Home Antioch Tuesday: Antioch City Council Set to Discuss Funding Homeless Housing and Services

Tuesday: Antioch City Council Set to Discuss Funding Homeless Housing and Services

by ECT

Following a September report by the Antioch Homeless Encampment Task Force, the Antioch City Council will begin discussing what programs they wish to fund.

According to the Agenda, the council will discuss a variety of housing and service options along with the fiscal impact. This comes back after the report was presented by the Task Force, with Mayor Pro Tem Joy Motts and Councilman Lamar Thorpe as the task force members. Tuesdays meeting provide the council with items, a summary, and the cost.

This format comes after the September meeting where no cost estimates were provided and the council refused to vote on the item without costs and an outline of what services would be provided.

“I want numbers, I can’t blindly say yes to these recommendations,” said Mayor Sean Wright who wanted a laundry list of how much items would cost and where they could place money.

Wright further highlighted during the September meeting that he would like all the items would look like if implemented and the cost because he didn’t want to accept them all in the format provided by the Task Force in a “blanket format” in the staff report.

This item also comes on the heels of the City Council agreeing to spend up to $100k on a Unhoused Resident Consultant— This came in a 3-2 vote with Mayor Sean Wright and Councilwoman Lori Ogorchock being the dissenting 2-votes.


 

Quality of Life Issues

Dumpster and Sharps Container Services
To date, Republic Services has provided dumpsters at the Fulton Shipyard area while the City is looking to bring a Sharps Container Service.  The city says the cost of the dumpster has been covered by Republic Services to date, however, they can begin working to expand the dumpster access outside of the downtown area to other parts of the city. The initial cost of providing a sharps containers program is $2,500 with additional cost for maintenance and collection.

Portable Toilets
Currently, the city is providing portable toilets at two locations in northern Antioch (downtown).  The cost is $400 per unit each month. City staff is recommending to expand this program at an effort of $5,000 per year.

Portable Shower Units
The city says Shower House Ministries has been providing this service to Antioch homeless and Antioch is looking to provide additional resources such as water and electricity which could expand the to increase the number of shower units to offset the cost of the services.  The cost would be $10,000 per year.

Laundry Services
The city is looking at supporting access to laundry services by supporting a mobile laundry unit or pursuing vouchers for existing coin-operated laundromats in the City of Antioch. The city could also lease or purchase a combination of a shower and laundry portable trailer that could be transported to different locations in the community.  The city says the cost to pursue development of a laundry service program through a laundry voucher program, mobile laundry services or similar effort is at a cost of $20,000 per year. To purchase a shower and laundry portable trailer is at a cost of $100,000.

 

The City Council will also look at immediate short-term shelter options:

Motel Services
The City could work with the CORE Team to purchase vouchers to refer vulnerable homeless individuals to a motel for temporary emergency lodging—this would allow the city to offer one-night, pre-paid stays at participating establishments. Vouchers would cost $100 and the initial purchase of 100 vouchers would cost $10,000.

Warming Centers
Staff highlights through the County Librarian and H3, the city could fund a warming center at the Antioch Library during cold or rainy winder days or nights. The program would require staff and served individuals would need to be pre-screened for safety reasons. The cost is $250,000 to serve 15-20 persons November through June.  Staff could also look at a “Winter Nights” program where local churches could rotate offering their facilities for homeless.

Safe Parking Lots
This program would be for individuals living in their cars or RVs who are considered homeless. Modeling this after the City of Oakland, Antioch could choose to require those participating to move their vehicles each day to prevent quasi-permanent situation. This could cost the city $35,000 for four months and serve 50-75 persons running through the winter and end of the school year.

 

The City will also look at Long Term Transitional and Permanent Housing

Support Existing Housing and Homeless Services
The City is currently supporting non-profit service providers through dedication of $123,000 in Housing Successor Administration Funds and $5,000 in CDBG funds. The city council has the option of increasing these funds to any of the various homeless service providers of the Contra Costa County Continuum of Care. This would allow these organizations to further leverage funds and make a broad impact in the city.

Establish Transitional and Long-term Housing Alternatives
The City is looking into potentially creating transitional and long-term housing alternatives. While costs of each were not provided, here is a look at what the city is looking at:

  • Tiny Houses, containers, huts, or similar types of temporary shelter. This would require the city establishing locations and determining the cost to serve these units with utilities and services.
  • RV Parks for trailers and motorhomes which could include hookups and services for this use. This would require the city establishing zoning within the city to permit this type of use.
  • Permanent housing where the city could provide a zone where permanent homeless housing would be permitted and investigating the many options and models that exist for providing permanent shelter where they anticipate the Unhoused Resident Coordinator position to investigate and report to the city council.

 

If You Go
Antioch City Council Meeting – Agenda
Tuesday, Oct. 22 at 7:00 pm
4703 Lone Tree Way, Community Hall A
Antioch CA

You may also like

19 comments

Frank Oct 21, 2019 - 7:30 am

Build it and they will come. Our tax payer dollars have gone far enough. How much is a one way ticket to S.F.? Just check out there budget for homeless.

