Along the Avenue

Lompoc residents living around the 600 block of West Ocean Avenue are organizing and preparing to make a stand at tomorrow night's city council meeting where the city's planning commission decision allowing Good Samaritan Shelter Inc. of Santa Maria to open a detox center and shelter at what has been the home of Avenue Flower Shop for for decades:

Residents who oppose placing a drug and alcohol detox center on West Ocean Avenue near downtown are circulating petitions and encouraging opponents to attend the Lompoc City Council meeting Tuesday night, when the Planning Commission's approval of the center will be reviewed.

The center, proposed by Good Samaritan Shelter Inc. of Santa Maria, would provide perinatal services to 16 women in recovery and include a separate co-ed detox building with six beds. The program would be residential and the residents would be monitored for substance abuse of any kind, including regular drug testing.

There is no such recovery center in Lompoc. Recovering drug users must go to the Good Samaritan center in Santa Maria.

Several hundred signatures already have been gathered and a large crowd is expected at the meeting, according to Alice Milligan, one of a group of residents that appealed a Planning Commission decision to allow the detox center to open at 608 West Ocean Ave., the current home of the Avenue Flower Shop.

Milligan said petitions are being left at stores and passed around in neighborhoods. They include the name and telephone numbers of each council member.

“There is a lot of support for the appeal,” said Milligan, a community volunteer who has been involved in the effort to revitalize downtown. “We want to show the City Council that there in concern in the community about the location.”

“We need a detox center, but not on our main drag,” she said.

As an interested party--for more than a few reasons--I have to call time-out here. First off, H street is now the main drag in Lompoc.

A quick trip down Ocean will make that clear when you take the time to drive it. It's 40 year old, in-some-places-empty-facades speak of the town that was, not the one that is. The city center that "is" runs along H street from College all the way to the Mervyn's center just south of the airport.

The current owner at Avenue knows it. I'm left to wonder why long-time residents don't recognize it.

Additionally, something that I haven't seen much commented on is this one little tidbit from the original plan proposed by Good Samaritan:

Sylvia Barnard says a staff will monitor the group 24 hours a day, and they cannot leave the facility without supervision. And arrangements are also being made to build a police substation inside the center.

"You're going to have a uniformed and non-uniformed presence continually on-site," says Lompoc Police Sergeant Chuck Strange. "So if there are any issues that crop up, we'll be able to handle them."

That it's being completely ignored in the criticisms (and I'm not saying that the critics have no legitimate concerns) leaves me wondering why. Is it that the provision is unknown to them? Is it known but ignored because it takes away a powerful talking point? Has it disappeared from the proposal altogether?

In looking forward to Tuesday's City Council meeting, will the question be addressed there? It would seem the perfect opportunity for answering this one lingering fear of the community about Good Samaritan's presence on Ocean Avenue just 1 1/2 blocks from Ryon Park and 1 1/2 blocks north of Lompoc Valley Middle School.

If a police sub-station is still in the mix, I'd urge the Council to carefully and clearly articulate that message to the community if it is truly interested in getting the townspeople's buy-in. Likewise, if it has been struck from the proposal, articulate how and why.

Either way, it's too important a situation to rubber-stamp anything; the city needs to engage it's citizens on a subject they obviously feel so strongly about.