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LOS ANGELES (CN) — Santa Ana, California, and Orange County have reached a settlement agreement in a legal fight over claims that the city is disproportionately taking care of the county’s homeless population allegedly because the county is transferring unhoused people there from surrounding communities.
“An agreement on sheltering homeless people has been reached between the City of Santa Ana and the County of Orange,” U.S. District Judge David Carter said in a court order Tuesday, inviting the chairman of the county board of supervisors and the city’s mayor to attend a hearing Thursday in federal court to approve the settlement.
Terms of the settlement weren’t disclosed and representatives of the city and county had no immediate comment.
The largely Hispanic city is among the poorest in Orange County in terms of median household income, according to the original complaint Santa Ana filed last year. Yet it is responsible for an outsized portion of services to homeless people because other, richer cities in Orange County refused to do their part, according to the city.
Instead, those richer cities have been happy to leave homeless people from their communities stranded in Santa Ana, the city alleged.
“Despite continued admonitions by this court, homeless individuals continue to be intentionally or unintentionally abandoned within Santa Ana by various means,” the city said in its complaint last year. “Some are transported for services to Santa Ana and left without a plan for return transportation to the city of origin. Other homeless individuals are brought to Santa Ana for shelter and essentially remain in Santa Ana if that housing solution ends. For others, it is believed they are simply transported to Santa Ana by neighboring agencies and ultimately abandoned.”
One particular reason many homeless people ended in Santa Ana is that the Orange County Sheriff releases homeless inmates from its Central Jail Complex in the city, because that’s where the jail is located, rather than returning them to their original places of residence, the city claimed.
Judge Carter in Santa Ana previously oversaw a lawsuit by the Orange County Catholic Workers over efforts to evict homeless people from encampments along the Santa Ana Riverbed. As part of settlements in that lawsuit, many Orange County cities agreed to provide more emergency shelter beds.
However, according to Santa Ana’s lawsuit, some affluent cities in the southern part of the county made plans to move homeless individuals to a shelter in Santa Ana.
“The expressed intent of these cities marks a radical departure from the type of meaningful progress toward an equitable distribution of homeless services throughout Orange County,” the city wrote in the lawsuit. “Despite their significantly elevated median household incomes, increased value of property taxes, and general wealth, these cities spend far less than Santa Ana on the provision of what should be their pro-rata share of homeless services.”
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