Mayor Julie Hoy’s efforts as a private citizen to repeal state requirements about removing homeless encampments spilled over into a recent Salem City Council meeting as over a dozen residents took the microphone to share concerns about the future of the city’s approach toward people without shelter.

Hoy last month signed on as a chief petitioner for a statewide initiative seeking to make it easier for cities and counties to remove homeless people and their belongings from public spaces.

She joined two other chief petitioners in filing “The Local Control & Safety Act” with the Oregon Secretary of State, which seeks to repeal a 2021 state law that requires cities to justify whether removing someone from the public place they’re sitting, lying or sleeping is “objectively reasonable as to time, place and manner.” The effort is backed by Oregon Business and Industry, a statewide chamber of commerce.

In the weeks since, Hoy has not publicly specified or answered questions about what she believes local governments, including Salem, should do with expanded control should the initiative succeed. 

She signed the petition as an individual, without listing her title of mayor.

But citizens speaking during the Monday, Oct. 27, meeting questioned Hoy’s participation in the petition, an apparent break from longstanding city approaches toward homelessness. 

Many tied their concerns to a council proposal at that meeting to accept a $180,000 largely anonymous donation from business groups to fund an expansion of a police homeless services team. After the testimony, the council accepted the donation in a 6-3 vote.

“She has aligned herself with business-driven efforts that treat homelessness as a threat to safety rather than a result of policy and societal failure,” said Salem resident Ryan Erickson-Kulas, who is involved in Salem Soup Squad, a mutual aid effort that serves hot meals regularly in Marion Square Park and Wallace Marine Park. “Mayor Hoy’s direction doesn’t end with safety. It ends with sweeps and displacement, not housing and stability…. I ask you to consider whether her ongoing alignment with business interests truly supports Salem’s goal of helping our unhoused neighbors, or simply advances a political agenda to make them disappear.”

Many of those who spoke during public testimony said they saw the mayor’s decision to file the petition as working against her own efforts with the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative Collaboration Track program run by the Harvard Kennedy School. The program earlier in the month brought city officials together with businesses and nonprofit leaders to discuss ways to address homelessness and safety in Salem. 

In that meeting, Hoy discussed the importance of collaboration, speakers said. Those who participated in the group, which plans to meet again in the new year, said they felt blindsided by her filing the petition.

“Julie Hoy has told city council and Harvard participants one thing, and then gone rogue and deviated from the proposed task and collaboration of 30 people, many of whom were on paid time from the city,” said Lorrie Walker, a local homeless advocate  who participated in the discussions, during her testimony. “Her word is meaningless… I implore city council not to be silent on these issues.”

Another called Hoy’s petition a “campaign stunt” amid her reelection campaign.

Hoy’s mayoral campaign site has not posted comments in support of the petition. She is seeking reelection in 2026.

Marion + Polk First, a conservative political action committee supporting Hoy’s reelection, has promoted the initiative, asking people in the community to add their signatures. Hoy did not respond to request for comment on their statement.

“Mayor Julie Hoy just signed on as a chief petitioner for the Local Control & Safety Act, a new statewide initiative that would give cities and counties the power to keep public spaces safe and clean,” a post from the organization said. “Right now, state law ties the hands of local leaders by forcing cities to prove that every action to move a camp or clear a sidewalk is ‘objectively reasonable.’ That law might sound good on paper — but in reality, it’s left our communities stuck in endless red tape while neighborhoods and parks suffer.” 

Despite filing the petition in her private capacity, Hoy addressed the group from the mayor’s seat during the meeting.

She read from a written statement off her phone, with similar phrasing to a statement she’d previously shared with Salem Reporter. She sent another similar statement to the news organization Friday in response to a request to comment on the council meeting.

“Repealing House Bill 3115 is truly about restoring local control,” Hoy began during the Monday council meeting, before being interrupted by some heckling from the audience. 

“She better not lie,” one audience member called.

“I am telling the truth,” Hoy continued. “(Repealing) House Bill 3115 is about restoring local control so cities like Salem can make their own decisions about how to respond to unsanctioned camping. Nothing about the Local Control & Safety Act is proposing anything having to do with sweeps and arrests. I agree we cannot arrest our way out of this problem. Period. It simply gives cities like Salem more flexibility. If the law were to be repealed it would be up to this council to determine what changes, if any, need to be made.”

