San Luis Obispo County contracts with security company for safe parking site
San Luis Obispo CA Sept 17 2022
After months of criticism about safety protocols from some of its unhoused residents, the Oklahoma Avenue Safe Parking Site now has three round-the-clock security guards.
As part of its consent agenda on Sept. 13, the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors approved a contract with Good Guard Security Inc. to provide protection for the parking site. Oklahoma Avenue’s site manager, Jeff Al-Mashat, told New Times that safety is the main reason.
Residents of the Oklahoma Avenue Safe Parking Site complained to the Board of Supervisors that the security guards on site are stretched thin and don’t offer enough services.
“It’s a challenging environment,” he said. “We often have people who are being released from jail, walking to the bus stop who stop by the site. We have the security there so that the people who are staying on the site have a sense of safety.”
The contract is retroactive, from May 1, 2022, to Dec. 31, 2023. It stated that the maximum allowable expenditure per year is $240,000. Al-Mashat said that any expense item more than $200,000 in the contract has to go before the county supervisors for approval.
“I believe the funding for safe parking during 2021-22 fiscal year was from general funds. Now we’re using ARPA [American Rescue Plan Act] funding to pay for parking village expenses,” Al-Mashat said.
But not everyone is happy. At the Sept. 13 meeting, a handful of parking site participants expressed their concern about how the program was being run under county and Community Action Partnership of SLO County (CAPSLO) supervision.
One of them was Dina Clark, who’s lived at the site since May. Clark told supervisors that the homeless people on-site get harassed more by CAPSLO and county officials than they did by the Sheriff’s Office when they were living on the streets.
“The guard company that you’re contracting with doesn’t even pay their employees with a paycheck, they pay through Cash App,” she said. “They haven’t gotten one check stub. I don’t think you want to have a contract with a company that’s a little fishy.”
She added that there aren’t enough security guards to cover the 24-hour shifts there and said it’s “impossible” for anybody to efficiently do their job with such time requirements.
“I’m pretty sure they don’t know their labor laws because they don’t get paid for traveling, no rooms, nothing; they sleep in their cars,” she said. “It’s unacceptable.”
Good Guard Security didn’t respond to New Times’ requests for comment by press time. Al-Mashat said though there were some hiring challenges, he rarely received reports of absent on-site guards.
“There have been a few shifts over the past couple of months that were not able to filled,” he said. “In the past couple of months, we have been more adamant with them [Good Guard Security] that we absolutely need to have more coverage.”
