Perhaps by empowering young people to do the job themselves.

That, at least, is what happening in the state’s most innovative small town, Gonzales (pop. 8600), in the Salinas Valley.

Starting in early 2020, middle school and high school students—members of the Gonzales Youth Council, a parallel city council for the young—have taken the lead in documenting the damage the pandemic was doing to their peers. But they didn’t stop there. Using their data, they created a new mental health strategy for the city and its schools, and secured resources to enact it.

In the process, Gonzales teens offered a model of do-it-yourself pandemic response with such potential that a report describing it was recently published in a peer-reviewed academic journal for school psychologists.

It’s no surprise that this work was done in Gonzales, a working-class marvel of self-governance in California’s lettuce lands. It’s a center of agriculture, food processing, and manufacturing, with a population that is 90 percent Latino and quite young for today’s Golden State (with one third of residents under age 18).

Over the past generation, the town has prioritized public participation and empowerment of its young people in community problem-solving—a strategy dubbed “The Gonzales Way”. In the process, Gonzales has produced eye-popping solutions to challenges from economic development to energy independence. Gonzales has been especially strong on health issues—winning national awards as it found ingenious ways to get clinics and medical professionals to serve its people, and vaccinating more than 99 percent of its eligible population for COVID.

The Gonzales Youth Council at work. Photo by Michelle Slade. Courtesy of Gonzales Youth Commissioners & Council.

Gonzales’ Youth Council—a student-selected body of ninth to 12^th graders first established in 2015—has been a big player in this work because it has real power. The body has written local laws on underage drinking, and led a police-community relations effort. Its members sit in on job interviews at the local schools.

Back in fall 2019, youth council commissioners began talking about focusing next on mental health. When the pandemic hit, they accelerated their plans.

The council wanted to start with an extensive survey of Gonzales youth. Unable to work in person, they needed to do the survey online—and to make that happen, they secured funding (from the Trinidad & Lupe Gomez Family Fund, a homegrown philanthropy), and sought advice from Gonzales’ own CoLab, a collaboration between the city and area colleges to develop solutions to community problems.  At a CoLab networking event, the young commissioners met Cal State Monterey Bay child psychology professor Jennifer Lovell.

“They were on the path to creating their own survey already,” says Lovell, whose research team then joined forces with the council. Under the partnership, university researchers helped the youth leaders to design the survey, gather anonymous responses, and analyze the quantitative and qualitative data. The youth council had final say on the survey’s contents and owned all the data.

The council conducted its first mental health survey in late spring 2020, focused on the question, “How well are youth doing during the COVID-19 crisis?” The survey included 52 questions (multiple choice, rating based, and open answer) on subjects from loneliness and screen time to academic coping.

The results revealed considerable mental stress among Gonzales kids. It wasn’t just that two-thirds said they were falling behind academically as they struggled with school closings and unreliable online lessons. Some 60 percent of the middle and high school students with younger siblings surveyed reported that they were having to help brothers and sisters complete their schoolwork online. And more than half of high school-age respondents gave answers that indicated they were suffering from anxiety, depression, or both. Gonzales’ young people also reported that they needed more information about how to handle these and other mental health problems.

The Youth Council swiftly developed plans to provide that information and assistance. The council circulated its own mental health check-ins via Instagram. The council also shared hotline numbers, inspirational messages, coping tips, and self-care reminders with students, and sought training for young people in how to respond when peers are having mental health issues.

In fall 2020, the youth council met with school, city, and county officials to advocate for more resources to assist Gonzales youth with their mental health burdens. As a result, these local governments resolved to reduce the stigma around mental illness and to make it easier for students to report mental health challenges.

The meetings also produced a new financial commitment. In January 2021, the city and school district agreed to share the cost of hiring an additional licensed clinical social worker to support student mental health.

People are paying attention to the Gonzales work—as an example of what scholars call youth-led participatory action research. Three youth council commissioners worked with Lovell’s team to write the peer-reviewed study in the National Association of School Psychologists’ quarterly journal, School Psychology Review.

But the youth council isn’t finished with this work, or satisfied the mental health of Gonzales. Earlier this year, the young people conducted a follow-up survey to test the impact of the new mental health resources, and asked students what else they need.

The good news: The 2022 survey revealed decreases in the high rates of mental stress, anxiety, and depression reported in 2020. But students reported continuing struggles balancing the burdens of homework, family, and managing their own health, and said they wanted better access to mental health services.

“We’ve had a bit of progress, mental health is being talked about more at school, but we need to keep talking about reducing the stigmas of mental health,” youth council commissioner Sherlyn Flores-Magadan, a Gonzales High School senior, told me. “And we have to provide more information to parents—that’s one of the keys for helping our teens.”

In Gonzales, there is also talk of new peer-to-peer projects—especially around tutoring, pedestrian safety, and community gardens. The logic is straightforward: Who better to help kids than kids themselves?

The post It Takes a Village to Tackle the Teen Mental Health Crisis appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Among the thousands of students graduating from San Diego State this weekend is one of California’s youngest and most unlikely philanthropists.

I first profiled Fabiola Moreno Ruelas, now 21, three summers ago, after meeting her in Gonzales, her small hometown in the Salinas Valley. Her story was simple—but unforgettable.

Fabiola had very few resources growing up. Her father had been deported, her family was evicted from housing, and she and her mother relied on food stamps to eat and on donations from neighbors and church for clothes and schoolbooks. She did well in school, but she needed both scholarships for tuition and additional money—from Gonzales community members—to cover her living expenses in order to go to college.

As a teen, Fabiola was seriously injured in a car accident—fracturing her skull, wrist, and back. But that accident would improve her fortunes. At age 18, during her freshman year, she received a settlement of $29,000.

Then she made a remarkable choice. Rather than spend the money on herself or her family, she chose to give back to Gonzales, the community that had helped her, and other poor kids. She used the money to start her own scholarship fund, the Ruelas Fulfillment Foundation, managed by the Rotary Club. She created an application—a 2.9 GPA and 80 hours of community service were required for eligibility—and launched with the offer of four $500 grants, to help Gonzales kids with college living expenses.

Not long after I met Fabiola in summer 2019, she headed back to San Diego for her sophomore year. Dropout rates are high for first-generation college students from less-advantaged families. She confessed to me that she found university difficult during her freshman year, and that she had contemplated leaving school.

In the end, her instinct for giving would help see her through.

It wasn’t easy, and it was sometimes scary. In her sophomore fall, the academic demands grew, and, even with scholarships, she juggled two and three jobs to afford to stay in school.

Then, early in 2020, she suffered two personal blows. In January, she got the unexpected and unsettling news that her father, back in Mexico, had died. A few weeks later, in February, her stepfather got hit by a big rig while riding a bicycle and suffered near-fatal head injuries.

As Fabiola was processing those hardships, COVID hit. She was a student resident advisor in a dorm—so when campus shut down, she at once lost her place to live and one of her jobs. She went home, only to confront more death and grief. COVID fatality rates were especially high in the Salinas Valley in spring and summer 2020. She felt unhealthy and isolated.

“At that point, I really did feel like I lost everything,” Fabiola tells me. “I was grieving my father and then my stepfather … I was grieving my [student] residents.”

She says she found purpose, and comfort, in giving away money. She funded three more students through her scholarship fund. And during the George Floyd-inspired protests in summer 2020, she decided to give $1,000 from the fund to the NAACP chapter at San Diego State.

