At Tuesday night's Ventura County Community College District board meeting, the chancellor requested more time to study a proposal to use the free E-Verify system for district employees.

The proposal was made last week by Bob Huber, who is running for mayor in Simi Valley. Incidentally, that city recently voted to use the controversial program, which is operated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to determine if employees are valid to work in the United States.

It's controversial because of what it does, not how accurate it is. False positives happen only 0.7 percent of the time, and it has been shown to catch 46 percent of illegal immigrants whose information is fed into the system.

The remaining 54 percent that get away do so because they are using stolen (and valid) birth dates and social security names.

Overall, the system is accurate 96 percent of the time, according to a research company commissioned by the government.

There's the research--now can we get this thing moving?

On the heels of Simi Valley's decision to approve a pilot E-Verify for city workers, VC  Community College District President Bob Huber proposed that county colleges follow suit.

Huber is also running for mayor, and has made a campaign issue out of E-Verify, which is a free government program that analyzes employee information to evaluate whether they are eligible to work in this country. It has a 96 percent accuracy rate, which pretty much makes its adoption a no-brainer.

However, a fellow board member wondered how much time it would take to scan each employee's documents, estimating five minutes per person at a minimum.

"I want to find out how much time our employees would be taking on it," the Star quoted the board member as saying. "We're not overloaded with classified employees now. Time is money."

If that's a concern, let me volunteer to do it. I'll find time to use the free online utility. Let's get this thing done and stop quibbling.

When Simi Valley's City Council, which includes Huber's opponent Steve Sojka, voted to adopt E-Verify in "an emotionally charged" meeting, it became the first city in Ventura County to do so.

Opponents contend that E-Verify isn't accurate. However, a study commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security shows that E-Verify catches 46 percent of illegal aliens it comes across. Not a home run, but if every company adopted E-Verify and we were able to catch half of all the illegal aliens working in those companies we'd be doing pretty good, because right now that number is ZERO percent. I'd guess that the reason that E-Verify doesn't catch the other half is because the illegals are using real, stolen identification information.

Certainly we don't want to be saying people are illegal when they are really legal. E-Verify avoids false positives 99.3 percent of the time. That's just about as close to perfect as you can get.

So the program sounds like it works pretty darn well. So my offer is out there--if cost is an issue for the college district, I will volunteer my time, and I'm sure others would do the same, to work on this program for you.