Santa Barbara County to Seek State Grant for $1M Farmworker Resource Center

With strong prodding from about 20 social justice advocates — about half of whom identifying as children of farmworkers — the Santa Barbara County supervisors on Tuesday voted to apply for a state grant to create a $1 million farmworker resource center, described as a mobile one-stop shop for farmworkers needing assistance with health care, labor rights, immigration, and education. The money — about $833,000 — is on the table courtesy of a bill sponsored by State Assemblymember Steve Bennett, who was so impressed with a Ventura County protype that in its first year served 1,400 farmworkers. 

All five supervisors expressed support for the idea, but North County supervisors Steve Lavagnino and Bob Nelson both expressed serious qualms about the details. It was only one-time funding, Lavagnino worried, meaning the county would be on the hook financially to keep the center alive after year one. With the state looking at a $25 billion deficit, he predicted, the supervisors could find themselves hard-pressed to find the money. 

Nelson was blunter. He didn’t want the money going to groups like CAUSE and MICOP, whose interests, he said, were adversarial to those of growers. Likewise, he didn’t want the Department of Public Health administering the program; there were trust issues, he said, between growers and that department based on Public Health’s outreach efforts to farmworkers during the COVID crisis.