Cyclists object to closure of Joe Rodota Trail over homeless encampment
SANTA ROSA – Without warning, fences went up on Santa Rosa's Joe Rodota Trail, restricting access because of the presence a small homeless encampment earlier this month.
On Tuesday, a group of cyclists questioned the need for that action.
Sonoma Regional Parks closed a half-mile section of the popular bike and pedestrian path on July 8, saying the encampment was "impeding safe public use of the trail."
Santa Rosa cyclist Janelle Black doesn't understand what she described as a panicked response.
"Yes, a huge overreaction," Black told KPIX 5. "There's always tents on the trail. I mean, they kind of move around. Sometimes there's more, sometimes it kind of goes down when they move people along. But there are always homeless people on the trail."
Tuesday morning, a group of cyclists from the Sonoma Bicycle Coalition rallied in front of the Sonoma County building to urge supervisors to reopen the trail.
They said it was unfair to pit them against the homeless when they never asked for it to be closed in the first place.
"The county is consumed with fears about liability for everything," said Tom Abrams, a cyclist from Sebastopol. "So, I have to assume that was in the forefront of their minds."
Out on the trail, about a dozen tents occupied the side of the paved roadway. The rest of the space was compressed within the portable fencing.
Two of the camp's residents, Earl and Todd, were playing a game of dice on Tuesday. They, too, thought it was ironic that it was the public that was being shut out.
Earl said he didn't see the danger, "No, no...unsafe? No, it's not unsafe."
But both men remembered 2019 when an encampment on the trail swelled to more than 100 tents and about 250 people.
"It looked real bad then, but they waited until everybody in town moved into the same place," said Todd. "It looked bad, the way they had to come clean it up, but now everybody's kind of spread out."
Todd thought the new fences are meant to keep it from happening again.
"Yeah, they're just trying to force us into someplace else," he said.
No one from Sonoma Regional Parks would speak about it on Tuesday, but it may be that the real danger lies in doing nothing.
Last time, officials waited until the camp got so big that it cost the county a million dollars to remove.
Supervisor Lynda Hopkins said she doesn't want to repeat that mistake.
"One of the challenges that we've seen is, once an encampment gets established and there's a certain number of people, you kind of hit a threshold where it starts to snowball really quickly, and it's known as 'the place to go.' And that's what we want to avoid," Hopkins told KPIX 5.
The cyclists said it's not fair to let a small number of campers restrict access to a public resource. They are urging county officials to designate a safe camping area for the homeless residents.
Currently, the county's shelter space is already over capacity, so they can't legally force the campers from the trail. The strategy now seems to be isolating the encampment to try to keep it from getting any bigger.
