Nellie Gail Neighbors Stage Protest Protest

Having lost a court battle to end an ongoing demonstration by members of a local carpenters union, residents of an exclusive south Orange County community took to the streets Wednesday to protest the protest.

“Our neighborhood has been under siege for eight weeks, and we want it back,” said Dennis Blough, one of about 20 residents of Nellie Gail Ranch who marched and waved banners for much of the day.

Carpenters Union Local 803 is in a dispute with Paul Bissin, owner of Covi Concrete Construction Inc. in Huntington Beach. For the past two years, Bissin said, the union has been trying to organize his company. After distributing leaflets to many of his 70 employees, Bissin said, union leaders began dispatching pickets to his construction sites and to Nellie Gale, where he lives. They also distributed leaflets to his neighbors.

“I hate it,” the contractor said Wednesday. “My kids are scared, my wife is scared.”

Of the union leaders, he said: “They can go anywhere they want in a business community and do their battle in a business way, but when it comes to threatening your wife and kids, that’s different. They stalk me every day.”

Jim Flores, a spokesman for the union, said the main point of contention is how much Covi employees are paid. “They’re driving down the wages of our community,” Flores said, “and we have to protect our area’s wages.”

Flores said of the demonstrations in Bissin’s neighborhood: “We take it personally that he’s trying to ruin the wage standards of our community. We have the right to exercise our 1st Amendment rights.”

Nellie Gale residents went to court to try to stop the demonstrators. An Orange County Superior Court judge ruled that the union must stay clear of Bissin’s house but has a right to picket at the entrance to the community, where home prices range from $500,000 to $5.5 million.

That ruling is what prompted some of Bissin’s neighbors to organize a demonstration of their own.

“This is a nice, quiet residential neighborhood,” Blough said, “and these guys are an absolute eyesore to come home to every day. I didn’t move into a million-dollar house so that I could come home and see this kind of stuff. We just want them out of here.”

The anti-picket demonstrators carried banners reading, “We support Paul Bissin--Good Neighbor, Great Father, Honest American Businessman” and “Shame on the Carpenters Union--Unprofessional Behavior.” They say they will keep marching until the union representatives give up.

Union leaders expressed equal determination. The protests in Bissin’s neighborhood will continue, Flores said, “until he stops undercutting our community wages.”