Camas code changes could prove costly

Perhaps influenced by the ire of community members who consider themselves part of the Dorothy Fox Safety Alliance — a group that has spent the better part of a year demonizing recovering addicts in a quest to prevent a substance abuse treatment and recovery center from operating near the Dorothy Fox Elementary School in Camas’ Prune Hill neighborhood — members of the Camas Planning Commission have eagerly embraced changes to the city’s code that would severely limit where drug rehabs and sober living homes can operate in Camas. 

If approved by the Camas City Council, the Planning Commission’s recommended code changes would make it impossible for drug treatment centers and sober living homes — group homes that allow people recovering from substance abuse to live amongst their peers in a safe, recovery-focused house free of drugs and alcohol — to operate in any of Camas’ residential or mixed-use zones. The planning commissioners also agreed to bar these types of facilities from being sited within 1,000 feet of Camas’ schools, parks and libraries. 

To operate in other areas of the city — mostly in light industrial and business park zones — the facilities will need to get a conditional-use permit. 

If the Camas City Council agrees to the code changes, the city would effectively be prohibiting sober living homes entirely, since these are, as the name implies, homes for people in recovery and are typically located in single-family or multi-family residential zones not light-industrial business parks located far from any school, park or library in the city. 

The recommendation to add sober living homes to the restrictive zoning changes came to the planning commissioners via an attorney for the Dorothy Fox Safety Alliance during a public hearing held in mid-January. The commissioners latched on to the attorney’s recommendation immediately, without discussing possible ramifications for the city or for community members in need of substance abuse recovery services like a sober living home. 

Hopefully, Camas City Council officials will dig a little deeper before passing the recommended code changes. If they do, they may find that the United States Department of Justice does not look kindly on cities that discriminate against people in recovery from drugs and alcohol — a protected group under the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Fair Housing Act.

The ADA requires state and local governments to provide “reasonable accommodations” to individuals with disabilities protected under the ADA, which includes people in recovery for drug addiction or alcoholism. 

In fact, the DOJ has sued several cities for violating these federal anti-discrimination laws after local governments imposed restrictions against facilities catering to recovering addicts. 

As the League of California Cities advised their municipal government members in 2016: “Zoning laws that discriminate on their face against disabled persons face substantial obstacles in court … Any regulation which treats a protected class differently than others, no matter how seemingly innocuous, or even well-intentioned, is ill advised For example, persons in recovery are being harassed by residents who did not know that a sober living home was opening in the community. In response, the municipality adopts a neighbor notification law with the intent of diffusing the situation and assisting the residents in the sober living home. That law is invalid because it treats sober living homes for persons who are legally disabled differently than it treats other residential uses.”

Likewise, the DOJ has warned state and local government officials that “imposing restrictions on housing because of alleged public safety concerns that are based on stereotypes about the residents’ or anticipated residents’ membership in a protected class (including people in recovery for substance abuse) by, for example, requiring a proposed development to provide additional security measures based on a belief that persons of a particular protected class are more likely to engage in criminal activity,” would be an example of zoning or land-use laws that would violate federal FHA rules. 

There is no doubt the Dorothy Fox Safety Alliance has used stereotypes about people recovering from drug and alcohol addiction to support their opposition to the Discover Recovery center. In the group’s original petition against the facility — a petition that garnered nearly 1,500 signatures in early 2021 — the DFSA’s anonymous founders stated: “After personally watching a community torn apart from a kidnapping, rape, strangulation of an 11 year old girl at the hands of an addict, we ask that you please sign this petition to be part of the collective voice educating local leaders and government of the public safety risk versus the existing code designation for an assisted living facility.”

As this newspaper has pointed out before, while there may be several valid reasons why the Discover Recovery center would not be a good fit for the Prune Hill neighborhood, completely unfounded fears that future patients will harm children is not one of them. Neither are unsubstantiated fears that the facility will increase crime in the Prune Hill area.

In fact, several research studies have shown there is no connection between inpatient drug recovery centers and increased community crime. A 2016 study by Johns Hopkins University researchers published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs concluded that drug treatment centers “have an unfairly poor reputation as being magnets for crime and a threat to community safety that is not backed up by empirical evidence.” 

Even so, many Camas leaders seem to have taken the DFSA’s word that having a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center near a school or public park or within a residential neighborhood poses a danger the city must remedy. But what exactly is the danger? Do they truly believe people seeking medical help for a treatable brain disease somehow pose more of a danger to the community than, say, a distracted driver speeding through a school zone or a parent who fails to safely secure guns inside their home or people who outright refuse to follow public health mandates during a deadly pandemic?

Blindly passing zoning changes based on false stereotypes that discriminate against a protected group of people is not only morally wrong, but could also prove to be a very costly mistake for the city of Camas. 

The city of Jackson, Mississippi, for instance, had to pay nearly $200,000 in a settlement with the DOJ after it was found to have “engaged in a pattern or practice of discrimination on the basis of disability by imposing unlawful zoning restrictions on group homes (sober living homes) for persons in recovery.” 

A similar discrimination suit in Garfield County, Colorado, cost taxpayers more than $500,000 in 2012, after a federal jury ruled that county officials had violated the federal FHA in its attempts to shut down a sober living home. 

Camas taxpayers have already paid more than $10,000 in legal fees related to the DFSA’s failed attempt to convince a superior court judge that the city’s hearings examiner erred in granting a conditional-use permit to Discover Recovery. Do taxpayers really want to be on the hook for tens or hundreds of thousands more if the city passes zoning rules severely restricting sober living homes’ ability to operate in residential zones or anywhere near schools and parks — rules that would likely be found to have violated federal law?