So did my friends, who set out for the Bay Area, San Diego, and Los Angeles. My own destination, two months after graduating high school in 2012, was a town just outside San Francisco. While I only stayed only seven months, it was refreshing to see so many different types of people and no one batting an eye at them. Everyone seemed free to express their gender how they pleased.

But times and places can change–and fast. After moving back to Merced, I began to see more openness and diversity. And so one day in late August, I found myself driving to the opening of the town’s first-ever Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center, right in the middle of downtown on G Street.

I had followed the progress of the Center from friends who were heavily involved in its making, from obtaining grants to preparing the space. But I was anxious as the opening date approached Merced. I was not sure how many people would show up. I worried that no one would be there at all.

It was a miserably hot day, but I swear the short drive to the center felt like one of those breezy San Francisco evenings when you’re anxiously waiting around to see your favorite band play. When my sister (with whom I live) and I finally turned onto G Street from our apartment here in Merced, in our truck, we were surprised to find that all the parking spots were filled. It was the first sign that something exceptional was taking place. Outside the Center, a crowd struggled to get into the building which is located in a business area surrounded by tax offices and immigration lawyers. More than a hundred people of all ages–parents, children, young adults–had showed up.

My sister and I walked through the Center, which has spaces for meetings, a library of books and videos, and an office area that visitors can use to do computer work like job applications or homework. There is also an abundance of educational material about sexual education, sexual identity, domestic abuse, and related topics. The whole place is brightly colored and welcoming.

While eating chocolate-covered pretzels with rainbow sprinkles, I caught up with old pals and made sure to congratulate the friends whose pioneering work created the center. As we headed out the door to leave, we ended up staying an extra 20 minutes, greeting people who kept arriving.

Then, as we were starting to drive away, the board members hoisted the rainbow flag outside on top of the building. My sister agreed to stop in the middle of the road–despite getting a green light–so I could take pictures. I shouted “amazing” and started to tear up. I have seen the gay pride flag countless times in different cities. In fact, my mom had one on display inside our house when I was younger. But to see it raised publicly in my small town meant something different. It is a flag no one will be able to miss, on one of downtown’s busiest streets. It reassures people who have been in Merced their whole lives that this is a safe place for them, and it says the same thing to anyone who’s just passing through.

Can a rainbow flag change Merced? Yes.

The flag, and the new Center, made me realize that Merced has more to offer people like me than I ever believed. It has a sense of community I hadn’t appreciated. And it offers a place where one can feel safe.

UC Merced is bringing in thousands of new people every year, and we want them all to feel that this is a united community where they are safe to grow and change. For now, I still intend to make a life somewhere else. But I look forward to visiting the place I’m from, and watching it change.

The post Can a Rainbow Flag Change My Small Town? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

First there’s 94582: San Ramon, California.

Since 2010, the roughly 38,000 citizens and businesses of this prosperous Bay Area suburb, where the median household income is $140,444, have purchased 463 zero-emissions vehicles. Such vehicles receive major state subsidies; nearly $1 million of these subsidies went to vehicle purchasers in San Ramon. But San Ramon doesn’t need the anti-pollution help. Despite being home to a large highway complex and a business park, the city scores in the cleanest 10 percent of California’s zip codes, according to the CalEPA’s Enviroscreen Index.

The second zip code is 93640, the Central Valley town of Mendota, population 11,800, with a median annual household income of $28,660, which is less than the $36,625 sticker price of a battery-powered Honda Fit EV. Mendota is in the top 10 percent of California zip codes for pollution and vulnerabilities such as childhood asthma, according to the CalEnviroScreen. And how many vehicles were purchased there under state subsidies? Exactly one, a lone car whose owner received $2,500.

California’s green vehicle policies have been successful enough to become a model for other states, fueling a movement that is electric, both literally and culturally. The state’s audaciously utopian vision has cajoled an initially reluctant auto industry into producing cheaper, better behaving electric cars, led by the media-savvy upstart Tesla. Since 2010, Californians have put more than 100,000 electric vehicles on the road. But those green vehicle policies contain a flaw that undermines their intent and magnifies the unfairness of California’s economy. These rebates–of as much as $5,000, funded by an extra charge on vehicle registrations–go mostly to affluent communities on California’s coast.

Of the $151 million in subsidies paid since 2010, people who bought zero-emissions vehicles in the Bay Area, South Coast (Los Angeles), and San Diego Air Basins have gotten $132 million. Over the same period, people in the San Joaquin Valley have gotten $3 million, despite having the most intractable air quality problems in the state.

Go below the Valley’s smog, and the problem runs much deeper: Its cars are old–much older, on average, than the state’s vehicle fleet. Estimates suggest that the median vehicle in poorer Valley communities is from 1996. According to the Air Resources Board, a vehicle made in 1996 produces 29 times as much pollution per mile from its tailpipe as one sold in 2012.

Translation: The Valley’s stock of old gas guzzlers is wiping out the clean air benefits of the subsidies we’ve bestowed upon the wealthy parts of the state.

You can see the dynamic by looking at those two zip codes together. Every 1997 vehicle in Mendota wipes out the emissions benefits of 29 electric vehicles in San Ramon. More precisely, it only takes 16 of Mendota’s finest clunkers to turn the benefits of nearly $1 million in subsidies for San Ramon into a pile of sooty particulate.

