A landmark June 28 ruling on homelessness by the U.S. Supreme Court has cleared the way for cities to resume enforcing bans on sleeping or camping in public places without first providing available shelter space.

The high court’s ruling has Bremerton police chief Tom Wolfe imploring the city’s elected officials to revisit its code on unauthorized camping, but while the City Council agreed to schedule a vote on an amendment that would remove the shelter space stipulation it spent much of 2023 constructing, several council members said they found the newly proposed change hard to wrap their heads around.

“I still don’t believe, ‘The sky is falling, the sky is falling!’ until I see that the sky is falling, and I don’t see any signs that the sky is falling,” said Councilwoman Denise Frey. “That’s just where I am.”

Wolfe, joined by Mayor Greg Wheeler in the council’s July 24 study session, recalled a year of “toxic compassion” in Bremerton after the closure of the Salvation Army’s seasonal shelter created the final push in a sudden explosion of “tent cities” on many downtown streets. The most infamous of these was located on and around Martin Luther King Way, where police activity, drug usage, overdoses and property damage became commonplace.

“I watched in 2023 as people died,” Wolfe said. “We enabled people to death. We fed them, we let them do their drugs, and there’s a human toll to that.”

Prior lower court rulings in the Ninth Circuit led the council to spend much of last year reconstructing city code to ensure its constitutionality. A stipulation that would suspend the code’s enforcement if no shelter space was available was approved in September, and the reopening of the Salvation Army’s shelter last fall meant the camps could be cleared.

The decision to revisit the policy now comes roughly one month after the latest decision in the case of City of Grants Pass vs. Johnson. A 6-3 ideological ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court overturned multiple lower court rulings that deemed the Oregon city’s ban on camping cruel and unusual under the Eighth Amendment.

Wolfe believes this ruling gives Bremerton the chance to return a sense of accountability to its local law while maintaining a sensible level of compassion. “When you only have compassion and no accountability, it leads to cruelty, and I think what happened down at MLK Way was cruel,” he said.

“We’re asking the council to uncouple the shelter requirement so we never ever go back to what we had,” added Wheeler. We all know there’s scenarios where we could fill up our shelter. It could be an increased amount of this impact. It could be natural disaster. It could be the Salvation Army is done.”

Despite the “what if ” scenarios of another sudden lack of shelter space that would make the city’s code unenforceable, multiple councilmembers saw little to no reason for a change. Councilwoman Anna Mockler’s thoughts took inspiration from Frey, saying, “I don’t understand why removing this option is going to make things simpler. Once the sky is falling, this council has leaped to aid the city every time, but right now, there’s no apparent sky falling.”

Wolfe went on to describe the effect those camps are continuing to have on his own officers as well as paramedics, city staff, nearby businesses and residents. Data provided by the Bremerton Police Department shows 6th Street, 8th Street, Broadway, and MLK Way were responsible for just 1.2% of calls handled by the BPD in 2019. That number ballooned to 6.2% in 2023. Even with those camps cleared, homelessness continues to contribute to call volumes, the department reporting that calls are on track to increase again in those four areas with 7.2% thus far in 2024.

That increase comes despite the added presence of Commonstreet Consulting, a Seattle-based firm that entered into a one-year, $212,000 agreement with the city to assist with the homeless crisis in January. Trisha Munson with Commonstreet said she understands the controversial matter of the subject but stands with Wolfe in saying the change is needed.

“It does offer us that opportunity for the people who are being resilient to change simply because they don’t want to,” she said. “We’re not talking about the mentally ill folks who are not able to ascertain that concept. We’re not talking about the people who have been banned from Salvation Army or from the other shelters. What it does do is it gives us the opportunity to offer that compassion and accountability that gives us the opportunity to get more people, some help.”

While several councilmembers continued to express concern over any such change and made calls for additional data sources, Councilman Eric Younger in an increasingly frustrated tone called a vote in favor of the amendment “common risk management”, continuing to say that if outside providers currently working on shelter space do not do so, the city must find a way to gain control again.

“If you pass this ordinance as it’s presented, now we have the tools in the toolbox to prevent last summer from happening again. If you don’t do it, shame on us,” Younger said.

Frey continued to maintain that she had not heard enough reason for the amendment, and with shelter space levels maintained underneath the maximum capacity at the Salvation Army shelter, Councilman Jeff Coughlin said the two weeks prior to the council’s Aug. 7 meeting should be used wisely. “It’s not urgent in the next week or two,” he said. “I think it’s our due diligence to take an extra week or two and just have this discussion a little more, get a little more data and then take action.”

Residents are expected to have a chance to provide public comment on the ordinance, which is expected to be up for a vote as soon as the council’s Aug. 7 meeting at the Norm Dicks Government Center.