Eurobodalla Shire Council has moved to reassure the community it is taking steps to help address the build up of homeless people in Riverside Park at Moruya.
That’s the response to a call from the Moruya Business Chamber President Rob Pollock for action on the build up of around 12 people living in cars, tents and caravans on the edge of the town centre.
The request follows an incident last week where one of the people living in Riverside Park verbally abused and threatened a women’s surfboat crew while they were training on the river.
Police were called and he was issued with an infringement notice.
Mayor Hatcher said council rangers can’t just move in with a big stick.
“It’s not as simple as that. There’s cultural aboriginal significance to that area so we’ve got to make sure we protect that,” Mayor Hatcher said.
“There’s obviously the waterway there and the environmental issues that we’ve got to protect,” he said.
“Some of that land is not council land.
“We’ve done some work in the previous months about doing a plan of management for that space and there will be a gate going in to keep people off certain areas of land there.”
The Mayor has called for some empathy towards homeless people living in the local community.
“We’ve got people living and doing it tough in National Park areas, behind commercial premises,” the Mayor said.
“It’s pretty open and glaring there at Riverside Park and most of your listeners would remember back the issues that we had at North Head Campground as well and those have kind of subsided but ultimately if you go in and push people out of one space, you’re just pushing them away from the services that they rely on,” he said.
“We obviously need more housing, more affordable and more social housing and that just comes from decades of of state governments not providing that, not funding it so you know there is a backlog.
“I understand the community’s outrage when issues like this happen but we’ve got also remember there’s people who are doing incredibly tough and you know we’ve got to have some empathy for them as well.”
The council said a recent decision by the State Government to redirect funding from a local outreach service is being felt hard.
“We lost some funding for assertive outreach in Moruya itself and we had Family Place and some other services that were actually going out into that area and working for those people who are doing it incredibly tough to try to give some support to them as well,” Mayor Hatcher said.
“It was incredibly good value for money but the state pulled that service. They decided to spend the money somewhere else,” he said.
Eurobodalla Shire Council recently hosted a workshop at the Bay Pavillions on the issue that brought together all of the frontline service providers to share information and develop ideas to help alleviate the situation.
