Waiting Workers Making Laguna Nervous : Townspeople Want Job Pickup Point Moved Out of City

The Circle K convenience store on North Coast Highway in Laguna Beach used to be such a homey place that some women wore bathrobes when they stopped by in the morning for breakfast staples.

No longer. The women don’t dare venture into the store without full dress, for fear they will be leered at by the dozens of hard-faced, unemployed men who loiter outside every weekday morning, Circle K manager Bill Thomas said.

“My customers tell me to my face that they’ll never be back,” Thomas said. “They are scared.”

The Circle K is on a street corner that has become a nucleus of activity for Latino laborers--many of them illegal aliens from Mexico--awaiting the possibility of daywork from passing motorists.

Numbers Swell to 50

Their numbers on an average weekday morning swell to 50 and more. They arrive in pickup trucks and buses from their homes in Santa Ana, Costa Mesa and other points inland. Some live as close as an apartment house across the street from the store.

The Latinos have been congregating in the Crescent Bay area of north Laguna for several years. But recent events--including implementation of the federal immigration reform act last year, which dried up the job market for many illegal aliens--have forced a growing number to seek work by standing along the 1400 block of North Coast Highway.

At the request of the North Laguna Community Assn. and Laguna Beach Mayor Dan Kenney, state Assemblyman Gil Ferguson (R-Newport Beach) has asked the state Department of Parks and Recreation to open the parking lot of nearby Crystal Cove State Park at 6 a.m.--three hours early--so dayworkers can congregate there in search of jobs.

Ferguson added that the park, which is halfway between Laguna and Newport Beach, is a good choice for a work pickup spot because it has ample parking and restroom facilities.

“This is such a simple little problem that I am hoping that various levels of government will let this thing occur,” Ferguson said from his Sacramento office.

State parks officials, saying they had not yet received the letter, had little comment Tuesday.

In Laguna Beach, meanwhile, about 30 people confronted the City Council on Tuesday evening to complain about the dayworker problem and throw their support behind the relocation proposal.

“We strongly feel we should not be forced to tolerate any longer this unsafe, unsanitary and unacceptable condition,” said Bill McDonald, a representative of the North Laguna Beach Homeowners Assn.

Mickey Williams, president of the Crescent Bay Homeowners Assn., added, “It is neither fair nor acceptable for the neighborhood of Crescent Bay to be a hiring hall.”

And Linda Cheatley, a 25-year resident of North Laguna, said the dayworkers have littered the area to such an extent that she is “embarrassed” to have it seen by tourists. “Laguna is really a special place,” she said. “And I think we need to protect this.”

After hearing the complaints, the council unanimously voted to endorse the proposal to move the workers to the park. Mayor Kenney said outside the meeting that the discussion was a “good step forward. If we pretend it’s not a problem, it would just get worse.”

Before Tuesday’s meeting, Thomas was at his store encouraging local resi

dents to attend. As he spoke, a dozen or so dayworkers loitered outside, rushing up to contractors who stopped in for coffee.

“You feel harassed when they come running up to you,” complained contractor Ted Chase, 57, of Garden Grove, after he fended off several requests for work while walking into the convenience store. “It’s infringing on your so-called privacy. They hit you like prostitutes on the road.”

“On Friday mornings, you can’t even park in here,” added soft drink deliveryman Randy Bice, who drives a semi-tractor trailer truck. “And you got to lock your doors and hold them down or they (dayworkers) will get in there.”

Every morning, Thomas said, he has to order dayworkers to go across the street and quit loitering on his property. Three times a day, he added, he winds up calling the police to get them off.

Thomas admits he is caught in an awkward position--the dayworkers buy almost all of their food and toiletries from his store. Thomas, in fact, is fluent in Spanish, in which he converses with the laborers who wander in on a regular basis to buy such things as soft drinks and hotdogs.

Ed England, owner of the Shell service station next door, said the problem with the dayworkers is one of perception.

“The problem is they walk up the street with 20 to 30 in a bunch and that’s what bothers people,” England said. “We have no problems with them whatsoever.”

Joe Miles, a local builder who stopped in at the Circle K Tuesday morning, said the dayworkers don’t bother him one whit.

“They’re just trying to make a living,” Miles said, adding he has friends who hire them. “I find that they work very hard.”

The dayworkers, themselves, wonder what all the fuss is about.

‘Better Than Stealing, No?’

“We’re just looking for a job,” said Manuel Pairra, 32, a Yuma, Ariz., man who was the only one who spoke English in a crowd of about a dozen dayworkers early Tuesday. “We need the work. We need the money. It’s better than being out on the street stealing, no?”

Pairra has been seeking jobs from the street corner for two weeks. Others have been there longer than a year. Jose Alfredo, 23, a Mexican immigrant from Acapulco, said the competition for jobs has grown steadily more intense since he first began standing out on the Laguna street corner a year and a half ago. He blamed the increase on the immigration reform act, which penalizes employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens lacking proof of residency.

The workers said they are paid a relatively good $6 an hour for an assortment of manual labor jobs, concentrated in construction and gardening. The jobs are sporadic, sometimes coming along only every other day or so for many who wait on the corners.

“It is harder now to find work because the papeles are necessary for work,” Alfredo said of the proof of residency documents now required by many employers. “There is more people and less work.”

Police say the Latinos pose little more than a visual nuisance.

“The complaints are that ‘they’re standing in front of my house,’ ” said Laguna Police Chief Neil J. Purcell. “They do urinate in a vacant lot and there is some (public) defecation. I feel for the residents there. I know I wouldn’t want that problem in my neighborhood at all.”

Laguna police say sweeps on day laborers in the city of Orange earlier in the year contributed to a surge in Laguna. The sweeps have succeeded in reducing from about 400 to 150 the number of dayworkers congregating along East Chapman Avenue in Orange, according to Orange police.

Some residents have advocated a police crackdown on the dayworkers in Laguna, patterned after the one in Orange. Orange police cited dayworkers for minor violations such as littering and jaywalking and arranged to have them deported by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service if they did not have proper identification.

But Purcell rejected that notion, saying his officers cannot legally arrest people for simply standing on a street corner.

“You can arrest them for dropping a cigarette butt on the ground” as Orange police did, Purcell said, “but it has never been our practice to zero in on a certain segment of our community.”