It appears that finally, after more than a year of effort, Gaithersburg residents may have succeeded in stopping the placement of a day laborer center in their city [*], although it took a new County administration to bring it to resolution.
Ann E. Marimow writes in tomorrow’s Washington Post:
In his first month in office, Leggett (D) has directed special assistant Chuck Short — a veteran of county debates that have pitted neighbors against newcomers — to “get this resolved and put this behind us.” Those involved in the discussions say Leggett has taken a fresh approach to the policy and politics, and they are hopeful a temporary site can be selected just outside of Gaithersburg as soon as this week.
Gaithersburg City Manager David B. Humpton said the administration of former county executive Douglas M. Duncan (D) “knew what a hot potato it was, and they wanted to keep it in Gaithersburg. There was no partnership. The partnership was a farce.” With the Leggett administration, “I feel a lot of promise,” Humpton said last week, acknowledging that “there are still going to be wrinkles in the road.”
In the long term, Leggett wants to get Montgomery out of the business of paying for day-laborer centers by using economic development money to help train workers so they can open their own businesses that would offer temporary job services.
“You don’t want to end up with centers scattered all over the county,” Leggett said. “We have to come up with a solution for people to find work in a dignified manner and have less reliance on these sites.”
More immediately, Short expects that the county will create a center using temporary trailers on county property just over the border from Gaithersburg. He has identified three possible locations near Shady Grove Road and Route 355 and said he is “very close” to making his recommendations to Leggett.
“Nothing moves very quickly in government, but we could move this one in 30 days,” said Short, who was the county’s health and human services director in the 1990s and helped open its first day-laborer center in Silver Spring.
This is, of course, why having a city government is useful — they kind of have to listen a bit more to their residents. The County, on the other hand, can proceed on something like this with virtually no public process. This is somewhat disappointing to some who wanted to stop a center in any form:
The prospect of moving outside the city limits appeals to the workers and residents such as Searles but has drawn criticism from others, who object to the county spending taxpayer dollars to assist any immigrants who are illegal. If the center is beyond the city’s borders, it would not be subject to Gaithersburg’s planning process.
Susan Payne, who met with Short last week and has helped derail potential city sites, decried what she said was a lack of data to justify such a center. “Ike Leggett is saying to the taxpayers, ‘I want to bleed off resources that could be used for other programs and train people for jobs that aren’t legally allowed to work.’ “
I would be curious to know what sort of data Ms. Payne thinks would justify a Center. I fear she might be just a bit disingenuous here. From my perspective, the presence of day laborers (or at least persons who appear to be looking for day work) in the Gaithersburg area is indisputable. If a day labor center does nothing else, it minimizes the vulnerability of an anti-solicitation ordinance to court challenge. If the County is willing to place the center in what is essentially an industrial/commercial location — as the area around Shady Grove & MD355 most certainly is; heck, that’s where the waste transfer station is — then the threat it presents to residential neighborhoods is minimized. I consider this a victory and a good compromise.
Now, if only the City Council will have the guts to pass an anti-solicitation ordinance, so that we can do something about all the day laborers who might remain scattered around the City and unwilling to move down to an official hiring site. Without that, this victory will be muted almost to extinction.
* Update: It was pointed out to me that keeping the center out of the City was not clearly the goal of the City residents, and I think this is correct. The motivations for opposing any specific placement of a day laborer center varied considerably. Some were only trying to ensure that it was placed in an appropriate location, e.g. not in a residential neighborhood. Some owners of commercial buildings who had been asked to lease for this purpose only refused to allow it on their properties. Some were attempting to prevent the establishment of any day laborer center anywhere. But the net aggregate effect of all this opposition was to cause all efforts to establish a center within the City limits to fail.