I’ve always hated Arvin, my uncommon, easy-to-mangle name. For most of my life I didn’t even know where it came from. When I was a kid I asked my father, who is from India, what my name means. He told me, “beautiful face.”

A skeptical child, I didn’t believe him. A recent Google search confirmed my suspicions, revealing no such translation and no correlation between my name and a predisposition to attractive features. So, not long ago, I asked my father again about the origins of my name. This time he had a different story. The common Indian name, he told me, is Arvind—with a “d.” My parents had decided to remove the “d” to make the name sound “more American.”

Hold on. First of all, what happened to the whole “beautiful face” thing? You can’t just take that back after you see how the face turns out. And, second, Arvin is not a common American name.

But I have to give my dad some credit. The name does indeed appear to have a spot in American history—or at least a spot by the highway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The word “Arvin” can be seen clearly from the road, imprinted on a municipal water tower near Bakersfield, in Kern County. For years friends have taken snapshots of it on their cellphones to send to me.

A few summers ago, I decided to ride my motorcycle down to Arvin. Maybe, I thought, going to the town could help me clear up some of my feelings about my name.

It was past noon when I rolled into town, the midday sun beating down stronger than I was expecting. My plan was to take a seven-stop walking tour I’d found on Arvin’s website. A sign on Bear Mountain Boulevard, the town’s main drag, greeted me: “Welcome to the City of Arvin.” The strip, about a mile long, was populated with fast food joints and squat buildings with Spanish signs in the windows. On either end was more farmland.

Unlike me, the town seemed to have no shortage of pride in its name. There was Arvin Doughnuts, which was conveniently located a short walk from Arvin Family Dentistry and Arvin Dialysis. Across the street was Arvin Auto. Never before had I seen my name so prominently exhibited. It was like seeing your name on Broadway, if Broadway was in the middle of nowhere and you’d never heard of it.

I didn’t see a Starbucks, but I wondered if they would screw up my order the way others did:

“Tall black tea for Irvin!”

“Americano for Marvin!”

“Bitterness with two pumps of self-loathing for Arwyn!”

Arvin, established in 1910, was named after George Arvin Richardson, a storekeeper who’d settled there when the land was little more than sagebrush and rabbits. (The name Arvin, several baby-name websites say, has Germanic origins.) The area’s biggest claim to fame might be the Arvin Federal Government Camp, built in 1936. It housed migrants from Oklahoma and the greater Southwest seeking refuge amidst the ruin of the Great Depression. Author John Steinbeck included the camp in his novel The Grapes of Wrath—although in the book it’s known as “Weedpatch Camp.” Not a terribly flattering nickname.

Arvin prides itself now on its “quiet residential areas, clean streets, low crime rate, a first-class fire station, and a well-kept City Hall,” according to its website. The town is 93 percent Latino, including a significant number of field workers who earned their livings picking potatoes, carrots, grapes, peaches, and plums in the farms surrounding town.

But newspaper reports paint a picture of a small town with big issues. Arvin landed on USA Today’s “Worst Cities To Live in America” list, which cited poverty, violent crime, and “not…much to offer in the way of cultural or entertainment options.” On top of that, the city has a scourge of toxic smog that regularly floats in from across the mountains, and had a water supply contaminated with arsenic (an issue that was recently resolved). In 2017 many residents, one news site reported, were afraid to leave their homes due to a national crackdown on immigration.

I parked my bike and after stripping off my helmet and motorcycle jacket, headed to the first stop on the walking tour, the Arvin Visitor’s Center and Museum. The visitor center door was locked, even though a sign indicated that the building should be open. I knocked and waited a minute, but nobody answered. I circled the building to see if there was an alternate entrance. There was none. So, I pulled out my phone, found a number for the center, and dialed it. A woman picked up. The center, I learned, was closed because it was run by volunteers.

“We’re all senior citizens, you know,” I recall her saying. “We can’t be there all the time. A lot of us are dying off.”

I wasn’t sure what else to say, so I said the only thing I could think of: “My name is Arvin.”

“Excuse me?” the woman asked.

“My name is Arvin. Like, you know… here,” I said. “I’m a writer. That’s why I came. I thought it’d be interesting to go to a place that has my name. I thought that maybe I’d learn something about myself.”

“I see,” she said. “Well, isn’t that lovely?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess.”

Unable to access the visitor’s center, I headed for the next stop, Garden in the Sun Park, a quarter-mile away. The park, the walking tour map informed me, hosts farmers markets and events and is “largely seen as the heart of Arvin’s new downtown.”

The heart of downtown turned out to be a scrubby field with picnic tables and playground equipment. The only noise I heard was what sounded like a Spanish version of “Peggy Sue” floating over from some houses across the way. There was a group of teenagers sitting at one of the picnic tables, giggling. For a moment I imagined their laughter was a cruel taunt—that they’d seen me and figured out my name.

When I was growing up I loved books with protagonists named Joe, Frank, or Henry. Sometimes in school we were made to read stories whose protagonists had weird names, like Won-a-pa-lei or Esperanza. I rolled my eyes at these books, with cultural references I didn’t understand, and characters I wasn’t excited about. Instead of feeling kinship, I felt repelled. I wanted normal stories, just like I wanted a normal name.

In a 1962 speech Malcolm X asked: Who taught you to hate yourself?

