Property owners in Oldtown Salinas take aim at a homeless-serving church.

Over a period of weeks earlier this year, former Salinas Redevelopment Director Larry Bussard went door to door to businesses in the city’s downtown and made an unusual request. Would you be willing, he asked, to write a letter detailing your experience, and that of your employees and customers, with the homeless?

Bussard was asking at the behest of the legal committee of the Salinas City Center Improvement Association, the business improvement district funded by assessments on all downtown property owners. He already knew a lot of the people who he talked to about writing the letters; once he started asking, he says, the floodgates opened.

Bruce Taylor, CEO of Taylor Fresh Foods and a property owner, wrote that Taylor has invested more than $45 million to help create a vibrant downtown for people to enjoy shopping, dining and entertainment – but that the effort will fail if the city continues to support the efforts of First United Methodist Church to provide homeless services in the same area.

“Surely you intelligent folks can find a compassionate solution that serves the homeless in a more appropriate location,” Taylor wrote, adding that until the city solves the problem, there’s no point in spending a planned $10-million-plus revitalizing Main Street. “You will discourage private revitalization efforts and the hope of constructing market-based housing in downtown Salinas will be fruitless.”

There’s Cheri Hitchcock, who owns property on the 300 block of Main Street and who writes she’s experienced vandalism, public drunkenness, loitering, harassment of tenants and their employees, public urination, people sleeping on the property and defecation at the back door.

“These problems… have all multiplied as the services at (the church) continue to increase and expand,” she wrote.

There are nearly 40 letters in all, outlining a litany of horror: building alcoves regularly reeking of urine and feces; health hazards, such as hypodermic needles, that must be disposed of. There are reports of vandalism – at Coast-Tel Federal Credit Union, someone broke into an outside electrical box and shut off the power, crashing the credit union’s network – and reports of harassment, also at Coast-Tel, where female employees who park in the city-owned lot routinely get cat-called by men who gather at the parking lot steps.

There’s sympathy to be found in some letters, a profound understanding that many who avail themselves of the church’s outreach services – including AA and NA meetings, meals, a used-clothing closet, a day room for quiet rest and internet use and medical care from Clinica de Salud – are in dire circumstances not of their own making.

But there also seems to be a profound lack of understanding about what the city can require the church to do – specifically, that’s obtaining a conditional use permit. First United Methodist has been in Oldtown for more than 100 years, and their use of church facilities for church purposes is grandfathered in. While the city has agreed to grant the church $500,000 in Community Development Block Grant funds to expand and modernize its kitchen (see story, p. 14) that funding hasn’t come through yet as city officials wait to find out if SCCIA will sue the city and try to force the permit issue.

None of that changes the mission that First United Methodist Pastor Steve Lundin has set out. They’re trying to be good neighbors and I’ve seen that play out; I’ve come across Lundin, on more than one occasion, crawling around bushes on city-owned property and picking up trash.

“We have bent over backward to work with the city and the SCCIA about the issues they’re complaining about,” Lundin says. “We’re continuing to network and improve our services and that doesn’t seem to have an impact on what SCCIA does.”

I empathize with the property owners of Oldtown; my house is about 5 feet outside the boundary that would have me paying SCCIA assessments as well. The bushes the city forced me to plant along our alley-facing parking area have proven to be a fine toilet spot for some people. There’s a price to be paid for living and working in an urban area. I hope the price in this case isn’t borne on the backs of the impoverished to the benefit of the privileged.

MARY DUAN writes the The Local Spin. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com