She stayed enrolled in school, which was conducted virtually, and soon found online work, mentoring and tutoring other first-generation, low-income students through their first years in college. She also got a boost from emergency federal payments to college students, though she was outraged that some other students—those without legal immigration status—weren’t eligible for the federal money. So, in January 2021, she made two more grants from her college fund to undocumented students, both at San Diego State. When she was down, one of her grantees—an engineering student—gave her a pep talk, she recalls.

She was always busy, between work (one of her jobs was in the university donor relations office) and studying political science. But she still found time to get more involved in student organizations and government—including as vice president of systemwide affairs for the California State Student Association, and, at San Diego State, as student diversity commissioner for Associated Students and as vice president of the student advisory board of the Educational Opportunity Program.

Graduating, she says, feels more like a beginning than an end. She’s not just the first college graduate in her family. She managed, just barely, to graduate without taking on debt. That will make it easier for her to do what she really wants: give away money to others.

All told, Fabiola has now given scholarships to 12 students from Gonzales High School, along with the NAACP and San Diego State students’ grants. She is raising money for more scholarships, with a particular emphasis on undocumented students, and helping students meet their basic needs.

She may even make a wider impact, too, since the governor put her on his vision council for reimagining post-secondary education. And while she isn’t sure what exactly will be next, she can raise money, and has unusual first-hand experience in increasing access to higher education.

Perhaps she could become the chancellor of the Cal State system, she muses.

After all, the job is open.

The post California’s Most Unlikely Philanthropist Is Starting a New Chapter appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Instead, Gonzales is among California’s most vaccinated places. In this Salinas Valley town of 9,000, where fewer than 10 percent of adults have a college degree, 98 percent of eligible residents have received at least one dose.

Readers of this column know that Gonzales is often an outlier of excellence among California communities. But in this case, it’s part of a larger, unexpected success story around vaccination in two of the state’s agricultural areas—the Salinas and Imperial Valleys. Their stories hold lessons that go beyond the pandemic.

The city of Salinas, the de facto capital of the lettuce-growing valley, also boasts a vaccination rate above 90 percent, well above the statewide average and the vaccination rate on the whiter, wealthier Monterey Peninsula. Meanwhile, Imperial County, along the U.S.–Mexico border, is the most vaccinated place in the southern part of the state, as CalMatters first noted. Imperial boasts an 86 percent vaccination rate (at least one dose)— 10 points higher than L.A., Orange and San Diego counties, and 20-plus points higher than San Bernardino and Riverside counties.

The contrast is even more dramatic when you compare heavily vaccinated Salinas and Imperial with the slow-to-vaccinate rural regions—the San Joaquin Valley and the North State—that have seen coronavirus surges paralyze local health systems this fall. Some counties in those regions—including Kings in the San Joaquin, and Lassen and Modoc in the far northeast—have vaccination rates below 50 percent. And perhaps most intriguingly, both the Imperial and Salinas valleys have large populations of younger Latinos working in agriculture and essential industries—the very demographic other parts of the state are struggling to vaccinate.

So, what explains the success of these two valleys, 500 miles apart?

The answers start with vegetables.

The Salinas and Imperial Valleys are California’s two great lettuce lands, leading producers of green vegetables, from spinach to broccoli. As such, they share networks of companies, mechanics, and workers who operate in the Salinas Valley through summer and fall, and the Imperial Valley (and neighboring Yuma, Arizona) in winter. It’s not uncommon to find agricultural workers with residences in both places.

Some of these same workers were among the hardest hit by the first wave of COVID-19 last spring, with 2020 infection rates as much as three times higher than California’s general population. The state was slow to require protective equipment, and testing was unavailable at first. But, after the early months of the pandemic, agricultural networks in the two valleys rallied in a big way.

Tight collaboration among entities that can be at odds—growers, labor groups, local governments, community advocates, and health clinics—was crucial. In the Salinas Valley, the Grower Shipper Association, an agricultural industry group, and Clinica de Salud, a community health clinic, shared an award for their joint efforts to protect workers. Together, they provided workers with personal protective equipment and quarantine housing, and, in 2021, they helped organize mass vaccination campaigns in the fields and at well-known sites like the Salinas Sports Complex. While the growers offered time off and transportation for vaccination, the clinics provided the doctors and nurses to do the jabs.

The Salinas Valley collaborators obtained their own supply of vaccines directly from the federal government, bypassing the state government. The vaccination collaborations also benefited from pre-pandemic organizing campaigns around farmworker health (particularly related to pesticide use) and the 2020 census count.

On the southern end of the lettuce network, county health officials worked with another industry group (the Imperial Valley Vegetable Growers Association), providers (including El Centro Regional Medical Center), and community nonprofits to get people vaccinated in even the smallest settlements of the sprawling valley. They provided transportation to get workers and far-flung residents to mass clinics at malls. And they brought vaccinations to the border, since many Imperial workers must cross to their jobs.

Participants in these efforts say the aggressive early spread of COVID in the community meant there was little vaccine resistance—too many people knew how deadly the virus was. Some also see the vaccination success as a by-product of increases in the county’s health infrastructure in the 10 years since the establishment of Obamacare.

But vaccination, for all the public conversation about national or statewide rates, is a profoundly local function. And Gonzales, which won a major national award for community health before the pandemic, provides a good example of how to do it.

Community health workers were central to the approach. Gonzales managed to hire two in 2020. Then in January 2021, by joining a program called VIDA that brought in county and philanthropic support, the city hired four more, for a total of six.

These community health workers went door to door, and into apartment buildings, schools and businesses, to build relationships with residents. They brought free food boxes, from three local food pantries that the city set up early in the pandemic, to quarantined residents. They also became certified COVID-19 testers. This helped them reach vaccine holdouts, who, after testing negative for COVID-19, were quickly registered for vaccine appointments.

The city’s vaccination campaign has been relentless—with many organizations partnering to host over 20 mass vaccination clinics since February at the high school, the small and independent Gonzales RX Pharmacy, and the local Catholic church. To make sure there were always enough people in town who could give shots, the city had five Gonzales firefighters certified in administering COVID-19 vaccines. In addition to these personnel, nursing students from nearby Hartnell Community College and pharmacy staff also handled inoculations.

“It’s very hard for people to say no, with the accessibility and ease of the process,” Carmen Gil, Gonzales’ director of community engagement, told me.

And therein may lie the prescription for ending this pandemic, even in the most stubborn locations. When so many different people and institutions in a place are working together to get you vaccinated, it doesn’t matter who you are or how small or rural your community is—resistance is futile.

The post Why California’s Lettuce Lands Are Unlikely Vaccination Leaders appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Would it be a population of about 30,000? By that definition, two of the three local leaders on the panel—former West Sacramento mayor Christopher Cabaldon and Coachella councilmember Megan Beaman Jacinto—live in communities of approximately 50,000, and would not qualify.

Gonzales city manager René Mendez, whose Central Coast town has a population of just 9,000, said that more important than a number is the necessity of fostering “connections and intimacy” among the people who live there. Though he’d be hard-pressed to consider a community of 30,000 a small town, he said, a town or city with a population the size of West Sacramento and Coachella can still feel intimate—and thus, by that definition, be a “small town.”

