An Orange County Superior Court judge is expected to weigh in Thursday on the county’s plan to convert a 76-room hotel in Laguna Hills into temporary housing and medical facilities for homeless people amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Laguna Hills, a city of roughly 31,000 in the southern section of the county, filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the hotel’s owner, the county and a nonprofit specializing in homeless outreach in an effort to block the effort. The owners of four buildings adjacent to the hotel, who also oppose the plan, joined in the suit.
The county brokered an agreement this month with Elite Hospitality Inc. to lease the Laguna Hills Inn for at least 90 days to shelter and provide medical care for homeless individuals who are over 65, have underlying health conditions, are showing symptoms of COVID-19 or who have tested positive for the coronavirus.
However, city officials, who say they didn’t know about the agreement until after it was signed, object to having sick and at-risk homeless patients so close to neighborhoods in their community. They contend the county’s plan would “present a high and unacceptable risk of propagation of the virus to the businesses and customers frequenting the area as well as nearby residential neighborhoods,” the lawsuit states.
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Under the contract, the county will pay $8,436 per day for use of the property, which will be managed by the homeless nonprofit Illumination Foundation. Those funds are expected to be reimbursed by the state, according to the document.
Homeless people, who are more likely to have underlying health conditions and weakened immune systems, often from living on the streets, are at a higher risk for developing severe forms of COVID-19 than the general population, health experts say. With that in mind, officials across the state have been working on ways to quickly move people indoors amid fears that an outbreak in this vulnerable population could strain an already fragile health system.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has allocated $50 million to purchase or lease hotels and motels across the state for that purpose, along with an additional $100 million in emergency grants. The state has also provided trailers to Orange County to use in isolating homeless people.
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The county said in a statement Thursday it will be opposing the city’s efforts to obtain an injunction.
“With appropriate community safeguards and security protections in place, the County of Orange is implementing Governor Newsom’s Project Roomkey to lease hotel and motel rooms in order to protect vulnerable individuals experiencing homelessness who are high-risk for developing serious illness from COVID-19,” the county wrote.
However, city leaders contend Laguna Hills — with a population including about 14% who are senior citizens and which borders the predominantly senior community of Laguna Woods — is not an appropriate place for such a facility.
“Our city took this extreme action because we have been put in an extreme position by this project,” Laguna Hills Mayor Janine Heft said in a prepared statement. “It is horrifying to propose to place a substantial number of COVID-19 patients in the Laguna Hills and Laguna Woods vicinity, where there are over 20,000 of the persons most at-risk — seniors. We could not stand by and watch this happen.”
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Residents in Laguna Woods had similar complaints when it came to light earlier this month that the county had brokered an agreement with Ayres Hotel to use the site for homeless housing and medical care. That deal quickly withered in the face of strident community opposition.
On April 7, a day after county officials announced the dissolution of the agreement in Laguna Woods, they signed a contract with Laguna Hills Inn. Laguna Hills officials responded by issuing a statement late last week saying they were exploring legal action to stop the plan.
As of Wednesday, Laguna Woods had 13 of the county’s 1,376 confirmed coronavirus cases.
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Kelly Richardson, an attorney representing the city and building owners, said he expects the county to argue during Thursday’s hearing that the facility will be secured and won’t present a danger to residents.
“It can’t be completely closed,” he said. “The transient people who will be staying there have civil rights just like the rest of us, and they can come and go.”
He added that while the county’s intention is a good one, he suspects officials did not think about the impact to the community before they entered into the agreement.
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“Why in the name of all that’s reasonable would you transport a population of sick people into an area with healthy people, and not only healthy people, but people who are uniquely susceptible to the worst aspects of the disease? This is not to denigrate the need for transient people to get shelter and care. You just don’t do it in a way that puts people in jeopardy.”
