County's homeless plan hits skids - Community opposition kills bid to shift services for the needy to regional shelters. The $7 million for the centers will now fund smaller programs.

More than a year after Los Angeles County supervisors unveiled a bold $100-million initiative that included opening regional shelters for the homeless, officials have quietly shelved that element because communities feared the centers would draw people from downtown's skid row.

Instead, the county has shifted its focus from building five so-called stabilization centers to supporting a host of smaller programs. About two-thirds of the money designated for a couple of dozen homeless prevention projects remains unspent.

The stabilization center concept "hasn't been killed at all yet," said Lari Sheehan, the county deputy chief executive who has coordinated much of the county's homeless prevention work. But "it became very, very obvious very quickly that these dollars are only going to go to good work when they work with the community and [communities] decide what they need. . . . We can't tell communities what to do."

Retired Chief Administrator David Janssen proposed creating a homeless services center in each of the five supervisors' districts. Each was to have about 40 short-term beds and be staffed by workers from the county's social services, mental health and health services departments. He described them as sites where hospitals and law enforcement agencies could place some of the county's estimated 90,000 homeless people while caseworkers connected them with housing and other kinds of aid.

At a time when public attention was particularly focused on how the city of Los Angeles was attempting to clean up its skid row downtown, the supervisors approved the countywide initiative in April 2006, with Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky labeling the effort a "historic investment."

West Covina officials feared the county might simply try to expand the city's existing homeless center, which provides services for several hundred people living on the streets there. West Covina wasn't interested in becoming "the discarding place for other homeless [from] other communities," said Mayor Mike Touhey. "They were trying to put a homeless center in the center of our downtown that we're trying to revitalize."

It was a lesson county officials learned the hard way: The "county-centric kind of approach -- that will not fly," said Nick Ippolito, a deputy who works on homeless issues for Supervisor Dan Knabe.

Over the last 18 months, the idea of regional centers has been replaced by a more grass-roots effort to talk with community leaders and local groups about what they view as a more acceptable way to combat homelessness locally.