Panther Pride Oct 21, 2019 - 7:31 am

I am all for the RV Park and Tiny Houses lets place it in the Beede Lumber Yard so Joy Motts can view it every time she goes downtown. If she wants this, it should be in her line of sight.

I hope the city of Antioch clarifies if this is Measure W money or general fund.

This is not what the city as a whole wants. You are inviting a much larger problem to Antioch when you start enabling homelessness and providing services. once you start, you will never be able to stop. This council is very short sighted and 2020 cant come soon enough.

Greg Oct 21, 2019 - 7:44 am

This council is not very fiscally friendly to its residents. You can solve this problem with an investment of $10,000 in BART passes. Give them to the homeless and problem is solved.

Jimmy Boy Oct 21, 2019 - 7:54 am

+Something else the city needs to provide to the homeless are fire extinguishers. How many have these folks started over the years and then ran away from? Now they would have the means to put out the fires they start.

Lauren Oct 21, 2019 - 12:40 pm

Most of those fires are deliberately set by the homeless who light it and then run away. There are many witnesses to that.

Meg Oct 21, 2019 - 10:12 am

Yeah way to go…accommodations for bums will only bring more bums.

Ramona Mayon Oct 21, 2019 - 12:31 pm

I can’t wait. City, as of 8.27.19, was intent on making the entire community at 701 Wilbur Avenue go homeless, after 19 years of letting us RV dwellers pay rent out there. The last month we paid rent (Dec 2018), it was over $800. Yet City’s minutes of that 8.27.19 meeting, it cites us as a “homeless community “. Get outta here.

Website I built about our fight for tenant rights of RV dwellers in Antioch, California @www.oldwilburvineyards.wordpress.com

Stop Thee Thieves Oct 21, 2019 - 12:45 pm

I think the City Council people are out of their minds! They have to be reigned in!

JG Oct 21, 2019 - 3:05 pm

These homeless don’t want to be responsible citizens of Antioch. They want everything for free and without laws. They don’t care as long as they get to do anything they want and get it for free. They are not law abiding people. They steal, brake into empty homes and cars, leave their trash anywhere and everywhere as they do there often human waste, show themselves to women and children at any given time, hang out in parking lots like the big problem at the rite aid on east 18th st with there rv’s, vehicles without license plates and fight, dogs barking, yelling, or worse having sex in public after dark in the cars and especially the rv’s with more homeless getting involved. Drugs & alcohol are a big problem too. The mayor and council members need to put their pay raises to work for the citizens of Antioch and stop making excuses! Do your job!

Elizabeth Oct 21, 2019 - 5:56 pm

The money should be used to buy these people bus tickets and send them back where they came from. Let their own cities and states take care of them. We here in California have our own problems to handle. San Francisco started the HOMEWARD BOUND program and it’s working out fine.

Rose D V Oct 21, 2019 - 6:00 pm

UNHOUSED RESIDENT CONSULTANT? What the F is THAT? Blowing $100,000 on such a position? Are the City Council people stark raving mad? Have the taken leave of their senses?

Diana Oct 22, 2019 - 12:04 am

Oh yes! They have! Without question! “Unhoused Resident Consultant?” hired at $100,000+ salary! Not bad! Maybe also hire a concierge and buy them some Pratesi sheets! I mean, if you’re going to spend taxpayers’ money so freely on dumpster services, portable toilets, portable showers, laundry facilities, motel services, warming centers, cooling centers, sheds, RV parking lots, why not go the whole hog?

MEV Oct 21, 2019 - 11:09 pm

Meanwhile, they’re back on Buchanan making a mess; so depressing and disgusting.

Nettibow Oct 22, 2019 - 8:30 am

I’m going to apply for the $100K job…I have compassion ? this article reads like the council members feel like they have to do something…seems like they’re going to try everything to see what works.

Ramona Mayon Oct 23, 2019 - 6:25 am

You really should apply for the job! Put a REAL person in there.

And you are absolutely right about the article reads like the City Council feeling like they have to do something about the homeless. But let me point out why I’m fairly sure its all purely self-motivated.

My husband and I were residents of 701 Wilbur Avenue mobilehome park (informal, FoxNews called it 9.09.19) for 5 years. Then 8.11.16 we all got 60-day vacate notices because the owner got THIS City Council’s approval for a 126-unit affordable housing project (9.07.16) and its been nothing but misery and anxiety and stress. We sued for our tenants’ rights and for federal relocation rights (since HUD money was applied for – public record 10.10.17 video hearing of THIS Council).

All this is happening because we live in an RV. If we were apartment dwellers, this wouldn’t be happening.

The website I built about this travesty (since nearly everyone on that property was a senior and half or more have already been run off) @ http://www.oldwilburvineyards.wordpress.com

Mayon v Bosman, City of Antioch, et al #C18-00168 Contra Costa Court, Martinez, Dept #33 will be ruling on Halloween. Trick or treat, right?!!

