by its statutory mandate. CDPHE is regulated by Title 25 of the Colorado Revised Statutes, which says the agency reserves the administrative power “to establish, maintain, and enforce isolation and quarantine, and, in pursuance thereof and for this purpose only, to exercise such physical control over property and the persons of the people within this state as the department may find necessary for the protection of the public health.” While the word “housing” is not explicitly mentioned anywhere in the agency’s mandate, the attorney for the homeless advocacy groups argues it can be reasonably inferred that the agency’s powers require it to work with the state government to get homeless people off the streets during the pandemic. “All they had to do was work with Governor Polis to issue a temporary order removing local barriers to housing and we could have saved lives,” said Jason Flores-Williams, attorney for the advocacy groups. Recently, the agency utilized its powers to create a Residential Outbreak Task Force, charged with mitigating the spread of COVID-19 in high-density, group-living settings such as nursing homes and assisted living facilities. No such task force exists for homeless shelters even though both types of settings are exempt from the State’s public health order limiting gatherings to 10 people or fewer. The city has said that exempting homeless shelters from the public health order is necessary in order to control the spread of COVID among homeless communities. This exemption allowed the city to open temporary shelters in the National Western Complex and the downtown hotel Aloft so that homeless people could receive essential services while abiding by social distancing protocols. Housing advocates say these exemptions don’t go far enough to protect the city’s most vulnerable residents. “Despite having a Democratic governor, a progressive attorney general and an agency that calls itself the Department of Public Health, the State of Colorado has done less for the poor and voiceless during this epidemic than many cities and states around the country,” advocates from Denver Homeless Out Loud wrote in a press release about CDPHE’s filing. As a statement posted on Denver Homeless Out Loud’s Facebook page satirically summed up CDPHE’s apparent message to the exponentially increasing number of unemployed and unhoused: “Drop Dead.” ■ Vendors of the Denver VOICE are looking forward to seeing their customers again and also to introduce new readers to the street paper. The Denver VOICE team would like your thoughts on what would we could do to protect our vendors and readers from spreading COVID-19 or other contagious diseases. To help us, please take our brief survey online: DENVERVOICE.ORG/SAFETY-SURVEY YOUR OPINION MATTERS TO US! 4 DENVER VOICE June 2020

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