The new Assembly speaker’s promise was unequivocal: Decisions about how billions upon billions of California taxpayer dollars are spent would no longer be made in private meetings or in the middle of the night.
“The budget will not be written behind closed doors,” Speaker John P
Nick Franco squinted across Morro Bay to the potential future of the California state parks system. The district superintendent of this coastal jewel, Franco ticked off money-making possibilities: Install gates and charge to get in the parking lot. Sell off the nearby county-run golf course. In the marina, bring in more concessions. Outsource to allow motorized recreation in the wetlands. And in the wild, undulating spine of sand dunes at Monta
Gubernatorial candidates Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown tangled in a blistering dispute Saturday over Whitman’s employment of an illegal immigrant housekeeper as they met for the campaign’s first and only Spanish-language debate.
The most intense exchange of the debate, held at Cal State Fresno, came when the moderator asked Whitman about the revelations earlier this week that she had employed Nicandra Diaz Santillan for nine years before firing her in 2009. Whitman has denied knowing that Diaz Santillan was undocumented until just before the dismissal.
Whitman turned to face Brown and accused Brown of being behind Santillan’s emergence.
“Jerry, you should be ashamed,” she said, turning to Brown and shaking her finger. “You and your surrogates put her deportation at risk. You put her out there. You should be ashamed for sacrificing Nicky Diaz on the altar of your political ambitions.”
Brown fired back, denying any involvement and accusing Whitman of failing to take responsibility.
“Let’s be sympathetic and let’s really empathize with the millions of people who are in the shadows and you want to keep them in the shadows and now you’re trying to evade responsibility,” he said. “Don’t run for governor if you can’t stand up on your own two feet and say, ‘Hey I made a mistake, I’m sorry, let’s go on from here.’ You have blamed her, blamed me, blamed the left, blamed the unions but you don’t take accountability.”
Whitman said she fulfilled her obligations as an employer and fired the housekeeper when the woman disclosed her undocumented status last year.
The 60-minute debate was much more confrontational, and their accusations much more personal than their first meeting, which took place Tuesday night in Davis. Saturday’s debate was sponsored by Univision, the Fresno Bee, the Fresno Area Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Cal State Fresno and the city of Fresno.
It was filmed at midday Saturday, with questions posed in Spanish and simultaneously translated for the candidates. It was to be aired later, after Spanish voiceovers were added to the candidates’ responses.
The meeting was plagued by technical difficulties. Immediately after the exchange about the housekeeper, the translation system stopped working, and both candidates were taken off stage for several minutes and placed in separate holding areas.
Unemployment, home foreclosures, education and the water shortage in the Central Valley also played prominent roles in the clash, but illegal immigration provided the sharpest contrast between the candidates, with Brown supporting a path to citizenship for undocumented workers and Whitman opposing one. Brown repeatedly accused Whitman of “talking out of both sides of her mouth” as she appeals to Latinos. Whitman stood by her proposals, including a guest-worker program, and emphasized instead her plans to create jobs and improve education, two areas of considerable interest to Latinos since the economy has disproportionately affected them.
Latinos are an emerging political force in California, representing 21% of the electorate, compared with 10% two decades ago. In 2008, they made up 18% of general-election voters. Republicans have long seen an opportunity to regain ground because many Latinos share some of the core values of the party, such as social conservatism, and are small-business owners. But until now GOP candidates have lacked the resources to make an all-out push for their votes.
Whitman, who has put $119 million of her own money into her campaign, has launched an aggressive outreach effort, flooding Spanish-language radio and TV and opening neighborhood offices in cities with large Latino populations. Brown, on the other hand, ran a bare-bones campaign through the summer, relying on labor unions to carry his message until last month when he began airing his own ads.
michael.mishak@latimes.com
Brown, Whitman tangle over illegal immigration in debate
The well-trod sidewalk beside a busy urban boulevard is an unlikely place for a young man’s memorial, but there it is, chained to a signpost outside a furniture store: a man’s bicycle painted ghostly white. Flowers cover the frame and snake up the signpost, and a rust-colored shawl is tied carefully to the handlebars.
