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Welfare rolls have declined in the San Joaquin Valley, but unemployment
remains high. In Fresno county, 22,930 families receive CalWORKs cash
assistance grants, with a family of three getting an average of $671 per
month. In neighboring Madera county, 3,000 families get CalWORKs cash
assistance, and a family of three gets an average of $485 a month.

California's welfare rolls continue to shrink, from 756,950 cases (each
case is usually a mother with two children) in 1997 to 656, 261 in 1998;
591,998 in 1999; 520,050 in 2000; 497, 818 in 2001; 486,446 in 2002; and
477, 486 in 2003. About half of the adults who left the rolls are
employed, but many have below poverty-level earnings. About 15 percent
of those who leave the welfare rolls have no visible means of support.

About 15,800 welfare recipients reached their five-year lifetime benefit
limit in January 2003, and about 3,000 a month have been dropped from
the rolls. In California, cash aid for poor children continues until
they reach 18; only the adult share of cash aid stops when time limits
are reached. Some of those losing the adult share of cash assistance
are large Vietnamese families with one minimum wage earner. Spending on
the state's welfare program, CalWORKS, has remained at $6.4 billion a
year, but the emphasis has shifted from cash assistance to job training
and supportive services, including child care.

Fresno county, which has not had an unemployment rate under 10 percent
since 1980, is working on a 30-30 plan- creating 30,000 jobs each paying
$30,000 over the next five years. The 200-page Regional Jobs Initiative
for Fresno County calls for fostering jobs in, for example, health care,
manufacturing and distribution, largely by helping current companies
grow. Currently, the three leading sectors in the eight-county San
Joaquin Valley are government (260,000 in 2002), agriculture (225,000),
and health services (85,000).

Huron is a city of 5,900 in western Fresno county with six bars, five
gangs and a famous drug alley. Twice a year, lettuce is harvested in
the area, the population doubles, and many residents rent out bedrooms
and garages to lettuce harvesters, most of whom are in the area six
weeks without their families. Huron, incorporated in 1951, has had
recall elections every few years since then. Dole pays $8 an hour to
its lettuce workers in the Huron area and has a labor camp. Dole
requires its employees to provide legitimate work documents, but smaller
labor contractors reportedly do not. Gang members know that workers
without bank accounts carry large amounts of cash, and robberies are
common.

Nearby Mendota, a city of 8,000, had an average unemployment rate of 36
percent in 2003, the highest among cities in California. About 40
percent of residents have incomes under the poverty line, the second
worst rate in the state.

President Bush in October 2003 visited 1,200-employee Ruiz Food Products
in Dinuba, a Tulare County city of about 18,000. Ruiz is the largest US
manufacturer of frozen Mexican food, and one of the largest Hispanic-
owned businesses in the US; 92 percent of Ruiz employees are Hispanic.
Dinuba's unemployment rate averaged over 21 percent in 2002.

Data from the 2000 Census, the Special Equal Employment Opportunity
Tabulation, shows that Hispanics in the San Joaquin Valley are
concentrated in food service, transportation, maintenance and farm labor
jobs. Hispanics are 44 percent of the San Joaquin Valley population but
90 percent of workers in farming, fishing and forestry; 54 percent of
building and grounds cleaning and maintenance workers, and 51 percent of
transportation and material-moving workers. Non-Hispanic whites are 43
percent of the population but 69 percent of managerial employees, 68
percent of architects and engineers and 74 percent of workers in
computer and mathematical occupations.

California has 476 cities, and Coalinga, a city of 12,000 in the San
Joaquin Valley with $37 million in long-term debt on 24 bonds, is asking
voters to raise its sales tax to 8.625 percent, second only to Avalon on
Catalina Island in Los Angeles County, which has an 8.75 percent sales
tax. About 160 cities including Coalinga add a tax of up to 10 percent
on utility bills for telephone, gas and electricity services.

Housing. Parlier is a city with 2,500 housing units and 11,145
residents, and in December 2003 announced a crackdown on 200 units that
had unlawful conversions, turning garages into apartments and tapping
into city services to provide seasonal housing for farm workers. Huron,
another city that adds residents during the harvest season, is taking a
hands-off approach to unlawful conversions. The city manager said,
"there is not enough housing. We have a large influx of migrant
workers, and they end up living in garages. They end up overcrowding
existing residences."

Carlsbad in San Diego county expects urbanization to displace most of
its labor-intensive crops within a decade, so farmers leasing land are
reluctant to provide housing for the workers they hire. The city of
Carlsbad has been struggling to develop temporary housing for 500
homeless workers employed by farmers.

The Washington Mutual bank donated $250,000 to provide start-up costs to
private developers interested in building homes for farm workers. In
2002, the Ventura County Board of Supervisor approved the 3,050-home
Ahmanson Ranch development near Calabasas, which Washington Mutual
inherited in a merger. Washington Mutual eventually sold the land to
the state as parkland for $150 million.

For the past several years, Mexican migrants have been camping on the
porch of the St. Helena Catholic Church in the Napa Valley over the
summer months. In Fall 2003, fearing that they would have trouble
illegally re-rentering the US, some stayed in Napa, and found a landlord
willing to rent them a 2,000 square-foot heated mobile home in
Rutherford that was originally offered to expand the number of beds at
an existing farm worker camp in Calistoga.

Budget. California faces a budget deficit of $14 billion in a $100
billion budget (the accumulated deficits of the past three years, 2001-
02, 02-03, and 03-04 total $13 billion), prompting proposed cuts in
health and human services, whose $23 billion accounts for a third of the
state's $71 billion in general fund spending. California funds items
that the federal government considers optional under Medicaid (Medi-
Cal), such as drugs for the mentally ill, and there is pressure to
reduce state costs and federal reimbursement by limiting coverage;
combined federal and state spending on Medi-Cal is $30 billion.

Spending on health care in the US was five percent of GDP in 1960; 7.5
percent in 1970; 10 percent in 1980; 13 percent in 1990; and 15 percent
in 2002, a total of $1.6 trillion, or an average of $5,440 for each
person in the United States. Even though more than 43 million Americans
are uninsured, the United States devotes more of its GDP to health care
than other industrial countries.

Air. San Joaquin Valley air authorities in December 2003 asked to join
Los Angeles to become the second "extreme" polluter in the US, which
extends the smog cleanup deadline in the San Joaquin Valley from 2005 to
2010 and avoids $36 million a year in annual fines on businesses that
pollute. About 10 percent of the 3.3 million residents of the 25,000-
square-mile San Joaquin Valley, the largest air district in the country,
have lung problems due primarily to ozone.

Elena Gaona, "Shelter site for migrants is elusive as winter nears; With
crop season over, workers being evicted," San Diego Union-Tribune,
November 27, 2003. Catherine Saillant, "Farm Labor Housing Gets Seed
Money," Los Angeles Times, November 18, 2003. Diana Marcum, "An annual
cash crop," Fresno Bee, November 2, 2003. George Hostetter, "Welfare
recipients get help getting out of town Valley counties fighting high
unemployment spend money to send folks somewhere else," Fresno Bee,
September 7, 2003.