Task Force to Urge Help for Homeless : Government: Report will recommend city spend $3.5 million annually on more beds and services.

The citizen task force charged with devising an overall strategy for managing Santa Monica’s homeless problem is poised to recommend that the city create an ambitious program of social services that would add between 203 and 295 permanent shelter beds at an estimated public cost of $3.5 million a year.

The plan, which could more than double the available shelter space in the city, is contained in a draft report of the Santa Monica Task Force on Homelessness. Its report will be delivered to the City Council in December.

At a meeting last week, task force members stressed that all their recommendations must be considered as a package. They then unanimously adopted a compromise position on the touchy issue of sleeping overnight in parks, which is prohibited by a law that until lately has not been enforced.

The group’s delicately worded policy statement--which now becomes part of the December report--favors neither closing the parks at night, as some had proposed, nor ignoring the sleeping-in-the-park law because the homeless have nowhere else to go, as others favored.

Vivian Rothstein, who helped draft the statement, said a middle course was important “to calm down the chaos which has existed in this community. . . . (We) should move somewhere creative rather than keeping this community at war with itself.”

Co-author Conway Collis, chairman of the group’s public safety committee, described the policy as giving the police latitude to protect public health and safety, while not endorsing wholesale rousts of those sleeping in parks.

“We’re not going to have sweeps for the sake of sweeps,” he said.

But some task force members acknowledged that the effect of the compromise would be to return the hot potato issue to the City Council.

“We drafted a statement that puts the key issue back on the (elected) politicians where it belongs,” said Sharon Gilpin.

Task force members contend that the other components of their overall program will go a long way toward solving the sleeping-in-the-park problem, and make the issue far less volatile.

Although some details remain to be worked out, the general shape of the task force’s recommendations has been agreed upon. The group will recommend an assortment of social programs designed to break the homeless cycle; meanwhile, it will urge a crackdown on activities that make the homeless problem threatening for the rest of the residents, such as using parks as restrooms, drug dealing and aggressive panhandling.

Additionally, the task force is recommending that the City Council enact a law against encampments in the park to prevent small tent cities from sprouting up.

Public funds to pay for the added services could come from city reserve funds, budget tightening and increased parking ticket revenue, Collis said. The public funding proposal is certain to be fought by those who want a stronger enforcement component, as well as those who believe that a proliferation of programs brings more homeless people to the area.

The city spends about $1.3 million a year on homeless services. If the task force program is adopted, the budget would rise to nearly $5 million a year.

The task force firmly opposes the creation of a single large facility where homeless people would be urged to go at night in favor of smaller programs.

Service providers favor smaller programs and are more conducive to linking people up with social services to provide a permanent solution to their plight.

If the task force gets its way, Santa Monica’s trademark daily feeding program on the City Hall lawn will be disbanded in favor of several small feeding programs.

The City Hall feeding program, which is funded by a private charity, is frequently cited by disgruntled residents as evidence the homeless problem is out of control. Critics say the no-strings-attached program sends an implicit message to the homeless that Santa Monica imposes no boundaries on behavior for them.

Police statistics show that 60% of people arrested on drug-related charges in Palisades Park in the past month are transients with no addresses. Police Sgt. Bill Brucker said most of the arrests are for sales or possession for sale of rock cocaine.

Collis said those among the homeless population who cause the biggest problems, and who often do not want services, may not find Santa Monica as hospitable when they must get their meals at a site “where there’s a lot of pressure for them to participate in programs.”