For months after her son Asif’s death on the adjacent street, Lizi Rahman would visit the bicycle at least twice a week. Sometimes she would stand in the middle of the wide, buzzing avenue and visualize Asif, 22, riding alongside the buses, trucks, cars and other cyclists.
“When I go there, it’s like I see him,” said Rahman, who still can’t believe that anyone could have missed her nearly 6-foot-tall son as he pedaled home one afternoon in February 2008. But a truck driver hit and killed Asif, and the so-called ghost bike erected in his honor is now one of nearly 70 in New York City, planted near the spots where riders were killed.
The practice began here in 2005 after 28-year-old Elizabeth Padilla died beneath the wheels of an ice cream delivery truck in Brooklyn. It was started two years earlier in St. Louis, where volunteers began erecting ashy white bikes to remember fallen cyclists. Now, there are ghost bikes in as many as 134 cities in 35 states and 21 countries, according to http://www.ghostbikes.org, which tracks the activities of the volunteer groups that maintain the bicycles.
Few have as many ghost bikes as New York, and as with most things that occupy precious public space in this overcrowded city, they have caught the attention of city officials. In June, the Department of Sanitation said it planned to remove “derelict” bikes, including ghost bikes, saying they denied other bicyclists parking spots and could block sidewalks or streets.
The department backed down this month after biking advocates argued that ghost bikes are memorials, not abandoned piles of steel. But people like Mary Beth Kelly, whose husband, Carl Henry Nacht, was killed while bicycling, said the battle showed the difficulties of getting the city to spotlight the hazards cyclists face, even as it encourages cycling and creates new bike lanes.
“We are trying to make New York a more livable city, and that means alternative means of transportation have to be made available and safe,” Kelly said. “These bikes serve as reminders that we’re only halfway there.”
The challenge of keeping growing numbers of bicyclists safe is not confined to New York, where commuter cycling has more than doubled since 2005. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa broke his elbow in July when he crashed his bike while avoiding a taxi that pulled in front of him. City biking advocates said the incident underscored their demands for more bike lanes and better enforcement of laws to prosecute drivers who endanger cyclists.
According to ghostbikes.org, there are at least seven ghost bikes in Los Angeles, in addition to smaller collections of bikes in Newport Beach, San Clemente, San Diego, Bakersfield and Fresno. The latest Los Angeles ghost bike was erected in February 2010 in memory of Ovidio Morales, 34, who was hit and killed by a driver while riding his bike in Compton.
Nationwide, the bicycle fatality rate has topped 700 annually since 2004. In 2008, the last year for which figures are available, the number was 716, including 42 in New York and 109 in California, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Lizi Rahman hadn’t heard of the ghost bikes before her son was killed in New York, but now she views them as a way of raising awareness among pedestrians, cyclists and drivers. She still visits Asif’s ghost bike a couple of times a month, and she keeps an eye on it when she drives by to make sure it hasn’t been knocked over. She notices when someone has left flowers or other mementos.
The scarf appeared recently. “It’s nicely wrapped around the front,” Rahman said. “Someone who loves him, adores him, came and in his memory put a scarf around it.”
Such gestures are common for the ghost bikes that dot New York’s five boroughs. With their white frames and tires and garlands of flowers, the bicycles are startling amid the gray and black of the city streets. Passersby sometimes stop abruptly, then move closer to read the signs that accompany each one. Rahman and Kelly say the bicycles could save lives by reminding people of the hazards on New York’s crowded streets.
But not everyone who has lost a loved one to a cycling tragedy embraces them. The parents of 8-year-old Alexander Toulouse still try to avoid the Brooklyn intersection where their son was killed by a post office truck in 2008, and they declined the invitation to attend his ghost bike’s unveiling.
“Alexander Toulouse. 8 years old. Killed by a truck. Sept. 6, 2008. Rest in peace,” the sign on the white children’s bicycle reads. On the anniversary of his death, someone left a cup filled with colored daisies on the sidewalk beside the bike.
