City Atty. Refuses to Draft Park Camping Law : Homeless: Myers calls it ‘oppressive’ legislation. The council will hire an outside lawyer to consult them on an ordinance, which was requested by the city’s task force as part of a comprehensive strategy.

In a tense confrontation, Santa Monica City Atty. Robert M. Myers told the City Council on Tuesday to get another lawyer because he and his staff will not write the “oppressive” law the council is seeking in order to prevent people from living in the city’s parks.

“We are not going to use our legal talent to draft such oppressive legislation,” Myers said. To do so, he said, would violate his constitutional values. “I’m a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Lawyers Guild and proud of it.” The guild is a politically liberal bar assocation.

By washing his hands of the proposed law against camping in the park, Myers paved the way for what some members of the City Council wanted anyway: an outside attorney to give them the legal advice they need to get a strong, but constitutional, law that will give authorities the means to keep homeless people from residing in the parks.

On a 6-1 vote, with Councilman Tony Vazquez the lone dissenter, the council authorized the hiring of an outside attorney to study various approaches and come back to the council in a month with a viable ordinance. Vazquez contended that the parks problem would vanish as homeless programs and housing are developed.

City Councilman Herb Katz forced the issue with Myers Tuesday night by asking the controversial city attorney to withdraw.

“His political views are in the way of what we want to do,” Katz said. “He has not listened to us. He has listened to himself.”

In a spirited defense of Myers, Councilman Dennis Zane said it was ethics, not politics, that drove the city attorney’s actions.

“I do not believe this city should demand of its employees . . . to do things they strongly object to ethically,” Zane said. Other supporters of Myers on the council also praised him, even as they hired another attorney to follow their instructions.

The law against encampments was requested by the city’s homeless task force as part of a comprehensive strategy to manage the city’s large homeless population through a balance of enforcement and social service and housing programs. In December, the City Council adopted the recommendations of the task force.

But the 18-member citizen panel, in eight months of work, was never able to agree on precisely what the encampment law should contain, so it is now up to the City Council to work out the details.

A draft ordinance released by Myers last week defined an encampment as something containing a tent, stove or cot and would have excluded a simple sleeping bag or bedroll, the form of bedding used by many of the people who have staked out the parks as their homes. On Tuesday night, Police Chief James T. Butts said Myers’ proposal appeared to pertain more to a troop of Boy Scouts than to the people now camped in Santa Monica’s parks. Butts, along with two council members and many city residents, have called for a law based on one in use in West Hollywood, which Myers deems unconstitutional.

“For some people in our community, ‘encampment’ has become a code word for driving homeless people out of our community,” Myers told the council in explaining his unwillingness to follow the West Hollywood example.

Not even Myers’ political allies on the council agreed, however. Although they differ over some details, all seven council members have indicated agreement with the homeless task force’s view that the parks must be cleaned up and made safe for all segments of the community. Because of the high presence of homeless people living in the parks and a growing crime problem, some city residents have been close to mutiny over the parks issue.

Four members of the City Council are up for reelection in November and would not like to be on the same ballot with an anti-encampment initiative that a residents’ group vows to place on the ballot unless the council takes firm action.

With Myers’ proposal clearly going nowhere, City Manager John Jalili presented the council with an alternative Tuesday that was the result of consultations with council members and the community group, Save Our City, which is threatening the initiative.

Jalili’s draft was presented just as the council meeting began. It attempts to tighten a perceived vagueness in the West Hollywood model by defining how much time in the park is too much time. Eight hours, for example, would be the limit in a park for someone with “excess personal belongings.”

But the police chief said time limits would present an enforcement nightmare. “You can’t chalk eyelids” as you would a car to see how long someone stays in one spot, Butts said.

At a public hearing on the ordinance, Myers was both blasted for substituting his own values for those of the people and praised for his humane approach.

Attorney Scott A. Meehan, who this week announced his attention to seek the Republican nomination for the state Assembly in the district that includes Santa Monica, accused Myers of deceiving the public by not advising them that a national parks regulation against encampments has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in a Washington, D.C., case.

“The D.C. regulation is constitutional, and he kept it from you,” Meehan said. “Instead, he presented a watered-down version that reflects his point of view.”

According to Meehan, the wording of the parks regulation closely approximates the West Hollywood law that Myers disdains. In one case provided by Meehan, a federal circuit court in Washington found that sleeping for two hours with a bedroll violated the law.

Myers responded that one of the cases cited by Meehan was mentioned in the staff report, and it was unfair to say he had not correctly defined “encampment” when neither the homeless task force nor the City Council had done so.

Another attorney, Sherman Stacy, noted that the council didn’t seem to mind testing the constitutionality of other laws, on such subjects as rent control, and he urged the council to therefore take its best shot on an anti-camping law as well.

A representative of the homeless task force, Peter Lewi, read a letter from its steering committee urging the council to reject the Myers version.

“The use of the parks as living accommodations interferes with the use by the general public as parks,” the letter said. “These purposes can only be accomplished by prohibiting behavior involving the protracted use and monopolizing of park areas by ‘camping out’ with sleeping bags and other equipment evidencing the use of parks (for) living as opposed to recreational areas.”

Resident Cherie Lebron-Weismantel, however, was one of several speakers who sided with Myers.

“I praise the homeless for their courage in the face of our materialism and greed. I praise the city attorney for his compassion amid those who seek a pure, perfect human race,” she said.