Dana Point Seeks Way to Connect Hot Line, Dayworkers

Dana Point officials are looking into a novel way to help ease the problems caused by large numbers of dayworkers congregating on city streets waiting for work: a telephone hot line matching workers with employers.

The hot line was recommended by a citizen task force appointed by the City Council last month to study the problem.

More than 100 dayworkers congregate along a 2-block section of Doheny Park Road in the city’s Capistrano Beach district. They have led to complaints from residents and merchants about littering, drinking in public and other nuisances.

Robert Chavez, a task force member who helped develop the hot-line idea, said the group had looked into the possibility of setting up a hiring hall--as cities such as Laguna Beach and Costa Mesa have done--but rejected that after finding that the halls had not solved the dayworker problem.

“A telephone hot line would match employers with workers,” said Chavez, a local real estate agent. “It could be called something like ‘(800) TRABAJO (work).’ ”

The hot line would set aside a block of time, for example, from 4 to 8 a.m., during which employers could call in for workers, said John Donlevy, assistant to the city manager. Then, from, say, 7 to 9 a.m., the workers could call in seeking a job, Donlevy said.

“When the employer calls in, he can say, ‘I need five workers to do this and this is where I need them to show up,’ ” Donlevy said. “Then the employees can call in and say, ‘Are there any jobs doing this?’ and that’s basically the whole concept of it.”

The hot-line concept is still in its formative stage. City officials have not worked out such details as who would staff the phones, where the phones would be or how much the hot line would cost to maintain.

Robin Blackwell of the Orange County Coalition for Immigrant Rights noted that access to phones could be a concern, but she believes that most day laborers would have access to a public phone if they had no home phone.

Blackwell was supportive of the idea because “it’s a different idea, because they’ve tried all the old things and they haven’t worked.”

“It’s a step forward.”

She said she did not believe that the workers--some of whom may be illegal immigrants--would be too skeptical to use the hot line.

She noted that two organizations --the coalition and the National Assn. of Elected Latino Officials--have successfully used hot lines to disseminate information.

“The hot line is not going to be intrusive into their privacy,” said Blackwell, who had heard of the proposed hot line.

Mayor Judy Curreri said details of the proposal are still being worked out by the task force, which is to formally present its hot-line recommendation to the City Council at a June 27 meeting. Curreri and other council members also expressed support for the proposal.

“We don’t know yet whether it will work, but we thought we would try something that might work,” Curreri said.

Dayworkers interviewed early Thursday in Capistrano Beach reacted enthusiastically to the telephone idea, asking how soon the hot line would be put into service and whether the newspaper would print the announcement in Spanish.

“With a phone, we don’t have to come here,” said Francisco Mosqueda Ortega, 33, a Mexican national living in nearby San Juan Capistrano who has been seeking day jobs from the same street for the past 2 years.

Armando Mogel Garcia, 48, another Mexican national who has staked out Doheny Park Road for the past “4 to 5 months” in search of work, added that his system of waiting on street corners is not very effective.

“There are many people, but little work,” Garcia said, waving his hand at the throngs of fellow Mexican nationals gathered on street corners.

Garcia, Ortega and other dayworkers say they are lucky if they can find work 2 to 3 days out of the week. With a going wage of $5 an hour, the men said they make about $300 a month; or barely enough to pay the rent, buy food and have enough left over to send back to their families in Mexico.

“The work is hard and the pay is low,” Ortega grumbled about his lot as a dayworker.

The merchants who want the dayworkers off the street are not as convinced that a telephone hot line will work.

Kenny Lawrence, owner of a hardware store on Doheny Park Road, said the presence of two lumberyards in Capistrano Beach draws contractors to the area every morning, and that it is easy for the contractors to just stop along the road to pick up workers.

“It would be great to get them off the street, but I don’t think this will work,” Lawrence said.

Garcia, however, said contractors are becoming increasingly skittish about stopping for workers because of what he called the once-a-week immigration raids in the area. Many of the workers, Garcia said, are illegal immigrants.

“The patrones don’t come here afterwards because they are afraid,” Garcia said.

Dana Point Councilman Mike Eggers, while describing the hot-line idea as “excellent,” said that a potential problem with it would be in publicizing the number to the dayworkers, who congregate in Capistrano Beach from cities all over Orange County.

Eggers has placed the dayworker issue on the May 25 agenda of the South County Leadership Conference, a newly formed coalition of south county government leaders who meet once a month to discuss regional problems. Besides Capistrano Beach and Laguna Beach, dayworkers are congregating in Laguna Niguel and El Toro, Eggers said.

At a council meeting last month, Eggers submitted a number of recommendations to help deal with the city’s dayworker problem. The council, on a 5-0 vote, approved studying the recommendations, which included:

- Adopting ordinances similar to Costa Mesa and Orange banning street hiring in the city.

- Adopting an ordinance banning public consumption of alcohol in the downtown Capistrano Beach area.

- Asking the Orange County Sheriff’s Department to enforce “no loitering” signs posted along Doheny Park Road.

- Ask the California Department of Transportation, Capistrano Beach Sanitary District and other owners of vacant, brush-covered land behind the downtown area to clear debris and vegetation within which some of the dayworkers sleep.

The council is to consider adoption of these recommendations at its June 27 meeting.

Eggers also had asked the city to consider setting up a hiring hall for the workers. But Donlevy, the assistant to the city manager, said that, unlike Laguna Beach and Costa Mesa, Dana Point does not have space for a hiring hall, and he said it would prove costly to rent a site.

Donlevy added that the telephone hot line is being considered as a complement to the other, get-tough measures that the city is considering.

“We wanted to address a positive aspect,” Donlevy said.