The city has approved a contract with Clatsop Community Action to manage services at the homeless encampment on Avenue S.

At a City Council meeting Feb. 10, councilors agreed to pay the agency $50,000 a year to staff the camp with a program manager and case managers, who will work about 28 hours a week.

Staff will provide maintenance and daily oversight, checking in with campers twice a day to monitor well-being and compliance with camp rules. Though they will issue warnings for camping violations, enforcement cases will be referred to police as needed.

Clatsop Community Action staff will also provide reports to the city once a month detailing the number of campers and any issues or concerns, and will respond to inquiries from the public, city staff and City Council regarding the camping program.

It is anticipated that Clatsop Community Action will use staff members from Esperanza Village, a microshelter facility on North Roosevelt Drive that opened in October.

Viviana Matthews, the agency’s director, said that the contract had yet to be signed, and that Clatsop Community Action is still working with the city to finalize details.

Seaside’s city-sanctioned homeless camping program emerged in 2022 after federal courts ruled that homeless people had the right to camp on public property if adequate shelter beds were not available.

First situated at the Mill Ponds, campers had to move to Avenue S to avoid flooding from king tides in 2023. Since then, neighboring residents and businesses have repeatedly expressed concerns about safety around the encampment.

The complaints resulted in a proposed move to the southwest corner of the public works yard near Avenue V, which will take place this spring. Currently, 29 people reside in the encampment.

For the last few years, Community Service Officer Paul Knoch had been managing the camp. But City Manager Spencer Kyle said that the responsibility had been resource-intensive, especially in addition to Knoch’s other duties.

“One thing we’ve identified is that when you have one person doing that, there is a high level of burnout,” Kyle said. “And so we want to be protective of our employees, and of anyone that’s going to be doing this job.

“By turning to Clatsop Community Action, we turn to the organization with subject matter expertise and ongoing training for their staff. We believe that there will be a better connection for our campers to the service providers and relationship building.”

Councilor Seamus McVey expressed concerns about the transition and scope of work, and said that the 30 to 60 minutes allotted twice a day for check-ins was not enough.

“If we work with the numbers there, either people are not getting served, or they are getting served but not adequately,” he said.

Jerome Steegmans, the program developer for Clatsop Community Action, said the scope of work depended largely on the funding and the scale of the issues at the encampment.

“When we started this conversation, we looked at some cheaper options and some more expensive options, and there is no way that we can meet the need in the county — people need way more support than we can give them,” he said. “So what we can do for $50,000 a year, we can make a promise to be there three or four hours a day, which is attention that they’re not getting.

“We can help identify issues and hand them off to the police department for enforcement, public works for cleanup, and we’ll have a presence. … No, it’s not enough to really change everybody’s lives, but we’re going to make a difference for some people.”

The partnership will begin March 1. Kenny Hansen, a former homeless liaison for the Astoria Police Department who now works as an outreach coordinator for Clatsop Community Action, has already begun helping out at the camp twice a week.

“I try to go down there when the community resource officer is off, so we have some sort of presence during that day. … From talking to some of the campers down there, they are open to getting help, they want to get help,” he said. “From the other side of it, there’s some that don’t want help, and there are some that are thinking about getting help.

“So when you’ve got all three of those, you kind of focus on the ones that want help right now, and there’s a couple of them, which is really good. And maybe others will follow and see what success stories these people can create and follow suit.”

Councilor Tita Montero said she appreciated the partnership with Clatsop Community Action, and said she wanted to make sure all the campers felt like they had somebody to turn to in those daily check-ins.

“I think the intent behind this, that I’m hearing, is that that third camper is at least seen once a day,” she said, referring to Hansen’s statement that campers fall into three categories — those who want help, are considering help or are not ready to receive help.

Councilors agreed they would check back in with Clatsop Community Action within the next six months to determine which aspects of the contract work well, and which need to be workshopped.

“It sounds to me a bit like a pilot program, in my vernacular, so I might look at it a little bit like that,” said Councilor Chris Binnicker. “And instead of thinking about it like ‘we’re locking in for a year to a program’ … I might look at it more as, ‘we’re piloting a new program, and we’re going to make mistakes, and we’re going to learn things, and we’re going to want to make changes along the way.’”