A draft resolution before the Shasta County Board today says that Supervisors believe California has passed gun laws that will later be determined to be unconstitutional by the courts and that infringe on rights under the Second Amendment. 

That’s why, the draft resolution states, they “may use all lawful means to prohibit any Shasta County Department, Officer, or Employee acting in their official capacity, from applying for grants, spending county public funds, using County public resources or County public employees, that directly or indirectly support any past, present, or future, state or federal infringement on the Second Amendment.”

The Board will also “use all lawful means at its disposal,” the draft resolution says, “to support and defend the Second Amendment,” including considering drafting or amending county policies, procedures, or ordinances in defense of it.

The draft resolution leaves the decision on what passes constitutional standards when it comes to the Second Amendment, in the hands of the Board itself. That is problematic, according to clear feedback from the Board’s legal counsel over the last draft of the resolution which came before the Board in February.

In a redlined version of the last version of the resolution, the County’s legal counsel at the time, Rubin Cruse Jr., noted a 2004 California Supreme Court ruling that confirmed that public officials may not decide for themselves whether or not laws are constitutional. 

Instead, the Court said, public officials must “faithfully uphold the Constitution by complying with legal mandates and leaving it up to the courts to decide whether they’re valid . . . A public official does not honor his or her oath to defend the Constitution by taking action in contravention of the restrictions of his or her office and justifying such action by reference to his or her personal constitutional views.”

That 2004 ruling confirmed what’s already clear in the California Constitution, that power is separated among three branches of government: the legislative branch which makes the laws, the executive branch which enforces them, and the judicial branch which interprets them. 

When it comes to local decision-making the Board does have some power in multiple branches of government according to the California State Association of Counties, which says that county boards have some executive and legislative roles in running local government as well as limited quasi-judicial power. 

None of those roles would allow county boards to determine what laws meet constitutional standards. 

The draft of the resolution in support of the 2nd Amendment, which will be considered by Supervisors today, July 25, was contributed to by the California Pistol and Rifle Association or CPRA. 

Only minimal revisions have been made to this second draft resolution despite the fact that it repeats some of the concerns with the last heavily red-lined version. 

Since February, both Rubin Cruse Jr. and his successor James Ross, have left their roles as County Counsel. The position is currently vacant. The staff report for the draft resolution says it was approved by the newly-appointed County CEO, David Rickert. 

The community college system is falling short of one of its most important benchmarks: the number of students who transfer to a four-year college or university. It remains well below the system’s own goal, and lawmakers have taken notice.

“Although most students intend to transfer to a four-year university, few do,” wrote a group of state legislators this year as they asked the state to audit community college performance.

Set in 2017, the goal was to increase the annual number of community college students who transfer to the University of California and California State University from nearly 89,000 to more than 120,000 by 2022. In the 2020-21 academic year, the most recent data available, nearly 99,000 community college students transferred to a UC or Cal State.

The Community College Chancellor’s Office responded to questions regarding the transfer goal by forwarding a letter that former interim Chancellor Daisy Gonzales wrote to legislators in March as part of an internal negotiation regarding the audit. In it, she wrote that the goal “has not been fully achieved.”

She wrote that the UC and Cal State system rejected nearly 30,000 eligible community college applicants in fall 2020 — more than enough transfers to meet the community colleges system’s goal. She wrote there was “insufficient capacity” at the UC and Cal State campuses and asked the auditors to include equal scrutiny of those systems, since everyone is mutually responsible for coordinating successful transfers.

However, there are many ways to measure transfer. To get a clearer picture, CalMatters looked beyond the chancellor’s office goal and analyzed the raw number of students who transferred every year, which includes but is not limited to those who transfer to a UC or Cal State. Those numbers are reported by four-year institutions across the country and analyzed by the California Community College Chancellor’s Office. Undocumented students are not counted because they lack a Social Security number. It’s the methodology that most closely aligns with the state’s funding formula, which pegs the transfer numbers to the amount of money a college receives.

CalMatters then compared those numbers to the total number of students who, upon starting community college, said they eventually wanted to get an associate degree or transfer.

Of the students enrolled in a community college in California who said they wanted to transfer to a four-year university, an average of 9.9% went on to enroll at a four-year institution in 2021, the most recent data available.

There are many reasons why students never transfer. The state’s roughly 1.8 million community college students are predominantly low-income, first-generation students of color. Many students, especially older students, must juggle work, children, and for some, even homelessness while attending school.

But certain populations and colleges have a harder time with transfer than others. CalMatters found:

• Students at rural community colleges are less likely to transfer to a four-year university than students who attend school in affluent parts of Ventura County, Orange County, the San Fernando Valley, and Bay Area suburbs like San Bruno, Pleasant Hill, and Redwood City.
• Colleges separated by only a few miles show stark contrasts in transfer rates. In 2021, the most recent year available, the transfer rate at Irvine Valley College was 16.7%, but just 10 miles away, at Santa Ana College, the rate was 5.4%.
• Younger community college students were most likely to transfer, and  the rates drop off the older a student gets. In 2021, students over the age of 50 were more than four times less likely to transfer than their peers between ages 20 and 24.

Rural, unprepared students face biggest hurdles

Lassen College has one of the lowest transfer rates in the state — 4.5% in 2021. It’s more than 10 percentage points below the highest performer, Irvine Valley College.

The reason is easy to see, said Roxanna Hayes, the vice president of student services at Lassen College in Susanville: The nearest four-year institution is over 80 miles away at the University of Nevada in Reno.

“It feels like we’re 2 hours from anything…when you come up to Susanville and you look around, there’s no other educational institution besides us.”

“We don’t have the sort of income that other counties have,” Hayes said. “It’s not just getting accepted to school: I’ve also got to live there and afford it.”

Among the community colleges with the lowest transfer rates, 60 percent are rural, and some are hours away from the nearest four-year institution.

Because of its proximity to numerous four-year institutions like UC Irvine and Cal State Fullerton, students at Irvine Valley College come to school already familiar with their transfer options, and most students don’t have to move if they want to pursue a bachelor’s degree, said Loris Fagioli, the director of research at Irvine Valley College.

The rural-urban divide is part of the problem, but it can’t explain everything, said Darla Cooper, the executive director of the Research and Planning Group of the California Community Colleges, a separate nonprofit organization that is funded in part by the chancellor’s office. The income of the student body, the focus and “culture” of the school, and even the economics of the surrounding town or city impact the transfer rate at any community college.

In the 2014-15 academic year, Los Angeles community colleges had some of the lowest transfer rates in the state, but that’s because many of its students were coming to community college unprepared, said Maury Peal, the community college district’s associate vice chancellor for institutional effectiveness.

The colleges enrolled those students in remedial courses, which can take years to complete and can reduce the likelihood of graduation. Backed by research that shows remedial classes to be ineffective, a law passed in 2017 and another in 2022 asked colleges to start placing students directly in college-level courses. Pearl said these reforms, plus other efforts like special degrees that guarantee a transfer to a Cal State or UC, have led to an uptick in transfer rates across the L.A. colleges.

West Los Angeles College, for instance, had a 5.4% transfer rate in 2015, among the lowest in the state. But by 2021, it was up to 12.3%, well above the statewide average.

“The fact that it’s improved is something we’re proud of, but it’s still not where we want to get to,” said Jeff Archibald, vice president of academic affairs for West Los Angeles College.

‘Swirl,’ prisons, and ‘transfer-oriented culture’ set schools on different paths

Unlike four-year institutions, which are often singularly focused on bachelor’s degrees for young adults, community colleges offer a range of educational opportunities depending on the demographics in the surrounding towns or cities, which can make it hard to compare one community college to another.

