By now you’ve likely heard that Grants Pass is facing yet another lawsuit for the new homeless-related regulations approved by the new City Council one day after they were sworn into office last January. This time, compliance with a state law is in question. In a nutshell, if a City regulates where homeless can rest/sleep then those regulations must be “objectively reasonable.” And while the definition of objectively reasonable is murky with this state law only being a few years old, I see no way the regulations approved by the City Council in early January could have been considered objectively reasonable.
And while hindsight is of course 20/20, perhaps the new City Council should have taken more than 24 hours to consider its options on compliance with state laws and not ignored the advice of the City attorney. And now it seems for some time to come we will continue to have two unmanaged homeless sites both on 7th street next to the Police Station, and at 6th and A Streets right next to City Hall.
The Patriot Conference held on Saturday March 15th at the Josephine County Fairgrounds included a special presentation by Dr. Robert Marbut. According to the description on the Discovery Institute website, Dr. Marbut is a renowned expert on homelessness and a senior fellow of Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth & Poverty. Marbut has a PhD in Political Behavior and American Political Institutions and his career has been marked by bipartisanship having served as Chief of Staff for San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros in the 1980s, as a White House Fellow under George H. W. Bush, and most recently as the Executive Director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness from 2019 to 2021 under both the Trump and Biden administrations.
Dr. Marbut spent the first half of his presentation discussing the rise and dangers of fentanyl. The stats are scary indeed, and Dr. Marbut said that in the last four- and one-half years we’ve lost more people to fentanyl than the loss of life in all US wars in the last 100 years. Dr. Marbut then discussed homelessness and suggested that changes in federal policies around 2013 are some of the primary reasons for the dramatic rise in homeless populations in the last 10 years. Federal policies used to emphasize treatment programs where needed as well as work and job training requirements to access benefit programs. Without those types of requirements, according to Marbut we are now enabling the homeless populations and the number of street-level homeless is doubling every three to four years.
Dr. Marbut’s presentation impressed at least three of our new City Council members, and two days after the presentation they suggested in a Council workshop the City of Grants Pass contract with Dr. Marbut to compile data and help the City develop a plan for its homeless population. Councilor Indra Nicholas made the contract recommendation and then Councilor Victoria Marshall suggested that “we” already learned a bunch from him, and we may not need to spend money on this. Councilor Kathleen Krohn suggested that we contract with him and that he is the only one she would want to contract with for these services. Veteran Councilor Rob Pell wisely suggested that the City may need to do a RFP for these services.
While I was also impressed by Dr. Marbut’s presentation and horrified by some of the stats he presented (you can now find his presentation on YouTube), after briefly doing some more research I’m not convinced contracting with him would be the best way to go. It’s not that Marbut doesn’t provide appropriate advice, but more so because I do think we know the bottom line of what his recommendations would be, and we don’t necessarily need to spend money on this. And there is great value in bringing people together and designing solutions locally, which is the direction the City Council seems to be going as the Grants Pass branch of U-Turn for Christ is at the beginning of launching a major initiative that would bring many parties together to work on homeless issues. The City Council has recently expressed informal interest in partnering or participating in the U-Turn for Christ initiative.
Also, any major consulting contract paid by the City does need to go through a RFP process and the City can’t just award a major consulting contract to someone without bidding it out, so to speak. Josephine County’s elected officials recently seem to think that major consulting contracts can just be given to their political buddies without even checking with others, but Grants Pass is run by a professional manager and professional staff and purchasing policies are followed in City operations. In addition, the Grants Pass City Charter prohibits Council members from interfering with personnel actions or specific purchasing processes (see section 2.6 of the Charter here).
Dr. Marbut is no stranger to controversy, so in jest I say he might fit in well in Grants Pass. When appointed by President Trump in 2019, his credentials, experience, and questionable stats came under the microscope. His longstanding claim that those who panhandle on the streets spend 93 percent of the money they receive on drugs, alcohol, or sex received a great deal of attention by national media, given some other studies showed that the greatest spend item is food. Apparently Marbut has convinced hundreds of cities and counties across the nation to pay for his advice.
Homelessness and what level of service Cities should provide is of course one of the toughest challenges faced by Grants Pass and many other cities. Success stories seem few and far between, therefore I have to instinctively question the track record of Dr. Marbut. If hundreds of municipalities have contracted with him for services, why are success stories so few and far between?
