AURORA, Colo. — Aurora’s new conservative majority on city council will soon decide whether to use city funding on a campaign to discourage people driving past panhandlers from giving them cash.
The campaign would create street signs in areas where there is a lot of panhandling activity, suggesting people donate instead to a fund called “Spirit of Aurora.” This fund would distribute the donations to service providers working with the unhoused community in that city.
“We would like to educate them that it’s better to give to the organizations that support those in need rather than to the panhandler directly,” Aurora Councilman Steve Sundberg, who sponsored the proposal, said. “Because in a lot of cases it just exacerbates a cycle of dependency that is not healthy.”
Sundberg, who asked to meet 9News near the intersection of I-225 and Iliff Avenue, said he has watched the same group of people living under the I-225 overpass and panhandling nearby for the past three years.
Two people in that area have overdosed on heroin in the last few years, the councilman said.
“We would just love to see them become healthy in the long term and that’s not healthy,” Sundberg said.
“We just see with our own eyes, right. I don’t know what the empirical data suggests," he said. "We don’t want to be a city that’s permissive to open air drug markets, that’s permissive to open camping, that’s permissive to aggressive panhandling. We’ll leave that to the cities on the West Coast.”
Sundberg said the proposal, which seems likely to pass with Aurora’s conservative majority on council, is not meant to criminalize panhandling, which courts have deemed Constitutionally protected free speech. He said people would still have the choice whether or not they wanted to support a panhandler.
“They can give if they want to,” he said. “But they should know that in a lot of cases they’re just contributing of a cycle of dependency and addiction.”
Cathy Alderman, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, argued this latest proposal is the latest in a series of rules in Aurora aimed at criminalizing homelessness.
“I don’t think I understand it,” Alderman said. “I think that people should be able to do with their money what they feel is best to do with their money.”
“If someone wants to give to an individual who is in need they should be able to do that,” she said.
Alderman said the argument that giving to someone in need perpetuates a cycle of destructive behavior was challenged by two separate surveys in Canada and San Francisco.
“The research shows that when you give people a basic income or you give people what they need to survive they spend it on those things that help them survive,” she said.
“If somebody spends their money on cigarettes or alcohol…that’s their choice…" Alderman said. "And that’s why I think people need to have the choice to decide whether they want to give to individuals or whether they want to give to organizations, and I don’t think the government has a role in that.”