Jacinto and Cabaldon agreed that the “small town” designation is relative, noting that it depends where you are. Hewing closer to Mendez’s definition, Cabaldon said that you know you’re in a small town if a fellow resident comes to a city council meeting and you know them not from the organization that they’re representing but because of a different relationship—through something like school or church or the neighborhood.

Marcum, the moderator, quoted Aristotle, who considered a place the right size if “the citizens should know each other and know what kind of people they are.” Turning to Mendez, she asked, “Does Gonzales meet that criteria?”

Unequivocally, “yes,” Mendez replied. The city even refers to its way of doing things as “the Gonzales way,” which he clarified, “doesn’t mean you always agree, just that you’re together, and you’re able to work through some issues.” That comes with downsides, too. For instance, Mendez was working to unveil a new multifamily housing project. A week before its unveiling, the community came out against it—with friends, relatives, and teachers all reaching out directly with unanticipated concerns. “It was a very uncomfortable conversation, but we worked through it,” he said, one that was discussed with emotion everywhere from the liquor store to the barber shop to the post office.

Cabaldon noted that West Sacramento—which nearly doubled in size over his two decades in office—wants “to be a small-town vibe with big-city amenities.” The challenge he found was that “the interconnectedness that we feel isn’t always completely real.” It can be easy to go to certain places and meetings and think you’ll see everyone, but then you miss communities within the community. “I wasn’t really running into recent immigrants from Laos, folks from the Ukrainian community,” he recalled.

This is the similar to one of the challenges facing Coachella, which is currently about 97 percent Latino. The city has doubled in population over the past 15 years and continues to grow, which makes for challenging city planning, said Jacinto. “There is a way of thinking in Coachella—that I share to some extent—which is, as we develop Coachella into the future, we want to ensure that it’s preserving spaces and culture and history for the people that live there now,” she said. “At the same time, about 70 percent of our city is undeveloped, so to speak, agricultural land that’s really ripe for development.” This land could mean opportunities—or challenges that push residents out. Neighbors hold different possible futures for the city in many directions, from the wealthier, larger cities of Indian Wells, Rancho Mirage, and Palm Springs to the working-class neighborhoods of incorporated communities in the more rural eastern Coachella Valley. “We have to be really careful in balancing [our] thoughts and dreams,” said Jacinto.

Turning to Cabaldon, Marcum asked, “Did [West Sacramento] want to be Sacramento, or did it always say, we want to keep an identity as a separate thing that we are?”

Both, said Cabaldon—residents wanted amenities and improvements, but they also didn’t want change. “Very few small towns want to grow just to grow,” he said. Regarding neighboring Sacramento, he noted that anyone who wanted to move there could, but as a politician, he got to have the best of both worlds. “I can draft behind the big cities when it matters and focus on maintaining and building out a small-town place,” he said. If you want to do something, even about a problem as big as climate change, you can open your office door and yell to your colleagues and make a plan. Which isn’t to say small towns are perfect. He joked that you could also have a situation where, say, there are four city councilmembers total—and one hates another because he stole his high school prom date. (When asked if this was a true story, Cabaldon laughed and said he was not referring to the current city council.)

“You don’t have to go through a lot of hoops to get something done,” Mendez joined in, speaking to a plus of small-town governance. “The key is to have partnerships.” In Gonzales, the youth council galvanized the community to figure out how to help young people facing mental health issues during the pandemic. Acting on the recommendations of these local teenagers, he said, the city council and school board came together to create a wraparound mental health approach and fund a social worker to support young people in crisis.

On the other end of the spectrum, small communities are often under-resourced and underrepresented in government. “Can you talk about how small is maybe too small and what the challenges there are?” asked Marcum.

In addition to working within Coachella, Jacinto advocates for unincorporated communities in the eastern rural Coachella Valley. These places, which exist primarily because farmworkers couldn’t find affordable housing elsewhere, lack basic resources like clean drinking water and septic systems. They’ve been forced to innovate, developing some of the state’s first point-of-use community water filtration systems and new regulations for mobile home utilities.

Small size necessitates and often facilitates innovation, the panelists agreed. Gonzales recently made universal broadband free to all its residents, and West Sacramento instituted universal preschool 18 years ago and has made free college tuition possible for every high school senior.

“In a smaller town you can imagine actually solving a problem,” said Cabaldon. “In a bigger city, it’s, ‘Let’s adopt a 25-year plan to do X.’” Small-town leaders know they can’t leave anyone behind, he joked, because you might run into that person at a soccer game next weekend.

Marcum then turned the discussion over to audience questions, submitted via a live YouTube chat.

One person wanted to know: How can you create a cultural center for a town?

Mendez said it’s about watching where your community gathers and what places they revolve around. “It’s observing your community, listening, and then you try to activate around that,” he said. In Gonzales, for example, they passed a sales tax to fund a new community center near the school—because it was identified as a place where people were already going.

Another viewer asked: What was the most innovative thing the panelists had seen come out of a small town?

Jacinto said that Coachella was “the first city in the nation to ban private prisons” and also the only place that instituted “hazard hero pay for farmworkers” in the pandemic—an extra $4 an hour for four months.

Viewers also wanted to know how to keep and attract young people to small towns. Creating extension campuses of larger higher educational institutions, said Mendez and Cabaldon, has been helpful.

Listening to the panelists discuss the reasons why people want to come or return to small towns, Marcum noted near the end of the discussion that it felt like the panelists were covering the things that make life good. Summing it up, she said: “You need basic necessities, you need opportunity that makes your children come home, you need fun, you need a place to live, and you need a place where everybody meets.”

The post Small Towns Can Create Big Change appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Longtime readers of this column will not be surprised to learn that the town in question is Gonzales, the California municipal version of the Little Engine That Could. Its small, working-class population of just 9,000, many of them farmworkers, has ingeniously solved tricky local government problems, from universal broadband to health care access, and from economic planning to child development.

Now Gonzales is tackling one of our state’s most stubborn challenges: how to develop local sources of cleaner, cheaper, and more reliable power as our state’s aging energy grid falters.

Tiny Gonzales’s solution? Creating the largest multi-customer microgrid in California. In essence, Gonzales is building its own electricity island among the vegetable fields of the Central Coast to guarantee uninterrupted power, from mostly renewable sources, for the agricultural and industrial businesses that provide the tax base to support its ambitious local programs.

The idea of microgrids—local power grids that can be separate or connected to the larger grid—is not new. In California, they are seen as tools to make electricity service more resilient and to better integrate renewable energy sources, like solar and wind, with the power grid. But efforts to establish microgrids face complex obstacles, from scarce financing, to regulatory barriers that prevent utility customers from sharing power across different grids, to opposition from established utilities.

What distinguishes Gonzales is how the town is bringing together different entities—a savvy start-up applying advanced technology and financing power to microgrids, big energy customers in agriculture and food processing, a new municipal energy authority, and a method for selling power capacity back into the state grid—to surmount those obstacles.

The effort is actually bigger than the town. The $70 million microgrid is the most expensive public works project in the city’s history, dwarfing a $5 million revamping of its Alta Street thoroughfare. But if the microgrid succeeds—it’s scheduled to start producing power next year—Gonzales could provide a model for other California communities, especially those in rural or outlying areas poorly served by the existing grid.

