Hispanic leader leaves Cobb board over ordinances
by The Associated Press
http://www.accessnorthga.com/news/hall/ ... ?ID=116152

MARIETTA, GA - The leader of one of Georgia's most high-profile Hispanic groups has quit a Cobb County initiative designed to reach out to the Hispanic community saying the county government has shown a ``consistent lack of open, honest and transparent dialogue.''

Jerry Gonzalez, head of the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials, resigned from the Cobb Latino Initiative after the county commission passed an ordinance last week that limits the number of adults who can live in a house.

Gonzalez said he was angry that the advisory group met July 23, the day before the vote, and neither Olens nor Annette Kesting the two county commissioners present mentioned the pending vote.

He said they also failed to mention a proposed ordinance that would prohibit day laborers from gathering on public property or in parking lots to solicit work.

Both ordinances target the Latino community in Cobb, Gonzalez said.

``I will no longer serve in a faux advisory role to government officials intent on using the Cobb Latino Initiative as insulation from their apparent and real anti-immigrant policies,'' Gonzalez wrote in his resignation letter July 25.

County Commission Chairman Sam Olens responded that advocates for the Hispanic community are making the county's actions a ``racial'' issue by implying that new rules are targeted at Hispanics.

``It's not a Hispanic issue,'' Olens said of the ordinance. ``It's a people issue. We're going to cite a boarding house whether the people are white, black or Hispanic.''

Cobb has 68,830 Hispanic residents, about 10.5 percent of the county population, according to 2005 census estimates.

The initiative is a group of business, nonprofit and community leaders that meets monthly to discuss issues important to the Latino community in Cobb.

Gonzalez's resignation comes at a time when Cobb has started to enforce several initiatives that affect illegal immigrants.

In late June, Cobb's jail started to check the legal status of every foreign inmate and has been trained to start deportation proceedings against those here illegally.

In January, Cobb started to enforce a rule requiring contractors on county projects to run new hires through a federal database to make sure they are legal workers.

Gonzalez said adding the housing and day labor ordinances and the way they came about were the final straw for him.

``Here we have another ordinance that clearly impacts Latinos and we're learning about it the day it's being considered before the commission,'' he said. ``They were doing everything in their power to make sure the issue did not come up before they voted on it.''

Olens said he gave Gonzalez a heads-up about the housing ordinance on April 30. Olens tried to send the group a draft of the ordinance June 30, but the e-mail got stuck in a spam filter, according to an e-mail from the county's spokesman.

(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)