Update: I have received the letters from City staff. The letter from Mr. Romer to Mr. Humpton is a Microsoft Word document. Note that the document should come up with the editing revealed; according to Britta Monaco, who sent the document to me, this is exactly how they received the document from the County. The letter from Mr. Humpton to Mr. Romer was sent to me as a multi-page TIFF. On recent Windows machines, this should open correctly using the Microsoft “Document Imaging” utility. I will convert it to a PDF and make that version available soon.

Update 2: A PDF of the letter from Mr. Humpton to Mr. Romer can be found here.

Update 3: I have posted the text of the Romer/Humpton letters. Also MoCo Progressive has some thoughts, and Cameron Barr has an article in today’s Washington Post:

Update 4: A blog reader has obtained a copy of the November 7 letter from David Humpton to Bruce Romer, informing the County of the City’s conclusion that “[…] it does not appear possible to have a site located in the City which meets the spirit of our Task Force’s criteria and is acceptable to a property owner.” I will have the full text up presently.

In interviews, Humpton and Mayor Sidney A. Katz said that the city would halt efforts to find a location. “We don’t believe there is a place we could find,” Katz said.

Humpton said this outcome represents a victory for the opponents of the center, who have included the Maryland chapter of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, an Arizona-based group that opposes illegal immigration.

“They have, in a sense, won,” Humpton said.

“His failure is a victory for the opponents? What an acknowledgment,” said Kim Propeack, advocacy director for CASA of Maryland, a nonprofit organization that aids immigrants and operates day-laborer centers funded by the county.

“I don’t know how much more vocal he wanted us to be,” said Grace Rivera-Oven, who runs a Spanish-language cable show and has supported the center. “Regardless of what the city decides, these are still people who live in the city,” she said of many of the day laborers. The city, she added, “will still have to deal with this issue.”

In an article in today’s Gazette, Sebastian Montes writes,

Tensions are escalating between Gaithersburg and county officials over the years-long and fruitless struggle to open an employment center for the city’s day laborers, with the county this week rebuking the city for ‘‘washing its hands of this issue.”

The county sent a three-page letter to Gaithersburg City Manager David B. Humpton Monday admonishing the city for ‘‘calling it quits” and ‘‘refusing” to find solutions and choosing to ‘‘retreat from its prior commitments” with the county.

‘‘It appears the City is attempting to wash its hands of this issue and push the day laborers outside of City borders,” wrote Bruce Romer, the county’s chief administrative officer.

I’m sorry, but Oakmont is not very much out of the City’s borders, and is almost exactly the same distance from, for example, the apartments along North Summit as is the Festival at Muddy Branch — about two miles. Seriously, the difference is maybe one or two hundred yards depending on exactly where along Oakmont we’re talking about. So what, exactly, does Mr Romer think is magical about the City boundary to the Day Laborers that they would be willing to go to Festival but not to Oakmont?

On Tuesday Humpton sent his own letter to Romer.

‘‘I received your letter … and I am very disappointed by its tone,” Humpton wrote. He said the county failed to acknowledge much of the city’s work and noted the assertion that the city has washed its hands of the issue ‘‘is simply not the case. We have been acting in good faith to resolve this difficult issue and will continue to do so.”

‘‘We believe that to have the greatest chance of success, an employment center must be in close proximity to where the day laborers live and have traditionally congregated and that is the City,” Romer wrote.

Mr. Romer would appear here to have a very low opinion of the resourcefulness of the day laborers. It seems that he believes that the laborers are incapable of learning — or are unwilling to learn — to go to a new location. I know that Latinos have strong traditions and the County tries to be supportive of these traditions, but it is unclear to me that this location is so strongly entrenched in their culture that they would not be willing to abandon it if something better came up. After all, most of them abandoned Central America to come here — what’s another mile or two? Mr. Romer is reaching here, I believe. I expect that he has some specific, ulterior reason why he wants to force the City to do this, and he is rationalizing it rather than being honest about his motivations.

The county has agreed to break its lease on a building at 17 North Frederick Ave. in Gaithersburg that both governments said last year would become the day-laborer center.

The county signed a 5-year, $35,000-a-year lease. When the city backed away from that plan in October 2005 under pressure from wary neighbors, the county kept the lease in hopes it might again be a viable site.

This is interesting, and it is a sign that the County has at least a small bit of sense left.

I have written to the City and asked for copies of the two letters. If they are made available to me I will post them on the blog.