“People want to see if we can pull it off,” says Rene Mendez, Gonzales’s longtime city manager. “We don’t agree with the idea that just because you’re small, you can’t do something like this.”

The problems that drove Gonzales to build a microgrid are familiar across California. The poor reliability of our current grid poses serious problems for companies that depend on steady power sources to operate advanced technology—like the refrigeration and processing machines of the food producers in the Gonzales Agricultural Industrial Park.

PG&E, the investor-owned utility servicing Gonzales and much of Northern and Central California, is so far behind in maintaining the existing grid that many communities, especially in remote places, can’t get the upgrades to the equipment needed to reliably deliver additional power. It could take up to three years for PG&E to update the local energy infrastructure to offer service to any new agricultural-industrial facilities that might move to town.

And PG&E’s use of regional power shutoffs to prevent fires has made finding local power sources that won’t shut down even more urgent. During one 2019 shutoff, Gonzales lost power for two days, resulting in multimillion dollar losses for local employers. This month, a PG&E lawyer said that these intentional outages will continue indefinitely.

Officials spent a decade trying in vain to convince PG&E to upgrade its infrastructure around Gonzales before the city started working on a 2017 plan to produce local electricity with ZeroCity, a Monterey-area company that works with municipalities on energy resiliency, and OurEnergy, a Santa Cruz technical and engineering consultancy. Recognizing that its existing municipal utility couldn’t afford to finance a microgrid by itself, in 2018 Gonzales formed a municipal energy authority that could enlist private financing and overcome some regulatory blocks.

Last fall, Gonzales agreed to work with Salinas-based microgrid developer Concentric Power to design, build, own, operate, and maintain the new microgrid. Concentric will also fund most of the project’s $70 million price tag, earning back its money over 30 years by selling power on a wholesale basis to the city’s new utility. The new Gonzales Electric Authority will contribute about $10 million, and take ownership of the distribution assets. The municipal utility will sell the power—at retail rates lower than PG&E’s.

About 80 percent of the power will come from renewables and about 20 percent from natural gas (which could eventually come from a renewable gas facility the city is also pursuing). The microgrid includes a substation that will allow the sale of excess capacity into the state system, or to Central Coast Community Energy, which serves residential customers in Gonzales.

Effectively, Gonzales is betting that its new microgrid won’t just keep existing food processors in town, but also will make it easier to attract other companies, strengthening the tax base that supports its civic innovation. Additionally, the microgrid should supplement the two giant wind turbines that tower above Gonzales, local landmarks that already serve local food processors. A third turbine might be in the offing.

“This is a community scale microgrid business model that hasn’t existed in the past,” says Salinas native Brian Curtis, founder and CEO of Concentric Power, which is already working on microgrid projects in the Central Valley and elsewhere in the Central Coast. “It’s going to be a watershed project for the state.”

Should the Gonzales microgrid launch and successfully serve multiple customers, it will be a powerful example of local power, especially for rural communities trying to protect or grow industry. Most microgrids serve a single customer or landowner, or are owned by utilities themselves. (In addition to Gonzales, microgrid believers also point to the Redwood Coast Airport microgrid in Humboldt County as a potential model for more powerful, multi-customer microgrids.)

In recent years, California has funded microgrid pilots—from the Blue Lake Rancheria tribal land in the far north to Borrego Springs in northern San Diego County—but it has struggled with the complicated task of creating a regulatory structure that would incentivize localities to produce more microgrids. One especially difficult issue is how to create a system of “microgrid tariffs” to govern how costs and benefits of different grids are shared.

By building its own microgrid, Gonzales is refusing to wait for the rest of California to get its act together. In so doing, one of our state’s smallest towns is, once again, setting a very big example.

The post The Huge Electric Leadership of a Small California Town appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You’ll find one answer to that question in Gonzales, a city of just 9,000 people in the Salinas Valley, where local leaders spent 15 years seeking to connect all residents to the internet.

Right now, even California’s biggest and richest cities are struggling to provide the internet access necessary for their people to work or study from home. But Gonzales solved that problem a few months ago. Before the pandemic hit, the town offered broadband service, free of charge, to all its residents. The story behind its rare achievement—tiny Gonzales is the first Central Coast city to do this—offers all kinds of lessons about power, and how communities can beat the odds.

Gonzales’ leadership is not entirely a surprise. The town, populated by farmworkers and surrounded by fields, is one of our state’s smallest wonders. In a region notorious for high crime and child poverty, Gonzales boasts low crime and high graduation rates. And while other California cities chase sales taxes by developing big retail and tourist attractions, Gonzales focuses on nurturing a diverse industrial base that employs local residents. Its local leadership is well-known for novel partnerships that provide innovative health services and extensive supports for children, who make up nearly 40 percent of the town’s population.

But even for a creative and nimble city, securing broadband has been very challenging. Gonzales’ long path to universal broadband suggests that it will be difficult to turn the temporary internet measures of the pandemic—like short-term service discounts from providers—into long-term bridges over our digital divides.

Gonzales’ broadband quest is also a tale of a David taking on multiple Goliaths. In 2005, internet service in Gonzales was slow and unreliable, and municipal officials couldn’t get service providers to work with the town.

So the city joined the Central Coast Broadband Consortium, which includes governments and organizations that seek better internet access. Gonzales officials also started regularly visiting the state’s Public Utilities Commission in San Francisco to press their case for rural broadband, including a link between Santa Cruz and Soledad.

At some PUC meetings, Gonzales was the only city represented. But as a small town, it didn’t have much leverage—until officials discovered how to advance their case by filing legal protests against corporate mergers and acquisitions.

In 2015, when Charter Communications sought to merge with Time Warner in a $78 billion deal, Gonzales moved to block California from offering its approval of Charter’s acquisition of Time Warner and Bright House cable systems, on the grounds that the deal wouldn’t help small towns. City officials fought so hard that PUC officials urged Charter to negotiate. Ultimately Gonzales dropped its opposition after Charter upgraded the system serving the town, bumping Gonzales’ upload speeds from 1 Mbps to 60 Mbps, and its download speeds from 5 Mbps to 100 Mbps.

A tech backbone was in place, but access to the internet at home still remained a problem for poor families. On my frequent stops to Gonzales in recent years, I saw kids sitting outside McDonald’s, Starbucks or even City Hall, using the free WIFI to do their homework. In 2017, such scenes inspired the city to add a Broadband Strategy to its general plan, with a commitment to “Universal Broadband for All.”

Gonzales then requested proposals from internet service providers to provide universal broadband. Four such proposals were filed, but Gonzales rejected them all, citing slow speeds or holes in the commitment to universal access. Instead, the city began to negotiate individually with providers. The city found a willing partner in T-Mobile.

In Gonzales, Wi-Fi for all. Courtesy of Carmen Gil.

T-Mobile’s offerings were well-suited for Gonzales’ needs. The company has a program called EmpowerED to get students online. T-Mobile also has an unusually dense network of cellular towers in the area—which provide cell coverage to people driving through on the 101. T-Mobile also was willing to shift its model, which focuses on school districts, and work with the city government as well.

The T-Mobile/Gonzales partnership was approved by the city council last October. T-Mobile upgraded wireless internet infrastructure, and donated 2,000 Wi-Fi hotspots—one for every city household. The hotspots offer speeds four times those required by the Federal Communications Commission, and can support up to 12 different devices at once.

