Poor Facilities for Stable Hands Alleged Again

Last June 27, inspectors from the San Diego County Department of Health Services cited San Luis Rey Downs Thoroughbred Training Center in Bonsall for violating various state safety codes in housing illegal aliens.

What the inspectors found were people crowded into storage sheds, tack rooms and stable areas. Some of the common toilets used by undocumented workers were unsanitary “with fecal material on floors and fixtures,” the county report said.

Some rooms lacked windows, ventilation and heating. Some had no fire escapes. And others were used not only to house people but also to store chemicals.

One 132-square-foot tack room--about the size of an average bedroom--was occupied by eight adults, who also cooked in the room. In another instance, the workers were housed in rooms padlocked from the outside--a situation that in a fire would court death.

County health officials issued a cease and desist order. After meeting with representatives and owners of the facility, county health officials thought “they had cleaned up the area and that no one was living there. We thought they were complying,” said Richard J. Ramirez, assistant chief of the division of environmental health protection.

But that belief was shattered Friday when county health inspectors, accompanying U.S. Border Patrol agents making a pre-dawn raid on the facility, discovered that nothing had changed.

Again, some of the 119 illegal aliens who were arrested were found living in sheds, tack rooms and stables. Again, there was overcrowding. And again, people were locked in for the night behind padlocked doors.

“That place was horrible,” said Harold Ezell, western regional director for the U.S. Naturalization and Immigration Service, who accompanied his agents on the raid. “They treat the horses there better than the people.”

“They were told not to do that, not to use those facilities again,” Ramirez said in an interview Wednesday. “It seems that things went bad again.”

The owners of San Luis Rey Downs, Mildred Vessels and her son, Frank N. Vessels Jr., of Alamitos, were unavailable for comment.

The lawyer for the facility, which at any one time may have 700 to 1,000 horses being trained and stabled there, acknowledged “there were some violations” but maintained that the horse-training complex is clean. He also said that, if the facility didn’t provide some form of shelter, the undocumented workers would be forced to live in canyons or hillside caves.

“Our place is clean. It’s not filthy,” said Garland Stephens, the lawyer for the training center. “We have showers for the workers. We resent that a little bit--that people are saying this place isn’t clean.”

As to why San Luis Rey Downs didn’t put the sheds, stables and tack rooms off limits to housing people, Stephens explained that the facility rents stables and barns to horse trainers, who hire and house their workers.

“The trainers keep horses there and keep their people there,” Stephens said. “These people work for individual trainers.”

But Ramirez, who plans to meet with Stephens and San Luis Rey Downs officials today, said, “That’s not an acceptable answer.” It is the facility’s responsibility, he said, to make sure that no one is living in uninhabitable areas.

It is probable, Ramirez said, that the county will take civil action against the owners. This could include a variety of remedies such as fines or a court injunction.

As a result of the raid Friday, Stephens said, “We’re probably going to exclude people from the areas that have substandard housing from now on.”

Claiming the facility can’t dictate to trainers who they hire, Stephens said trainers will just “have to hire a night watchman” to watch over their horses in the evening.

“Unless it meets county health regulations, we won’t be using any housing,” Stephens said. “I think it’s too bad for these people (undocumented workers) who will have to move up in the mountains or the sides of the hills or the canyons because they won’t have a place to sleep.”