Who indeed?  Was it the white man, as Malcolm suggested? Was it popular books, movies, and TV shows that privileged so-called “all-American” characters and stories? Was it my parents, for saddling me with an uncommon name?

Whatever the case, Arvin, California didn’t seem to hate itself. In fact, it seemed downright pleased with itself—and, as its walking tour indicated, its history. As I walked toward the next stop on the tour, Arvin’s first post office, I saw two women on a front lawn. They were pulling clothes out of garbage bags and hanging them on a rack for a yard sale.

One of the women was a farm worker, and the other was retired. Next to the retired woman, whose name was Lourdes, I noticed a bicycle with a small American flag draped over a wire basket. Lourdes was from Mexico, she told me in Spanish as her friend translated. She’d lived in Arvin for 10 years and previously in Los Angeles. In Arvin she’d worked at a laundromat and furniture store, and did odd jobs like selling tamales.

“When I was little I always had a dream that someday I’d come to California,” she said. “It was exactly what I dreamed: a lot of jobs and a lot of opportunities.”

For this reason she loved the American flag. “If you’re living in a country, you have to stand behind it,” she proclaimed.

An Arvin resident filled with pride. Imagine that.

As I moved on, I couldn’t help but think that whoever planned this walking tour should have also included a packing list: snacks, sunscreen, an IV. I hadn’t brought a water bottle and felt dehydration setting in by the time I arrived at my next destination. There was a row of houses with patchy brown lawns on one side of the street, and on the other an elementary school. On the corner was a school crossing guard sitting under an umbrella. I asked her if she happened to know where Arvin’s first post office was, and she gestured at a blue house with a chain-link fence surrounding it. I walked over and discovered behind the fence—on the resident’s lawn—a squat, three-foot-tall monument.

Peering through the fence’s metal links I read: “The name ‘Arvin’ was selected for the post office by the U.S. Post Office Dept. from a list submitted by Mrs. Heard,” the town’s first postmaster.

In 1914, a resident named Birdie Heard (speaking of weird names) petitioned the federal government for the addition of a post office. The proposed names included Bear Mountain, Walnut, and Arvin. Officials in Washington, D.C. chose Arvin, as it was the only name that wasn’t already taken in California. The name was kept for the city when it incorporated in 1960.

Stricken by the heat, I slumped down onto the curb and checked the walking tour map. The next stop was a two-for-one: the Arvin Community Center—home to the Boys & Girl Club—and a place called Smothermon Park.  There were three more stops after that. But I didn’t have the heart, or the energy, to go on. I’d seen enough.

Had I learned anything, apart from the importance of planning ahead?

I thought back to Lourdes’ flag. I thought back to the acres of fields I’d passed on my way into town. I thought about the heat, and people who spent all day working in it, and the new immigrants—the ones from Mexico, not the Midwest. I thought about the town’s walking tour, its visitor’s center, the volunteers who, at least sometimes, commit to passing on a little bit of Arvin’s history. Perhaps, despite the small town’s big issues, there was something quintessentially American about Arvin. Here, in this town named after a white man, was a new group of settlers in search of opportunity.

Maybe it wasn’t such a bad town to share a name with.

I returned to my bike and reluctantly tugged on my hot motorcycle jacket and gloves, ready to hit the highway for Los Angeles. Back on Bear Mountain Boulevard I pulled into a coffee shop I’d seen earlier. The door was open, but inside there were no tables. The walls were half-painted and there was no merchandise. The owner and some friends were inside.

“Do you guys have drinks?” I asked.

“Sorry,” the owner said. “We closed. We’re turning the cafe into a smoke shop.” Nobody wanted to buy premium coffee when they could get it for a buck at McDonalds.

I told the men what I’d told everyone else I’d met so far: My name was Arvin, and I was in town to see if I could learn anything about myself.

They considered it for a moment.

“It has your name,” someone finally said, “but it’s nothing to brag about.”

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> The Place Where Everybody Knows My Name appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s the question being posed as regions and localities implement the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), the historic 2014 state law that brought regulation to California’s diminishing groundwater supplies.

Groundwater is the water buried in aquifers, the underground spaces between rocks, soils, and sand. Layers of aquifers are called groundwater basins. California has hundreds of them, and we could not live without them. Eighty-five percent of Californians depend on groundwater, which constitutes roughly 40 percent of California’s water supply (and 46 percent in times of drought).

SGMA was designed to protect the most overdrawn groundwater basins, often in rural regions, by requiring plans to balance the amounts of water being pumped from, and recharged into, aquifers by 2040. Complying with the law—and achieving sustainability—is expected to dramatically change the California landscape over the next. Two decades from now, state residents and businesses will have to use considerably less groundwater, agricultural land will have to go out of production, and local ecosystems will have to be restored.

SGMA tried to cushion disruptions from its changes by giving local agencies new power and broad discretion to form and elect a new species of local government—called Groundwater Sustainability Agencies, or groundwater authorities for short. The idea was to encourage democratic collaboration in the making of groundwater sustainability plans—thus avoiding the fights that have long plagued water policy in California. These groundwater authorities, having been created by local communities themselves, would be more inclined to listen to all stakeholders and to develop plans that would minimize local pain.

