Ken McCall: Homeless people have downtown homeowner frustrated

Friday, July 19, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

DEWAIN STEADMAN is fed up.

Across North Seventh Street and a vacant lot from his home of 22 years, homeless people have taken up residence.

Over and over again.

Depending on the day, Steadman says on a recent tour, as many as 15 people sleep in the shrubbery along a wall on the state Department of Transportation property.

It's late afternoon and the fenced lot, just north of the U.S. 95 off-ramp to Las Vegas Boulevard, is empty.

They're all off getting dinner, Steadman figures, but the bedrolls and shopping carts and the debris are there along the wall.

"Just this morning," says the 68-year-old, pointing through the fence, "there's a guy over here urinating against the wall. And here's another one over here defecating.

"It's an ideal hotel for the bums to check in and out of."

Steadman has called the Transportation Department and Metro Police more times than he can count. They've done three sweeps of the area in recent months, but Steadman is still not satisfied.

The homeless always come back.

And, really, there's not much anybody can do about it. They have to go somewhere.

But don't tell that to Steadman. The retired Clark County School District employee and -- some would say -- community gadfly, says he's called so many times that one agency official in Carson City told him never to call again.

The official denied that charge, but it's obvious Steadman has been driving them crazy.

It's not that they deny there's a problem, it's just that they can't find a solution.

"I'm sure he feels frustrated," says Patty Mamola, an NDOT engineer in charge of maintenance in the Las Vegas area. "I do, too.

"You run 'em out of one area and they go to another area, and you run them out of the other area and they come back to the first area."

The agency, she says, has its own reasons to keep people out.

Homeless people cut irrigation lines so they can bathe, she says. They cut fences for access to campsites. They often damage landscaping where they sleep, and sometimes cut limbs off trees and shrubs to build lean-tos.

Then there's the health and safety risks for highway workers.

But enforcement, says Mamola, who has met with Steadman and taken his tour, is not their job.

"We're only in the business of building and maintaining highways," Mamola says, "not of enforcing laws and removing bums.

"That's way out of our league."

Still, the agency does cooperate with Metro Police to notify people that they're trespassing, then go in and clean up after police have cleared the area.

Mamola says she promised they'd try to clean up the Seventh Street lot "every two weeks or so, manpower and workload permitting."

Cleaning up after vagrants, however, is well down on the priority list, falling behind fixing potholes and guardrails and signs and freeway lighting and getting rid of roadway safety hazards.

On top of that, Mamola says, there are "many, many" homeless campsites in the hundreds of miles of agency right of way in Southern Nevada.

"To be honest, it's not really fair to be giving Mr. Steadman preferential treatment."

Steadman, however, certainly doesn't feel he's asking for preferential treatment. He just wants the agency to keep its property clean.

And he's obviously not afraid to insist on it.

"I'm a believer in my rights," he says. "I'm a believer in constitutional government."

That same Constitution, however, is getting in his way.

The document, it seems, never states that people without homes aren't covered.

The Nevada Supreme Court, for example, tossed out the state's vagrancy and loitering laws.

The terms "vagrancy" and "loitering" were found to be unconstitutionally vague, says Bernard Little, chief of the criminal division in the Las Vegas city attorney's office.

So Metro uses trespassing laws, says Lt. Tom Lozich.

Metro tries to use its new homeless intervention program to get the people help whenever possible, Lozich says, because the alternative is a futile merry-go-round of misdemeanor arrests followed by immediate release.

"I feel bad for Mr. Steadman," Lozich says. "I'd feel the same if somebody were to camp out across from my house.

"But we only have so many tools to work with."