Ventura County Labor

As laborers return to the ballot box today to break a deadlock in a representation election at the nation's largest strawberry grower, the United Farm Workers union and a rival committee have stepped up campaigns in the fields around Oxnard in an effort to win the high-stakes organizing vote. Pickers arriving at work Wednesday morning were greeted by an informational picket outside a Coastal Berry Co.

More than $54,000 has poured into campaign coffers in the crowded race for Ventura City Council, with two pro-growth candidates and an incumbent slow-growth councilman collecting the biggest share of donations. By the 5 p.m. deadline Thursday, 11 of the 19 candidates for the three open City Council seats had filed financial disclosure forms as required by state law. Eighteen of the candidates are registered and one is running a write-in campaign.

Richard Urban Underwood, a fourth-generation Ventura County farmer, died of pneumonia New Year's Eve at St. John's Pleasant Valley Hospital in Camarillo. He was 83. He was born July 8, 1916, in Santa Paula at his family's former home, which is now included on tours by the Santa Paula Historic Society. Underwood attended UCLA and UC Davis. He started farming grain around his small home on the present site of Moorpark High School.

The chief of Ventura County's largest labor union narrowly survived a move Tuesday to fire him, the third ouster attempt in 28 years. Board members representing about 4,000 county and city workers in Service Employees International Union Local 998 gave Executive Director Barry Hammitt a 29-17 vote of no confidence, three votes shy of the two-thirds majority needed to terminate his contract.

Ventura County's largest labor union has filed a lawsuit accusing the county of using temporary employees to fill jobs that should be full-time civil service positions, which the union maintains is a violation of state law. Officials of Service Employees International Union Local 998 allege that the county has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to temporary employment agencies in the past year for services including clerical, maintenance and landscaping duties.

In what farm-worker advocates call a key victory, a federal judge has returned to state court a lawsuit against a Santa Paula labor contractor stemming from use of a controversial employment program designed to offset worker shortages. The lawsuit was filed last year on behalf of 10 Mexican laborers brought to Ventura County by labor broker Ralph De Leon under the federal guest-worker program.

Two dozen critics of the proposed $1-billion Ahmanson Ranch project told Ventura County supervisors on Wednesday that an environmental study of the new mini-city is seriously flawed and that the development should not be built in the rolling hills near Calabasas. But an equal number of speakers at the four-hour hearing in Thousand Oaks supported Ahmanson Land Co.'s plan to build a 3,050-dwelling community on 2,800 acres inside Ventura County at the Los Angeles County line.

The Ventura County economy continued charging into 1999 with the same gusto it exhibited in late 1998, racking up solid home sales and a low 4.9% unemployment rate. Last month, 917 homes were sold in the county--up more than 26% from February 1998, according to a report by a La Jolla-based research firm. The median home price also grew 9.5% over the same period last year to $219,000. The figures include new and resale homes as well as condominiums.

It was a novel experiment in California agriculture, this controversial plan by Ventura County labor contractor Ralph De Leon to import Mexican laborers to pick lemons near Somis. Tapping a federal program, the veteran Santa Paula labor broker employed 38 guest workers for two months earlier this year, picking them up at the border and putting them to work in the county's citrus heartland. He provided housing, three meals a day and transportation to and from the lemon groves.

The application process for legalization of undocumented farm workers began slowly Monday amid widespread anxiety, fear and confusion over the new immigration law and scattered reports of shortages in agricultural labor up and down the state of California. Like those illegal aliens eligible for general amnesty who have been applying for legalization in a slow and cautious stream since May 5, farm laborers appear to be in no rush for judgment.