June 9, 2005. Orlando Sentinel.
DAYTONA BEACH — Enormously high unemployment rates in pockets of Daytona Beach have prompted a community meeting to rectify the problem.
Fighting Against Injustice Towards Harmony (FAITH), a grass-roots group of 21 Volusia County churches, will ask the Daytona Beach City Commission to enact a First Source ordinance. The ordinance would require employers who receive public subsidies to consider applicants from specified pools of low-income, unemployed or under-employed people before opening the job search to the public.
The Action Assembly will meet at 6:30 p.m. Monday at St. Paul Catholic Church, 317 Mullally St., Daytona Beach. Organizers are expecting nearly 1,000 people to attend.
Research by FAITH members found that Daytona Beach had a 4 percent unemployment rate in the 2000 Census. However, six census tracts in the city limits showed rates that ranged from 9.1 percent to 42.3 percent. Those census tracts represent 30 percent of the city’s population but have half the city’s unemployed within their boundaries, according to the report.
“A 42 percent unemployment rate in any part of the community is intolerable,” said Jackie Mole, co-president of FAITH and a member of Allen Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Daytona Beach.
FAITH is asking the city to enact First Source, an ordinance used in cities such as Portland, Ore., Berkeley, Calif., and Washington, D.C., that has helped lower high unemployment rates.
“We are asking the city to take the very first step to draft the ordinance,” said the Rev. Jimmie Moore, who leads the group’s jobs committee and is pastor of Allen Chapel Church. “Portland and Washington, D.C., has employers do quarterly hiring reports to see if they are making a good-faith effort to hire its residents or they will lose their subsidies. We feel businesses that work in our city should give something back.”
Moore said he did not have an estimated cost for implementing the project.
The organization has helped clean up drug hot spots in the county, helped establish a substance-abuse treatment program at the county jail, implemented a reading curriculum called Direct Instruction in 14 elementary schools and worked to expand the hours of the Votran bus service.
