Sounding Off:

The [editorial] about Someone Cares Soup Kitchen on 19th near Pomona is slightly skewed to one side — the side of the powers that own the property and oversee this nonprofit organization (“Neighbors should help soup kitchen,” April 11).

If you worked and lived in this area you might be shocked and dismayed at the lack of wisdom and intelligent consideration for the taxpaying citizens who live in this area, and be stunned that it was approved by the City Council!

My fine art studio is a few doors away from the soup kitchen.

I am planning creative workshops for children and their parents.

Would you bring your children here with the homeless languishing across the street or parking their shopping cart on the side of my studio, sleeping off booze in my bushes?

Friends and potential clients come here and fear their car will be vandalized.

Every day, I walk my little dog to the Senior Center and am confronted with a homeless drunk with garbage strewn around, stenched with booze and a loaded down shopping cart.

Children who walk to school a few blocks away pass by garbage and drunk homeless who just came from the soup kitchen.

Senior citizens are confronted daily with a passed out or sleeping homeless, usually drunk, smelly and with a loaded-down shopping cart on the premises.

The directors of the soup kitchen are displaying a lack of wisdom in not seeking professional guidance in dealing with the homeless.

Morally, ethically and to assure the safe environment for children and seniors, the soup kitchen would be better placed in an area at least one mile from elementary schools and family residents.

If there are lower income families in this area that need food, it would be better placed with them in the form of groceries they could pick up, take home and prepare in their own home.

Helping the homeless is important, yet not at the expense of existing taxpaying families in this area of Costa Mesa.

The citizens of this area have the legal right to the enforcement of municipal codes that protect them from extreme noise at extreme hours and liquor/bars/drunks from bars.

It seems apparent that the city of Costa Mesa disregards the Hispanic community by placing liquor-based businesses, grandfathered-in atrocities as well as soup kitchens that feed homeless with no place to sleep near the soup kitchen!

Would the Costa Mesa City Council members allow these conditions in their neighborhoods? Would Gary Monahan be OK with the soup kitchen next to one of his bars? Or right around the corner from his children? Would Mayor [Allan] Mansoor allow his home to be invaded by noise, drunks, bars, liquor stores, soup kitchens teaming with homeless with nowhere to go in his neighborhood? Would you?

This problem needs to be adequately addressed with intelligence, expert guidance and research of successful models from other cities.

DONNA MAGRINA lives in Costa Mesa.