ON MONDAY MORNING, Resolutions Northwest, a mediation group
contracted by the city, hosted a meeting with local business owners to
draft a Good Neighbor Agreement (GNA) over the proposed day laborer
site on NE Martin Luther King Jr. and Everett Street. Many of the
business owners directly adjacent to the site, however, expressed anger
and frustration with a perceived lack of outreach by the city. Instead
of negotiating “good neighbor” items like controlling litter, the
business reps vented.
“I’ve been there for 32 years, half a block from the site,” said
Vince Powell of Powell Motors at the March 31 meeting. “There was no
communication with me until this thing was slam dunked by the
commissioners. They claimed they had all kinds of business
communication with the stakeholders… but there was nothing.”
The controversial project is set to open May 6, 2008 in an empty
parking lot, with a trailer and tent setup beginning later this month.
On March 5, city council approved the project unanimously, despite
business owners’ protests that they’d had little or no communication
with the city. The process for writing the GNA started last week, two
months after its planned start date.
“If we had met in January, as they said they would, to start working
on this process, then maybe. But to bring us together two months after,
with four weeks on the agenda to work out this amount of stuff, it
doesn’t seem reasonable,” complained Powell. Jon Allred of Stark’s
Vacuums demanded to know if the hire site opening date could be pushed
back, to allow negotiations over a GNA to continue “in good faith.”
Both VOZ, the nonprofit labor group chosen to run the site, and the
city have stated that the opening date is nonnegotiable, with a
representative from Resolutions Northwest admitting that VOZ was
actually getting pressure from the mayor’s office to open the site even
earlier. Other than a few police officers, the city didn’t have a
representative at the meeting.
Darrell Chasteen of Precision Motor Car says, “I’m maybe a block
from the site, I knew nothing of [it], no one came to my shop, no one
called me, no one sent me letters. I feel like it’s too late for me to
make a difference, it’s already over.”
While the project is supposed to prevent day labor abuses and
alleviate many of the loitering and littering problems along NE MLK and
E Burnside—where day laborers currently cluster on the
sidewalks—many of the business owners near the new hire site have
taken exception to the mayor moving a citywide problem into their
section of the neighborhood. Many feel that business owners along E
Burnside and SE Ankeny, including Bob Wentworth of Chevy, stand to
benefit from removing the day laborers and placing them on NE
Everett.
“It’s a group of people that had a problem and decided to move it
into someone else’s backyard without involving the stakeholders,” said
Ken Beckman of Beckman’s Detail.
The tentative deadline for the GNA is June, but Resolutions
Northwest and local business owners will meet every week in an attempt
to negotiate an agreement by the time the site opens.
With additional reporting by Amy J. Ruiz