COSTA MESA : Charity Allowed to Use Center’s Kitchen

Someone Cares Soup Kitchen can continue to prepare its free lunches at the Rea Community Center, but it cannot serve them there, the City Council decided this week.

In a 4-0 decision, with Councilman Peter F. Buffa absent, the council granted the charity the right to rent out a portion of the center’s kitchen along with office space for $125 a month. It will use the center’s stoves, refrigerators and other supplies to cook and store the food it serves each day to hundreds of homeless and poor people who depend on the group for meals.

The charity formally withdrew an earlier request to move its entire operation to the center. Less than a month ago, Someone Cares asked the council for permission to move back to the Rea Community Center, which it had occupied for several years in the late 1980s.

Space was available because the senior lunch program was vacating, and Someone Cares needed a new home because the room it had rented from South Coast Community Church was no longer available.

The request, although never formally considered by the council, sparked a neighborhood outcry reminiscent of one more than three years ago, when neighbors’ complaints forced the charity to move from the Rea Community Center to South Coast Community Church. Once again, residents living near the center said they didn’t want hundreds of people filing through their neighborhood and expressed fear about an influx of homeless people and transients.

The protests prompted Someone Cares to withdraw the request and instead ask just to use the kitchen and office space. In the meantime, the charity has moved to First United Methodist Church on West 19th Street.