June 18, 2001, NY Times A Fertile Farm Region Pays Its Jobless to Quit California

By EVELYN NIEVES

VANHOE, Calif. — After decades of trying to cobble together a living in the Central Valley — cleaning budget motel rooms, picking vegetables in the boiling hot summer, emptying bedpans for homebound elderly people and, lately, scraping by on a $616-a-month welfare check — Lorrie Gedert decided enough was enough.

She was broke, and three months behind in the $300 rent on her apartment, but leaving turned out to be a cakewalk. Tulare County, as Ms. Gedert, 36, learned from a flier that arrived in the mail with her assistance check, offers welfare recipients an extraordinary option: It pays them to move away.

Over the last three years, Tulare County has paid more than 750 welfare recipients like Ms. Gedert an average of $1,600 a family to move almost anywhere in the country. For Tulare, one of the poorest counties in the country, giving welfare recipients a one-way ticket out is one solution to an unemployment rate that wavers between 15 and 20 percent.

Critics of the program, which has expanded to two other counties, say it shows that the Central Valley has resigned itself to entrenched poverty, and they fault officials for paying to move people without first securing them jobs at their chosen destinations.

But Ms. Gedert has no complaints. Just two weeks after calling the program office, on June 7, she and her daughters, ages 15 and 20, were on their way to a new life, armed with nearly $3,000 in county-issued checks for the truck rental, gas, food and lodging for an 1,800-mile trip to Little Rock, Ark.

"It just seems like it'll be a whole lot better there," Ms. Gedert said as she watched some neighborhood children and her 18-year-old son, who has enlisted in the Navy, load the last of her kitchen knickknacks into a 24- foot Ryder truck. "Anywhere," she added, "is better than here."

While Ms. Gedert does not have a job lined up in Little Rock, she has connections. Her boyfriend, who moved there six months ago, works in landscaping and says he can get her a job doing the same.

If that does not pan out, she said, she will follow up on what she saw on a visit there in May. Help-wanted signs were in 10 or 15 stores, she said, and there are always opportunities to work as a maid or a home- care aide.

To officials here, the relocation assistance offers the best if not only way for the valley's unemployed, uneducated poor to progress, especially since the 1996 federal welfare bill put a five-year lifetime limit on welfare benefits.

The program was expanded to Kings County, west of Tulare, in October, and to Fresno County, the heart of what is known as the Central Valley's San Joaquin Valley farm belt, in March.

The rapid growth of the program says much about this large swath of California, long mired in poverty. While the Central Valley is the richest food-producing region in the world, it is also one of the poorest places in the country. Unemployment in the valley, with 5 million residents in 18 counties, averages about 10 percent, about three times the national average. In Tulare, the unemployment rate is 15 percent in the best of times.

And many of the small farm towns in Tulare, which has a population of 368,000, and other parts of the valley, where virtually all the work is seasonal, have much higher unemployment, up to 50 percent. Tulare's labor pool of about 150,000 people includes 10,500 families that receive welfare.

While its green fields and ripening crops give Tulare a country beauty, much of its housing consists of modest single-family homes, boxy concrete apartment complexes and, along back roads, shacky farmhouses.

More than a third of Tulare's residents receive some kind of public assistance, census figures show, and the figures in other counties, particularly in the southern end, are not much less. Many officials here will point out that if the Central Valley were a state, it would have the nation's most depressed economy.

"We are giving hope to people who are facing close to starvation," said Frank Escobar, who manages Tulare's relocation program, known by its acronym, MOVE, or More Opportunities for Viable Employment. "We are really a relief valve to the large unemployment problem and the poverty of the Central Valley because families are moved and working full time, able to get off welfare, able to save enough money to start thinking about buying a house."

Since the program began, Tulare County has moved welfare recipients to more than 40 states at a savings to taxpayers of about $3.5 million a year, says the program's employment supervisor, Karen Davidson. "And that's just for the welfare checks, and that's just in Tulare County," she said. "That doesn't include the other benefits, like medical, food stamps, assistance for their children, et cetera."

Ms. Davidson said that 85 percent of the former welfare recipients (55 percent of whom are white, 35 percent Hispanic and the rest Asian and black) had found jobs where they relocated, at least for the six months that the program tracked them.

"When there's enough permanent jobs in the valley," Ms. Davidson said, "we'll stop moving people out."

A smattering of states, including Kentucky and Oregon, have also paid welfare recipients to relocate. But the Central Valley's program is the most elaborate of its kind.

