Antioch has agreed to contract out its cleanup of homeless encampments at a cost of about $450,000 a year — or more than $2.3 million — for the next five years.
The city’s public works department had taken on the role for the last several years with the police code enforcement officers first going on site to ask the unhoused residents to move from city property and right-of-ways.
But in November of last year, the Antioch Public Works Union asked the city to take encampment cleanups off their plate so they can get back to doing what they were hired to do – provide maintenance to Antioch’s roads, parks, marina, open spaces, water and sewer lines and flood control areas.
“The time and resources dedicated to these cleanups prevents staff from completing their regularly scheduled and sometimes state-mandated maintenance work,” Acting Public Works Director Scott Buenting told the council this week. “Contracting out homeless encampment cleanups will help free up city staff to perform necessary maintenance work in a timely manner.”
Buenting said his staff spent 2,197 hours cleaning up homeless encampments at an estimated cost of $350,000 in 2022.
“These costs, however, will continue to rise due to inflationary factors such as negotiated wage increases and ongoing maintenance costs for equipment and supplies,” he said.
Buenting estimated the annual in-house costs for services for 2024 is $360,500 and $371,315 in 2025 or $1,913,443 over five years. That’s about $400,000 less than contracting it out, but doing that will help free up city staff to perform necessary road and park maintenance work and sewer repairs, he said.
Some 20 city workers came out to support an outside contract, and half of them spoke of their experiences cleaning up encampments, which they said included finding used needles, drugs and knives.
“Our job is to go in there and shuffle through it and haul it away; it’s very dangerous,” Chad Truesdell said. “…And when they see us out in the community, they don’t like us. We’re taking their home away and it really puts us, as Public Works, and our families in a very, very dangerous spot.”
Truesdell said he and other public works staff “aren’t even doing sewer-related repairs and cleanup that residents pay for” when they are busy cleaning up encampments.
Art Hernandez agreed, noting he and others don’t want to be out in the position they are in having to move the unhoused out of their homes.
“Unfortunately, we get put in that position where it looks like we’re the ones who are moving them out and it’s not something we want to do,” he said. “It’s sad enough to have to tell them to move. Even though they get tagged to move, they never move, and I get it, because they have nowhere to move.”
Miguel Santoyo said he’d been robbed doing his city maintenance job.
“I’ve been threatened, I have been spit at and I’ve been called every name in the books,” he said. “All that I ask is that we let the professionals do what they are hired to do and let our (city) department of collections concentrate on what we were hired to do, and that is the sewer.”
Todd Northam, a maintenance worker and union representative, said the move to an outside contractor was “inevitable.”
“We stepped up and took care of it in the short term, but like everything it had a price,” he said. “And the price was that we weren’t getting the citywide maintenance work done. And it’s catching up.”
Homeless advocate Andrew Becker agreed that public works shouldn’t be cleaning up encampments, but he said contracting it out wasn’t the answer either.
“I think the city has a responsibility to its community members,” he said. “And the majority of these unhoused have been here in our community on the streets for years. They have been pushed around by the police department. The only true advocates in support that they get, I guess get a minute and a half (of time to speak) to come here and to fight for them.”
“These men and these women should not be put in these positions,” Becker said of city workers. “Their safety is paramount. But I questioned why Public Works is doing this presentation and why other departments who work with us are not a part of this conversation.”
Since the city had already promised the union last year it would relieve its workers of the responsibility of cleaning out encampments, there was little discussion.
“I would like us to move forward with the outside contract as soon as possible,” Councilwoman Lori Ogochock said in advancing the motion, which was approved on a 4-0 vote with Mayor Pro Tem Tamisha Torres Walker abstaining.