2 Cities May Require Hiring of Bilingual Staff

The city government here is poised to become the first in California to require that many departments hire workers who speak either Spanish or Chinese, in an effort to provide services to a fast-growing population of immigrants not proficient in English.

With census figures showing that 35% of this East Bay city’s residents are Asian or Latino, the City Council is scheduled to vote Tuesday on whether to make all departments that have contact with the public hire bilingual employees.

“Some people may think, ‘Why do this for immigrants?’ ” says Ignacio De La Fuente, City Council president and co-author of the proposal. “They pay taxes. They don’t take advantage of services.”

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is expected to vote in May on a similar ordinance. No other city in California--the most diverse state in the continental United States--has taken such a strong measure, according to advocates for limited-English speakers, who say they also are unaware of any similar regulations nationwide.

State and federal laws require bilingual access to government services, but critics charge that the measures are unspecific and lack enforcement provisions. They also say that, until recently, immigrants, minorities and non-English speakers have been politically powerless and their needs ignored.

Change is coming “particularly because of the growing Asian American and Latino populations that cause policymakers to examine this issue,” said Ted Wang, policy director for a statewide civil rights organization called Chinese for Affirmative Action. “And the growth of the limited-English population has been dramatic.”

Efforts are underway to strengthen California’s bilingual access law. And before leaving office, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order bolstering federal language access regulations; conservative lawmakers are working to overturn that order.

In the Bay Area, there has been little opposition to the measures, which would require the cities to add bilingual staff whenever a group of limited-English speakers that shares a language reaches a certain threshold. But the Oakland proposal has caused a flurry of opinion pieces and letters to the editor in local newspapers.

“Oakland is about to go bilingual, with two ‘official languages.’ But neither of them is English. Something is very wrong with this picture,” argued one writer in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Mauro E. Mujica, chairman of an advocacy group called U.S. English, says he has nothing against immigrants. He’s one himself. But immigrants are “uninvited guests,” and need to learn English. Hiring some bilingual government workers would be fine, he said in an interview, but “to institutionalize it is a bad precedent.”

The cities, of course, scoff at such statements. The proposals, proponents argue, are not about official languages, but about equal access to government.

One draft of the San Francisco proposal charges that “city employees are frequently unable to communicate with persons requiring their services. . . . Consequently, substantial numbers of San Franciscans are denied rights, benefits and services to which they are entitled.”

The cities abound with stories of residents wronged--of small-business owners paying hefty fines for breaking city rules they don’t understand, of children translating for parents at city-run hospitals and clinics, of domestic violence victims forced to rely on their abusers to make police understand the beatings they just endured.

John Phung owns a grocery, a produce store and a fish market in Oakland’s Chinatown and lived in the city until recently. He was born in China, and Cantonese is his first language.

Phung has paid hundreds of dollars in fines for allegedly violating Oakland’s public works regulations. In 1996, he was sent a notice telling him to remove a refrigerator from his driveway. He did, he said through an interpreter, but he had difficulty telling the city.

“So they sent me a fine and I had to pay it,” he said. “It was over $600. They didn’t understand, so I paid it instead.”

Queena Lu, 17, takes turns with her sisters getting out of school in San Francisco to go to medical appointments with their mother, who was diagnosed in November with rectal cancer and speaks little English.

Simply hearing firsthand from a doctor about how sick her mother is was bad enough. But Lu said that, since her mother’s diagnosis, surgery and recovery, she has often been frightened and frustrated because she couldn’t do a better job of interpreting.

“I don’t know the certain word you say in Cantonese, like organ parts,” said Lu. Trying to tell her mother--awaiting surgery in a city-run hospital--about chemotherapy was the worst. “I would describe it, and she would be scared. Doesn’t it sound bad? ‘A needle is going to be injected into you.’ ”

Oakland’s ordinance would require that, in departments that have contact with the public, the city fill vacancies with bilingual workers for every language spoken by 10,000 or more residents whose English is limited.

The 2000 census figures on language proficiency have yet to be released. But, using 1990 numbers, Oakland officials say the first hires should be able to speak English as well as Spanish, Cantonese or Mandarin. Vietnamese-speaking workers could eventually be added.

The city has yet to conduct a full analysis of the proposed ordinance. Though Oakland has 300 vacancies, it is not known how many of those positions are in departments where there is public contact.

Twenty-five of the city’s 65 departments are expected to be affected, with public health, safety and business-related services hiring bilingual workers first. Such departments would include those providing police and fire services, business licenses, garbage services and building permit processing.

City officials emphasized that no one would be fired or transferred because of the ordinance and that only one new position--a compliance officer--is expected to be authorized.

The ordinance would also require that certain vital documents be translated into Spanish and Chinese.

De La Fuente said the city’s goal eventually is to hire certified translators and set up its own translation office. Although the overall costs of the ordinance have yet to be calculated, translation services are expected to cost $250,000 to $300,000 a year.

Neither Oakland’s nor San Francisco’s proposal includes a hard number for how many vacancies must be filled with bilingual speakers. As with Oakland’s, the goal of San Francisco’s proposal is for city departments to “provide the same level of service to limited-English-speaking persons as they provide English speakers.”

The San Francisco ordinance, which was proposed two years ago only to fizzle, is more of a work in progress than Oakland’s. San Francisco officials, however, have a better sense of the language needs of their constituents.

They are waiting for the 2000 census results to tell them the current number of limited-English speakers. But the city is one of three in California for which the census bureau provides annual breakdowns called American Community Survey profiles.

In the 1999 profile, more than 43,000 Spanish speakers are described as having poor English skills. Nearly 121,000 Asians and Pacific Islanders are limited-English speakers, and Chinese Americans make up 65% of the city’s Asian population.

State law requires that state and local agencies provide bilingual services. Federal law says that all recipients of federal funds must provide “meaningful access” to people who have poor English skills.

Most government agencies make some efforts, but “most cities do not comply,” said Luz Buitrago, executive director of the Oakland-based Law Center for Families, a statewide advocacy group for low-income people. “Oakland and San Francisco are making a clear commitment to the limited-English-speaking communities.”