Located in Blythe, a rural town near the Arizona border, Palo Verde College has consistently had the lowest transfer rate of any community college. In 2021, just 1.1% of Palo Verde College students who indicated they wanted to transfer succeeded in doing so — but roughly half of the college’s students are in prison. Other rural colleges with low transfer rates, including Lassen College and Feather River College, also enroll a high percentage of incarcerated students relative to other schools.

Rural areas also come with different job opportunities, especially compared to the state’s highly educated coastal cities, Cooper said.

“Do the jobs where you’re located require a bachelor’s degree?” she said. “Because if they don’t, you’re probably not going to have a lot of transfer.”

In dense urban areas like Los Angeles, students tend to take classes at multiple  community colleges, creating a “swirl” in the data that can mask some long-term outcomes,  Archibald said.

But disparities still persist, even within the same city. Los Angeles Pierce College and Los Angeles Valley College, which are located in the San Fernando Valley, consistently outperform other Los Angeles community colleges.

Pearl said Pierce and Valley College have developed a reputation for preparing students for four-year colleges or universities. He pointed to other Los Angeles community colleges, such as Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, which are geared towards career and technical training.

A 2008 Research and Planning Group report found that a “transfer-oriented culture” was a recurring reason why certain community colleges had higher-than-expected transfer rates. The report also said those colleges had close relationships with local high schools and four-year institutions, along with support services for students.

Although the report was done 15 years ago, the transfer rate patterns have persisted. Many of those schools profiled by the Research and Planning Group in 2008, such as Irvine Valley College, continue to outperform their peers today, according to the CalMatters analysis of recent data.

Community colleges in wealthy areas or those with high-performing high schools have higher transfer rates, too. “We know this with almost all educational outcomes, there is an economic or socio-economic driver behind it,” Faglioli said.

Pearl said Los Angeles Pierce and Valley colleges benefit from “high-performing” charter schools nearby, which can boost transfer rates if community college students start school better prepared.

Why transfer still matters

To encourage colleges to meet the system’s goal of increasing transfers to a UC and Cal State, community college officials put forward a new formula that pegged a portion of a community college’s funding to its outcomes. One of those outcomes is the number of people who transfer to a four-year institution.

But Lizette Navarette, interim deputy chancellor of the community college system, said that community colleges with low transfer rates are not getting penalized.

That’s because the new funding formula also takes into account the percentage of low-income students who meet certain benchmarks for success and the number of students who complete career-oriented programs. Navarette said rural colleges and other schools with low transfer rates have the opportunity to make up any potential gaps in state funding.

Lassen College, for example, received nearly $3 million more dollars last year than it would have under the previous funding formula, despite having some of the lowest transfer rates in the system.

However, the greatest impact of low transfer rates is not on the community college but on the student, Cooper said.

“For most people of color, most people who are low-income, community college is their only way into higher ed,” she said. “Even if what they want to pursue requires a bachelor’s degree, not everyone can go straight to a university.”

Four-year colleges and universities are selective and can be expensive, she said. While some community college students can earn more with a certificate or an associate degree than those with a bachelor’s degree, she said those students are the exception, not the norm.

“Everybody wants to bring out Bill Gates,” Cooper said. “He didn’t graduate college….If you can be that, awesome, great, fantastic. But for most people, it’s beneficial for life.”

In the internal letter to the state auditors, former interim Chancellor Gonzales pointed to areas where the community college system has seen significant gains toward its 2017 goals. More students are completing their courses and gaining degrees, for instance.

In general, more students are transferring to a four-year college, according to the CalMatters analysis, which includes upticks in the number of students transferring to a UC or Cal State. But the progress remains less than third of the goal that the chancellor’s office set out to accomplish by 2022.

A spokesperson for the Community College Chancellor’s Office said the system will deliver a new transfer goal “in the coming weeks.”

Data reporter Jeremia Kimelman contributed to the reporting for this story. 

Adam Echelman covers California’s community colleges in partnership with Open Campus, a nonprofit newsroom focused on higher education.

Dozens of rural Fresno County residents spoke out Wednesday, urging California leaders to address the “urgent need for investment” in local broadband internet access.

“We want, and we need broadband of the highest quality,” said Martha Sanchez, a resident of Selma. “It’s not a luxury anymore; it’s become a necessity.”

Sanchez and others gathered at Washington Union High School in Easton as part of a “digital access conference.” The event included Assemblymember Dr. Joaquin Arambula, the Children’s Movement of Fresno, and All Children Thrive.

Broadband internet access in communities like Easton remains slow and expensive.

Speakers at the events said connectivity issues hamper students, teachers, and business owners.

Broadband internet access in Fresno faces funding challenges

Funding remains one of the largest roadblocks to achieving digital equity.

Some fear the state’s forthcoming Digital Equity Plan won’t reflect the challenges in Fresno County.

In fact, Mike Espinoza, the executive director of The Children’s Movement of Fresno, said funding issues could get worse.

Espinoza said the California Department of Technology relies on maps from the Federal Communications Commission that are “flawed” and “incomplete.”

“We know that the State’s Digital Equity Plan will outline its planned investments by county,” Espinoza said. “Though we fear that the state’s overreliance on the incomplete FCC/CPUC data will motivate them to avoid investing in Fresno’s digital infrastructure.”

Additionally, Wednesday’s gathering came just a day before the Fresno City Council is expected to vote on a resolution to “foster equality for Fresno residents and bolster resources for upward mobility.”

Arambula promised to stand by the affected communities and push for a solution at the state capitol.

“For us to build a stronger future, we need to be listening to residents to address those digital divides and inequities head on,” Arambula. “We need to make sure that every one of our residents feels that ability to connect to internet that’s high speed and that works to address the issues that our economy demands.”

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A new kind of food may soon be arriving on grocery store shelves: climate smart. Under the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, a nascent U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) program, this amalgam of farming methods aims to keep the American agricultural juggernaut steaming ahead while slashing the sector’s immense greenhouse gas footprint.

This spring, the Biden administration began allocating $3.1 billion to hundreds of agriculture organizations, corporations, universities, and nonprofits for climate-smart projects. These entities will pass most of the money on to tens of thousands of farmers, ranchers, and forest owners, including growers who manage thousands of acres and underserved and disadvantaged farmers who often have much smaller operations. The first agreements have now been signed; the money is starting to flow.

The USDA estimates that the 141 funded projects will, collectively over the project’s five-year lifetime, eliminate or sequester the equivalent of 60 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, on par with removing more than 2.4 million gas-powered cars from the road over the same period. They will achieve this by paying growers to adopt practices thought to either reduce greenhouse gas emissions or capture carbon dioxide from the air. These practices include reducing or eliminating tilling of soil, planting “cover crops” that grow during the off-season and are not harvested, improving how farmers use fertilizer and manure, and planting trees.

More importantly, the agency aims to catalyze new, premium markets for products such as climate-smart corn, soybeans, and beef, which it hopes will spur farmers to continue these practices far into the future. “People want to know that when they’re spending their dollar at the grocery store that they’re not hurting the environment; they want to be helpful,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said last December when announcing projects that received funding. The emerging market for climate-friendly products, he added, represents “a transformational opportunity for U.S. agriculture.”

The idea has enthusiastic supporters. The market that Vilsack envisions “is potentially massive — much bigger than any federal program could be,” says Ben Thomas, senior policy director for agriculture at the Environmental Defense Fund. “And it’ll last as long as the conditions that create the market still exist.”

But the high-profile effort has also come under fire. Some researchers fear that the agency lacks a workable plan for measuring and verifying the impacts of the practices federal dollars will be paying for. Others say science has yet to prove that climate-smart practices truly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. “We don’t have that understanding yet for most climate-smart management practices,” says Kim Novick, an environmental scientist at Indiana University.

