In a generic shopping center in the northern section of Lompoc, the smooth black asphalt of a parking lot abruptly gives way to a swath of yellow-brown scrubland that cradles a bend in the Santa Ynez River. There doesn’t seem to be anything special about the area today: It’s just dirt and brush dotted with clumps of green thanks to recent rains, which swelled a formerly drought-parched river.
Seven months ago, things looked very different. Just ask Mike Lemos, founder of Lemos Feed and Pet Supply, which has a location in that same shopping center. He’s been at the spot for 23 years, and the last few years were challenging.
“Many mornings, we’d show up to work and there’d be two or three people passed out on the sidewalk behind the building,” Lemos told members of the Lompoc City Council at a public meeting in mid-January. “[There was] defecation and urination on the side of the building. Gallons of bleach and Pine-Sol we poured out there to mute the odors.”
Those were just some of the problems caused by Lemos’ close proximity to the riverbed, which over the years became home to makeshift camps for more than 100 homeless individuals in the area. The camps were spread over hundreds acres of land in and around the riverbed and were a breeding ground for disease, trash, crime, and other health and safety hazards. An aerial photo taken by the Lompoc Police Department in 2018 showed massive swaths of trash hidden behind a grove of trees near Lemos. Needles, plastic, and feces were ankle deep in some areas.
But today that trash is gone. So are the riverbed’s camps and the people who once populated them—thanks to a massive cleanup effort the city completed in less than a year. Executing the ambitious cleanup plan wasn’t easy. Lompoc has a small police force and a tight budget, and faced the daunting task of trying to evacuate more than 100 people from a miles-long area that was difficult to access. But through careful planning and partnerships with community organizations and Santa Barbara County, the riverbed and the property, parks, and trails surrounding it are once again clean and safe for residents to enjoy. The price of the effort wasn’t cheap, costing the city nearly half a million dollars.
“It cost a lot of money to do this, we understand that,” former Lompoc Police Chief Pat Walsh told members of the council at the same meeting. “But we got our river back.”
A critical point
The view from the video camera shook as a Lompoc Police cruiser slowly rolled down the road next to the riverbed. Amid trees and bushes, improvised shelters of tarps, cardboard, wood, and other materials peeked out. They were just hints of the more extensive complex of camps and trails that lay inside the bed.
“It had been going on for some time,” Lompoc City Manager Jim Throop told the Sun. “It was a known issue for years that there had been people living in the riverbed. But it got to the point where it became critical.”
As of June 2018, city and police officials estimated that there were at least 110 homeless individuals living in 60 to 70 encampments in the riverbed spread over an estimated 750-acre area. The projected number of people living in the riverbed was just under one half of the homeless population recorded in the area during the previous year’s homeless point-in-time survey.
The camps were posing a number of problems for the city, residents, business owners, and even the homeless who resided in the riverbed. Public officials were worried that unsanitary conditions in the camps could lead to the spread of disease, and residents and business owners near the riverbed complained of problems with trash, vandalism, and theft. According to one city report, the Lompoc Police Department responded to 137 calls related to issues with homeless in the riverbed during the first seven months of 2018. Incidents in the area included violent crimes: stabbings, rapes, and even a murder in 2017.
“There were a lot of confrontations,” Lemos recalled at the Jan. 15 council meeting. “Our staff didn’t feel safe walking to their cars, especially during the shorter time of year when it got dark [early].”
Lompoc’s fire department was familiar with the riverbed as well. They were called to respond to 12 fire-related incidents in the area during the first seven months of 2018, and 13 in 2017. Fires in the riverbed were particularly dangerous because of the massive amount of dry brush. Still, many homeless residents had fires, hotplates, and even makeshift stoves or grills in their camps.
In addition to health and safety concerns, the city knew it was working on borrowed time. Heavy rains were forecast to hit the Central Coast in late 2018 and early 2019. If the riverbed filled as was expected and nothing was done about the camps, the homeless residents could be hurt or even killed, and millions of pounds of trash, biological waste, and hazardous material from the camps would be washed down the river and out to sea.
“There was this possible danger with the coming rains,” Throop said. “We just could not take a chance with having anyone down there.”
The effort would not be cheap either, estimated at hundreds of thousands of dollars. The city moved forward with developing its plan of attack, appealing to the county and a plethora of community organizations to make it happen. On Aug. 7, 2018, the council voted to approve the plan, and set the cleanup effort in motion.
The riverbed residents
Before anyone could clear a single piece of trash from the Santa Ynez Riverbed, its current residents had to clear out.
Removing the homeless from an encampment is easier said than done. In the years that they’d been using the riverbed, those residents had constructed elaborate dwellings and amassed a large amount of personal property. Simply using a large police force to kick them out of the riverbed without trying to provide them with a chance to get shelter, resources, and a way to move their personal property would have been heartless, and possibly illegal.
