As Oregon continues to face an ongoing housing crisis, the City of Eugene has been challenged with a lawsuit filed by activists on behalf of the homeless community. The lawsuit accuses the City’s park rules of being unconstitutional and granting too much power to officials allowed to decide the punishments for violating such rules.
 The rules in question prohibit “engaging in any activity or conduct which is disruptive or incompatible with the appropriate use of the premises or which interferes with the reasonable use and enjoyment of the park,” and give City officials full discretion to assign jail time, fines and exclusion to anyone, according to the complaint.
The complaint states that “there are no definitions within the rules of ‘disruptive,’ ‘incompatible,’ ‘appropriate use,’” and so on, describing these rules as “unconstitutionally vague.”
One rule allows the City to “exclude people from all 5,000-plus acres of parks and other city facilities and activities, for a violation of any Park Rule, or after simply being asked to leave,” as stated in the complaint.
The lawsuit is supported by Civil Liberties Defense Center senior civil attorney Marianne Dugan and former attorney Sarah Alvarez.
 “If an officer thinks that your behavior is inconsistent with other people’s enjoyment of the park, you’re out,” Dugan said. Dugan has now taken on full responsibility of the complaint, as Alvarez moved on from the CLDC in November 2023.
 Dugan said that the unconstitutionality of the City park rules has to do with a violation of freedom of speech, as well as due process.
“It’s the First Amendment because people are being arrested and excluded for speech,” she said. “And then due process because these officers have pretty much unfettered discretion when to do this to people, and the appeal process is pretty meaningless because the administrators [are] just rubber stamping what the police have done.”
Dugan said that the lawsuit challenges park rules that exclude and arrest mainly unhoused people from all public spaces, but plaintiffs Nicholas Hollows and Samuel Yergler are not unhoused.
“They’re two people who have been advocates for the rights of unhoused folks, and while voicing their opinions in public places, in the park, they were arrested for basically being disruptive,” Dugan said.
According to the complaint, both Yergler and Hollows were arrested in Eugene parks by the same two officers on separate occasions. Both plaintiffs received a “Notice of Restriction of Use” at the time of their arrests, banning them from entering or using any of Eugene’s public spaces for 30 days.
 “That’s what jumped out to me was when I saw these two, basically identical processes against two unconnected people who are both advocates I thought, well that’s a pattern. We got to stop that,” Dugan said.
In an interview with The Jefferson Exchange, Hollows emphasized the impact these park rules have on the unhoused community in Eugene. “During the time I spent in the encampments I witnessed, without exaggeration, hundreds of exclusions given to people, and one was given to me when I was arrested for asking questions during an eviction,” he said.
The City of Eugene has until Jan. 10 to provide an answer to this complaint according to Dugan, and has no comment at this time.