The city will resume cleaning homeless camps after a formerly divided City Council voted in lockstep to approve a new contract for the work.

The new contract requires the staff of Rapid Response Bioclean, the company that has been doing the clean-ups for the past five years, to be trained in tactics to avoid violent conflict, learn to engage with people who are in mental health crisis, take CPR classes and carry the opioid overdose reversal drug naloxone.

It also adds language that says clean-up workers “must be polite, diplomatic and professional at all times, and treat all persons with dignity and respect. Discrimination and harassment shall not be tolerated in any form.”

When the weather turns freezing and snowy, those clean-up crews then become outreach workers who are supposed to check on campers’ safety and well-being, distribute hand warmers and trash bags and help them get to shelter.

Lucas Hillier, who runs the clean-up system, told City Council on Wednesday that the changes were added after significant feedback during the last five years since the program started. This new contract is supposed to be a more compassionate approach to work officials say is necessary to balance the needs of business leaders and people who live near campsites with people who are living on the streets of Portland.

Through the city’s hotline, One Point of Contact, every complaint about a homeless person, camp or RV is vetted by a team of people who rate the site on a variety of metrics, such as the appearance of drugs and needles, how many yards of trash are visible and if there is obvious criminal activity.

If the camp scores above a certain threshold, a crew of biohazard cleaners are dispatched to move the people living there, then go through the remaining belongings, sorting it into trash and usable property, which is stored in a police facility.

The system has undergone significant changes since it was first implemented. In the last fiscal year, the program cleaned 3,122 campsites, removed 8,400 gallons of human waste, 1,300 tons of garbage, and removed 28,909 hypodermic syringes.

Those numbers have generally increased since the program started in 2014.

He said that between January and June 2019, only 15% of the sites reported through One Point of Contact were actually cleaned.

That number does not include the fact that reports steeply increase in the summer months as more people live outside when the weather is good.

However, Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty at first resisted the idea that one company should be handling biowaste and also acting as an outreach worker. Mayor Ted Wheeler pulled the vote from an agenda in mid-December to give him time to win Hardesty’s vote.

In the meantime, clean-ups stopped because the city was only authorized to spend $5 million on clean ups for the past five years and that money was used up by the beginning of January.

Now, that work can resume with $4.5 million set aside per year for the next five years.

Hardesty made a point of underlining the changes to the contract and that the City Council will have a work session to discuss possible further changes, as well as hearing community feedback.

-- Molly Harbarger

mharbarger@oregonian.com | 503-294-5923 | @MollyHarbarger

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