Transfer alone will not return parks to the people

Key West Mayor Morgan McPherson is pushing hard on his recommendation that the city of Key West assume responsibility for Higgs Beach, a property owned and maintained by Monroe County, located at the intersection of White Street and Atlantic Boulevard. We heartily support his recommendation and we see no reason why the county would not be disposed to accommodate him if the City Commission votes approval of his proposed resolution at its meeting Tuesday night. As Mandy Bolen reports in our news pages today, the mayor's initiative reflects the public's increasing anger at the takeover of public parks by vagrants, druggies and mentally ill homeless.Nevertheless, as we see it, a transfer of responsibility from the county to the city won't solve the problem. Everyone who lives in the vicinity of Bayview Park, a city property, surely knows that it has become a vagrant encampment as bad as, if not worse than, Higgs Beach. It's only in this sense that the mayor may be putting the cart before the horse.Whatever the solutions to these problems may be, don't blame the cops. The courts have ruled that vagrants have as much right to the parks as everyone else. You can't arrest them unless they break the law. In short, this is not fundamentally a law enforcement issue. To his credit, Mayor McPherson has suggested that if the city assumes responsibility for Higgs Beach, the property could be outsourced to a nonprofit organization that would provide management as well as supervised activities for children and families, including amenities and playground equipment. Perhaps this would be a step in the right direction in making the park less hospitable to vagrants. But it won't prevent them from encamping elsewhere in the community. What's clear to us is that remedies will require recognition that many homeless people are seriously mentally ill or addicted to drugs or alcohol or both. That's a task for social services, not law enforcement. Maybe the city can enact regulations that can be enforced. Apparently, other communities have done so. Another avenue may be found in seeking relief from the courts. It is surely an utterly absurd notion that municipalities are not entitled to protect public parks from wholesale invasion by vagrants whose daily presence denies citizens as well as visitors, especially children, the use of facilities paid for by taxpayers. If the law says you can't yell fire in a crowded theater, surely there must be some lawful protections that will prohibit destructive, unwanted, invasions of public parks in our neighborhoods.

— The Citizen

Peanuts. From the Internet:
A vagrant is a person, usually poor, who wanders from place to place without a home or regular work. Urban vagrants are commonly called "street people". Some towns have shelters for vagrants, such as The Rescue Mission in Syracuse, New York. Vagrancy is a crime in some European countries, but most of these laws have been abandoned. Laws against vagrancy in the United States have largely been invalidated as violative of the due process clauses of the U.S. Constitution. But the FBI report on crime in the United States for 2005 lists 33,227 vagrancy violations. In legal terminology, a person with a source of income is not a vagrant, even if he/she is homeless.

More Peanuts:
Why, KEY WEST CITIZEN, do you use in what is generally considered a pejorative term -- “vagrant” -- to describe what for some time now in the City of One Human Family is called “homelessness?” Why, KEY WEST CITIZEN, do you go after something so “dangerous” to Key West as homeless people, when you do not go with equal vigor after something so DANGEROUS to Key West as developers and their political cronies who don't seem too terribley concerned about tearing down trailer parks or where rank and file workers will live inside?

I used to be a vagrant. I had no home, no income. I slept outside, ate in soup kitchens. I bathed every day. I didn’t get drunk. I didn’t cause public disturbances. And I was a registered voter and voted, and I ran for public office. There was nothing I could do about being homeless but ride it out, wait on God to change my circumstances. I got to know many local vagrants. I found some of them to be very interesting, gentle, respectful people. They were living in the way that seemed to best suit them. They caused no trouble. They just wanted to be left alone.

I spoke to you Citizens and the Key West City Commission about this several times in 2001 - 2004. I told you there is nothing you or any person or organization can do to stop chronic homelessness. I told you only God can change that. I asked you to join me in a tour of Key West’s homeless population, to get to know the population that so troubled you, so you could at least perhaps understand it, instead of sitting in your comfy offices and homes, and slinging paper arrows at and sending out your police to something you knew very little about. You did not take me up on my offer. You still live in your tiny little mainstream worlds.

Yes, some of the homeless people in Key West are quite unpleasant to be anywhere near. Yes, some of them hang out in Bayview Park and at Higgs Beach. Yes, when these people get really out of line, they are unbearable to be around. The City has a place to put them when they cross the bounds of human decency and respect, and it’s the County Jail on Stock Island. Otherwise, homeless people have just as much right to use open and public spaces as, say, your average knee-walking fall-down-drunk tourist or local on Duval Street. As, say, Pritam Sing. As, say, Mayor McPherson. As, say, any of you Citizens.

How come you don’t howl a bit about the taking of a really nice part of Higgs Beach Park and turning it into a dog trot, making it utterly distasteful to any person who doesn’t have a dog? Oh, you were behind that appropriation of public space, because it was being used by vagrants and now they no longer use it because of the dogs and what they do in that park. Hmmmm. Have you considered turning all of Higgs Beach and Bayview Park into dog parks? Wouldn’t that be an real easy way to get the vagrants to hang out some place else -- like, hmmm, Truman Annex? Now, that’s a real nice shaded area, pretty sidewalks, nice big luxury homes to inspire the vagrants to leave their unAmerican ways and return to the American dream, isn’t it?

Meanwhile, did you know Key West police cruisers are using the asphalt walking path at Higgs Beach, the path on the sea side of the parking lot regularly used by tourists and locals and vagrants to walk along that beach? Yes, police cruisers on a walking path. Maybe you should go out there and see it for yourself. You might have to wait a while, but if you wait long enough, you will see it with your own two eyes and wonder what in the world is the reason for it? I would like to know, if you figure it out.

Sloan Bashinsky, mayoral candidate
623 Josephine Parker Street #102
Key West 33040