ӣ����Ƶ

ST. LOUIS — Plans to transform the city’s approach to caring for the homeless have run aground at the Board of Aldermen.

Alderwoman Alisha Sonnier canceled a Tuesday hearing on her bills and said they would be pulled from consideration. She said she is not giving up and would be working with other officials to write new bills that can pass.

“I do have faith and confidence that we will get to that point,” said Sonnier, of Tower Grove East. But she could not say when the new bills would be filed.

The bills were supposed to be a triumph for the board’s new, left-leaning majority, just like efforts to strengthen police oversight and send cash to the poor. But with criticism coming from all sides, aldermen struggled to find consensus, and the debate instead divided progressive Democrats, prompting public rebukes at hearings and in the media.

Sonnier and Aldermanic President Megan Green wanted to end what they saw as the city’s cruel bulldozing of tent encampments, boost shelter space in the city and inaugurate a more humane and effective policy toward some of the city’s most vulnerable residents. Progressive activists had called for such changes for years.

The bills would have eliminated a requirement for shelters to get signatures from neighbors before opening — with a threshold no shelter operator has met in more than a decade. They would have required a month’s advance notice before clearing an encampment so providers could find everyone shelter.

They would have set up city-run camps with security, sanitation and services for those who don’t want housing. And they called for an end to what supporters termed the criminalization of homelessness, most notably by exempting homeless people from public urination laws.

But those ideas attracted a wave of opposition. At hearings on the bills, neighborhood associations railed against the challenge to their residents’ veto power. Businesspeople said they wanted the city to crack down on panhandling, sleeping on the street and pooping outside their doors.

A spokesman for Mayor Tishaura O. Jones said at least one bill might violate state law.

And key aldermen like Michael Browning, of Forest Park Southeast, and Anne Schweitzer, of Boulevard Heights, publicly blasted the plan. They were skeptical that the camping areas would actually help people and worried about how much the sites would cost. They weren’t comfortable nixing the petition requirements for shelters, which constituents said were their best tool to control what comes into their neighborhoods. And they said an uproar over the public urination provision had tainted the discussion.

Green and Sonnier called out the dissenters, noting that some of them made campaign promises to support progressive changes to city homeless policy. Activists came to hearings and blasted the intransigence, saying the board would be responsible for people dying in the cold this winter.

But no one moved.

“I don’t think proposing solutions that are unfeasible is progressive,” Browning said at one point.

It wasn’t clear where forthcoming negotiations would lead, either.

Browning said he welcomed an opportunity to slow down discussions and dig into solutions in a more collaborative fashion.

A spokesman for the mayor said the office looked forward to “opportunities to support our unhoused neighbors.”

Schweitzer declined comment.

Green, like Sonnier, said Tuesday that efforts to change homeless policy are not dead.

She said she would work with aldermen on changes to homeless policy for as long as it takes to get something done.

“The status quo is untenable,” she said.