I am not making this point to advocate the end of the green vehicle subsidies, but to point out that these subsidies were created to target the state’s wealthy. And they succeeded.

Rebates, tax credits, and HOV lane stickers appealed to the better-off in parts of the state with thriving economies and traffic congestion. Now the state needs to come up with a new set of policies to target California’s many Mendotas. We need a suite of incentives—low-interest loans, nonprofit auto leasing, and more accessible, appropriate rural transit–to get working families out of older polluting vehicles and into cleaner transportation (which doesn’t have to be electric).

Last year I spoke with a Mendota farmworker who drives a 1995 Ford Explorer. Mr. Hernandez drives twice as far to his skilled job every day–115 miles round-trip–as the average driver of a Nissan Leaf. Last year he had to pay for two smog tests and repairs, totaling around $500, just to keep his car registered.

From Mr. Hernandez’s point of view, the car is a money pit, but it’s necessary in order to get himself to work and bring his daughter to high school. (Parents have to drive their kids to school when the Valley’s Tule fog delays school start times.) Because the car gets only 15 mpg, he spends $400 to $500 a month on gasoline, and often puts off paying other bills to keep getting to work.

Mr. Hernandez said he’d love to get “a little Honda.” Ironically, if he had access to credit, he could get a Ford Fiesta for $1,400 down and $194 a month, which would cut his gasoline bill in half. But such credit is not easy to come by: The percentage of families without a bank account in Fresno is 3.5 times the national average, and used car dealers charge much higher interest.

A well-designed state program to enable families to finance or lease better cars would improve their financial situation and reduce gasoline consumption, and carbon emissions. Mr. Hernandez’s clunker is a big opportunity to make much more dramatic air quality gains than we’re currently achieving. Once they’re in place, these programs can be extended to make electric or other zero-emissions vehicles accessible to more families and income levels. This will not be easy, but it is no more utopian than the dream of kick-starting an electric vehicle market.

And as it now stands, California’s air incentive policies miss the people who could use them, and sometimes even seem to work in reverse.

California’s air districts offer cash to owners who turn in old, polluting cars to junkyards, but these programs seem to pick up clunkers that are not driven much. In a survey of 164 vehicles scrapped in Southern California, 29 percent were incapable of driving 25 mph.

By contrast, Mr. Hernandez, with his high weekly mileage, got stymied when he went to his local scrapyard. He was offered a $400 incentive, but was told he’d need to pay $650 to clear up an issue in the title. The deal simply didn’t make sense. “Now I own an antique!” he said throwing up his hands like a man who’s trapped. But he’s not the only one: California’s big green vision will be stuck in neutral until we figure out how to extend its promise to every zip code.

The post Your Electric Car Isn’t Making California’s Air Any Cleaner appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Surprised to hear from me? In normal times, I wouldn’t be inclined to cooperate with the anthropomorphic scheme of a writer desperate for a mid-summer column.

But today so much is being said about agriculture here in the Central Valley, and dairies in particular, that I felt the need to—if you’ll pardon the pun—milk the moment. Too many of you city slickers have the wrong impression of the cows you pass along the 5 or the 99.

In the stories and headlines, we cows are usually invoked as symbols of the past, the epitome of a traditional way of life. And so the stories say we’re threatened by whatever is the news or preoccupation of the day—climate change, labor costs, taxes, regulations, cheap food, the environment. Sometimes cows and dairies are portrayed as victims, unable to flee this dysfunctional state for greener pastures, like other businesses have. Or we cows are seen as victimizers, part of a water-guzzling agricultural industry that is getting its comeuppance with this drought.

Most of these narratives, I can assure you, are just so much manure. The truth is, I’m not old-fashioned, and these are neither the best nor the worst of times for me. In fact, if you got to know me, you’d realize that I’m a lot like you, my fellow Californians. And no, I am not just saying that because we’re mammals, or because there is some of me inside you if you drink milk or eat cheesy pizza.

What I am saying is that we all feel a little like cattle these days. Like all my fellow Californians, my life is being reshaped by technology. Like most of you, I am producing more than ever before. And like many of you, I experience a higher quality of life than those who came before me. But, just like for you, my day-to-day remains a struggle, and I don’t have a clear sense of what the future holds for me, not to mention my calves and grand-calves.

The story of my California probably sounds a lot like yours. We’re still the number one state in dairy (as we are in so many other things), producing nearly 5 billion gallons of milk annually, more than a fifth of the American supply. The county where I live, Tulare (this piece was inspired by a stare down I had with a columnist there), is one of four California counties among the top five dairy counties in America.

But California’s continued leadership among cows is not assured. The end of the last decade was brutal for us, much as it was for you with that housing crisis and recession. Supplies got so high that prices dropped. Then the cost of feed soared, in part because of a lack of rainfall. The combination of lower prices and high feed costs was too much for many dairymen. Since 2007, as a result of foreclosures and consolidation, California has lost about a quarter of its dairies.

Some dairies actually left the state. That may sound strange—how can you pick up and move a farm?—but it’s not uncommon. More than a generation ago, my ancestors lived in Southern California’s Inland Empire, which was full of dairies, but they relocated here in the San Joaquin Valley where land was cheaper. Today, states like Utah, Colorado, and South Dakota seek to lure our dairies with promises of cheaper land and less environmental regulation.

The result: The one constant in my corral is change. Just as you probably have to do more with less in your office, today’s economics require dairies to produce more with fewer cows.

