Voice of OC (https://voiceofoc.org/)
South Orange County mayors, under pressure from a federal judge, on Thursday chose a closed elementary school along rural Santiago Canyon Road as a site they’d like to see become a new homeless shelter.
Dana Point, Laguna Niguel and Lake Forest this week became the latest cities in Orange County to take stands against the state’s sanctuary laws, adopting resolutions and filing briefs in support of the federal lawsuit against California.
The council also may ask voters to change the city charter to add punishments for a mayor if he or she doesn’t sign ordinances and resolutions approved by a majority of the seven-member council.
Santa Ana council members and residents have said the three cities’ refusal to accept emergency shelters revealed a double standard: It’s okay to put shelters near poor kids in Santa Ana but not near kids from wealthier families.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in state grants could become available next year, and some community leaders want to compete for it to help build 2,700 homes for homeless people.
As Orange County Supervisors have increasingly abandoned their regional responsibilities, they’ve largely been left with a one job they seem to hate: combating the effects of poverty.
“I think it’s improper for us to talk about, really, that subject matter now,” said supervisors’ Chairman Andrew Do.
On OC with Bill Witte, chairman and CEO of Related California, a real estate development company that focuses on all sorts of urban multi-family housing developments, including affordable housing and mixed income housing.
Spitzer was “stirring up a bunch of lies and nonsense” with his comments last month to public meetings of the Laguna Niguel and Costa Mesa city councils, Supervisor Shawn Nelson said. Spitzer said his colleagues weren’t telling the whole story.
The effort to have district elections in place for November seems to have been killed, according to Councilman Vicente Sarmiento, who supports the proposed voting system change.
The homeless people who slept in the Santa Ana Civic Center for years were cleared out by Thursday afternoon and people can’t sleep there anymore after much of the area was blocked off by chain link fences.
Orange, Newport Beach and Westminster joined the county and seven other cities in opposing California’s sanctuary state law, which limits state and local law enforcement’s communications with federal immigration authorities and prohibits officers from holding and questioning people based on immigration violations.