Encinitas’ Hiring Hall for Migrants to Be Closed

The migrant worker job center in Encinitas--the first of its kind to open in the county--also will be the first to close. Encinitas city officials are planning to abandon the hiring hall at the end of the year.

Discontent with the program by Encinitas City Council members and the recent resignation of the city’s migrant affairs director left funding of the day-labor hiring hall in doubt.

At Wednesday’s Encinitas council session, representatives of Esperanza International asked that the city share the cost of a $10,000 environmental impact study for a farm-worker housing project in the same area. The nonprofit charitable aid agency was turned down by a 3-2 vote.

Larry Graff, city management assistant, said the Esperanza group had proposed that the city pay half the cost of the study and obtain environmental documentation needed to create a permanent migrant hiring hall to replace the existing mobile center operating from a vacant lot near the intersection of El Camino Real and Olivenhain Road.

Esperanza is planning to place trailer housing on property leased from the Ecke family across El Camino Real from where the migrant jobs center has been operating since November, 1989, Graff explained. The environmental findings would provide data for both projects. The Encinitas hiring hall was patterned after the nation’s first job center for documented aliens in Costa Mesa and was designed to remove the large numbers of migrant workers who crowd Encinitas street corners in the mornings, waiting for local contractors and growers to offer them work.

“I’m the one who went up there and toured the Costa Mesa facility and voted for this one,” said Mayor Gail Hano, “but it just isn’t working. It just isn’t worth the money we are putting into it.”

Hano said there are insufficient jobs available for the 60 or so migrants who show up each morning, “and it’s lucky if 20 or so are placed” in day labor jobs. She said she thinks that the jobs center will have a fair trial by the end of the year, and “unless things pick up again and jobs are available, or unless some other group decides to take it over,” the center will be closed.

Councilwoman Maura Wiegand voted in favor of the jobs center study but concedes that the council majority will prevail.

“Any business deserves a better trial than that,” Wiegand said of the two-year life of the project. “Of course there are not enough jobs for the number of workers. It’s the economic climate right now.”

A final decision on the migrant hiring hall will be made during city budget discussions in June.