That’s been good for me in some ways. It’s more important than ever for me to live comfortably so I give more milk. I now enjoy special fans and water sprays that keep me cool in the summer; flat, dry, and fluffy bedding (some cows even have water beds); and more freedom to exercise and socialize with my herd mates. I spend half the day resting; otherwise, when I’m not in the milking parlor, I eat (I need as much as 35 gallons of water and 60 pounds of feed a day). The medical care I get is better than a lot of humans’ (and I don’t have to deal with the Covered California website or phone line). Not that things are perfect: Many of today’s cooler dairy sheds have hard floor surfaces that make my hooves tender when I walk on them too much.

The pace of life in today’s more productive, technologically enhanced dairies has sped up. The game changer: sexed semen. You read that right—for nearly a decade, dairymen have been able to impregnate their cows with semen modified to produce more female (milk-producing) animals. And you thought online dating had taken the romance out of mating.

Parenting has also gotten more complicated. We’re having babies—calving— at 24 months old, and calving season is now year-round. Younger, fresher animals mean that a dairy makes more milk today with 700 cows than it used to make with 1,000 cows. The downside: It’s like being a billionaire’s wife—there always seem to be younger, hungrier females around, ready to take your place. Cows now typically have five years before they leave the dairy; there’s a nasty rumor in the sheds that we all eventually become meat for human consumption, but I prefer not to think about it.

In the last year or so, because my fellow cows and I are so productive (despite the drought), there’s been talk of a California comeback in dairy. Milk prices are up as overseas demand for dairy products increases, and our cow competitors in Europe and New Zealand have their struggles. But the comeback feels tentative.

There is also the problem of all those nuts out there. There’s only so much land in California, and if you’ve been in the Central Valley lately, you can see almonds (as well as pistachios and walnuts) taking up more and more land that once belonged to us cows, or to our feed. Olives are gobbling up more acres too, as the world can’t seem to get enough olive oil. With the drought taking more land out of cultivation, feeding me and the cows that come after me will get harder.

But you won’t hear me complain. California cows live by the same rule that the boys in Silicon Valley are always citing: adapt, or die. So you can whine about all the change in the state until the cows come home, but that doesn’t mean we’ll listen.

The post If California Cows Could Talk appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My cousin, a farmworker, was in a car accident when I was a kid. To visit him on his deathbed at the nearest hospital, my mother and I got on the bus in Huron. Three hours—and 13 or 14 stops later—we arrived in Fresno. In that time, we could have driven to Los Angeles, 192 miles away, with a pit stop at a burger place. Decades later, that bus ride still takes more than five hours round trip. There is only one bus to Fresno per day; it leaves Huron at 8:30 a.m. and arrives at 11 a.m., and then leaves Fresno at 3 p.m. to arrive back in Huron at 5:30 p.m. People who make that trip spend more time on the bus than they do running errands and attending appointments.

That bus ride is one of the reasons why, in 2008, I founded the San Joaquin Valley Latino Environmental Advancement Project (Valley LEAP), an environmental justice nonprofit that seeks to improve life in my hometown and others like it. The length of the bus ride is a powerful physical and psychological barrier for this farmworker city, which has one of the highest poverty rates (46 percent) in the state. There might as well be a wall between Huron and the world’s opportunities. It’s a struggle for Huron students just to get to the regional high school, which is 20 miles away and takes two hours round trip by bus. Students from Huron begin the school day an hour earlier and end it an hour later, which takes a toll on student achievement. To further one’s education in far-off Fresno or UC Merced is almost unthinkable.

Owning a car is tremendously expensive: the typical cost of gas and maintenance is usually between $400 and $600. For some farmworkers, who often make $1,200 a month, that’s as much as half their income. And we’re not the only town in the Valley where owning a car is a necessity. A forthcoming multi-community study by UC Davis researchers Jonathan London and Alex Karner found that a 45-minute commute by car gave Valley workers access to nearly 90 times more blue-collar, health, retail, and service jobs than a 45-minute commute by bus. Ninety times!

How do people get by? They collaborate. Last year, Eddy Reyes, one our fellows at LEAP, worked with scholars at UC Merced and UC Davis to survey 28 farmworkers in Huron, Hanford, and Fresno to learn how much money they spend on their cars. He discovered that half of them carpool to work—or to put it another way, they leverage their social capital for economic mobility. In this survey, Reyes uncovered an entire informal transportation system that is virtually invisible to outsiders and policymakers in Sacramento. One feature of this system is the raiteros—retired farmworkers who have the trust and respect of people in Huron and provide informal transportation to get people to hospitals, courts, and other critical appointments in Fresno for a cheap rate.

Ride-sharing works in Huron because in this diverse society of migrants, there is a long tradition of social ties that intertwine generations. For example, when my father, a bracero, brought my mother to Huron from Michoacán, she was immediately adopted by an older person in the neighborhood and mentored on adapting to her new American reality. Today elders will often provide rides to recently settled migrant farmworker families who are new to Huron and unfamiliar with the public transportation system. They also provide a tremendous service for people who don’t know how to drive or who lack a car or driver’s license.

We in Huron should be proud of this system, but there’s more we can do to improve transportation and open up access and opportunities to the people here. A Caltrans-funded planning process that resulted in a report by Valley LEAP, the City of Huron, and the local government commission recommended strategies to improve safety for pedestrians and cyclists—like widening sidewalks and creating bike lanes—and to improve the local public transportation system by adding benches, maps, and schedules at Huron bus stops.

