Medford approves new urban campsite for houseless along Biddle Road

A parcel of land along Biddle Road will soon be the site of a centralized haven for the houseless population, Medford Police Chief Clauson said on Monday.

Is in his 20s.

Biddle road.

Earlier today- i spoke with medford police chief scott clauson about what comes next.

Now aren't those folks, some of them who live on the greenway, they specifically don't want to go to shelters and don't want to go to areas that they might have to live under certain restrictions.

Why would this camp or with this camp be different?

Um, really the motivation for getting these folks to this area was, will be that we can consolidate our services.

So we right now have.

Portable toilets and hand wash stations and food, um, interspersed throughout the greenway over 17 miles.

And this will allow us to consolidate those services to one location.

So we hope just by that fact that there will be services that they will want to come to this location where there's food and, and case management you've described something that doesn't necessarily fit into what many people would think would be the traditional police department.

Timeframe and or a skillset.

Why is it something the department is so involved in right now?

Well, public safety is, is definitely my role and it's my mission.

And right now i want to make the greenway a safer place.

The, the issue that we're facing right now is an extreme fire danger.

And it, when we continue to have, uh, the homeless down into the heavy vegetated areas, they continued to almost nightly, um, light fires.

And so i'm really concerned about some of our residents who live along the greenway, um, a long table rock area.

We have a lot of businesses of course, out by biddle road it's chevy way.

And those are very vulnerable.

Areas.

And, and today, since march 1st, we've had 99 fires reported along the greenway just within our city limits.

So it's definitely a, uh, there's definitely a high occurrence.

So if can try to keep folks off the greenway in fire season is a primary concern.

What's your timeframe for getting that up and running d applying and getting all osfkinto the air thatu're honwlk at's just so we have sebenchmare nprofits to get in and get thenf july.

Is your goal to have,d ty and cut dnn fireworks?'s my goas through this time of covid,ich t u guys haveo jump before youn a?

Um, w we need to get the area veled off and then, um, rubber ee wants to come in and putsomeo atre's, there's a visualfect tho work onhat.

Um, and then from er it's just a matter of moving the portable toilets and, and hand wash stations over there.