Landeros Presses for Homeless Strategy

VENTURA —  Pushing forward with a campaign to spur county government to action, Ventura City Manager Donna Landeros on Monday criticized the lukewarm response of county officials to efforts to hammer out a regional strategy for sheltering the homeless.

Saying the city for too long has shouldered the lion’s share of that responsibility, Landeros is proposing a broader approach that includes identifying homeless people with a mental illness or drug addiction and tapping county resources to get them the help they need.

Under the current system, Landeros said, those people are lumped into the larger homeless population, and many end up in Ventura because of its availability of social service programs and a county policy that places them in low-rent motels throughout the city.

Landeros said the entire system needs to be overhauled so that the county and other cities start picking up their fair share of that financial burden.

“We really feel like we are the ones who are going to have to force this change,” said Landeros, who will meet today with other city and county representatives of the Ventura Council of Governments to discuss the issue.

“We have been talking about this issue since last April--and we haven’t felt that anyone has been listening,” she said. “We are really trying to get a buy-in on the part of the Board of Supervisors to take a look at the bigger picture.”

County officials say there is some truth to issues raised by the city manager, but that her confrontational tactics aren’t helping solve the problems.

“Finger pointing is the wrong way to talk about the homeless,” Supervisor John Flynn said. “There is no doubt that the whole county needs to share in housing the homeless, but you don’t solve problems by standing off and hitting people over the head with a sledgehammer.”

Landeros traces the root of the conflict to a decision last spring by the county to stop funding a cold-weather shelter for the homeless. The county made its decision after Gov. Pete Wilson vetoed a request for $1 million to keep the shelter program alive.

At that time, county officials said they were shifting their focus, and their money, to establishing a transitional shelter for homeless families near the Camarillo Airport.

In September, the city of Ventura also refused to allocate money to help open a countywide winter shelter, a move that drew sharp criticism from homeless advocates. The city did, however, agree to funnel $40,000 toward the transitional shelter on the condition that the county adopt a regional strategy for keeping people off the streets.

That strategy has not materialized and the money has not been touched, Landeros said.

“What we were trying to do there was start breaking a cycle of coming to the city of Ventura and asking us to solve what we believe is a countywide problem,” she said.

Landeros said that effort dovetails with a city campaign to improve the downtown district through redevelopment. While millions of dollars have been poured into that campaign, downtown shop owners have identified homelessness and aggressive panhandling as persistent problems.

Seeking to put a stop to such activities, city officials have begun cracking down on unauthorized social programs, such as food giveaways in city parks, that they say encourage homelessness.

“As a society, as a city, we don’t want to do anything that condones homelessness,” Landeros said. “There’s a whole subculture we have of helping people be homeless, and that is what we are going to be targeting.”

In the end, Landeros said the city’s goal is to get people throughout the county to think differently about homelessness, to realize that it isn’t a seasonal problem that can be cured by setting up an emergency shelter each winter.

At the root of that effort is the need to take a hard look at how the county addresses the problem, she said, examining everything from the response of the mental health system to the county’s pay out of general relief money to help people keep a roof over their heads.

“We’re not looking for change overnight; this is a long-term repositioning,” Landeros said. “But clearly the model we are using now is broken. It’s just a matter of saying it’s so broke, let’s start over again.”

In addition to the meeting today sponsored by the Ventura Council of Governments, Ventura officials plan to meet next week with Supervisors Susan Lacey and Kathy Long to further explore the issues.

Long said Monday that she hopes the discussions will provide a starting point for improving services to the homeless. Already, she said good ideas are being generated, such as looking at ways to beef up mental health services for people living on the streets.

But Long said she disagrees with the city’s assertion that the county has been slow to act in embracing a more regional approach to the problem.

“I think it’s so easy for folks, when they work from different databases of statistics, to point a finger,” Long said. “But when you’re all sitting around the table hearing the same information, it gives you a solid foundation to work from.”