Area Poor Lose Out as Resource Center Closes

Virginia Billegas has no job, no car and three young children to support--one of whom is mentally retarded.

The 39-year-old El Monte resident had come to depend on food from the Interfaith Community Outreach Center since she moved out of East Los Angeles seven months ago. But when Billegas showed up at the center with her 11-year-old daughter last week, she found a locked door and an empty parking lot.

“I came to look for food for her,” Billegas said, “and I found it closed. It means a lot to me because I don’t work. I just get welfare.”

Los Angeles County marshals closed the resource center Jan. 6 just as the staff was about to serve a hot meal to 150 people, said Sylvia Franco, the center’s executive director. Last year, the resource center served food to 80,000 people on a $78,000 budget and provided medical help and immunizations to children and contraceptives and prenatal care to women, she said.

The organization was three months behind in rent payments, and the closure has left the area sorely lacking in services for the poor.

A countywide referral agency says only one other emergency food service exists in El Monte and South El Monte. Many service agencies in San Gabriel Valley cities restrict aid to residents in their area, making it difficult for people to seek help outside city boundaries.

One family that pulled up to the closed center in search of food said the nearest food giveaway they knew of, in La Puente, required proof of La Puente residency.

The same goes for El Monte. An administrator of a county-run food pantry for the elderly poor said he is not allowed to help residents who have come from nearby Rosemead--where a senior food service recently closed--without special permission from his director.

El Monte resident Lynn Banyard--who came searching for food for herself, an elderly friend who lives in his car, and another friend’s child--said she had no idea where else to go.

“A couple of years ago there were places all over. Now there doesn’t seem to be any anymore,” said Banyard, 33, a recovering alcoholic who was referred by a nearby church to Interfaith on Wednesday and arrived to find it deserted.

While Banyard had never been to the Interfaith center before, others depended on it to feed their families.

Billegas, who learned of the center through her daughter’s school and would go there for food every Wednesday and Friday, rents a small room for herself and her three children in El Monte. Her 12-year-old daughter is retarded, attends special classes in school, and cannot be left unattended at home, Billegas said.

The center provided bags of food to families on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and hot meals every weekday at noon, serving more than 6,000 people each month, Franco said.

But the organization’s shoestring budget and a history of financial dependence on the San Gabriel Valley Presbytery left it vulnerable to the Jan. 6 eviction. The center was formed in 1985 by a dozen Presbyterian and Methodist churches in east San Gabriel Valley, and occupied three different El Monte locations over the years, Franco said.

A seed grant from the San Gabriel Valley Presbytery kept it going until last spring, and then financial woes set in. A $12,000 grant from County Supervisor Gloria Molina’s office helped pay the rent for a while, and then Interfaith got into financial trouble again, Franco said.

A private citizen donated money to hire a specialist in seeking grants, and the agency was in the process of applying for several grants when the eviction occurred, she added.

City officials met with Franco within 24 hours of the eviction, El Monte City Administrator Gregory D. Korduner said. But he said El Monte does not have the money to assist Franco, though city staff is trying to find the Interfaith center a more affordable location.

The problem of homelessness and poverty is steadily increasing in El Monte and other parts of the San Gabriel Valley, and funding should come from the city and county, said the Rev. Karen Kiser, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of El Monte and a former Interfaith board member.

“There is a tremendous amount of homeless people, and this has increased in the last two years,” she said. “There’s just a pocket of poverty here that is not serviced. I get people coming to my door every afternoon. There’s a tremendous need.”

County officials agree a regional solution is needed.

“There has to be a coordinated effort because the cities (in the San Gabriel Valley) are not that large, and the homeless will cross boundaries. They are going to look wherever they can to find services,” said Robert Alaniz, press deputy to Molina.

The region’s cities should consolidate efforts, as they have in dealing with gang and water issues, Alaniz suggested.

As for another bailout grant from Molina, Alaniz said that is unlikely.

“There just isn’t a lot of money right now,” he said.

The El Monte-South El Monte Emergency Resources Assn.--a one-woman operation that receives city funding and is more established than Interfaith--provides emergency food, rental assistance and other services from a van, and another church-run agency provides medical help and food. But there is no other walk-in center in El Monte like Franco’s.

Behind the main building at 2140 Durfee Ave., a small house that Franco helped restore in exchange for a rent discount served as a clothing giveaway center, a free medical clinic one day a week, and a shower and laundry facility.

A van visited the site every Monday for gynecological exams, AIDS testing and counseling, contraceptive giveaways and prenatal care. An immunization van was seeing patients in the parking lot when Los Angeles County marshals arrived Jan. 6.

“They got evicted along with me,” Franco said.

“We’re it. That’s why people come to us,” Franco said. “We’re always open on the days we say. And our policy is out there: We help poor people, people on disability, people on unemployment, moms on welfare, seniors, anybody who needs it.”

Others in the community speak highly of Interfaith’s services.

“I think it’s tragic that they got evicted. There is a great need in this area for emergency food,” said Teresa Abbott, information and referral supervisor for the El Monte-based Info Line, which Abbott said handles about 1,000 calls a day from people seeking referrals to emergency services throughout Los Angeles County.

Abbott’s agency has been referring people in need of emergency food in the El Monte area to the van service--run by El Monte resident Lillian Rey--and to Interfaith.

According to court documents, the center’s landlord, Richard Gregorian, filed eviction papers Dec. 1 because the center was three months--$6,600--behind in rent. Interfaith has rented the Durfee Avenue facility since June, 1991, Franco said.

Lt. Eric Wiggenhorn of the Los Angeles County Marshal’s Department in El Monte said a five-day eviction notice was posted on the property and Franco was also mailed two notices.

Franco maintains that she received no papers and knew nothing of a Dec. 17 eviction hearing at Rio Hondo Municipal Court.

“We had just finished our food line for bags of food, and we were in the process of heating food up,” she said of the eviction. “(The marshal) told me, ‘You have five seconds to vacate the building, and if you don’t cooperate I’m going to arrest you.’ I barely had a chance to turn off the coffeepot when I was running out.”

Wiggenhorn said the marshal followed the normal procedure. Evictions are scheduled 15 minutes apart, and marshals are instructed to get tenants out as quickly as possible to head off confrontations inside the building.

Last week, stacks of canned soup, rice, beans and boxes of toothpaste remained locked inside the center, inaccessible to Franco for the time being. Clothes overflowed from a box in the rear house, and a plastic vat labeled “Tomato-Basil Soup” sat on the rain-soaked porch, testimony to a quick departure.