Sweet News for Citrus Belt’s Sour Times : Agriculture: A good crop is expected after last year’s devastating cold snap left many deeply in debt.

The sweet fragrance of hope fills the citrus groves of Central California. The navel oranges are maturing, and the harvesters are returning to work--some for the first time since a devastating freeze swept through the state nearly a year ago.

Barring another disaster, it will be a good crop in California this year--a predicted 2.5 billion pounds, more than twice last year’s ravaged harvest. The orange trees are mostly healthier than growers expected. Box factories and packinghouses are noisy with activity once more.

But citrus growers and workers who have suffered through an abysmal year know all is not remedied with the ripening of fruit. Recovery is beginning, but life in the citrus country of the San Joaquin Valley long will bear the mark of last December’s Arctic Express.

As winter--with its attendant higher utility costs--approaches, farm workers’ first small paychecks provide only slight defense against an avalanche of unpaid bills. Many families have clung desperately to their homes, only to face foreclosure or eviction now. Relief agencies that miraculously helped feed the multitude are running out of both supplies and money. Businesses have been lost or laden down with debt.

“Although the freeze is ended, and the crops are coming back, it’s going to be a long while before the economic impact lessens,” said James Mangis, operations manager of Food Link, a nonprofit food bank that supplies most of the food distribution centers in Tulare County. “People will still be hurting for a long time.”

Yet Mangis and other community leaders can also find something positive in the legacy of the freeze.

“One of the most miraculous things about the whole crisis was . . . how many different people worked together: growers, cooperatives, Sunkist and the network (of community agencies). We never worked together before,” Mangis said. “Now, as a crop comes in and we begin see the end of this, we have a lot of lasting relationships, a lot of respect between sectors who didn’t know much about each other before the thing started.”

Food Link was one of several agencies that pulled together when the big freeze settled on the groves Dec. 20 and stayed for two weeks, destroying most of the navel oranges ripening on the trees, as well as the Valencia orange crop that was to have been harvested beginning in the spring.

The millions of oranges that were lost throughout 33 California counties cost the industry an estimated $1 billion in lost revenues. The San Joaquin Valley’s orange yield last year was 1 billion pounds, about a third of the 3.2 billion pounds harvested in the valley in the 1989-1990 season.

Although employment has now returned to about 75% of its pre-freeze level, the cold front left more than 10,000 people jobless for nearly a year. Worst hit was the San Joaquin Valley, which produces about 85% of the state’s navel orange crop, and especially Tulare, Fresno and Kern counties. Businesses in towns such as Lindsay, Porterville and Strathmore felt the pinch of their customers’ empty pockets.

Lindsay was perhaps the hardest hit, in part because its economy is so closely linked to the citrus industry. There, unemployment soared to nearly 50%. The only furniture store in town, a fixture since 1938, sold not one stick of furniture in the month of January, and closed in April.

Among many employers that laid off nearly all its workers was LoBue Bros., a family-owned orange growing and packing business. Fred LoBue said restaurants, a drug store and many small retailers in town have also closed in the past year. “There’s not a single place left in town where I can buy a shirt,” he said.

Last week, he said, “I was driving through town and saw an old building--built in 1907--and thought ‘Gee, all the good times and bad times that building has seen, this is probably the lowest it has seen in 84 years of existence.’ ” The grand old building, most recently home to a drug store and doctors’ offices, is now vacant.

Things aren’t much better a bit south of Lindsay in Porterville. Several shops along Main Street, the city’s longtime retailing center, have closed. Down the street at Faggart Buick, there are fewer customers to notice that the buildings are looking a bit worn these days. The needed new coat of paint will have to wait until next year, said sales manager Michael Webber, describing just one of the dealership’s belt-tightening moves in the face of 20% lower profits this year.

Growers and packers who were lucky enough to qualify took out loans and refinanced others to see them through the year. Others barely scraped by on savings, and most say they’ll be working their way out of the financial hole for the next four to five years. And while the orange trees have come out of the freeze better than experts feared, the less-hardy lemon trees will take longer to come back.

Donald Laux, a Porterville citrus grower who has 300 acres of his own and manages another 3,000 acres, said he expected that there would be little or no lemon crop from the area this next spring, and it may take three to five years for the lemon trees to recover.

