Legal Warriors in Battle Over City’s Homeless : Courts: Attorneys Harry Simon and Robert Wheeler line up on opposite sides in the dispute over laws governing the homeless in Santa Ana.

In a small, dreary courtroom, attorneys Harry Simon and Robert Wheeler have a bad case of litigious deja vu .

Simon, a Legal Aid Society of Orange County lawyer, and Wheeler, an assistant city attorney for Santa Ana, are arguing--again--about the plight of the homeless. They have bickered in prior battles, steps in a long war over Santa Ana’s three separate legal attempts to push homeless out of the downtown Civic Center.

“These laws make being poor a criminal act,” says Simon, 32, who has put countless hours into defending the rights of the homeless in civil court.

Then Wheeler, 52, takes his turn: “The city has an obligation to everyone in Orange County to make the Civic Center open, accessible and safe.”

So goes the war of words in Santa Ana’s ongoing fight to outlaw the homeless from sleeping on the city’s streets. It’s a battle closely watched by leaders in urban centers across California and beyond who are awaiting legal guidelines spelling out how far local governments can go in rousting street people, panhandlers and the dispossessed.

Wheeler won the latest round, when a Superior Court judge recently allowed police to begin citing people for setting up house at Civic Center Plaza, the concrete basin and maze of government buildings at Santa Ana’s core that has drawn hundreds of homeless looking for shelter.

But both lawyers know this was just a minor skirmish in the ongoing dispute that has permeated their lives for much of the past three years.

Simon and Wheeler, two men in the same field but miles apart in beliefs and motivations, will meet again--soon--on their common ground, the courtroom.

To Simon, his position as the unassuming advocate for the people is a matter of conscience. “There’s a part of me that says, ‘My side makes logical sense, and theirs doesn’t,’ ” he said last week over pizza at a Santa Ana restaurant. “Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to win--law is interesting that way.”

Wheeler is pragmatic. His client is the city government, and the city must do what’s good for its law-abiding residents.

The government workers, lawyers and residents who use the Civic Center each day, he said, have rights, too: They are entitled to a public plaza that is clean and safe.

“I’ve been aggressively panhandled, yelled at, seen bizarre behavior, (and) stepped around pools of urine,” said Wheeler, sitting at a long table beside shelves of legal volumes in a City Hall library.

He smiles--a sight as common as his button-down shirts and brown-rimmed glasses. “The ordinances are part of changing the atmosphere here, making it a better place.”

But constitutional rights are at risk in the Civic Center, Simon insists. And constitutional law is his passion. Simon credits his persistent defense of constitutional rights to his father, a former newspaper reporter, history professor and activist who served on the Colorado Civil Rights Commission in the 1950s. Simon studied at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Hastings School of Law in San Francisco--a city he enjoys for its generally liberal atmosphere.

He joined Legal Aid--a group of similar-minded advocates for those who can’t afford $250-an-hour lawyers--in 1988. That was after what Simon describes as a draining year in family law and a few disappointing months with a San Francisco law firm that specialized in First Amendment law and represented television talk show host Geraldo Rivera, the New York Times and other prominent clients.

Orange County posed a meaty challenge for him. “I think America, and particularly Orange County, has trouble with discrimination based on poverty and class,” Simon said.

But “did I ever imagine I’d be Harry Simon, Lawyer for the Homeless?” asked Simon, who splits his time defending the homeless and the elderly. “No, not exactly.”

He said he hoped to join the U.S. Department of Justice’s civil rights division in the 1980s, but when job interviewers asked his opinion of Ronald Reagan appointees Ed Meese and William Bradford Reynolds (“It was hard for me to find anything good to say”), Simon decided on public interest work.

Wheeler, meanwhile, calls himself a moderate. Ideology--whether conservative or liberal--doesn’t really motivate him, he said. Competing in court and arguing legal points are more his style. “I just love litigation,” he said.

He also relishes the chance to create precedent in the ordinances against camping in the urban center. “These are what lawyers call cutting-edge issues,” Wheeler said.

California has long been Wheeler’s home--he went to California Western School of Law in San Diego after studying in the early 1960s at UC Berkeley, where he eluded the liberalism that was taking root.

“I walked by (people espousing the Free Speech movement) wearing my penny loafers and Madras shirts, with my fraternity brothers,” Wheeler said. “The movement was just beginning . . . and didn’t really affect me.”

Wheeler and Simon do have a few things in common--persistence, for one, in a legal whirlpool that has seen other lawyers come and go.

Simon started defending transient clients in 1990, when several homeless people in Fullerton complained they got sick after the state sent out planes to dust the area with malathion. Blocked from sleeping in armories, homeless people were exposed during sprayings. Simon wrote a brief for the case.

In court, Simon said, “I was dressed as I usually dress--in jeans--so I had reporters coming up to me asking if I was one of the homeless clients.”

In the first case against Santa Ana, Simon and Legal Aid sued over the city’s ordinance in 1992 that blocked people from “camping” on public land citywide. He lost in Superior Court and took the case to the 4th District Court of Appeal in November. The case is pending.

The police later started arresting people under a state Penal Code section barring lodging on public land. Simon helped prepare another lawsuit against Santa Ana, completing legal briefs just before leaving on his honeymoon in October. A judge will hear that case in about three months.

Last year, City Council members passed a second anti-camping law, this time forbidding anyone from sleeping or cooking at the Civic Center. That’s the case that sparked Legal Aid’s third lawsuit.

“There’s no talking to these guys,” Simon said.

The city’s enforcement doesn’t deter him. His New Year’s resolution: to keep suing the city officials until they relent.

Attorney Christopher Mears, who has represented several homeless clients in civil and criminal cases involving Santa Ana, called Simon the “linchpin” among lawyers defending the homeless.

“He’s one of the brightest and most meticulous civil rights lawyers I’ve ever met,” Mears said. “He has a tireless belief in his position.”

Wheeler also quietly but persistently heads the city’s effort to remove the homeless, under the direction of City Atty. Edward J. Cooper. He works nights and weekends, preparing the city’s cases and studying laws in other cities. Earlier this month, Superior Court Judge Robert J. Polis said the latest camping ordinance that Wheeler drafted is likely to pass constitutional muster when it goes back to court later this year.

A former assistant city attorney in Simi Valley, city attorney in the Bay Area town of Mountain View, and deputy district attorney in Monterey County, Wheeler said he especially enjoys municipal law.

Santa Ana has paid the homeless more than $450,000 in settlements in recent years. Simon decries that the city has spent that money on enforcement efforts, rather than on shelters, but he doesn’t blame Wheeler. “The thing about Bob is he’s the kind of guy who no matter win or lose, he still enjoys it,” Simon said.

Wheeler admits that he admires Simon too: “Harry Simon is an exceptionally good lawyer.”

Neither man likes to lose. But Simon takes it particularly hard because he worries about his clients. “It’s hard to leave it behind some days, it really is,” Simon said with a sigh. To Simon, affordable housing and health care are rational solutions to homelessness--not prosecuting transients. He said he fears such ordinances may become a trend if Santa Ana wins its court battles.

“If we lose this litigation, there’s going to be a rush on to do this everywhere,” Simon said. “Who wants to be the last city on their block to have homeless people?”