The program’s harshest critics assail it as a giveaway to rich corporations that will do little to rein in climate change — and might even exacerbate it. “This program is just pork for big polluters,” says University of Iowa economist Sylvia Secchi. “It’s a greenwashing scheme. It’s going to allow nothing to get done.”­

For decades, efforts to cut fossil fuel emissions have focused on power plants, factories, and automobiles, not farmland. “Agriculture has just not been at the table in a meaningful way,” says Thomas.

But it should be. For all of industrial farming’s success at feeding people and livestock and producing biofuel, the sector is also a major polluter, accounting for roughly 10 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and roughly a quarter of emissions globally. The main greenhouse gases emitted by U.S. agriculture today are nitrous oxide, which comes mainly from soil microbes that digest nitrogen fertilizer, and methane, burped by the nation’s roughly 92 million cows. Both warm the atmosphere far more, per molecule, than carbon dioxide.

Farmland itself was also once a major source of atmospheric carbon dioxide as farmers cleared carbon-rich forests and plowed up prairie soils, releasing carbon from trees and the ground. Now, climate-smart agriculture aims to recapture some of that carbon.

Unlike with organic farming, climate-smart farming has no list of allowed or prohibited practices. “There is no single definition of climate smart,” says Omanjana Goswami, an interdisciplinary scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Instead, it comprises a mélange of practices that, studies show, can either reduce farms’ greenhouse gases emissions or increase the amount of carbon stored in their soils.

Funded projects are receiving up to $95 million over five years to help farmers take up these practices and to create monitoring and marketing programs that, it’s hoped, will keep farmers on the climate-smart track after the program ends. That all-carrot, no-stick strategy is intentional and necessary to reduce agriculture’s climate impact, says Robert Bonnie, under secretary for farm production and conservation at USDA and one of the program’s chief architects and champions.

“A voluntary, collaborative approach is the only approach that works here,” says Bonnie. “Regulation isn’t very good at asking people to adopt new practices.”

The department says the program will deliver benefits to underserved and disadvantaged farmers, a group that includes farmers of color, women, veterans, and small and beginning farmers who have, in the past, struggled to access USDA funding streams and have sometimes been intentionally excluded from them. Many of the projects whose signed agreements have been made public, for example, will direct at least 20 percent of funds to underserved farmers.

Champions of the program also note that expected benefits go beyond increasing carbon sequestration and reducing greenhouse gases from farm fields. By encouraging farmers to reduce tillage, plant cover crops, and take other measures, “we’re improving water quality; we’re reducing erosion,” says Adam Kiel, executive vice president of AgOutcomes, which is managing a $95 million climate-smart partnership led by the Iowa Soybean Association.

But as the climate-smart commodities program gets underway, many experts are warning that even its most-touted practices often fall far short. For example, some cover crop studies have found that the practice did not sequester significant amounts of carbon in soils, while other studies that did find gains also had gaps or methodological problems that diminished confidence in the results. And an analysis published in May in Nature Sustainability found that yield losses resulting from cover crops in the United States could erase as much as 70 percent of their climate benefits if farmers cut down trees elsewhere or plow up grasslands to compensate for those losses.

“I wouldn’t say we should pause everything, because there are some real benefits to cover cropping,” says David Lobell, a food security researcher at Stanford University and a coauthor of the Nature paper. “But I think we should be much more vigilant about maintaining productivity” as more farmers start using cover crops.

Other projects aim to reduce the greenhouse gas footprint of beef and dairy herds by more carefully managing how these animals graze pastures, so their manure can feed perennial grasses and other plants whose roots pull carbon deep into the soil. But grass-fed cows can also emit significantly more methane over their lifetimes than those that spend more of their lives in feedlots. Some projects plan to feed cows experimental additives that could reduce those methane emissions.

Measuring and modeling nitrous oxide emissions accurately is also notoriously difficult. And practices thought to reduce such emissions — like applying some fertilizer in the spring, just before planting, rather than applying all fertilizer in the fall — sometimes backfire. In fact, few long-term assessments of any climate-smart practices have been conducted on working farms, says Novick, making it hard to tailor practices to particular soil types, climates, and situations.

“It doesn’t appear that funding decisions from this program were necessarily made in a way that maximizes climate mitigation,” says Novick, who led a team that last fall authored a report on how science can inform nature-based climate solutions. “Ideally we would have first invested in the data tools necessary to understand when and where a practice is likely to succeed as a climate solution.”

There’s also the question of how to measure the program’s benefits. Funded groups are required to take measurements that will allow the USDA to assess the impacts of the practices farmers are implementing. But the agency is also relying heavily on a computer model that was designed to estimate greenhouse gases for planning large-scale projects and that cannot accurately quantify emissions and carbon capture from individual farms, notes Jon Sanderman, a soil scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center.

Bill Hohenstein, director of the USDA’s Office of Energy and Environmental Policy, acknowledges that the science behind climate-smart agriculture remains a work in progress. But he says it’s mature enough to take action. “We could wait a decade and probably understand these benefits better,” Hohenstein says. “But our view is that we would end up with generally the same recommendations.”

In addition to the technical challenges of measuring carbon and greenhouse gas changes, the Climate-Smart program will have to get farmers to stick with new practices after payments have ended. Officials say that payments to cover the startup costs for enrolled farmers are essential. “If this stuff was free, folks would already be doing it,” Bonnie says. But once they’ve bought equipment like seed drills for no-till planting and climbed the learning curve, he and Hohenstein say, reduced input costs, yield increases resulting from healthier soils, and premiums for climate-smart products will start to pay for themselves.

Many experts view such projections as overly optimistic. Hanna Poffenbarger, a soil scientist at the University of Kentucky, says it may take a decade for cover crop benefits, such as reduced need for fertilizer and increased soil organic matter, to translate into profits. That aligns with the experience of early adopters like Trey Hill, a farmer in Maryland who says that even after planting cover crops for more than 20 years, he’s still seeing yield losses in some of his corn fields and an unclear impact on his bottom line. “When you talk about improving soils,” he says, “we’re talking about a 10-year commitment before you would really even see anything significant.”

Details on the projects themselves have been slow to emerge. Though the projects receiving the bulk of the funding were announced last September, the USDA has so far shared fewer than a quarter of the signed agreements on its website. For the remaining projects, the department has published scant information. For example, a $61-million project led by the agribusiness giant Tyson to create and market “climate-smart beef” comes with only a two-sentence description that does not explain what practices will make beef climate smart. In response to an interview request, a Tyson representative linked to a blog post lacking substantive information on how the company’s claims will be verified.

The vagueness troubles observers like Goswami, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who says that without clear standards, companies will define “climate smart” in different ways, potentially confusing customers. “If Tyson comes in and says farms and ranches who we’re buying cows from have implemented X amount of cover cropping, does that make their beef climate smart?” she asks.

Even people who received funding fear that the program could overwhelm or confuse farmers who are suddenly inundated with competing climate-smart offers. “In Iowa alone, there are 17 different climate-smart projects” that will be recruiting farmers, Kiel notes. At the same time, another branch of the USDA, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, has been tasked with disbursing nearly $20 billion injected by the Inflation Reduction Act into farm programs, including ones that pay farmers to grow cover crops or set aside land for conservation. Private-sector carbon markets are also courting farmers. And many of these initiatives require that farmers not take money from competing programs, to avoid double counting of climate benefits. “There’s going to be farmer confusion,” Kiel says. “It’s unfortunate, but at least there’s going to be lots of choices.”

Secchi, meanwhile, questions why some of the wealthiest corporations and individuals in industrial agriculture are receiving additional federal money. She would have instead liked to see the government insist that growers already receiving government subsidies through other programs do more to reduce their climate impact. “Why can’t we ask farmers who are getting crop insurance subsidies to plant cover crops at zero extra cost for the taxpayer?” Secchi asks. She’d also like to see more of the funds directed toward minority, Indigenous, and other disadvantaged farmers.

