City councillors have asked for a cost analysis of expanding the community safety officer and clean team programs, but it’s unlikely there’ll be money to pay for something like that.
The recommendation, made at a governance and priorities meeting Monday, April 29, followed a presentation evaluating the downtown Nanaimo community safety action plan.
The report reviewed the action plan’s effectiveness since it was implemented in 2022 to respond to downtown Nanaimo’s most serious social issues. The report specifically emphasized a critical need to invest in Nanaimo’s CSO and clean teams to ensure the sustainability of those programs and the safety and well-being of CSOs and clean team staff.
“We wanted to see if [the action plan] was meeting its objectives, if we were properly resourcing it and if there might be opportunities to expand some of the initiatives city-wide,” said Dave LaBerge, director of public safety. “We also wanted to have a look to see if the plan was properly aligned with other plans, including city plan and the youth resilience strategy and the health and housing task force.”
Funding for the report was gleaned from $75,000 allocated from the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General a year ago. The report, presented by Alana Best of consulting firm Deloitte Inc., was compiled through workshops, neighbourhood and business engagement sessions, interviews with community safety representatives and community safety officers, and surveys of people experiencing homelessness.
Best said there was strong positive feedback about the CSO and clean team programs, and consultants who followed CSOs on the job witnessed strong operational co-ordination between service providers supporting people in need downtown.
“The clean team and the CSOs provide significant positive and overwhelming changes to the downtown Nanaimo core. I think that came through in spades,” she said.
But despite positive community feedback, CSOs can’t provide around-the-clock coverage, nor can they keep up with demand for their services.
LaBerge said the program’s initial goal was to provide seven-day-a-week coverage, 21.5 hours a day with 12 officers, but it was soon realized that could barely be achieved even if no one became ill or took a holiday. As well, since the program launched, illicit drugs were decriminalized, Nanaimo’s unhoused population climbed and two officers have been off work with injuries, so CSO teams have been downsized and program hours cut back. To avoid having officers work the streets alone, others have to be called in on overtime or night shifts cancelled.
“Not only were we starting a new program, but the conditions we were working on were evolving very quickly. I can tell the committee that the CSOs have administered more than 1,500 units of naloxone and provided life-saving CPR more than 80 times in the last year and a half,” LaBerge said. “It has taken an enormous toll on the officers: not just the sheer amount of work and the amount of trauma they’re experiencing, but just trying to do this with very scarce resources … The demands are very complex and they’re incessant and I would characterize it as burning the candle at both ends.”
Barry Hornby, senior CSO and program supervisor, said the work is a daily challenge, especially in winter, to try to find shelter for unhoused people and ensure their medical and mental health needs are met.
“We’re not just dealing with homelessness, we’re dealing with mental health aspect and the addiction. They’re all intertwined,” Hornby said.
But compassion and establishing relationships with unhoused people has helped.
“The team that we have brings the social services background, not just the enforcement background,” he said.
The report recommends three options to sustain or expand the CSO program that range from staffing 20 full-time CSOs and adding an additional supervisor, to extending CSO services beyond downtown by raising the number of full-time CSOs to 30 and adding a supervisor. The consultant also recommends growing the clean team staff to up to 10 full-time employees, extending it beyond downtown, and supplying appropriate vehicles and equipment.
Coun. Paul Manly asked if community associations favoured a CSO program expansion.
“The issues that we’re seeing are not just concentrated to downtown and that’s changing and spreading, so they feel there’s a responsibility to move beyond that and to take care of the larger picture in Nanaimo,” Best said.
Most councillors agreed to creating a cost analysis and feasibility study and business cases for expanding the programs ahead of 2025 budget deliberations, but some expressed reservations about potential costs to taxpayers.
Coun. Janice Perrino said council had just passed a 7.7 per cent tax increase and has asked taxpayers to continually pay for more emergency and social services, warming centres, shelters and vandalism grants, but the situation for Nanaimo’s unhoused population is not improving.
“If we were to agree to an additional possibly 30 CSOs and 10 more members of a clean team, I shudder to think what the tax number will be for next year … It goes on and on and on and nothing is improving this story,” she said. “I just can’t endorse yet more money and less help from the province.”
Coun. Hilary Eastmure acknowledged the money already spent to produce the report plus additional costs for a feasibility study and business cases and wondered if narrowing the study scope could save money and staff time.
“At the end of the day when it comes down to it, it’s not going to be financially feasible for us to expand the CSO program to the entire city,” Eastmure said. “That’s almost like creating our own bylaw police force and it’s just a bottomless pit of resources.”
Coun. Ben Geselbrecht said he thought Perrino’s comments were “bang on,” but the city is in “the bottom of a hole” of a drug crisis and homelessness and the study could provide information about how the CSO program is “demonstrating how it’s helping us dig our way out.”
The motion passed with Perrino opposed.
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