[www.recordnet.com]

Where homelessness is off the rails

By Michael Fitzgerald Record Columnist
Posted Jun 25, 2015 at 5:18 PM

Stockton's homeless population has become a costly and dangerous problem for Stockton businesses, but you don't grasp how bad it is until you ride a railroad.

"We've found people passed out on the tracks before," said Dave Buccolo, general manager of Central California Traction Co., a small but busy Stockton rail company. "And when they're woken up, they're belligerent."

Buccolo invited me to "hi-rail" the tracks and see. We climbed into one of those pickups outfitted with both conventional tires and metal wheels that ride on tracks. Buccolo set out from the company's headquarters at the Port of Stockton.

Established in 1905, Central California Traction Co. dispatches three engines to 58 customers along 75 miles of track at the port. But the port is secure.

The problem is the line that extends off port grounds to customers in Stockton and Lodi.

Along this line a fourth engine travels through the gritty industrial parts of downtown and east Stockton, skirting razor-wired industrial sites, graffiti-tagged warehouses and blighted neighborhoods.

On strips of land alongside much of this roadbed the homeless set up tents. They shoot drugs. They generate huge amounts of trash. They break into businesses and homes. They steal metal. They start fires.

"I find needles all over the place," said Jerry Martinez, the railroad's manager of track and equipment. "A bunch of shopping carts, a lot of garbage, mattresses, sleeping bags, five-gallon buckets of (feces). It's terrible."

Clattering along tracks, we crossed a bridge over the Diverting Canal. Metal thieves burning the plastic casing off electrical wire accidentally set the bridge on fire.

Signal boxes standing near crossings must be fenced like a supermax prison or thieves steal equipment from them and sometimes trigger the crossing gate.

When confronted, some homeless leave quietly. Others refuse to budge. Some threaten to fight. Some carry knives or chains. They throw rocks at trains.

Police, responsive as they can be, are understaffed and absorbed with violent crime. Prosecutors are mindful that the jail is filled with violent offenders.

In short, the system does not do its job.

"I barely clean up and these guys are back," Martinez said.

Yet city codes require the railroad to keep its property clean. "Once (trash) is on my property, the city says its mine," said Buccolo. Code enforcers demand its quick removal.

The railroad has spent more than $200,000 cleaning up the homeless encampments along its right of way, Buccolo said. It will soon have to spend another $45,000 to fence one of its lots.

From the hi-rail Buccolo pointed out a business that recently installed a new metal fence. Thieves stole the fence. Another Waterloo Road business had to fence off its landscaped front yard to stop homeless from camping in bushes. Passing residential backyards, Buccolo pointed out where homeless people leap fences and break into homes.

And all along the line, everywhere, trash.

Martinez said he rousted one woman three times in one week and filled a dump truck with her garbage.

"I don't expect police to respond to my homeless people when they have, quote, 'real crime,' " said Buccolo.

But the city should arrest, and the county should prosecute, the worst repeat offenders, Buccolo said. To him, that seems the least a city could do.

In some ways the city has improved its business climate. But Stockton cannot be called business-friendly as long as businesses are plagued in this way. Along the homeless corridors, the city is systemically business-unfriendly.

"My fear," said Buccolo, "is we're either going to hurt one of them or one of them is going to hurt one of my employees."