But the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority—covering 11,000 square miles in the western Mojave, including parts of Kern, Inyo, and San Bernardino counties, which sit above a very large pool of groundwater—has disdained conciliation with an alarming ferocity. Last year, it approved a groundwater plan so politically incendiary that it might have shocked Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher who saw human life as a war of all against all.

If the plan survives multiple legal challenges, it could bring a swift end to agricultural production in an important region for pistachios, force the closure of the valley’s oldest business, and cut off water to the unincorporated rural community of Trona (pop. 1,900). The plan’s aggressive provisions also might extend this water war into the San Joaquin Valley, Los Angeles, and the nation’s capital.

At the heart of this conflict in California’s inland desert is, ironically, the United States Navy. The Indian Wells Valley is home to the Navy’s largest single landholding in the world, the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, covering 1.1 million acres, an area larger than the state of Rhode Island. Ridgecrest, the biggest city in the valley, is a military town, owing its economy and its relatively high education levels to the presence of this installation devoted to the research, development, acquisition, and testing of weapons systems.

Local officials, led by former China Lake commander and Kern County supervisor Mick Gleason, have fought for decades to grow and protect the Navy base. To make sure that SGMA wouldn’t affect Navy water, they moved quickly to set up an authority in the Ridgecrest city hall that they controlled, and that largely excluded major water pumpers in industry and agriculture. In the process, the authority produced a plan for valley groundwater that is bizarrely one-sided, even for the crazy world of California water.

Rather than phasing in changes over the next two decades, as the law anticipates, the authority plan immediately imposes enormous pain through fees greater than $2,100 per acre foot of water—so high that they represent an effective ban on agriculture or water-needy industry in the valley. Mojave Pistachios, a major nut producer, says the fees would force it to abandon a $35 million investment in trees made in 2011, before SGMA. Searles Valley Minerals, a going concern since 1873, says its water bills would increase by 7,000 percent, forcing immediate closure and the loss of hundreds of jobs.

Even stranger is the plan’s justification for such high fees, which could take this water war statewide: a need to pay for major infrastructure to import new water into the Mojave. Such a project is—quite literally—a pipe dream, since it would mean taking water that now goes to the Central Valley or Los Angeles, regions with more power than the Indian Wells Valley. In addition, proposing the expensive moving of water into the desert is sure to draw the ire of environmentalists.

This ill-considered plan has already backfired. Pistachio growers and Searles refused to pay the fees and instead filed expensive lawsuits that could reduce the groundwater authority’s power and budget. The mineral company even launched a public campaign against the groundwater authority, with backing from residents and businesses of Trona, whose water supply is also at risk under the plan. Searles’ campaign highlights the fact that it is the only U.S.-based company to produce a critical ingredient for the pharmaceutical glass used in COVID-19 vaccine vials.

The controversy has drawn the attention of politicians far beyond the desert, in Sacramento and in Congress. And that in turn has brought wider scrutiny to, and created water risks for, the massive Naval base, which the groundwater plan was designed to protect. Searles, in legal documents, has attacked the Navy, claiming that its water rights are senior to that of the base.

“The Indian Wells Valley is a microcosm of what can go wrong when the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act is implemented without adequate public participation and buy-in, and without detailed plans for a sustainable water future,” Searles vice president Burnell Blanchard wrote in Sacramento-based CalMatters.

The good news is that compromise seems possible. While there are disputes over the models of how much water is being overdrafted now, both sides agree that there is enough groundwater in the basin to last hundreds of years.

The pistachio growers have proposed alternatives that would raise fees and reduce their water usage to the authority’s preferred target, but over the two-decade period set up by the law. If a deal can’t be done, the state should step in, put the current plan on hold, and push the authority to renegotiate.

Unfortunately, state leadership, when it comes to managing water and water infrastructure, is rarer than rain these days. And there are already signs of local conflict and litigation threats at other authorities. So, now would be a good time for the state legislature to send a message by beefing up oversight in SGMA. For starters, the state should provide more technical and financial support for the non-expert local residents and businesses designing these plans. California should also require that all stakeholders in a basin have real representation on the boards of groundwater authorities.

California water planning is enough of a battle already, without folks in the high desert igniting a water war.

The post The Next Great California Water War Is Starting Underground, in the Mojave Desert appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

From this narrow neighborhood park atop the Panorama Bluffs on Bakersfield’s northern edge, you can’t actually see everything. It only seems like you can.

And when you take in this panoramic view of Kern County, you are not just looking out upon our nation’s greatest valley. You are witnessing how California’s past and present may be converging to create a very different future.

The view of oil fields and waterways isn’t exactly beautiful, but it is stunning—even overwhelming. And it provides undeniable evidence that in California, you really can defy the laws of chemistry: Here, oil and water really do mix, and all too well.

As you look out and down, the water appears first. The Kern River, fed from the slopes of Mt. Whitney, the state’s tallest peak, meanders below the park’s bluffs, winding through a small forest of willows, cottonwoods and sycamores. There are fish in the river, and birds flying above it.

This pastoral river can feel like an oasis amidst the larger, drier landscape. But it’s a time machine, a portal into the past—and perhaps into the future.

This land you see from Panorama Park used to be one of California’s wetter places. The river and other waterways often flooded, and the valley was a land of lakes. One of these was Tulare Lake, which could grow to as much as 60 miles long and 36 miles wide, making it the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. In heavy rains or heavy snowmelt in the Sierras, the water systems of the Kern and San Joaquin Rivers and Tulare Lake would merge, turning the middle of California into an inland sea.

