A JUDGE'S ORDER

INITIATIVE 17, a strongly favored 1984 ballot referendum that requires the city to provide "health maintaining" shelter for all of its homeless people, is haunting the District government. Spokesmen for the homeless recently used it to persuade D.C. Superior Court Judge Harriett Taylor to order the District immediately to open a new shelter for women. The judge also ordered the city to maintain the new shelter space it has added since the litigation began and to open even more space whenever existing shelters are full on two consecutive nights. Judge Taylor called the city's shelters "virtual hell-holes" and ordered them made safer and more sanitary.

Initiative 17 embodies a humane purpose, but it creates more problems than it solves. It is a treasury-busting proposal that does not provide resources to meet the problem it points to, and it is so loosely written that it isn't clear the city will ever be able to meet its requirements fully. The initiative imposes on city funds an iron demand that preempts other claims that are no less important. It puts one needy constituency, of many, automatically at the head of the line.

The city is facing a budget deficit of $175 million. Mayor Marion Barry announced recently that the city spent $27.3 million on services for some 7,500 homeless people in fiscal 1988. Are the initiative's supporters willing to accept a tax increase to pay for more shelters? If not, what city programs should be raided for the money? How about public safety, at a time when the city has set a record for homicides and drug trafficking and ought to hire 200 more police officers? How about education funds, at a time when the public school system is facing a deficit of its own?

Still, the judge's use of Initiative 17 may have one good effect. In a number of reports over the years, the D.C. government has been told that its programs for the homeless are inefficient, poorly managed and offer few of the services that would help the homeless become more independent. Bureaucratic confusion has discouraged badly needed assistance from the private sector. New ideas that might enable the city to serve more of the homeless at less cost have been largely ignored.

We don't know how much more the city could have done with the $27.3 million it spent on the homeless last year. But it's time for the city to buckle down and work on the many promising programs that have been outlined in the past. If Mayor Barry needed a deadline to inspire some action, the court has given him one.

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