The city, not residents, pays monthly service charges, at a discounted rate of $12.50 monthly per household device. Partnership documents value T-Mobile’s donation at more than $504,000. The total annual cost to the Gonzales government is $300,000—paid for with general fund revenues and a special ½-cent sales tax approved back in 2014.

Hotspot distribution started in schools and low-income housing complexes. Anyone presenting proof of residency in Gonzales received them; so did households outside the city who attend Gonzales schools. Since COVID forced shutdowns, the city has offered drive-by service for equipment pickups.

Residents tell me the devices are already activated when you get them, so they are easy to use. And with education and other services now moving online, the hotspots have become indispensable for Gonzales’ many multi-generation families. Grandparents sing the hot spots’ praises, and some college students from Gonzales, now back home, say their city internet connections are better than their campus ones.

“They work really, really well, even with all the people suddenly online—Google Docs, Google Classroom, Zoom, are all working,” says Isabel Mendoza, 17, a Gonzales High senior and commissioner with the Gonzales Youth Council, a youth government with a role in city and school district decision-making. “Before, because we have five people in my house, and a number of electronics, the internet was really slow.”

René Mendez, the longtime city manager, has been fielding inquiries from towns around California asking for broadband advice, and nearby Greenfield is now moving forward with a similar program.

“I think this is doable across the state,” Mendez says, particularly if cities aggressively seek out internet providers and make deals that mix new broadband investment with cost-sharing. “Why can’t you provide broadband for the whole community, just like you do with sewer and water and streets?”

Of course, it should be much easier for poor towns and people to secure internet in California, which invented our tech world, than it was for Gonzales. But the city doesn’t dwell on past struggles—it’s moving forward. Gonzales’ deal with T-Mobile is for two years, but it’s renewable. City officials are planning a trip to T-Mobile headquarters, and plotting the next chapter of universal broadband. It starts with 5G.

The post One Small California Town’s 15-Year Fight for Universal Broadband appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Because I’m from an immigrant family in this part of California, I had the desire to serve the agricultural community in Gonzales and across the Salinas Valley. Throughout my entire life—growing up in Watsonville and East Salinas, and working professionally in a local hospital and federally-funded clinics—I have seen firsthand what it’s like not to be able to get medical care during an illness. This experience has inspired me to work harder and differently to make sure health care is accessible, affordable, and high-quality.

Lack of accessibility to health care has been an issue in my family for decades. My grandmother died in Mexico from “sick sinus syndrome,” a heart rhythm problem related to the cardiac sinus node. Living in poverty, she didn’t have access to a cardiologist, and couldn’t get the pacemaker and specialty care that would have given her an opportunity to live longer.

My interest in medicine dates from my childhood and adolescence. I happen to have been born in Santa Cruz to migrant farmworker parents who then lived in a farmworker camp in Watsonville. Transportation, and thus access to care, were problems for them; they had to ask for a ride to reach the nearest hospital that accepted the state Medicaid program, 45 minutes away. Consistency of care was also a challenge. Our family—my parents and their five children—were binational; we would live six months in Mexico and six months in the United States, as my parents couldn’t afford to stay here in the winter when the strawberry season and lettuce harvesting were over.

On long family trips to Mexico by car, we would encounter accidents on the roadside where people were injured, and I remember wishing I had the skills to help the wounded. Seeing the complications of diabetes in family members and friends—including premature deaths that could have been prevented with prescriptions, diet changes, and other medical care— strengthened my own desire to become a medical professional.

My interest also stemmed from having had a younger sister who was born with congenital anomalies. She only lived 9 months—three months longer than my parents were told she would survive. My parents at the time were accused of causing the congenital malformation from exposure to drugs or alcohol, but they didn’t use such substances at the time. The more likely cause of her malformations, I later learned, was exposure to pesticides in the fields.

Education was not a priority in our family. My parents, who only had first and second grade educations, wanted me to stop school at the eighth grade. When I didn’t, they stopped supporting me economically, so I had to work, to support myself—and, as the oldest, to support my siblings. Work meant picking strawberries. During the summers, the shifts were 10 hours a day, seven days a week.

As a first-generation high school student, I lacked mentors or even a good counselor; I didn’t know about college prep, honors, or AP classes, and the counselor enrolled me in general education classes during my freshman year at Alisal High School in East Salinas. But I was blessed with having a teacher, Mr. Terry Espinoza, who took an interest in me during his world history class. He asked to look at my schedule, and then he picked up the phone in his classroom, called the counselor, and insisted I be put in college prep and honors classes.

In high school I applied to the Monterey County Youth Program, which placed low-income students in summer jobs. I was lucky to be selected and matched to a job in the x-ray department at Natividad Hospital, a county hospital that provides care to the underserved and uninsured. I found I liked being part of serving these patients; I would go down to the emergency room to pick up x-ray films and translate between doctors and Spanish-speaking patients. The x-ray staff was very supportive, keeping me on after the summer so I could work there for the rest of my high school years.

I married during my junior year of high school, and was pregnant with my son as I applied to four UC schools. I got accepted at each and was offered a full ride at UC Berkeley (I would have paid just $90 a year). But I didn’t have much guidance from the school and didn’t understand my options. In May of my senior year, my son was born prematurely, at just 32 weeks, and my husband underwent back surgery. In support of me, he suggested that I leave my son behind with him so I could continue my education, but as a mother I couldn’t do this, even in pursuit of the dream of becoming a physician. I turned down Berkeley (I wish I had deferred admission, but didn’t understand how that worked), and took care of my premature baby and my husband.

Fortunately, Salinas has an excellent community college, Hartnell College, which I attended before transferring to UC Santa Cruz, where I earned a biology degree.

I have lasting regret that I never became a doctor. I was pre-med and, after graduation, I attended a post-baccalaureate program at UC Davis that was supposed to guarantee med school admission to all 24 students in the program. But it didn’t happen. I recommend UC Davis to people, but, unfortunately, while at the post-bacc program, I was aggressively discouraged from applying to medical schools, and even told by one official that I would be insulting medical schools to think I would get in with my MCAT scores. I was heartbroken, stopped the application process, and didn’t even open the envelopes I received from med schools. Years later, when I did open those envelopes, I discovered that the medical schools at USC and UCLA wanted me. It still brings tears to my eyes when I think about it, and it taught me a lesson that I share with students today: don’t let anyone tell you you’re not good enough, don’t be discouraged, apply and pursue your dreams.

My own dream was shattered, but I did return home to serve families like my own, as a physician’s assistant. My family’s own doctor said I could do much of the work a physician does with more flexible hours to raise a family. I now have three children, the youngest of whom is six. (That premature baby is now a strong and healthy Santa Cruz police officer). I worked at the local federally-funded community clinic for over a decade, about 10 miles away from Gonzales, where I live.

The problem in small towns like this is that it is difficult to attract physicians, physician assistants, and other medical professionals. It’s even harder to get them to stay; most leave after a few months. To have reliable providers and continuity of care, we need physicians and physician assistants who have roots in the community and the drive to serve the people here.

At the clinic, I saw many patients who came from Gonzales to my clinic, so, since I live there, I started a project to open up a family practice clinic in Gonzales to provide affordable medical care and ultrasound services. I approached a local doctor, Ignacio Guzman, who grew up in Gonzales in an immigrant family, and shared my vision of providing medical care in our agricultural community at an affordable price. We have started with one examination room and a small waiting room, and we offer affordable ultrasound and lab services inside the pharmacy.

