Directors of Food Bank Scramble for Funds : Oxnard: The money is needed to pay for construction of a new storage warehouse and to buy supplies.

Even as the Seabees from Port Hueneme broke ground Saturday on a new storage warehouse for Food Share, directors of the Oxnard food bank are scrambling to raise funds, both to pay for construction of the new building and to buy food for an ever-expanding clientele.

On Saturday, six men clad in olive drab maneuvered huge machinery to knock down a concrete wall separating Food Share’s lot from the adjacent, vacant parcel as the charity’s executive director, L. Jewel Pedi, wondered where her organization would find the funds to construct the building.

“We’re out there pushing every five minutes,” Pedi said. “Donations are very, very difficult to come by right now.”

The recession has hit Food Share, as it has many charities, on two fronts. As people make less money, they have less money to give. Simultaneously, as the economy continues to drag along, more county residents find themselves out of a job and in need of the food bank to help put dinner on the table.

Two years ago, Food Share served 93,000 families around the county each month, many of them through other social service agencies that receive Food Share donations. Pedi said she does not have exact figures for 1993, but estimated that the number has risen by about 28% in the past 24 months.

The charity is now storing its food in another Oxnard warehouse it rents for “several thousand dollars a month,” according to Dee Volz, the director of Food Share’s resource development program.

But a $950,000 grant from the federal Housing and Urban Development Department, awarded last February, has allowed Food Share to buy the 12,500-square-foot building that houses its office and primary warehouse, as well as to purchase enough adjoining land to build a 6,500-square-foot warehouse extension.

To George Langston, 74, a 15-year Food Share volunteer, it’s all kind of amazing. Snapping pictures Saturday of Navy machinery clearing weeds from the vacant lot, he remembered back 15 years ago, to Food Share’s inauspicious beginnings.

“Food Share was just a Ventura house with a two-car garage in the back yard,” he said. “We ran bananas from the banana boats that docked in Port Hueneme. They’d give us the ones that were too ripe for them to ship. They were still good, though, for us to eat.”

Convinced that needy people existed in prosperous Ventura County, Food Share volunteers wheedled farmers and merchants into donating extra foodstuffs and produce, expanding the food bank operation slowly from the bungalow in Ventura to a fire station in Saticoy and finally, about six years ago, to the current headquarters on North South Bank Road, just outside the Oxnard city limits.

“When we saw this warehouse, we thought we’d never need any more,” Langston said. “We thought we had so much room. Now we’re building more room.” Volz estimated that the new warehouse, which should be ready for use by the spring of 1995, will cost $450,000 to build. About $92,000 has already been raised in donations, and Food Share workers hope private grants will make up the deficit.

For now, though, the food bank has just enough money to pay for the Seabees’ fuel--their time and machinery were donated--and for a contractor to lay asphalt across the dirt lot. After that . . . well, Food Share’s directors will face that expense when they get to it.

In the meantime, more donations of food would indeed be welcomed.

“Food Share needs more food, and not on a piecemeal basis, either,” Volz said. “It’s scary to look at (the inventory) going down.”