Panel to Hear Plan for Homeless Campground : Ventura: Preliminary proposal for permanent encampment will go to housing committee. But some doubt the project will ever win city OK.

Hoping to entice some of the city’s homeless people from their encampments on the Ventura River bottom and their sleeping bags in alleyways, Ventura officials are considering constructing a permanent campground for the homeless on the city’s west side.

“Hopefully, we’d be putting people off the street into a central location where they can get services,” said Maj. Eddie Patterson of the Salvation Army, one of the local charities working with the city on the housing proposal.

Although officials are unsure how much it will cost to run the project, they will present their preliminary plans to Ventura’s housing committee Wednesday. Eventually, the proposal must be approved by the City Council.

Loretta McCarty, a city planner who has worked on the project on and off since a former City Council member first mentioned it in 1991, said she is not sure whether city leaders will be enthusiastic enough about the project to fund it.

But, she said, planners and homeless advocates are anxious to push forward with the idea.

McCarty said the city will need a vacant lot where about 25 families or individuals could set up camp in tents or vehicles and have easy access to job services, and alcohol and drug rehabilitation programs. Although several sites have been identified, officials declined to disclose the locations, saying they were still negotiating with the property owners.

So far, at least one housing committee member, City Councilman Jack Tingstrom, said he likes the idea.

“We want to do something for the ones down there (in the river bottom) that desperately need our help,” he said. “They need something to give them back some of their self-esteem.”

Some of the city’s homeless people, however, say the idea may not be popular with many of the 200 or more individuals living by the river or on the streets.

“I bet you less than 10% of the people who come through here would go for it,” said Al Sanders, a homeless man who is trying to get his teaching credential.

“A lot of these people have flat rejected society,” Sanders said as he chatted with a friend at a local homeless charity’s headquarters Monday afternoon. “They just won’t deal with it anymore.”

For his part, though, Sanders said he’d be one of the first to sign up for the site. A former Ventura College student, Sanders, 44, said he dropped out of school and society’s mainstream a few years ago when a drinking problem spiraled out of control.

Today, he said, he’s sober, looking for work to pay off his school debt and sleeping either by the river or in a vacant site mid-town. “If you have no home, no phone and no car, it’s three strikes and you’re out,” he said.

McCarty said that’s part of the problem the project would attempt to solve. Currently, homeless families in Ventura can stay at the shelter run by Project Understanding, a local homeless aid organization, and homeless families and single women can stay at a Salvation Army shelter. But for single men like Sanders living in Ventura, there is only the outdoors and shuttered buildings.

Under McCarty’s plan, the city would set up two fiberglass, dome-like modules on a vacant lot, one that would hold administrative offices and one that could be a kitchen. The city and local charities could provide security and social services.

Even those most intrigued by the idea, though, are skeptical that city leaders will ever seriously consider it.

“It surfaces from time to time,” said Rick Pearson, executive director of Project Understanding. “But the overarching concern is political will.”

Bill Dycus, an unemployed man paying his rent, for the moment, with welfare money, was more blunt.

“If you set it up in town, people are not going to go for it,” he said. “You know how people are with so-called undesirables. They will help them out to some degree, but they don’t want to really solve their problems.”