By Don Krok Santa Monica
It’s been several months now that the two largest city contracted construction projects have been moving along — the reconstruction of the Main library at Santa Monica Boulevard and Sixth Street, and the Virginia Park reconstruction project on Pico and Cloverfield boulevards, and still no one has done anything to encourage the homeless to get work on those projects. Not all, but certainly a lot of homeless could improve themselves, and thereby ease their impact on Santa Monica if just given the opportunity to do so. Since Oscar de Torre went before the City Council demanding that his “at risk youth” ought to get some sort of priority in hiring onto the Virginia Park project, that site has a 100 percent Latino workforce. There is no diversity to be seen. The main library has very few non-Latino workers. Both of these huge city projects need a much more diverse mix of ethnicities working on them, and that doesn’t seem likely to occur as it should. From the employers simply hiring a good healthy mix of different ethnic peoples, without some of those cheated out of a chance to participate in this abundant work sending in complaints to the state contractor’s licensing labor board.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 23, 2004. Read the original PDF.