There are other ideas as well. At Valley LEAP, we want to see the city’s raiteros go “green” by making the city of Huron’s two rarely used hybrid cars available to them. With careful scheduling, raiteros could earn an income and spend less on gas by, for example, taking a family to a child’s asthma appointment at the Central California Children’s Hospital in Madera County. This plan could also save money for Fresno County, which pays for expensive taxi rides for the elderly with Fresno County’s Measure C funds. Making ride-sharing green would lower transportation costs and lessen pollution impacts for both families and the city government.

We’d also like to figure out how to use community-based vans instead of cars so raiteros can shuttle more people to jobs and appointments, and so there will be fewer vehicles on the roads. Vanpooling cuts greenhouse gas emissions for travel by 77 percent—even more than riding some buses and trains.

California Vanpool Authority—or Cal Vans—already does some of this work, getting students to school, workers to farms, and correctional officers to prisons in the Central Valley. Unfortunately, Cal Vans is only available to seasonal users who ride five to seven days a week. We’d like to see the Cal Vans program make some exceptions to this rule so that a portion of their vans can be used based on need rather than on a set schedule.

California is always ahead of the game when it comes to technology and innovation. It’s time to embrace the Valley’s social innovation and stimulate a fluid system to connect our orchards, crops, neighborhoods, downtowns, and more than 20 educational institutions. In ads and labels, organic is sexy, sustainability is hot, and green is slapped on everything (green or not). What we really need is for the workers behind those labels—the people who grow and pick the nation’s produce—to have greener rides, greener pockets, and a harvest of opportunities, too.

The post The Central Valley Was Ride-Sharing Long Before Uber appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In this very quiet California election year, it’s fitting that our state’s most overlooked region has emerged as the center of every single major debate about California’s future. As we fight over high-speed rail and water and prisons and fracking and unemployment, we are really debating the future of the San Joaquin. Not that many of us have noticed; the new leader of the California State Senate, Kevin de Léon of Los Angeles, recently dismissed the region as a place full of tumbleweeds.

The San Joaquin—the south Central Valley stretching from the California Delta to the Tehachapi Mountains—only looks small compared to the rest of California. With 4 million residents across eight counties, its population is as big as Oregon’s—and bigger than that of 24 states (Nevada, Oklahoma, Iowa, and Connecticut among them). In square miles, it’s larger than Maryland or Massachusetts. And for all the talk about the power of the San Joaquin’s agriculture, most of its people live and work in cities. Fresno has more people than the cities of Atlanta or Miami. Stockton’s population is bigger than that of Cincinnati or Newark. Bakersfield is home to more humans than Tampa or St. Louis.

And the San Joaquin’s problems may be even bigger than the place itself. So now, without quite realizing it, we are having a variety of different policy debates that all turn on the same question: Just how much does the rest of California want to do for the San Joaquin?

This is the real question of high-speed rail, even though it’s obscured by debates over the project’s cost and legality and whether it will ever get people from L.A. to San Francisco in less than three hours. High-speed rail is less about connecting north to south—and more about connecting the San Joaquin, where rail construction is to start, to our coastal mega-cities, and about trying to boost the San Joaquin economy by attracting new people and jobs to the region. Those important goals are why so many California leaders, Brown among them, are still backing the train despite the collapse of public support for high-speed rail.

The water debate has a similar cast. Yes, California’s water issues are statewide, but the drought is being felt most strongly by the San Joaquin. Farms there, despite considerable improvements in water efficiency, remain heavy users of water, and need the sort of steady supply promised by backers of the water bond measure and the proposed Delta tunnels.

The San Joaquin has more than its share of prisons and crime, and so the state’s ongoing “realignment” efforts—to house more prisoners in county jails—has an outsized financial impact on some communities there. The fierce debate over how and whether to allow fracking in California is very much about what happens to natural gas in the Monterey Shale, much of which sits under the San Joaquin. The immigration debate has been especially hot in the San Joaquin, where agribusiness wants comprehensive reform, and Bakersfield’s Kevin McCarthy leads the U.S. House of Representatives majority blocking it.

And when people talk about the lack of jobs in California, they are really talking (even if they don’t realize it) about the San Joaquin, where unemployment remains in double digits even as most of the state experiences economic recovery.

The bad news is that all six of these San Joaquin-centric policy fights—high-speed rail, water, fracking, prisons, immigration, jobs—are complicated and could end in stalemates. The good news is that each of these debates, when grounded in the particulars of the region, could scramble our partisan and predictable politics and inspire creative compromises.

It’s good that both major parties are divided by these issues. Governor Brown has stood up for the San Joaquin by backing high-speed rail in the face of criticism from other Democrats, including his lieutenant governor, that it costs too much. He’s also drawing protests from environmentalists within his own party because of his support for water infrastructure and his refusal to ban fracking, which is about as popular as George W. Bush is among his Bay Area base.

Kashkari, the Republican gubernatorial candidate from coastal Orange County, is playing both sides of the San Joaquin divide. On one hand, he’s made poverty central to his platform, which includes a specific plan for combating it in the San Joaquin. On the other, he’s calling for the demise of high-speed rail (Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” has become his theme song). His opposition to high-speed rail puts him at odds with other San Joaquin Republicans—including perhaps the most important politician to watch this year, Fresno’s popular mayor, Ashley Swearengin, who is running for state controller and may be the California GOP’s best hope.

