Cuts in public transit across the state have made it tougher for transit-dependent Californians to get to work. In San Diego’s City Heights neighborhood, many residents now find themselves commuting several hours a day to get back and forth from their jobs.
Sitting before a panel of legislators, a Santa Cruz area farmer recently compared the potential fate of California’s strawberry industry to the current state of American automakers. He argued that if agriculture doesn’t innovate, it faces a bumpy road ahead. And, he argued, that the decisions of regulators today will create the roadmap for the future of farming. It’s no easy task–the direction of the state’s agriculture system is at stake. One set of choices sets us down the road of producing food that continues to poison humans and contaminate our soil, water and air; the other turns a corner to widespread adoption of methods that, though they are more sophisticated and foreign to most conventional growers, produce safe and healthy food for all.
If someone handed Governor Schwarzenegger a check for a billion dollars, you probably wouldn’t expect him to tear it up or send it to Washington, D.C. to give to other states. But that’s exactly what he has proposed doing in his FY 2010/11 budget. And his budget would toss a million children’s reliable health care overboard at the same time.
California enters 2010 in extraordinary fiscal circumstances, with a significant structural budget deficit that continues to require spending reductions in all areas of state government. At the same time, caseloads in our state’s biggest health and human services programs have grown dramatically in recent years, a reflection of both policy decisions to support the state’s safety net as well as the more recent dramatic economic downturn.
Fresno youth are capturing their neighborhoods in photos and writing short essays describing what they see. We’ll be featuring several of these photo essays in this space.
Gunfire is so common in Richmond, Calif., that residents of neighborhoods like the Iron Triangle no longer call 911 at the sound of shots fired, according to the city’s police department. In response, earlier this year, the city installed the ShotSpotter system. The sensors detect and pinpoint gunfire fired to a specific address, and call police to the scene less than a minute after shots are fired.
Ryan Nicole Peters is an Oakland spoken-word artist, youth counselor and aspiring politician. An idealistic young woman who wants to be a politician in these cynical times?
Five years after the Sacramento Hunger Commission targeted the South Sacramento neighborhoods of Avondale and Glen Elder in an effort to improve access to fresh fruits and vegetables, the community’s food resources remain scarce. There is no major grocery store in the neighborhood, farmers markets are too few and far between, and community gardens have failed to catch on as a viable alternative for residents. HealthyCal contributor Nik Bonovich has the report.