Working on a Big-City Problem : Santa Clarita: Merchants say day laborers are scaring away customers. The council is to discuss a hiring hall proposal today.

The city of Santa Clarita may be relatively sheltered compared with Los Angeles, but the young community now has at least one thorny issue in common with its teeming neighbor to the south: day laborers.

Drawn by the promise of plentiful construction and gardening jobs in the rapidly growing suburb, Latino day laborers have been flocking to the city. Every weekday morning, more than 100 of them gather in the Newhall section of Santa Clarita in search of work.

Their presence has angered area merchants, who complain that workers scare away customers, occasionally break windows and commit other acts of vandalism.

“It affects business tremendously,” said Tee Potter, who owns a stereo store on San Fernando Road. “When you have 25 of them out there leaving their trash and urinating on the side of the building, customers, especially women, just don’t want to come in.

“Somebody has got to do something.”

For the past 18 months, the City Council has grappled with the situation without making much headway. At the merchants’ request, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which provides police services to the city, conducted a special two-week foot patrol along a half-mile stretch of San Fernando Road earlier this year.

Sheriff’s Capt. Bob Spierer said last week that authorities had no evidence that vandalism in the area was caused by day laborers. “What it really amounts to is that the merchants are afraid the day laborers are scaring people away with catcalls when the women come by,” Spierer said.

The City Council is scheduled to discuss the issue again today, including the possibility of opening a hiring center for day laborers similar to those in North Hollywood and the Orange County city of Brea.

The center would cost the city $25,000 for the first six months, Assistant City Manager Ken Pulskamp said. Supervised by two part-time city employees, the center would be open Monday through Saturday from 6 a.m. to noon, and would provide toilets, benches and coffee for the workers. Under the proposal, the city would lease a site near the railroad tracks at 9th Street from the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission.

“It’s worth a try, I think,” Councilman Howard (Buck) McKeon said. “It won’t get everybody off the street, but we’ve got to do something.”

But merchants want the site farther away from their businesses, said Tony Maric, a paint store owner and spokesman for the merchants. They are also concerned that employers and workers would not use it.

“It’s a waste of money,” said Joseph Jasch, who operates a car repair shop near the proposed site.

Such centers elsewhere in Southern California have had mixed results.

In Brea, about 60 out of 150 job seekers get work through the city’s center each day, said Judy Campos, a city spokeswoman. Although many laborers are idle each day, the program has been successful “because nobody stands out in the streets anymore,” she said.

In North Hollywood, the number of people who get jobs is much lower than in Brea. The center, established in July by the city of Los Angeles, attracts more than 100 people daily, about 15 to 20 of whom get jobs, said project director Bill Molina.

Don Eitner, vice president of the Universal City-North Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, said merchants are pleased with the “considerable diminishment of the number of people on the corners. And I think it will get even better as word gets out to more and more employers.”

Some members of the Santa Clarita City Council are determined to forge ahead with the center despite the merchants’ reservations.

“This is America--we can’t just go in there with whips and start beating on them to make them leave,” Councilwoman Jill Klajic said. “Centers have worked in other cities and we at least owe it to the community to give it a try.”

But Councilwoman Jo Ann Darcy has doubts. “We have a bunch of teens crying out for a recreation center to get them off the streets,” she said. “We can’t throw away our money in this city. I have a great fear that the hiring hall is not going to do the job.”

Some Newhall merchants favor more punitive solutions. “Harass the INS--get them to arrest these people, that’s what we should be doing,” one shop owner shouted at a community meeting the city held on the issue last month.

Concerns voiced at the meeting drew a pointed response from Alfredo Vasquez of Los Angeles County Community Services, an outreach organization. Vasquez told merchants their complaints had racist overtones.

Prompted by merchants’ complaints, 10 U.S. Border Patrol agents arrested 65 men in Santa Clarita on Thursday--45 in downtown Newhall and the others at local carwashes and job sites, agency spokesman Alan Dwelley said.

“It’s made a big improvement,” Maric said.

But Pulskamp said there are problems with the INS sweeps and with the merchants’ suggestion that the city outlaw the practice of soliciting work. “On the down side, if you get the men deported, their families have no means of support and that creates a societal problem, to say nothing of the humanistic side of it,” he said.

As the city grapples with the situation, Santa Clarita is becoming a more popular locale for day workers.

“I heard about this place from a coyote who told me this was where the work was,” said Gregorio Sanchez, 18, as he waited outside a paint store in hopes of getting hired.

“My friends from Guadalajara told me about this place,” said Indio Saucedo, 23, who stood nearby trying to flag down a prospective employer.