But in the 19th century, farmers began taming those volatile river and lake waters, eventually creating today’s drier landscape, with its tumbleweeds. Dams and canals went in. From Panorama Park, you can see two of the first: Beardsley Canal and Carrier Canal. Water that supplies the Carrier Canal also feeds the Kern Island Canal—Bakersfield once had so much water around it that its name was Kern Island.

Bakersfield is still an island—perhaps California’s largest isle—at least in the ways its people live and think. The hometown of Kevin McCarthy, the highest-ranking GOPer in the U.S. House of Representatives, is a redoubt of reactionary Republicanism, surrounded by a state turning ever bluer. But what really makes Bakersfield an island in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley is its economic devotion to oil.

The vista from Panorama Park demonstrates this, to a shocking degree. To your left, an oil refinery is in view. Beyond the river vista near the bluffs, massive oil fields stretch north for many miles, further than your eye can see. Indeed, the oil fields here so dominate the landscape they remind me, perversely, of the giant trees not far away in Sequoia National Park. The oil patch, like the sequoia groves, is too grand in scale for a human field of vision, or even to be easily photographed.

Kern River Oilfield, discovered by prospectors in 1899, helped turn California into America’s leading oil producer in the early 20th century. It brought people from around the world to work and live here. From Panorama Park you can see the community of Oildale, where Merle Haggard grew up in a boxcar, and later wrote a song about it:

The oil tanker train from down on the river
In Southern Pacific and Santa Fe names
Would rumble and rattle the old boxcar we lived in
And I was a kid then and I loved that old train

Haggard would popularize the brand of country music known as the Bakersfield Sound. You can visit his family boxcar at the Kern County Museum, just two miles from Panorama Park. Poor people, successors to the Haggards, still live around Oildale, and still pay too much for sub-standard housing.

The Kern River Oil Field has produced 2 billion barrels and counting. But its output has fallen dramatically since 1985, propped up by pushing steam into the wells to draw out the sticky oil that remains. This is an extraordinarily costly practice, both economically and environmentally, and support for the oil business is not bottomless, even here. A court recently ordered Kern County to halt new oil permits. From Panorama Park, you’re looking at an industry in decline.

Bakersfield is changing in other ways, too. If you stand in the park and turn away from river and the oilfields, you’ll see Alta Vista-La Cresta, one of the city’s older neighborhoods. The Alta Vista tract was first laid out by Donald McClaren, son of famed superintendent of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, John McClaren. This neighborhood was once a distinguished address—its denizens enjoying those grand views—but the area has been fading ever since Bakersfield expanded west, to the other side of Highway 99, and richer people bought places in neighborhoods like Seven Oaks.

The Panorama Vista—specifically, the area between the bluffs and the oil fields to the north—has been the focus of successful restoration for more than a generation. It’s been called the Panorama Vista Preserve since 2004, and visitors there enjoy trails and a native plant nursery.

It’s not hard to imagine the preserve growing larger, and the vista changing. As California responds to climate change, the state will turn harder against oil. In the 50 years, the pumpjacks might well be gone, replaced by park space, solar energy farms, or some of the new homes California needs to build.

These days, water already feels like a far more precious commodity than oil. And this land, if restored to its original condition, might fill with it. Will some dams be removed? Will the vista become wetter again?

The view from Bakersfield really makes you think.

The post From Bakersfield, You Can See Forever appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Dear Bay Area,

Welcome to Wasco.

You may never have heard of this small city of 25,000 in the San Joaquin Valley. You probably can’t pronounce it (it’s WAW-skoh).

But you and Wasco share a future.

You could be connected—at least temporarily—by the most expensive infrastructure project in state history.

Your Wasco connection is a byproduct of problems with high-speed rail’s plan for a San Francisco to Los Angeles train. The financial and engineering challenges of tunneling the Tehachapi Mountains have delayed construction to L.A. And the project is short $2 billion to get the train to Bakersfield, which happens to be the hometown of U.S. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a fierce opponent of high-speed rail.

So, unless the money materializes, the high-speed rail could start by connecting the Silicon Valley to the Central Valley, starting in San Jose and concluding with a temporary station in Wasco, 24 miles northwest of Bakersfield.

A confession: When this plan became public last year, I said Wasco was an unworthy southern terminus for such an ambitious project. But after recent visits, I’ve changed my mind. I now believe that a fast train from America’s wealthiest metropolitan area to the best darn town in northern Kern County is kismet. Wasco offers much of what Bay Area residents might be yearning for.

And don’t worry about showing up in large numbers. Wasco is expert at processing heavy volumes of visitors; after all, the Wasco State Prison, which accounts for about 5,000 of the town’s people and a good chunk of its employment, is also a “reception center” that processes people into California’s prison system and, within months, gets them to the right state corrections facility. Of course, you don’t have to go there—unless you want to be part of the prison’s successful community volunteer program. Wasco offers so much more.

The Wasco water tower. Courtesy of the city of Wasco.