Tentative ruling comes out on the Court website at 1.30pm but please note the ONLY thing being ruled about is whether or not the City is going to be forced to file an answer to our 4th Amended Complaint. I have been trying to bust the City’s immunity since May 2018. Apparently under state law, a municipality cannot be sued for what it inspects or doesn’t inspect and cannot be sued for what it permits or doesn’t permit. We sued them for failure to carry out a duty under law. October 31 we find out (seventeen months back and forth with the City’s lawyers; no contact with City staff except a letter 1.14.19 from Teri House, the CDBG Consultant, about mobilehome rehabilitation grants not ever having been available in Antioch).

This entire “ad hoc committee on homeless encampments” floor show (since March) has been the City’s lame attempt to put a frame around the goings-on at 701 Wilbur Avenue. You can be assured that I point that out in every court paper I write. Yes, we are self-represented. No one is out there who will help, so we did it ourselves.

The landlord evicted us as soon as we sued him (#C18-00168 filed on 1.26.18) and we have been out here on the streets in our RV since 7.23.18 more than a year. The City’s Code Enforcement team issued the first “vacate-the-RVs” notice on 1.30.17 The article in the East Bay Times, the owner openly says he has been doing this for 19 years and that when Code Enforcement visited in 2008, they didnt say anything about the 15+ RVs on his land (each behind its own fence, with a shed and a private garden, mind you).

The last time we paid Joe Bosman rent )Dec 2017), the bill was over $800 yet in the mini-minutes of the 8.27.19 Council hearing, the residents were called “the homeless community”. Since when do homeless people pay rent? By the very act of paying rent, you aren’t homeless, right?

Now factor in that we have been suing the landlord since 1.26.18 and into THAT litigation,
we have been trying to force accountability on the City since May 2018 and sooooooooooooooooooooooooooo that tells you what a hard-won victory all this ACKNOWLEDGEMENT at 10.22.19’s really is. I have written thousands of words in LIVID protest and before the writing, I had to read hundreds of thousands of words more about how to stop a wholesale illegal eviction like this.

But rather than take direct responsibility for a tenant-relocation debacle, this Council decides to call the park a homeless ENCAMPMENT. Unreal. Just bloody unreal. RV dwellers who paid RENT and UTILITIES to this man for years are literally being called “homeless” because of their alternative mode of housing.

See, this is EXACTLY why I want to go to federal court and file a case inder 14th amendment. How can people be treated so disparately???!!! Lucky for the Council, my husband having serious health issues slows my (litigation) ambitions down. He was hospitalized for liver failure in early August and his acceptance to UCSF’s Liver Transplant unit is pending.

The most hilarious part of last night’s meeting was watching Forrest Ebbs, the Community Development Director, face as he told HIS town (not mine) ” … several parking lots downtown, now nobody panic, but … ” meaning that the City has really, truly, actually conceded that we RV dwellers have a right to exist somewhere.

Except their idea of the RVs having to leave the parking lots during the day, only slipping in at night to rest, nahhhh, that’s not exactly what I had in mind when I started this lawsuit 20,000 pieces of paper ago. Oh no, not at all. You can count on them most definitely getting another one of my private emails today. Since they showed their strategy 8.27.19 (of calling my friends and former neighbors a homeless ENCAMPMENT) I have been writing them. Up to #9, I believe.

EQUAL FACILITIES please, same as the non-gypsy, thank you very damn much.

By the way, my books are on Amazon and a 1900+ paper on Academia where I was accepted as an Independent Researcher in 2017 for my work on gypsy hate speech.

Julio Oct 22, 2019 - 7:21 pm

Just throwing more money at the wall to see where it sticks.

Jeez us Oct 22, 2019 - 9:19 pm

So people who don’t have a home or job and just happen to be camping out in your town, means the city council feels it’s their duty to raise taxes on the working poor to provide for them?
How do we know these people are from here? Because they say so?
You want the biggest dumping ground in the bay area for homelessness and crime then I say go ahead and pass these measures.
If the city of Antioch wants to be like SF or Oakland they should encourage business to move here instead of a major homeless encampment.
Seriously people, talk to your neighbors let them know what’s about to happen because there won’t be away to turn it back once it starts. Go to city council meetings and voice your opinions, don’t let these losers walk all over Antioch, they are only trying to advance their political careers at your expense. Nobody wants this but it will happen if you don’t stand up.

Ramona Mayon Oct 23, 2019 - 10:23 am

That’s exactly right.

Jan 26, 2018 my husband and I sued our landlord and the City of Antioch, in order to stand up for our housing rights.

Even though the actual lawsuit is only for us (since we are self-represented we can’t legally help the others), we hope we can help the others still out at 701 Wilbur Avenue, get noticed.

http://www.oldwilburvineyards.wordpress.com

Matt Oct 23, 2019 - 11:19 am

It is so discouraging to live in a town where hardworking tax payer $ is used to enable, encourage, & promote being a bum. Have any of these programs worked in any of the neighboring cities where they have been Emplemented? What we need are tuffer laws on Arson, theft, drugs, trespassing, littering, ect. Businessess are closeing, tax paying citizens are moving out, and the city wants to invite more losers to our town. What a disgrace!!! It’s no wonder Antioch was voted the most miserable place in the Bay Area. We must stand up to these corrupt politicians and hold them accountable.

Comments are closed.