| Town
Day Labor Site: Round 3 |
| The Town Council is about to enter round three of its efforts
to reshape the day labor site into a service that does not
help undocumented or illegal immigrants. |
| The Council started out in February seeking a new operator
for the site with a request for proposal that was so obviously
limited it would never work in the real world. That proved
to be true when nobody responded to it. |
| Intent on re-inventing the day labor center into one that
checks residency status—even though that's against federal
law—the Town Council reworded the request for proposal, and
got a whopping two proposals in return. |
| Now, the town is on its third try after acting town manager
Art Anselene and his staff determined that the two responses
were not valid. |
| At this point, the Town Council has clearly recognized that
opening the day labor site has helped clean up the streets
of Herndon. Otherwise, why would it want to continue to operate
one at all? |
| So now, it's a question of how to limit the site so severely
that it only serves a portion of the population, while forcing
the operation of the center away from a county-funded non-profit
and toward a for-profit private enterprise. |
| One has to ask, after months of Town Council discussion
and much consideration and activity by the town staff, where
will the town be when this vision is complete? Not much farther
than where we started out, I suspect. |
