Encinitas offers homeless parking lot organizers partial funding, half-year contract

The Encinitas City Council unanimously agreed Wednesday to offer Jewish Family Service a half-year contract and a quarter of its requested funding to continue operating its overnight parking lot for homeless people in Encinitas.

The new offer is a counter proposal to the full year and full funding that JFS had requested, and JFS representatives told council members it was a non-starter.

“We cannot run a program with only six months in a horizon,” Kaley Levitt, JFS’s president of government affairs, told the council after Mayor Bruce Ehlers crafted the new offer during the meeting.

Levitt said the program will run out of its current, one-year, regional grant funding on Dec. 31. JFS has already notified its staff that their jobs are at risk, and is starting to wind down the operation by referring new clients to its other overnight parking lots in San Diego County. If approved, the new city contract would be the second, six-month contract that Encinitas has given the organization this year and that level of uncertainty has already created staffing issues, Levitt said.

Several council members said JFS’s request for a one-year contract and $610,000 in city funding was a no-go for them.

They said the organization wants to charge Encinitas full-freight for a program that mostly serves homeless people from other communities and said the city’s money could be better spent on hotel vouchers. They noted that Encinitas has just signed a contract with the San Diego Rescue Mission to provide homeless outreach services, adding that they would rather work with the rescue mission than continue with JFS.

“You are not the group that deserves this,” Councilmember Luke Shaffer said, calling JFS’s requested $610,000 in funding for the coming year “highway robbery.”

Several council members noted that JFS’s funding request is a significant increase from the $540,000 the organization budgeted for the current year when regional grant funding and money provided by JFS covered the parking lot’s operating costs. The mayor said he could support giving the organization $150,000 in city funding — or half the parking lot’s forecasted expenses for the first six months of 2026 —  but no more than that.

In the five years that Encinitas has hosted the program, regional grant money and funding from the JFS organization have covered all of its operating expenses. Encinitas hasn’t contributed any money, but has allowed the organization to use the city’s community center parking lot each night for $1 a year. A new round of grant funding — money JFS has previously been using to help cover parking lot operations — won’t be awarded until midway through 2026 and that is why they’re asking the city for money now, JFS officials said.

Out of the $610,000 budget request for 2026, JFS was proposing to spend $291,562 on salaries for program employees, including case managers and a site supervisor, paperwork submitted to the city indicates. The other major expense would be $173,468 for security guards, who are required to be on site from 6 p.m. to 7 a.m. daily.

Encinitas established its overnight parking lot program with JFS at the start of the COVID pandemic under a City Council majority that has since changed. The program initially was housed on a private lot within the Leichtag Foundation property and then relocated in late 2021 to the city’s Senior & Community Center’s lower parking lot on Oakcrest Park Drive. While there was much community concern about the potential for criminal activity and other issues when the program started, and then when it relocated to its current site near a junior high, those issues have not materialized and no calls have been made to sheriff’s deputies, city officials said Wednesday.

So far, the program has served a total of 306 people, with 78 of them Encinitas residents. Typically, the 25-spot parking lot runs about 65 percent full each month, a city staff report states. Users receive financial education, house-hunting help, family wellness services and other assistance. They’re only allowed in the lot at night and must leave during daylight hours.

Proponents of the program have hailed it as a way to serve the area’s “hidden homeless” — people who have recently lost their housing due to financial issues and might spiral into permanent homelessness if they don’t quickly receive help. Opponents have said the lot’s clients would be better served by being placed in housing of some type elsewhere, rather than being allowed to temporarily sleep in their vehicles at the community center.