We organize everything here to the benefit of those patients who are hardest to serve. We stay open until 6 p.m., and we don’t take a lunch break until 2—so that we can see people during their own lunch. Our small clinic is open to everyone who needs and seeks medical care, including the uninsured and those on almost any kind of insurance, including Medicare, Medi-Cal, and Central Coast Alliance, a regional nonprofit health plan. (In addition, I helped open and staff a local federally-funded clinic that was about to lose their funding because they couldn’t find a local provider.)

We also advocate for our patients. We don’t offer immunizations yet: We’d like to, but need funding for the refrigerator required for vaccine storage. In the meantime, families seeking vaccines have to drive to Salinas, which is 20 to 30 minutes away, depending on traffic, or take a bus, or pay $50 for a ride to the local public health department.

I also advocate for local students to become medical professionals. I’ve been disappointed that universities like California State University Monterey Bay don’t accept more local students into their physician assistant programs. This contributes to the shortage of medical professionals in the area, and adds to the challenges of providing accessible care and continuity of care, with long-term relationships between the providers and patients. We also need ultrasound technicians and well-qualified medical assistants.

With financial assistance from the city of Gonzales, we were able to purchase the ultrasound machine that now sits inside the Gonzales pharmacy. Our services are open for patients from other medical facilities and open to doctors from other medical practices. We prefer to provide ultrasound in the pharmacy because, in Mexico, people are used to seeing doctors and getting whatever else they might need at the pharmacy. (The local pharmacist, Jimmy Eitoku, shares the vision of making medical services as affordable and accessible as possible).

Before we offered ultrasound services, it was difficult for patients in the south part of Monterey County to access medical imaging at affordable prices. (The cheapest was an hour north, in Gilroy). Because we’re not in a hospital with all that overhead, our ultrasounds are cheaper. While they charge $1,600 in King City for a pelvic ultrasound, here in Gonzales we charge $400. We offer testicular ultrasounds at $180 and abdominal ultrasounds at $225.

But staffing the ultrasound site, and our clinic, has been an issue. We are hurting for local medical staff that are bilingual and invested in the community. We need certified sonographers who are trained in vascular ultrasounds, carotid ultrasounds, and ultrasounds of other body parts.

In other words, we need more people who dream of building a new health system, starting in this small agricultural community.

The post We Put the Ultrasound Machine in the Local Pharmacy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This spring—as federal prosecutors announced a major college admissions scandal that had ensnared wealthy movie stars and prominent Californians, who paid millions in bribes to get their kids into elite universities—a poor kid from a poor California town faced her own dilemma about money and universities: How could she use her own meager bank account to help others go to college?

Fabiola Moreno Ruelas, an 18-year-old from the Salinas Valley town of Gonzales, was about to become California’s most unlikely philanthropist. She had not had a glittering, Carnegie-style (or even Kardashian-style) upbringing. In fact, she had suffered much of the worst of California, from the deportation of her father, to a serious auto accident, to the eviction of her family from their home.

But when Fabiola received $29,000 on her 18th birthday—a windfall that was itself a product of a moment of misfortune—she knew she didn’t want to spend it on herself. Yes, $29,000 was far less than the hundreds of thousands of dollars that rich parents had paid to admissions counselors and college coaches in bribes to guarantee college for their own kids. But it was enough, she thought, to make a difference in the lives of her friends and neighbors in Gonzales.

On the one hand, this is a simple story about a small, new scholarship program. On the other, it is an urgent and timely fable about the real meaning of poverty, the true nature of generosity and community, and the abundance of spirit that can spin bad luck into good.

As such, it also might be considered a 21st-century updating of another child of the Salinas Valley, John Steinbeck, who advised in The Grapes of Wrath: “If you’re in trouble or hurt or need—go to poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help—the only ones.”

Fabiola was born in Salinas and moved to Gonzales, 20 minutes south along the 101 Freeway, when she was two. Her father, who was undocumented, was deported when she was still a small child, but she and her older siblings stayed on in Gonzales. In selection of a hometown, at least, she would prove to be very lucky.

Gonzales is home to 10,000 people, more than one-third of them children. Many of their parents work long hours in local processing plants or in the surrounding fields of green vegetables. Gonzales is neither rich (median household income is $53,000) nor well-educated, with just 10 percent of adults holding college degrees.

But over many years, Gonzales has developed a local culture that is extraordinarily supportive of children. A dense web of programs is available for kids during the summer and after school, involving sports, service, or jobs. And Gonzales celebrates its children’s achievements forcefully. On a recent visit, the city had posted banners all around town featuring recent Gonzales High School graduates and the colleges they are attending this fall.

Fabiola and her family always struggled, but they found that people in Gonzales were reliably there to help—to find cheap or donated clothes (via a local church), or to get them signed up for food stamps or welfare. Fabiola started kindergarten at the young age of four—her mother needed a place to send her—and her teachers bought her first set of school supplies and uniforms. In middle school, she was able to do sports because they were free, and she helped other members of the community to fundraise for youth programs.

But in high school, her life got even tougher. Freshman year, she was in a very serious car accident while riding with five friends to celebrate a birthday. She fractured her skull, wrist, and back, but at least she and everyone else survived.

After her sophomore year, her family was evicted from their apartment. They had nowhere else to go, and though her mother and new stepfather were working, every paycheck would go to pay the lawyers’ fees to contend with a lawsuit from the landlord who had evicted them, she says. With a new baby brother, the family moved around from place to place, depending on the generosity of neighbors. They collected plastic bottles from the side of the freeway, redeeming them to get money for food. They didn’t have money to pay their water bill, so Fabiola filled up jars at a local elementary school.

It was the indignity of fetching water that became a turning point for Fabiola. As she stood at the school faucet, she realized she did not want to live like this. She had been an indifferent student, but education, she realized, was the only thing that was free in her life, so she decided to seize its opportunities for all they were worth. Her brother-in-law gave her his old computer. She got straight A’s her junior year. She even took a sociology class at Hartnell College up in Salinas, because the class and the books were free. She went to the Gonzales Starbucks—not to buy anything, but to use the free Internet so she could do her homework.

Joining the Gonzales Youth Council—which operates like a young person’s city council, even writing local ordinances—didn’t cost her any money, so she did that, too. Senior year, she applied to become a youth commissioner of the council, to represent the body at the school board and city council. Soon all of Gonzales’ opportunities came at her, including a paid fellowship with the city government.

No one in her family had completed college; one older sister had dropped out of Hartnell. But Fabiola’s mentors at City Hall encouraged her. And the school superintendent even took her along on a trip to San Diego, where she discovered she liked San Diego State. She applied, and was admitted, with $13,000 in scholarship money. But she would need to pay $5,000 out of her own pocket just to survive, and she didn’t have it. Where would she get the money?

Gonzales, once again, would supply the answer. The town has a tradition of local citizens starting small scholarship funds. A local firefighter, who died in 1996, endowed a scholarship for students who have a 3.0 GPA and are interested in the emergency field. A family of teachers set up another scholarship. And then there’s Maury Treleven, who works with the city and set up the Treleven Family “Service is Learned” Scholarship, which gives money, no strings attached, to college-bound Gonzales kids.

