Santa Clarita Gives Nod to Monday Opening of Homeless Shelter

VALENCIA — Over the objections of some residents, the Santa Clarita City Council has given volunteers approval to open the city’s first homeless shelter Monday.

The facility will operate every night from December to March, when the heavy El Nino storms have been predicted.

The City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to endorse the project and spend $10,000 in city funds for staffing and miscellaneous expenses. In letters and phone calls to city officials, several dozen residents had expressed fears the shelter would do more harm than good, by attracting the homeless from Los Angeles to a city that now has only a few dozen homeless people.

On Tuesday, however, just one resident dissented from the nearly two dozen who spoke before the council in support of the shelter. But Mayor Clyde Smyth cited 13 written comments to the council opposing the plan, compared with four letters of support.

“You just don’t leave people out in the rain,” said Councilwoman Jan Heidt, summing up the intent of the shelter effort. “And there’s frost on the ground already.”

In October, the council tentatively agreed to help outfit the former cosmetics company warehouse in Canyon Country where the shelter will be situated. Officials hope eventually to put recreation facilities in other parts of the 20,000-square-foot building, which the city acquired in June.

Two paid city staff members will join volunteers organized by the local Interfaith Council in running the shelter. The city will pay for utilities and other minor expenses, but the Interfaith Council--an association of local Protestant, Catholic and Jewish religious groups--will actually run the shelter.

Charitable donations to the interfaith group are expected to support the shelter, which will open its doors on the remote, industrial cul-de-sac of Golden Valley Road Monday evening and close March 31. It will be open to the homeless from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m.

Thirty cots have been set up, according to Roberta Gillis, a key organizer of the shelter effort and president of the Santa Clarita Democratic Club. Visitors will receive a clean set of clothes and will be able to shower and eat two meals.

More cots may be added if needed to accommodate the city’s homeless population, which officials and activists estimate to be no more than a few dozen scattered about the 40-square-mile city.

City officials say phone calls from residents have been evenly split for and against the shelter. In calls and letters to local newspapers, some have expressed concerns a shelter would attract homeless people from Los Angeles.

“People are so paranoid that people in L.A. are going to hop in a cab or rent a limo and come up to the welcoming city of Santa Clarita,” Gillis said before the meeting. “I’ve lived here for 20 years and I know people. I know the attitude.

“These people are really secure in their own little cocoons, their own little worlds. And it’s ‘I, me, mine.’ ”

Larry Blanton of Valencia, the lone opponent to speak Tuesday, predicted the shelter would draw mostly con artists and criminals.

“Mark my words: You’re looking for trouble,” he told the council. “You’re opening Pandora’s Box. They’ll all come: the needy, the good and the bad.”

Before establishment of the shelter, there was no structured homeless outreach effort for the Santa Clarita Valley. Gillis said she and other activists made occasional trips into washes and sparsely populated areas of the city to deliver food and clothing to people living there.

Also Tuesday, the council spent three hours debating possible changes to the city’s Circulation Element, a document that will guide decisions on traffic engineering and road construction. More than 100 people packed the council chambers for the discussion, which centered on the proposed widening of major streets to accommodate increased residential development.

The debate grew so intense that Councilwoman Jo Anne Darcy left her bed to take part. She had been watching a local cable TV broadcast of the meeting while recuperating from minor injuries sustained in a recent car accident. City Atty. Carl Newton ruled that monitoring the meeting via television legally qualified her to vote.

After an unusual flurry of rejected or abandoned motions, most of which elicited cheers or moans from the crowd, the council narrowly approved a recommendation to expand Valencia Boulevard from six to eight lanes between McBean Parkway and the Golden State Freeway.

Councilwomen Jan Heidt and Jill Klajik voted against that plan, arguing it represented a hasty expansion that would compromise the quality of life for residents near the street.

By a unanimous vote, the council also removed from the Circulation Element a proposed extension of The Old Road through an area regarded as environmentally sensitive because of its oak trees, but recognized that L.A. County has some planning authority in that area and could still build the extension.

The council deferred decisions on other arteries in the Circulation Element until future meetings.