SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The Sacramento County District attorney just served the capital city with a lawsuit over the growing homeless crisis. What, if anything, will this cost taxpayers?
"We have more unhoused people in Sacramento than San Francisco. Whatever the city's been doing, it's not working,” said Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho. “We need to change course of action and this lawsuit is going to do just that."
He announced the lawsuit in a morning news conference Tuesday and he says he's prepared to go to trial.
This comes a month after threatening legal action if the city didn’t do more for the crisis.
“Nobody here as part of this lawsuit is seeking a single dime. All we want is to have the court imposed upon the city, forcing them to require them to take certain steps that they're supposed to do to keep our streets safe and clean,” said Ho.
He says he has hundreds of witnesses ready to testify about the city’s inactions negatively impacting them in relation to the homeless crisis, but hopes they can avoid trial all together.
Sacramento Mayor Darell Steinberg responded to the lawsuit in a statement Tuesday.
“The DA's lawsuit will not clear a single sidewalk nor get a single person off the streets. We are working day and night to enforce our laws and provide relief to our community while avoiding the futile trap of just moving people endlessly from one block to the next,” he said in a statement.
Ho stresses this isn’t a political or personal venture, but it’s about the public’s safety in Sacramento.
“When you have eight out of 10 individuals that are chronically homeless, suffering from mental health and drug addiction, that drives the vast majority of the public safety issues within the community for them and the rest of the community,” he said. “Public safety, that's all it's about.”
Just last week Gov. Gavin Newsom sat down with Politico and said he believes the court system has tied the hands of local municipalities.
"The challenge is the judges are using a perverse interpretation of [Martin v. Boise] and this Granite Pass decision. I think they've gone too far, so far that even up in Sacramento, we weren't able to clean up encampments this summer,” he said.
He says the question of how to handle encampments and the homeless crisis needs to go to the Supreme Court.
"We're going to file an amicus brief. We're going to intervene and I hope this goes to the Supreme Court, and that's a hell of a statement for a progressive Democrat out of California to say, but it's just gone too far. People's lives are at risk. It's unacceptable what's happening on the streets and sidewalks,” said Newsom.
Meanwhile, the mayor says he's opened 1,200 shelter beds in his seven years as mayor.
