Woolsey aid helps workers who lost jobs

Employment available for fire cleanup, repairs



Workers who lost their jobs because of the Hill and Woolsey fires could find temporary employment repairing damaged hiking trails and other scorched public lands in Simi Valley, Camarillo, Thousand Oaks, Newbury Park and Westlake Village.

The Ventura County Board of Supervisors authorized the county’s Workforce Development Board to accept an $810,400 grant from a state Employment Development Department program designed to assist hundreds of workers displaced by the fires.

Through the department’s Disaster Recovery National Dislocated Worker Grants, Ventura County is eligible to apply for up to $2.4 million between now and 2021.

A dislocated worker can be anyone who had their paycheck cut as a direct result of the fires.

“What kind of workers? For example, gardeners who lost contracts because homes burned down,” said Alex Renteria, workforce services manager at Goodwill Industries of Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties in Oxnard. “The project is giving work back in the same communities” where jobs were lost, she said.

The county’s program will hire up to 50 displaced workers. Goodwill in Oxnard received $651,515 of the $810,404 grant to manage recruitment, hiring and training.

All of the repair and cleanup projects will be focused in the eastern part of the county, where the Hill and Woolsey fires swept through parts of Camarillo, Simi Valley, Bell Canyon, Thousand Oaks, Newbury Park and Westlake Village.

Erupting on the same day, Nov. 8, the Hill and Woolsey fires together burned over 101,400 acres, destroyed over 1,500 structures and damaged another 343.

A county staff report said the two fires sparked “an urgent need” for temporary workers to repair damaged hiking trails, repair and repaint public outbuildings, fix downed fences, remove dead trees and perform other work as flooding continues to threaten burn areas.

Program participants will work up to 480 hours. The starting salary is expected to be $17 an hour, Renteria said.

To start out, the program will hire and train an initial group of 17 temporary workers but will add more as the training progresses. Depending on their employment needs, workers could receive additional career training, she said.

“For example, if a worker needed computer skills we could offer him some computer training,” she said.

This past December the EDD received over $44 million in dislocated worker grants from the U.S. Department of Labor to provide temporary jobs on fire cleanup and recovery projects in Ventura, Los Angeles and Butte counties.

EDD officials expect the grants will help 1,350 workers who were left unemployed or with shortened job hours because of wildfires in the three counties. Some of the grant money is intended to retrain workers who permanently lost their jobs because of the fires.

“These funds will put people who have lost their jobs back to work,” EDD director Patrick Henning said in a news release.

Workers displaced by the two fires in eastern Ventura County can apply for temporary cleanup and repair jobs by calling Goodwill Industries of Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties at (805) 981-0130.