Intermittent Use of Shelter Is Approved : Homeless: State law forced Escondido to end continuous operation of the facility after Feb. 15. Weather prompts reopening through April 30.

The Escondido City Council unanimously agreed Wednesday to open the local National Guard armory intermittently as a winter-weather shelter, one day after it ceased operation as a continuously open haven for the homeless.

The vote came in time for a storm that is expected to bring rain and cold to the county today.

The city had been allowed by the state to keep the shelter open every night from mid-November to Feb. 15, but continued to keep the shelter running after then. The state recently reminded the city that, after Feb. 15, it had permission to run the shelter only during bad weather.

“The city doesn’t have jurisdiction over that building, the state does, so the state puts down the mandate on its availability and non-availability,” said Bob Klug, a program manager with the North County Interfaith Council, which ran the shelter.

The armory had been San Diego County’s only continuously operated winter shelter and had just completed its first season. The county’s other two winter shelters, in Vista and El Cajon, open only during cold weather, which is defined as temperatures below 40 degrees, or below 50 degrees when it rains.

“We’ve contacted the state and found out that they will allow us to extend the mandate for the shelter at the armory for inclement-weather days only,” Escondido housing manager Pat Getzel told the City Council.

The council’s vote allows the armory to open on cold nights through April 30.

Although advocates of the homeless would have preferred continuous use of the shelter later into the year, they say they are pleased with the city’s willingness to open the shelter as much as the state will allow.

“We’re just tickled to death that the city allowed us to use that facility when we were able to, and we were allowed to get people off the streets,” Klug said.

“Hopefully, next year, other cities about our size will look at our problem and say, ‘Geez, that was cost-effective, and it got people off the streets, and the business owners thought it was a great thing, and the parks and recreation officers loved it because it kept people out of the parks at night,’ ” Klug said.

Getzel estimated that the winter program cost $167 a night to shelter an average of 54 people. About 453 homeless people used the shelter, about a third of them Vietnam-era veterans and a large majority of them single men.

Concurrent with the shelter program, Escondido offered a hotel voucher program for homeless families, which, on the average, served eight children and six women a night, according to a city survey.

Klug commended what he sees as a City Council that deals with the homeless issue in good faith.

“They’ve done right by the social service agencies, and they have a long history of doing what’s right by the community,” Klug said.

Besides supplying blankets and food for the homeless who went to the shelter, Klug’s organization provided two counselors to help people find jobs and housing.

Homeless advocates prefer a continuously open shelter to an intermittent one, saying homeless people are more likely to use it because they can rely on it to be open. Also, it is logistically easier to provide social services from a shelter that people know ahead of time is going to be open, the advocates say.

In the spring, the city will review the shelter’s performance along with that of its other housing programs, to decide whether it will fund the program again next winter.

The opening of the winter shelter had been opposed last year by the executive director of Lifeline Community Services, which runs a shelter in Vista, who argued that few people would use the Escondido site and that the city should support the Vista facility instead.