Homeless Trouble Oceanside Firms : Business: Merchants lead city officials on tour of area that has seen an explosion in transient population and a 46% rise in crime.

Fed up with startling increases in crime that they blame on a new surge of homeless people moving into Oceanside’s San Luis Rey River Valley, a group of area businessmen Thursday took city officials on a tour of the area and pressured them to take action.

For several months, Oceanside’s homeless population has been migrating to the dense brush that crowds the river near the municipal airport. As the population has increased, so have the crime and nuisances for businesses in the neighboring Oceanside Industrial Park. Police confirm that crime in the area is up by 46% over last year.

Michael Stenson, owner of a printing business and president of the park’s merchant association, said his firm has been broken into five times this year, resulting in thefts from petty cash boxes and vending machines. Other merchants recite a similar litany, saying they also routinely deal with vandalism, people sleeping around their buildings and transients harassing their employees.

“We’re being run over,” Stenson said. “We’re physically being taken over. And the feeling at City Hall is ‘just leave them alone.’ ”

So a group of about 20 tromped through a couple of campsites, starting about 8 a.m. Thursday--early enough to stir many of the campers from their sleep.

One of the merchants, David Quignon, said several of the camps were using tarps, pallets and other materials he was certain had come from area businesses. “I think I even saw one of my tarps in there,” he said.

Although no one has an exact number, city officials and merchants estimate there could be more than 1,000 homeless people living in camps throughout the river valley that winds across the city’s northern border. For various reasons, homeless people have been concentrating in increasing numbers near the industrial park.

One of the reasons often cited is the attraction of the Brother Benno’s Center, which moved from downtown to a former warehouse in the industrial park last year. The center dishes up breakfast and lunch to about 200 people a day, and gives people on the street a place to shower, spend time and take advantage of various services during the day.

“It’s been a magnet,” Stenson said.

The Brother Benno’s Center, in fact, closed its doors Wednesday for seven days, acknowledging that a few of its clients have been responsible for problems in the area, and to send a message that the inappropriate behavior won’t be tolerated.

“Maybe a sanction of this type--realizing that the innocent always have to suffer for the actions of a few--will get their attention,” said Bud Ogle, the center’s acting director.

At the same time, the city has been helping property owners in the downtown area shoo away transients. And, a flood-control project on the San Luis Rey River has disturbed many encampments, forcing the squatters to look for new settling places. On top of it all, with the weakened economy, more people who had been living on the edge of poverty are now out on the streets.

At one of the campsites Thursday, a young man who called himself Misfit and gave his age as 25 said he has lived in the brush along the river for a year and a half, relying on General Relief payments and “Dumpster diving” to get by.

“It’s comfortable and it’s homely here. It’s wooded, too,” Misfit said. “It beats living on Hill Street.”

Misfit said that, until the last several months, the concentration of homeless people was nowhere near the level it is now.

“There was no trash then,” he said.

Now, just outside the individual camps, trash is strewn about--everything from food wrappers and dinner rolls to 12-pack beer cartons and tattered clothes.

Several campsites had bicycles parked nearby, with the squatters either using them to get around or assembling them from parts they scrounged. One campsite had a Volkswagen bus shell and a refrigerator used as a storage cabinet.

At another campsite, David, 40, said he was thinking of going back to his home state of Texas. An ironworker and welder who came to California a year ago and found it difficult to find full-time work, David gave up living in a downtown Oceanside motel and moved out to the river valley two months ago. He earns some cash by doing yard work on weekends.

“Somebody told us about Benno’s and that they were living out here,” David said. “But it doesn’t look like it’s going to be too cool out here, either.”

Fed up with what was happening to the industrial park, business owners formed the merchant association two months ago and voiced their concerns to city officials. City Manager James Turner responded recently by forming a committee with city department heads and merchants to discuss possible solutions.

Two members of the committee, Greg Anderson, the city’s building director, and Dale Geldert, the city’s fire chief, joined the merchants’ tour Thursday. Neither had immediate recommendations as to what could be done to address the problem.

“We’re trying to come up with viable alternatives--something that won’t just shift the problem to another area,” Anderson said.

Turner said he expects a recommendation from the committee in a couple of weeks. Once the city is able to offer the homeless some alternatives, he said, it will begin clearing them out of the land, which is city property.

“It’s going to take longer than the merchants out there would like, but there are certain procedures we have to follow,” Turner said. “We want to do this in the most humane way we can because these people are really deserving of some help.”

Another complicating factor, Turner said, is that the land is protected by federal laws governing wildlife habitats for animals such as the least Bell’s vireo.

“We’re responsible for trying to protect habitat, and they do tend to destroy it with their fires and their cutting things down to build structures,” Turner said.

Bob George, an Oceanside police spokesman, said the number of reported crimes in the industrial park rose this year after holding relatively steady the two previous years.

In the municipal airport area, 111 crimes were reported through June 30, compared to 76 during the same period in 1991, George said.

But the police department has stopped short of attributing the rise specifically to the homeless.

“The crime has gone up down there, but to be able to point a finger at any particular group is very difficult,” George said.

The police department has responded, however, by assigning an officer with a dog to patrol the area at night.

“Regular beat officers spend as much time there as they possibly can, in addition to their other duties,” George said. “With the limited manpower we have, it’s difficult.”

Meanwhile, the merchants are looking into hiring a security service to beef up patrols. They also are now working closely with Brother Benno’s board of directors.