Some residents in southern San Jose are outraged by the proposal to use an existing homeless facility as an alternative housing for prison inmates.

Residents said the way the plan was presented to the community was unhelpful.

It started a few weeks ago when Issa Ajlouny received an invitation from the county to attend an online meeting with neighbors. Ajlouny is the founder of a community group called SAFER San Jose.

“I didn’t want to go there,” he said. “And then I got a call from a whistleblower.”

At the meeting, Santa Clara County Health Services announced it would use an $8 million state grant to purchase the emergency homeless housing site at the corner of Monterey and Bernal, as well as another on Vermont Street. The shelters will be used as a diversion program for prison inmates, which it says is “primarily aimed at people with mental illness, substance abuse, or both.”

“I was the first one to raise my hand,” Ajlouny said. “And I said, well, my head is spinning right now. I can’t even think of the questions I want to ask because you just did a core dump on something we didn’t know about. And you want to vote on it in 12 days.”

Aljouny said housing people with mental illness and substance abuse problems is very different from simply building a tiny house village for the homeless.

“We all know addiction is hard,” he said. “As much as the person and their family want to overcome the addiction, sometimes it just doesn’t work. And we will bear the brunt of that addiction.”

The county is looking for ways to address mental health issues without sending people to jail.

No one wanted to go on camera on Tuesday, but an email said: “The goal of this program is to help homeless people with mental illness improve their health, find permanent housing and avoid unnecessary encounters with the justice system.”

But the city was reportedly inundated with angry letters and emails, and while the idea would be difficult to sell in any neighborhood, City Councilor Sergio Jimenez acknowledged it could have been presented better.

“I think the county representative may not have done as good a job as he or she could have,” he said. “Frankly, we as council members were a little surprised at how quickly things got out of control.”

The council has put the matter on hold while it gathers more information about the proposal. And although the matter was scheduled to be voted on at Tuesday’s meeting, Jimenez said he still wasn’t sure who would be housed at the facility.

“No, everything I’ve heard, all the emails I’ve received, and the people who have called me personally that I represent in this particular area, say there’s going to be a ‘prison diversion program.’ People with criminal records, and so on and so forth. I’ve just heard a lot of information, but I haven’t been able to trace it back to any concrete facts or wording related to the grant agreement.”

The county hoped to get the grant and house the first test subjects at the facility starting Nov. 1. And the city appears interested in selling the site to generate money to build more permanent housing.

Jimenez, however, promised that there would be a “re-evaluation” and that the community would have time to learn about the plans for the site. But that may not make much difference to people who live nearby: trust is easily broken and not so easily restored.