City Ready to Adopt Day Labor Rules : Ordinance: Measure would prohibit solicitation from cars during the morning and criminalize business transactions in parks.

Meliton Calderon, 40, rides the bus every morning from Pasadena to Sierra Madre’s Memorial Park, where he has waited for construction and yard jobs at foothill homes for the last four years.

Calderon stands at the park’s edge with about 20 of his Pasadena neighbors, many of them his relatives from the Mexican state of Michoacan.

But if some local officials have their way, the tip of a hat, a raised arm or a step toward even a legally parked would-be employer could mean a misdemeanor citation for Calderon and the homeowner or contractor who picks him up.

The city of Sierra Madre is poised to adopt an ordinance that would prohibit day laborers from soliciting work from any vehicle on the town’s main streets during morning hours and would criminalize business transactions in the city’s parks.

The City Council twice approved the language of the ordinance and had been expected to adopt it this Tuesday. But as the threat of a lawsuit from civil rights groups intensified, the city attorney recommended delaying the vote, City Councilman Clem L. Bartolai said.

The Latino laborers who gather in the city’s downtown park have long been a point of contention for some residents of the upscale and predominantly Anglo community.

While city officials say the ordinance was designed to address traffic hazards and does not single out day laborers, they concede that it was spurred by a desire by some citizens to disperse the men.

Residents have complained that the men trample the park’s grass, dirty the restrooms and have ogled some women. One man went to the park with a gun after the laborers made a rude comment to his wife, said Councilman George A. Maurer, and another Sierra Madre resident said he twice saw laborers urinating in public.

Others say that they have never been threatened but that the men simply make them uncomfortable and that they are afraid to go near them with their children.

“My interest was in creating a situation where people who have used the parks, especially women with small children, had access to those parks, and that they had access to them in a non-threatening way--not to say that anybody is threatening them, but there is a perceived threat,” said Mayor Gary B. Adams, who asked that the issue be placed on the council agenda in October, 1991.

Adams said the ordinance is intended to eliminate safety hazards created when contractors looking for workers double-park, and the laborers run into traffic to offer their services.

“I have no intent of depriving people from making a legitimate wage,” he said.

Sierra Madre Police Chief I. E. (Bill) Betts said there have been no traffic accidents, confirmed harassment or any crime linked to the presence of the day laborers in the park.

The American Civil Liberties Union and Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) have vowed to sue the city if the ordinance is passed, saying it violates constitutional rights to free speech and a state constitutional right to work and betrays a “thinly veiled racism.”

Similar ordinances have been challenged and overturned in Costa Mesa and Encinitas. An Agoura Hills ordinance passed in 1991 is still in litigation, at an estimated cost to that city of $100,000 to date, the former city manager said.

In addition to traffic problems, litter and trampled vegetation, the ordinance states, the cluster of laborers is causing “pedestrian obstruction and harassment” and a “milieu for criminal activity.”

The law would make it a misdemeanor for anyone seeking work to approach or gesture to any vehicle within 200 feet of the city’s two main streets--even if the vehicle is legally parked. Potential employers also could be cited. It also bans any “commercial activity,” including offering or soliciting work, in any city park between the hours of 7 and 10 a.m.

Those aspects of the ordinance go beyond the issue of traffic safety, said MALDEF regional counsel Vibiana Andrade.

“That provision would prevent two housewives sitting in the park from talking about Tupperware events, two businessmen walking through the park from discussing a business deal, or the next-door neighbor’s kid from saying, ‘Hey, do you want me to mow your lawn?’ ” Andrade said. “They may think, ‘This is a way to get rid of day laborers,’ but when we pass laws, those are laws for the entire community.”

Other critics, including many residents, say that laws already exist to deal with safety issues and that incidents of harassment have been minimal and unproven.

“I think our Constitution protects the right to freedom of speech, particularly when we’re talking about speech used to communicate the most essential need we have: to survive,” said ACLU attorney Robin Toma. “The court already recognized the right to ask for alms or beg as protected speech, and we think this is even more compelling because here are people trying to work for a living.”

City officials say the ordinance does not violate constitutional rights, it just restricts the time, place and manner when solicitation can be carried out.

But the men say the ordinance is heavy-handed and not based on facts.

“That’s pressure. That’s discrimination, if they take the food out of our mouths,” said Calderon, who has five children and a wife in Morelia, Michoacan.

“There’s no drinking, no drugs, no nothing. We just come here for work,” he said. “The majority of people respect us, and we respect them. They come by with their families, and we make a path for them to pass by.”

If no one pulls up to offer work by about 10 a.m., Calderon said, the laborers get on the bus and go home.

Antonio Ortiz Calderon, 45, a lanky man with weathered skin and a worn cowboy hat, has been coming to Sierra Madre on and off to look for work for the last 10 years. A father of six children in Morelia, Ortiz is related to many of the men who gather in Memorial Park daily.

“We only come here to work, and there’s always work here. That’s exactly why we come,” said Ortiz, who added that the relationship with employers, pedestrians and police has always been respectful.

Several years ago, the men would gather a block down the street, next to a cafe where contractors often went for breakfast, Ortiz said. But when the sidewalk got crowded, police asked them to move to Memorial Park.

When a new man arrives, the older men tell him immediately not to make comments to women, and to treat people respectfully, said Paul Rodriguez, 31, who has been coming to Memorial Park for five months.

“It would really make it hard for us,” 21-year-old Ramiro Cortez, also from Morelia, said of the ordinance. “Already it’s slow. Sometimes we only get one or two days of work each week, just enough to pay the rent and eat.”

While a number of residents who have addressed the city council since the ordinance was first drafted in September say they have never been harassed and urged the council to work with existing laws, or develop a hiring center, others see the men as a symptom of the country’s porous borders.

While a number of the men, like Calderon, are in the country legally, some are not, and residents say that allowing them to stay in the park or developing a hiring center gives tacit approval to illegal immigration. Even the employment of legal residents may represent a drain on the Sierra Madre economy, some add.

“The use of day laborers, whether they are in the country legally or not, hurts our community, because proper taxes aren’t being paid in a lot of cases,” said Sierra Madre resident Rosemary Hagerott.

The wording of the ordinance was approved unanimously at first reading, and by a 4-1 vote at its second reading Feb. 9, with Bartolai casting the dissenting vote.

Bartolai said he is not convinced that the problems presented by the laborers are “that great” or that the majority of residents approve the ordinance. His “no” vote, however, stemmed from the fear of litigation that appears sure to follow if the ordinance becomes law.

While city officials ponder the wording of the ordinance in hopes of staving off a lawsuit, some contractors say the city’s efforts are misguided.

“It’s bull. These guys are great. They help me out and I help them out,” said Craig Adkins of Craig’s Construction Clean Up, who often hires the men for long jobs, and recently came to Memorial Park to pick up Santiago Gonzalez, a documented worker from Morelia.

“If you go to Pasadena, on East Villa Street, there’s a thousand guys standing there,” Adkins said. “These guys have the initiative to get away from all the derelicts and come here. They want to work. Homeowners come and grab them all the time.”