Protests Delay Opening of Halfway House

OXNARD —  Until neighbors recently got wind of it, dozens of convicts were set to begin living in a large building on D Street as early as Friday.

But now, plans for Ventura County’s first state-authorized halfway house are on hold while its operator and the city of Oxnard resolve a disagreement over permits.

A group of Oxnard residents objects that a public hearing was never held on the 40-bed residential facility and argues that the building was approved to house only recovering substance abusers, not prison inmates.

Cornell Corrections of Houston holds a 4 1/2-year, $3-million contract to run the home for the state Department of Corrections and has agreed to postpone the facility’s opening until at least Tuesday.

But Cornell said it intends to forge ahead soon after that, maintaining it followed every procedure necessary to earn approval from the city.

“We have done everything the city has asked us to do. We’ve filled out every form. We’ve complied,” said Mark Thompson, managing director of Cornell’s Ventura-based pre-release division.

“It’s a little late in the game for them to turn around and say ‘I didn’t know about it so you can’t do it,’ ” Thompson added.

At Tuesday’s City Council meeting, City Manager Ed Sotello was told to meet with Thompson to review the project, which council members will discuss in executive session next Tuesday.

“Something that critical should have gone through the proper channels and gone to either the Planning Commission or the City Council,” Councilman John Zaragoza said Wednesday.

Certain inmates--among them violent criminals, sex offenders and those who belonged to gangs in prison--are excluded from participating in the voluntary work-furlough program, Thompson said.

But that stipulation doesn’t satisfy a number of residents opposed to the project who are petitioning the city to keep it from opening.

“All the people that should have been in the know are not,” said Alan Wingo, chairman of the Wilson neighborhood council, who blames city staff for not telling nearby residents about the halfway house. “They just went right around us and nobody knew anything about it.”

“What I’m concerned about is the [Department of Corrections] buses are set to roll in any day, and this case hasn’t even gone out to the public for a hearing,” said Jess Gutierrez, who has organized a committee to block what he calls the “Oxnard prison.”

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Thompson, who is scheduled to meet with Sotello today, argues that a hearing is not necessary because the building most recently housed a residential program for substance abusers, called Primary Purpose, and still has a special-use permit to do so. Based on that, the city’s planning office determined Cornell was operating a similar program and approved its application.

“They didn’t let us slide on anything,” Thompson said. “The city just didn’t roll over and say they didn’t care.”

For example, he said, Cornell has fenced in a lot beside the converted medical building because the city did not want inmates who lived there to linger outside on the street.

The building is in a residential neighborhood, one block from a private elementary school.

Gutierrez, a former youth parole officer, was hired as the facility’s assistant director, but said he resigned after four days because the staff was poorly trained and not ready to run the program. Thompson says Gutierrez was fired.

Gutierrez contended that the city was too quick to approve the conversion of the two-story building at the corner of D and 5th streets into a halfway house for criminals. Residents should have been alerted in August when the permit was granted, he said.

Thompson agreed with Gutierrez that neighbors should be told what sort of inmate is moving into the facility and how the program is structured.

“I think that if anything needs to be done--if there’s any shortcoming at all--it’s the delay in getting the information out,” he said, adding that the city should have notified neighbors. “I don’t think anything else would be accomplished through a formal process.”

To allay residents’ concerns, Thompson said his company will host an open house in a few weeks to introduce the public to the facility’s 15-person staff and its first occupants, whom he originally expected to arrive between Friday and Jan. 22.

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Only men will live at the eight-bedroom facility; most will stay between 90 and 120 days, after having served less than five years in prison, Thompson said.

Inmates from prisons throughout California apply for the program, are screened and enter a few months before they are scheduled to begin parole.

While living at the facility, inmates receive job counseling and other assistance. They must find work in the community and save money for their release. Staff members closely monitor the inmates’ activities, Thompson said.

Nearly all of the Oxnard facility’s inmates would be former Ventura County residents or plan to live here upon their release from the program, he added.

“These are folks who are going to be living next-door in three months anyway,” Thompson said. “It’s going to be people’s brothers and cousins and dads.”

Gutierrez, who lives in another Oxnard neighborhood, also questioned why his city was chosen as the site for the halfway house. He contended that more affluent areas of Ventura County would not have allowed the facility, but that Oxnard “has a history of being dumped on.”

“These people don’t even know where to begin in terms of their rights and communication,” he said, “ . . . so it’s easy to dump on them. They don’t know how to make noise.”

Thompson said his company considered other sites in Oxnard, Ventura and Santa Paula--though none in Simi Valley or Thousand Oaks--before paying $610,000 for the building at 435 South D St.

“I think that there’s a need for these types of houses in every community,” he said, crediting Oxnard’s planning staff for agreeing to the facility. “Some communities admit there’s a need and say, ‘OK, let’s work with you.’ . . . Other cities say, ‘Absolutely not.’ ”

The program would be the only one of its kind in Ventura County under contract with the Department of Corrections. Previously, inmates from Ventura County being released early were placed at halfway houses in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles counties.

Statewide, California has about 2,500 beds for its pre-release programs, said Jim Henson, the state Department of Corrections deputy administrator for this region.

“We have them in other communities,” Henson said, “and they have not posed any problems to the community at large.”