Santa Ana to Consider New Ban on Homeless : Ordinance: This law is aimed specifically at stopping encampments in Civic Center only. Related but broader measures have been blocked by the courts.

City officials, temporarily barred by the courts from enforcing an ordinance designed to clear the homeless from city streets, next week will consider a new law aimed at halting homeless encampments in the Civic Center area only.

The Santa Ana City Council will discuss the ordinance, which would prohibit people from using the area for “living accommodation purposes,” at Monday’s council meeting.

Legal Aid lawyers sued the city over the first law, which took effect in the summer of 1992, and got the 4th District Court of Appeal to issue a temporary order that blocked ticketing of the homeless until the judges decide its constitutionality.

Harry Simon, a Legal Aid lawyer, said he will sue the city again if more homeless people are cited under a new ordinance.

The proposed ordinance “constitutes banishment of the homeless,” said Simon. He noted that about 3,000 homeless people live in Santa Ana, where there are just 300 shelter beds.

City officials said the law is needed because homeless people recently began moving back into the Civic Center again after a separate court barred police from ticketing most homeless men and women.

Under that ruling, which pertained to the city’s use of a state anti-lodging law, only people sleeping in “enclosed structures” can be cited, said Assistant City Atty. Robert Wheeler.

“It’s not that we’re unsympathetic to the plight of the homeless,” Wheeler said. “We feel that as a city we have an obligation to keep the Civic Center open for public use. . . . It’s not designed for sleeping and camping purposes.”

The proposed new ordinance is patterned after a United States Park Service regulation upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1984. It would bar anyone from sleeping, making a fire, digging in the earth or cooking in the public areas of the Civic Center. It would, however, allow “short-time, casual sleeping.”

It differs from the city’s first ordinance because it targets the Civic Center instead of the entire city.

Simon noted that the Supreme Court upheld the regulation’s language when it was challenged on the basis of freedom of speech by several homeless activists who were arrested when they camped in a park as a form of protest.

“But we’re not talking about the right to demonstrate (in Santa Ana). We’re talking about the mere right to exist,” Simon said.

Wheeler said the new ordinance’s language is designed to focus attention where many homeless stay--the Civic Center--and also to deflect Legal Aid’s arguments that the city’s anti-camping law limits a homeless person’s freedom of travel into Santa Ana.

In April, a Superior Court judge upheld most of Santa Ana’s first anti-camping ordinance. When the ordinance went into effect last year, about 275 people were living in the Civic Center, many in makeshift huts and tents.

But in June, the state appellate court issued its injunction against enforcing the anti-camping law. Criminal cases against 25 homeless defendants have been stalled while the court deliberates.

In October, another Superior Court judge blocked the city from enforcing the similar state anti-lodging law.

So far, the city has paid homeless people $450,000 in settlements from civil cases filed before the first ordinance was enacted, said Legal Aid’s Jere Witter. “You could build something for homeless people to stay in for that much,” Witter said.

City Councilman Robert L. Richardson said that while he supports the city’s legal efforts against the homeless, he also has a plan to spend city money to help the homeless, with the cooperation of Orange County churches.

The plan calls for Santa Ana to donate $300,000--$1 per Santa Ana resident--in 1994 for countywide homeless services such as shelters if nine other cities in the county agree to donate $1 per resident, Richardson said.

“We’re concerned about trying to find a solution that goes beyond the regulation of camping in the Civic Center,” Richardson said. “I think folks deserve something better.”