gaithersblog.net

S.A. Miller writes in today’s Washington Times,

Maryland Gov.-elect Martin O’Malley yesterday announced the 40 members of a transition steering committee that he said reflects the state’s diversity and includes former NAACP chief Kweisi Mfume.

Members also included Gustavo Torres, executive director of the immigrant advocacy group CASA of Maryland Inc.; Shannon Avery, political action chairman of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center of Baltimore and Central Maryland; and Karen White, national political director of Democratic pro-choice group Emily’s List.

This is also mentioned by Sean R. Sedam on the Gazette’s website:

The team also includes Gustavo Torres, executive director of Casa de Maryland and T. Eloise Foster, a former Glendening administration budget secretary, who will lead a ‘‘very deliberate, very thorough budget review,” the mayor said.

For reasons that will become clear below, I hope and expect that the “budget review” mentioned in that quote is to be done by Ms. Foster without Mr. Torres’ help.

In additon, the selection is reported by Ben Nuckols in today’s Washington Examiner:

Other prominent members of the 40-person team include former governor Harry Hughes; Maryland Democratic Party chairman Terry Lierman; former Maryland attorney general Stephen Sachs; Karen White, a former communications director for Gov. Parris Glendening and the national political director of pro-choice group EMILY’s List; and Gustavo Torres, executive director of Hispanic advocacy group CASA of Maryland.

However, both John Wagner’s story in the Washington Post and Jennifer Skalka’s report in the Baltimore Sun fail to report on the selection of Mr. Torres.

Perhaps the Post and the Sun are doing Mr. O’Malley a favor here. Who is Gustavo Torres?

On February 22, 2006, the Gazette reported:

‘‘We are going to target them in a specific way,” said Executive Director Gustavo Torres. Casa representatives will go out with cameras and video cameras to record the Minutemen, but that will only be the first step, he said.

‘‘Then we are going to picket their houses, and the schools of their kids, and go to their work,” Torres said. ‘‘If they are going to do this to us, we are going to respond in the same way, to let people know their neighbors are extremists, that they are anti-immigrant. They are going to hear from us.”

Torres also takes issue with the notion that all of the men who wait for work at official and unofficial pick-up sites are in the United States illegally. ‘‘I have a big surprise for the Minutemen: We know for a fact that many of our workers already have documents.”

Schreiman said he is not against immigration, as his grandparents emigrated from Russia, adding that they came legally to the United States. He said he would be as adamantly opposed to Canadians or people of any other nationality entering America illegally.

Gustavo Torres, Executive Director of CASA de Maryland, clearly has a bit of a temper. He also has a rather mixed record on inclusiveness. On August 11, 2006, the Gazette quoted Mr. Torres again:

‘‘This is an historic moment for the immigrant community,” said Gustavo Torres, executive director of Casa of Maryland Inc., which advocates for immigrant workers’ rights. ‘‘We are going to choose the right people to represent our community, people who look like us.”

In addition, Mr. Torres appears to equate support for his organization’s day laborer programs with acceptance of Hispanics in general. From an October 8, 2006 Washington Post story concerning the derailment of a County plan to place a day laborer center in a residential neighborhood in Gaithersburg,

Gustavo Torres, executive director of CASA of Maryland, a social service organization that would have operated the facility under the aegis of the county and city, said the collapse of the plan is “a very clear message that the city doesn’t welcome the Hispanic community.” A fifth of the city’s population is of Latino or Hispanic origin, according to the 2000 Census.

This is despite the fact that, even aside from the entire issue of illegal immigration, a reasonable person might have some questions about the inclusiveness and efficacy of these day laborer centers. Right on CASA de Maryland’s own website, we can find evidence of inclusiveness problems:

The employment program provides low-income Latino and African immigrants with essential job placement services and contact with companies and contractors.

This is not classic Equal Opportunity language.

Not that it does all that much good: from the Final Report of the Gaithersburg Day Laborer Task Force, we find a table of hiring statistics at three local day laborer centers:

See also, for example, this Gazette article from October 19, 2005:

Chavez, who emigrated from El Salvador a year ago, woke up at 5 a.m. to be among the first in line for a job. Hopefully, he said, his luck will be better next week.

‘‘If we don’t work, how are we going to eat and pay rent?” said 51-year-old Chavez. ‘‘… We want to tell our employers that we came to this country to work and not to cause problems.”

The center has been successful in attracting day laborers to a central location, but not enough employers are there to offer jobs.

The Silver Spring site serves about 200 people every day. There is another temporary site on New Hampshire Avenue that the group also manages.

It took time for the Silver Spring center to catch on as well, Cantor said.

But several months can be a long time for people who are unemployed.

Mauro Morello of White Oak was among the unlucky bunch at the center last week.

He watched some day laborers leave that morning.

Maybe, he said, they were heading to a street where employers who don’t want to deal with Casa’s procedures would pick them up.

For the laborers, finding work is the most important. If working and not getting paid is a risk, they might take that risk, Morello said.

People have the pressures of making a living and sending money to their families who remain in their homeland, he added.

But even the Silver Spring center has its troubles. From the March 15, 2006 Gazette,

A Gaithersburg resident has written a report sharply criticizing the financial practices of Casa of Maryland, a nonprofit group that runs three employment centers for day laborers in the county.

Mike Stumborg based his report on data from Casa and from county financial records, pointing to Casa’s recent trend of decreasing job placements while at the same time costing the county more money per placement. It also draws attention to the $1 million-plus in contracts the county awarded Casa in 2005 without opening them to competitive bids.

Stumborg’s conclusion: Casa ‘‘is grossly mismanaging the operations of its current day laborer centers, making it highly unlikely that they will perform any better if saddled with yet another center in Gaithersburg.”

In a rebuttal, Casa Executive Director Gustavo Torres said the report ‘‘grossly distorts Casa’s financial practices, and we reject its conclusions.”

Casa’s rebuttal, sent to The Gazette Tuesday, concedes that they have placed fewer workers into jobs in recent years — at Silver Spring, Casa’s largest and oldest center, the number has dropped from 9,073 in 2002 to 4,128 in 2005.

In response, Torres wrote, Casa is making ‘‘strategic changes to meet the evolving market demands by employers,” including a marketing plan, new efforts at vocational training and more community organizers to work directly with day laborers and potential employers.

But where Stumborg claims that Casa is doing ‘‘much less with much more,” Casa counters that the increase in cost per job is due to Casa’s reassessment of inflation and the increasing number of people they serve.

Why would either CASA’s assessment of inflation, or an increase in the number of people that they serve, cause the cost per placement to go up? For the former, I’m really not certain, but for the latter, I will theorize here that it is because it costs something to serve someone even when they don’t get a job — if they serve more people but don’t find any more placements, then of course the cost per placement would go up.

So why would Mr. O’Malley bring someone like Mr. Torres into his team? Perhaps this has something to do with it.