After hearing more than three hours of public comments, the Santa Monica City Council voted to postpone debating a pair of ordinances designed to curb trespassing and meal programs downtown.
“It’s already past midnight,” said Mayor Mike Feinstein. “It doesn’t much make sense to me to begin an extensive debate at this time.”
Council members rescheduled the debate for the Oct. 8 city council meeting. At that time, the council will decide whether to enact a pair of strict ordinances designed to place barriers on public meal programs regularly held in downtown parks and give greater power to police officers to enforce trespassing laws in the doorways of downtown businesses.
The council received guidance from two of its advisory boards. The city’s Recreation and Parks Commission endorsed the ordinances while the Social Services Commission recommended the council take no action on the ordinances and create a task force to study the issues outside of a political context.
Some council members said they are leaning toward enacting the ordinances and creating a task force similar to one formed more than a decade ago to study the city’s homeless population and develop recommendations about how the city can better appropriate funding to local social service organizations.
“We need to know where everyone is out there,” said Councilman Herb Katz, “because right now we don’t know, we’re not homeless.”
More than 80 people spoke at Tuesday night’s council meeting, where hundreds of activists, homeless, business owners and residents spilled out of the jam-packed council chambers and into the hallways, nearly filling the main lobby of City Hall.
Television monitors were stationed in the hallways and the main lobby so the overflow audience could watch the proceedings taking place down the hall. Flood lights from television cameras eerily illuminated the front of City Hall, where dozens milled about smoking and waiting for their turn to address the council.
Many said they came to put a human face to the debate over how the city provides social services to those living on the streets of Santa Monica and what it would
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on September 26, 2002. Read the original PDF.