About 20 encampments have sprung up in the unincorporated areas of the Santa Maria Riverbed since it was cleaned out last year.
“The majority of the folks that are out in the riverbed … are the more hardcore, where they’re not going to accept the resources that we provide,” Senior Park Services Officer Ruben Ramirez told the Santa Maria City Council on Jan. 21. “In the city, we are encountering more homelessness in the parks.”
For now, Ramirez said, the best that the city can do to address the riverbed camps is to notify the respective jurisdictions that they exist, either Santa Barbara County or San Luis Obispo County or Caltrans. Santa Barbara County collaborated with the city, SLO County, Caltrans, and local nonprofits to clean encampments out of the riverbed over the course of several months in 2024, spending around $6 million. The project aimed to connect the estimated 110 to 150 people living there with resources to help them get housing, employment, health care, and more.
Since the cleanup, Santa Maria Police Sgt. Felix Diaz told the council that calls for service have increased and that the department and city are constantly doing encampment cleanups and responding to calls about transient issues.
“A lot of people who have relocated out of the riverbed have come into the city. A lot of them are in the railroad tracks area,” he said, adding that the initial offer is always to connect unhoused individuals with services. “Last week, we were in the railroad track area, we did arrest 11 subjects for various charges. … So we’re doing our enforcement.”
Ramirez said that Santa Maria City Rangers also patrol the riverbed five days a week for two hours a day, but the jurisdictional boundaries do present an issue for enforcment.
“It’s not a whole lot, but it’s the best we can do right now,” he said.
City Councilmember Maribel Aguilera-Hernandez asked whether there was a way to negotiate some kind of agreement with the other entities that enables the city to patrol the riverbed outside of its jurisdiction, do what it needs to do to address the issue, and send them the bill.
Assistant City Manager Chuen Wu said he was in the middle of trying to negotiate memorandums of understanding with the counties, Caltrans, and the California Highway Patrol to do just that.
Councilmember Gloria Soto asked how much the city spent tackling the issue and how it was planning to measure success. A document tracking the city’s progress on the issue is in the works, Wu said. It would include what the city’s done, what it’s going to continue to do, and plans for the future. He added that success can be hard to measure.
“Some of it is visible, and when we consider what was visible in the Santa Maria Riverbed a year ago versus what is visible in the Santa Maria Riverbed today, there is a clear difference,” Wu said. “In terms of the riverbed, there is a distinct change and improvement for the better, but we understand that as those individuals move out, they move into the community and require ongoing monitoring.”
Soto said she was glad that the city was planning to take more initiative by tracking what it’s doing and measuring the outcome rather than relying the counties for that.
“It feels as if we’re being really reactionary when it comes to addressing homelessness rather than being strategic,” she said. “Those efforts are still not enough, and additional resources need to be added. … and that investment really needs to come from the city, again, rather than waiting to see what other jurisdictions are going to do to address homelessness in our city.”
This article appears in Jan 30 – Feb 9, 2025.