“It is a good idea to highlight cycling fatalities,” Alexander’s father, Chris Toulouse, said in an e-mail, but he said ghost bikes were no substitute for the city making drivers more aware of bike lanes and making cyclists more diligent about obeying traffic rules. And for him and his wife, at least, they are more of a painful reminder than a pleasant memorial.
Though most ghost bikes are old and donated by bike shops, the bicycle memorializing Nacht is one the doctor used for commuting. It replaced the original donated ghost bike, which was smashed by a car even though it was off the street and beside a designated bike path that skirts the Hudson River in Manhattan.
Nacht and Kelly were pedaling along the popular path in June 2006 when a police tow truck turned onto the path from the street, hitting Nacht.
“That bike has particular meaning to me,” Kelly said of the current ghost bike, which she offered to volunteers after the first one was wrecked. Nacht would have turned 61 on Sept. 10, so Kelly did what she always does to memorialize his birthday: She visited his old bike and filled its basket with flowers.
But memories are only part of the reason Kelly says the ghost bike must remain. “It has a very important message, which is that cyclists even on a bike path cannot be protected enough,” said Kelly, who like Rahman was active in the campaign to preserve ghost bikes.
They are resting more easily now that sanitation officials have changed their tune, but Leah Todd of the Street Memorial Project said there could be battles ahead as the number of ghost bikes grows to match the number of bicyclists killed.
“I’m never confident that there will be a last fight,” Todd said.
Police, meanwhile, announced the death of another cyclist on Sept. 11: a 23-year-old woman run over by a city bus after being knocked off her bike by a driver who opened a car door into her path.
tina.susman@latimes.com
‘Ghost bikes’ stand in memory of fallen cyclists
The candidates vying to be California’s next governor had their first face-to-face debate Tuesday evening, a polite but contentious exchange in which Republican Meg Whitman and Democrat Jerry Brown largely stuck to their campaign stump scripts, questioning each other’s fitness to lead the state and accusing their opponent of being beholden to campaign contributors.
Whitman repeatedly hammered Brown for his union ties, saying he would be unable to renegotiate pension contracts after labor unions spent millions of dollars propping up his candidacy.
“He will bring people together — it will be a meeting of all of the special interests and the unions who are there collecting IOUs from the campaign they have funded,” she said before 750 audience members in the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts at UC Davis. “I will not owe anything to anyone and I will do what is right for the people of California.”
Brown countered that Whitman has received $25 million from wealthy contributors who would directly benefit from her plan to eliminate the state capital gains tax, which he said would blow a $5-billion hole in the state budget.
“This is a little bit like the kettle calling the pot black,” he said. “That $5 billion comes right out of the general fund…. It’s from schools, from kids, from teachers … to the most powerful and big campaign contributors.”
Brown and Whitman are locked in a tight race, which is remarkable because of Whitman’s record-breaking spending and Democrats‘ double-digit voter registration advantage in California. Interest in their first matchup was intense, with more than 130 journalists covering the event, serving outlets as far away as China, Germany and Japan. A couple hundred protesters milled outside.
The most amusing exchange occurred when a moderator noted that Brown twice ran for president when he was governor previously and asked what would prevent him from doing so again.
“Age,” Brown said. Then he grinned and continued: “Hell, if I was younger, you know I’d be running again.”
But “I now have a wife, I come home at night, I don’t try to close down the bars in Sacramento like I used to do when I was governor of California. I’m going to spend more time in Sacramento and get it done,” he said. “So don’t worry about that; I’m in for the duration here.”
Much of the exchange focused on which candidate is best prepared to fix the state’s flawed government and to spur economic growth and job creation — the billionaire former corporate chief who says her business experience will help right California, or the longtime politician who says his decades in public service mean he alone can bring together the state’s dysfunctional legislators.
Brown said he thought long and hard before deciding to run, and chose to do so because he believes his political experience could help the state weather its current hardships.
“I care a great deal about public service. I think it’s honorable. I’ve lived in this state all my life, I love it, I voted here all my life,” he said. And “God willing,” he added, he would die in California.
Whitman responded that shaking up the status quo takes a new approach.
