COURT THREATENS TO FINE CITY ON SHELTERS

JUDGE, CITING NONCOMPLIANCE, CALLS LONG-TERM PLAN TO IMPROVE CONDITIONS INADEQUATE

A D.C. Superior Court judge ruled yesterday that the District government has failed to comply with important parts of a January court order requiring major improvements in city-financed shelters for the homeless. She threatened to impose $1,000-a-day fines for continued violations of the order.

Judge Harriet R. Taylor, ruling in a case brought by advocates for the homeless Mitch Snyder and the Community for Creative Non-Violence, also rejected as inadequate a city plan for long-term improvements in shelter operations. Taylor ordered the District to devise a new plan by March 17.

The finding of civil contempt against Mayor Marion Barry and the District government is the latest in a string of court rulings that the city has failed to meet legal requirements for a range of city services including prisons, juvenile detention facilities and facilities for the retarded and mentally ill.

Yesterday, Claude Bailey, a spokesman for D.C. Corporation Counsel Frederick D. Cooke Jr., said the city was disappointed by Taylor's decision.

"The judge has overlooked the enormous task the city has undertaken to provide shelter for the people of the District and people who come to the District specifically to get shelter," Bailey said. "It's not an easy job."

Two weeks ago the District asked the D.C. Court of Appeals to overturn Taylor's Jan. 7 preliminary injunction, which ordered the city to comply with Initiative 17, proposed by the Community for Creative Non-Violence and approved by D.C. voters in a 1984 referendum.

The initiative, which is the only one of its kind in the country, requires the District government to "provide health-maintaining and accessible overnight shelter space offered in an atmosphere of reasonable dignity to all homeless persons."

In her new ruling, Taylor said the District had not provided 100 cots for the homeless at the Reeves Center, a city government office building at 14th and U streets NW, as required by her injunction, and had ordered homeless men to leave the building before 7 a.m.

She said the District government had failed to carry out her order to publicize the shelters "deliberately, recklessly, or because of gross ineptitude." Announcements about the shelters took three weeks to prepare, she said, and then were returned by the post office because of "insufficient postage."

Taylor said the District's long-range "corrective action plan," filed Feb. 3, was "more of a report than a plan," and proposed no "system for monitoring compliance," as required by the injunction.

Taylor's ruling was based on evidence presented in hearings on Feb. 14, 15 and 16.

Since then, with court permission, the shelter at Reeves Center has been closed, and a new one started in the old Randall School, First and I streets SW, which is used for city offices. Sue Marshall, the mayor's coordinator for the homeless, said that all city-financed shelters remain open, as Taylor required, until 7 a.m.

Overall, Marshall said, the city has shelter space for 1,630 single adults and 570 families. She said that for most of the winter the District has accommodated about 3,500 homeless people a night as individuals or in family groups. Despite its budget problems, Marshall said the District expects to spend about $18 million on the homeless this year.

"Everybody knows the city is up against it here," said Lois Williams, a lawyer who handled the case for the Community for Creative Non-Violence along with John W. Nields, a counsel for the congressional Iran-Contra hearings in 1987. "But there is a law," Williams said, "and the city is obligated to follow it."

She said the lawyers would ask Taylor to collect the $1,000-per-day fines if the city does not comply fully with the court order. But Snyder remarked, "I'm not sure money is of great consequence to the city even though . . . it cries poverty . . . . I hope the District will get its act together now, but I am increasingly pessimistic."

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.