Disability Rights Oregon and five homeless plaintiffs filed the lawsuit in January, alleging Grants Pass's treatment of homeless people violates state law, including disability protections.
Tuesday's hearing was on a motion for a preliminary injunction. A court injunction would prohibit the city from enforcing its public camping ordinances while the lawsuit plays out.
However, after two hours of testimony on Tuesday afternoon, Judge McGlaughlin said she would make a decision by the end of the week.
The city is still under a temporary restraining order until March 29, which also says that homeless people in Grants Pass can’t be cited, arrested, fined or detained for camping, except in two parks. That order has been extended multiple times as part of this lawsuit.
Grants Pass only recently had an injunction lifted after four years from a previous court case over its treatment of homeless people. Last June, the city won that case when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its favor. The argument in that case focused on the Constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
A big question in the current lawsuit is whether the city's public camping ordinances are "objectively reasonable," as required by Oregon’s . But that term isn’t clearly defined.
The city currently has two sites designated for homeless people to rest.
Aaron Hisel, the attorney representing Grants Pass in this case, defended the city's practices during the hearing but acknowledged its solutions have not been perfect.
"The current places where people are being allowed to go and camp for four days without having to relocate at all, where there's toilets, there's dumpsters, the city has a contract for people to come through and clean up — even if they're not perfect, that is much better than what we saw while the exact same type of injunction was in place for years," he said. "It is not objectively unreasonable because it is imperfect."
Tom Stenson, deputy legal director at Disability Rights Oregon, said he felt good about the questions that the judge had asked.
"I thought she latched onto some of the key legal facts, some of the ways in which the statutes are written that support our position and that explain why what's going on in Grants Pass is objectively unreasonable," he said.
Before the hearing, about a dozen residents from the local volunteer group Park Watch protested outside the Josephine County Courthouse. Park Watch picks up trash in the city’s public parks, monitors them for illegal activity and informs police.
Brock Spurgeon, one of the founders of the group, said he hoped a new injunction would not be implemented so the city could keep its parks clean.
"We're not anti-homeless or even anti-drugs," he said, but said the group is against drug use, theft and vandalism in city parks.