An August 2018 city staff report to the City Council noted that some cities that improperly cleared homeless encampments had been hit with costly lawsuits, forcing them to pay out millions in damages and attorney’s fees. Instead, Lompoc would need to find a way to help the riverbed residents get services, support, and even the opportunity for housing in order to do things right.
“That takes a lot of patience, heart, time, and not to mention money,” the staff report stated.
To kick off the initial phase of the cleanup, the council approved creating a homeless liaison position within the Lompoc Police Department. The department tapped veteran officer Mauricio Calderon for the job. In a January 2019 presentation to members of the City Council, Lompoc Police Sgt. Kevin Martin said Calderon had more then 20 years on the force, and that experience made him particularly capable of working with the residents in the riverbed.
“He’s got the knowledge and wisdom to be compassionate to the people living in those conditions,” Martin told the council members
Working with area nonprofits, Calderon’s first task was to identify the homeless living in the riverbed camps and contact them individually. During those conversations, which oftentimes could be lengthy, he would inform them that the city planned to clear out the riverbed and that they needed to prepare to leave.
Calderon’s job also required finding out if any of the residents qualified for various services, such as drug and alcohol treatment, medical care, and housing. That personal contact made all the difference, according to City Manager Throop.
“We didn’t go in there in force,” he said. “We had an officer who went in and met every single person in the riverbed. Just with those one-on-one talks, many of them were understanding.”
In the end, the individuals living in the riverbed essentially had two options: They could accept help, support and services, and temporary shelter through a planned triage center provided they follow a set of simple rules, or they could choose to leave and set out on their own.
Either way, they had to be out of the riverbed.
The triage center
Lompoc opened its Riverbed Homeless Triage Center at River Park on Sept. 10, 2018, the same day that all of the riverbed’s residents were officially required to evacuate.
Over the next 30 days, the homeless residents who decided to take up Calderon on his offer would get to live at the center. There, they gained access to a multitude of support services provided by employees and volunteers from government agencies and nonprofit organizations such as the Coast Valley Substance Abuse Treatment Center; the Community Defender Division of the Santa Barbara County Public Defender’s Office; and Santa Barbara County Social Services, Public Health, Behavioral Wellness, and Animal Services. Nonprofits lending a hand at the triage center included Prepare 2 Care, Micah Mission, Planting a Seed, Home For Good, Good Samaritan Shelter, and the North County Rape Crisis and Child Protection Center.
Through those various groups, displaced riverbed residents could seek shelter, jobs, drug treatment, food, and—for some—even permanent housing.
“This was a collaborative effort,” Shawndel Malcom, director of the nonprofit Planting A Seed, told the council at the Jan. 15 meeting. “We would not have been able to do that without the other partnering agencies.”
By the time the triage center closed down on the afternoon of Oct. 10, 2018, the city had some hard numbers on just how many of the former riverbed dwellers had actually benefited from its operations. According to the city, 69 of the 110 homeless individuals living in the riverbed chose to use the center. Of those, three were able to obtain permanent housing and another three were able to reunify with family members, while 22 were able to get placed in temporary housing or shelters. In addition, six triage center residents entered drug and alcohol or mental health treatment programs.
During his presentation, Lompoc Police Sgt. Martin praised the efforts of the triage center collaborators for playing a vital role in helping clear the riverbed in a thoughtful and compassionate way.
“This is an amazing feat for the city and our partners,” he said.
Throop agreed and noted that the model set by the triage center was drawing the interest of other governments as a way to effectively address similar issues.
“Everything came out really well,” he said. “It was successful enough that even the county might use it in other areas.”
Taking out the trash
With the riverbed cleared of its former residents, the city then turned to a second task that was just as challenging: clearing the gargantuan amount trash from the area. The riverbed had no bathroom facilities and no proper place to dispose of garbage and trash, and many in the camps were intravenous drug users. After years of accumulation, that meant there was not only a large amount of debris to remove, but much of it was biological and hazardous.
“A big part of the cleanup was bio waste,” Martin said. “Human waste, animal waste, needles; all those things posed a challenge.”
They also were enough of a danger and a liability that the city decided against manning the cleanup with community volunteers, opting instead to hire a professional waste removal company called Qwick Response to conduct the bulk of the removal operations. The City Council approved a $400,000 contract with company in October 2018.
The sheer amount of waste taken out of the riverbed was shocking. In total, the city removed more than 462 tons of trash.
“That just short of a million pounds of debris,” Throop said.
