Riverbed Residents Fear Expulsion : Ventura: Homeless say a revitalization plan is a scheme to oust them. The project may add hiking trails and eliminate pollution.

A plan to restore the trash-strewn Ventura River bottom to its natural state has angered some of the dozens of homeless people living there, who fear it is a scheme to push them out.

Biologists are drafting the plan for the city to “reverse a trend of degradation that has been happening for about 50 years,” Mike Josselyn of the consulting firm Wetlands Research Associates told a small group of homeless people at City Hall, where the first workshop on the plan was held Wednesday night.

The city of Ventura, the state Parks and Recreation Department and the California Coastal Conservancy are spending about $100,000 to draft the plan for the 120-acre area, said Josselyn. If the three agencies enact the plan, they could spend up to several million dollars to build hiking trails, eliminate water pollution, increase native bird and fish populations and eradicate the kikuyu grass that is strangling native greenery, Josselyn told the audience.

But several river-bottom residents said they worried the plan would force them out of their makeshift lodgings.

“I’ve been pushed around all of my life,” said one, who identified himself only as a Vietnam veteran named Rick.

“Now I live in the river bottom because I’ve chosen to live there. I have a home and I’m very content. Now they want to push me out of there. I’m angry. Why should they spend $2 million to fix something that’s working fine?”

But Barbara Fosbrink, city coordinator for the project, said the river is anything but fine.

Water pollution in the river has fouled the lagoon at the river’s mouth, and rogue vegetation from river-borne seeds is choking out the endangered spiny rush plant, Fosbrink said.

“We’ve got a unique resource here on our coastline and we ought to be taking care of it,” she said.

But while city officials have offered the homeless a role in planning the cleanup, they stopped short of saying they would allow the river-bottom residents to stay in their makeshift lodgings.

“I can tell you the issue of the homeless needs to be addressed,” Fosbrink said. “I can’t guarantee that people are going to live there or not. . . . I can’t tell you there’s going to be a shelter for the homeless in Ventura . . . . There’s not a simple answer.”

River-bottom resident Jim Moore thought about his future Thursday afternoon and shivered in the thick fog that rolled through thickets near his mattress.

“Something tells me we’re gonna wind up getting run out of here,” said Moore, 40. “We heard they were going to change it into some kinda bird sanctuary and chase us all out of here.”

Split from his wife and unable to use his oil field experience to find work because of an injury, Moore said he was forced onto the street about a year ago.

Moore, who has been living beneath the Main Street Bridge for a month, scoffed at the city’s plan to restore the riverbed.

“I used to play down here when I was a kid, and I don’t see anything different than when I was 11 or 12, except for a little more trash,” he said.

Moore’s friend, Tree Epps, 42, said some of the homeless there already pile much of their trash in central locations. He pointed to a 15-foot-square pile of trash dominated by empty cereal and pancake-mix boxes.

The city need only pick up the piles, not push out the people, the men said.

“If they want people off the streets, they ought to give them a place to go,” Epps said.

Ventura’s only homeless shelters, one now operated by Project Understanding and another planned by the Salvation Army, are devoted solely to women and children, not to single men.

Epps said he does steady drywall work, but because he has no address or telephone he has trouble finding a permanent job.

Epps and Moore said that if the city forces the people out of the river bottom, they will land on the streets of Ventura.

On learning that the city has not promised to leave the homeless alone, river-bottom resident Thomas Lawson said bitterly, “They’re going to run us off, aren’t they? There ain’t nothing you can do against the system. They’ll do whatever they want.”

More workshops on the river-bottom plan will be held next spring.