Morgantown City Council Approves Camping Ban Despite Community, Member Opposition

Morgantown’s City Council has passed a camping ban aimed at addressing homelessness in the city. The Morgantown City Council voted 4 to 3 early Wednesday morning to enact a new article of City Code entitled “Camping on Public Property” at their Sept. 3 meeting.

The meeting began shortly after 7 p.m., but the vote was not cast until after 1 a.m.

In total the meeting stretched close to seven hours, including more than five hours of public comment from close to 30 citizens, overwhelmingly against the ban.

Second Ward resident Charlie B said she works as a business systems analyst. She spoke for close to an hour, including a detailed estimate of the cost of incarceration for violations of the ban that encompassed police and staff time, prison per diems and more.

“If this process successfully incarcerated everyone in town, it would cost taxpayers over $200,000 per month to deny the most vulnerable among us autonomy, self-determination and freedom with no preventative measures to ensure that housing is afforded to those impacted,” B said. “Given inflation, this could potentially cost taxpayers closer to $383,000 per month.”

Up to 30 days of incarceration is the penalty for repeated violations of the new camping ban, which includes fines ranging from $200 to $500. It is estimated there are more than 150 people experiencing homelessness in Morgantown.

Morgantown now joins Wheeling and Parkersburg, which passed their own camping bans in 2023.

Citizens repeatedly warned the council that they are prepared to formally petition for a referendum that would halt the ordinance until a public vote. An unofficial petition had already garnered more than 500 signatures before the end of the meeting.

Others, like Leslie Wilbur, said lawsuits are also impending.

“At the first reading, we had a counselor who brought up a lot of really great points about ways that this could be amended to at least be more enforceable, to avoid the lawsuits that you know are coming,” she said. “I mean, you’ve had multiple attorneys who deal with civil rights issues say that they are prepared to take this to court, so that’s not going to be a big surprise, right?”

After the vote and a brief recess, Ward Seven Councilmember Brian Butcher asked why the ordinance needed to be passed now. Several amendments that Butcher proposed at the Aug. 20 meeting were declined in part because their adoption would require the ordinance be publicly read a third time Sept. 17.

“One thing I can’t seem to understand, and maybe we can have a discussion about, is why we feel like we need to rush this through and not think through the kind of legal liability that we’re taking on,” he said. “Have those kinds of discussions about the legal liability, at least have work sessions why we felt this was necessary, with all of the legal implications that we feel like are coming up, and the difficulty that we’ve expressed with enforcing it.”

Deputy Mayor and Ward Four Councilmember Jenny Seline replied that as an issue that affected the entire community, public camping needed to be addressed.

“There is nothing that prevents all of us seven and the groups that are represented here today, working together on services and temporary and permanent housing,” she said. “This is something that there has been an urgency for because of the impacts on people both housed and non-housed.” 

The ordinance is meant to be effective 30 days after adoption. However, the ban requires that shelter must be offered to those experiencing homelessness and denied before a citation can be issued, so a provision in the ordinance delays the effective date until an emergency shelter is open within Morgantown and accepting new entrants.

The city’s emergency shelter experienced a budgetary crisis earlier this year and has not accepted new intakes since mid-March. Catholic Charities is expected to take over the city’s 28 bed emergency shelter in the coming weeks. With just one other shelter in the city with 26 beds, there are not nearly enough spaces to offer the more than 150 people estimated to be experiencing homelessness in Morgantown. 

Ward Five Council Member Danielle Trumble and community members expressed concern that police officers would be expected to spend time locating shelter to offer before citation.

“I agree with Annie and Haley, who both raised concerns that we are now forcing our police to become social workers,” she said. “We do have one. We are going to ask every single one of them. And we are not going to be able to recruit police. We are not going to be able to retain police. There’s going to run for the hills when we tell them this is now essentially your main job is enforcing this.”

Only two other issues were quickly discussed at the meeting before its conclusion close to 2 a.m.