Shelter Issue Hotly Debated in Encinitas : Housing: Migrant worker aid group makes case to City Council for converting motel into low-cost housing for homeless.

The Encinitas City Council listened Wednesday night as more than 100 speakers--many with impassioned pleas--voiced support for or opposition to the conversion of a motel into a shelter for the homeless.

The Rev. Rafael Martinez, executive director of the North County Chaplaincy, the group seeking to convert the Image Inns in Leucadia into a 106-unit, low-rent apartment house, offered the council a compromise.

He proposed that the council allot $103,000 of the city’s community development funds to the project, conditioned on resolving problems that have caused stormy clashes between the opposing sides and have divided the community.

Council action is necessary to free up other state and county grants that are conditioned on the city’s approval of the project.

Mayor Gail Hano firmly controlled the overflow crowd of about 300 but was unable to stifle angry outbursts from residents who were forced to stand outside the council chambers.

One Encinitas man urged Hano to “throw out all the bused-in people” who came to show support of the project so that local residents could be seated. Hano refused, pointing out that no one can be excluded from a public meeting.

Twice she warned the crowd that she would clear the room if another outburst of applause or catcalls occurred.

James Stitz, spokesman for property owners in the Avocado Acres neighborhood around the motel said the housing project was “ill-conceived no matter how well-intentioned its proponents are.”

He said that area residents already are talking about selling their homes: “Stand back and watch the for sale signs pop up” if the project is approved.

Stitz said the neighborhood would become ghettoized from the high-density, low-income housing, and stressed that Image Inns would become a holding tank for homeless people.

Proponents praised the chaplaincy proposal as an unusual opportunity and said the opposition was “founded mostly in fear.”

A Spanish-speaking agricultural worker said through an interpreter that he “had come to speak for my friends and brothers still living like rabbits in holes in the ground.” He implored the council to approve the Image Inns project “to bring them out of the dirt.”

The motel, which stands on a hill east of Interstate 5 at Leucadia Boulevard, was seized last fall by a Los Angeles bank, which later agreed to sell it to the Chaplaincy. Word of the proposed homeless shelter sparked protests from nearby property owners and residents who fear the building will become a flophouse for the unemployed and homeless.

North County Chaplaincy is facing a Friday deadline to make a $100,000 down payment on the $2.8-million-dollar purchase price on the hotel. Martinez said a conditional action by the council would satisfy bankers, allowing completion of the sale.

In five community meetings held to lay out the Chaplaincy’s plans for operating the motel as affordable housing units, Martinez stressed that only employed people who could not afford the steep rents of the seaside community would be housed there.

Plans for operation of the housing project include a 24-hour resident manager, a meal service and classes for the residents.

The chaplaincy said it plans to raise $800,000 in grants and donations and obtain a $2-million loan to acquire the motel. Rents from the units will go to repay the debt and to operate the facility.

Martinez said that sources for about $500,000 of the funds had been identified but that several of the state and local government grants were contingent on receiving the city’s blessing.

The chaplaincy, whose main mission is to ease the plight of North County’s growing population of migrant workers from Mexico and Central America, announced in May its plans to buy the Image Inns motel.

Community meetings since the announcement have included angry outbursts by Encinitas residents who say the motel will become an eyesore, breeding crime in the surrounding neighborhoods and attracting undesirable tenants.

But city officials say that Encinitas is under scrutiny by the state Housing and Community Development Department for failing to provide any plans for developing affordable housing for low-income residents of the area.

Councilwoman Anne Omsted said the city also has been sued by California Rural Legal Assistance attorneys for its failure to address the problems of migrant workers, including provision of adequate housing, and the city has prevailed.

Omsted said a third unresolved issue, which deals with zoning and density restrictions in the city’s General Plan, will go to court, “and I would think that the judge in the case would give consideration to our efforts to provide affordable housing for workers” if the Image Inns housing project is developed.

CRLA attorney Claudia Smith countered that Encinitas city officials have a history of harassing migrant workers, and that the chaplaincy’s Image Inns proposal “is calling the city’s bluff,” by offering to provide what the city has attempted to prevent--decent housing for agricultural workers.

Smith said the CRLA will appeal the court rulings that went against it in order to force Encinitas to modify its housing element to provide for affordable housing. Present city General Plan guidelines make it economically impossible to provide low-rent housing in the newly incorporated city, she said.