“My view is if we’re going to change the direction of the state, we have to do it very differently,” she said. “My approach is anchored in focus. I want to do three things really well to restore the faith of the people in California can have in their government.” She said she wanted to cut government spending, create jobs and fix schools.
They also discussed immigration, with Brown favoring a path to citizenship for those in the country illegally and Whitman opposing. And Whitman reiterated her apology for not voting for much of her adult life.
The meeting, sponsored by Capital Public Radio, NBC’s KCRA-TV in Sacramento, the Sacramento Bee and UC Davis, was the first of three debates scheduled before the November election. The next one is Saturday in Fresno.
The U.S. Labor Department issued a critical report on enforcement of workplace safety in California on Tuesday and ordered the state to fix myriad problems, including poor training of safety inspectors and delays in responding to complaints.
Federal officials took aim at the state Division of Occupational Safety and Health, saying, among other things, that inspectors do not always review a company’s history statewide before deciding whether to cite it for repeat violations. They also found that the division’s appeals process “falls short.”
The problems found with California’s program were “relatively serious, especially with the appeals board,” said Jordan Barab, deputy assistant secretary of Labor for occupational safety and health.
The Labor Department’s review mirrors many of the findings of a Times investigation last fall that found the division’s appeals board repeatedly reduced or dismissed penalties levied by health and safety inspectors, even in situations in which workers died or were seriously injured.
The Times highlighted the case of Bimbo Bakeries USA, where nine employees have lost parts of fingers or a limb in several California plants since 2003. After most of those accidents, investigators found that baking machines did not have proper guards to prevent employees from reaching in to dislodge dough that got stuck. It is not clear that inspectors recognized the problem as a pattern across the plants.
Many of the penalties levied by the Cal/OSHA were dismissed or reduced on technicalities by judges working for the appeals board, so the company wasn’t required to immediately fix hazards.
The Times focused on several serious examples, including the case of a worker on the Golden Gate Bridge, Kevin Scott Noah, who plummeted 50 feet to his death.
A Cal/OSHA investigator concluded that the contractor had not provided employees with scaffolds; it issued three “serious” citations and a $26,000 fine, records show.
The contractor appealed on the grounds that Cal/OSHA had issued the citations to Shimmick Obayashi, the name listed on the company’s business cards. The company’s full name was the Shimmick Construction Co. Inc./Obayashi Corp.
An administrative law judge tossed the case out, writing that Cal/OSHA had failed to determine the company’s legal name.
Candice Traeger, chairwoman of Cal/OSHA’s appeals board, could not be reached Tuesday for comment
Workplace safety advocates hailed the federal government’s action, saying it underscored that safety in California has been suffering for years.
“I don’t think people realize how broken our system is,” said Gail Bateson, executive director of Worksafe, a nonprofit that advocates for workers.
But Len Welsh, the chief of the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, took issue with some of the more than 40 findings about his division.
“They got a lot of stuff frankly wrong, and embarrassingly so,” he said. For example, he said, one finding accuses the division of not opening investigations into seven fatal accidents quickly enough. But another finding says there were two such accidents. When his office questioned the findings, federal officials couldn’t explain the discrepancy, he said.
Cal/OSHA and the appeals board have 30 days to respond to the report and develop corrective plans.
The general review of California’s program was part of a larger examination of all 25 U.S. states that run their own workplace safety programs under the jurisdiction of the federal program. Serious problems were also found with Hawaii’s program, which could be taken over by the federal government.
jessica.garrison@latimes.com
Cal/OSHA ordered to improve workplace safety
A federal judge Tuesday blocked the execution of convicted rapist and murderer Albert Greenwood Brown, saying there was “no way” the court could conduct an adequate review of California’s new lethal-injection procedures before the death sentence was to be carried out Thursday.
U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel in effect reversed his Friday decision that the execution could go forward if the state gave Brown the option of dying by a single-injection method used in other states, rather than the three-drug cocktail prescribed by California’s new regulations.
Earlier today, Fogel had asked attorneys to weigh in on the state’s new procedures for carrying out lethal injections, including how similar and different they are from the older rules that the judge had previously found to be flawed.
