Grant to Provide Jobs for Quake Victims

A Ventura County jobs program will receive a $2.2-million federal grant to provide work primarily for residents who lost their jobs in the Jan. 17 earthquake, the U. S. Labor Department announced Monday.

The grant, part of a $28-million package to help 2,000 displaced workers in Southern California, will put 174 Ventura County residents to work in public jobs or nonprofit agencies, said Philip Bohan, project manager for the county Job Training Policy Council.

The program actually began in February with $221,000 in seed money from the Labor Department and should last until March, 1995, Bohan said. The agency has already placed more than 120 residents in custodial, clerical or bookkeeping jobs related to earthquake cleanup and repair.

Most of the early work involved cleaning up damaged buildings and moving furniture into place, Bohan said. Now many of the workers are filling in at overworked nonprofit agencies, such as the American Red Cross and Food Share Inc. In addition, some program workers will begin serving as monitors in the Simi Valley Unified School District in an effort to prevent violence at the schools.

As many as 4,200 Ventura County residents have filed unemployment claims, citing the Northridge quake as the cause of their job losses. There have been 34,000 quake-related claims in Southern California, according to the state Employment Development Department.

Another 8,000 self-employed workers in the Los Angeles region have taken advantage of an expanded program allowing them to seek unemployment benefits because of the earthquake. No figures were available for Ventura County.

In addition to workers displaced by the earthquake, the grant money is available to those chronically unemployed or laid off in a plant closing.

The Labor Department grant will also provide about $12.8 million for temporary workers in the city of Los Angeles and about $10 million for job programs in Los Angeles County.

The California Conservation Corps will receive about $2 million.