The 924,620 pounds of garbage removed from the riverbed included 57 quarts of collected sharps and needles, five truckloads of tarps, and 499 pounds of human waste. By mid-January it had all been hauled off, leaving a transformed riverbed and police Sgt. Martin more than impressed.
“All the structures were gone. All the campsites were gone. Just about every piece of trash is gone,” he said. “It doesn’t even look like the same place. … It’s amazing what it’s transitioned to.”
Stuck with the bill
With the massive effort mostly behind the city, it’s clear that the ambitious cleanup project was a success. With the homeless population out of the riverbed—many of them receiving shelter and support services—and the tons of hazardous trash and makeshift shelters cleared away, people are beginning to use the parks and trails surrounding the riverbed once more, Martin told the council.
“People are going back down there and feeling safe when they do,” he said.
Lemos, too, noticed a marked difference, and said he was grateful to the city and police department for taking action on the issue.
“They handled everything in such a professional manner,” Lemos said. “They are doing a great job in making all this happen.”
But the success came with a hefty price tag, especially for a city currently grappling with a looming budget shortfall. In total, the city estimated that the cleanup effort would cost more than $500,000. That not only includes the waste removal contract, but $40,000 for the triage center, and an estimated $21,305 to cover overtime costs for the police department.
Lompoc’s 2018-19 fiscal year budget deficit totaled $649,350, and that deficit is expected to grow to $1.2 million in fiscal year 2019-20. Those estimates do not cover the cost of maintaining the cleaned-up riverbed or the expense of having police officers patrol it. Both will be critical to keeping the progress made by the cleanup.
“If we don’t continue with that, it’s going to be repopulated, and we don’t want to go back to that again,” Throop said.
To help pay for some of the costly cleanup effort, Throop said the city is asking other government agencies to chip in, including Santa Barbara County. While the city owns many parcels of land in the riverbed, it is technically in the jurisdiction of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office. The Lompoc Police Department, however, responds to calls in the riverbed as part of a mutual aide agreement with the county.
The city is currently asking the county to reimburse it for some of the costs associated with the cleanup. Throop said Lompoc is seeking partial reimbursement for the triage center and is also asking the county to cover some of the cleanup and personnel costs as well. As of the March 5 City Council meeting, however, he hadn’t heard back from the county, and the city remained saddled with the entirety of the cleanup, drawing criticism from multiple council members.
“The county never … brought this up to the level of importance that they wanted to contribute funding-wise,” Councilman Victor Vega said during the meeting. “They sent people for support, but they didn’t want to come up with any money. … It should be noted that they weren’t very good partners up to this point.”
On March 21, Throop told the Sun that the county had formally agreed to pay for part of the cost of triage center but still hadn’t responded to the other requests. He added that the city was still “reaching out and trying to work with them.”
Throop also said that the city is seeing if it can cover some of the cleanup costs through state and federal agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). But those efforts have yet to come to fruition.
In the end, Throop said he hoped the county and other outside stakeholders would understand that the Lompoc took on the project in an effort to be proactive and address the riverbed issue before it led to an environmental disaster or the loss of human life.
“We are hoping to show that we were forward thinking enough to fix this before something happened,” he said. “We prevented a calamity—isn’t that a good thing?”
Looking ahead
While the city frets over whether it will get any help paying for the expensive cleanup effort, the near-total turnaround of the riverbed in just seven months has sparked a sense of accomplishment and pride in those who helped organize and carry it out.
“It doesn’t even look like the same place for us that have been down there working,” Martin said as he flipped through a series of before-and-after photos during his Jan. 15 presentation to the council. “I don’t know any community that could have done what was done in the amount of time we had.”
Both Throop and Martin have also said that the cleanup effort bore fruit beyond simply cleaning up the riverbed. The process and strategies deployed could be used to address future issues in dealing with homelessness in the city.
At the March 5 council meeting, Martin said that the department used a similar one-on-one notification process when it attempted to address problems with homeless individuals living in their cars along Aviation Drive and Cordoba Avenue. He said that he viewed the health and safety issue posed by people living in their cars on the street as very similar to the situation in the riverbed.
“We’ve seen that’s already worked, and I think we can apply that same methodology to address the parking issues in those areas,” he said.
Even with both the riverbed and the parking troubles mostly behind it, the city faces an uphill battle to address homelessness, as does almost every city in California where decreasing housing availability and affordability continues to push individuals and families on the edge of homelessness into the ranks of those without a place to live.
While the search for a solution continues, Lompoc can, at least, look to the riverbed cleanup as a beacon of what is possible.
Mayor Jenelle Osborne echoed a similar sentiment after Martin’s presentation in January.
“I think it’s a really beautiful reflection of what our community is capable of,” she said.
Staff Writer Chris McGuinness can be reached at cmcguinness@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Mar 28 – Apr 4, 2019.