COSTA MESA UNPLUGGED:

My corporation received mail today from the Employment Development Department.

In it were the forms the business has to file once a quarter with the state’s tax collectors.

These nice folks want the scoop on whom we employed, how much we paid them and how much scratch we held back in taxes over the last three months.

You gotta do this stuff if you run a business. Otherwise, really spooky people with no personalities but who have the muskets to make your life miserable begin sending you letters and paying you visits.

The department’s fan mail got me to thinking about Costa Mesa’s exercise in day labor and job center déjà vu.

Remember that before the Costa Mesa City Council — led by then-Mayor Allan Mansoor — began chumming the political waters in town with the juicy entrails of immigration screening in the city’s hoosegow, there was a feeding frenzy over the city’s continued operation of the Costa Mesa job center.

In those days, I liked the idea of boarding the thing up. It wasn’t a good idea, I figured, that the city was using tax revenues to bankroll a place vulnerable to illegal employment transactions (read: the hiring of immigrant workers ineligible to work in the United States).

My sentiment hasn’t changed.

But when the job center disappeared, the effects the center’s proponents warned of materialized. The ranks of day laborers flagging down prospective work along Costa Mesa’s streets and storefronts ballooned.

Businesses and plain folk who need cheap labor for this or that job — and who aren’t of the mind to fool with all those department forms and federal reporting requirements — haven’t minded. It’s far easier to round up the labor you need streetside without getting entangled in all that government twine.

Let’s not pretend either that some percentage — even a pretty big one — of the day labor population in Costa Mesa didn’t get here through America’s back door when the porch light was out. These folks — whom I believe to be otherwise honest and hardworking souls — liked Costa Mesa’s old job center because there wasn’t much, if any, curiosity about their immigration status or work eligibility.

So now we are revisited by the social condition that spawned the first job center: day laborers hanging out on streets and around storefronts looking to make a day’s wage.

The pickle is apparently sour enough to have caught Mayor Eric Bever’s attention. Bever — who previously voted to shutter the old job center — is chatting up the idea of bringing one back in connection with some serious tweaking of the city’s municipal code governing solicitation of work.

From a constitutional perspective, the feat might add up to something like trying to chuck a football through an open-ended coffee can.

On the one hand, the city can’t deny a person’s right to seek work wherever they choose to seek it.

But, apparently, it can put the skids to public solicitation for employment if, as an out, it provides a place, time and way for these folks to find a gig.

Which is why Bever is taking a second look at a job center in Costa Mesa.

If a job center does return to Goat Hill (and probably two would be better to spread the wealth a bit), it should be required that the center’s staff provide employers with I-9 Forms (the government sheet that gathers information to verify work eligibility). To boot, those forms must be completed on site by the employer and the worker, and a copy provided to the center.

Bever is also curious about the anti-solicitation ordinance in the city of Orange. That bit of code says, in part, that a private property owner who allows five or more work solicitors to hang out in front of his or her business must apply for a conditional use permit from the city. An onerous exercise, believe me.

If you’re wondering what the angle to all this is, it’s this: Folks legally eligible to work in the U.S. will have to go to the job center to find it. On the flip side, day workers ineligible to work here will have no place to go in Costa Mesa without risking citation and, more problematic, potential immigration screening by the city’s resident Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.

Or so it seems. That’s because in Costa Mesa and Orange, public solicitation for work from public sidewalks is prohibited only when that sidewalk is adjacent to a city street where a motorist (read: employer) cannot legally park. So then is solicitation permitted on sidewalks next to city streets where motorists can legally park? And in that case, is it constitutionally-protected solicitation? If so, then Bever’s initiative here could be clever by only half.

BYRON DE ARAKAL is a former Costa Mesa parks and recreation commissioner. Readers can reach him at [email protected].