Redondo Beach Lets Plan for Transients Die a Quiet Death : Homeless: The City Council declines to vote on church’s proposal to set up aid station in city park.

Invite the homeless to Redondo Beach? Feed and clothe them in a city park? For free?

“We might as well have Hanoi Jane and Martin Sheen just bus ‘em on in from downtown L.A.,” City Councilman Terry Ward privately scoffed when the idea first emerged two weeks ago.

But when the request--made by a church and blessed by the city’s fundamentalist Christian mayor--came to a hearing Tuesday night, it was with a kinder, gentler attitude that council members turned it away.

After a lengthy discussion, they simply declined to bring it up for a vote.

“I don’t think the city of Redondo Beach acts with malice,” explained Councilman StevanColin, whose district includes the park where Hope Chapel-Redondo Beach wanted to set up a temporary aid station for transients.

When constituents phoned City Hall to offer their opinion, Colin said, “almost every caller (opposing the idea) started out by saying, ‘I don’t want you to misunderstand me--it’s not that I don’t want to help the homeless. It’s just that I don’t think we should do it in a city park.’ ”

At issue was a request from Hope Chapel’s Haven of Hope Ministry to set up a 45-day food and clothing distribution program in Dominguez Park, in central Redondo Beach. The 17-acre park is the home of the South Redondo Little League.

The program, which would be run out of a church-owned trailer, would also draw transients for a head-count that would help gauge the extent of homelessness in the affluent beach cities of the South Bay.

The Rev. Bill Gross said public land was needed because the church itself is homeless: Hope Chapel-Redondo Beach is so new that it has no church property and holds Sunday services in a high school cafeteria. He added, however, that part of the reason his church came to the city was that homelessness “is not just a church problem.”

The request--which put yet another suburban community on the spot in dealing with Los Angeles County’s reputation as the nation’s homeless capital--prompted a flood of emotional debate.

Some, like Ward, compared the reaction to the furor that erupted earlier this year when Malibu’s honorary mayor, actor Martin Sheen, declared that exclusive seaside enclave a sanctuary for the disenfranchised. Other council members expressed fears that such involvement could create the sort of tensions that have arisen recently in Santa Monica, where liberal policies toward the homeless have placed a strain on social services and spawned political backlash.

Local advocates for the homeless mentally ill backed the idea, claiming that the beach cities are lacking in services for the disenfranchised, even though local outreach workers report there are at least half a dozen homeless people in every Redondo Beach park.

But park officials argued that the plan would draw transients to a city where street people are seldom seen, and several members of the clergy expressed concern that it would duplicate free lunch programs already being offered in Redondo Beach by local churches and the Salvation Army.

Residents living around the park also complained that the program would make it impossible for their children to play safely there.

The sole backer on the council was Mayor Brad Parton, a frequent Hope Chapel congregant.

“If this isn’t something our city can jump on . . . then our idea of government is pretty mixed up,” Parton told his colleagues.

But the request did not come to a vote. Instead, the council asked that Hope Chapel be added to the city’s referral list of local social service agencies.