United Neighborhoods Organization

Los Angeles-area activists campaigning for a major increase in the minimum wage claimed a second corporate ally Thursday when The Boys Markets Inc. announced that it supports a "substantial increase" in the $3.35-an-hour standard. The Ralphs grocery chain issued a similar statement last week.

More than 500 members of the United Neighborhoods Organization and Southeast area residents attended a meeting at a Huntington Park church Monday night to demand that Chem-Clear Inc. drop its plan to build a hazardous waste treatment plant in neighboring Vernon. But Chem-Clear's regional general manager, Martin L. Smith, said his firm refuses to scrap its plan to build the treatment facility in an abandoned factory at Slauson and Boyle avenues in heavily industrialized Vernon.

A campaign forum on the so-called "Save Our State" initiative at the Museum of Tolerance was briefly disrupted Tuesday night by members of several Los Angeles-area community groups who charged that the November ballot measure, which would eliminate most government services to illegal immigrants, is racist.

Officials of the United Neighborhoods Organization on Wednesday said they are "prepared to fight" if Chem-Clear Inc. does not quickly abandon its plan to build a hazardous waste treatment plant near Huntington Park High School. UNO leaders, speaking at a press conference on the steps of Huntington Park City Hall, set a Nov. 4 deadline for Chem-Clear to agree to withdraw. But Father Rody Gorman, pastor of St.

Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, commenting on the volatile issue of police deployment, said the Police Department has been overly generous in assigning officers to South-Central Los Angeles. If there has been an error, Gates told a meeting of Hollywood neighborhood groups Tuesday night, it has been in "deploying a greater balance" to South-Central Los Angeles.

About 15,000 people in Los Angeles County could be ousted from their homes under new rules denying federal housing subsidies to undocumented aliens, leaders of an Eastside neighborhood action group said Saturday. When the policy was announced in April, the Department of Housing and Urban Development said the rules are intended to reserve limited housing "for persons with the most legitimate claim--namely, citizens and other persons lawfully present in the United States."

Chanting "Stay out of our churches," about two dozen Protestant and Catholic religious leaders from throughout Los Angeles County on Monday joined a protest against what they called the desecration of an Orange County Catholic church last week by an immigration agent who entered in pursuit of two illegal aliens.

Two Los Angeles community groups have prepared a plan to help reverse the city's relatively high dropout rate with the promise of jobs for students at six high schools. It is an incentive worth trying. The United Neighborhoods Organization and the South-Central Organizing Committee are sponsors of the plan. They want to assure employment for graduates of six targeted high schools. To qualify, the students would be required to have at least a C+ average and a 95% attendance record.

I was stunned by Los Angeles Chief of Police Daryl F. Gates' response (Letters, April 14) to my article (Editorial Pages, April 10) on City Councilman Robert Farrell's single-district tax plan for more policemen. I do not understand why Gates supports the beginning of a process to dismantle a citywide approach to fighting crime. Instead of a united war on crime, the Farrell plan will divide Los Angeles into neighborhoods, or block by block, hiring of policemen based on ability to pay. We could end up with 15 City Council members with their own uneven district police units.

How the mayoral candidates spent their day: A shoving match erupted outside Richard Riordan's downtown law office between his supporters and black lawyers protesting his firm's hiring record. Michael Woo said his campaign did not paste swastikas on Riordan's campaign signs, and claimed Riordan made up the accusation to divert attention from the fact that a Riordan volunteer heckled President Clinton during his Los Angeles visit. (Riordan workers said the heckler acted alone.