Bonnie, the USDA undersecretary, responds that catalyzing large-scale change requires working with companies big enough to reach thousands of growers farming millions of acres. Building a program that will create new markets rather than new regulations and policies, he adds, insulates climate-smart agriculture from future Congresses and administrations that may be less climate friendly.

One thing is certain: As the government looks to steer the ocean liner that is American farming in a direction that’s climate friendlier yet still highly profitable, a lot of eyes — both hopeful and skeptical — will be watching closely.

The Practical Housing Policy Conference sponsored by the Monterey Bay Economic Partnership (MBEC) brought local housing advocates, government officials and policymakers together at the California State University, Monterey Bay Alumni & Visitors Center on June 27 to discuss ways to reach affordable housing goals set by the state of California.

“You cannot recruit business, retain business or hire folks without thinking about housing that’s mixed-use, single-family, affordable or market rate,” said MBEC president Tahra Goraya. “It’s bringing doctors and teachers and others in, and it’s also making sure that farmworkers are housed.”

The state of California requires cities to create a compliant Housing Element plan every eight years and the next one is due Dec. 15. The plan must include a Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) requirement, an assessment of the number of new housing units that cities will require through the term of the plan. In Monterey and Santa Cruz counties, that number is set by the Association of Monterey Bay Area Governments. The San Benito Council of Governments makes the same assessment for San Benito County, which is determined by the county’s median income.

According to MBEC Director of Housing and Community Development Gabriel Sanders, a recent study by the organization revealed that the deep need for affordable housing in California is the result of historical and cultural trends. 

In San Benito County, the RHNA is based on a median family income of $105,100 and would require the county to build 5,005 new housing units by the end of 2031. Of that number, 2,947 would be required to be affordable housing.

For Hollister, that would mean building 2,350 affordable housing units out of the 4,163 units required. San Juan Bautista would need 50 affordable units out of the 88 required. The unincorporated areas of the county would need 547 affordable units out of the 754 required.

The results of the MBEC study released in June 2023 recommended five major policy changes to expedite the building of homes needed to relieve the crisis. 

Streamline permitting and reduce discretionary reviews  

The study suggested that discretionary reviews by planning commissions, city councils or the San Benito County Board of Supervisors can introduce challenges to housing approval which are subjective and not necessarily written into law. It recommends “right of approval” mechanisms that would require objective standards which, once met, would override the opposition and streamline the steps leading to construction.

Increase allowable densities

The study advocates for more “efficient use of vacant or non-vacant land” by increasing height limits, increasing the amount of area in a parcel that can be used as floor space, removing units-per-acre limits, and creating bonuses for affordable housing projects which take advantage of all allowable density regulations. Under the plan, parking requirements for new housing units would be reduced or eliminated, suggesting that building near local mass transit would reduce car dependency and thereby reduce the need for more parking.

Reform impact fees

Because impact fees for construction are set at the same rates regardless of size, a 4,000-square-foot home is assessed at the same fee as a 400-square-foot apartment. The study recommends scaling fees by square footage rather than by unit, which would create an incentive to build smaller and more affordable units. The plan also recommends deferring all impact fees until units are ready to be occupied rather than when they are in their early stages. This would delay cities collecting the fees for around two years but would save the developer from having to finance those costs.  

Increase funding sources for affordable housing

According to the study, smaller communities do not have equal opportunities for state and federal resources because they do not have sufficient matching funds. Raising funds through bonds typically requires a 66% voter threshold which may be difficult to reach. In an example drawn from Santa Cruz County, a local parcel tax measure received only 55.9% of the vote, leading to a recommendation that the required threshold be lowered to 55%, a point where passage is more readily assured. Other recommendations include locating unused publicly owned land which could be developed as affordable housing and partnering with local agencies to find otherwise inaccessible funds such as those earmarked for educational or public health institutions.

Optimize inclusionary housing ordinances

The study recommends creating incentives for affordable housing projects through offering bonuses, deferring fees, or making concessions on conditions which place a burden on developments that include inclusionary components. This would allow developers to increasethe number of affordable housing units that would fit their projects.

The study concluded that local policymakers who create zoning rules, set fees and approve developments might not be in step with best practices in the drive toward creating more affordable housing. It recommended that all of these issues be revisited regularly to ensure that policies remain suited to the ever-expanding need for affordable housing.

“This is not just a paper exercise we are doing,” Goraya said. “These are not just boxes. These are homes where people will live. There are a lot of rules when it comes to building affordable units and development, but there are ways to optimize them that do incentivize more affordable housing and greater density.”

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The opposite side of the reservoir is dark and so quiet that water lapping on the shore and bats clicking overhead can be heard over the distant hum of boat engines. This is the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe’s reservation in California. The water that rose behind Parker Dam to create Lake Havasu washed away homes and flooded about 7,000 acres of fertile Chemehuevi land, including where tribal members grazed cattle.

This story is the third story in a series about the Colorado River. See the rest, as well as other great reporting from High Country News by signing up for our newsletter.

The communities across the reservoir reflect the vast divide in economic opportunities between Indian Country and the rest of the West, which has been perpetuated, in large part, by who received water and who did not.

In 1908, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal government owed tribes enough water to develop a permanent home on their reservations, and that their water rights would hold senior priority, meaning they trumped those of others. In the Colorado River Basin, most tribes, even during a drought, should get water before Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and elsewhere.

More than a century later, only a few basin tribes have benefited from this system. Of those that have, some live near federally funded canals and pipelines that can deliver water to their land; others received money to build their own water systems; and some negotiated for the right to market their water to other users. The Gila River Indian Community, for instance, recently struck a deal with the federal government to forgo using some of its water in exchange for up to $150 million over the next three years, depending how much water it conserves, and $83 million for a new pipeline.

But most of the basin’s 30 federally recognized tribes have faced seemingly endless barriers to accessing and benefiting from all of the water to which they’re entitled. The Chemehuevi Reservation fronts about 30 miles of the Colorado River, yet 97% of the tribe’s water remains in the river and ends up being used by Southern California cities. The tribe never receives a dollar for it.

The water that has already been guaranteed to basin tribes but remains unused totals at least 1 million acre-feet per year — nearly one-tenth of the Colorado River’s flow in recent years and nearly four times the Las Vegas metro area’s allocation. If sold outright, this water would be valued at more than $5 billion, according to a ProPublica and High Country News analysis. For the Chemehuevi, a tribe with about 1,250 members, that means the amount of water it has on paper but doesn’t use would have a one-time value of at least $55 million.

Steven Escobar, the Chemehuevi’s tribal administrator, grew up testing his mettle against the Colorado River’s currents, swimming across its cold waters upstream of the reservoir. He still thinks of the river in terms of struggle. But now, it’s a struggle for the tribe to get the same help from the federal government to access water as others have, or, if not, to get compensation for what’s legally theirs.

“All that development and governmental support that they provide every state, that should be the same thing they provide to tribes,” Escobar said. “We’ve had to fight for everything out here.”

As demand on the Colorado River far exceeds its supply, tribes worry that they’ll never receive the water they’re owed.

The Chemehuevi are left in a bind: The tribe doesn’t have the pumps or other infrastructure necessary to deliver its full allotment of river water to its reservation. While the federal government gave the tribe a grant to build a small reservoir, neither it nor the state of California has allocated money to build a larger delivery system.

“All that development and governmental support that they provide every state, that should be the same thing they provide to tribes.” 

Even as a backup option, the tribe is unable to lease its water to other users, such as rapidly growing cities, or earn money by leaving it in the river to preserve the waterway. Antiquated laws and court rulings typically allow tribes to be paid to conserve only water they previously used. Any changes to how a tribe could market its water would take an act of Congress.

“This is a long-standing problem,” said Mark Squillace, a professor at the University of Colorado’s law school. “From the perspective of the people using that water, why would they pay when they’re already getting it for free?”

