Ventura Opening Center to Ease Homeless Back Into Mainstream : Transients: Local officials expect the facility to match displaced river-bottom dwellers with available social services. It will remain open through March.

Two weeks after floodwaters ripped out homeless encampments along the Ventura River, local officials are opening an assessment center today that will match displaced transients with available social services.

The center is scheduled to open today at 9 a.m. and operate until the end of March, when officials say it will close because it will have fulfilled its mission.

“We hope the need for city assistance to the river-bottom homeless will cease by March 31,” said Carol Green, assistant to the city manager. By then, she said, the former squatters “will already be enrolled in existing programs and be on their way to self-sufficiency.”

The center will match transients with people who can direct them to drug and alcohol counseling, sign them up for welfare or food stamps, and tell them about employment opportunities.

Former river-bottom dwellers will also be eligible for emergency housing vouchers from the federal government, which officials say should become available soon.

The city has decreed that, because the floods forced squatters out of the riverbed, no one is to return to their former shanties because it is neither safe nor sanitary. The council was scheduled to vote late Monday on ordinances strengthening Ventura’s ability to bar camps along the riverbed and to jail trespassers.

City Council members have debated since summertime kicking transients out of the river bottom, but were constrained by legal decisions in other cities saying that would be a violation of the squatters’ civil rights.

Because transients can no longer live in the river bottom--and because council members do not want them moving onto local streets--city officials have proposed the assessment center to help former river-bottom dwellers ease back into the mainstream.

The Ventura City Council was scheduled to vote late Monday night on spending $43,900 to help keep the center on North Ventura Avenue open and provide shelter, at least through mid-February, when officials say they may need to ask for more funds.

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Councilman Gary Tuttle said in an earlier interview that he could agree to spend this money now, on the assumption that Green is correct and he will not be asked to approve more funds in the future.

“When you give people the opportunity, I expect them to take it,” he said. If people are still living on Ventura’s streets after March 31, he said, “it’s kind of their own fault.”

But other service providers say officials should not expect a temporary assessment facility to solve the city’s homeless dilemma.

“Obviously, that’s not true,” said Clyde Reynolds, director of the Turning Point Foundation, of some officials’ assertions that the center will take most of Ventura’s transients off the street. The Turning Point is an organization that aids the homeless mentally ill.

“Basically, it will assist those people who are ready to accept help,” Reynolds said, guessing that figure would be under 50% of the total homeless population. “We can’t be expected to solve everybody’s problems in two months.”

Reynolds said that many transients may resist aid because they suffer from mental illness, or because their drug or alcohol addictions are so severe that they cannot function in society.

Indeed, Randall Feltman, the director of the county’s Mental Health Services Department, addressed this quandary when the service providers first began planning for the center last week.

“How can we give these (homeless) people--who can no longer go down to the river bottom--how can we provide these people with the most humane, appropriate alternative possible, realizing that some won’t accept it?” he said. “So then we can say to ourselves at the end of this project that they may not all take it, but we did our best.”

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Reynolds said the city will probably need to invest in some type of long-term center if it is to fulfill its obligation to the people forced out of the river bottom. Councilwoman Rosa Lee Measures, who led the crusade last year to rid the river bottom of squatters, said she also hopes the city will spend more money to provide long-term assistance and more jobs to local transients.

But Tuttle said enough is enough.

“I’m anxious to help them,” he said. “But I don’t want to put future council members into the homeless shelter business.”