Adding to the valley’s anxiety, cooler than normal temperatures this past spring and summer delayed the ripening of the oranges a few weeks past the normal early November start of harvest.

Just before Thanksgiving this year, less than 2 million boxes of navel oranges (at 40 pounds a box) had been shipped. In the same period last year, before the freeze hit, growers had shipped 5 million boxes, according to Sunkist Growers, which handles more than 60% of the navel oranges produced in California and Arizona.

For the first month of harvest, there were only part-time jobs for many of the recalled citrus workers. Now, say most growers and packers, employment is back up to about 75% of what it was before the freeze last year. Area residents who had left in search of interim farm work are returning, LoBue said.

The delay in returning to work full time has meant even more hardship for workers. While support and relief agencies were overwhelmed earlier in the year with contributions from throughout the state, they say the donations are dwindling and the money is running out.

Throughout the hard months, landlords and banks were part of the support network--holding out for as long as possible before sending out eviction or foreclosure notices. Part of the patience was a hope that help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency would soon be coming.

The FEMA program set up shop in Fresno in April to provide housing assistance to those who, because of the freeze, lost apartments or homes, or faced foreclosure or eviction.

“FEMA (money) finally came through about June, when people were near the end of the rope, losing hope,” LoBue said. “Renters were being kicked out, or people were losing their homes.”

FEMA has so far distributed more than $4 million. However, of 5,464 applications for assistance, the agency has rejected more than 3,000. Some applicants didn’t qualify because their needs weren’t related to the freeze, said Josie Arcurio, individual assistance officer at the Fresno operation of FEMA.

But by far the biggest reason for rejection was lack of documentation. Applicants must show notices of layoff and notice of actual or impending eviction or foreclosure. Many people, Arcurio said, could not provide such proof--in large measure because of the underground, cash-based economy that still exists throughout the agriculture industry.

Nancy Martinez, who works with the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation helping victims of the freeze, said she believes FEMA is “arbitrarily” rejecting applications. “I think the main intent of FEMA is not to approve, but is to deny access to services,” she said.

Martinez said the foundation has worked with many families who are in need but have become frustrated by the bureaucracy. She told of a citrus worker who was denied housing assistance from FEMA because he could not provide paycheck stubs.

Before the freeze, the worker had been part of a crew in which only one person was paid by check. That person then paid the others in cash. “FEMA called that employer, and the employer said he didn’t have that system on his ranch. Obviously, (the employers) don’t want to say they pay less than minimum wage,” Martinez said.

Some employers--seasonal contractors among them--were no longer around, and, said Arcurio, at least two major employers in the area refused to provide documentation for the workers. One of those companies began working with FEMA officials this month after harvest began, Arcurio said.

“Landlords have been trying to be patient,” said Lali Moheno, community services manager of Community Service and Employment Training, a program that has been intimately involved in helping Tulare County’s citrus workers through the crisis. But many landlords can no longer afford to be patient, she said.

At the Visalia CSET office, she said, “we’re getting between three and four families a day who have been denied, and they’ve got big bills; maybe they owe $1,800 or $2,200 or $2,800 in back rent. . . . As soon as the landlords find there won’t be any help from FEMA, they are issuing eviction notices. Those families . . . come in to us. All the agencies are struggling to help as many as we can. But we have to prioritize because there are a lot of them.”

Moheno said although the public has been very generous, donations are waning. The agencies will be spending much of their remaining funds to help the families through the first weeks of winter.

“There are still hungry children to feed,” said Mangis of Food Link. “But the desperate needs are winter clothes and blankets--and they’re almost more important now than food.”

Citrus Harvest Rebounding

California is the nation’s No. 1 producer of navel oranges sold as fresh fruit. Between 85% and 90% of the state’s annual navel orange crop comes from the San Joaquin Valley. This year, navel production is predicted to exceed 2.5 billion pounds, nearly double last season’s freeze-wracked harvest.

‘90: The Arctic Express, a devastating two-week freeze, ravages the Citrus Belt.

‘91*

* estimated Source: Sunkist Growers Inc.