The Law of the River at work

A half-century ago, the Bureau of Reclamation began construction on a massive canal called the Central Arizona Project to send the waters that flooded the Chemehuevi’s land 336 miles across the desert to Phoenix and Tucson. The pumps that power the system, which help deliver the state’s share of the Colorado River, are the largest single consumer of electricity in the state.

Meanwhile, the Chemehuevi rely on a single diesel pump to draw water six stories up to the plateau where they live above Lake Havasu.

For at least 50 years, the river’s decision-makers have recognized this disparity in water access. In 1973, a body called the National Water Commission submitted a report to Congress: “In the water-short West, billions of dollars have been invested, much of it by the Federal Government, in water resource projects benefiting non-Indians but using water in which the Indians have a priority of right if they choose to develop water projects of their own in the future.”

For tribes, the first challenge is securing their water rights. After the Supreme Court’s 1908 decision confirming tribes’ right to water, two paths emerged to quantify and settle the amount and details of those rights. Tribes could, with the backing of the Department of the Interior, negotiate with the state where their reservation is located. Or they could go to court. Fourteen basin tribes are still in the midst of this process, but either path they choose presents trade-offs.

Tribes that negotiate typically need to trade some of the water they believe they’re owed in exchange for money to build water-delivery infrastructure. They can also trade their water priority — leaving them more susceptible when allocations are cut, a reality that’s already threatening to curtail their water amid the West’s ongoing drought.

For tribes that choose to go through the courts to get their water, there’s no opportunity to negotiate for funding for canals, pipes and pumps, meaning there’s no way to move the water they’re awarded onto a reservation.

“It’s not enough to have the right to the water,” Squillace said. “You also have to have the infrastructure.”

“It’s not enough to have the right to the water. You also have to have the infrastructure.”

Highlighting the difficulties in converting rights to water on paper into actual water on a reservation, tribes around the West that secured a negotiated settlement only increased their agricultural land use by about 9% and saw no increase in residential or industrial development, according to estimates from a recent study published in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.

And if a tribe can’t move water, it often can’t monetize it.

Laws passed between 1790 and 1834, known as the Indian Non-Intercourse Acts, have the effect of prohibiting tribes from leasing water beyond the borders of their reservations without congressional approval. Settlements also typically bar them from permanently selling their water and often prohibit them from leasing it.

“This is what’s left”

Politicians packed a conference room at the Arizona Capitol in April, where they unveiled an agreement to pay the Gila River Indian Community millions of dollars to leave its water in Lake Mead. Officials took turns at the lectern extolling tribes for their role in preserving the Colorado River.

“We don’t have any more important partners in this effort than in Indian Country,” Deputy Secretary of the Interior Tommy Beaudreau said.

When the Gila River Indian Community negotiated its water rights, the Central Arizona Project had begun carrying Colorado River water near its reservation south of Phoenix, and the tribe had some political clout after spending millions of dollars on lobbying. Those advantages allowed the tribe to negotiate tens of millions of dollars for infrastructure to deliver its water and the right to lease tens of thousands of acre-feet to nearby cities and a mining company. Its settlement has now made the tribe a well-compensated partner in conservation efforts.

“These are truly historic investments in directly tackling the challenge presented to our state and our region by the historic drought,” Gila River Indian Community Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis said during the April news conference announcing the deal to trade more water for money. The tribe declined requests for additional comment, as it is negotiating further water deals.

The Chemehuevi, by contrast, can’t access or lease most of their water. Their rights were quantified and settled via the courts in the 1960s, at a time when the tribe didn’t have federal recognition. So it didn’t receive infrastructure funding.

Escobar, the Chemehuevi’s tribal administrator, would prefer to use his tribe’s water, not lease it. He wants to expand pumping capacity and construct a cascading series of reservoirs. Once the Chemehuevi access the water, they could use it for more houses to bring enrolled members back to their land, new businesses to provide jobs and increased farming to grow the reservation’s economy.

Escobar talked about his dreams and the difficulty in developing Indian Country as he drove past the frames of unused greenhouses, evidence of a failed venture. Near a field where the tribe’s single tractor was working the soil, Escobar described the Chemehuevi’s agricultural plans. Behind him, Lake Havasu covered soil that could have been productive fields or pastureland. In front of him stretched sandy desert where the federal government said the tribe should harvest crops.

“We want to be a benefit to the system, but right now, they’re making it hard.” 

“This is what’s left,” he said of the tribe’s potential farmland that wasn’t submerged by the reservoir. “It’s sad.”

After the once-nomadic Chemehuevi fought for recognition of their tribe and their reservation, they partnered with the University of Southern California to develop a plan to farm 1,900 acres using the 11,340 acre-feet of water per year, about 3.7 billion gallons, that the government allotted them — at least on paper. But, in a good year, the Chemehuevi farm only 80 acres, growing melons for food, devil’s claw for basket weaving and cottonwoods for a riparian restoration project.

If it can’t transport more water to expand the farm, Escobar said, the tribe could accept leaving water in the river in exchange for compensation. “We want to be a benefit to the system,” he said, “but right now, they’re making it hard.” Many non-Indigenous people and a few tribes around the basin earn money limiting their water use, whether by fallowing farm fields or ripping out lawns.

Why shouldn’t all tribes be paid? Escobar asked.   

Anna V. Smith is an associate editor of High Country News. She writes and edits stories on tribal sovereignty and environmental
justice for the Indigenous Affairs desk from Colorado. @annavtoriasmith

Mark Olalde is an environment reporter with ProPublica, where he investigates issues concerning oil, mining, water and other topics around the Southwest.

Umar Farooq is an Ancil Payne Fellow with ProPublica, where he reports on national issues. @UmarFarooq_

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

Community residents and housing advocates are regrouping after an unsuccessful push for Fresno’s new city budget to include a rent control program. 

“Community members are disappointed, and there really is this feeling that their narratives, their testimony aren’t being taken seriously,” said Marisa Moraza, a campaign director with Power California Action.

That fight, advocates acknowledge, is an increasingly uphill battle in Fresno, where the mayor and city council have said solving the statewide housing crisis means incentivizing development and courting reinvestment.

Rent control, they argue, would be counterproductive to building new housing units.

“In terms of rent control, I can tell you I don’t support that because I’ve seen what has happened in other cities,” Mayor Jerry Dyer said during a news conference Thursday following the budget’s adoption. “When rent control is implemented, ultimately, you have landlords making fewer dollars, and so they’re not investing in their property. And as a result, we end up with a lot of slums within a city.”

Despite lingering frustrations, housing advocates say they aren’t backing down on their demands.

In May, a coalition of advocacy organizations sent a letter to Dyer and the Fresno City Council, listing a series of budget requests on everything from transportation and infrastructure to housing and, specifically, a new rent control program.

In the letter, advocates said the city should establish a board to enforce rent-control policies, which, they say, would stabilize rents in Fresno.

“We wanted to also wrap in the opportunity to actually allocate funding for something like a rent control program,” Moraza said. “It would be a very low funding allocation, but just having that allocation then opens the door to conversation of building up a policy.”

Mayor, council push to build more affordable housing, remain opposed to rent control

Just before the city council approved the 2024 fiscal year budget Thursday, a group of community residents and housing advocates, with signs in hand, rallied inside the Fresno Council Chambers.

“What do we want? Rent Control!” The group chanted. “When do we want it? Now!”

About 15 seconds into the chant, Council President Tyler Maxwell put the city council meeting into recess for five minutes, and the city’s live feed and audio cut out shortly after.

The chant capped about two months of Fresno residents and housing advocates showing up to public comment before a city council – which they have noted is composed of a majority of landlords – to voice their concerns about rising rents.

“This is really like our final attempt to be able to speak directly to council members because the in-person meetings (with them) weren’t making a shift,” Moraza said. “We’re now seeing that public comment is not making a shift.”

Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Dyer said the rent control issue was a nonstarter.

Dyer said passing rent control would send a message to housing developers to leave Fresno, which he said could lead to a lack of housing production and actually drive rents up. Dyer has maintained that the city can resolve its housing crisis by building more units, and rent control does not fit his vision.

Since 2021, 400 new affordable housing units have been built and are currently occupied in Fresno, city spokesperson Sontaya Rose told Fresnoland in May. She said the city plans to add 2,493 more affordable housing units by the end of 2025.

But when new affordable housing developments open up, applications pour in.

One 60-unit affordable housing development in Clovis recently received over 10,000 applications, and another 57-unit development that opened up in Fresno’s Chinatown received 4,000 applications, said Michael Duarte, the chief real estate officer at the Fresno Housing Authority, at a June 15 Fresnoland/CalMatters panel on housing.

Duarte added that the Fresno Housing Authority received 10,000 applications in less than one day for its Section 8 housing voucher waitlist. 

Rent control isn’t the only way to help tenants, leaders say

In an interview with Fresnoland, Fresno City Council President Tyler Maxwell said he sees both sides of the issue but said he believes rent comes down to simple supply-and-demand economics.

He added the best way to bring rent down is to increase the housing supply, and that means construction.

“These last three years, I can tell you that we have set a record when it comes to either subsidizing or helping initiate affordable housing projects here in the city of Fresno,” Maxwell said. “It’s a priority for not just this council but the mayor and his administration to really try to expedite as many housing projects as possible.”

In lieu of rent control, Maxwell said the council in recent years has taken steps to beef up some protections for tenants.

He pointed to the city’s Eviction Protection Program, which Maxwell co-authored in 2021.

The program, which provides legal representation for tenants facing eviction, wasn’t included in the proposed budget that Dyer released in May. 

Maxwell, the only city councilmember who rents his home, pushed to save the program with a budget motion to put $2 million towards the program’s third year. He said he hopes the program wouldn’t require a budget motion to get funding in the future.

“Going forward, my hope is that it starts getting baked into the proposed budget,” Maxwell said. “Ether because it’s a priority for the mayor or a priority for the city attorney.”

Maxwell added that another piece of legislation he authored, the Tenant Relocation Assistance Program, helps renters avoid getting displaced due to unhealthy or unsafe living conditions. The ordinance requires landlords to assist with the expense of relocating tenants to complete needed renovations or face fines.

However, the city’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program, a key COVID-19-era effort that provided assistance with rent and utility bills to Fresno residents who met income requirements, is going away soon. The $54 million from federal and state governments that funded the program is almost depleted, and the remaining $2.5 million in funding remaining for the program will likely get spent in the next fiscal year.

With no city funding to keep the program around next year, it will likely end soon.

“There was a lot of community momentum and energy that really shows that folks care about this issue,” said Marisa Moraza, a campaign director with Power California Action. “We will continue to push for this rent control demand.”

The post Frustrated rent control advocates say Fresno leaders aren’t listening, but the fight isn’t over appeared first on Fresnoland.

For those who have been wondering about what was going on north of the Hollister Municipal Airport with all the blue tarps and 9,000 pilings driven 50 feet into the ground that will eventually support a 1-million-square-foot fulfillment facility, the wait is over.

Today, Amazon answered BenitoLink’s repeated requests to verify that the new building will be its latest venture in San Benito County. BenitoLink also requested the former city manager Brett Miller to reveal the tenant of the fulfillment center but never responded. A planning department staff member recently told this reporter the city was under a nondisclosure agreement for that project.

“We’re looking forward to opening a new facility in the city of Hollister, which has been a great partner on this project from the start,” responded Alisa Carroll, an Amazon public relations manager. “While we don’t have a specific launch date to share right now, once we have a better sense of timing, we’ll look to begin hiring for hundreds of good-paying jobs for the region.”

Driving by the location that has been mysteriously referred to as Project Almond located on 73 acres in the planned Clearist Industrial Park, the pace of construction has picked up recently as bulldozers and dump trucks are working on a road leading from the site where one wall was hoisted up a few days ago near San Felipe Road.

Carroll was not able to answer BenitoLink’s questions as to the actual function of the fulfillment center. According to Amazon, though, there are six distinct types of fulfillment centers:

Sortable fulfillment center
Around 800,000 square feet in size, sortable fulfillment centers can employ more than 1,500 full-time associates. In these buildings, Amazon employees pick, pack and ship customer orders such as books, toys and housewares. It adds robots associates often work alongside robots, allowing them to learn new skills and helping create a more efficient process to meet customer demand.

Non-sortable fulfillment center
Ranging in size from 600,000 to 1 million square feet, non-sortable fulfillment centers employ more than 1,000 full-time associates. In these centers, associates pick, pack and ship bulky or larger-sized customer items such as patio furniture, outdoor equipment and rugs.

Sortation centers
At sortation centers, associates sort customer orders by final destination and consolidate them onto trucks for faster delivery. Amazon’s website states this sort center network provides full- and part-time career opportunities and is powering its ability to provide customers with everyday delivery, including Sunday delivery.

Receive centers
Amazon’s receive centers support customer fulfillment by taking in large orders of the types of inventory that it expects to quickly sell and allocating it to fulfillment centers within the network. Full- and part-time roles are available in these buildings, which are about 600,000 square feet in size.

Specialty
Amazon’s fulfillment network is also supported by additional types of buildings that handle specific categories of items or are pressed into service at peak times of the year such as the holiday season. Many of these buildings feature part-time opportunities with the option to convert to full-time.

Delivery stations
In these buildings, customer orders are prepared for last-mile delivery to customers. Amazon delivery providers enable every day shipping.

Amazon has been operating a delivery station in Hollister since September 2021.

Because of the square footage and the described use of distributing furniture and appliances, the new building will most likely fall into the non-sortable category.

The Planning Commission resolution that approved the project states it will provide an e-commerce fulfillment center and distribution facility. It will operate with approximately 449 employees, including 275 employees during the day shift and 174 employees during the night shift. During the day shift there would be 16 office workers, 169 warehouse workers, 10 security personnel and 80 drivers. During the night shift, there would be 15 office workers, 150 warehouse workers, and nine security personnel.

If Hollister’s newest facility follows similar Amazon facilities, robots will play an important role. According to Amazon, it has 175 fulfillment centers around the world; 26 have humans and robots working side by side.

“In addition, robotic animation benefits employees, as they take over performance of fulfillment centers’ less desirable, more tedious tasks,” the Amazon website states.

As described by Amazon, one type of robotics or bots are flat, wheeled, 300-pound machines that glide across facility floors, moving small bins and large pallets of products to associates. Other bots called palletizers “provide robotic muscle for the operation” as they identify and lift boxes from conveyor belts before stacking them on pallets for stowage or shipping. Then the six-ton robo-stows are used to lift even heavier items.

“Used to expedite the inbound process once truckloads of inventory reach the centers, the robo-stows that are currently employed lift pallets of inventory up to drive units on higher floors within fulfillment centers,” according to Amazon.

There are, though, some claims that robots and humans don’t always get along and there have been injuries.

According to a BBC report based on a study conducted by the Center for Investigative Reporting which claims to have acquired internal records for 150 warehouses over four years, “At the most common kind of Amazon ‘fulfillment center,’ serious injuries are 50% higher for those that have robots than those without.”

According to a Reveal News report, after Amazon debuted the robots in Tracy the serious injury rate there nearly quadrupled, going from 2.9 per 100 workers in 2015 to 11.3 in 2018, records show.

The report said Jonathan Meador watched the transition from his position loading boxes into big rig trailers. The article stated the robots at the Tracy warehouse were so efficient that humans could barely keep up and the pickers and packers were expected to move more products every minute, and more boxes shot down the conveyor belt toward Meador.

