EDITORIAL:Get job center back on agenda

It’s always disheartening when government fails to protect the least fortunate among us as that should be the main priority of our political leaders, but it would be silly at this point to assign blame for the bureaucratic snafu that has led to the imminent closure of the Luis M. Ochoa Job Center in June. The important priority is finding a way to keep this vital community resource open.

Orange County supervisors recently canceled an agreement that financed the job center as part of its county jobs program. City officials clearly were taken by surprise by the action, which was considered so routine by the county that the supervisors voted on it as part of its consent agenda. So who goofed up? Who cares. It’s a problem that needs fixing — as soon as possible.

Job seekers came to the center 9,864 times last year, said Jim Lamb, project manager for the city’s Economic Development Department. Of those, 59% found a job the day they came in.

That tells us there are a great deal of job seekers in Huntington Beach and that folks are hiring. In other words, it’s popular and needed.

It would be unpleasant, to say the least, for everyone if the job seekers scattered throughout the city. Neighbors would complain about the soliciting, and the unemployed would find it that much harder to earn a day’s pay.

We won’t pretend to have a solution — we’ll leave that sort of thing to the experts like Lamb. We just want to urge our elected leaders to prioritize this issue. If they can bail out the Huntington Beach Playhouse — a move we heartily endorsed — then surely the City Council can also find some way to help keep the job center open.

The council might want to first call County Supervisor John Moorlach, who put the job center issue before his fellow supervisors in the first place because county officials prefer to support job centers with a more regional focus.

“If [city officials] have a problem, we can either put it back on the agenda or, you name it,” he said.

Moorlach has done plenty to earn a reputation for getting things done by brokering solutions to long-disputed issues. We encourage him to step up and help fix this problem.

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