Venetians who attended the Venice Neighborhood Council (VNC) Homeless Committee meeting Monday night at the Venice Public Library.

By Angela McGregor

The Monday evening meeting of the VNC’s Homeless Committee opened with a presentation by Taylor Bazley from Mike Bonin’s office on Mayor Garcetti’s Homeless Shelter Initiative, dubbed “A Bridge Home”.

This proposal would incentivize neighborhoods to create emergency shelters on vacant city parcels. These 24/7, year-round shelters would facilitate the homeless in getting off the streets by offering them services and entering them into the Coordinated Entry System (CES). The incentive would be extra sanitation dollars in an amount Bazley stated could be “transformative”. A future meeting will be held in order to gather input as to possible locations for such a program in Venice.

Beginning of Bazley’s talk was not recorded. New camera.

The first motion of the evening was a statement of support for a council file titled “Family Reunification through Service Providers”, which would create a citywide program based on Venice’s pilot program, which last year reunited 30 homeless individuals with supportive family members. This motion passed, 8-0, and will move onto the VNC Board for final approval.

The second motion was a letter in support of the West LA Veteran’s Administration Master Plan to provide housing for homeless vets on their campus. The letter includes the following: “The West L.A. campus of the Veterans’ Association was donated specially to serve the veterans who are now living on the street…If all 5,000 beds that the facility was designed to hold were to be made available we would be able to house and care for almost every homeless veteran on the streets of Los Angeles County. It is imperative that we immediately fund and execute this reclamation project and serve each and every veteran that seeks help and assistance.” This measure also passed unanimously.

The final three motions on the agenda all began with the phrase, “Whereas the City of Los Angeles has been handcuffed by the terms of the Jones Settlement to enforce laws that provide safe, clean and clear sidewalks for residents, businesses, and visitors.”

Committee Chairman Will Hawkins explained to the attendees that, in 2005, the City came to an agreement — titled the Jones Settlement — with attorney Carol Sobel which mandated that the City not enforce LAMC 41.18(d) (no sleeping, sitting or camping on sidewalks) between the hours of 9 pm and 6 am until the City had created 1250 units of Permanent Supportive Housing, at least half of which were to be in the greater downtown area. (the full settlement can be viewed here: http://wetnostril.homestead.com/JonesSettlement.html).

In the intervening 13 years, the City has not provided an update on how many units have been constructed or if the terms of the Settlement have been met. In addition, the lack of enforcement has manifested, in some parts of Venice, as a lack of law enforcement generally. Motion #3 on the agenda requested “updated stats and figures that show whether or not the terms of the Jones Settlement have been satisfied”. A similar motion, passed last year, was ignored by the City, but as Hawkins put it, the City needs to show “either their shameful lack of progress on this issue, or their equally shameless lack of transparency”. The motion passed, 7-1.

Motion #4 — to create a safe camping program in Venice — met with more resistance from both attendees and the Committee itself. The proposal was to allow individuals who had registered with the CES to specify and reserved spots on the sidewalk between the hours of 9 pm and 6 am, with the approval of 2/3 of homeowners on the block. Discussion centered around the liability this would create (the original language of the motion was changed to replace “neighbors” with “homeowners”, since property owners would ultimately be liability for any damages this might create), as well as the appearance of condoning sidewalk camping of any kind, which creates a mobility hazard, especially among the disabled. After much discussion, the Committee decided to table this motion until their next meeting.

Motion #5 — which would create a program whereby homeowners would allow homeless individuals to put a tent on their property — and Motion #6, which would create a program to financially subsidize homeowners who wish to allow homeless individuals to park on their properties and make use of their bathrooms — were both tabled for the next meeting due to a lack of time.

Motions 4,5, and 6 will all be considered at the next meeting.