“Before robots, it was still tough, but it was manageable,” he said. Afterward, “we were in a fight that we just can’t win.”

As for replacing human workers, in a 2019 Reuters story, Scott Anderson, director of Amazon Robotics Fulfillment, said technology is at least 10 years away from fully automating the processing of a single order picked by a worker inside a warehouse. He also said the technology for a robot to pick a single product from a bin without damaging other products or picking multiple products at the same time in a way that could benefit the e-commerce retailer is years away.

Related BenitoLink stories

Amazon delivery hub opens in Hollister | BenitoLink

Amazon opening Hollister delivery facility Sept. 28 | BenitoLink

Hollister fast-tracked Amazon development without public input | BenitoLink

Tenant of jumbo fulfillment center still not revealed | BenitoLink

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The post Amazon confirms new fulfillment center in Hollister appeared first on BenitoLink.

This story was published as a partnership between the Center for Public Integrity and Fresnoland.

When Arlin Benavides Jr. set out to hear residents’ environmental concerns in one of the most marginalized parts of a region facing water scarcity, groundwater contamination, extreme heat and other woes, he wasn’t sure if people would open their doors, much less talk.

He was aiming to engage with people in Tulare County in California’s Central Valley, a region known as the food basket of the world and a place with extreme poverty. Many of the residents live in remote, isolated farming hamlets.

In these far-flung communities, Benavides, an AmeriCorps CivicSpark Fellow working for Tulare County’s Resource Management Agency, discovered that residents felt forgotten by their local government officials. When he explained that he was part of the agency’s effort to develop an environmental justice element for the county’s general plan, he was met with suspicion and skepticism.

“You could see anger rise within them. They would tell me stories of just not having good experiences — most commonly it was the story that they had told previous government agencies what they needed, what were the challenges, and they felt like those changes were not done soon enough,” said Benavides, whose fellowship was part of a CivicSpark program that aims to help local public agencies address community issues such as climate change, water resource management and housing.

What had changed between those experiences and Benavides showing up on their doorsteps: California started requiring local governments to integrate environmental justice principles into their planning processes.

The first such law in the nation, Senate Bill 1000 calls for municipal leaders to engage communities in a meaningful way while doing land use work, such as updating general plans, which set priorities for development. Ultimately, the 2016 law aims to address environmental inequities caused by land use policies, such as poor air quality in communities of color hemmed in by industrial facilities. But on the ground, addressing entrenched inequities baked into urban planning policies can be tough.

In a newly released study, two researchers examined those challenges as municipalities across California implemented SB 1000. It’s an analysis they hope can illuminate efforts across the nation as civic leaders seek solutions for communities burdened by pollution — often Black, Latino, Indigenous and low income.

The study’s authors, Michelle E. Zuñiga and Michael Méndez, said the research was inspired by feedback they heard from community and environmental justice organizations who shared their struggles about how SB 1000 was being implemented and what they described as spotty compliance, particularly in communities facing environmental hazards.

For example: city or county planners who don’t understand institutional and socio-economic barriers facing residents, or planning managers who aren’t supportive of or in some cases are hostile to incorporating environmental justice into their work.

Some municipalities argue that existing land use regulations and policies benefit everyone equally, and that explicit environmental justice ordinances or provisions in a general plan are unnecessary, said Méndez, an assistant professor of environmental planning and policy at the University of California, Irvine.

“Time and time again we see how that is not the case, that urban planning has been used as a racist tool kit to enforce existing disparities within and among communities,” he said.

To determine how the law was being implemented in communities with high levels of cumulative environmental health impacts, Zuñiga and Méndez focused their study on cities and counties with census tracts identified by the state’s environmental health screening tool as the most disadvantaged by pollution, such as toxic releases, groundwater threats, traffic fumes and hazardous waste.

Results, they found, have been mixed. There are positive outcomes, such as the creation of environmental justice advisory committees in Tulare and other counties. But many obstacles remain. The researchers found that some communities experience ineffective community engagement, little support from elected officials, limited discussions of environmental racism and a lack of resources to implement and monitor the measures needed to comply with the law.

These challenges mean progress toward environmental justice will be slow and uneven, the authors wrote: “Environmental justice will not be fully realized without strong oversight and political leadership, and racial diversification of urban planning institutions.”

Their research also affirmed the need for the type of guidance that the California Attorney General’s bureau of environmental justice has issued to local governments about the law. The bureau has done this via comment letters that point out shortcomings in local approaches, but it also provides feedback on how to comply with the law. One of those letters to Tulare County, for example, urged officials not to rush through their general plan amendments before fully engaging with disadvantaged communities.

Attorney General Rob Bonta has also intervened in Fresno, saying in 2022 that Fresno County’s draft general plan raised “civil rights and environmental justice concerns” and pressing Fresno city leaders not to approve a rezoning proposal that would add pollution in “some of the most over-burdened and under-invested environmental justice communities in all of California.”

In some cases,  Zuñiga and Méndez discovered a lack of understanding among planners on how to define environmental justice, so they outlined in the paper how environmental justice is measured, observed and defined.

Last fall when they presented their preliminary findings at the American Planning Association conference, some planners shared that they’ve faced pushback from leaders in politically conservative municipalities, while others described challenges with implementation in areas with historic under-investment, said  Zuñiga, an assistant professor of urban and community planning at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Increasingly, she’s seen more planners across the country take on the task of addressing environmental injustices through local government plans, even without laws such as SB 1000.

“This work is very important, not only for California, where there is a policy mandate, but for other planners in other areas of the country that are taking on this charge as well,” she said. “Because of the push of the community organizations prioritizing environmental justice, they also are pushing for environmental justice plans.”

When Benavides first began his fellowship in Tulare County in late 2019, he decided to reach out to Sacramento County, which had already approved an environmental justice element in their general plan. He wanted to know how they involved community organizations in the process. He learned that Sacramento opted to create an environmental justice advisory committee, a process that he knew would also reinforce the requirements of SB 1000.

But first Benavides set out to conduct outreach to understand the issues — from housing and food justice to public utilities and transportation — that residents faced. Benavides, a resident of the more affluent Marin County near San Francisco, was shocked by what he found.

“I didn’t really realize that there were people that didn’t have potable water; that the conditions which [farmworker advocate] Cesar Chavez was trying to improve or ameliorate are still existing in Tulare County,” said Benavides, who was particularly struck by the stark disparities in wealth between farm owners and the working class residents living in unincorporated areas of the county.

The geographical distances between the county seat of Visalia and these small communities were further deepened by a lack of regular visits from county officials. One woman Benavides spoke to was initially angry as she described how, despite repeated efforts to share the problems facing her community, living conditions either don’t improve at all or don’t improve fast enough. “I think that this is also an ongoing cycle where planners go out into a community to really try to understand people, and then, the moment a plan is developed those relationships are not maintained, those stories are not valued,” said Benavides.

He knows that often this happens because planning agencies may lack the bandwidth or resources to maintain these relationships. But that day, as he spoke to this resident, he decided that no explanation could excuse what she had gone through.

So rather than offer an excuse, he apologized. The woman was so overcome with emotion that she started crying. “I felt like as a representative of local government, it was my due diligence to say, ‘I’m sorry for everything that you’ve experienced,’” he said.

But he also explained that there was something he could do to help in that instance, and that was to invite her to participate in the environmental justice advisory committee that was being formed as part of the general plan process to develop an environmental element.

“There is something that I can do for you, and that is to guarantee that you have a seat at the table,” Benavides told her.

Ultimately, Tulare County did create an Environmental Justice Advisory Committee in 2020 to advise its Resource Management Agency. Key to that is providing feedback on the county’s draft environmental justice element and ensuring that it improves the quality of life for disadvantaged communities throughout the county.

