ACLU lawsuit calls Laguna Beach’s benevolent reputation into question

It’s morning on Main Beach. The volleyball players lather up with sunscreen and the baby strollers roll past. A few dozen feet away, a woman lies in the sand, bundled in a puffy coat and plaid hat, her bags arrayed around her.

In Laguna Beach, a place with Mediterranean charm and spectacular ocean views, they all share the same sidewalks and seashore, whether they live in cliff-top houses or bunk under the boardwalk.

The balance in this tourist town has been an uneasy one: How to cope with the city’s small but chronic homeless population while being true to Laguna Beach’s reputation as a city with a kind heart. The city prides itself on its tolerance: Kooky locals are commemorated with their own statues, residents serve meals to the homeless in neighborhood parks, and painted parking meters collect change to help them. The town, once known as a bohemian retreat where psychedelic sojourner Timothy Leary lived in a cave, was slapped with a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union late last year that accused the city of harassing the homeless.

City officials were flummoxed by the suit. This was not the Laguna Beach they knew.

“The cities that are a little more liberal in their political leanings and generally have somewhat more of a social conscience are the ones being penalized,” said City Manager Ken Frank. “It’s crazy.”

Some of the town’s 24,000 residents viewed the suit as a harsh rebuke to Lagunans. “The people who live here are tolerant,” Barbara Wilks, 57, said on a morning constitutional across the boardwalk with her husband. “They’re characters, and Laguna is a place of characters.”

Homeless people sprinkled around downtown recount run-ins with police but consider the city pleasant.

“I know Laguna pretty well,” said Mark Lane, 51, who’s lived on the streets since 1993. “They are pretty friendly to the homeless. They feed us and all. All the cops know me after all these years.”

Drifters are even deemed hometown heroes: A 9-foot redwood statue of “The Greeter,” a friendly local legend with a wild-bearded grin who used to wave and call out to passersby, marks the heart of downtown.

Although the lawsuit has “been viewed as an indictment to our community, I don’t believe that that’s so,” said Dawn Price, executive director of the local homeless aid organization Friendship Shelter. “Some of our residents who care so deeply about these issues felt that it was almost a personal attack on them.”

Even so, there remain grumbles that the city is too lenient with homeless people urinating or panhandling in the doorways of boutiques and cafes.

According to the ACLU, Laguna Beach is not the vagrant-friendly town it claims to be. But what about the cop who did outreach for the homeless and the specially decorated parking meters for the city’s roughly 50 homeless people? Mere window dressing, the suit claims.

“Laguna had more art galleries than it had shelter beds and facilities for the homeless,” said Mark Rosenbaum, legal director of the ACLU of Southern California.

The ACLU’s 22-page complaint, filed jointly with Newport Beach firm Irell & Manella and dean of the UC Irvine Law School, Erwin Chemerinsky, on behalf of five homeless individuals, says that Laguna Beach authorities violate homeless people’s constitutional rights and the Americans with Disabilities Act by waking them up to interrogate, search or cite them.

“City officials and law enforcement treat the chronically homeless . . . as if they are essentially outlaws, assuming that they are involved in criminal activity, selectively enforcing local ordinances and criminal laws so as to harass and intimidate” those homeless with mental and physical disabilities, the complaint reads.

The focus on Laguna Beach doesn’t mean that other Orange County cities are doing any better, Rosenbaum said. But “the city plainly had the resources to deal with the homeless population and wasn’t addressing it.”

In response to the lawsuit, city officials last month voted to repeal the eight-decade-old anticamping ordinance that had made it illegal to sleep on the beach overnight.

Resident Jim Keegan, who serves breakfast to homeless people in a beachfront park every weekday morning, believes the lawsuit was needed to spur the city into action.

“They weren’t providing beds,” said Keegan, who helped initiate the lawsuit. “Any chance of that occurring without holding their feet to the fire seemed remote.”

Laguna Beach churches provide emergency beds in cold weather on a rotating basis; a resource center in town offers job help, clothing and food but no overnight stays. And Friendship Shelter, a 31-bed facility for recovering homeless people, has strict requirements for sobriety and employment

A newly formed homeless advisory committee is evaluating year-old task force recommendations and the police outreach program, and studying the feasibility of creating emergency shelter beds in town, said committee head Ed Sauls.

“It’s my sense that Laguna cares for and helps their homeless probably more than most cities,” he said. But “we should be asking ourselves: ‘Is there a more effective way to be helping the homeless that benefits the entire community and the homeless individuals?’ ”

The ACLU filed a similar suit aimed at Los Angeles’ skid row that was settled in 2007. Their latest target is Santa Barbara, home to 18 city-supported shelters and between 800 and 900 homeless people.

The suit frustrates officials there “because we’re going to spend a lot of effort and even potentially funds on resisting this lawsuit that could be used to help the homeless,” said Santa Barbara City Atty. Stephen Wiley. “It very much politicizes the process.”

Officials in Laguna Beach, a resort destination regularly spotlighted on reality TV, are in talks with ACLU attorneys to resolve the suit. Most agree that creating permanent shelter beds is a nice idea. Just how to do that, though, while retaining the tourist trade, is another question.

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susannah.rosenblatt @latimes.com