Imagine yourself boarding the high-speed train in San Jose and arriving, less than two hours later, in Wasco. On the way down, to prepare yourself for crossing cultural borders, you’ll listen first to some Korn (a band with Kern County roots) followed by country songs, from the late Merle Haggard’s classic “Radiator Man from Wasco” to the rising L.A.-based country star Jaime Wyatt’s “Wasco,” about picking up her boyfriend the day he gets out of prison.

If the weather is good, you’ll be greeted in Wasco by a spectacular view, from the coastal mountains to the west to the Sierras in the east. This time of year, you’ll be treated to the glory of blossoming almond trees.

If you arrive hungry, you’re in luck. Wasco offers the kind of stick-to-the-ribs vittles that have gotten harder to find in health-conscious Bay Area eateries. Head first to Hoyett’s Sandwich Shop, a centerpiece of Wasco life since 1948, with terrific char burgers and chili (the local gossip is free). On Friday nights, the place stays open late—until 7 p.m.—for fish dinner. And if Hoyett’s is closed, it’s a short stroll to Teresa’s for chile verde or to La Canasta for shrimp cocktail.

Bay Area types should feel comfortable getting around Wasco. Bring your bike: The city has been adding lanes. Or walk: Wasco is building new green spaces and meandering sidewalks to make the city more pedestrian-friendly. And while your Uber or Lyft app won’t work here, the city’s Dial-A-Ride service will take you anywhere within Wasco’s 9.4-square-mile city limits for $1.75, and outside town—paved roads only, please—for $2. (Kids, seniors, and people with disabilities pay $1, and a 13-ride pass is available for $15.)

No stop in Wasco is complete without a visit to the Wasco Union High School auditorium. No joke. The Renaissance Revival auditorium, constructed in 1928, is one of the most colorful and beautiful buildings in California, and deserves its spot on the National Register of Historic Places.

From there, you can walk back toward downtown to do some window shopping. And anything you can’t find downtown, you can pick up at a retailer that Wasco has but San Francisco lacks: Wal-Mart, up on Highway 46.

Wasco is great at putting on special events. There’s the spectacular Festival of Roses in September, the local bands at the Wasco Music Festival in October, and Día de Los Muertos in November. Locals will tell you nothing beats the spectacle of the November rallies before the annual high school football game between the Wasco Tigers and the Shafter Generals, from the town just down the road. (Plus, there’s a good chance you’ll see Wasco win, as they have 10 years in a row).

But the best thing about Wasco may be the slower pace and all the ways to stay chill. The local parks are large and leafy. During hot Valley summers, you can pay $1 and swim all day in the public pool. There’s a skate park, and you can bring your pets along without worry. The local vet, Thomas Edick, is so good that people come from all over the southern San Joaquin Valley to have him look after their animals.

Visitors from the Bay Area who enjoy people watching will not be disappointed. One great spot is a downtown alley where the city sometimes sets up a piano and invites anyone to play; and those who appreciate the weird can search for the Wasco Clown, a scary figure who started appearing four years ago and became an internet sensation.

All the fun Wasco offers may leave you ready for a good night’s sleep. Don’t worry: When it’s time for bed, you’ll have options. If you want a hotel, the best bet is the new Best Western on Highway 46. If you decide to settle in for a while, for just $189,000, you can get a terrific four-bedroom, two-bath home with a two-car garage and, according to the listing, a driveway large enough for an RV. You could rent it out via Airbnb, which could have a big future here, since well-to-do locals leave their homes empty on weekends and sneak away to their cabins near Glennville (up in the Greenhorn Mountains).

Indeed, one thing you’ll love about Wasco, once high-speed rail takes you there, is that its central location makes it a great starting point for trips around the region. In the Wasco vicinity, you can watch drag strip racing in Famoso, raft the Kern River, hike in The Wildland Conservancy’s Wind Wolves Preserve, or rent a houseboat on Lake Success near Porterville on the Tule River. You can even hire a limo to take you on a tour to Paso Robles wine country, or rent a car nearby and head up to Sequoia.

Wasco, given its dependence on prisons and agriculture, has an economy very different from technological and sustainable San Francisco, but you have enough in common to compare notes. There’s a solar array near the elementary school offices. A local start-up, Sweetwater Technology Resources, is developing ways to clean up water from the oil industry. And if you want to commiserate about economic disruption, Wasco will hear you. Just as Bank of America abandoned its San Francisco headquarters for Charlotte, Bank of America recently shut down its Wasco branch. Wasco folks will tell you about how their area has had to pivot from being the world’s potato capital to a producer of first cotton, then roses, and, lately, almonds and pistachios.

If you’re one of those stalwarts of Bay Area politics, drop by the Wasco City Hall, where the quiet diversity of the city council is instructive. With one white woman and four Latino men, the council boasts a higher percentage of ethnic minorities than the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. It’s also close to the community; when I spent a morning with Mayor Tilo Cortez recently, constituents greeted him with hugs.

At the council, of course, you’ll discover one giant irony about the potential Bay-to-Wasco connection: The city officially opposes high-speed rail, because of concerns about the effect on local businesses in its path. In particular, the SunnyGem almond processing plant may be condemned and relocated.

Here’s hoping things work out, and, before long, you Bay Area folks will be dancing the night away at Mr. and Mrs. Nightclub near the train station. When you step outside for some air, you’ll appreciate Wasco’s beautiful water tower.

