City, citizens struggle to make a safer downtown

Mike and Alex Gregory have been running Oxford Antiques at 2411 Montana Ave. for 33 years, dating back to the days when the avenue was studded with empty storefronts and an abandoned train depot overrun with pigeons and transients.

But in some respects the difficulties of being on Montana Avenue are worse than ever, Mike Gregory said. What does he have to deal with?

“Everything you can think of, all day long,” he said. “I have to be on my toes every minute.”

As if to illustrate the problem, a man who was evidently quite drunk staggered into the store while Gregory was talking to a reporter. The man stumbled against the door as he opened it, dropped a shirt draped over his back and spilled some ice cubes out of the cup in his hand.

Gregory immediately ran to the front of the store and told the man he had to leave, which he did, without much ado. Gregory said it’s usually that easy to keep drunken transients out of his store and away from his customers.

But he’s not getting any younger, he said, and sometimes push comes to shove.

That’s when business owners hope Matt Lennick and Tony Nichols are nearby. The two Downtown Resource Officers, whose positions are funded by an assessment against property owners in the Business Improvement District, patrol the downtown, usually on bicycles.

A little before noon on Wednesday, an incident at Sixth Avenue North and North Broadway showed what they deal with on a regular basis.

They bicycled up to three transients sitting on the curb of the US Bank drive-through, 10 feet from a “No loitering” sign. One of the transients, a woman, was holding a can of high-alcohol-content beer.

“She started screaming at us as soon as we pulled up,” Lennick said. Normally they would have written her a citation for open container and let her go, but she was so belligerent they called in a squad car and had her arrested for disorderly conduct.

If she hadn’t been taken to the jail, Lennick said, “with that attitude we’d have been dealing with her all day.”

Her two friends were released because they didn’t have any alcohol and they had no trespass warnings on record. People generally aren’t charged with criminal trespass until a second offense.

The problem with transients is not new, but there is a perception that it has been getting worse. The Downtown Billings Alliance sponsored a forum in late May at which downtown residents and business owners spoke of their concerns and officials talked about possible solutions.

Three weeks later, photographer Michael Sample was stabbed to death at the Fargo Hotel building, which houses the Sample Foundation, a private charitable organization. The building sits on the 2400 block of the alley between Montana Avenue and First Avenue North.

Police Chief Rich St. John said the murder, “as tragic as it was, was not an act of random violence” and the downtown is still generally a safe place. He said indications are that the man charged with the murder was not a transient, and that he knew Sample and had some kind of altercation with him before the killing.

But perceptions matter, as Lisa Harmon, director of the downtown alliance, acknowledged.

“What happened to Mr. Sample just brought a lot of things to the surface,” Harmon said. It was shocking, especially in the eyes of people from small towns in Eastern Montana, and for that matter to many Billings residents already wary of the downtown.

“The city is demanding a response,” she said.

As explained at the forum in May, some steps are already being taken. Lennick and Nichols tracked the correlation between businesses selling alcohol and the number of police calls near those businesses.

Nearly half the open-container violations tracked within a 500-foot radius of North 27th Street and Sixth Avenue North were traced to the Downtown Conoco at 2701 Sixth Ave. N. It remains the only downtown store that sells single containers of cheap, high-alcohol beer.

Lennick said those beers sell for 99 cents and are equivalent to three regular beers. The Conoco store has been cited for selling to inebriated people, and the owner recently approached the downtown alliance to talk about making changes at his store, Harmon said.

All told, Lennick and Nichols said, police fielded 698 drunk and disorderly calls around Sixth and 27th in 2013, which jumped to 407 such calls in the first five months of this year. Similarly, open-container citations in that area went from 335 last year to 401 in the first five months of 2014.

Looking at a different area — a 500-foot radius around Skypoint, in the heart of downtown Billings — the numbers tell a similar story. Police crime analyst Becky Shay said there were 94 drunk and disorderly calls in the first six months of 2013 in that area, compared with 164 in the same period this year. Open-container violations went from 23 to 61.

Harmon said the city is looking at ways to crack down on the crimes associated with the downtown. There is no state law against public intoxication, she said, so she has been working with the resource officers and the city attorney on the possibility of having legislation introduced in Helena to make it a criminal offense.

St. John said a city ordinance bans aggressive panhandling, but he’d like to see it expanded. If a panhandler walks onto a public street to accept a donation from a motorist, he said, both should be subject to fines.

“We need to bring some accountability to those who enable,” he said. It may also be time to “re-energize education,” St. John said, driving home the point that giving money to panhandlers is counterproductive.

St. John also expressed a common frustration — that too many charities and churches are providing services with no strings attached. People come to Billings for a drunken binge, knowing they can obtain food, clothing and shelter if the weather turns bad.

As Lennick put it, if all their basic needs are being met, “then they can focus on finding enough money to get drunk.”

