City creating task force to tackle homeless population issues in downtown
El Centro downtown merchants said they have a problem – a serious one – with the homeless population in their area.
Merchant Randy Ramsey said, ” They’re breaking windows. They’re breaking into cars. They’re breaking into buildings. And in between we still have them doing drugs and stuff during the day and loitering around these businesses. We’ve got a million-dollar park across the street we can’t even use because they’ve taken it over. ”
They said it is killing their businesses.
” Half the offices are empty or abandoned because of this. Decent people don’t want to walk down the sidewalk when you have people asleep, passed out on the concrete, on the gutter, ” Ramsey said.
Over 40 downtown merchants met with police on Tuesday to share concerns.
Sgt. James Thompson said, “We’re all working to try to come up with a solution to deal with homelessness in a humane way without negatively affecting the business owners.”
Thompson encouraged the merchants to report every act of trespassing and every act of vandalism, but at the same time he said arresting is not the final answer.
“We get better outcomes when we work with individuals to try to help them stabilize in their drug addiction, their mental health issues, try to work on changing their homeless situation either by relocating them to reunite with family members or somebody that wants to be a support system to help,” Thompson said.
Jessica Solorio , Spread The Love Charity, said they’re working to do just that.
” There’s no other agency that can say that have provide three-hundred bus tickets to reunify with family members so that they’re no longer homeless. No one has those numbers, but we have those numbers. And so what it may look like on the outside that we’re enabling, we’re definitely not, ” Solorio said.
City Council Member Jason Jackson said they’re launching a task force and are looking into dealing with vacant buildings and absent owners. When he asked for volunteers at the meeting several hands went up.
“Put some kind of restrictions, start fining those business owners or building owners who won’t comply, won’t take care of graffiti or vandalism or allowing their building to be used for homeless or criminal activities,” Jackson said.
Anyone interested in more information regarding the task force can contact the City of El Centro at their website.
