Oildale neighbors oppose county over plans for homeless village
Dec. 28—Not everyone at the meeting was sure they could fight the county and win.
But everyone appeared willing to try.
About 50 people attended a community meeting Tuesday afternoon at Mobiletown USA, a mobile home park in Oildale where area residents joined together with nearby homeowners and others to share concerns about the so-called tiny homes village for homeless individuals the county of Kern plans to develop just down the street.
If it is built, the $2.8 million supportive services village, at East Roberts Lane and Hart Street, would be located directly across from the Rasmussen Senior Center and not quite a block west of Mobiletown USA.
"There is no logic to what they're doing," Mobiletown resident Judy Vollert said of county officials.
Vollert argued that it's a terrible idea to place a homeless facility made up of 50 sleeping cabins in the vicinity of a senior center and a mobile home park also filled with seniors.
She compared the location to placing it near a school. Both populations — children and seniors— are vulnerable, Vollert said.
Richard O'Neil, president of the Kern Parkway Foundation, is also opposing the county's chosen location for the village. He suggested at the meeting there are other locations that would be more appropriate for the village, including the old airport terminal and parking lot at Meadows Field.
"If you go out to the old terminal ... it's completely vacant," he said. "And the parking lots ... are vacant, abandoned.
"You could have a homeless center put up tomorrow on those big parking lots that are not being used," he said.
Steve Goodwin, a retired peace officer who lives at Mobiletown, noted that the 2.89-acre parcel of vacant land the county purchased in 2016 was supposed to be for a new county fire station.
"Does the community have any say in it?" Goodwin said of the decision to build a homeless center instead.
"That's why we're here now," said Kathleen Chambers, who helped facilitate the meeting along with Julie Carter, owner and operator of Mobiletown USA, which she says has been the target of homeless trespassers.
"All the questions are important and I want to get them answered," Carter said.
But she told the gathering that she believes the true power lives in the individuals who attended Tuesday's meeting, and the hundreds of other residents of the surrounding neighborhood.
"If we don't write letters or go to the (Board of Supervisors) meetings, we won't have done our part," Carter said.
Reporter Steven Mayer can be reached at 661-395-7353. Follow him on Facebook and on Twitter: @semayerTBC.
