On the lunch tables at Mary’s Kitchen, stacks upon stacks of supplies, from paper towels to holiday decorations to bins of pillows and linens, sat Sunday, April 10, ready to be sold.

During the week, patrons often sit at the tables to eat a hot meal or get a few hours rest, but with a possible May 1 eviction looming, the soup kitchen has begun clearing out boxes of donations from its location at the end of West Struck Avenue in Orange, where it has served the area’s homeless and hungry for more than two decades.

While the nonprofit’s leaders still hope a judge might delay the eviction awhile longer, city leaders are expecting the soup kitchen to leave the property next month, laying out a plan for the court’s review on how Orange would provide replacement services as soon as May 2.

Last year, city leaders told the nonprofit’s CEO Gloria Suess that they planned to terminate in 90 days the license agreement that allowed the nonprofit to operate at the city-owned property. After Mary’s Kitchen sued, a judge granted an order preventing the city from evicting it until May.

In his November order, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter said that extension should provide enough time for the soup kitchen to move to a new location if it wanted, and for the city to come up with a plan to replace the “critical services” it provides in Orange.

Now just weeks before the injunction is set to expire, Mary’s Kitchen hasn’t identified a place where it could start anew. Suess said it’s the nonprofit’s hope that it will be able to stay until the end of its current agreement with the city, which goes until June 2024.

“I don’t think we realized how difficult it would be, because we just thought, ‘We’ll just go to another place,’” Suess said. “But that’s not how it’s happened.”

The nonprofit has money on hand to finance a property, but hasn’t been able to score a location in an area zoned for shelters, despite working with a realtor to scour for possibilities.

In an April 5 court filing, city attorneys presented Orange’s plan for providing services for Mary’s Kitchen clients once the nonprofit leaves the property, and for connecting them to shelters that specialize in helping people navigate the path to long-term housing – a key element city leaders argue has been missing from the soup kitchen’s efforts.

The arrangement would include staging food and hygiene facilities along Struck Avenue starting 9 a.m. May 2 “for as long as they are needed,” officials said.

Trailers containing showers, restrooms and laundry services, which the city has rented for at least a year, would be available Mondays through Saturdays, and mail collected at the soup kitchen would be held at a secure city location and then distributed by city staff and volunteers for a few hours each day. Mail services would continue until patrons can change their address, which they’ll be able to get help to do, attorney Seymour Everett said.

Through partnerships with local nonprofits and food banks, the city plans to have “grab-n-go” food available during the day. A local nonprofit, Love Orange, is also setting up a program to hand out hot meals twice a day at religious facilities around the city. Those locations, which haven’t been identified yet, “will be geographically spread out in Orange to maximize outreach efforts,” the plan filed with the court says.

The city’s goal will be to transition those who come for serves into the county’s continuum of care program, which aims to end homelessness by coordinating with various regional providers and obtaining funding for rehousing people.

But what about those people who don’t want to go into a shelter, Suess asked. “We can’t let them be unfed or unclothed or unwashed or unloved.”

Mary’s Kitchen had a modest showing at its garage sale Sunday.

“We have to get rid of everything,” Suess said Monday as she directed volunteers to load some bins into a van to be hauled to Salvation Army. Some stuff will be donated, and the nonprofit will still try to sell more things. “That means the buildings, all these (storage) bins, everything.”

She said to help Mary’s Kitchen find a new location, its leaders would likely tweak its operations to include some sort of housing component, to make itself more appealing to cities in which properties might become available.

“Our plan is not to shut down, it’s to relocate, to remake ourselves into a different type of agency,” Suess said.

Brooke Weitzman, an attorney representing the soup kitchen, has asked Judge Carter for a meeting to discuss the nonprofit’s search and the city’s transition plan, and “whether it is necessary to extend the preliminary injunction to permit Mary’s Kitchen to remain operational while it continues its search for another property.”

Attorneys for the city objected to a delay, noting crime has continued to occur at the soup kitchen – a factor officials have said led to the city’s original termination of the license agreement.

Also, city attorneys wrote to Carter that the partners included in the transition plan “have already began implementing and engaging their service networks,” and without access to the property after May 1, “the monthly expenses that the city is already obligated to pay will be wasted and lost, with the city’s equipment being forced to languish.”

Carter on Monday agreed to meet with both sides for a conference on April 21.

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