It has lights that change color with the seasons. There’s also the city logo, featuring a rose and Wasco’s welcoming motto, one the rest of California should get behind: “Grow With Us.”

All aboard,

Joe Mathews

The post All Aboard, Bay Area, on Your Fast Train to Wasco appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

First, it’s famous for producing food. In 2014, it grew $7.5 billion worth of grapes, almonds, milk, citrus, and beef. The county’s carrots alone were worth $288 million.

Secondly, in a national survey by the Food Research and Action Center, the county seat of Bakersfield consistently comes in as the hungriest city in America, with about a quarter of families saying they struggle to pay for food.

In 2013, 13 organizations in Kern County came together as the Food Policy Council to grapple with the Golden Empire’s hunger-agriculture conundrum.

Members now include a science teacher, a mom who’s revving up her school district’s wellness policy council, a retired cop, a planning consultant, a farmers market manager, representatives from Public Health, Kaiser Permanente, Aging and Adult Services, and the Food Bank.

Zócalo spoke with Jill Egland, Vice President of Community Impact at United Way of Kern County about the Council and what they hope to accomplish.

Q: It sounds like one of the challenges in Kern County is choosing a problem where the Food Policy Council can really make a difference. Is that so?

A: Well, yes, but not in the way you might think. When we first convened, we were all over the place in terms of what we thought we should be focusing on. Most of us are direct service agencies—we think in terms of program delivery, right?—so, we automatically went into “doing” mode—coming up with new programs the Food Policy Council could implement. But the fact is, everyone sitting around the table already had an overwhelming workload. Our first meetings felt more like recruitment sessions—everyone had something going on that desperately needed volunteers, and the Council represented a new source of worker bees.

Finally, making the shift and looking at problems from a policy perspective at first was just as frustrating for us because nobody could see past the specific context of their agency. Diabetes is a great example. Statewide, there’s a big push for a tax on sugary drinks, which has been proven to be a huge contributing factor to diabetes. The logic for the tax is, you make sugary drinks more expensive than water, and people will drink water instead. Our county health-related council members—whose local work is influenced by state mandates—were for this. Others weren’t so convinced. My agency’s perspective, for instance, is that this sort of tax is regressive—essentially getting poor people to fund programs to study themselves.

Then it hit the news that the arsenic levels in the town of Arvin’s water was off the charts. People were told to stop using their tap water for anything. Kids were told to stop drinking from school drinking fountains. Local foundations have been paying to get filtration systems installed in the schools most directly affected, but they’re $1,500 a pop.

What we’ve come to see is that you can’t advocate for taxing the orange-colored sugar water that’s currently available by the gallon jug for a buck without also advocating for access to free, clean, uncontaminated water. Once Sacramento passes a bill to cover the costs of school filtration systems and laws that protect the further contamination of our groundwater, the Kern Food Policy Council will be happy to discuss a tax on sugary beverages.

Q: Why did you start the Food Policy Council?

A: We started it because we thought it would help us strengthen our county’s emergency food relief efforts. What we’ve discovered since, though, is that the underlying causes of the chronic hunger in this county are way more complicated to solve than just bolstering our food bank. Early on, we learned about other California communities actually identifying their food deserts, and then using the data picture as an advocacy tool. One of our members had the GIS software, so we brainstormed what we wanted on it, and he create a map that identified low-income neighborhoods and the locations of any shop that sold fresh produce. He included all the bus lines, and added circles around the shops showing a 2-mile radius, which is, I guess, considered a reasonable distance to walk. It was amazing to behold. But when we looked at it all together, it was like trying to come to an agreement on the meaning of a Rorschach inkblot. We realized that we didn’t know what we didn’t know. We didn’t know what we should be valuing, or really concerned about, or what assumptions we should be challenging. Take the 2-mile walking threshold, for instance. When it’s 110 outside, who’s walking 2 miles to get produce? Should we be advocating for more bus routes, then?

From the perspective of UWKC, food insecurity is a byproduct of financial instability. People can’t afford to eat well. United Way did a survey of families in Kern County and found that 34 percent can’t pay basic bills; and nine out of ten of those families have at least one member working. In order to make ends meet here, a family of four needs to have 2.25 minimum wage jobs. It’s important to have fresh produce at the food bank, but then again, everyone should make enough money to go to the store and buy whatever they want.

We decided to do a Food System Assessment to learn more about the whole system. We didn’t just want to know who didn’t have food; we also wanted to find out about food waste, food employment, and food processing and manufacturing in Kern. The whole picture.

Q: It sounds like the more traditional California food policy approach wasn’t really going to work here. How did you tailor it for Kern?

A: Kern County is different from other places: Big Ag and Big Oil influence just about everything. While public housing for low-income residents is usually financed by HUD, here a third of it is also financed by USDA, and is meant to be used as transitional housing for farmworkers.

We had to figure out how to get the other food system stakeholders in Kern to join us. We’d failed so far to get Big Ag at the table—there’s a history of acrimony between the agriculture industry and the labor movement, and a definite awkwardness between Big Ag, the second largest employer in the county, and the agencies making up the FPC, who essentially fill the gaps in services that exist due to the low wages earned by farmworkers.

