A few news items this morning on the recent labor center developments:
Keyonna Summers writes in The Washington Times:
Officials said the new site, a former scuba retail store that became available this week, would require some “minor fix-ups” but could “readily house some offices.”
“I think we’ve got a good proposal to come before the mayor and City Council on October 12,” said City Manager David Humpton. “With public support, we are hopeful that the center could become operational before the winter season.”
The City Council will seek public comment on the center at a special work session at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 12, but officials said several residents are expected to offer comment at tonight’s regular meeting.
Several residents said yesterday that such a center would be a “blatant violation” of federal law and would draw illegal aliens to the city.
Judicial Watch, a public-interest law firm, threatened in July to sue the city if it opened a center. It had filed a similar suit last year against the town of Herndon. Residents there ousted most council members who supported opening a partially taxpayer-funded worker center last year.
[…]
Other residents said that they are satisfied with the proposal, but that they will encourage the council to find a faith group “with deep local roots” to run the center and adopt an anti-solicitation ordinance that bars the laborers from seeking work outside the center.
Mr. Humpton said he supports the ordinance as “another enforcement tool that the police can use to encourage the workers to use the site.”
Sebastian Montes writes in The Gazette:
The potential site is the former Atlantic Edge Scuba store near the shopping center’s east end. The storefront became available in recent weeks.
It is the closest the city has come to finding a site since July, when Humpton proposed a building on East Diamond Avenue in Olde Towne that was rejected by city leaders after neighboring business owners balked.
This time around, the city feels it has a better site that will be less objectionable.
‘‘We’re hoping there won’t be this large disparate group of property owners that will dispute this solution,” said Tony Tomasello, assistant city manager.
If the mayor and council are favorable to the site at the Oct. 12 work session, the county would step in to negotiate the terms of the lease.
Nellis has not laid out its asking price, Tomasello said, but ‘‘I would imagine it’s going to be in the $30-plus per foot range.”
At 2,050 square feet, that would put the rent at roughly $70,000 annually.
Nancy Treos has a brief in The Washington Post:
The Montgomery County Council has been pushing the city to find a place to accommodate the laborers, who had been gathering each morning in the parking lot between another shopping center and a church on North Frederick Avenue until city police made them leave. Plans for the center to open at another facility on North Frederick Avenue fell through after residents complained that it was too close to their houses.
If only that was all it was. But even taking it to be that simple, let’s take a look.
This is the current situation:
By contrast, here’s the new proposed site:
In case you can’t tell from this picture, there’s a fence around that community to the back of the shopping center. Now, as I’ve mentioned earlier, this site isn’t perfect. But I think it is a whole lot better than what is being used now, and may be optimal, when one accounts for the constraint of having to find a landlord willing to lease for this purpose.
(Images taken from screenshots off local.live.com and Photoshopped to add the text; apologies and thank you to Microsoft. Both images are linked to the original pages at live.com.)