The San Joaquin is essential to both parties. Success in that region would keep Kashkari from embarrassing himself in November. And if the Democrats can kill off the GOP in its last major California stronghold, they could ensure that California—a GOP stronghold for most of the 20th century—remains a Democratic powerhouse for the rest of the 21st century.

The San Joaquin also may provide a solution to a basic problem facing California this year: the total absence of public interest in an election lacking any overarching narrative, or clear stakes. The candidates are all familiarly boring or boringly unfamiliar. But the San Joaquin is not a boring place; it’s worth fighting for.

When Governor Schwarzenegger was in office, he focused public attention on a specific issue by giving each year a theme. 2005 was his Year of Reform; 2007, the Year of Healthcare. He didn’t get the policies he wanted in either year, but he did manage to drive media coverage and public debate across California. In that spirit, it’s not too late to call 2014 the Year of the San Joaquin.

The post All California’s Problems Lead to the San Joaquin Valley appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In engineering class, such consequences were rarely, if ever, mentioned. Instead, we learned that the impacts of our designs would be handled later by other professionals during a project’s “environmental review.” But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if late-stage review would produce anything more than small or ornamental changes to projects. Wouldn’t it be better for everyone to anticipate such effects and address them in their initial designs?

A similar question hangs over California today as it seeks to implement SB 375, a 2008 law that requires each of its regions to develop 30-year plans to reduce the number of miles people drive each year.

Long-term planning is a good idea, but this law didn’t require much else. It didn’t require local governments to rein in sprawl by bringing destinations—work, schools, healthcare facilities—closer to where people live. It didn’t require cities to provide more opportunities for people to walk or use public transit. Instead, it directs regions to make a plan and determine how that plan will perform in the future. There are few incentives for local communities to follow through and no penalties if they don’t. The most important legal check on the 30-year plans is a computer model that evaluates them by simulating future travel patterns—and that model doesn’t account for the realities of political decision-making.

As it turns out, it’s awfully easy to hit a regional driving reduction target if your plan is based on a future detached from the politics of transportation investment and local land use. The San Diego region, for example, placed most of its projected investment in public transit near the end of its 30-year planning period to show that it would reduce driving in the future. Never mind that between now and then city and county governments can approve sprawling residential developments on the urban fringe that run contrary to SB 375 plans. The federal dollars that typically support ambitious public transit projects could also be gone by that time.

Common sense, not to mention the imperatives of climate change, demand that we make changes today, not in 30 years. Even if it’s too late to avoid the worst of climate change’s impacts, building cities that allow people to go without an automobile for some trips can decrease risk of wildfire damage, improve resiliency to drought, and reduce the “heat island” effect that makes urban areas warmer. And plans that encourage more walking and biking today will make us healthier in the long run.

In collaboration with colleagues from geography and community development, I have been studying California’s efforts to hit SB 375’s goals. Including perspectives from beyond engineering is absolutely necessary to understand the promise and perils of long-term planning.

My colleagues and I have found that, for all the things it’s missing, SB 375 has the transformative potential to spark regional conversation, and local action. And nowhere is this type of regional vision more important than in the San Joaquin Valley, where planning agencies are currently adopting their SB 375 plans.

In the Valley, as elsewhere in California, development traditionally has been driven by cheap land, seemingly abundant infrastructure, and a lack of consideration of environmental and social impacts. As a result, development has expanded outside central cities, where it can produce new revenue for cash-strapped local governments and seems to meet the preferences of some consumers for low-density housing.

But this type of fringe development has been disastrous for the region as a whole. Forty percent of Valley commuters cross county lines for work each day. There are few reliable transit options; it currently would take a resident of Lanare about two hours to travel the 30 miles to Fresno by bus—four times longer than it would take to travel by car.

With so many people on the road, it’s no wonder that the entire Valley fails to meet federal standards for ozone and fine particle air pollution. According to recent data prepared by California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, about a quarter of the Valley’s census tracts are among the most polluted and most vulnerable in the state. And the American Lung Association says the Valley’s metropolitan areas rank among the worst in the nation in terms of air quality. Sprawl also consumes valuable farmland—60 percent of all San Joaquin Valley land developed since the Gold Rush was prime agricultural land, according to the American Farmland Trust.

Making progress on such issues requires cities and counties to work together. Unfortunately, each county is coming up with its own plan under SB 375. That’s eight separate plans in the San Joaquin Valley to address similar patterns of sprawl and automobile dependence; eight separate plans for an over-committed public to comment on; and no overarching analysis or discussion of how it all fits together.

There’s nothing in the law that says those counties couldn’t come together to create a strong plan that includes new regional transportation alternatives, more affordable housing, and incentives for higher-density housing in urban areas. There are already good examples of what might be possible in rapid public transit, like the proposed Fresno Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) line and the successful Stockton BRT. A strong Valley-wide regional plan might also encourage reconsideration of some of the county plans, which call for future growth in new towns far from urban concentrations of jobs.

It’s not enough to make plans for 30 years down the road with the hope that we’ll make things right between now and then. Although modeling can tell us a great deal about our potential futures, the hard work of redesigning our regions, and their land use and transportation policies, needs to start right now.

