Center Where Day Laborers Can Find Work to Open in Sun Valley : Trailer: Program will offer free coffee, Mexican sweet bread and English classes to about 200 workers. It will cost Los Angeles $3,500 a month.

The city of Los Angeles will open a hiring center for day laborers in Sun Valley within weeks, the first such center to open in the San Fernando Valley, the coordinator for the city day labor program said Monday.

The city is moving ahead despite a small decline in participation at its hiring center in Harbor City, the first of seven centers to be established in the city.

Nancy Cervantes of the day labor program said the city wants to locate the new center in the Sun Valley Recreation Center, 8133 Vineland Ave.

If the city Recreation and Parks Department rejects the request, she said, the program would be established on an empty Department of Water and Power lot on Sherman Way between Radford and Hinds avenues.

Ray Magnana, a field deputy for Councilman Ernani Bernardi, said a center at either site would serve 150 to 200 laborers, mostly from Mexico and Central America, who wait for jobs on Lankershim Boulevard between Strathern and Saticoy streets.

“Some businessmen feel that laborers congregating near their businesses prevent customers from going into their establishments,” Magnana said. “The hiring center will not impede existing businesses. It is a controllable area and is near employers who want workers and workers who want to be employed.”

The center will be operated by two supervisors out of a trailer on the site. While the workers wait for jobs, they will have access to portable toilets. They can also drink coffee, eat Mexican sweet bread and learn English in classes--all free. The operation will cost the city about $3,500 a month, Cervantes said.

“It will be safer for workers and prevent them from running into traffic and getting injured while they try to jump into employers’ trucks,” Magnana said. “It’s a reasonable, humanitarian way of dealing with the different interests.”

The center will be the second to open under the city program, approved by the City Council in 1989.

The Times reported last week that some laborers had abandoned the Harbor City center, which opened in October, to return to an intersection popular among workers. Their presence at that intersection led to complaints of loitering and prompted officials to create the Harbor Regional Park center.

The men said they left the center because there is not enough work to go around. City figures indicate that about 18% of the laborers who come to find work can expect to take home a paycheck on any given day.

Nevertheless, the project still attracts between 125 and 200 men daily, and many laborers and some city officials see the program as successful.

Cervantes said growing numbers of immigrants have increased the numbers of those standing on the corners.

“You judge the success not by the elimination of the corner but by the reduction of numbers of people standing there,” she said. “Instead of 180 at the old corner, we now have 30 or 40 maximum.”

A similar effort in the city of Glendale ended last September when the Catholic Youth Organization decided it could no longer allow day laborers to gather in its parking lot while waiting for employment. A CYO spokesman said enrollment in the organization’s day care program had dropped more than 50% because parents feared leaving their children while dozens of workers waited outside.

Karen Constine, a spokeswoman for Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores, who sponsored the Los Angeles hiring center proposal, said the city must convince employers to use the hiring centers.

“If employers continue to pick them up at the corners, then day laborers will continue to congregate there,” she said. “If the employers use the hiring site, then the laborers will go to the site. It’s simple supply and demand.”