Time has become a crucial factor in whether Brown will be put to death this year.
The attorney general’s office has said that the state’s supply of a key drug that renders condemned prisoners unconscious will expire on Friday and that further executions would have to wait until at least next year, when new supplies are expected.
Brown was convicted of raping and killing a 15-year-old Riverside girl in 1980.
Judge blocks California’s first execution in five years
It was just before 11 a.m. when Isabel Marroquin Tambriz once more began to cry. Her wails were so piercing they rose above the brass band. They traveled down the dirt paths of the village, which grew ever more crowded with mourners.
“Walijoq caewaj!” she yelled over and over in Quiche. Wake up, my love. Wake up, my love.
In a casket outside her cinder-block home lay the body of her husband, Manuel Jaminez Xum. He was dressed in a pinstripe three-piece suit, finer than anything he’d worn when he was alive.
Following Maya tradition, his family had filled the coffin with the few clothes he owned so his spirit would not return to haunt them. For protection in the afterlife, near his right arm, they tucked a sword carved out of wood.
Los Angeles police say the 37-year-old man, whom acquaintances in California had identified as Manuel Jamines, was drunk and threatening two women with a knife when an officer shot him Sept. 5 in Westlake. Word of the shooting prompted protests in the neighborhood, where angry residents threw things at police.
In Guatemala, too, his death was news. Political leaders spoke out in his defense. And the day before his funeral, a throng of media lined up in Guatemala City for the arrival of the day laborer’s body, flown back from Los Angeles, where he had lived for seven years.
Five hours to the west in his damp, lush village on the steep slope of a small volcano named Xac, or Charred One, the Maya community of 2,000 reacted to the shooting with shock and indignation. In the decade or so since they began sending their men to the United States, Jaminez Xum was the first to have died there.
Like many of the 6 million Mayas who make up nearly half of Guatemala’s population, the people of Xexac have little to do with the outside world. They speak to each other in the Maya highlands language of Quiche. They cook with firewood. Converts to Christianity, they have six churches in the village but only two cars. Some of the young boys have skinny jeans and spiky hair, but the women dress in traditional knitted skirts and cotton shirts embroidered with brilliantly colored flowers.
Ten years ago, many in Xexac had never seen Guatemala City, let alone the United States.
“We didn’t know what Los Estados Unidos meant,” said Diego Guarchaj y Guarchaj, a childhood friend of Jaminez Xum.
Then a man from the village followed his wife’s relatives to Westlake and changed everything.
Diego Ixquiactap began to make money, hundreds of dollars each week. He started buying village land and built something never before seen in this world of wooden shacks: a white-washed, concrete block house with arched windows and doorway.
“It was beautiful,” Guarchaj y Guarchaj said. “Everyone saw it and knew we had to go too.”
In the years that followed, 60 to 70 men left Xexac, most of them to join brothers and cousins as day laborers in Westlake. They borrowed $3,500 to $5,000 from private lenders in nearby towns to pay their smugglers. And they agreed to pay 10% to 20% interest on the loans each month once they got to Los Angeles.
It was a risky decision.
Those who found steady work soon paid off their debt and began to construct their houses in Xexac — hacienda-like structures in pastel colors with Spanish colonial-style columns, spacious porches and wrought-iron windows. Those who struggled saw their debt climb and only seemed to worsen their families’ plight.
Jaminez Xum, an orphan raised by an uncle from the age of 2, decided to take his chances in 2003 when he realized that the $15 a week he was making in the coffee plantations would never be enough to properly care for his wife and his three young sons. Tired of living in a dark, cinder-block room with a dirt floor, no bathroom and nothing but wooden planks to sleep on, he wanted a real home with a garden and a porch.
His wife imagined it too as she walked past the nice homes built with money from America.
“It’s good,” Isabel told him. “You should go.”
Protests over police shooting resonate all the way to Guatemala
Pistachio vinyl covers the gurney in the state’s new lethal injection chamber, the only splash of color in a sterile white room where corrections officials intend to put to death rapist-murderer Albert Greenwood Brown next week.
