City says abatement notices to go up at Davis Park within the next few weeks

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) - Members of the LaFrance administration said Tuesday that abatement notices will be going up at Davis Park in Mountain View within the next few weeks and that the camp will be abated by early summer.

Special assistant Thea Agnew Bemben said the goal is to have children playing on the ball fields at the park this summer, but didn’t give a specific date when the camp will actually be cleared.

Bemben said the Mountain View Community Council will be among the first to know.

“We want to make sure we communicate with the Community Council and other folks that we’ve been working closely with once we have a date, and then we will be making that public,” Bemben said.

People who live in Mountain View have expressed their frustration at the camp, which has grown steadily over the last few years and which residents say has increased crime in their neighborhood. In the last few months, it’s also been the scene of two deadly shootings.

Pam Brennan, who has lived in her Mountain View home for more than 40 years, said she was particularly frustrated to hear Mayor LaFrance tell Alaska’s News Source during a televised interview that the camp at Davis Park wouldn’t be abated any time soon.

“Something to the effect that it couldn’t be done right away because there was no place for the people to go, and you had to have a place for them to go or they would just move elsewhere,” Brennan said. “But the problem is, why should that be our neighborhood’s problem?”

According to Bemben, the mayor understands their frustration.

“The mayor is very, very well aware of the public safety risk, of the public health risk that is being posed for the people who are staying in the camp and the people in the immediate area,” Bemben said. “The thing is, we can’t just implement an abatement in the way that we would for a smaller area because that could potentially cause even greater impacts to the community.”

Bemben said outreach workers have begun letting campers know the camp will close and they will need to make a plan for where to go. Outreach efforts will increase in the coming weeks, Bemben said. But for many, where they will move is still in question

Bemben said an important piece of the puzzle is a $5.5 million federal grant that will become available for people to access this week. The money, earmarked as “rental assistance,” will be used to help people in shelters find more permanent housing, which Bemben said should free up shelter beds. She said it can also be used to bring people directly from the camps into permanent housing with case management.

“We believe with the amount of assistance that we have available that people will be able to find units,” she said.

The hope is that people currently living at Davis Park won’t just move to another section of town but, with help, will find some type of housing that is not in a public space. In an emailed response Wednesday to a follow-up question about how to ensure campers don’t simply move to a new area, Bemben referred to funding available to help their plight.

“Our approach is to ensure there are funds available for emergency rental assistance along with outreach to support connection to those and other healthcare and shelter resources along with addressing camping in other locations,” Bemben said.

Bemben said residents can also expect to see more enforcement.

“We now have a fully staffed Municipal prosecutor’s office and we will be increasing enforcement of crimes such as theft, trespass, and illegal drug use and distribution,” she wrote. “We will also be increasing engagement with vulnerable people in public spaces through our mobile teams (MIT, MCT, ASP). Through increased engagement and enforcement we intend to connect people with resources and to reduce the number of people who are unsheltered in Anchorage.”

At Davis Park and the nearby snow dump, Bemben said the clean-up will require a major effort, but the city is committed to making it happen.

“We have a lot of refuse, structures. It takes quite a bit of resources to dismantle something that’s been there two, probably three years at this point. So we are amassing all of those resources and getting ready for an abatement that will hopefully be successful for the community, for the people who are staying there, and all of our partners,” she said.

Pam Brennan said if campers move on and the clean-up happens, it will be a victory for the neighborhood and its children, who can no longer safely use the park. But like many of the residents of Mountain View, she’s likely to believe it only when she sees it happen.

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