City Council to Allocate Funds for Services to Aid Homeless : Ventura: Officials plan to use $105,000 in federal community block grants to keep assistance center open year-round.

An effort to provide social services to Ventura’s transients received a $105,000 boost Monday when the City Council agreed to allocate some federal community block grants for homeless services.

City officials have spoken for months about opening a permanent assistance center where needy men and women could hook up with public social services and private aid providers. The city now pays for such a facility on Ventura Avenue, but the funding is only temporary, and officials say more money will be necessary to keep the center open year-round.

More than 100 local homeless people were displaced this winter when the Ventura River flooded, washing out their encampments along its banks. Under pressure from the business community to clear squatters out of the river bottom, the council pledged in January to ban transients from returning to their muddied shanties.

The city has since received promises of 50 federal housing vouchers for the displaced vagrants. Now, officials say, the block grant funds could help them round out their aid efforts.

At Monday night’s meeting, Ventura resident Bruce Frazier urged the council to spend the money intelligently. “I encourage the council to look at programs that are not just handouts,” he said. “You do need a program that is creative, you do need a program that teaches vocational training and you do need a program that preaches self-reliance.”

Officials say Ventura is slated to receive about $1 million in Community Development Block Grants for the 1995-96 fiscal year, which begins July 1.

The grants are distributed annually by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which requires that the money be spent to improve urban areas and enhance living conditions for poor people in those areas.

City officials say they can allocate $105,000 toward some sort of assistance program for the homeless. Councilwoman Rosa Lee Measures, who has spearheaded an effort to drive transients out of the Ventura River bottom, has said that the city will not have a specific plan for the funds until at least Wednesday, when the council’s housing committee meets to discuss the matter.

The council voted 6 to 0 to distribute the rest of the grant money to a host of other programs. Councilman Greg Carson was absent.

But Councilman Gary Tuttle said he had reservations because he thought the city was spreading its funds too thin. “I’m not surprised because this is the spend council,” he said. “I’m up here with all these conservatives who think government can’t do everything for everybody, and every time I turn around we’re spending.”

The city’s Redevelopment Agency will receive more than one-third of all the federal grant money. The agency--composed of City Council members--decides when and how the city should spend tax dollars it receives to repair blighted areas of town.

Officials allocated about $200,000 to relocate businesses that are forced out of downtown by the revitalization effort there. The agency also received $170,000 for administration costs, including gathering data, organizing studies and paying bureaucrats.

Other programs receiving the money include a west Ventura youth boxing program, which will get $10,000 to upgrade its facilities, and a storm drain improvement project, which was allocated $337,000 to construct sidewalks, curbs and gutters, and lay underground wiring, on Ventura Avenue between Barnett and El Medio streets.

The council also agreed to pledge all $337,000 in federal housing funds to Cabrillo Economic Development Corp., a nonprofit organization that builds low-income housing around the county. But the pledge is conditional: Cabrillo officials will receive the money only if they propose a project the council likes.

Cabrillo wants to build a 140-unit house and apartment complex on 23 acres at the end of Citrus Drive in east Ventura. Company officials say they hope to use about $1.4 million in block grant funds, collected from the city over the years, to leverage the additional $23.6 million they will need to build the project.

But the development has run into intense opposition from neighboring homeowners, who say the low-income people who would live in the complex would bring crime to the middle-class community and cause housing values to plummet.