An Oldtown Salinas business association gears up to litigate homelessness.

A sunny November morning, and the Clinica de Salud mobile health unit is getting ready to pull away from the curb outside First United Methodist Church in Oldtown Salinas. A volunteer folds up a table and chair to move them back inside the church offices, and offers a toothless grin and directions to a stranger looking for the pastor.

Across the street, a man sprawls on his stomach across the sidewalk, his jeans hanging halfway down his hips, exposing Army-green underwear. I’m not sure if he’s injured or even dead, but as I near, he readjusts, grabs a ballcap off the ground next to him and props himself up using a concrete parking barrier as a pillow.

Two scenes of Oldtown, but both are scenes the Salinas City Center Improvement Association – a 501(c)3 public benefit corporation formed in 2016 and self-funded by tax assessments on Oldtown property owners – would prefer didn’t exist. Based on correspondence I obtained via a Public Records Act request, the association may be gearing up to sue the city of Salinas to remove them.

The first letter from the law offices of Horan Lloyd arrived in September, addressed to Salinas Mayor Joe Gunter and the City Council. The firm announced it represented the association and was responding to the city’s plan to allocate a $500,000 Community Development Block Grant to the church so it could modernize and expand its decrepit kitchen, from which it serves lunch to about 100 people a day.

The letter states it wasn’t meant to cover the merits of the church’s homeless outreach, but rather to discuss sound planning. It states the city can’t use federal funds to benefit a religious institution and claims the kitchen project would bring an influx of people with mental illness and substance abuse problems to the neighborhood, leading to an increase in public intoxication, drug sales and other crime – and increased vacancy rates that would hinder revitalization.

According to the association’s July meeting minutes, discussion centered around “the merits of an action” against the city because of the church’s activities.

Association President Catherine Kobrinsky-Evans says the board’s decision to hire a law firm was unanimous, but no decision has yet been made on suing.

Kobrinsky-Evans is measured and thoughtful when asked about the association’s issues with the church: In short, granting the church $500,000 in federal money directly controverts the city’s own vibrancy plan for downtown, and the spillover effects of that many troubled people being drawn to downtown for services is too much for the business district to bear.

“Getting people off the street and into transitional housing and getting them the services they need is what the Salinas City Center would support,” she says. The Methodist church program as it stands, she says, “is almost a program that enables.”

I asked Steve Lundin, pastor of First United Methodist, for his take. “They’d like for us not to do what we do,” Lundin says. “I’ve heard from several of them, ‘Pastor, we like what you do, we’d just like you to do it somewhere else.’ This [grant] is not going to increase the volume of meals. People are not going to come because all of a sudden we have a nicer kitchen. It’s just that we’ve worn the place out. We need more elbow room.”

The city is now conducting a federal environmental review of the project, and the only comment on it came from Horan Lloyd attorney Pamela Silkwood, citing negative impacts the project would have. If the project passes environmental review, the city will request the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to release the funds.

On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, as the Methodists were gearing up to serve a few hundred people lunch, I was driving through Oldtown and came across this scene: Lundin, crouched over the bushes of the city-owned garage a block away from the church, picking trash off the ground.

Meanwhile, the cleaning crew contracted by the association to keep the streets of Oldtown looking spiffy apparently took a four-day holiday, which meant patrons who flocked to the district for the “Small-Business Saturday” shopping event were greeted by broken bottles, empty food containers and trash strewn all over.

MARY DUAN writes The Local Spin for the Weekly. Reach her at maryrduan@gmail.com. A longer version of this story appears on Voices of Monterey Bay at vomb.org