Stricter limits on sex offender housing in Fresno County after Fig Garden complaints
Fresno County supervisors this week doubled down on stiffer rules for halfway houses that assist convicted sex offenders after complaints from Fig Garden neighbors despite warnings that about 30 residents would become effectively homeless.
Such transitional housing in California is legal, but Supervisors Garry Bredefeld and Brian Pacheco sponsored the ordinance that passed unanimously to limit any halfway houses that have a registered sex offender to no more than six beds.
State law would not allow the ordinance to be any stricter, officials said. The Fresno law says if even one of the residents is a registered sex offender, the six-bed limit applies and includes staffers who live on site.
“These people don’t belong in these residential neighborhoods, but we have to deal with it,” Bredefeld said. “Our hands are tied, and we’ve come up with this ordinance to deal with it and to make it safer for our residents.”
The bulk of the concerns expressed at a Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday centered around two homes next door to each other in Fig Garden run by Centers for Living, a faith-based nonprofit that also operates other homes in the county.
The nonprofit is headed up by married couple Dawn and John Coyle, who said they also live on the premises. Dawn Coyle said about 30 of their 120 clients would be forced out with the passing of the ordinance.
She asked the supervisors to meet with her to go over other potential solutions, saying the 30 days between the vote and when the law goes into effect was not enough to make arrangements.
“I live on the properties. This is what we do,” she said. “There is a population out there that nobody wants to help. We want to help them.”
A number of supporters of the halfway houses spoke in defense of Centers for Living, of which some said they had seen the programs work or were themselves graduates of the program.
One Fresno resident, Matt Rivera, cautioned potentially putting sex offenders on the street would make them harder to keep tabs on. He said he grew up in Fig Garden but no longer is a resident there.
“It sounds as though, from a public bystander, that we just don’t want sex offenders in the neighborhood, and so we’re going to distribute them into other neighborhoods and unsupervised and most likely unhoused,” he said.
Fig Garden is a county island policed by sheriff’s deputies, but the neighborhood is in the middle of the city of Fresno. The new law comes at a time when both the county and city of Fresno have adopted ordinances in which people living on the street can be arrested for refusing services.
Sex offenders in Fresno County who have permanent housing are required to report in-person once a year to a branch of the Sheriff’s Office downtown, according to spokesperson Tony Botti. A person who does not have a permanent address is expected to do the same once a month.
Fresno County Sheriff John Zanoni worked with the supervisors on the ordinance, arguing the halfway houses are unruly with larger numbers of tenants. There were more than 100 calls for service to the two neighboring homes in Fig Garden in the past five years.
Residents in Fig Garden complained they do not feel safe near the homes, and they worry about children in the area.
“I don’t doubt that many of the residents are doing well and have found the Lord — have improved their lives,” resident Beverly Raine said. “But a lot of them haven’t, and they walk by our homes every day. There’s trash, drug deals. I see them going on all the time.”
The ordinance’s co-sponsor, Pacheco, said the county needs to constrain the number of people living in halfway houses.
“I don’t think there’s any question that the Coyles are truly trying to help people, and I can appreciate and respect that,” he said. “For me, it’s about concentration and public safety.”
The California Supreme Court in 2015 struck down many restrictions on where a registered sex offender could live. A voter initiative in 2006 had prevented those sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of schools, parks and other sensitive areas.
Those restrictions meant sex offenders could not find housing in many larger cities, leaving them homeless and also difficult for authorities to monitor.
