CALIFORNIA ALBUM : Putting the Heat on Panhandlers : Santa Barbara merchants and city leaders are touting a voucher plan, using coupons for food and clothing. But activists say the street people need jobs, not harassment.

An old dispute over panhandlers is being revived on the cobblestone streets of downtown, just in time for the summer tourist onslaught.

As the state’s economy has languished, so has this seaside city’s retail business. And now, merchants are targeting street panhandlers as the root of bad business.

“Panhandlers follow people, they block them, and they use language that’s intimidating,” said Michael Cooper, a dentist and chairman of the merchants’ Santa Barbara Downtown Organization. “Aggressive panhandling scares people away from downtown and we don’t need that.”

The business group is campaigning to get rid of aggressive panhandling, which they say is practiced by drunk, abusive street people who use money to buy drugs or alcohol.

Law enforcement alone is not the answer, the merchants agree. “You can’t outlaw panhandling altogether because it’s part of their 1st Amendment rights,” said Gregg Irish, human services director for Santa Barbara County.

So instead, retailers and city leaders are trying to build support for a voucher plan, using coupons that the public could hand out instead of cash, and which panhandlers could redeem for food and clothing.

Merchants plan to ask utility and cable television companies to enclose an optional extra charge in their monthly bills so consumers can buy the street vouchers. With an extra $10 a month, a consumer could give the vouchers to the panhandlers.

“Instead of giving panhandlers money, tourists and residents could hand them a voucher,” said Cooper. The vouchers would buy only necessities, and could not be used to buy alcohol, tobacco or drugs.

The idea is similar to programs in Seattle and Berkeley, said Irish, who is helping to design the plan. Vouchers would also carry information telling homeless people where they can go for food, showers and clothing.

“We want people to stop giving panhandlers money because they just use it to buy King Cobra (malt liquor) and pass out on the beach,” said Bob Phinney, a board member of the downtown merchants’ group.

And some panhandlers, Irish said, will eventually leave for other towns that do not discourage panhandling.

Yet some critics say the voucher idea is flawed. They point to a winter survey of homeless people who had stayed at county shelters. In that survey, only 7% said they had earned money from panhandling.

“You’re talking about a lot of energy focused on a very small group,” said activist Joe Williams III. The county offers food, clothing and medical care through a handful of agencies, including nonprofit groups such as Catholic Charities and the Salvation Army, Williams said.

“The homeless people are like a lot of us,” he added. “They need jobs, not vouchers. . . . What we have is a big-time problem trying to be solved by small-time minds.”

Williams and a group of 30 people recently boycotted retailers to protest the merchants’ blaming Santa Barbara’s economic troubles on the homeless.

The boycott helped to illuminate some problems that Santa Barbara’s street people face.

At a recent City Council meeting, a homeless activist asked the council why it outlawed public urination when it did not provide public toilets. To underscore his point, the activist pointed out that Mayor Sheila Lodge has a heated toilet seat in her home, while street people have nothing.

The mayor cried at that; she explained later that the seat had been installed only for the comfort of her elderly father, who had recently died.

The council later approved building a $250,000 public bathroom in a city parking lot. But that project was tabled after workers unearthed an adobe building beneath the asphalt; the proposed public toilet is now an archeological site.

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Over the years, Santa Barbara has developed a reputation for enforcing some of the toughest anti-homeless laws in the nation, said Will Hastings, director of the Legal Defense Center here. The city has outlawed camping, sleeping, drinking alcohol and building fires in public areas.

“Almost every normal human function is criminalized in this town,” said Peter Marin, a local writer and national advocate for the homeless.

In 1986, the city’s strict anti-sleeping law was spoofed in the “Doonesbury” cartoon strip. Mitch Snyder, the late Washington activist, threatened to invite the nation’s homeless population to Santa Barbara unless the city rescinded the law. The city did, but in 1990 passed a similar ordinance.

That summer, the homeless community camped in front of City Hall for 22 weeks to protest an anti-camping ordinance. The law was modified.

For the 3,500 or so people living on Santa Barbara streets, the city offers about 320 beds; shelters are often available to them for no more than five days each month.

The rest of the time, a homeless person must sleep in the parks, streets or alleyways--all of which are illegal sleeping spots and can bring the homeless into contact with tourists.

“When summer comes, the police crack down on the homeless people because they believe it mars the city’s image,” Marin said.

Besides the voucher plan, the city’s merchants and homeless have met in the past few weeks to discuss their differences and try to arrive at solutions.

Among the suggestions is a jobs training program and a jobs center where merchants can hire homeless for entry-level jobs.

Hastings, who for decades has defended the city’s homeless population, was encouraged by the meeting: “I saw more progress in the first two-hour meeting than I’ve seen in all the other city meetings combined.”