The post Can California’s San Joaquin Valley Conquer Urban Sprawl? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The youth disconnection is part of a bigger issue: Merced has the highest rate of child poverty in the state—40 percent according to the U.S. census—and we also have more kids, proportionally, than most counties. In 2011, the year I graduated from Golden Valley High School, Forbes called my hometown America’s third most miserable city. Since then, I have been part of a group of young people who’ve been organizing to get more youth services in Merced—recreation, jobs, summer programs—but we have been stonewalled by local officials.

This frustrates me, because this is home. I am a 21-year-old Merced native, the youngest of five siblings, and have lived here my entire life. I have a job as an assistant at We’Ced Youth Media, a local program founded three years ago by New America Media with community support. I’ve always wanted to raise a family here, and with the birth of my son six months ago, now I have the chance to.

If you’re young and live in Merced, you can feel particularly disconnected on hot summer afternoons. Recreation and summer school options usually require money. All this leaves more time to do nothing but smoke pot or to sit on the couch playing video games until night, when it’s time to try to find a house party. Get a summer job? The adult unemployment rate in Merced is nearly 17 percent right now, and unemployment among people age 16-19 even higher. Basically, the only way to get a job around here is if you know someone who can plug you in somewhere.

Before the recession, Merced spent a lot of money on youth recreation, but over the last few years, much of that spending ended. The two town swimming pools closed, which made it a lot harder to cool off in the Valley’s hot summers. Three years ago I was part of a group of residents and teenagers who organized to get McNamara Park pool reopened. We won, but spending on youth is still down 60 percent.

Last year We’Ced organized a forum to ask city council candidates about youth issues. To prepare, we surveyed 500 young people in Merced to see what was important to them. They said their biggest needs were finding jobs and productive things to do. We joined with other youth groups to ask the city council to help expand an underfunded summer jobs program the Merced County Office of Education already has in place to cover jobs for more than 100 teenagers, and help the Boys & Girls Club extend their hours and reopen some of the youth drop-in centers they closed down. The total for both of these requests is about $413,000 out of a total city budget of $194 million.

Since then I have attended many council meetings, but I don’t feel that the members are listening to us. They aren’t going to allocate more funds to Parks and Rec for youth services and worse, will not acknowledge their responsibility as our elected officials to help develop the city’s young people. Oftentimes their body language shows their disinterest. They rarely respond to our testimonies or questions, and when they do their responses are usually rude, careless, or defensive.

In years past, council members brushed off our requests by telling us that we had to be involved from the beginning of the budget process in order to see results. This year we’ve done just that. But from the beginning of the budget process, our requests for transparency and dialogue were met with either opposition or indifference. To his credit, new council member Michael Belluomini has asked the city manager to look into the budget to find money for youth services But more than once—in public at council meetings—the city manager stubbornly pushed back at even the thought of going back into the budget. Even though the city has a significant budget surplus, the council has expanded the funding for youth recreation by only $35,000. The budget is scheduled to be finalized Monday night.

It’s also been very disappointing to see and hear council members, city staff, and the mayor try to turn our requests into a fight between city employees and young people. The council and city staff tell us that in order to fund youth services they would have to let city employees go. They are very focused on employees; when they talk about public safety, they start talking about hiring police. To me, investing in young people is part of public safety.

In a way, the city council members are the ones who are “disconnected” from the city’s future. The overwhelming majority of Merced’s young people are non-white, while all but one member of the council are middle- to upper-middle-class white men.

The struggle for recognition has changed those of us who got involved. In April we held a rally with 100 people. People are getting a sense of responsibility and leadership. Now we need to get some compromise from the city council.

I wish I could say that I see my future firmly in Merced, but I don’t. I want to stay in Merced. It’s my home and it’s all I know. I don’t want to raise my son anywhere else.

That said, if I hadn’t found my job at We’Ced, I would not still be in Merced. I recently re-enrolled at the local junior college and have hopes of being successful in school and beginning a career to better the future of my family. But I also have a back-up plan: leaving Merced.

The post Merced’s Kids Are Not All Right appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For the past few years, the Star Wars creator has been vying for the opportunity to spend an estimated $700 million to build a museum in the Presidio to showcase his art collection. His museum proposal was one of three for a prime location near Crissy Field that went before the Presidio Trust in February. All three were rejected as inappropriate for the site, currently home to a sporting goods store.

Now Lucas—the man who brought American Graffiti and Luke Skywalker to the imaginations of millions of Americans—has turned his focus to Chicago, a city that has embraced his plan with fervor. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has even picked out a location for Lucas, near Soldier Field on the shores of Lake Michigan.

Not to be outdone by potential museum-poachers from the Midwest, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee has responded with a new location, a city-owned lot just south of the Bay Bridge. It recently became available when the NBA’s Golden State Warriors said “enough” over the lengthy approval process for their own proposed waterfront arena and hotel complex, and took their project elsewhere in the city. Backers say the new site would be an ideal fit for Lucas, and unlike the arena, wouldn’t require lengthy a lengthy permitting process under the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Even if neither Chicago’s nor San Francisco’s bid comes to fruition, Lucas will have plenty of suitors waiting to welcome his collection of art and Hollywood memorabilia. But what if Lucas took his vision for “the country’s premiere venue for understanding the connections and lineage of illustrative and visual art” and did something truly bold? What if he chose an unexpected home for his vision?

Forget the political minefield of San Francisco, which will pick apart everything from the building’s design (too traditional) to its collection (not serious enough). And say “thanks but no thanks” to Chicago, where President Obama seems likely to build a Death Star of a presidential library that promises to outshine Lucas’ museum.

