Church Congregations Plan Mass Meeting on Drugs

A group of church congregations that have battled local officials the last 2 years over such matters as stoplights and park patrols will hold a mass meeting on countywide drug problems Thursday with the mayors of Anaheim and Santa Ana.

More than 1,000 members of the Orange County Congregation-Community Organizations, an interfaith federation of 15 congregations, are expected to attend the 7:30 p.m. meeting at Servite High School in Anaheim, group spokesman Andy Saavedra said.

The group will ask Mayors Daniel H. Young of Santa Ana and Fred Hunter of Anaheim to take back to their city councils resolutions declaring a “drug epidemic” in Orange County and calling for increased resources for law enforcement and treatment and prevention programs.

“There are gaping holes in the war on drugs,” said Saavedra, a member of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Santa Ana. “We want to ask them (the mayors) why they’re not making drugs the No. 1 priority and get them to admit that there’s an epidemic.”

The congregations have been organized with the assistance of the Orange County Sponsoring Committee, an umbrella group of religious and lay community leaders that began organizing county neighborhoods in the 1970s.

About 2 years ago, after a few dormant years, the committee regrouped and brought in professional organizers from the Pacific Institute for Community Organizing (PICO) in Oakland. The organizers work with individual congregations, developing local leadership and helping to identify community problems.

The newly organized church groups have used their muscle to win several battles over the last 2 years:

- Parishioners at St. Boniface Catholic Church in Anaheim pressured city officials into improving lighting and increasing patrols at Pearson Park, a local haven for drug traffickers and drugs.

- Members of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church persuaded Santa Ana City Manager David N. Ream to clean up a city-owned storage yard and reduce neighborhood truck traffic that residents felt was dangerous. The church group is now fighting the city over the location of a new park that it fears may bring drugs and other crime into the community.

Thursday’s meeting, however, will be the first time that the PICO-organized church groups have banded together and confronted public officials on such a multifaceted problem as drugs.

Saavedra said that in more than 4,000 interviews with parishioners from the 15 congregations, church leaders found that concern about drugs was a unifying theme.

“It wasn’t just a thread running through the interviews--it was a rope,” Saavedra said.