Encinitas can continue its private security employees in the coming months to help reduce the problems of public urination and illegal campsite by homeless in the city center.
According to a new report from the Sheriff department and other data, there seems to be a dozen homeless, homeless, who regularly engage in illegal behavior in the city center, said Mayor Bruce Ehlers at the meeting of the municipal council last week.
However, he added, contrary to what some people may think, most people who use food bank and other social services at the community resource center on the second street in the city center are not even shelter-they are housing, but are likely to lose it due to financial difficulties.
Given this situation, it seems preferable not to place new requirements on the CRC, forcing it to solve the problems of the city center with public urination, drunkenness and consumption of drugs, the heap of thrown waste, the illegal campsite in the bushes and behind business, and other problematic behaviors, he said.
“I think we have to find our global solution before starting to apply more detailed solutions on one basis one by one,” said the mayor.
The members of the Council first suggested putting further requirements on the CRC at a meeting last month, saying that this was in response to business owners and the complaints of residents concerning the homeless who behaved badly in the city center. At this meeting, the member of the Council, Jim O’Hara, said that he wanted to modify the annual CRC grant funding agreement with the City to add new “performance-based standards” demanding that the CRC prevents impacts caused by the homeless on neighboring companies, while the member of the Luke Shaffer council said he wanted more responsibility for the organization.
City employees then wrote a new addition to the City of CRC contract, which was examined on Wednesday by the Council when he was holding a public hearing on the annual financing of subsidies of community blocks in the city. After more than a dozen people, most of them, from supporters of the CRC, spoke at the hearing, the members of the council finally decided to include the addition of the proposed contract and agreed to finance the subsidy of $ 30,000 from the CRC.
During the weeks between the meeting last month and on Wednesday, several members of the council visited the buildings of the CRC city center, given data on CRC customers and heard from supporters of the CRC. Many CRC supporters also attended Wednesday’s meeting, wearing purple shirts and waving CRC panels.
The member of the Council Marco San Antonio told the crowd that he had unconsciously hired a homeless two weeks ago to work in his printed business. The man, who later told him that he lived in a van with his mother, turned out to be a very responsible employee who presents himself every day to work on time, he said.
John Van Cleef, CEO of the CRC organization, thanked the mayor of the city for having recently denounced a social media position which compared the population of downtown the city center to “rats and seagulls”. He said that customers typical of the CRC food bank include a 72 -year -old widow who has trouble paying his public service bills and a 41 -year -old divorced man who rents a room in Cardiff.
The vast majority of CRC customers are not without shelter, and the organization requires that its customers sign a contract which obliges them to be in good conduct at CRC or to lose their access to the food bank, he said. Also, he said, the employees and volunteers of the CRC walk on both sides of the second street block where the organization is located daily by collecting waste.
He “respectfully asked” the council to reject the addition of a proposed contract, claiming that his proposed requirements are “vague and (she) seems to be in conflict with federal standards”.
Ehlers said that the Council would examine the revisions proposed to the Sans-de-City Action Plan at the city level at its meeting on May 14 and that would be a good time to consider hiring a private security company to patrol the city center.
It is difficult for Sheriff deputies to stop people for public urination-as they arrive at the scene, activity is over, he said. But, private security employees who regularly patrol the city center could arrest citizens and the city could pay them for their time in court, he said.
Encinitas tried to temporarily use private officers at Swami beach, which was effective in solving problems there, he added.
Originally published:
California Daily Newspapers
