Declaring War on Blight

Orange County supervisors approved a plan Tuesday to use $500,000 for revitalizing at least eight unincorporated neighborhoods where residents have complained about run-down houses, abandoned vehicles, gangs and crime.

The county, for the first time in recent memory, is putting together a task force of agencies to attack all the major problems in a coordinated fashion. The task force consists of the sheriff, probation, planning, housing and social services agencies.

“This program is an opportunity for us to reclaim Orange County, street by street,” said Sheriff Mike Carona. He has assigned two bilingual deputies to the El Modena community in Orange, where a pilot project has been in place for two months.

Supervisor Cynthia Coad said the county’s strategy will borrow from what was started in El Modena, an ethnically mixed residential community surrounded by the city near Chapman Avenue and Hewes Street.

The idea is to go in as a task force and help a community overcome problems that often feed off each other.

El Modena was besieged by drug pushers, overcrowding, unemployment and “three gangs in an area that only has eight streets,” said Coad, who introduced the project there.

So far, the county’s effort is a model of cooperation.

Coad said the two deputies were added as part of a community policing program. They not only patrol the area, but also attend neighborhood meetings and get to know residents and their concerns.

Deputies, in turn, have called in tow trucks to haul away abandoned or inoperable vehicles on streets, and then identified and arrested gang members and drug pushers who had taken over certain streets.

Code enforcement officers then were brought in to cite landlords for substandard and overcrowded dwellings. Programs were set up to upgrade run-down housing with federal Housing and Urban Development funds administered by the county.

“This was a first for Orange County,” Coad said. “In the past, if code enforcement had gone out there and condemned a building, like a shack with 20 people living inside, we might have had 20 homeless people. But this effort also involved social services and housing [representatives] who also went out and found the homeless . . . and helped them. It was a coordinated effort.”

The county’s plan also calls for spending $50,000 for the Orange County Conservation Corps to assist in certain unincorporated county islands. The corps can help by hiring youths from at-risk neighborhoods, who then can clean up blighted areas.

Originally, Coad’s idea was to identify some of the county’s 77 pockets of unincorporated islands and revitalize them with the goal of having them annexed to cities.

But now she’s separating those goals.

Tiny, one-block areas could easily be rehabilitated and incorporated, she said. But residents in island communities such as Orange Park Acres in Orange may want more county services so they can remain “quite happy the way they are.”

Under the new program, annexation would be resident driven, Coad said.

“If residents want to improve their community or join the incorporated area, it would be our job to help them by coordinating what they want with the city, the county and other agencies,” she said.

The program is aimed at some areas that have been neglected for years, where, she said, “if the problems are not addressed now, the cost to help later would be unjustified.”

The supervisor said she has been contacted by residents in seven other neighborhoods who want the county’s help. But she refused to identify them, saying it was premature to do so.