Mendota’s Dream of Better Times Hits Setback

It might seem strange these days that any town, even a community as desperately poor as this one, would pin its economic dreams on a new prison. Farm towns up and down California have gone into the incarceration business, only to discover that few jobs at the local prison actually go to locals.

Instead of finding an economic savior, towns such as Corcoran have received a pittance of tax revenue from prisons, hardly enough to make up for the sting of housing some of the most infamous penitentiaries in America.

But Mendota, the third poorest city in the state, with an unemployment rate of 40%, thought it had struck a better deal. The local prison would be built and operated not by the state of California, but by a private company--one that pledged in writing that 80% of the staff would be hired from Mendota and surrounding farm communities in the San Joaquin Valley.

This summer, the old cotton field at the edge of town was cleared and the beginnings of a foundation poured for the 1,024-bed facility. Then one day in June, with no warning, the workers suddenly vanished. The Corrections Corp. of America, suffering an apparent case of cold feet, deserted the project in mid-construction. A silent crane and a dozen or so prison cells in the making mark the forlorn spot.

The company promises that it has not abandoned the project, saying it simply overextended itself on another large private prison in the Mojave Desert and will return to Mendota when the other prison--already built--is operating.

But residents of this hard-luck town say there is no timetable for that happening, and they can’t help wondering if they’ve been spurned again. Some residents had even quit longtime jobs to work on the construction crews.

“This is one of the poorest communities in America, the Appalachia of California,” said Mayor Robert Rasmussen. “The prison represented opportunity, the birth of hope. . . . We can’t afford to lose that.”

A stranger blindfolded and suddenly dropped into this town of 8,000 might swear he had been whisked south of the border. From the chatter on the streets to the compact discs that line the grocery stores, everything is in Spanish. The faces under straw hats and bandannas are the faces of rural Mexico and El Salvador.

Mendota proudly proclaims itself the “cantaloupe capital of the world,” a harvest so grand that the town doubles in size each summer as farm workers--many of them undocumented--arrive to pick the melons and tomatoes and staff the packinghouses.

But agriculture has not always served the town well. The drinking water ranks among the worst in the state for clarity, taste and smell, a consequence of big farmers over-pumping the ground water and allowing a salt-laden plume to invade the aquifer. To make matters worse, Mendota sits in a sump, a spot so low that much of the local lore concerns the great floods from the San Joaquin River just outside town.

The 1990 Census listed the per capita income as a mere $4,500 a year, and city leaders say nothing much has changed in a decade that has brought prosperity to so many other places. The five-gallon pickle jar at the Westside Market still fills with pennies, and it is not from townsfolk donating spare change, but from those forced to buy groceries with pennies. There are still families whose children miss every other day of school in the winter, one child attending classes one day wearing a coat and another child attending in his stead the next day, wearing the same coat.

Townsfolk say the planned prison, while hardly a cure-all, would help jump-start the local economy with as many as 300 jobs in Mendota and nearby Firebaugh and Kerman, farm towns with economic profiles nearly as bleak.

“We saw the prison as a way out of the fields for the children of farm workers,” said interim City Manager Bruce Barnes. “The idea was to get out of seasonal work at minimum wages and go into year-round work at a decent wage.”

Corrections Corp. of America, a Nashville-based company, makes the same pitch to elected officials across the country: We can build and operate prisons much more cheaply than the state or federal government. But the company and the nation’s other large private prison operator, Wackenhut Corrections Corp., have had a difficult time piercing California, in part because of the power of the state’s prison guard union, which sees private “McPrisons” as a threat to job security.

Before the company broke ground in Mendota, it was putting the finishing touches on a huge prison in the Mojave Desert. The $100-million, 2,300-bed maximum security lockup in California City had been built on spec--without the guarantee of a single inmate.

David Myers, a former Texas prison warden who runs the West Coast branch of the company, said problems in securing a contract for prisoners have complicated his building plans. Getting the California City facility on line must take priority over the Mendota prison, he said.

Myers said the state government has refused to consider housing its inmates in private prisons, so he has been negotiating with officials in Orange and Kern counties and the federal government about housing their overflow inmate populations. He said the talks are far enough along that the California City prison has begun hiring its first 100 employees--a good sign for Mendota and its plans to house federal inmates for the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

“We wanted to commit all of our efforts and energies to California City to get that solved,” he said. “Even though we don’t have a contract in hand, we’re pretty confident we’re going to get one.

“Once we get that solved and operating, we are still committed to Mendota. It’s my intention to crank that project back up as soon as possible.”

Councilman Steve Martinez, whose family owns the only hamburger and milkshake joint in town, said he’s willing to read the best into the company’s intentions.

“It was a real heartbreaker for our people when the construction stopped. But I’m confident that CCA will work out some type of arrangement with the federal government and we’ll be back on the front burner again.”