Homeless Aid Is Casualty of Fiscal Crisis

For the men and women who find refuge and supper each night in Orange County’s churches and shelters, the county’s complicated financial crisis is simple.

It translates directly into more hardship: canceled rent assistance, vanished job training programs and cold, bland food.

Some among the homeless can literally taste the aftereffects of risky investments that went awry and prompted the biggest municipal bankruptcy case in U.S. history, because one program, designed to give them more nutritious fare, has been abruptly scrapped.

“It still amazes me how thin they can cut that meat,” said one homeless man, Jim Enriquez, 43, after finishing a low-budget baloney dinner at a Santa Ana shelter. “I just hope (county supervisors) are eating good. I hope they really enjoy their meals. They’re always welcome to come down here and dine with us.”

So far, much of the public attention in the Orange County financial crisis has focused on the irony of an affluent county fighting for its financial life and on outrage over school cutbacks and municipal layoffs. But advocates for the homeless say the crisis is most severe--and immediate--for the 12,000 to 15,000 Orange County residents who might starve or freeze without county money.

Between 30 to 50 nonprofit agencies offer services to the homeless countywide, and nearly all no longer receive county funds. The list includes the agency running emergency shelters at county armories, as well as several running rental assistance programs.

County officials say they don’t yet know if these programs will get money from the county in the future. Some are owed thousands of dollars for services rendered before the county filed for bankruptcy court protection, but those nonprofit agencies might have to line up in court with thousands of other creditors.

Taking note of these difficulties, County Supervisor William G. Steiner said Tuesday that he would recommend today that about $100,000 be forwarded to nonprofit agencies providing shelter to the homeless and others in need of housing.

That will come as welcome news to Jim Miller, executive director of a nonprofit agency called Shelter for the Homeless that runs a $260,000-program at two armories during the winter.

“If emergency funding from the county doesn’t come through, then we’re going to have to take some drastic steps, including closing one of the armories,” Miller said.

Miller said he has been phoning the county for 10 days, frantically trying to learn the status of $30,000 that his agency is owed for running two National Guard armories for the homeless--in Santa Ana and Fullerton--the past three weeks.

Despite leaving repeated messages, Miller said he can’t get a county representative to call him back.

Miller said that without the funds, he would be forced to end free shuttles to the armories, a service that helped curtail the size of homeless crowds congregating in various neighborhoods throughout the county. Next, he would have to fire the security guards who make the armories safer for families.

Miller said he eventually would be forced to close one of the armories, where about 300 men, women and children seek a bed and a hot meal each night.

Maria Mendoza, the county’s homeless-issues coordinator, said Miller’s agency and others that help the homeless won’t know for months where they stand with the beleaguered county. But prospects for the homeless are bleak, she said, because many rely solely on county funds rather than a mix of public and private money.

Any agency depending solely on the county is facing extinction, she said, as the county tries to “prioritize” all expenses.

“We don’t know the extent of how they’re going to be affected,” she said of nonprofit agencies and their homeless clients. “All I know is, they’re at the bottom.”

And others may be pushed into homelessness as a result of the financial debacle.

Rental assistance programs, which helped struggling people avoid shelters by offering no-interest rental loans, have been postponed indefinitely.

Families on the brink of homelessness still call the agencies that once administered $1 million in emergency rental aid.

“We just have to tell them we can’t help them right now,” said Janine Limas, a spokeswoman for Interval House Crisis Shelters, one of the agencies that dispensed rental aid. “We’ve had several people call between this month and last month. With the holidays and stuff, it gets tough.”

Before the funds were frozen, Interval House helped more than 100 people escape or avoid homelessness this year, said Limas.

People who had received eviction notices, as well as those already living on the streets, were eligible for the loans. They could use the money to cover the first month’s rent or moving expenses, whatever spells the difference between staying independent and returning to a shelter.

“It was a great program,” Limas said.

So was the job training program, which gave homeless people skills to build careers--”The stuff that really gets people off the streets,” said Tim Shaw, executive director of the Homeless Issues Task Force, a county-funded nonprofit group that coordinates homeless services.

More than 300 people learned to polish their employment skills or hone their resumes thanks to the job training program that now exists somewhere in budget limbo, Shaw said.

Forced to compete with other programs that provide “essentials,” such as food and shelter, Shaw and others said job training can’t win. But those who provide food and shelter are not having an easy time either.

Before the crisis, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department had agreed to serve supper in the armories, which have crude kitchens and no refrigeration systems. Under the plan, the Sheriff’s Department would make a bit extra each night when it prepared meals for the county’s thousands of jail inmates.

The cost of the plan, Mendoza said, would have been negligible.

But in the midst of a budget catastrophe, even a few extra pennies were seen as an extravagance. So instead of chicken and hamburger and Salisbury steak, the homeless will get canned soups and cold sandwiches. For Christmas, they made do with a thin beef stew.

“When (the financial crisis) first came down,” said Enriquez, the homeless man, “we all said, ‘You watch. The first place it’s going to hit is the homeless.’ ”

On Friday, the day before Christmas Eve, Mendoza stopped at one of the armories to find the homeless dining on soup and sandwiches, and it made her feel a bit bleak.

“It’s the one meal they have per day,” she said, “and we always try to make it kind of special.”

But for now, as a consequence of the budget crisis, the meals will be inferior to those served to county jail inmates.

“They’re the bottom of the line,” Miller said of the homeless. “And that’s the sad thing about it, because there’s a lot of suffering people.”

* BANKRUPTCY COVERAGE: Related Orange County stories inside. A3, A12