12-20-17 Health and Public Safety

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was vetoed by the Mayor. A couple years later, what has been referred to as a stripped down version was passed. When I looked at it, it is far from being stripped down in my opinion. In my opinion, Indianapolis has come a long way to protect the rights of its citizens. The public policy of the Indianapolis Ordinance is stated as `No person should suffer unnecessarily or be subject to unfair discrimination or arbitrary treatment based on his or her homeless status. It is the intent of this article to lessen the adverse effects and conditions caused by the lack of a home or residence.' In enforcing that public policy, Indianapolis enacted statutes aimed at protecting people who were living in camps. Under the Indianapolis Ordinance, if the City were to come through and disrupt those camps,they had to provide the camp with a fifteen(15) day advance notice. When they do go through,the City must store belongings for sixty(60) days to give the opportunity for people to reclaim those items. They must catalog all items collected. Indianapolis does go a long way to protect at least the camps that the homeless are living in. Indianapolis also had the duty to find housing for those they disrupted from those camps. Whether it was transitional housing or permanent housing,they would have to try to find services for those people. Indianapolis is much different than South Bend in terms of services and volunteers available. He continued, One (1) of the questions that comes up in talking about the Homeless Bill of Rights is how those rights will be enforced. A statement of rights is, or can be, meaningless unless there is an enforcement procedure. To actually protect those rights and to do more than simply recognizing those rights requires an enforcement proceeding. On the State level, they can create agencies and causes of action. The State can create remedies for the violation of a Homeless Bill of Rights that cities can't legally do. Cities cannot do anything that is contrary to a state statute. We can't create additional rights that the State says do not exist. So whatever enforcement proceedings the City would want to enact to protect these rights has to be done with what we have on the books already. My thought on this is if we are trying to eliminate discrimination against people based on their housing status, the term housing status could be inserted into our human rights ordinance of the City. This would create another classification of people against whom discrimination is illegal. To do that would simply require the addition of the phrase `housing status' after the term `gender' in the statute. That would allow a homeless person whose rights were violated to file a claim with the South Bend Human Rights Commission to have a hearing. That is something that could be done. I am not advocating for this route but am simply stating its possibility. He went on,As Vice President Davis has mentioned, Councilmember Dr. David Varner has agreed to look into identifying corresponding responsibilities of the homeless. This is something I have not seen in any other Homeless Bill of Rights but it is certainly something that is not precluded. A statement of corresponding responsibilities would simply be a reminder of the responsibilities that every person in this City has, including the homeless. Possible examples would be to obey Federal, State and Local statutes and ordinances, refraining from obstructing public ways or harassing other individuals and obeying lawful commands from Police and Fire personnel. We could probably list one-hundred (100) different responsibilities because we all know we have many responsibilities owing to the City and each other as citizens of the City, but this would be a reminder of those. Just like establishing a Bill of Rights, corresponding responsibilities might also need an enforcement procedure. A possible procedure could be establishing that the violation of any of these responsibilities would be an affirmative defense 4