Homelessness: where I stand

We can have compassion without giving up accountability. Help people who are willing to accept help. But protect our parks, our businesses, and our neighborhoods too.

Start with the actual numbers. Riverside County’s January 2025 point-in-time count, the most recent with city-level data, found 65 people experiencing homelessness in Menifee, 43 of them unsheltered, out of 3,990 countywide. Menifee is not Los Angeles, and the job of the next council is to make sure it never becomes it. Cities that waited until the problem was entrenched have spent fortunes trying to claw their way back.

Menifee already has the right architecture, and it deserves credit for building it early. The police department created a dedicated Homeless Liaison Officer position in April 2022, and that officer works alongside county behavioral-health outreach teams to connect people with services. The city also has a camping ordinance on the books, adopted in 2021, that makes camping and storing personal property in public areas unlawful, with an outreach-referral step built into enforcement.

The legal ground has also shifted. For years a federal appeals court ruling limited when cities could enforce camping laws. In June 2024 the U.S. Supreme Court decided Grants Pass v. Johnson and held that enforcing generally applicable public-camping laws does not violate the Constitution. Cities got their authority back. Menifee should use it: offer help first, every time, and enforce the rules when help is refused.

My position:

• Outreach first, every time. Keep the Homeless Liaison Officer and county behavioral-health partnership funded and in the field, so every enforcement contact starts with a genuine offer of services.
• Accountability when help is refused. Enforce the camping ordinance consistently in our parks, on our trails, and along our business corridors. Compassion for the person does not require surrendering public spaces that belong to everyone.
• Report the results. The outreach numbers exist today in a federal grant report almost nobody reads. Publish them where residents will see them: contacts made, services accepted, encampments resolved, and the trend over time.
• Work the problem regionally. Shelter beds, behavioral health, and housing programs run through the county. Menifee should be at that table pushing for its share of resources, because homelessness does not respect city limits.

This is what compassion with accountability looks like: a real hand up for people willing to take it, and a clear answer for everyone else that our parks, our businesses, and our neighborhoods are not negotiable.