Program to Give Jobs to 200 Victims of Freeze : Employment: The field hands would work for cities, schools and other public and private nonprofit agencies.

Up to 200 Ventura County farm workers who lost their jobs after the December freeze could be employed full time for the next six months through a new government program beginning Monday.

The program, to be run by the nonprofit Center for Employment Training in Oxnard, will put field hands to work for $5.70 an hour at cities, parks, schools or other public and private nonprofit agencies in the county.

At about $230 a week, the wage is slightly more than unemployment benefits and far less than the $70 to $150 a day that workers can earn in a 12-hour day during harvest season.

“It’s not much, but it’s something,” said Felix Gonzales, 37, who has picked lemons in the Santa Paula area for 19 years and lost his job after the freeze. “It’s a little more than unemployment insurance, and I would rather be working and learning new things.”

Since he has been unemployed, Gonzales is learning a new trade as a machinist through a class offered at the Oxnard center.

The Dec. 21-24 freeze, which sent temperatures plummeting to 15 degrees in some orchards, caused $128 million in damage to Ventura County agriculture, hitting citrus and avocado crops the hardest.

The new program is part of a $6.6-million effort to provide temporary jobs for 1,800 of the estimated 30,000 to 60,000 farm workers statewide who were left unemployed after the freeze.

In Ventura County, more than 7,000 workers lost their jobs immediately after the freeze, and officials estimate that 5,000 people are still out of work. Shorter harvests and the lack of a fall lemon crop this year are expected to cause unemployment to rise again over the summer and fall.

To qualify for the Center for Employment Training program, workers must have lost their jobs as a result of the December freeze. The state Employment Development Department in Oxnard has already sent the center a list of 500 eligible people, a spokeswoman said.

Up to 200 qualified workers will be hired by the center and sent to work for other agencies in jobs that could include maintenance, cleanup or machine work, depending on the employees’ qualifications, center director Shirley Ortiz said.

“This program will give them an opportunity to buy some food, get some experience and give them some time for the employment market to develop again,” she said. “They also pay into their unemployment, so when this job runs out their benefits could be renewed.”

Baudelio Canisales of Oxnard, a four-year veteran of the fields and area packinghouses, said he will be happy to do whatever work that he is assigned to do.

“I want more work experience, and I am trying to learn to speak English,” Canisales, 37, said.

Jacinto Rosales, 41, a father of seven who has worked 20 years in area fields, said he applied to work in the center program in part for the extra money that it would provide while he is unemployed.

“Working is a better example for the children,” he said.

Ortiz said she plans to hire the workers as quickly as she can interview them and process their applications. She is still in the process of contacting city governments, school districts and other agencies to see whether they can use the free work force.

“We’re hoping that some of these jobs may turn out to be permanent, but we’re not counting on that,” Ortiz said.