SANTA ANA : Charity May Have Found a New Home

The Neighborhood Service Center, which provides emergency food and clothing and medical and counseling services to the Minnie Street neighborhood, may have found a new home.

Executive director Mary Ann Salamida said she hopes that by later this month she will be able to move the center into a county-owned building at 1141 E. Chestnut Ave., which was once used for paramedic training.

Before that can happen, however, the city’s Planning Department must determine whether a special permit will be required.

“I hesitate to be too positive or negative at this point,” said Melanie McCann, an assistant planner with the city. “We are still in the process of gathering all of the data together. There still could be something that pulls the cork out of the whole thing.”

Salamida said the 3,000-square-foot building would be an ideal place for the center to continue offering its services, which include paralegal counseling and literacy classes.

The center serves an average of 1,000 Latino and Cambodian immigrants each week and has been looking for a permanent home all summer.

On June 17, the center was forced to vacate the church at 430 S. Standard Ave. that it had rented for more than two years when the landlord, the Orange County Southern Baptist Assn., decided to use the church to house a new congregation.

Faced with the prospect of having to discontinue services, the center was saved temporarily when the Santa Ana Unified School District offered to rent five portable classrooms at the Roosevelt Annex, a makeshift campus next to Roosevelt Elementary School. But the district will need the classrooms in the fall to house an overflow of students, and the center must move out by Aug. 10.