Disputed Topanga Meal Program to Continue : Homeless: Topanga Canyon residents say free food will encourage day laborers to camp in the hills, posing a fire threat. Supporters say it may prevent campsite cooking.

Leaders of a group that serves soup to transients looking for work in rustic Topanga Canyon said Tuesday that they will continue to feed the hungry despite demands from residents for them to stop.

The decision by PATCH (People Assisting Topanga Canyon With Helping Hands) to continue feeding up to 40 homeless men a day came in spite of community opposition voiced during a contentious town meeting Monday night.

Residents of the area argue that the free food offered by PATCH attracts men from other parts of Southern California, some of whom do not leave at the end of the day but set up illegal campsites in the surrounding brush. Residents say those camps pose a fire threat and create sanitation problems.

PATCH has responded that the same number of men show up at the spot whether it offers food or not and that by feeding the workers it may be preventing them from cooking in the brush. Even so, the group decided to move the soup kitchen from where the day laborers congregate outside a post office to a church about a quarter of a mile away.

Organizers said that by separating the job gathering spot from the soup kitchen, residents will see that the workers do not show up solely for free food.

Nonetheless, PATCH officials are not happy about moving.

“Now the hungry people in the canyon are going to have to come to us,” said Susan Petrulas Nissman, one of PATCH’s co-founders. “It’s discouraging when something like a soup kitchen is politicized.”

Residents predict moving the food will not quell the dispute. “That’s not what the community decided,” said Terry Sweeney, a member of Concerned Topangans for Public Safety, a group formed last month to rid the community of day laborers. “They’ll probably create quite a ruckus.”

Galvanized by a canyon fire earlier this year that authorities believe was ignited by a transient cooking on a makeshift stove, about 200 residents packed a meeting of the Topanga Town Council on Monday to discuss what to do about the men seeking jobs who gather each day in the center of town.

In addition to requesting that PATCH stop serving meals, residents decided unanimously to ask that no one hire workers from the site and encouraged residents to drive to the San Fernando Valley or the Westside to find day laborers, with the hope that as the jobs disappear so will the men.

They also called for the creation of a task force composed of the public agencies that have jurisdiction over the area to roust illegal campers from the rugged hills between the San Fernando Valley and Malibu.

Residents at the meeting also decided to investigate other ways of hiring workers and to create a group to clean up areas of Topanga Canyon using day laborers as volunteers.

What good the measures will do remains to be seen. The Town Council has no power of enforcement. Already PATCH has defied Monday’s vote. And board member Marty Brastow said she thought few residents in search of day laborers would be willing to drive 20 minutes to the Valley when plenty of men are waiting down the block.

“The men are here because there is work,” she said, “and the community up to this point has been willing to provide it.”

The Topanga Canyon debate echoes one that has been taking place a few miles away in Malibu, where Los Angeles County authorities recently 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 they say would 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.