Santa Barbara County Grand Jury
• 2023-2024
• Agency Response
Response to:
Homeless Encampments in Santa Barbara County
City of Santa Barbara Office of the Mayor SantaBarbaraCA.gov*
⚠️ Translation Notice: This content has been automatically translated. The original English text is the official version. Translation may contain errors.
⚠️ Este contenido ha sido traducido automáticamente. El texto original en inglés es la versión oficial. La traducción puede contener errores.
Findings and Recommendations 2 findings
F2
The negative effects of encampment sweeps can be mitigated when a variety of community resources are present at the time of the clean-up. Response to Finding 2: Agree. The City of Santa Barbara does not facilitate "sweeps" of encampments. The City's Encampment Response Protocol carefully details our approach which includes a guiding principle that addressing encampments requires collaboration from community partners and agencies.
Related Recommendations (1)
R2
The County and cities shall ensure that all sweeps occur utilizing a multi-disciplinary approach.
F3
Encampments lack basic sanitation services. Response to Finding 3: Agree. Encampments create unsafe and unhealthy conditions for several reasons and chief among them is the lack of basic sanitation services. Encampment sites often contain the presence of human waste, needles or other unsafe, unsanitary and hazardous material.
Related Recommendations (1)
R3
The County and the cities shall make trash cans, porta-potties, resources for handwashing, and sharps containers for safe disposal of needles and other hazardous waste available near encampment sites.
* This report's PDF did not contain easily extractable text and required Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for analysis. There may be minor errors in the extracted findings and recommendations due to OCR limitations with scanned documents.