Encinitas may pursue hiring private security employees in the coming months to help reduce problems with public urination and illegal camping by homeless people in the city’s downtown.
According to a new Sheriff’s Department report and other data, there appear to be about a dozen, “bad actor” homeless people, who regularly engage in illegal behavior downtown, Mayor Bruce Ehlers said during last week’s City Council meeting.
However, he added, contrary to what some folks may think, most people who use the food bank and other social services at the Community Resource Center on downtown’s Second Street aren’t even homeless — they’re people who have housing, but are at risk of losing it due to financial difficulties.
Given that situation, it seems best not to place new requirements on CRC, forcing it to resolve downtown’s issues with public urination, drunkenness and drug use, discarded trash piles, illegal camping in the bushes and behind business, and other problem behaviors, he said.
“I think we need to come up with our global solution before we start applying more detailed solutions on a one-by-one basis,” the mayor said.
Council first suggested putting new requirements on CRC at a meeting last month, saying this was in response to business owners and residents’ complaints about badly behaved homeless people in downtown. At that meeting, Council member Jim O’Hara said he wanted to change CRC’s annual grant funding agreement with the city to add new, “performance-based standards” requiring CRC to prevent any homeless people-caused impacts to nearby businesses, while Council member Luke Shaffer said he wanted more ability from the organization.
City employees then drafted a new addition to CRC’s city contract, which was reviewed by the council Wednesday as it held a public hearing on plans for the city’s annual Community Block Grant funding. After more than dozen people, most of them CRC ers, spoke during the hearing, council ultimately decided against including the proposed contract addition and agreed to fund CRC’s $30,000 grant request.
In the weeks between last month’s meeting and the one Wednesday, several council have toured CRC’s downtown buildings, viewed data on CRC clients and heard from CRC ers. Many of CRC ers also attended Wednesday’s meeting, wearing purple shirts and waving CRC signs.
Councilmember Marco San Antonio told the crowd that he had unknowingly hired a homeless person two weeks ago to work in his print shop business. The man, who later told him he lives in a van with his mother, has turned out to be a very responsible employee who shows up every day to work on time, he said.
John Van Cleef, CEO of the CRC organization, thanked the city’s mayor for recently denouncing a social media post that compared downtown’s homeless population to “rats and seagulls.” He said CRC’s typical food bank clients include a 72-year-old widow who struggles to pay her utility bills and a 41-year-old divorced man who’s renting a room in Cardiff.
The vast majority of CRC’s clients are not homeless, and the organization requires its clients to sign a contract that requires them to be on good behavior at CRC or lose their access privileges to the food bank, he said. Also, he said, CRC employees and volunteers walk both sides of the block of Second Street where the organization is located daily collecting trash.
He “respectfully asked” the council to reject the proposed contract addition, saying its proposed requirements are “vague and (it) appears to be in conflict with federal standards.”
Ehlers said the council will be reviewing proposed revisions to the citywide Homeless Action Plan at its May 14 meeting and that would be a good time to consider hiring a private security company to patrol downtown.
It’s hard for sheriff’s deputies to arrest people for public urination — by the time they arrive on scene the activity is over, he said. But, private security employees regularly patrolling the downtown could make citizens’ arrests and the city could pay them for their time in court, he said.
Encinitas tried using private officers temporarily at Swami’s Beach, which was effective at resolving problems there, he added.
