City could win back costs of overtime (Hazleton Standard-Speaker)

By KENT JACKSON
Staff Writer

SCRANTON – By winning a court battle challenging its immigration law, Hazleton might gain $100,000, or about what it spent last year on police overtime, which the mayor said rose due to illegal immigration.

Fees of $10 that tenants pay under the act will amount to $100,000 more than last year, according to a line in the city’s budget that an attorney challenging the act read during the trial Friday.

Attorney Thomas Fiddler brought up the fee when quizzing city Administrator Samuel Monticello during a cross-examination that also might cause the judge to re-evaluate what Mayor Louis Barletta said Thursday about police overtime.

Tenant fees and overtime were among the points stressed when Monticello and three other city officials testified during the fifth day of the trial presided over by federal Judge James M. Munley.

A code officer testified that he prepared zoning forms in Spanish until the city enacted an ordinance making English the official language.

The director of the department that checks complaints about junk cars and run-down buildings said he and his staff also can handle complaints about illegal immigrants – no matter that they’ve never dealt with immigration and that the Illegal Immigration Reform Act is the first of its kind in the United States.

Hazleton can’t enforce the act and begin collecting tenant fees unless Munley decides in favor of the city and lifts a restraining order.

Even then, the $105,400 in revenue projected from tenant fees in this year’s budget, compared with $5,000 last year, isn’t all gain, according to the exchange between Fiddler and Monticello.

The city has to pay some of that money to set up the office that will collect the fees and register tenants.

Fiddler asked if that includes paying the part-time salary of a clerk at $10 an hour and buying a computer, software and filing cabinet.

Monticello agreed, adding the clerk will work 25 hours a week and said the city bought a chair and everything else needed for the office.

Defending the lawsuit is expensive, too, although the city received contributions for its legal bills from around the nation.

On Thursday, plaintiff’s attorney Vic Walczak from the American Civil Liberties Union asked Barletta how many police officers Hazleton could have hired with the $75,000 spent for its legal team.

On Friday, Fiddler reviewed the overtime pay for police, which he said exceeded the budget each year since Barletta and Monticello entered office in 2000.

Monticello agreed.

On Thursday, Barletta counted the $70,000 of police overtime as a major chunk of the $200,000 deficit that he expects will result when the audit of last year is finished.

Barletta listed overtime as one of the costs of illegal immigration that could bankrupt the city.

Fiddler, who said the city maintained a AAA bond rating, reminded Monticello of what he said in a deposition before the trial began when asked how much of the police overtime resulted from illegal immigration: the pay periods for May 26 and June 9, 2006.

Those pays were “such a spike as opposed to other months,” Monticello said Friday. He asked the police chief and learned that time period included pay for participating in murder probe and a drug raid.

Monticello said he didn’t research other months to determine what overtime resulted from crimes involving illegal immigrants and didn’t know if the police broke down figures that way in their own records.

Plaintiffs including the ACLU and the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund claim the city overstated the costs to police, other city agencies, schools and the hospital from illegal immigration.

They claim that the act discriminates against Latinos who make up the majority of Hazleton’s new residents and are most likely to be denied housing or jobs because of act.

The act doesn’t penalize illegal immigrants directly, but imposes sanctions against companies that employ them or landlords who rent to them.

Public Works Director Bob Dougherty addressed concerns raised by the plaintiffs that the act allows anyone to file complaints, even maliciously, and that legal immigrants and citizens might have trouble proving their residency status under the act.

What would Dougherty do, Fiddler asked during cross-examination, if the author of hate mail, which a Latino leader previously testified he received, filed a complaint under the act?

“I can’t determine motivation. We have to review the complaint. There may be hidden motivation” that the investigation will uncover, Dougherty said.

He said his department typically dismisses property complaints after realizing they resulted from squabbles between neighbors.

With any complaint, Dougherty said his staff members telephone, leave placards on doors and write letters to try resolving the violation without filing a citation with a district judge. They would take the same approach with the immigration act, he said.

“But you’re dealing with a subject you’ve never dealt with?” Fiddler said.

“Yes,” Dougherty replied.

Nor has anyone else in the country, said Fiddler.

“I’ve read that,” Dougherty said.

On Thursday, New Orleans University professor Marc Rosenblum testified for the plaintiffs that the act gave people three days to submit information to verify their residency status, whereas federal law allowed eight days.

Dougherty countered him by saying the three-day period set by the city’s act wouldn’t begin until the federal officials made a final determination of the person’s status.

Fiddler asked why the city hadn’t designed all the forms required by the act or trained workers to enforce it.

Dougherty said city officials plan to produce forms and train workers if the judge lifts the injunction.

Code Officers Richard Wech and Paul Kattner testified that they hadn’t been trained to enforce the ordinance yet.

Fiddler said an advertisement telling tenants to register under the act was in English and asked if the city realized that people who speak Spanish might not know their obligations under the act.

Kattner, meanwhile, said he had forms used in the code enforcement translated to Spanish for people who came into his office.

After Hazleton approved a law making English the official language of city government, Kattner gave the forms to the mayor.

Plaintiff’s attorney Thomas Wilkinson asked if the forms were available again in the code office as a result of an agreement that avoided a legal challenge to the English language law.

Kattner said he hadn’t gotten back the forms.