Top Legal Advocate to the Poor Falls Victim to Cuts

She has never been more successful, but for the first time in her life, poverty law attorney Barbara Macri-Ortiz will soon be out of work.

It doesn’t matter that she has scored a string of victories during her 13-year legal career, the most recent of which will result in the creation of more than 150 units of affordable housing in Oxnard. Or that she has dedicated the past 30 years to working with the poor, first with the United Farm Workers union and then with the Oxnard-based Channel Counties Legal Services Assn.

Come Monday, Channel Counties will shut its doors, after nearly 40 years in business, the victim of budget cuts and the nationwide consolidation of federally funded legal aid programs.

And the 51-year-old single mother of two--a college dropout trained by the UFW to practice law--will start hunting for a new job, one she hopes will allow her to continue, to some degree, working on behalf of indigent clients who otherwise would have no access to legal representation.

“I think it’s a real shame that we’re closing down,” said Macri-Ortiz, sitting behind her desk in a cluttered office that has no chance of being sorted out and packed up before the New Year’s Day deadline.

“Between the three of us here, we had 50-plus years of legal aid experience,” she said of her fellow lawyers. “That wealth of talent is being lost, and it’s going to take some time before it’s replaced.”

The same thing is happening to legal aid programs across the nation.

The closure is part of a push by the Legal Services Corp.--a private, nonprofit group created by Congress to oversee and distribute money to legal aid programs nationwide--to make programs more efficient and effective.

The Washington, D.C., group decided earlier this year that one agency should represent a service area encompassing rural outposts from Imperial County to Yuba County, including counties along the Central California coast.

After months of negotiations and talks of merging the three agencies that had been providing services in those areas--Channel Counties, California Rural Legal Assistance, and Legal Aid of the Central Coast--the Legal Services Corp. made CRLA the sole service provider.

CRLA, which for more than 30 years has provided legal services to the poor statewide, already has an office in Oxnard that provides legal help to migrant farm workers and others.

On Tuesday, the agency will launch a basic services office to pick up where Channel Counties leaves off.

Some Channel Counties staff members are expected to take jobs with the program, which will provide services ranging from the resolution of landlord-tenant disputes to helping secure Social Security benefits for the elderly and disabled.

“We hope we will be able to continue the good work and the good will generated by Channel Counties over the years,” said Luis Jaramillo, deputy director for CRLA in Salinas.

Disruption of Services Feared

Despite that optimistic outlook, worries abound.

None of Channel Counties attorneys in Oxnard will be part of the new program, prompting concerns about the disruption of legal services to the poor.

Co-Executive Director Robert Miller took a job in the fall with the local appellate court, while attorney Grant Specht will join the job search with Macri-Ortiz.

Moreover, there is wider concern about the emphasis that CRLA will put on its expanded basic services work in Oxnard, said Greg Ramirez, a local attorney and president of the board of directors of Channel Counties.

He and others have long worried that the two agencies bring different strengths--and different missions--to practicing poverty law.

“The type of work that we do--Social Security appeals, administrative law, housing issues--hasn’t been a priority for CRLA,” Ramirez said. “Time will tell if they are going to step up to the plate and deliver legal services of the same quality and scope as Channel Counties.”

Macri-Ortiz has her own concerns.

During her 10 years at Channel Counties, she worked hard to draw attention to the need for affordable housing in Ventura County, she said.

Through toughness and tenacity--and lawsuits accusing cities of shirking their responsibility to shelter the poor--it had gotten to the point where some housing developers automatically knew they would have to work low-income units into the equation as they pitched new projects, she said.

And she never missed an opportunity to tell city leaders they needed to do more to house poor people.

Most of her victories have come in Oxnard.

During the past two years, Macri-Ortiz has forced the city to approve a 62-unit, low-income apartment complex near El Rio, spurred the creation of 58 units for farm workers in south Oxnard and fought for the inclusion of 54 low-income dwellings in an upscale housing project on the city’s north side.

Now she worries that all that momentum will be lost.