Instead, what if Lucas returned to his childhood roots, and to a place that would truly value his collection and its impact? One where his museum wouldn’t be yet another in a long list of tourist attractions, but the centerpiece destination?

George Lucas: Build your museum here, in the San Joaquin Valley.

Lucas’ hometown of Modesto might be the best choice. Last year residents feted their native son with a parade in honor of American Graffiti’s 40th anniversary. Lucas’ Modesto story is one of overcoming challenges; he was in a serious car accident his senior year of high school that he has called a life-changing event, spurring him to enroll in Modesto Junior College and eventually go to USC. Given his personal story and Modesto’s own economic and educational challenges, his vision for a museum dedicated to “the filmmaker’s passion for education and the role art can play in inspiring young people” couldn’t hope to find a more appropriate home.

Of course just up Highway 99, Stockton would also be an appropriate destination. A once proud city that for too long has been mired in bankruptcy, it already has a reputation for quietly stealing away coveted assets from San Francisco. Exhibit A: the Google Barge, now docked at the Port of Stockton, after the aforementioned San Francisco Bay Commission booted it from Treasure Island.

Even Fresno could put up a strong argument in the case to land the Star Wars museum. The city’s major science and art museum defaulted on a major loan and closed for good at the height of the financial crisis, leaving a massive void in the community and a $15 million debt to the city, which had guaranteed the loan. Fresno is also home to one of the state’s largest urban school districts, where most students will likely never have the opportunity to visit such a cultural institution.

Of course, in the world of billionaire producers and art collectors, prestige and glamour will almost always win out over hardscrabble determination and true need. But Lucas’ films are about the triumph of the underdog. And isn’t putting the new Lucas museum in a city that’s already overflowing with them the ultimate example of the rich getting richer? If located in the Central Valley, his museum wouldn’t just stimulate the minds of young people; it would also help give a sizeable boost to the local economy, which is plagued by double digit unemployment.

We’ll most likely know soon where Lucas plans to build. And someone as skilled as the legendary director will probably be able to navigate the political and regulatory obstacle course that any Bay Area location would involve, no matter how lengthy. But if San Francisco looks like it will debate the minutiae of his proposal forever, Lucas would be wise to look east to the San Joaquin, where this project would be moved forward at light speed.

The post Bring the George Lucas Museum to Modesto appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

There is a serious shortage of nursing instructors in Fresno. It’s one of the greatest shortages of skilled workers in California, which ranks 46th in the nation when it comes to nurses per capita, according to the federal Bureau of Health Professions. The Valley has one of the lowest nurse-to-patient ratios in the United States.

In 2006, I made the switch from chief nurse at the Fresno Heart Hospital to instructor, and taught nursing at San Joaquin Valley College and Fresno Pacific University. Being a nursing instructor doesn’t pay as much as being a nurse administrator—but teaching is exciting. As an instructor, it’s my job to teach students to recognize the abnormal, and establish plans of care for patients. To do this, an instructor needs to stay current with what’s happening in healthcare, which is a field where the only constant is change.

I wanted to be a nurse from the age of 7, when I first admired nurses in their starched white uniforms. When I told my high school counselor in my sophomore year that I wanted to be a nurse, he shook his head and said that, because I was poor and Latino, I should be a secretary. I was undeterred. I even turned down a full scholarship to a business school to become a nurse.

It’s easy to get discouraged when you study nursing. On the first day of class, students are excited, but the reality of the difficulty of the major soon hits home. Each of the major areas of study—medical, surgical, obstetrics, pediatrics, and mental health—has a requirement of many hours of clinical practice.

The pressure is unavoidable when you combine the academic work and those high-stakes clinical hours. If an accountant makes a mistake, it can mean a loss of dollars to the company; if a nurse makes a mistake, it could mean a patient’s life. And there are no shortcuts in nursing. After graduation, aspiring nurses are required to pass a national licensing exam comprised of as many as 250 questions that measures critical thinking in a clinical environment.

Nursing students come from every conceivable background. What they have in common is struggle—many live on a shoestring budget. I’ve had students who slept in their cars because they could not afford to rent an apartment, and their families lived out of town. More than a few are in the “sandwich” generation, caring for both their children and their parents while trying to make it through a nursing program. Many students expect to be able to continue working full-time while going through the nursing program, only to realize that the pace is impossible. When they give up their full-time positions, they are suddenly faced with losing benefits for their families. This can lead to additional stress—and a lack of cooperation or attitude in the structure.

In the years I’ve taught nursing, I’ve come to realize that students have to learn for themselves how they will overcome the barriers to completing a nursing education. I always try to be sensitive—to lend an ear, offer a hug or words of comfort. But I’m also passionate about making sure patients come first. One of the most important lessons I tell students is: If you cannot walk out of a patient’s room knowing that the care you just provided is the same care that you would want for yourself or a member of your family, you need to go back into the room and provide the care again—this time in the correct manner.

The work of a nursing instructor does not fit into a simple 12-hour day, much less an 8-hour shift. There is constant coaching and mentoring that must take place, along with developing and grading tests, reading and correcting papers and care plans, and preparing lectures. It can be challenging to teach nursing, and the pay is often less than what you can make as a registered nurse working a 12-hour shift at a hospital. Most nursing instructors do the work because they love it. Teaching nursing is a calling within a calling.