We knew that nobody locally had the authority needed to facilitate a conversation between such diverse stakeholders. So, we asked Dr. Gail Feenstra, from UC Davis’s Sustainable Agriculture Research Education Project to help us. Everyone respects UC Davis in Kern County. Everyone sends their kids there—conservative and progressive alike. We invited the Wonderful Company, Kaiser, Kern Health System, the Farm Bureau, the Center for Race, Poverty and the Environment, city managers and planners, the Dolores Huerta Foundation, school districts, county agencies, our state legislators, and California State University Bakersfield to attend a meeting about the food system, facilitated by UC Davis. Twenty-eight stakeholders in all. Everyone said yes.

The first thing Gail asked us was to describe what we wanted our food system to look like. Everyone had a different vision, and was pretty passionate about it. Over the months, she helped us listen to each other, and build a picture of our food system that reflected everyone’s passion. And the group said yes. She asked, “What would you specifically need to see improve in order for you to agree that the system as a whole was improving?” and helped us focus on what was viable and measurable. At one point, The Wonderful Company and the Dolores Huerta Foundation disagreed over a particular set of indicators. There was a fierce debate; we all got into it. But by then, we had met enough times so that people genuinely liked each other. We had a civil discourse.

Q: What were the subjects of debate?

A: There was a big one around what is meant by a “healthy environment.” People in the schools wanted a decrease in pesticide/herbicide levels. The Cooperative Extension people said that since you can’t measure that accurately, we shouldn’t include it as an indicator. The public health people adamantly disagreed with Cooperative Extension. Then the planners in the room said they would be willing to get together and figure out a way to do it. Everyone walked away from the conversation feeling they’d been heard.

Q: How did the group come to like each other enough to work through this?

A: Gail constantly reconfigured everyone. Nobody stayed in the seat they started in. Everyone had the opportunity to work closely with everyone else at some point, to share information and brainstorm ideas. By the end of the first meeting, we were all on first name basis. The constant reconfiguring also made it really hard for anyone to stay locked in their cynicism. There were just too many perspectives and stories and, well, this overarching sense of hopefulness. Even the biggest cynics have come around.

We also always have a meal in the midst of our meeting. It sounds hokey, but there’s something really powerful about stopping one’s work in order to break bread together. It’s like, things can get really contentious, but then there you are, sitting across from the person you were certain you had absolutely nothing in common with, both of you chowing down on Mediterranean food, making happy grunting noises.

Q: What’s the big, complex problem you’re wrestling with?

A: People like to point to the irony between our abundant agriculture and our high level of food insecurity. But it’s really not any more ironic than having workers at a Toyota plant drive some cars that aren’t Toyotas. Our agriculture industry is part of a global market. Its importance to us here is not so much as a food generator as it is a wage generator. To understand the symbiotic relationship between workers, the local economy, and big agriculture—you have to see it as its own complex ecosystem. The unspoken question—the elephant in the room—is how sustainable is this ecosystem, truly? The drought is showing us just how vulnerable a system it is.

We understand the complicated relationship of the workers to industry. Nobody wants to see Big Ag fail. We’ve had a portent of what that would be like, with the downsizing of Big Oil here in Kern. The influx of unemployed oil workers has been a blow to the local economy, and to the agencies trying to provide relief. But everyone knows Big Ag needs to evolve. Kern’s relationship to agriculture needs to evolve. We can’t continue relating to food production primarily as a commodity. On the other hand, if the legislative landscape changes too quickly, and Big Ag destabilizes, we’ll have an emergency on our hands. So we have to start these conversations, getting everyone out of their siloes in economics, industry, or social services to talk about the future of Ag here.

Q: So part of this was making peace with Big Ag?

A: Well, if Wonderful decides to grow their pistachios in Texas, there’s just nothing to keep them here. Systemically speaking, we’ve got to figure out how our higher education, our technical and vocational training, doesn’t just feed the Big Ag labor force, but also fosters innovation and entrepreneurism. We need more small and mid-size farmers, more independent ag-related enterprise, in order to diversify our economic base. We also need to help farmworkers get more than just an increase in wage; they need a voice at the table.

Q: So what does this all have to do with food, aside from low wages and poverty for workers?

A: We’ve had to realize that we don’t have a functioning food system, despite the presence of Big Ag. How we get carrots is that they leave our fields, get processed in LA, and come back here in little sacks. Our real local food system is CISCO (the super market distributor).

At the same time, we have 60 small farmers who sell their produce outside of Kern because there isn’t enough local farm-to-fork activity to make it viable for them to stay. We know we have to build a local market through restaurants, farmers’ markets, other retail outlets. Schools could provide a market big enough to make it interesting for the larger ag enterprises to consider. But finding a price point that makes it worth it for both sides is difficult. We’re looking into how those small farms, and even gardeners, can get licensed to sell vegetables to their local convenience stores. We’re also realizing that we need to develop new investment options, and economic incentives that encourage people to innovate and be food entrepreneurs.

In the next few months we’ll get a report back from Gail Feenstra’s group and start to talk about what we can do.

Q: Are you hopeful?

A: Yes. Rich Harwood, who founded the Harwood Institute for Public Innovation, says that there are five stages of community life, how quickly and easily can embrace change depends on which stage they’re in. First, a community is in The Waiting Place. People will tell you that change would be possible “if only we had the right mayor.” And so they do nothing. The next step is “Impasse, where everyone agrees something is wrong, but nobody can agree on what it is. If you can find a small group that agrees, maybe you get an isolated pocket of something happening. The next phase is Catalytic, with pockets of innovation starting to connect. But I think that Kern is now out of the Waiting Place and moving through “Impasse.” And that’s a great thing! The Food System stakeholders are an example of a small group of people who have figured out how to agree. Hopefully, the assessment will let us identify other small groups, connect with them, and help us move into the Catalytic stage.