An Elgin clock, the only other furnishing, ticks above the death bed, tracking the time to the first execution to be carried out in California in nearly five years — unless a judge moves to stop it.
The hexagonal room surrounded by viewing compartments and a holding cell where Brown is expected to spend his last six hours were built to comply with a federal court order that state officials correct deficiencies in the execution regimen. U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel halted the February 2006 execution of murderer Michael Morales after hearing testimony about inadequate anesthesia and cramped conditions in the former gas chamber.
Fogel’s order set in motion a legal duel between those who want capital punishment practiced in a state where two out of three citizens support the ultimate penalty and those who oppose executions on moral, religious and economic grounds and have used the hiatus to challenge its validity in state and federal court.
“We are fully prepared to carry out an execution on Sept. 29,” San Quentin State Prison Warden Vincent Cullen said as he accompanied journalists on a tour of the facility housed in a cinderblock annex to the prison’s teeming East Wing.
At 200 square feet, the lethal injection chamber built with inmate labor and $853,000 in taxpayer money is more than four times the size of the old metal-walled gas chamber used for two executions by lethal gas and 11 by lethal injection since capital punishment was restored in 1977.
Vials of the three drugs used to execute the condemned are stored in a caged and locked refrigerator in the death chamber’s adjacent Infusion Control Room. Sodium thiopental would be pumped through first, to anesthetize the inmate, then pancurium bromide to paralyze him and, finally, potassium chloride to stop his heart. Two grommeted holes in the wall on either side of the gurney would be threaded with tubes to carry the lethal infusions from the masked execution team in the control room to the veins of the inmate. The inmate would be restrained by five black straps across the body and cuffs to steady his arms and ankles. Four tan wall phones with red warning lights stand ready to receive calls from the governor, the warden, the state attorney general and the U.S. Supreme Court, should a last-minute clemency be granted.
Fogel has yet to inspect the new death chamber or review the revised execution procedures drafted by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation over the last three years and approved by a state agency in July. But department spokeswoman Terry Thornton pointed out Tuesday that the Morales case wasn’t a class action on behalf of all death row inmates and posed no barrier to Brown’s scheduled death by lethal injection.
The warren of rooms being readied for their first use are silent, in stark contrast with the grunts and shouts and thunderous footfalls emanating from the concertina-wire-enclosed rooftop recreation yard where maximum-security inmates exercise high above the sparkling waters of San Francisco Bay. A fog-shrouded skyline is visible on the horizon.
Lethal injection is the “default” method of execution in California, with the gas chamber still available and fully functional if a condemned prisoner should choose that over lethal injection, said Lt. Sam Robinson, public information officer for San Quentin.
Brown’s attorney, Jan B. Norman of Los Angeles, has petitioned Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to grant her client a reprieve so that the next governor can consider the prisoner’s request for clemency. Schwarzenegger, who leaves office in January, has said he wants to resume executions as soon as possible. Norman criticized the rapid-fire moves to resume executions since the new protocols were adopted six weeks ago and accused the governor and his lawyers of “a headlong rush to execute as many people as quickly as possible and to sabotage the ability of inmates’ counsel to respond.”
Brown, who raped and murdered a 15-year-old girl in 1980, is one of 708 California prisoners on death row, including 18 women. Only a handful have exhausted all appeals and are eligible to be issued death warrants.
A state appeals court on Monday lifted an injunction against executions that had been imposed by a Marin County judge, clearing away the last legal hurdle to fulfilling the death warrant issued by a Riverside County judge for 56-year-old Brown.
carol.williams@latimes.com
Clock is ticking on first execution at San Quentin’s revamped death chamber
California’s deeply troubled labor market took another hit in August as employers laid off more workers than expected, renewing fears that the state’s economic recovery has stalled.
Employers cut 33,500 jobs, marking the third straight month of losses and pushing the state’s unemployment rate to 12.4%, up from 12.3% in July, according to data released Friday by the Employment Development Department. California has lost 113,100 jobs since August 2009.
