Moorpark Council Postpones a Decision on Gathering of Day Laborers

With no easy solution at hand, the Moorpark City Council on Wednesday night postponed making a decision on how to deal with laborers who gather each day on a downtown street corner.

About a dozen merchants and an equal number of day laborers attended a special City Council meeting.

The merchants want the city to move the men off High Street. They said the laborers who gather each morning in front of the Tipsy Fox Market at High Street and Spring Road scare off potential customers.

“I have nothing against these men getting jobs, but this is interfering with our business,” said Kathy Amador, owner of the Moorpark Flower Emporium across the street from the market.

But the day laborers said they were doing nothing wrong by gathering on the corner and were being unfairly targeted for criticism.

“The bottom line is that they are going to go where the work is,” said Ricardo Melendez, who does community outreach for the nonprofit community group El Concilio del Condado de Ventura.

Melendez was hired by the city of Moorpark to talk to the day laborers and persuade them to attend the meeting. He was also at the meeting to help translate for the workers and encourage the city to hire someone to mediate between the laborers and downtown merchants.

After several days of watching the workers, Melendez said he had not observed any of the type of disruptive activity that was described by merchants Wednesday night, including leering at women, urinating and defecating in public and littering.

“From what I’ve seen, they have acted with the utmost respect for everybody,” Melendez said before the meeting. “And they are willing to move, but that’s going to take a shared responsibility. It’s not just up to the workers but to the people doing the hiring.”

The city tried to move the men to a designated spot in front of City Hall three years ago after studying the problem for more than a year. But the workers returned to the corner within a few months because those doing the hiring were not using the new site.

Officials from Moorpark have looked at how other cities have dealt with the issue but haven’t come up with anything that is sure to work, Councilwoman Eloise Brown said.

“None of those ideas were attractive to me,” Brown said.

She introduced the idea of setting up a hall where day laborers could gather in a more organized fashion to get work. The hall would be modeled on a labor hall that was once operated in Moorpark by the United Farm Workers union for agricultural laborers.

Although other council members liked the idea, none was prepared to vote on the issue.

Some of the ideas floated by residents at the meeting included cracking down on illegal immigrants among the men seeking work, pushing all the men out by enacting an ordinance that bans gathering on the street to solicit work and providing an alternative site--complete with bathrooms, a phone and job board--for the laborers.

But looking at how other cities have tried and failed to come up with something workable, officials in Moorpark said they want to be cautious about how to proceed.

The city of Agoura Hills, which five years ago passed an ordinance preventing day laborers from gathering on public streets, has spent many thousands of dollars on legal fees defending the ordinance after it was challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union.

An appeals court sided with the city and upheld the ordinance, but the law has reportedly done little to prevent day laborers from gathering in Agoura Hills, said Mary Lindley, assistant to the Moorpark city manager, who researched the subject.

Moorpark Councilman Bernardo Perez said whatever council members decide, they have to remember that the Tipsy Fox parking lot has become the established gathering spot and it will be hard and perhaps expensive to relocate workers.

“I just think everybody has to remember that,” Perez said. “I’m also just concerned that some people will never be happy about the fact that these men gather in the street to find work.”

The council will revisit the issue at a meeting June 5.