Q: What happens after the catalytic phase?

A: Don’t know. We refer to them as the “Nirvana stages.”

The post We Grow the Country’s Carrots, but Ours Come in Bags appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

ArtWalk and First Friday were the brainchildren of Don Martin, who opened Metro Galleries in 2007. To encourage people to come downtown after work, he organized businesses to stay open late on the first Friday of every month. Then, he asked artists to set up and sell their work (be it visual, literary, or musical) on the sidewalk.

But over time, the original vision of the ArtWalk became blurred as non-artists set up their stuff anywhere on the First Friday of each month. Martin did his best to run off the chili vendors and sock merchants, but he had a gallery to run.

At the time, I was applying to become the executive director of the Arts Council of Kern. After hearing complaints from artists, businesses, and people who attended ArtWalk, I met with Martin. Like any politician, I promised him I would turn the ArtWalk around if I got the job of running the Arts Council of Kern.

I got the job—and quickly realized that no one managed the ArtWalk. There were no event permits filed with the city and when business owners called the Downtown Business Association to complain about a vendor who set up a table in front of their doors, the complaints were forwarded to Martin. Basically it was an event with no order. The buck had nowhere to stop.

So I paid a visit to the city treasurer, who was so glad to see me that he handed me a thick folder of forms to fill out and finally make the ArtWalk legal. How the ArtWalk went on for so long without permits is still beyond me. It was a vendors’ squatting paradise.

I began filling out the city’s forms and designing an ArtWalk permit application for participating artists, which included the event’s rules and regulations, as well as the fee structure. With the help of a few council members, artists, and Martin, we decided a fair permit fee would be $25 for a single Friday, $120 for 6-month permit, and $180 for a year. I had no easy way to get in touch with the participating artists since there were no email or phone lists. So I hit the streets.

On a hot First Friday evening last June, I walked the ArtWalk handing out the new application to all the vendors. I tried my best, in the 100-plus degree heat, to explain to each vendor how the permitting process worked, how being permitted would protect them, how much the different permits would cost, and when they would be available for sale.

Most of the initial reactions from the artists were positive. Many were happy that there would be a focus on the arts and that they could reserve the same space each month.

But then I began to get angry emails and phone calls accusing me of starving artists, fixing something that wasn’t broken, and trying to define art. I hadn’t defined art, so the arts council did. The ArtWalk would be for anything creatively and originally assembled using separate parts or pieces—and/or the prints, CDs, or DVDs of those original works. Food and cosmetics would be excluded from the ArtWalk—those types of products can be sold at farmer’s markets.

Then the paper called.

A Bakersfield Californian reporter camped out in front of our building the first day of permitting, and stood in the permit line with angry people. We permitted 20 vendors in the first 90 minutes while calming the angry. The paper interviewed frowning artists and I responded to three-pages of interview questions from the newspaper and conducted a two-hour face-to-face interview with the reporter with two follow-up calls. For my trouble, the paper published a critical story that quoted me only twice.

Then an artist told me that some vendors would boycott First Friday. We decided to hold a public meeting, which drew about 50 people, as well as two newspaper reporters and a TV station. It went well. Supporters of the new policy overwhelmed the naysayers. Don Martin came and talked about the history of the ArtWalk while I discussed necessary changes. After the meeting, we sold 10 more permits.

But the reaction was mixed. I was cussed out and hung up on by some, praised and thanked. I took this as an opportunity. When those who were upset exhibited great passion for the arts, I asked them to be on the Arts Council’s board. I was impressed by my critics and skeptics who knew how to light a fire and had a feeling for the arts in Bakersfield.

In order to complete the permit process, all businesses in the ArtWalk area had to sign a notice supporting our efforts regarding first Friday’s ArtWalk. Not a single proprietor batted an eye. For those who struggled with the permitting process, I offered discounts and one-month free trials; I also wrote a grant support scholarships for future artists to participate in the ArtWalk.

There was one last test; Martin and I were called to a meeting in City Hall, and we arrived intimidated at all the departments who were there: city parks and recreation, city treasurer, code enforcement, three Bakersfield police officers, detectives, city higher-ups, and two others whose names I never got. But after an exchange of many business cards and an explanation from Martin and me, they offered their support. Code enforcement committed to be out at First Friday checking for permits and assisting in all ways possible. Don and I left with personal cell phone numbers for what seemed like the entire City Hall.

The first ArtWalk under the new process was on a scorching August Friday. I took neon chalk and numbered each vendor’s space. We set up a table for questions before the artists began to set-up. Code enforcement stopped by, as did police officers. I had hired private security that checked permits. It went as smooth as silk. Hundreds of people braved the heat and walked the art-filled streets of Bakersfield. I was pleasantly bored, but proud, as I did my rounds asking each artist if they were happy.

The following Monday our phone rang off the hook with artists wanting to be permitted for the next ArtWalk.

The post When Art Disappeared from Our ArtWalk appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.