Officials Seek Funds for Shelter for Homeless

As part of a regional strategy to help lift people out of homelessness, officials of a Ventura County program will ask supervisors today for $96,900 to keep a transitional housing facility in Camarillo open until June. In addition, they will ask permission to seek funding for a permanent facility for homeless people in transition.

Kathy Jenks, who oversees the River-dwellers Aid Intercity Network, or RAIN, said a permanent location has been identified to replace the temporary facility in an old Fire Department building near Camarillo Airport.

Today, Jenks will ask for permission to seek funding to move the home--where 56 people currently live--to the former Assn. for Retarded Citizens center at 1732 S. Lewis Road.

If supervisors approve, homeless officials will begin searching for the $400,000 needed to repair the dilapidated county-owned building near the new Cal State Channel Islands campus so that clients can move in by summer, Jenks said.

Of the $400,000 start-up fee, about $120,000 could come from federal Housing and Urban Development funds, and the rest would be obtained from federal and state grants as well as county coffers, Jenks said.

RAIN was created in late 1997 to assist people who lived in the Ventura and Santa Clara river bottoms.

Since then, it has broadened its range and now serves homeless families in transition countywide. So far, it has served 438 men, women and children from throughout the county.

Of that number, 41% were from Ventura, 38% from Oxnard, 8% from Thousand Oaks, 7% from Simi Valley and 4% from Camarillo, according to county statistics. The remaining 2% were from unincorporated areas.

County officials estimate there are between 2,000 and 4,000 homeless people in the area.

In addition to providing temporary housing, RAIN helps people combat substance abuse, find jobs and housing, and assists them in other problems that might hinder self-sufficiency.

Jenks said the $96,900 being sought today is imperative to the program, expected to become a cornerstone in the new regional approach to helping get people off the streets.

“It would get us to the end of the fiscal year so we don’t have to keep piecing everything together from week to week,” Jenks said. “It would give us the breathing room to focus on the big picture, which is the continued operation of the program on a permanent basis.

“We’re at a crossroads,” she continued. “Either the county is going to support it or they’re not.”

Supervisor Kathy Long, who oversees a countywide homeless committee that includes city and county elected representatives, said she believes the board would approve funding to keep the shelter open.

“I’m supportive of it,” Long said Monday. “Frankly, we’re morally required to help true members of families, parents and their children who don’t have a place to stay.”

Long urged the county’s 10 cities to pitch in on a permanent transitional shelter.

As it stands, Ventura has set aside $40,000 for a countywide shelter, and federal housing officials recently awarded $750,000 to the city of Oxnard to support the transitional program for three years beginning in July.

It would cost $1.1 million to run the program for one year at the new location.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do to see if we can get the funding pieces together for the new location,” Long said. “It’s a county-owned site and we should move ahead. But that doesn’t preclude all of the cities from helping if this is to be a regional transitional center.”

Long’s committee was established early this winter after an escalating conflict over who should bear most of the responsibility for caring for local indigents.

Ventura officials complained that their city had been forced to shoulder most of the cost and criticized Ventura County government for failing to abide by a state mandate to provide homeless services.

County leaders responded by agreeing to study homelessness as a regional crisis and promising to make a greater commitment to plug in the gaps in the current system that serves homeless people.