People living in Orange County’s largest homeless encampment soon will get access to basic sanitation – such as toilets and showers – as part of the first step in a long-term plan to dismantle the entrenched riverbed community and find its inhabitants housing.
County supervisors on Tuesday, June 6, approved a $750,000 pilot program that will make the banks of the Santa Ana River more habitable in the near future while paying social service contractors to help move people to shelters, motels and apartments. Supervisors also approved spending $5 million in mental-health funding to pay for permanent housing for qualifying homeless people.
The board’s action Tuesday is its most substantial to date in directing resources to help and remove people from the riverbed encampments, which span from Anaheim to Orange to Fountain Valley, and which have become a symbol of the county’s growing and intractable homeless problem. In recent months, homeless advocates have demanded the county provided access to toilets and potable water for the riverbed homeless, who have lacked those basic amenities, leaving some to defecate in buckets or on the ground.
“We need to act now,” said Supervisor Andrew Do, who proposed the action alongside Supervisor Todd Spitzer. “If we don’t act, these encampments will pose a threat to public safety, public health and the environment.”
In addition to sending social workers into the homeless encampments, the board’s action directed county officials to work with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department to develop a plan for round-the-clock policing of the river banks, which supervisors admit have lacked law enforcement oversight. Sheriff’s department representatives have not responded to questions about what such patrols would entail, but the board said they could make room in the county’s proposed budget for the increased responsibility.
The pilot program approved Tuesday is half as short and half as costly as the one-year plan that was proposed last week. Do said he pushed for the reduced duration so the county can collect data on whether its efforts are landing homeless people in housing. By year’s end, the county intends to use that information to develop a long-term plan with a time frame to get all homeless people out of the riverbed.
The original plan also didn’t call for any spending on permanent housing, causing several homeless advocates to publicly criticize the county’s efforts, saying it wouldn’t do much good to pay people to help the homeless find housing if there weren’t any units available.
Supervisor Lisa Bartlett responded Tuesday by getting the board to commit $5 million from a state funding source that taxes California’s wealthiest people to pay for new mental-health programs.
That money could pay to house 50 homeless people, according to the county. There are nearly 500 people living in tents along the Santa Ana River, although it’s unclear how many would have the disabilities and mental-health issues to qualify for the units.
“It’s not near enough, but it’s a really good start,” said Paul Leon, founder and president of the Illumination Foundation, a nonprofit that helps the county’s homeless. “For a pilot program, they are going to be able to show really quickly, ‘We took these people out of there.’ I think they’ll say let’s go ahead and keep doing it.”
Mohammed Aly, the founder of the Orange County Poverty Alleviation Coalition and the man Spitzer credits as a catalyst for the proposal, said Tuesday’s action shows the county has finally displayed an understanding of what is necessary to help end homelessness.
“They recognized these are human beings worth of basic services and respect,” Aly said.
However, Tuesday’s action also raises questions about why it took supervisors so long to allocate Mental Health Services Act (MHSA) funds to pay for housing for the homeless – something for which state officials say the money was specifically intended. Orange County has $254 million in unspent MHSA money – more than three times the “prudent reserves” recommended by the state – which it accumulated over the last decade by spending far less than what it received from the state, according to records provided by the OC Health Care Agency.
In a written response, the OC Health Care Agency said its MHSA reserve level is high because the funding is based on fluctuating tax totals, making it difficult to predict how much money it will receive each year.
“The OC Health Care Agency’s Behavioral Health Services team will review our unspent balance with even greater scrutiny this year as the funds from the State have continued to increase; and, as such, we’re able to identify dollars for one-time projects, such as today’s direction by the OC Board of Supervisors to utilize $5 million,” the agency wrote in a statement. “We are in the process of determining if there are additional dollars that could be made available for one-time or ongoing projects.”
At Tuesday’s meeting, Spitzer also questioned why the board hadn’t been made aware there was extra money for housing for the homeless, saying it was, “kind of an odd way to tell us you have resources.”
However, the investigative news publication Voice of OC uncovered the county’s mental-health funding stockpile nearly two years ago, when it had $220 million in reserves.
Supervisors also directed county staff to work more closely with local cities to help end homelessness.
But Do noted the limitations of such partnerships. He pointed out that the board had approved $3.1 million in state funding last August to create new emergency medical centers dedicated to treating people who suffer sudden psychiatric episodes. But he said those crisis-stabilization centers still haven’t opened because cities won’t approve the locations.