Marbut, including in his recent presentation at the fairgrounds, bragged about San Antonio being a success story. As a former San Antonio city councilman, Marbut is also known as the founder of Haven for Hope, a vast shelter complex on San Antonio’s West Side that has been the focus of much controversy since it opened in 2010. In fact, Marbut’s time at Haven for Hope was short lived and in only one year, the founding CEO was out.
Dr. Marbut in his recent local presentation at the Patriot conference claims San Antonio saw an 85 percent decrease in homeless population while more liberal Austin saw a significant rise in homelessness. Except, a 2019 article about Marbut suggested that the point in time count of homeless in San Antonio showed an increase in homeless in the decade since Marbut implemented the controversial strategy. The article suggested that warehousing homeless people on the city’s poorer West Side may only have succeeded in shifting them out of central business districts and tourism areas. The 2019 article also stated Haven for Hope garnered a reputation as a place of despair with significant increases in crimes including assaults, rapes, and threats of terror. The article also said San Antonians say that people who use the shelter refer to it as the “Haven for Dope.”
Sure enough, I went back and listened to Dr. Marbut’s local presentation more closely. His comment about the reduction in homelessness in San Antonio were that San Antonio reduced the homeless in the downtown area by 85% (this is not the reduction of homeless in the entire city). Further looking into stats, in fact the San Antonio strategy seems to have primarily moved the homeless population out of the downtown area but hasn’t decreased the homeless population citywide. The 85% reduction seems to be a misleading statement.
In fact, in an article dated January 2025, it was pointed out that according to last year’s point in time count, San Antonio now has the 2nd highest homeless population among major cities in Texas. San Antonio has now surpassed Houston, Austin and Fort Worth in its homeless numbers. Homeless numbers in San Antonio have increased about 13% in the last two years, and at the end of 2023 the San Antonio City Council approved of a $16 million dollar plan to lease a 200-bed downtown Holiday Inn and pay a local nonprofit to operate this as a low barrier homeless shelter. A “low barrier” shelter, in the downtown, is the polar opposite of policies recommended by Marbut so this may be another data point that San Antonio may not be the success story that Marbut claims it to be.
At least one other major City that implemented Dr. Marbut’s strategies seems to have had similar results. And critics say his strategy just moves them to a new location and does little to nothing to bring people out of homelessness. I don’t think anyone has all the answers, and what’s right for Grants Pass may not be what’s right for other cities. But a competitive RFP for homeless consulting services does seem in order if the Grants Pass City Council actually wants to pay for advice.
I tend to think that the City need not pay for advice from a consultant at this time. However, at risk of stating the obvious, there will need to be a significant additional investment in time and money by many agencies throughout Grants Pass to start making progress on homeless issues.
In other news, last week the Grants Pass homeless issue was also covered by Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson on both television and her podcast. The managing editor and host Sharyl Attkisson is a five-time Emmy Award winner and recipient of the Edward R. Murrow award for investigative reporting. Full Measure claims that they broadcast to 43 million households on Sinclair Broadcast Group stations. Former Grants Pass Mayor Sara Bristol and new Mayor Clint Scherf were both interviewed, and it appears those interviews took place at least two months ago. For those of us following the local situation closely, there wasn’t much new revealed. But it’s not a great feeling that Grants Pass is still in the national spotlight over this issue and about 9 months after the Supreme Court decision last summer we still don’t have anything resembling a legally defensible plan of action (at least from the City’s perspective).
After everything I’ve read and heard in recent years, my two cents is that the following need to be a core part of our local homeless strategy:
- Increase our attacks on the “drug” and substance use issues from both the treatment perspective and the law enforcement perspective.
- Actively collaborate with all local stakeholders on service solutions.
- Avoid low barrier “solutions.” Homeless shelters can potentially be low barrier on entry but cannot be operated as low barrier based on results of many other cities that have tried this.
- Work with state and federal representatives to update laws so that cities have more flexibility to address homeless issues and so that service providers such as the Grants Pass Gospel Rescue Mission can be “recognized” by the government as a homeless shelter (for purposes of assessing local service capacity).
And I tend to agree with how Dr. Marbut ended his local presentation: “Compassion without accountability is enablement.”