Keeping up fight to help O.C. homeless
Attorneys ask judge to bar three cities from enforcing laws that prohibit camping.
Attorneys representing seven homeless people who were displaced from encampments along the Santa Ana River Trail sought an order from a federal judge last week temporarily prohibiting Costa Mesa and two other cities from enforcing anti-camping laws.
The request was submitted in federal court Thursday as part of an amended complaint in the civil rights case filed in January against the county and the cities of Orange, Costa Mesa and Anaheim over the clearing of encampments along the Santa Ana River.
The complaint requests that individuals be permitted to remain at and have continued access to emergency shelters, recuperative care, transitional programs and sober living facilities.
The filing says people who have had access to supportive services after they left the river trail “live with constant fear about the lack of options in the county, generally, and when they will be returned to the street.”
“The fear impedes their recovery,” the filing says.
It is unclear when U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, who has been overseeing the case, might rule on the request. Costa Mesa spokesman Tony Dodero did not respond to a phone call seeking comment.
Over the last several months, Carter has been urging the county and its 34 cities to devise plans to expand the number of emergency shelters. Discussions have been ongoing, county officials said.
Carter told officials and attorneys during a hearing in April that he doesn’t have jurisdiction to tell cities or the county where they should place shelters. Instead, he proposed a regional approach in which the county would be broken into three zones — north, central and south — each with an equal distribution of shelters and homeless services.
The idea is that each zone would be able to care for its homeless population, lessening the burden on other regions.
At the time, Carter said he could prohibit the county and the cities of Anaheim, Costa Mesa and Orange from enforcing their anticamping laws if the groups couldn’t solve how to keep people off the streets.
“We can’t criminalize the homeless by citing them in one location and citing them in another location simply for being homeless,” Carter said during the hearing.