Bill to Fund Farm Worker Housing Sent to Governor

For the second year, a proposal to spend $500,000 to build housing for migrant farm workers living in squalid encampments in rural San Diego County was approved Friday by the Legislature.

The measure, sponsored by Assemblyman Nolan Frazee (R-Carlsbad), passed through a legislative budget conference committee and was sent to the desk of Gov. George Deukmejian, who blocked an identical housing grant last year by exercising his line-item veto power over the state budget.

Whether Deukmejian will change his mind this time around is uncertain, but elected officials from North County have been working for months to “educate” the state’s chief executive about the dire need for migrant housing, said Frazee aide Richard Ledford.

“The Administration told us two things last year,” Ledford said. “First, they said they didn’t perceive that there was a real need for this kind of housing. And secondly, there was no perception of strong public support.”

Lined Up Support

Since last year’s defeat, Ledford said Frazee has been busy lining up support from local social workers and office holders “to heighten public awareness, which was awfully easy to do, and to generate public support.”

City officials in Oceanside, Encinitas, Carlsbad and Escondido have expressed interest in obtaining state funds to build the housing, he added.

Frazee’s proposal would make the $500,000 available to local governments as seed money for the construction of 100 to 500 housing units anywhere in the county for migrants now living in canyons and makeshift shelters.

Ledford said the state money won’t, on its own, go very far in providing suitable housing for the migrants, many of whom are likely to become American citizens through the federal immigration amnesty program. For instance, the Singh brothers farm near Oceanside is currently spending $1.5 million to build a 300-bed facility, he said.

Hope Voiced

Yet word of the Legislature’s action on Friday drew expressions of hope from those working with the migrant workers that, at least, a dent could be made in the housing problem.

“I hope that will allow us to make a beginning in at least locating some land” for the housing, said the Rev. Rafael Martinez, director of the North County Chaplaincy, a North County ecumenical group working with the migrants.

“We desperately need housing for farm workers,” he said. “In places around Encinitas, the City Council keeps pushing people out of encampments in the canyons and there is no place to go.”

Roberto Martinez, director of the U.S.-Mexico border program for the American Friends Service Committee, said Friday the money requested by Frazee is “long overdue.”

New Situation

“We needed it, like, yesterday to get something going for affordable housing for farm workers and their families.

“Now we have a new situation because of the legalized workers,” said Martinez. “They have their families with them and they are living in the plastic housing, caves and places like that.”

Both men are part of a coalition formed last year by Frazee and California Rural Legal Assistance to help find housing for the migrants, estimated to be between 5,000 and 10,000 people.