Fabiola won a $5,000 Treleven scholarship and headed off to San Diego State last fall, when she was still just 17 years old.

When she turned 18 during the year, she suddenly came into a bit of money. As part of the settlement from that freshman year car accident, she was entitled to $29,000 when she became an adult.

Fabiola mulled over what to do with the windfall. She talked with her family about the possibility of starting a business or buying a house for her mother. But as she and her family thought more about it, they wanted to make sure the money didn’t disappear quickly. And Fabiola felt strongly that she needed to give something back to a community that had supported her through so many difficult years. She decided to start with the sort of scholarship program she knew well, because she herself had benefited from it.

In December, she helped set the program up, naming it the Ruelas Fulfillment Scholarship, in honor of her mother. She worked with her high school counselor to create an application for high school seniors seeking extra money they would need to be able to afford to live during college. A 2.9 GPA and 80 hours of community service are required for eligibility. The Rotary Club agreed to manage her scholarship fund, so that the money would grow and last longer.

Thirty applications came in, and it was in March, with the news dominated by the college admissions scandal, that Fabiola awarded her first scholarships—$500 each to four students. She says she selected applicants who showed great resilience. One of the recipients is a student she ran against in the youth commissioner elections. She plans to make similar awards the next two years, and then see if she might be able to raise money to do even more.

“I was a little selfless in thinking about this money, but everyone in Gonzales was very selfless in helping me growing up,” she says. “Our community put us first.”

I met Fabiola in Salinas, where she was staying with an older sister for the summer. She exuded appreciation—for her life, for family, and for California.

When I asked her what she made of the college admissions scandal, she expressed some puzzlement. Didn’t those rich parents know that everyone would have been better off if they’d devoted their own financial windfalls to college scholarships for all the kids who can’t afford it?

In that answer lies a parable about two Californias—one rich and old and pessimistic about their own children’s abilities to rise, and the other poor but young and optimistic and determined to lift everyone up.

Which California would you rather live in?

The post The Fabulous Fable of Fabiola’s Scholarship Fund appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What if California actually decided to put the needs of its poor kids first? What would that look like?

Here’s one answer: it might look like Gonzales, a small city of 9,000 people—many of them farmworkers—along Highway 101 in the Salinas Valley.

The people of Gonzales don’t have educational credentials (less than 10 percent of adults over 25 have a college degree) or wealth (the median income is less than $17,000 annually). But they do have one incredible resource: youth. Thirty-six percent of the population is under the age of 18, and about 1,000 of the 9,000 residents are under age five. More than 85 percent of the Gonzales Unified School District qualifies for free and reduced lunch.

Very much against the odds, Gonzales has relentlessly assembled a rich suite of supports and services that touch the lives of every young person in town, from pre-school through high school. Today Gonzales has so many different programs for youth—service programs, recreational programs, after-school programs, summer programs, job programs—that it is now the rare California city spending more on youth than on its fire department.

As Gov. Gavin Newsom seeks to deliver on his campaign promise of a new system to support children from the womb through the college dorm room, Gonzales should serve as inspiration—and a reminder that there are no good excuses for not doing more for California’s kids.

Gonzales residents are poor, but they still voted for a half-cent sales tax to fund enhanced services, like youth services. And while leaders in the small city don’t have much power, that didn’t stop them from creatively sharing that power—and granting Gonzales children the authority to help make decisions about how money is spent. The kids even shape policy through a separate youth version of the city council.

Gonzales, for all its challenges, has real strengths. It has developed an industrial park of food processors and agriculture-related businesses that produce steady tax revenue. And, despite being a city of migrant workers, it has stable and thoughtful local leadership. City manager René Mendez, who also coaches the high school’s tennis team, notes that when two new city council members were sworn in recently, one was the former police chief and the other was the wife of a former councilmember who decided to hire him 16 years ago.

Early in his tenure, Mendes asked the city council members to make drawings of what was most important to them in Gonzales. They all drew pictures of parks, playgrounds, and other places for kids. That exercise triggered a shift in the council’s focus to children. Also guiding the shift were recommendations from Youth for Community, a panel of young people convened with help from city police and the Monterey County Office of Education. Ultimately, the city and the school district created a partnership called Gonzales Youth 21st Century Success Initiative.

The city started by developing year-round sports offerings and an aquatics program. Later, the city added full-day, five day-a-week summer camps that working parents can afford ($50 a week) and that keep kids physically active and engaged with community. The city now provides this same full-day coverage during spring break, winter break, and any other weekday when schools are closed.

“Our attitude is: if we don’t have the money, we’re going to find the money,” says Sara Papineau-Brandt, the parks and recreation chief, who has led the ramp-up of programs.

In 2016, the city joined with the school district to launch a robust after-school program, with a focus on homework assistance. It now serves 226 kids in elementary and middle school.

Still, Mendez and Papineau-Brandt note that most child care in this city where people work long hours in the fields is provided by grandmothers, or other family and friends, who have little training in early childhood development. So the city applied for and won a United Way grant to start a program called the Friends, Families & Neighbors Playgroup, in which caregivers learn how to handle challenges with the children they care for. The city is also working on initiatives that would create a city pre-school program that could also help the city’s’ informal caregivers become licensed.

When test scores showed the town’s high school students underperformed in math, the city funded a STEM program for middle and high school students called Wings of Knowledge, which uses math and science to tackle real-world technology challenges. (One project involved building, placing, and collecting data from digital soil monitoring devices that help farmers manage water usage).

As much as possible, Gonzales employs the city’s own children as part-time workers or interns in its programs. Students as young as 9th graders are asked to interview and fill out applications—giving them experience. The city also gives part-time work to college students from Gonzales to keep them connected to the town.

How does a town like Gonzales, where per capita income is half that of the state, manage to do better than many wealthier communities? Mendez, the city manager, says Gonzales has more money for kids because it limits spending on other things. The city doesn’t offer retiree health benefits, which have been a big burden for other cities, and it keeps its police force small, which provides significant savings since police are the biggest part of municipal budgets. Gonzales can do this because crime is low—property crime is 40 percent below state averages, and the robbery rate is 60 percent.

Is there some kind of virtuous circle between youth programs and low crime rates? Gonzales officials say they can’t be certain whether their emphasis on youth has led to low crime. But it sure doesn’t hurt.

Gonzales isn’t immune from the problems of California cities. There is a lack of housing both for existing residents and for teachers and other professionals being recruited there. In response, the city is annexing land and pushing for new housing development, with developers paying their impact fees by providing school facilities, day-care centers and other services for young people. In Gonzales, many wonder whether new state investments, especially in pre-school and early childhood, will prioritize smaller cities that often struggle to compete for grants.

Here’s hoping that the state, in doing more for children, also embraces the democratic spirit of Gonzales. In the after-school program, middle schoolers meet with staff weekly to decide on activities. And when the city had to put in a new playground structure at its tot lot, staffers were required to give a presentation on different options to kindergarten and transitional kindergarten students. The kids then had a binding vote to determine which structure would be purchased. “No one over the age of 5 got to vote on that,” says Papineau-Brandt.

I got a taste of youth democracy recently in the city council chambers, where the Gonzales Youth Council meets two Wednesdays a month. In 2014, the city and school district jointly appointed two youth commissioners, who are 18 or younger and attend city council and school board meetings; those commissioners lobbied to create the Youth Council, which consists of middle and high school students who go through an application process to serve.

