Food Coalition Falls on Hard Times Again : Homeless: A program to feed the needy that was ousted from West Hollywood is now drawing police and health citations in Hollywood.

The Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition, which two months ago was ousted from West Hollywood’s Plummer Park, is again fighting for its survival.

The nightly feeding program for the homeless moved across the city border to Hollywood in order to continue its operation, but there too it has run into difficulties.

In recent weeks, the group has been issued citations from the police and threatened with closure by the county Department of Health Services for operating without a permit after both agencies received complaints about the program from a movie supply company. The program operates in front of the company’s building at Sycamore Avenue and Romaine Street.

“It’s the same thing all over again,” said Ted Landreth, a spokesman for the coalition. “What we are faced with is an underlying hypocrisy. People pretend that they care about the have-nots when all they really care about is protecting their own material well-being.”

The coalition moved the program to the intersection of Sycamore and Romaine in March after it was ordered out of Plummer Park by the West Hollywood City Council following neighborhood complaints that the feeding program was causing sanitation problems and attracting criminals.

The new site was selected because it is in an industrial area away from homes and is only a mile from the park where it had operated for two years. The group bought a truck with donated funds, began using the kitchen at nearby Bethel Lutheran Church and resumed its nightly feeding operation.

Within a few weeks, the program was operating at full strength, feeding roughly 150 people a night with food brought in by truck and distributed to the homeless who would eat in a parking lot on the corner.

“Everything was going well; our numbers were back up, and then suddenly all hell broke loose,” said Maggie Preston Brammall, a coalition volunteer.

The same complaints that the group received from residents in West Hollywood began to haunt the program at the new location.

Mole-Richardson Co., a movie supply company that owns the building and parking lot on the intersection of Romaine and Sycamore, complained to the police that the program was causing litter and attracting undesirables.

Police began making visits to the feeding line, warning operators that there had been complaints about the program. And May 16, six police officers and a county health inspector showed up at the site. The group was issued two citations, one for parking in a red zone, another for distributing food within 100 feet of an intersection.

“The police told us they would continue to harass us until we moved,” Brammall said. “They told us they knew plenty of laws they could use against us.”

Capt. Rick Dinse of the Hollywood Division denied that his officers were harassing the program. He said the citations were issued after several warnings.

In addition, he said, police have “received numerous complaints from a businessman in the area that the program is drawing transients into the community who are loitering around, intimidating clients, and urinating and defecating on his property.”

A Mole-Richardson spokesman would not comment on the matter other than to say that the company is trying to work out a solution with the feeding program.

Dinse met with representatives from Mole-Richardson and the coalition in his office May 18. Dinse said he told coalition members that they could continue distributing food near the intersection as long as the feeding operation is restricted to the public sidewalk and the group does not break any laws, such as littering and trespassing on private property.

“Even though they may not be considered a good neighbor, they may continue to operate there as long as they don’t break any laws,” he said, adding that his officers will continue to monitor the group’s operation.

In response to the complaints, coalition volunteers have stepped up efforts to make sure that the area is cleaned and that their clients do not loiter in the neighborhood after the meals are served.

Coalition members have also been under the scrutiny of the county Department of Health Services, which has said the program is operating without a permit.

Health officials inspected the group’s kitchen and its food truck and listed three pages of violations that must be addressed before a permit is issued. Most of the problems were considered minor, but some of the more expensive items included removing the linoleum floors and replacing refrigerators with professional models.

LeTaun J. Cole-Burke, chief environmental health specialist for the county, said the county is not trying to put the group out of business.

“Our goal is not to put anyone out of business,” she said. “We are working with them to help them improve their operation so there is less likelihood that the food will be contaminated. We don’t want the homeless to become sick either. Let’s take some preventive measures.”

The permit requirement by health officials caught coalition members off guard because they had operated the volunteer program in West Hollywood without a permit.

Because many of the requirements would place a financial burden on the group, coalition members have asked the county to relax some of the requirements.

“If they start pressing us on concrete floors and professional refrigerators, we are out of business,” Brammall said. “We couldn’t possibly create a concrete floor in a church we don’t own.”

She said the group is short of money since West Hollywood cut off its funding and evicted it from Plummer Park. It has also had to scramble to find adequate donors to cover its food distribution. It lost a major food donor when Drexel Burnham Lambert declared bankruptcy. In many ways, she said, the coalition is like the people it serves.

“We are desperately short of money. It is almost laughable how little money we have to operate,” she said. “Every day is a struggle. The problem is that a lot of people think we don’t have a homeless problem, that the homeless are people who are lazy and don’t want to work. Then there are those who care, but they just don’t want to look at the people in our line.”