When Benavides ended his fellowship in 2020 and passed the baton to the next AmeriCorps CivicSpark fellow, he was glad to know the committee would continue the relationship-building work.

It’s that level of engagement, he said, where residents’ experiences are not only valued but are imprinted in the land-use planning documents, that can transform lives for the better.

Inviting residents to collaborate on land use and development was a first step, he said. Equally as important for real change, he told residents, is that “we continue building a relationship after that is done.”

The post In Tulare County, officials test new approach to environmental justice appeared first on Fresnoland.

In rural Siskiyou County, where California meets Oregon, the local community college is hiding its LGBTQ+ center behind closed doors. Queer students are scared for their safety. 

“We are a very conservative county, and we have many students that are out at school but not at home,” said Ty Speck, who goes by “Mama Ty” among students and serves as the advisor to the LGBTQ+ club at the College of the Siskiyous. Instead, she said, the three students in the group wanted to meet in a rotating set of undisclosed locations.

All across California, but especially in rural areas and small cities scattered across the Central Coast, the Central Valley, and the Far North, community college leaders push back at the notion that California is an easy place to be queer. 

In a report from last year obtained by CalMatters, college administrators across the state expressed their support for LGBTQ+ students but said that setbacks persist. 

The report came as a follow up to a 2021 state grant of $10 million — the first of its kind geared specifically towards LGBTQ+ students in community colleges.  But colleges consistently said that the money, less than $100,000 per college on average over five years, was not enough to hire staff positions or to set up a LGBTQ+ center on campus, even in places where many students want it. 

Only 30 of California’s 115 brick-and-mortar community colleges had a designated LGBTQ+ space on campus at the time of the report. Eighteen colleges said they would use the state funds to help develop an LGBTQ+ center.  The remaining 67 schools, including the students and faculty at the College of the Siskiyous, chose to invest the state’s dollars in training for staff, special graduation ceremonies or mental health support for LGBTQ+ students, who are significantly more likely to commit suicide than their peers.

Culture wars put LGBTQ students on edge

Allie Harrison, 25, knows what it’s like to live on the margins. A self-described witch who grew up kissing girls and boys in rural Lassen County, more than two hours north of Lake Tahoe, she is now one of the three members of Lassen Community College’s LGBTQ+ student group. 

“Everybody assumes that it’s like the rest of California and it’s not,” she said. 

When Harrison attended Lassen High School a decade ago, she said the church would co-opt the school cafeteria after hours to run events. When that same church found out about her sexuality, the pastor told her mother that she was a “bad influence” and couldn’t attend the youth group anymore, Harrison says. 

Later, she says her mother kicked her out of the house in part because of her sexuality, and Harrison moved to San Jose with her dad, where she embraced the more open-minded culture at the high schools she attended. 

Now, back in Lassen for college, Harrison says the culture is more accepting than it was just 10 years ago. There’s a Facebook group for LGBTQ+ people in Lassen County that counted Harrison as its 100th member, and the group regularly meets at a local bar. 

But the culture wars that have swept the country have come to Lassen County. In April, residents came to a “showdown” over an effort to remove LGBTQ+ books from the children’s section of the public library. Weeks later, someone stole a pride flag from a local organization and spray-painted allegations about pedophilia on its walls.

The College of the Siskiyous took down its pride flag temporarily in 2019 after someone claimed it was illegal to fly it. The college’s new leadership has since purchased additional flag poles and made a point to fly the flag every May, when the school observes its annual pride month (most students are gone in June). 

On the coast, similar challenges pervade, according to the report issued by colleges last year. 

“Although California is known for its liberal acceptance and support of diverse communities, the small cities within the Central Coast of California are heavily conservative and do not host a large population of LGBTQ community members,” wrote an administrator at Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria, just south of Pismo Beach. 

In Watsonville, between Santa Cruz and Monterey, community college administrators reported that the pride flag has been stolen or defamed multiple times and that the “vibe” on campus is not welcoming to LGBTQ+ students.

Many LGBTQ+ students never make it to community college at all, wrote an administrator at Golden West College in Huntington Beach: “The most at-risk LGBTQ students often find themselves homeless during high school and struggle to make it to college.” 

Small in number, rural LGBTQ students see gains 

Outside of major cities, attendance and participation in LGBTQ+ groups can be sparse. 

“We are a small rural college and often do not have a large enough population of any one group to have a center specifically for that group,” administrators at Lassen Community College wrote to the chancellor’s office. 

With the state funds, the college initially proposed hosting a “dinner banquet” with a keynote speaker, but with just three students in the LGBTQ+ student group,  college director Jennifer Tupper decided to take them out to a nice dinner instead. Each student got a “very nice classic pen,” she said. The college also hosted a “Diversity Summit” that included representatives from various communities on campus.

While rural communities across the state have smaller queer populations, support in general has increased over the years. 

In Bakersfield, home to Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the LGBTQ+ community has grown and services have become increasingly available in recent years, said Bakersfield College student Cecil Dexter, who identifies as transgender.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dexter used to drive more than  two hours every month in order to meet with a doctor who could prescribe testosterone. Today, he can see medical providers in Bakersfield or in his hometown of Tehachapi, which has nearly  13,000 people.

The Bakersfield College campus lacks a physical space to meet, and the LGBTQ+ student group only began last fall. However, recent pop-up events such as the lavender prom — a dance for the LGBTQ+ community — attracted nearly  200 people, and even smaller events get “a pretty huge turnout,” Dexter said. 

Growing the coffers for LGBTQ centers

The 2021 state grant — $10 million spread across the community college system — was never supposed to fund LGBTQ+ centers, said Jacob Fraker, a consultant for the Legislative  LGBTQ+ caucus. Instead, the money was meant to help with small projects, such as hiring queer-friendly mental health professionals or supporting the events that Dexter hosts in Bakersfield. 

Setting up a safe space on every campus where LGBTQ+ students can gather is urgent, he said, especially in the case of rural community colleges and certain California State University  campuses that are known to be less welcoming. He pointed to the case of CSU Maritime, where female, transgender and nonbinary students reported “widespread sexual misconduct, racism, and hostility.“

But he said local community college districts, not the state, should be the ones to pay for it. 

This year, the proposed state budget from the Legislature includes another $10 million over three years for LGBTQ+ services to be divided among the state’s 115 community colleges. CalBright College, which is entirely online, did not receive funding. Fraker said the governor has signaled to the caucus that he’ll approve it.

In the first allotment of funding from 2021, the $10 million was divided up based on how many students each district had and what percentage of students were considered low-income. 

College of the Siskiyous got a little more than $10,000 a year, for five years, starting in 2021. It was not enough to even hire a part-time staff member or set up a center, the college wrote in its report. 

The state also made it so that no district could receive more than $500,000, which meant that large urban districts with multiple colleges received fewer dollars per student. 

This year, Los Angeles Community College District lobbied to get the state to raise the maximum to $900,000, according to the district’s spokesperson, Juliet Hidalgo. 

“SF, Los Angeles, San Diego — they eat up all that money and there’s never enough for the rural colleges. They (rural colleges) want to do stuff, but they don’t have the population,” said Fraker. He said the new funding will also include provisions that ensure rural schools get a fair share. 

Except the math doesn’t work. 

If Los Angeles and other large districts get more funding in this year’s budget, some smaller community college districts will inevitably see less. Neither Fraker nor the Community College Chancellor’s Office could identify who the losers might be. Determining final funding allocations for each college can take months, Fraker said. 

In an interview with CalMatters, administrators at the College of the Siskiyous were surprised to learn about the new grant in this year’s state budget: In the governor’s earlier proposal, there was a typo that said only Los Angeles would receive money for LGBTQ+ students. 

Adam Echelman covers California’s community colleges in partnership with Open Campus, a nonprofit newsroom focused on higher education.