North Texas cities grapple with day labor

 Huffines Plaza in Lewisville has seen better days. Let's hope so, at least.

Hard against Interstate 35E whizzing past, it bears all the markings of a tired strip shopping center, right down to the beaten, potholed asphalt parking lot. A Dollar General competes with a 99-cent store. The restaurant is Mariscos Y Taqueria. The sports bar is El Pollo Alegre. Down the way are a lavanderia, a meat market and a "mini-bazaar" for all your money-transfer needs. A tattoo parlor shares space with an insurance agency, just past the Buy Low Beer & Wine.
Until recently, it also was the place where contractors knew they could find guys looking for a day's work and a day's pay – dry-walling, swinging a hammer, landscaping, restaurant work – whatever you need, they can do.

When the center owner decided all the day laborers were scaring off paying customers, he asked the city for help. In Lewisville, the only remedy is to have police enforce trespassing laws, which they can do only on private property and only at the owner's behest.

Huffines Plaza today is relatively laborer-free, but the business didn't disappear. It just moved down the block and across Mill Street to a 7-Eleven, where at mid-morning yesterday about three dozen Hispanic men in denim and work boots crowded around two picnic tables and spilled into the used-car lot next door.

Assistant Police Chief Jerry Galler says Lewisville has been dealing with day-labor solicitation this way for about two decades. If the workers stay out of street, police act only if property owners ask for help. If not, the underground industry goes on. The goal at Huffines Plaza, he says, is education, not hauling people to jail, especially when criminal trespass is a Class B misdemeanor.

That's the Lewisville method. Another way is how Plano, Garland, Denton, Fort Worth and McKinney handle it. They regulate it, with city-run day-labor centers.

Plano was among the first in North Texas to try this, opening its center in the mid-1990s on DART-owned land near North Central Expressway. The city has paid for all improvements to the property, and Neighborhood Services Manager Christina Day says Plano spends about $200,000 a year to operate it. Over the years, this has paid for driveway improvements, a small building, restrooms and a system that requires day laborers to register and check in with barcoded photo IDs.

"There's no perfect solution," she says, "but we see this as a more cost-effective way of managing the situation. We've had many fewer complaints from businesses and residents this way."

The Lewisville way moves the disorder to another parking lot. The more orderly Plano way has an upfront and ongoing cost to city taxpayers but eases the law enforcement burden. Lewisville has considered a city-run facility, but objections from taxpayers to spending on "an illegal activity" stifled that notion.

As a rule, we lean toward local control. What works for Plano might not work for Lewisville. Dallas' solution might not be Irving's. Frisco isn't Coppell. That's why each has a city council and city staff to manage its affairs in the way they see fit (and voters demand).

It's almost certain that some of those day laborers outside the Lewisville 7-Eleven are here illegally. It's more certain that they are just trying to feed themselves and their families.

And it's absolutely clear that while local control is our preference, it's unfortunate that federal inaction – like the inability to pass sane and effective immigration reform – puts localities like Lewisville and Plano in the difficult position of having to fend for themselves as best they can.

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