Homeless encampments are a “huge public safety and health issue” in Federal Way, according to Mayor Jim Ferrell.

And he announced on Tuesday the city has a plan to clean them up.

“There are a number of locations in the city in which there are needles strewn everywhere, there’s garbage everywhere, there’s hulked-out cars,” Ferrell said at a City Council meeting, referring to the camps. “It’s a public safety issue and it’s a health issue with all the needles.”

The plan, or “initiative,” as city officials say, calls for collaboration among multiple different city of Federal Way departments – the police department, community development, code enforcement, public works, parks and human services.

Once homeless encampments are identified around the city, spokeswoman Cathy Schrock said, officials will determine if they are located on public or private land. If they’re on public land, the people living there will be notified that the camp will be closed and given information about various human services – housing, chemical dependency, mental health and more. If the camps are on private land, city officials will notify the landowners and inform them that they are not in compliance with city code.

“But eventually, if all those things don’t come into play, you have the ‘simple’ crime of trespassing,” Schrock said. “Our intent is not to take these people and turn them into criminals; our intent is to give them opportunities.”

Ferrell, Federal Way Police Chief Andy Hwang, and two deputy chiefs visited a former homeless encampment in February after they learned a fire had started in the area from people using propane tanks to cook and stay warm. The encampment was near Steel Lake on private property but was about 50 yards from a “whole row of houses.”

“It would stagger the mind by how much debris is back there,” Ferrell said, adding that if the fire had occurred in the middle of summer then the city might have lost the entire forested area.

The “unified command initiative to address homeless camps” is led by Deputy Chief Stephen Neal. Chief of Staff Brian Wilson said the plan is to “tackle this huge problem” in the next six to nine months. Schrock said they’re still in the beginning stages of identifying where homeless encampments are.

In January, the annual One Night Count tallied 263 people sleeping outside in Federal Way, a 150 percent increase from last year.

Five representatives from the city of Federal Way recently attended the Sound Cities Association Convening of Cities on Homelessness event on March 11 to build relationships and bring city governments together on the regional homelessness issue and learn about “promising practices.”

Wilson said the city has implemented several of those practices already, including a coordinated approach to human services; a strong effort from faith-based communities, such as Reach Out, which provides services; the police department’s “community/problem” oriented policing approach; a strong non-profit human services provider base; planning for a day shelter, and the most recent homeless encampment initiative.

“One thing I came away with was that it’s important with this effort not to just focus on individual cities and what their responsibilities are,” Wilson said at Tuesday’s council meeting. “I really believe this is a regional issue and that there has to be regional dollars and regional solutions that are identified to address this, and it should not be left just to individual cities to be responsible for.”

Councilman Martin Moore encouraged the city to do all it could to help combat homelessness, including looking at a task force, while Councilwoman Dini Duclos said it was a “very complex problem.”

“I was on the original committee to end homelessness, the 10-year plan,” Duclos said. “And one of the things we discovered of people being drawn to this state from other states across the country – some as far away as Florida – because we had more services that were available to people.”

Duclos said she’s not saying the city should cut back on services, but rather that the problem couldn’t be solved overnight and that some people actually choose to be homeless.

But for those who don’t choose to live in their cars, a tent or on the street, housing is a root cause.

Manuela Ginnett with the Multi-Service Center said in a past report that for every $100 rent increases per month, homelessness rises 15 percent in cities and 39 percent in rural areas.

“It’s clear that housing stock is not available; it’s not there,” said Councilwoman Lydia Assefa-Dawson, who was once homeless and works with the King County Housing Authority as a family self-sufficiency coordinator. “This issue… it’s going to continue. And even for the housing authorities that do have Section 8 vouchers and public housing, it’s a two- to three-year wait for people to even get into housing, affordable housing. Homelessness is a big issue and it’s going to be here for a long time.”

With addressing the homeless encampments, Schrock said the No. 1 goal is to understand how big that issue is.

“In the overall scheme of things, we’re still only talking about a couple hundred people,” she said, adding that the city’s intent is not to displace people from the camps but to help them in the long run.