A Boston city councilor is calling for a new plan to deal with the crowding, drug dealing and filth that has returned to the city’s open-air drug market at Mass and Cass, saying that the current approach has been a “failure.”

Councilor Ed Flynn plans to file a hearing order at the next City Council meeting on Aug. 7, that he says is aimed at addressing the “humanitarian crisis, public safety and public health emergency” at and around the intersection of Melnea Cass Boulevard and Massachusetts Avenue, and the “critical need to enhance city response and services related to this area.”

“There is an urgent need to reevaluate the current strategies in addressing the public safety, quality of life, neighborhood services, and public health issues related to the situation in Mass and Cass and in the impacted neighborhood of South End, Roxbury, Dorchester and South Boston,” his order states.

“We need to identify ways to improve the city’s response to the opioid crisis, drug-dealing activities, and homelessness,” Flynn wrote.

Flynn told the Herald that while the new city ordinance implemented last November has successfully cleared out tents from the area, hundreds of people are still gathering there each day to publicly deal or use drugs and take part in other illegal activity.

This past weekend, Flynn said he saw roughly 150 people on Melnea Cass Boulevard and in the surrounding neighborhoods. He said that the people gathering there are not staying overnight, like in prior years when tents were allowed.

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The inhabitants appear to have housing and are coming to Mass and Cass by day to use and sell drugs, which is “unacceptable,” Flynn said. The situation there has continued to worsen throughout the summer, he added, which has resulted in filthy streets littered with needles and trash that he described as a “public health crisis.”

Flynn is pushing for a city crackdown that leads to arrests and prosecution of drug dealers, and efforts that get the people openly using drugs off the streets where they can harm themselves and into medical facilities for detox-related treatment.

The situation is also unfair to residents living in the surrounding neighborhoods who have to walk by needles and addicts who are passed out on their streets every day when they are coming home from work or taking their kids to school, he said.

Flynn considers the city’s current approach to the area to be a “failure,” saying, “We need to have a new policy and plan to deal with this crisis.”