We desperately need more people with this calling—especially in the San Joaquin Valley. One idea for helping to solve the faculty shortage problem involves hospitals, colleges, and universities working together to create joint appointments for experienced nurses who are interested in teaching. This would allow a nurse to keep his or her clinical job (including salary and benefits) while working as a nursing instructor a few days a week.

More qualified instructors will result in better-educated nurses, and that will be good for everyone. I imagine that someday, I’ll be a patient in a hospital or ambulatory care setting and will recognize the nurse caring for me as a former student. I will smile proudly.

The post Can California Figure Out a Way to Train Nurses? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Your first problem involves water. Residents of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta—California’s most vital estuary and source of water—fiercely oppose Brown’s plan to build tunnels that will divert water from north of the Delta to provide more reliable supplies to San Joaquin Valley farmers and Southern California. Their opposition is based on fear. In the short term, they fear construction of the tunnels will disrupt their lives. In the long term, they fear that the tunnels, by allowing other parts of the state to bypass the Delta, will lead Californians to forget the Delta. A forgotten Delta, they fear, will slowly die under the stresses of climate, habitat loss, and encroaching salt water from the San Francisco Bay.

Delta folks are likely to fight and sue to block the Bay Delta Conservation Plan and the tunnels it would create indefinitely—unless something dramatic happens to change the conversation. When you ask people in the Delta what would inspire them to conversation and negotiation, they say they need more than promises. They will only consider supporting plans that include “physical assurances”—the placement of water infrastructure that ensures the Delta will not be bypassed and that its health will remain a cause of concern for all.

That brings me to the second, seemingly unrelated problem. It involves housing—for governors. Yes, Governor Brown personally keeps a loft apartment in Sacramento near the Capitol. And then there’s the state’s Leland Stanford Mansion, a 19,000-square foot Victorian in Sacramento that serves as the governor’s official reception place. But California, unlike most states, has no official gubernatorial residence. Efforts to create one have foundered for years.

This failure is now an opportunity. Why not offer Delta residents a very clear and timely “physical assurance” that they won’t be forgotten by establishing an official governor’s residence in the Delta?

The idea may seem humorous or provocative, given the hostility of so many Delta residents to Brown and his tunnels. But I mean it seriously. Governor Brown, people in the Delta couldn’t accuse you of abandoning the Delta at the same time you were moving there. And living there would offer an opportunity to engage residents firsthand—and get the ground-level understanding necessary to make Delta plans acceptable to people living in Delta communities.

Beyond today’s debate about water, there are benefits to turning California governors into Delta residents. Politics is often too fast-paced for the minds and bodies of those who practice it. But the Delta is a peaceful mix of river towns, islands, levees, and sloughs—a natural refuge. It’s also not too far from the governor’s office. The commute from the Delta town of Clarksburg to the Capitol is shorter, according to Google Maps, than the commute from the monstrous Casa de Los Gobernadores that the Reagans built (and Brown abandoned) in the Sacramento suburb of Carmichael.

Clarksburg is a nice town that produces a great deal of good wine—which could be a comfort to future governors when their job approval ratings take a dive. But Clarksburg is hardly the only good option in the Delta, a diverse place with 1,000 miles of waterways and a half million people. Walnut Grove, just a few minutes south of Clarksburg, is also close to the Capitol and has several large homes that would suit a governor. A place near the proposed tunnels would also be fitting, as a demonstration that the governor is ready to live with any disruption caused by construction or water diversions.

But taking over an existing house wouldn’t be as interesting, or as educational, as building a new one. (Yes, building a brand-new governor’s mansion seems like an extravagance, but the famously cheap Brown could get away with it.) Floods are a part of life in the Delta, and a host of environmental regulations govern construction. Many Delta homes are built high up on stilts. Wouldn’t it be cool—and a teachable moment—if the governor’s place were an eco-friendly, regulatory-compliant residence built high above ground?

When I tested out my idea of relocating the governor to the Delta on recent visits there, I got no shortage of cheeky suggestions for where to build a gubernatorial mansion-on-stilts. One person would love to see Brown in a house-on-stilts on Staten Island—a crucial Delta habitat for sandhill cranes that is owned by the Nature Conservancy. A few Delta residents suggested Isleton, a dysfunctional town where a former police chief bought guns on credit for his small department with the expectation that a future marijuana farm would provide the revenues to pay off the debt. (It didn’t work out.)

But other residents were more serious. My favorite suggestion was placing the residence in or near the historic small town of Locke, built in 1915 by Chinese immigrants who were forced to leave Walnut Grove after a fire destroyed their neighborhood. Locke has preserved its historic main street and has a couple museums (including one devoted to gambling), which help it to retain a special charm and a sense of the Delta’s rich history.

Delta folks do like to battle public officials, but they’ve been proud to count those who have chosen to live in the Delta—like Congressman John Garamendi and Secretary of State Debra Bowen—as neighbors. But requiring the governor to live in the Delta would send a profound message, and not just to Delta residents mad about today’s water infrastructure plans.

Such a move would demonstrate to all Californians that our water comes not from a tap but from real communities. It would emphasize that California’s future, as an economy and a place, lies in environmentally minded development.

And it would be a reminder to our leaders that reckoning with the challenges of climate change, water, and natural disasters is not merely part of the job—it’s something that they should live with, every single day.

The post The Governor Should Move to the Delta appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.