“It’s a great program, but we need some accountability and control over who’s providing what,” St. John said. “Unless it’s coordinated and controlled, it’s enabling.”

The city’s Community Development Division has talked for years about the possibility of instituting the ultimate in coordinated services, a one-campus center modeled on the Haven of Hope in San Antonio, Texas.

City Administrator Tina Volek said she has been looking at a similar concept in Reno, Nev., where the city-owned Community Assistance Center is run by the Volunteers of America. The center has, on one campus, men’s, women’s and family shelters, medically assisted detox, a health clinic, psychiatric services and case management, and food and clothing. Volek said it cost $12.1 million to build.

Of the charities and churches providing assistance in Billings, Volek said, “God bless them, they’re helping people,” but “we need a centralized place where they can provide that service and do it more efficiently.”

Harmon said tax-increment financing from the downtown area could be used to help create such a center, but recently another promising funding source was made public. In April, the foundation funded by the sale of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Montana announced it will have more than $150 million to fund health-care programs in Montana.

Denis Prager, board chairman for the Montana Healthcare Foundation, said at the time that he would like to “focus on one or two areas and solicit proposals.”

Harmon said that focus could favor an application from Billings.

“We can think of no more pressing issues than addiction and mental illness in the biggest city in Montana,” she said.

City Councilwoman Jani McCall said the idea is promising, but she cautioned that the city would have to find a permanent funding source to keep the operation running. She also said that such a center would be aimed at the homeless population and wouldn’t necessarily have much effect on transients.

Lennick said some people come to Billings specifically to drink and party until their money runs out. He wrote an open-container citation Tuesday to a man who said he rode up from Crow Agency on the tribal bus, which charges $4 for a round trip to Billings. Lennick said he knows of tribal members who use the subsidized bus to get to jobs in Billings, but the service is also being abused.

St. John said it is necessary to differentiate between homeless people, who don’t generally cause many problems, and the transients who wander the streets drunk, panhandling, passing out, urinating in public and otherwise causing trouble.

Harmon said a high percentage of the transient population is made up of Native Americans, which is one reason she and Volek recently met with Leonard Smith, director of the Native American Development Corp. in Billings. Also in attendance was Jason Smith, director of Indian Affairs for the state.

“They acknowledged that there is that issue,” Harmon said.

Leonard Smith said that while the focus of his organization is business and economic development, it has a role to play.

“If we’re part of the problem, we have to part of the solution,” he said. “It gets back to being involved.”

Smith works downtown and said he sees the problems every time he goes to lunch. The transient population seems to have increased, he said, and you “see stuff that you didn’t used to see.”

He would like to see Native Americans more involved in downtown activities, as a reminder that they contribute a lot of money to the local economy. He said Native American organizations could also work toward having more Indian case managers and aid workers on the streets.

“Realistically, I think Native Americans respond better to other Native Americans,” he said.

In the meantime, St. John said there are subtle changes that can have an effect on the behavior of transients. The city removed a bus stop bench at Sixth Avenue and Broadway that had been a major hangout, he said. Once the bench was removed, the gatherings stopped.

US Bank cut back on the vegetation around its drive-through, making it much less desirable a place to sleep or hang out, he said. At the downtown bus transfer station, fears of its becoming a center for transients were never realized for one simple reason, St. John said: all the benches there have divided seating areas and no backs.

St. John also wanted to clear up the misconception that Lennick and Nichols are the only two officers working the downtown. While they concentrate their efforts there, he said, six other officers are assigned to the downtown as well.

Mike Gregory, at Oxford Antiques, thinks the city should impose a tax on all downtown businesses that serve or sell alcohol, then use that money to “bring in more security, more police.”

Down the block, at the Billings Depot, director Jennifer Mercer urged Billings residents to vote for a public safety mill levy, which the City Council is considering placing on the Nov. 4 ballot.

Mercer is no stranger to the transients on Montana Avenue. When she took over the renovated depot buildings three years ago, she said, she counted 13 transients living on the property. They were sleeping behind bushes, inside three cabooses, even in walk-in coolers outside a closed restaurant in one of the buildings.

She kept having the cabooses locked up and secured, but the transients kept breaking in.

“Eventually, they learned they could just burn a hole in the roof to gain permanent access,” she said.

She ended up having two of the cabooses taken off the property and a secure roof was put on the remaining one. Bushes were cut down and other hidey-holes removed. When she started at the depot, Mercer brought her dog, Allie, a black lab mix, to work with her, more for protection than companionship.

She used to prowl the property five times a day, moving people along. Most of the people were friendly, she said, and “just wanted to be left alone.”

The police always advised her to call them to clear people out, but she knows how busy the police are, and she had Allie. For a while there were no problems on the property, but lately she’s gone back to patrolling it once a week with Allie.

“The crappy part of my job is making these people feel they’re not wanted,” she said.

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