For more than two decades, Solvang upheld a ban against overnight camping on public property.
Two years after a 2023 revamp that made temporary camps lawful, the city is calling back to its 2002 stance.
Approved 5-0 by the Solvang City Council on its first reading, the potential new anti-camping ordinance prohibits overnight stays on city-owned and public spaces at all times, City Attorney Craig Steele told the council at its May 27 meeting.
“In the past ordinance, we made concessions, … because of pre-existing legal precedent,” Steele said. “Currently there’s an allowance [for some overnight camping] in the municipal code that was consistent with what supreme court precedence was prior to this case coming down last year.”
Steele was referring to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Grants Pass v. Johnson in 2024.
This case reversed a lower court’s ruling that banned jurisdictions from enacting laws to criminalize camping in areas that don’t have enough shelter beds to serve their unhoused populations.
At least 40 California jurisdictions adopted new homelessness response policies after the Supreme Court’s verdict, according to previous Sun reporting.
If Solvang’s proposed policy passes its second reading, scheduled for the City Council’s June 9 meeting, the city’s current allowances for temporary camping will be eliminated by mid-July.
Currently, the city’s municipal code allows anyone to camp, whether they’re in or outside of a vehicle, on city-owned property for 24 hours at a time, except for areas in Solvang’s Tourist Commercial District, within 100 feet of Mission Drive, or within 200 feet of any school.
The proposed ordinance axes the 24-hour allowance and tightens certain restrictions related to homelessness response. For example, the city’s current 72-hour notice policy before removing camping materials from a public area would be cut to a 24-hour notice.
Similarly, the city’s retention period, where it keeps removed materials in storage for at least 90 days, would be shortened to at least 60 days, Steele told the council.
Before motioning to approve the anti-camping policy’s first reading, Councilmember Elizabeth Orona asked staff to elaborate on the ordinance’s newly proposed exclusion order policy for violators who are caught camping in the same public space, such as a park, twice in one year.
Under the proposed camping ban, Steele said the city will be allowed to issue exclusion orders for those kinds of violators, which will ban them from visiting the respective site they were caught at during any part of the day.
Expiration dates on exclusion orders will vary, Steele added, and an appeal route will be open for alleged violators to choose to use.
This article appears in Jun 5-15, 2025.