Managers of Portland’s program for finding and cleaning up homeless camps need to do a better job, city auditors concluded in a report published Wednesday.

They need to better communicate with people who report camps and with those who live in them, the audit found. Camps need to be strategically prioritized for clean up, it said. And tents, ID cards, credit cards and other property confiscated from illegal camp sites needs to be better catalogued and stored and more readily returned to its owners, the audit said.

The clean-up program, which costs $3.6 million a year, does a satisfactory job of finding and cleaning Portland’s many homeless camps, auditors concluded after interviews with program workers, field observations and document reviews.

For example, they found crews removed more than 2.6 million pounds of garbage from area camps in fiscal 2017 and are usually polite to people they are booting from illegal campsites. But auditors also found much room to improve.

Since 2015, Portland has had a streamlined system, called One Point of Contact, that allows people to notify officials of illegal campsites. Contracted crews subsequently remove tents, garbage and other items from some of the sites that get reported and store campers’ seized belongings.

The audit, conducted when during summer and fall 2018, found that residents say they appreciate having a one-stop-shop for complaints about homeless people and camps, but frequent users say they find the pace too sluggish.

Users of the system also complain they are not notified when camps they report are put on the clean-up list or actually dealt with. The city says it will fix this.

When officials created the One Point of Contact system, they said the database would allow complaints of camps to be prioritized for clean-up. Crews were to visit each site to judge it on biohazards, garbage and other factors, such as whether campers are aggressive or openly using drugs.

But auditors said they found little evidence that such prioritizing occurred nor what criteria were invoked when deciding which camp to tackle next or leave alone.

Auditors also found the city frequently ignores hundreds of residents’ complaints. The week of June 4, 2018, for example, the city received 680 complaints about homeless camps but never followed up on them in 254 cases, auditors concluded.

That non-response doesn’t comport with the crackdown on illegal camping instituted by Mayor Ted Wheeler earlier in his term.

“There’s nowhere trash is acceptable. There’s nowhere needles are acceptable. There’s nowhere graffiti on public right of ways are acceptable,” Wheeler said in 2017.

The clean-up crews are supposed to give occupants of tents and tarps 48 hours to 10 days’ notice to pack up their stuff and move on before a sweep. The crews dismantle any structures left behind, lay items on the ground, photograph and document them, then either throw items in the trash or take them to storage.

But homeless people interviewed by auditors complained they are not given time to pack their things and have trouble retrieving confiscated property. And the imprecise eight-day window leaves many feeling anxious a sweep could come at any moment.

Homeless people and advocates say that retrieving items from a single storage location – a warehouse in Southeast Portland – is not easy for people without cars.

And homeless people reported to auditors that they sometimes gave up on trying to get their property back because crews at the city warehouse took so long time find it. The city also did not store valuables such as IDs, credit cards and prescription medications separately from shelves full of blankets, tent parts and other property.

Officials have since instituted a separate filing system for those items, the audit said.

Auditors found a deep divide among Portlanders over camp removals. On one hand, many found the so-called camps “sweeps” to be harsh. On the other, people said illegal camping should never be tolerated.

“We had extremes from, ‘You're harassing people, you should leave them alone,’ to the polar opposite, which essentially was, ‘Arrest these people,’” said lead auditor Kristine Adams-Wannberg.

Wheeler and Chief Administrative Officer Tom Rinehart responded to the audit with a letter saying they will follow through on auditors’ recommendations and have already begun making reforms.

Camping on public property is illegal in Portland. Auditors noted that Wheeler’s administration has allowed homeless people to break those laws while the city works to find people housing. Adams-Wannberg said auditors did not probe Wheeler’s decision to let the law go unenforced.

-- Gordon R. Friedman

-- Molly Harbarger