Residents Debate Soup Kitchen Program : Topanga Canyon: Some say the project to aid transients increases danger of brush fires. But others say the community has an obligation to the homeless.

Nearly 250 Topanga Canyon residents, described by participants as an unprecedented turnout, gathered Monday night to debate whether a program to feed transient workers and the homeless is increasing fire danger in the canyon.

“This is one of the most incendiary issues I can remember in years,” said David Gottlieb, a canyon resident and a board member of the Topanga-Las Virgenes Resource Conservation District.

Many in the crowd at Topanga Elementary School called for an end to a soup kitchen that serves up to 40 meals a day to transient workers, arguing that the free food attracts more laborers than the rustic community can support and increases the threat of brush fires from campfires set by transients.

Other, equally impassioned speakers maintained the community has an obligation to the largely Central American immigrants it uses for cheap labor.

At issue was whether the nonprofit group PATCH--People Assisting Topanga Canyon with Helping Hands--would close its controversial soup kitchen. A vote was planned, New England town meeting style, after state and local officials discussed the issue. These included representatives of the Los Angeles County Fire Department, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and a Los Angeles city transient worker program.

“I think the community needs to be able to talk,” Marg Starbuck, a founder of PATCH, said. “I feel PATCH served the purpose of getting us to this point.”

“We just want a solution so that our homes aren’t threatened by fires, our creeks aren’t like open sewers, but that people who need it are helped,” said Bill Lovejoy, a member of a group called Concerned Topangans for Public Safety.

The meeting was prompted in part by a January fire, which authorities said was set by a homeless person cooking on a makeshift stove. Many of Topanga’s day laborers spend nights camping in the canyon’s parched, chaparral-covered hills rather than returning to the city by hitchhiking and bus. Although it caused little damage, the recent fire raised concerns that such campsite cooking might start brush fires.

It followed a November brush fire, also started by a homeless person’s cooking, that scorched 10 acres, according to county fire officials, who say they are investigating as many as three fires a week ignited by homeless workers.

Topanga Canyon joins Malibu as a community torn by a conflict between the desire of many politically liberal residents to aid the homeless, and concerns involving property values and fears of drought-fueled fires.

At Zuma Beach, for example, Los Angeles County authorities have closed a hiring center because of complaints that its free lunches are drawing transients who then camp in the hills.

PATCH has been working to start a hiring center in Topanga and to bring public transportation there, which Starbuck said could solve the problem of laborers camping overnight. Concerned Topangans for Public Safety has proposed a plan in which employers and workers would phone a hiring exchange each morning, eliminating the need for laborers to congregate at street corners.