“We were really ready to branch out and bring some housing equity to Ventura County,” said Macri-Ortiz, who cut her teeth in the field of hardball negotiations earning $5 a week organizing strikers at the start of the UFW’s table-grape boycott in the late 1960s.

“If nothing else, I hope there’s a greater awareness of the problems and the solutions surrounding low-income housing,” she added. “And that jurisdictions know they just can’t say, ‘It’s too hard; it costs too much; it can’t be done.’ ”

Those who have gone up against Macri-Ortiz--and had their arms twisted during her dogged pursuit of affordable housing--have developed respect for her passion and abilities.

Oxnard developer Dave O. White recently won City Council approval to build an upscale community--complete with an 18-hole golf course, elementary school and hundreds of luxury homes--on the north side of the city, near Gonzales Road and Victoria Avenue.

But not before Macri-Ortiz forced the developer to donate 3.1 acres for construction of 54 low-income units adjacent to the project. She had filed a federal lawsuit against the city, alleging that the project failed to provide housing for poor people as required in the city’s housing plan.

In addition to the land giveaway, city leaders agreed to designate two downtown parcels for low-income housing as part of a lawsuit settlement.

“Personally, I think she is very good at what she does,” said White, still stinging a bit from being singled out by Channel Counties to provide affordable housing while other developers have gotten away with paying in-lieu fees.

“In a way, for this county that has a desperate need for affordable housing, it’s a shame she’s not continuing,” he said. “We all think we’re going to do everything we can to resolve social problems, but sometimes it takes an advocate like that with a big club to make it happen.”

Macri-Ortiz’s advocacy goes back a long way.

Born in Connecticut but raised in the Southern California city of Ontario, she remembers even in high school being involved in student government and pushing local officials to pursue legislation requiring hospitals to accept all emergency room patients, regardless of their ability to pay.

Neither of her parents attended high school, and Macri-Ortiz was the first in her family to attend college. It was at UC Santa Cruz that she started volunteering with the United Farm Workers union.

Established Legal Program for UFW

She dropped out of school and went to work full time for the union in 1969, rising quickly from organizing picket lines to running the accounting department, then the arbitration division and finally the UFW’s legal department.

It was there, in 1981, that she established an apprenticeship program to allow union members to train under UFW attorneys and eventually take the state bar exam. A year later, she went through the program herself and emerged in 1987 with her law license.

After leading legal battles for the union during the next three years, crisscrossing the state at a moment’s notice, Macri-Ortiz said she decided she needed a job that allowed her to spend more time with her children, Gina, now a 17-year-old senior at Oxnard High School, and Anthony, a 15-year-old sophomore at Rio Mesa High School.

That’s how she ended up at Channel Counties.

“She’s one of the best and brightest attorneys I have ever met,” said Ventura attorney Ron Harrington, a Channel Counties board member and president-elect of the Ventura County Bar Assn.

As bar president, Harrington said he hopes to build up a legal services fund that one day can support an independent legal aid program, one free of all the red tape and restrictions handed down by the federal government.

“I know Barbara is very concerned about what happens to these services” he said. “This has been her life.

For now, Macri-Ortiz is left to figure out how to dismantle this life she has known for the last decade.

She hasn’t even started packing; her makeshift diploma from the United Farm Workers School of Law and her California law license still hang prominently on the wall. Her file cabinets are jammed with old cases and paperwork; photos of her children still line the shelves.

The last official day for the staff was Dec. 19, the day Macri-Ortiz scrambled to make copies of important paperwork before the copy machine was hauled away.

With cases still left to be closed, she hasn’t given much thought to where she’ll work next, although she hopes to land a job with a law firm that will allow her, in some capacity, to continue some of the work she has been doing.

“I don’t know what the future has in store for me,” she said. “I’ve got a couple of irons in the fire but nothing definite yet. This stuff was a lot of fun, and it was so important to the clients we served. I’d like to think I’d be able to duplicate at least some of this work, but I don’t know how realistic I am. I guess we’ll find out.”