Won’t Budge From Park, Group Says : Homeless: Volunteer group that feeds homeless in West Hollywood will fight city order evicting their program from a park.

A West Hollywood volunteer group that has served food to the homeless every day for the last three years says it won’t budge, despite a recent order from city officials to move the program out of city-owned Plummer Park.

Volunteers for the Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition, which is partially funded by a $29,000 grant from the city of West Hollywood, said the city can cut off the money, but cannot constitutionally prevent the group from serving food to homeless people on public property.

“We have decided we are not going to leave, are not going to be treated this way,” said volunteer Ted Landreth. “We are citizens of this country, and the homeless are too. This is a public park.”

City staff on Oct. 17 sent a letter to coalition president Mike Dean telling the group it would have to leave the park by Nov. 1.

City Council support for the program has slowly eroded in recent months after reports of violence, intimidation and unsanitary conditions began to trickle in from city park staff.

“A worse element of the homeless has come to make up the larger segment of the total population they are serving. I have heard about some incidents of violence among the people who come there for food,” said City Councilman Paul Koretz, who until recently had supported the giveaway. “The fact that the coalition does not do any kind of screening and does not adequately supervise the homeless has made this too dangerous a situation.”

But volunteers at the program that serves as many as 200 meals a day scoffed at “paranoid” reports to the City Council and maintained that their program is clean, well-run, and even helps prevent violence. They said Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies have only been called to the site twice in the last two years.

“We are a clean-running organization. We are putting people back on the streets with a full belly instead of hungry,” said coalition vice president Chip Ermish. Ermish said turning some people away, such as those intoxicated with alcohol or drugs, as suggested by City Councilman John Heilman, amounts to “using food as punishment. We will not turn anybody away.”

Ermish and volunteer Landreth criticized council members for relying on what they said was second-hand information about the program.

“I have been a volunteer since we started, and what is astonishing to me is that since 1986 only one member of the council has ever been around to see what we do, much less to investigate complaints,” Landreth said.

Councilman Steve Shulte, who has consistently supported the meal kitchen, has visited the food giveaway on several occasions, at least once in Plummer Park. Shulte said evicting the program from the park may complicate the problem, but acknowledged that some undesirable things are going on at the giveaway.

“It has a kind of rag-tag image. But after all, we are serving homeless people who are very desperate, not Beverly Hills housewives,” Shulte said. “Now I’m afraid that not only are we going to have these homeless people out here, but they are going to be hungry.”

Shulte said he favors moving the giveaway from site to site to avoid concentrating a problem in a single location, but said the program should “tighten up so there are not going to be people who abuse others.”

Though the program was originally slated to end Nov. 1, the council approved an ambiguous resolution at its Oct. 16 meeting that coalition members interpreted as extending the deadline to Nov. 6, which would have allowed them to come up with alternative sites.

Coalition president Dean said he had understood that the food group would be allowed to plead its case one last time at the council’s first November meeting. But on Oct. 20 he received a letter telling the group the council’s resolution had been “clarified,” and that the group would have to be out of the park by Nov. 1.

Koretz said he believed the food coalition “has an extension until Nov. 6, but it is possible that because the resolution was so vague that staff could have made the decision,” to cut off the program as originally scheduled.

Coalition volunteers said they held last-minute negotiations with city Human Services department officials, including director Lloyd Long, but that their proposal to move the giveaway from site to site was rejected late last week.

But even if the city’s order to vacate stands, food giveaway supporters believe they are on firm legal ground for refusing to leave the park, even if they do lose use of a city kitchen. One volunteer has even spoken to the nation’s leading homeless advocate, Mitch Snyder, about the city’s order.

Snyder is the fiery, controversial, Washington activist who in recent years has become an outspoken critic of the way local governments handle their homeless. Snyder was the subject of a 1986 television movie, “The Mitch Snyder Story,” starring actor Martin Sheen and praising his activism.

“Snyder knows these issues backwards and forwards, what one’s rights are. They (the city) have absolutely no right to throw you out of a public park,” said volunteer Landreth.

The food giveaway has been operating out of the park on the east side of West Hollywood since August, 1988. The program was originally run from the Crescent Heights United Methodist Church on Fairfax and Fountain Avenues, but was ordered to move by the City Council last year after neighbors complained about the program.