Work In Progress

[April 30th, 2008]

Plans for Portland’s first day-labor hiring center seemed so simple: a single-wide trailer. Two Port-A-Potties. And as many laborers as could fit under a 30-foot tent.

But nothing is ever simple when the city is Portland and the issue is land use.

On Wednesday, April 30, the City Council will likely vote to waive building requirements for the planned center at 240 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., a parking lot surrounded by a chain-link fence, on property owned by the Portland Development Commission (“New Tent City,” WW, March 12, 2008).

The waiver is needed because plans for the center are “unable to meet zoning-related standards,” according to a memo dated April 30 from Bureau of Development Services Director Paul Scarlett. Those standards require building walls at least 15 feet high, with windows and a door facing the street, pedestrian walkways and a stormwater filtration system.

Even if the council acts now, site preparations could be a week or more behind the scheduled opening this Tuesday, May 6. But ready or not, workers will start showing up on that date.

“We cannot change the date,” says Romeo Sosa, director of the VOZ Workers’ Rights Education Project, which will manage the center under a $200,000 contract with the city.

That’s because day laborers and their employers have already been told of the new site. The center is intended to improve safety for the workers, many of whom are undocumented immigrants, and cut down on abuses by contractors.

The council will also waive a city design-review process that usually takes two or three months, and rarely favors trailers (see “Mary’s Place,” WW, Nov. 7, 2007). The waivers are “temporary,” but that’s a flexible word. They won’t expire until 2013, at the end of VOZ’s lease with the PDC.

The purchase of a tent to shelter the workers and a trailer for VOZ’s on-site managers was also delayed, Sosa says, because the first check from the city came “a little bit late.” Carmen Rubio, a staffer in Mayor Tom Potter’s office who is overseeing the day-labor center, didn’t return messages. Rubio took over the project in early April after Potter staffer Kevin Easton left the city to join the nonprofit Equity Foundation.

Commissioner Randy Leonard, who oversees the Bureau of Development Services, sponsored the April 30 ordinance. His chief of staff, Ty Kovatch, says city staff have been diligent in getting the hire site open on time. For example, the bureau waived hundreds of dollars in permit fees for VOZ.

“No construction project in the history of the Earth has gone exactly on time,” Kovatch says. “And usually it’s very easy to throw city employees under the bus.”