Both the 3rd and 4th District Santa Barbara County supervisors seem to have been ignoring Lompoc’s homelessness problem. Let’s examine the issue carefully and place current actions in context with history.
The homeless encampments have been in the riverbed for more than 30 years. At the start of these encampments, the entirety of the Santa Ynez River in Lompoc between the Robinson bridge and the Highway 1 overcrossing was owned by the county. At first there were only a few, but the community grew to nearly 100 camps. There was a lot of drug use, and conflict was common, sometimes fatal, between the various occupants.
When Caltrans abandoned a proposed Highway 1 bypass route beside the river between highways 1 and 246 and Central Avenue, the city accepted ownership of the land for use as open space and thus became owners of the homeless encampments as well.
For decades, folks living near the riverbank on the east side of town complained to the City Council and police department about vagrants in the area. Since the property had not been annexed into the city, officials at the time said that there was “nothing they could do” since they thought the problem was in the county.
Finally, last year, after a legal determination that the city owned the property, the city accepted responsibility for removing the vagrants because it determined that an environmental disaster was brewing because of the tons of trash, hazardous materials, biohazard waste, and metal objects that had accumulated over the years.
The city and county agreed to set up a triage area at River Park, also in the county but owned by the city, and began evicting the squatters. In theory, this center would temporarily house and then relocate the homeless to more organized surroundings. The county also provided some assistance in the removal of the trash.
When word of the triage effort spread out, probably via all of those free cellphones provided by the state, homeless people who weren’t identified as having lived in the riverbed mysteriously started appearing from Santa Maria, Santa Barbara, and other areas to cash in on whatever the program was offering.
While many wanted to camp at the park, be fed three times a day, and be able to sign up for benefits, only a few accepted a more permanent place to stay; the rest filtered into town and set up camp wherever they could hide.
The county is responsible for providing and monitoring low-income housing programs. Somehow over the last few decades, 30 percent of the available multi-family housing units in Lompoc have been converted to low-income occupancies while other cities have only 5 to 6 percent apportioned for this purpose. Several of the older motels have also been converted to house Section 8 voucher residents; some have been this way for several years.
Burdening Lompoc with more low-income/homeless housing units doesn’t seem to be an equitable solution in a community struggling with the revenue side of providing the community with needed general fund services because these properties don’t pay property taxes and the motels don’t pay transient occupancy taxes on rooms filled with Section 8 voucher recipients. They do however receive a very high volume of the services that the property doesn’t pay for.
Simply allowing the vagrants to run free and set up camp on commercial or public property doesn’t seem reasonable either.
So, what has the county done about the homeless housing problem? Even though there has been a lot of talk in dozens of meetings over the last few years, no tangible plan has been proposed to address the issue.
Neither the 3rd or 4th District supervisors have taken an active interest in resolving the problem; meantime, the homeless population is growing every day as they are provided cash for food, given clothing, and allowed to roam the city begging for money or simply stealing whatever they want from merchants.
It’s past due time for politicians to stop talking and start making some forward progress on the homelessness issue.
Ron Fink writes to the Sun from Lompoc, about Lompoc. Send comments through the editor at clanham@santamariasun.com or write a letter to the editor for publication and email it to letters@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Feb 14-21, 2019.