Town Wants More Than Citrus Trees

ORANGE COVE, Calif. —  Even in the dead of winter, as farm towns across the San Joaquin Valley sleep their deep slumber, this little town awakens before first light.

Here at the foot of the snowcapped Sierra, the fields aren’t the usual vineyards or peach orchards waiting for spring to stir. This is the heart of the citrus belt, and grove upon grove is filled with oranges fat and sweet. The packinghouses shake with the steady pound of 4 million navels rolling from field to conveyor belt to box.

For the farm workers of Orange Cove, it doesn’t get any better than this. Winter’s navel harvest will give way to spring’s Valencia crop--six months’ worth of jobs. Yet even in steady times, this town stands as one of the five poorest in the state. One of three residents, who want no part of the low-wage harvest, is jobless. The welfare dependency rate exceeds 60%.

Seeking to add new industry to a place that lives and dies on the dice roll that its fruit will dodge another killer frost, Mayor Victor Lopez is prepared to offer the world.

“I’ll roll out the red carpet for anyone who is going to bring jobs to Orange Cove,” he vows. “Free land, free infrastructure, not a single fee. We’ll fast-track everything and anything, believe me.”

That’s big talk for such a poor town, but Lopez can back it up. The federal and state governments prop up Orange Cove to the tune of tens of millions of dollars in aid. The largess can be seen in every corner of this hamlet--from the fancy jobs development center named after the mayor to the sparkling new child care facility named after his mother.

And Lopez, who began his 21st year as mayor, is now dangling the biggest carrot of them all.

Last month, Orange Cove was among only 40 communities selected nationwide to share in a $17-billion pot of federal tax incentives. The credits will be used to create job growth, lure economic development and build affordable housing in a region of the state that seems plucked from south of the border.

As word of the selection spread, the mayor with the jet-black pompadour and fingers flashing gold began fielding calls from businessmen looking for generous tax breaks. They filled his ear with state-of-the-art packinghouses, mattress companies and insurance call-in centers.

“I’m not one of those leaders who says we need to get rid of our agriculture base,” Lopez said. “But we are surrounded by 21,000 acres of oranges, and if something happens, like the freeze of 1990, we’ve got nothing else to fall back on.”

That this gateway town to Kings Canyon National Park threw its lot to oranges is due, in no small measure, to the suburbanization of Los Angeles. As the citrus groves of the Southland were paved over with housing tracts and mini-malls, the growers came up and over the mountain in the 1960s.

City Hall Shows State’s New Political Reality

Though the groves and packinghouses remain, everything else has changed. The town is now nearly 90% Latino. In the last five years alone, the population has doubled to 9,000. The newcomers include 2,000 El Salvadorans who have risen to the ranks of crew bosses and have pooled their incomes to buy houses and businesses.

To step into City Hall--an old Santa Fe railroad depot--is to be greeted by California’s new political reality: Finance Director Alvertina Rivera; revenue clerk Caroline Gomez; City Administrator Jose Antonio Ramirez; city clerk June Bracamontes; Public Works chief Gabriel Jimenez.

Above them all is the tornado force of 58-year-old Lopez, a.k.a. “Mayor for Life.”

He chuckles at the image of himself as the politician with the ever-present tin cup. Three times a month, he travels to Sacramento to meet with legislators and agency directors. They know his pitch well but find it impossible to turn him away empty-handed. The same with bureaucrats in Washington.

This is a town, after all, with no stoplight, no fast-food restaurant, no high school, no movie house, no pharmacy and no place to dance. Blame the last one on him, Lopez concedes. He banned dancing within city limits because the honky-tonks along Main Street were selling beers for $5 a pop--just for the right to tango with a bar girl.

“We’re a very quiet community now,” said Lopez, who grew up in Orange Cove as the son of migrant farm workers. Cutting the jobless rate in half is far more complicated, Lopez said. The problem isn’t the recent Latino immigrants breaking their backs in the fields for minimum wage. Rather, it is the townsfolk two and three generations removed from Mexico.

Growing up in America, they see fieldwork and its $6- and $7-an-hour wages as beneath them, he said. But instead of working their way up a different economic ladder, they are dropping out of school and having babies out of wedlock.

“The Latino kids born and raised in this community have lost hope,” Lopez said. “We need to bring in the kind of industry that will get them to work.”

As he gives a tour in his new silver Chrysler with the license plate frame VPL--Very Powerful Latino--he points to the benevolent hand of government everywhere.

The Victor P. Lopez Rural Economic Development and Job Training Center, a handsome building topped in Spanish tile, was built with $3.5 million in federal grants. Since 1997, 27 welfare mothers have become certified child care providers by attending classes at the center.

Some of the graduates are working at the Julia A. Lopez Child Care Center, a dawn-to-dark preschool for 150 farm workers’ children. Instead of spending all day in the fields at the feet of their parents, they move from computer lab to art room to playground.

Lopez says farm work--six months in the orange groves followed by three months picking grapes and stone fruit--remains the bread-and-butter of his community. The steady wages have enabled field hands to move into gated apartment complexes with swimming pools and clubhouses. More than 300 such low-income units have been built in recent years by reeling in $25 million in state money.

The complexes are spotless, not a graffiti mark in sight, and the lawns are as green as the citrus trees. “Can you imagine a field worker coming home and swimming?” he says. “It happens here in Orange Cove.”

Across the way, 200 single-family stucco houses have been built with $18 million in USDA rural assistance funds. That Orange Cove will now share $17 billion in federal tax incentives could not have come at a more opportune time. The city is building sewer and water treatment plants with $23 million in state and federal funds.

‘Orange Cove Is a Hidden Jewel’

To fuel growth, it is negotiating a deal to secure 2,000 acre-feet of river snowmelt delivered through canals. The water is needed because decades of over-fertilizing have tainted the ground-water table.

A high school is about to break ground so the kids will no longer be bused 11 miles to Reedley. On 19 acres, comedian Paul Rodriguez, a native of these parts, is developing a shopping center.

“Orange Cove is a hidden jewel,” said Frank Iwama, a Silicon Valley attorney who came to town last week representing investors from Japan. “The view of the mountains alone is worth millions.”

But venture down Main Street and there is grumbling.

“A lot of the money seems to be going down a big hole,” said Vince Vasquez, standing behind the counter of Orange Cove Hardware, the oldest business in town. “As far as downtown goes, all we’ve gotten is a new street median and some landscaping.”

At Joe’s Barbershop, customer Art Morin wondered about all the new buildings named after the mayor and his relatives.

“I don’t agree with his family name everywhere,” he said. “But everything seems to be lined up now. The water, the sewer, the housing, the $17 billion. I think we’re finally going somewhere.”