“We were trying all this stuff for kids, and for some of it, kids weren’t showing up at first,” says Mendez. “The fundamental idea for the youth council was to bring the kids in so we could see what we were missing.”

Youth Council members set their own agenda and take on various tasks, from organizing the city holiday celebration to researching local cannabis regulations to hosting workshops for young people (one recent one was about college applications). Youth council members even handled the sensitive job of surveying the community about police department conduct; the idea was that immigrant residents, who are wary of federal immigration authorities, would be more likely to speak with the young people.

The Youth Council can also make policy. In 2017, the Council held hearings and drafted a new and comprehensive ordinance on underage drinking that replaced a heavy fine on parents who served alcohol to minors with a requirement that those parents take an educational course. This ordinance was unanimously adopted by the city council.

At the meeting I attended, the Youth Council discussed ongoing efforts to reduce extracurricular fees charged by the school district, and to increase transportation for kids who attend Gonzales schools but live in small communities outside the city limits. Youth commissioner Cindy Aguilar, a high school senior, explained their effort to create a Youth Innovation Center, with computer labs, a maker space, and a music studio. Sales-tax dollars are helping the project, but the council will need to raise money as well.

“We got to meet again with the architect,” said Aguilar. “We said we wanted it to smell like chocolate chip cookies.”

Don’t be surprised if the Gonzales kids get what they want. With representation comes power. And if California is serious about putting kids first, the state should form its own youth legislature.

The post The Small California Farm Town That Puts Kids First appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But if that’s true, how do you explain Gonzales?

The small city of just 9,000 sits in the heart of the poor and agricultural Salinas Valley, a region known for its high poverty rate, a weak economy tied to agriculture, and a history of gangs. Despite all that, it has a success story to tell.

Start with Gonzales’s relatively low crime rate (a stark contrast with the higher-crime city of Salinas just 20 miles up the 101), and then look onward to its 95 percent high school graduation rate, new health care facilities and enviable doctor-to-patient ratio, investment in sustainability (symbolized by a giant wind turbine, the city’s tallest structure), and a remarkable record of economic development victories.

Most intriguingly, Gonzales has advanced by figuring out how to make its small size an advantage. Building on stable leadership—the relentless city manager, Rene Mendez, is in his 13th year in office—Gonzales has kept city government small and simple, operating more like a nonprofit that constantly seeks partnerships and grants. City hall is a one-story building the size of a small restaurant.

Being small has allowed Gonzales to move faster—and speed is highly desirable in a state as slow and bureaucratic as California. The city’s streamlined structure allows for speedier reviews and planning; getting a project approved takes months, not years. An example: A very large vegetable processing plant for Taylor Farms was unveiled in July 2013; by April 2014, the project was done.

The result: Gonzales has been growing faster economically than many wealthier communities in Monterey County. In the past three fiscal years, Gonzales’s tax base has grown by 17 percent, 19 percent, and 20 percent, respectively, as it has added industrial and commercial development. Those gains represent more than 1,200 new jobs within the city limits.

The city is now home to companies oriented toward technology, agriculture, and the environment. Among these are HealthySoil, which manufactures products that improve crop production; Ramsay Highlander, which designs and manufactures advanced harvesting equipment; and Constellation Brands, an international producer and marketer of beer, wine, and spirits.

Gonzales’s approach is unconventional among California small towns. The more typical formula is to beautify the town center and develop a signature entertainment venue that attracts visitors, while chasing major retailers like Costco to produce high levels of sales tax for municipal coffers.

Mendez, who grew up in Patterson in the San Joaquin Valley and came to Gonzales from a job as Inyo County administrator, knew that Gonzales, small and somewhat isolated, was not a natural fit for tourism and malls. Instead of chasing big retailers, he wanted the city to build itself to serve its own residents. So the city has focused on enhancing its industrial footprint and taking advantage of its location on the 101 in the Salinas Valley, where good weather and clean water produce vegetables. Instead of having a Costco, Gonzales is the place that produces the vegetable trays that you buy at Costco.

Mendez says one virtue of a small city is that there is no bureaucracy. He and other city leaders have to build relationships directly with businesses, nonprofits, and other governments because they have no coterie of aides to do that for them.

Building those relationships, in environment-obsessed Monterey County, has required investments to match partners’ interest in sustainability. Gonzales built a wind turbine, its tallest structure and most distinguishing landmark, to accommodate the sustainability-minded Taylor Farms, which does extensive recycling of water and waste and relies on solar power and onsite cogeneration in its growing Gonzales processing facility.

Soon, Gonzales will be home to a 130,000-square foot Mann Packing facility that will reuse all water on site.

Many of Gonzales’ partnerships are designed to serve its youthful population: 60 percent of residents are below age 35, and more than one-third are 18 or younger. These youth partnerships include the Gonzales Youth 21st Century Success initiative, which focuses on building academic skills, and Bright Futures, which builds career readiness.

The city government also expands its capacity by hiring young people as interns and using them even in policy roles. In 2013, the city and school district jointly created a Youth Council that writes grant applications for school camps, tackles community improvement projects, and helps form policy, most recently in devising legislation on medical marijuana and on “social hosting,” the term for adults who host underage drinking parties. To give the Youth Council teeth, two of its members have non-voting seats on the city council. “I’ve found the city does listen to us, because we’re there,” says one council member, Cindy Aguilar, 16.

But the best example of the Gonzales method may involve health care.

Five years ago, the city had just one full-time doctor who was overwhelmed by patients needing her services. So the city identified a vacant piece of land and worked to convince Salinas Valley Memorial Healthcare System, which has a hospital up the road in Salinas, to open a satellite facility there. A fundraising campaign, led by a million-dollar donation from Taylor Farms, helped get that clinic built.

That might have been enough in some places, but simultaneously, the city was negotiating with non-profit Clinica de Salud to set up a second clinic. Gonzales now has six doctors and four dentists, and isn’t stopping there; a partnership with the county health department is working on new community health goals.

Gonzales’ record is less impressive on other issues, especially housing. The city is badly overcrowded, with 4.1 persons per household. Mendez notes that Gonzales hasn’t managed to build even one single-family home since 2005, though that’s not for lack of effort. The city is working on three new developments that could produce more than 6,000 housing units, as well as new schools and a library. But none have been built, as developers and the city struggle with familiar California issues of ownership, financing, and regulation.

In California, small, freewheeling cities have been viewed with suspicion because of scandals like the one in the city of Bell, where the city manager and his allies plundered $5.5 million, via inflated salaries that were the highest in the nation. But Gonzales shows that a small city can put freedom to good use, if it’s willing to seek partners. (For the record, the city pays Mendez $190,000 a year, about average for a California city manager).

Mendez says Gonzales is not singular; other California rural cities can make similar progress if they’re relentless about seeking collaborations with other institutions, particularly with each other. “Our types of communities have to do a better job of working together to pursue jobs and advocate for each other,” he says.

And Gonzales has more to do. Community development director Thomas Truszkowski took me around the city, talking about infrastructural improvements for industry. These might include a second wind turbine, to provide more renewable energy. Gonzales also could use a hotel, he said—to accommodate the visiting executives and employees of the city’s many businesses.

On these and other projects, Gonzales is looking for partners.

The post Small and Speedy, Gonzales Is a City on the Move appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.