Camping Ban Is Proposed for Santa Ana

Thwarted by the courts from using existing laws to control the city’s growing homeless population, officials have drafted a new ordinance that would ban outdoor camping and the storage of personal belongings on public property, City Atty. Edward J. Cooper said Wednesday.

The proposal is the latest step in an ongoing civil rights battle between advocates of the homeless who defend their rights to set up their own shelter and city officials facing pressure from residents and business owners to remove the homeless.

Cooper said the proposal is modeled after a Santa Barbara ordinance that survived a 1989 court challenge, and he is confident Santa Ana’s law would withstand legal scrutiny.

“There’s no question in my mind,” he said.

The proposed ordinance was originally designed to remove the homeless from the Civic Center area, where daytime visitors are likely to encounter the makeshift tents made of of blankets, plastic, cardboard and shopping carts.

“The use of this area for camping purposes or storage of personal property interferes with the rights of others to use the areas for which they were intended,” an early draft stated.

But Cooper said the ordinance, which has not yet been scheduled for a City Council vote, was being revised to include the entire city, not just the Civic Center. A schedule of fines is still being developed, he added.

The ordinance defines camping as living temporarily in a facility such as a tent, hut or temporary shelter.

The head of a downtown ministers’ alliance said that while he sympathizes with the city’s struggle to maintain the Civic Center, he also wonders: Where are the homeless supposed to go?

“On the one hand, we have 200 to 300 people sleeping down there, and it makes doing business pretty impossible for people,” said the Rev. Mike Pulsifer of the First Presbyterian Church in Santa Ana. “But on the other hand, where are these people going to go? If that is not the place, where is the place? We have to provide for these people.”

Crystal Sims, litigation director of the Legal Aid Society of Orange County, echoed Pulsifer’s concerns, adding that the city should also help set up shelters before evicting the homeless from the Civic Center.

“They push and push and push and don’t try to help,” Sims said. “What they are doing will not deal with the problem.”

She also wondered whether the city was violating an earlier out-of-court settlement in a lawsuit filed on behalf of the homeless. As part of the settlement, the city agreed not to take any action that would remove the homeless from Santa Ana.

“It looks like an escalation in the war against the homeless in Santa Ana,” she said.

Pulsifer and Sims said they have known for some weeks that the ordinance was being drafted but have not seen the details.

While the homeless population continues to increase throughout Orange County--there are an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 homeless people, but only about 800 shelter beds--large clusters of homeless people have settled in Santa Ana.

Last August, the City Council agreed to pay 28 homeless people $400,000 to settle a civil rights lawsuit filed on their behalf by the Legal Aid Society and several Orange County lawyers who donated their services. The homeless had been arrested in a series of controversial sweeps at the Civic Center on suspicion of offenses ranging from littering to jaywalking.

In another major case, Santa Ana paid $50,000 to 14 homeless people who sued in 1988 after their bedrolls and other property were confiscated by city park employees and discarded.

Using a more subtle approach, city parks officials attempted last November to remove the homeless from the Civic Center plaza area by relocating their portable toilets to a parking lot on the periphery, just west of the Orange County Courthouse.

But many of the homeless people living in the plaza area refused to move after arguing that they could not be forced out. The alternative location, meanwhile, has continued to grow in population.

The Santa Barbara ordinance also applies to city parks, but Cooper said Santa Ana already has a law prohibiting overnight camping in city parks.

Approval of the camping ordinance was not met without controversy in Santa Barbara. Homeless people and their supporters picketed City Hall and camped out in front of the mayor’s office when the ordinance went into effect in 1990.