Council briefed on regional efforts to address homelessness

By Lillian Goodwin, Correspondent

The City Council and City of Menifee convened this week to review local homeless response programs, including a report courtesy of the Regional Homeless Alliance on their Assessment and Action Plan, which was drafted earlier this year.

The Regional Homeless Alliance, or RHA, is a coalition of local jurisdictions that aims to address the growing unhoused populations in Menifee, Lake Elsinore, Wildomar, Murrieta, and Temecula. Co-founded in 2016 by the cities of Temecula and Murrieta, the goal of the RHA was to achieve functional zero homelessness within the five cities through uniting their resources. After receiving $500,000 in federal funding in 2022, the RHA was formalized and set to work on developing a strategy for the region’s homelessness problem.

The meeting started off with Captain David Gutierrez of the Menifee Police Department providing a brief overview of the city’s current approach to addressing homelessness. When the Menifee Police Department was founded in 2020, they were already well aware of the situation in the city.

“We knew that there were issues with those experiencing homelessness in Menifee,” Gutierrez said. “We wanted to properly address that.”

Consequently, they formed a task force called the Problem Oriented Policing Team, or POP, which set out to address quality of life issues within Menifee’s jurisdiction. Acting as first responders, the POP team keeps a lookout on their patrols for opportunities to preemptively stop crime and work on strengthening ties with all parts of the community, including the homeless. Existing issues with homeless populations, however, can be a challenge for the team, which has only been in operation for four years. Connecting with the right resources has become the modus operandi for answering calls related to homeless individuals.

Once contact with a first responder is made, the baton is passed to the Riverside University Health System team, which includes behavioral health and peer support specialists. The process can also start with the Homeless Housing Opportunities, Partnerships and Education Program team, or HHOPE, which can decide where to go from there, whether it’s subsidized housing or rehabilitation facilities.

The aforementioned teams have reached out to the homeless population in Menifee over 1,400 times in the last 18 months, and 16 people in particular have required multiple visits -- sometimes numbering in the hundreds -- before a breakthrough.

“They often have to do repeated contacts with these individuals before they’re going to accept resources,” Gutierrez explained.

The Menifee community’s clemency can also present a challenge when coordinating efforts with the homeless population, Gutierrez explained.

“They have big hearts, and a lot of times we see them engaging with the homeless and offering food, clothing, and sometimes money,” he said. “We want them to help. That’s critical. But we want them to do it in the right way. That’s why we began to utilize the Responsible Compassion program, in which organizations are giving things to these individuals that can genuinely help them. We find that if you enable them, they stick around, and they’re not getting the help that they need.”

There are 18 individuals within the city of Menifee currently and regularly experiencing homelessness, according to Gutierrez.

“In other words, they’ve been here a long time. They’re likely a part of those 16 that have been contacted hundreds of times,” he said.

City Council member Lesa Sobek brought to attention the existing programs as well, including the task force Responsible Compassion, which under the RHA would join forces with the other cities.

The RHA’s Assessment and Action Plan, which was drafted by Murrieta city contractor Baker Tilly in July, identified several issues with the typical city-by-city approach for solving homelessness within their individual jurisdictions. As Baker Tilly’s Special Advisor, Susan Price, pointed out during the meeting, homeless populations frequently migrate from one city to the next, and not necessarily to those with the most resources to accommodate them.

Responsibility for handling homelessness, the report argued, now falls on local governments in such a way that cities by themselves are ill-equipped to handle. The RHA put forward a regional, rather than city-based, approach as the more effective option. Through centralizing the effort by region and involving County resources, jurisdictions can work toward practical solutions and “compassionate responsibility,” a phrase borrowed from previous programs.

The plan’s incorporation of County infrastructure focuses on the Continuum of Care program, or CoC, a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development project that reaches countrywide. California alone has 44 CoC satellites. The program offers annual competitive grants for homelessness response systems, and in 2023 Riverside County was awarded $15.7 million for rapid rehousing and housing subsidy programs.

“This strategy is multi-year. This is not something you would do in a six-month period,” Price said. “It covers all of the different components of the ecosystem within Riverside County… it was very clear across all the five cities that they’re experiencing a mental health and addiction crisis with regard to those experiencing homelessness.”

Price also emphasized the importance that the city start using the Homeless Management Information System, or HMIS, which is maintained by the CoC. The database offers insight as to whether that individual has already been put in touch with appropriate team members and automatically enters them in a queue for regional housing resources.

Chiefly, the report recommended a Memorandum of Understanding, or MOU, with the other four cities of the RHA. The agreement would outline the intentions and action plans of each city with respect to the homeless population, allowing further collaboration.

“I think we’re on the right track here,” Mayor Bill Zimmerman said at the conclusion of the presentation.