GROUP OBJECTS TO LIMITING SERVICES AT BENNO’S

Panel advises denying those with criminal record

The North County League of Women Voters is objecting to a proposed oneyear limit on the use of a mailing address available to homeless people who use services at the Brother Benno’s Foundation in a business park near the Oceanside airport.

“Our focus as a League, beyond homelessness, is the potential suppression of voting rights for those who need a mailing address to register and vote,” said Bill Loftus, a member of the North County chapter’s board of directors.

Also a concern to the League and to the Brother Benno’s board of directors and staff is a proposal to require a laminated photo identification card for anyone who uses Brother Benno’s services. Information about each cardholder would be part of a database shared with the Oceanside Police Department.

“Brother Benno’s shall use this database to refuse services and entry to clients who have been engaged in criminal activity,” states a Jan. 14 memo from the city planning staff to the Oceanside City Council. The memo summarizes the conclusions

of a committee created by the city Planning Commission to review the nonprofit’s conditional use permit.

A presentation on the Brother Benno’s Standing Committee’s proposed changes is scheduled for the Oceanside Planning Commission’s Feb. 8 meeting.

Brother Benno’s serves between 150 and 300 meals a day depending on the time of year and other circumstances. About 100 homeless people use the center on Production Avenue as their mailing address, and at present there’s no limit on the time.

Loftus and others said the police should not decide who gets homeless services, and that the information collected about the homeless could be used for the wrong purposes.

“That means homeless families could be turned away from food resources because someone in the family has a criminal record,” Loftus said in a recent email. “That means that getting food or taking a shower at Brother Benno’s could ‘mark’ you within the Police Department and result in action taken against you.”

Police Chief Frank Mccoy, who retired Dec. 28, told the Brother Benno’s committee at its final meeting in November that, “The Police Department will be providing lists of those folks that we

deem should not be receiving services, based on their criminal activity in our city.”

Asked by Brother Benno’s board President Kathleen Diehlmann whether the police would provide any information about the people on the list, Mccoy said it would not.

“The people we give you on the list have committed 20 or more crimes,” Mccoy said. “We are talking about people we have identified as career criminals.”

Volunteers at Brother Benno’s should be able to help anyone who needs help, Diehlmann said.

“We don’t ask about what their criminal history is,” she said. “We want the ability to serve people and care for people who have made mistakes.”

Brother Benno’s operations manager Darryl Harris said “it doesn’t seem kosher” for police to decide who benefits from a nonprofit’s food distribution program.

“I deal with these people all the time,” Harris said. “I’m not going to paint a rosy picture of anybody; that would be completely unrealistic. But not allowing people (to access services) based on their criminal records, or what we think they’ve done, or they might have done ... it puts us in a really weird spot.”

Planning Commissioner Tom Rosales, who chaired the committee, said at the November meeting that the committee spent a lot of time discussing both the mailing

address limit and the shared database.

“This is kind of where we landed,” Rosales said.

Another committee member, Planning Commissioner Louise Balma, said homeless people could get a general delivery address at an Oceanside post office, instead of using Brother Benno’s.

Harris said it was a bad idea to send homeless people to the post office to get their mail.

“That would be a tremendous burden on the post office,” Harris said. “We deal with a different kind of crowd here. We know what we’re doing.”

Balma said the best solution may be to find a new location for Brother Benno’s outside the business park.

“We’re trying to listen to ... the people in the business park who have been putting up with this for 29 years,” she said.

The Planning Commission created the committee in 2019 to review the Brother Benno’s permit because of increasing complaints about crime, trash, trespassing and noise from businesses in the area around the service center. The homeless tend to congregate nearby, some with RVS and other vehicles that they park on the streets.

The soup kitchen served its first meal in downtown Oceanside in 1983 and moved to its present location in 1991.