Westchester residents establish GoFundMe to pay for legal battle to remove homeless encampment

WESTCHESTER, LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- A group of neighbors who live near Westchester Park are fighting L.A. City Hall over a growing homeless encampment near the senior center and library.

They call themselves the Westchester Playa Community Coalition. For more than a year, they say they've been battling Councilman Mike Bonin's efforts to allow the nearly two dozen RVs and other vehicles to stay there.

"This parking lot is under city jurisdiction, not recreation and parks, so while recreation and parks is cleaning up the other parking lots in the park to make them safe for children, seniors, our council member will not clean up this parking lot," said Debra Huston.

The community group has taken the interesting step to establish a GoFundMe account to raise money to pay for legal fees in their fight against City Hall. They're raised nearly $3,000 so far.

The group believes it helped stop a plan to turn another parking lot at Westchester Park into a 24/7 safe parking area, which the L.A. Department of Recreation and Parks also shot down.

"This past Friday, we learned that the proposal was not moving forward. We believed our attorney helped a lot with that," Huston said.

The lawyer pointed out the city doesn't allow living at the park or any other parks in Los Angeles. The situation in Westchester is similar to others going on in a number of other neighborhoods in the city of Los Angeles, where communities and City Hall are battling it out over what to do with the homeless who have set up camp at city parks.

Eyewitness News reached out to Councilman Bonin for comment, but we haven't received a response.

While both sides try to figure what the appropriate thing is to do with the encampment, indications are it could be settled in court.

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