Day-Laborer Law Fuels Legal Clash : Courts: Opponents, led by ACLU, say measure violates basic rights. Agoura Hills officials cite public safety as their goal.

Longtime resident Harvey Arron just wanted to do something for the group of mostly Latino day laborers who gathered regularly in the parking lot of a local lumber company near his home.

So he drove to the site, bringing some used clothes that he planned to hand out.

But what Arron, 57, got for his trouble was a citation for violating the city’s ordinance that bans hiring day laborers from the roadway or from commercial parking lots that post signs prohibiting the practice.

“I tried to give clothes to them,” Arron said in a statement. “I was outraged that by talking to the Latino day laborers, I was treated like a lawbreaker. It reminded me of what my father and grandfather used to talk about Nazi Germany, when Germans who spoke to Jews to help them would be persecuted.”

Arron was arrested in August, 1991, one month after the law passed and about three weeks after sheriff’s deputies from the Lost Hills/Malibu sheriff’s station arrested 27 men and women in a citywide sweep. Many of those arrested were turned over to INS officials who carried out an operation in the city on the same day.

Since the law has been tied up in the courts, enforcement has stalled and 25 or more day laborers still stand outside fast-food restaurants and along Agoura Road every day.

The Agoura Hills ordinance, passed as a public safety measure, prohibits anyone from seeking solicitations or contributions from motorists from sidewalks, roadways or commercial parking lots where owners post signs to prevent such activities.

City officials contend that it is needed to control traffic congestion, which has caused accidents as the result of activity by employers and day laborers along Agoura and Kanan roads, major thoroughfares through the city. The city blames the death of one day laborer on the traffic disruption caused by men rushing up to vehicles.

The two-year-old ordinance has been criticized by a number of legal scholars, residents and local police, and has been challenged in court by a coalition of six civil rights organizations. The city won the first round, but the challengers, led by the American Civil Liberties Union, have appealed.

Defending the ordinance has cost the city nearly $124,000 in legal fees through June 30, said City Manager Terry Matz.

“This is the first time the Court of Appeals has addressed this question and if the court agrees with us, it will have long-range effects in that it will be the law for L. A. County and beyond,” said Robin Toma, an ACLU attorney working on the case.

Toma said the organization hopes that an appellate court victory will help the fight against similar laws in nearly a dozen other Southland cities.

Legal battles over day-laborer restrictions have raged in a number of cities in Los Angeles and Orange counties. An Orange County Superior Court struck down a Costa Mesa ordinance that also attempted to regulate the problem, and the threat of lawsuits has stalled a similar ordinance in Sierra Madre. Decisions in such cases often depend on the precise wording of ordinances.

Opponents of the law contend that speech, assembly and travel rights guaranteed by both the state and federal constitutions are being violated. The Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Public Counsel, the Central American Refugee Center and the National Immigration Law Center have joined the ACLU on the case.

Several legal experts agree that the Agoura Hills measure may be vulnerable.

“My opinion is that there are real constitutional problems with these ordinances,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, a USC law professor who specializes in constitutional law. “People do have the right to gather on public sidewalks, and they are allowed to engage in speech, including speech for commercial transactions.”

Another potential defect is that the law limits only one form of speech. To be valid, restrictions on the time, place and manner of speech must be neutral and not limit particular types of speech, said Jonathan D. Varat, a UCLA law professor.

“It undermines the idea that this law was passed as a traffic safety measure,” Varat said. “I can yell and scream from sidewalk-to-car or car-to-sidewalk if it’s not about money,” he said.

In a Cincinnati case decided last year, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled against city officials who tried to rid public sidewalks of advertising news racks, contending that they crowded the sidewalk and amounted to a public nuisance. The court ruled that commercial speech, while not as protected as other forms, still enjoys constitutional safeguards.

In response to such claims, city attorneys point out that “the ordinance allows solicitation of pedestrians, businesses and residences,” thus providing alternative avenues of communication for day laborers and other business endeavors.

For other cities who have attempted to restrict day laborers, criticism and court dates have become part of the process.

“If you want to pass an ordinance like this you’d better have a lot of money and be prepared to go to court,” said Larry Graff, a fair-housing officer in Encinitas, which unsuccessfully tried to defend a similar measure earlier this year.

Graff said the city rescinded the ordinance because officials “saw the handwriting on the wall.”

In Agoura Hills, despite the insistence of city officials and their legal advisers that the thrust of the law is to prevent accidents, at least one city official stated that an aesthetic objection is involved.

“Our residents don’t like these people standing around our city,” said outgoing council member Darlene McBane. “They don’t like the image it projects.”

The controversy has taken a toll on sheriff’s deputies who patrol the city and are charged with enforcing the law.

“We constantly are cast as the bad guys, and it infuriates me because in the four years I’ve been here we’ve tried to work with the day-worker problem and make it better for everyone involved,” said Lt. Jim Pierson.

In its 47-page court brief, ACLU attorneys contend that deputies who enforce the law “have created their own ad-hoc standards for enforcement.”

Pierson, who serves as liaison officer between the city and the sheriff’s station, has recommended opening a job center where workers could register and a coordinator could match skills with work requests from residents.

City officials balked, contending that budget constraints prevented them from spending up to an estimated $35,000 to run a hiring hall or job site.

“We don’t have the land or the money, and we were told it wouldn’t work,” McBane said.

Despite the city’s legal position, Chemerinsky believes that the aesthetic question is at the heart of most of the restrictive ordinances.

“My understanding is that these laws really are directed at day laborers, and their gatherings are deemed undesirable and this is an attempt to prevent them,” Chemerinsky said.

Troubled by the litigation surrounding the law, Los Angeles County officials are monitoring the outcome of the Agoura Hills case and will use the court decision as a guide to craft its own law for unincorporated county areas, said Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, who floated a similar measure before the board earlier this month.

Arron’s case was eventually dismissed, but two years later the city still struggles to enforce the law in spite of the difficulties it’s encountered.

“I’m not pleased with the ordinance because it’s not used correctly,” Arron said. “If I wanted to give them something, why can’t I help them?”