Jackson City Council members narrowly passed an ordinance Tuesday prohibiting excessive and unattended personal property in public areas like sidewalks and parks.
Items removed by the city would be available to pick up at no charge for at least a month.
City Council members twice delayed voting on the ordinance.
In July, City Council members requested amendments creating additional protections for pets and essential property like medication or identification documents, increasing the amount of notice given before property downtown is removed by the city and removing a civil infraction punishable by a $50 fine from the ordinance.
Consideration of the ordinance was delayed to August to provide city staff time to update the draft language.
At that meeting, City Council members appeared deadlocked in the absence of Councilmember Freddie Dancy.
With Dancy back in attendance Tuesday night, the amended ordinance passed 4-3.
Critics said the ordinance would make things more difficult for the city’s unhoused population, even as a downtown encampment that originally sparked the regulation is no longer in the area.
Jackson resident Alex Scott said “mildly inconveniencing a few people going up and down the city streets” is not a worthy reason to “drastically drive down the quality of life of people who already don’t have an especially high quality of life.”
“I'm not trying to ask you guys to solve homelessness,” Scott said. “It'd be great if you did. I'd be all for it. I would help in any way I can. That'd be awesome. But that's not why I'm here tonight.”
Councilmember Conner Wood said additional changes to the public property ordinance could be made down the road, including an option for people to voluntarily store their personal property rather than waiting for it to be collected from a public space.
“I would like to see us maybe revisit this ordinance in a few months and see what changes we should make if we find that it’s not working as intended or if it’s having consequences that we don’t want it to have,” Wood said. “No ordinance is final.”
City Council members passed the ordinance with little discussion Tuesday night after a public hearing on a report about the city’s Community Development Block Grant program performance lasted more than an hour despite having just a few speakers.
One speaker held the podium for more than 40 minutes as other attendees began trickling out of the room before the regular public comment period began.
A motion to limit speakers to five minutes of comments during the public hearing failed 5-2.
Mayor Daniel Mahoney said he wanted to be cautious about limiting the length of comments during public hearings because there could be a time when officials want to continue hearing from an informative speaker.
“You’re going to run out of words before I run out of patience,” Mahoney said.