Hoy also said she’d been under an overpass earlier that day, where she said a man was found unconscious, bleeding from his head. She said he was taken to the hospital.

“No one at that camp offered any information on that person. That to me is not safe for him or for the community. And so we have to find a way to do this differently,” Hoy said. 

The existing state law was created through a collaborative effort which included the League of Oregon Cities, Association of Oregon Counties and nonprofits. Supporters say it has set standards for the civil rights of homeless people, while allowing the city to enforce camping bans in unsafe or unhygienic situations.

Within current state laws, the city of Salem already bans camping in some areas, including near building entrances and encampments that block sidewalks. The state requires that cities give people a 72-hour notice before clearing an encampment. That’s in a separate statute which the initiative petition doesn’t address.

In the past year, the city’s homeless services team visited 947 sites and contacted 2,400 people, figures that include repeated visits, said Gretchen Bennett, the city’s acting community services director, in a Monday email. She said that available services are discussed at nearly every interaction, including available shelters, food, clothing and addiction services.

She said they tracked 365 resource referrals in the past year, and plan to soon start tracking the number of people who accept the referrals. She said the city doesn’t track how often, or where, a 72-hour notice of an encampment removal is placed.

Mayor Julie Hoy leads effort to expand city, county ability to sweep homeless encampments

The mayor’s efforts also drew discussion during the Mid-Willamette Valley Homeless Alliance during an Oct. 23 board meeting. 

The alliance manages homeless service funds in the greater Salem area and is governed by a board including local elected officials and service providers. Hoy represents the city of Salem for the alliance. 

Alliance member Christopher Lopez, a Monmouth city councilor, put forward a motion for the alliance to publicly express opposition to the petition.

“Cities need clear and workable rules. People also deserve humane treatment. Repealing the statute … doesn’t add clarity, it doesn’t add system capacity and it doesn’t add shelter. What it does is it removes the statewide ‘objectively reasonable’ standard, and the legal pathways that it creates to prevent the criminalization of homelessness,” Lopez said, according to a recording of the public meeting shared with Salem Reporter.

Hoy, during that meeting, denied that the initiative was a criminalization effort. 

“It’s not about criminalization, it’s not about sweeping camps, it’s not about an issue of human rights, it’s simply about local control and each individual municipality’s way of dealing with their very individualistic problem and situation and issue that they’re dealing with,” Hoy told the group.

The alliance board opted to table the vote to give board members more time to learn about the initiative and existing laws.

Some who addressed Hoy and the council were there in response to an Instagram post by Salem Soup Squad, which Holly Schiefelbein helps lead.

She said in an interview that she felt the initiative was an important issue to speak out about.

“Seeing that our mayor had taken a stance that would make it easier to criminalize people that are unhoused, and is the first of potentially several dominoes that could fall to make it easier to sweep people who are unhoused from camps, and just generally criminalize being unhoused in a system that does not provide sufficient support seems like a travesty,” Schiefelbein said.

Schiefelbein said that she had concerns about the mayor’s claim that she was acting as a private citizen, but was publicly saying it was something the city she leads needs, and speaking about the petition from the mayor’s chair.

“If she’s filed it as a private citizen, that’s fine, but do not use your pulpit as mayor to make comment about it. That’s blurring the lines,” she said.

Of 17 speakers who addressed the topic, one expressed support for wider bans on public camping rather than opposition. Salem resident Manny Martinez said he would like to see a ban on public camping after enough shelter and housing is made available, and that housing programs should require accountability from people with addiction issues. Martinez is running for the Ward 2 city council seat, according to campaign filings and a Tuesday morning Facebook announcement.

“We’re done being told that we lack kindness and compassion. We’re done being gaslit into believing that this issue is not the emergency that it so clearly is,” he said. “We’re done, and now we demand a long-term solution to this problem, instead of enabling it.”

Schiefelbein said she was proud of Salem for turning out Monday to share their support for the homeless community.

“The overarching tone of a lot of conversations lately have been very anti-homless, very anti-empathy, lacking compassion. And I think it was good and helpful for us to show up and counter that narrative. That there are people in the community that do care and can see (homelessness) as a bigger issue, as a systemic issue, as opposed to an individual choice issue,” Schiefelbein said. 

UPDATE: This story has been updated to note Manny Martinez’s council candidacy.

Contact reporter Abbey McDonald: [email protected] or 503-575-1251.

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