Perhaps in part because of the valley's poverty and swelling pool of willing workers, the relocation program has not met the sort of intense resistance encountered by big cities that have tried to push people off welfare rolls. But to critics like Joseph Penbera, an economist and chief economic adviser for Fresno County, the program sends a distressing signal that the valley lacks the initiative to solve its chronic unemployment and attract jobs.

"I remember when we had 9 percent unemployment in Appalachia in the late 60's — it was 50 percent higher than the national average — and it generated outrage and all kinds of roads and development programs," Mr. Penbera said. "In Tulare, unemployment is six times the national average and nobody is saying anything. There's a high degree of ineptitude that makes it difficult to change the status quo."

Just why the Central Valley was left behind during the nation's great economic prosperity of the 1990's is open to debate. The New Economy passed over the valley without leaving so much as a tread mark. But blaming the seasonal agricultural labor market for the Central Valley's poverty and unemployment is simplistic, Mr. Penbera said. Technology has made farming more efficient, so that fewer workers are needed these days, he said. And the Central Valley's lack of investment in infrastructure has deterred companies from relocating here.

It is as if the Central Valley has flown the white flag, given up on ever trying to improve its lot, the economist suggested.

"We need the roads and the connections to roads that will attract companies," Mr. Penbera said. "We also need training programs. Instead of relocating people, we should be training them. There are companies who are begging for skilled laborers."

Other critics say the program should offer residents more than a few job leads and a check. Pablo Espinoza, director of the American Friends Service Committee's farm workers project in Tulare, said the county should secure jobs for people before they are sent out.

"What happens if the promise doesn't come through?" Mr. Espinoza said. "What are you going to do in a new place, where you don't know anybody, with a family, and you don't have any money?"

The program does require that its clients move where unemployment is under 5 percent, Ms. Davidson said. It also insists that clients have jobs secured if they move within California and awards up to $600 in incentives for those who find and keep jobs. Those who decide to move back must agree to repay the program for the relocation costs if they reapply for public assistance.

Clients of MOVE, who were referred by the program to a reporter to be interviewed for this article, had recently relocated and sounded blissfully happy.

Belinda Hernandez, 27, who left Dinuba, a small farm town in Tulare, for Sparks, Nev., in October, said: "I love it here. I'm not going back. I didn't know anybody here, but I got through it, I did it."

In Tulare, she had worked dead- end jobs for the minimum wage. She had waited tables, worked in a packing house and swept floors in commercial buildings. For a while, she also collected $200 to $300 a month in food stamps and about $400 a month in welfare, she said.

"They had sent me a letter with my food stamps," she said of the MOVE program. "And so I decided, well, I'm going to try this."

Her first few weeks were a bit rocky. The program had given her $2,700 for moving expenses and a job lead at America West Airlines in Sparks, but she turned the job down because of the flying demands and found work in one day as a leasing consultant to an apartment complex.

"I left all my family back in California," she said, "and now they want to follow me here."

Gloria Dickerson, 25, and her husband, Nathan, 27, moved from Visalia, Calif., to Ocala, Fla., in April with their daughter, Emily, 3, and their son, Drake, 1.

In Visalia, the couple was on public assistance because of an accident Mr. Dickerson had suffered when he fell off a ladder while working at an animal shelter. They were receiving $350 in food stamps and $416 in welfare each month. But though the welfare department paid for her to get a high school diploma and an accounting clerk certificate, she could not find a job.

They had already decided to move to Ocala, where her sister lives, when they learned of the relocation program.

"We qualified and they got us going pretty quick," Ms. Dickerson said. "The MOVE program paid for the U-Haul rental, plus they gave us about $500 for hotel, food and gas."

Her husband had a job as a welder waiting for him that her sister had found for him, and they are renting a mobile home in a park her sister owns.

Ms. Dickerson is starting a job working for the county road department as a staff assistant, which requires some accounting, she said.

"Everything is going really good," Ms. Dickerson said. "We've always been normal working people until my husband got hurt, and then one thing happened after another and we found ourselves on welfare. But now we are actually looking into buying a car, and in the past two years I would not have thought it possible."

Ms. Gedert planned to stay with friends in Little Rock until she could find a place of her own. The way she described Arkansas, "green and lush," it sounded more like Shangri- La than a state struggling with hard- core poverty. "I just know I'll stay," she said. "It's just so beautiful there."

-- robert waldrop (rmwj@soonernet.com), June 18, 2001