Last month’s losses were widespread, hitting almost all sectors, including construction, manufacturing, financial services, leisure and hospitality, trade, transportation and utilities. Government was the biggest loser, shedding 9,200 jobs, most of them temporary census positions.
“The thing that is disconcerting is that we have lost jobs in virtually every industry,” said Sung Won Sohn, an economist and UC Channel Islands professor. “At this stage of an economic recovery, we should be doing much better.”
California has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, well above the national rate of 9.6%.
The deteriorating job market is bad news for the Golden State’s 2.3 million unemployed workers. Almost 1 million of them have been jobless for more than six months. And nearly 200,000 have exhausted their unemployment benefits, which last up to 99 weeks.
Some of the unemployed — discouraged or depressed — have quit looking for work. About 926,000 such Californians who are no longer counted as unemployed said they want a job, according to the most recent state government figures. Some are going back to school or retraining for other careers. Others are retiring early or applying for disability insurance.
California’s labor force participation rate, which measures the percentage of the population working or actively seeking a job, fell to 64.2% in July from 66% in July 2008. Economists said that’s a worrisome decline that could hurt the state’s productivity down the road.
“When the economy turns south, people exit the labor market,” said Mary Daly, a vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco who has studied the trend. “They search and search and don’t find anything, so they just stop looking for work.”
Applications to the Social Security disability insurance program are projected to reach 3.3 million in the 2010 fiscal year, a 27% jump from 2008, according to Mark Hinkle, a spokesman for the agency. In California, applications increased to 287,000 in the 2009 fiscal year, up 12% from the year before.
“As the economy has gotten worse, the applications have gone up at a pretty steady correlation,” said Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue.
Mark Allen Jr., 29, lost his job at a mortuary in downtown Los Angeles in April and has been unable find new employment. His car was repossessed two weeks ago and he’s barely making his rent. Allen said he had been battling medical problems for a few years. After consulting a lawyer, he’s now in the process of applying for disability benefits.
“It’s absolutely a last resort,” he said. “I really don’t know where to turn before I am totally out on the street.”
Other unemployed workers are going back to school. Community colleges throughout the state are experiencing “unprecedented demand,” said Paige Marlatt Dorr, a spokeswoman for California Community Colleges, the largest higher education system in the nation.
But because of funding cuts, campuses had to turn away 140,000 students in the 2009-10 school year, she said.
Rosemead resident Queenie Luc, 52, is studying commercial and medical billing at Los Angeles City College. She lost her job in 2008 when the garment factory that she managed closed.
“I just want to finish so I can find a job,” Luc said.
But so far, California employers have shown little confidence in the strength of the economic recovery.
“Businesses are still really cautious and are taking a wait-and-see attitude,” said Jerry Nickelsburg, senior economist at the UCLA Anderson Forecast.
Los Angeles County lost 12,800 jobs in August as the unemployment rate rose to 12.6% from a revised 12.4% in July. Manufacturing, information and government experienced significant job losses. But construction and professional and business services gained jobs.
Orange County’s unemployment rate fell to 9.6% in August, from a revised 9.9% in July. The county lost 2,300 jobs, with the biggest losses in government, educational and health services and trade.
In the Riverside-San Bernardino metro area, the unemployment rate fell to 14.8% from a revised 15.1% in July. Job losses were modest, with payrolls down by only 100 positions. Still, that area has lost 22,700 jobs over the last year.
San Diego County lost 2,200 jobs in August, and its unemployment rate dropped to 10.6% from a revised 10.9% in July. Ventura County added 500 jobs as its unemployment rate fell slightly to 11.2% from 11.3% the month before.
Cristina Molinari, 60, has been out of work since July 2008 and ran out of benefits in April. The Woodland Hills resident worries that because of her age no one will hire her. A onetime computer programmer, she says she has been told that her skills are outdated, or, alternatively, that she’s overqualified.
She recently called the Social Security Administration to inquire about receiving benefits early. They said she was too young for Social Security but recommended she apply for disability insurance.
“It’s ironic that I’m too young for that. Because as far as the job market, I’m too old to be hired,” she said. “It’s pretty tough.”
alana.semuels@latimes.com
