HealthyCal.org

By Robin Urevich

At a Planned Parenthood clinic near Salinas, farm workers who plan to have children in the near future are learning to protect themselves against pesticide exposure on the job.

“This is dangerous work,” said Jessica Dieseldorff, a nurse practitioner who’s heading up the pilot education program.

Billions of pounds of pesticides are sprayed or injected in the ground each year in California, but researchers say they’re just beginning to learn how those chemicals affect pregnant women and their children.

A University of California Berkeley study, published last month in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, found that prenatal exposure to organophosphate pesticides, which are known to be toxic to the nervous system, is related to lower IQ’s in children.

Seven-year-olds whose mothers had the highest organophosphate levels in their systems during pregnancy lagged a full seven IQ points behind the kids whose mothers had the lowest levels of exposure.

In 1999, researchers at UC Berkeley’s Center for Environmental Research and Children’s Health embarked on the study by partnering with a Salinas hospital and a health clinic to form the CHAMACOS (Center for the Health Assessment of Mothers and Children of Salinas) project. Together they recruited 500 pregnant women and tested them for organophosphate exposure twice during their pregnancies. The researchers have followed them and their children ever since, measuring the cognitive abilities of the kids about every two years.

The Berkeley study and two others by researchers at Columbia University and Mt Sinai Medical Center are the first to examine the long-term effects of pesticide exposure on children before and after birth. All three studies have reached similar conclusions.

Dieseldorff, who examined the research in recent months, said the results surprised her because they showed that pesticides don’t necessarily cause immediate harm like premature birth or underweight babies.

“But the effects are more subtle. They’re showing up as developmental delays,” Dieseldorff said.

Dieseldorff and her co-workers have identified 40 patients who work in the fields and want to become pregnant in the next year. In addition to the usual advice—stop smoking, limit alcohol consumption and load up on prenatal vitamins—clinic staffers offer common-sense pointers on limiting pesticide exposure: Don’t eat the fruit you harvest before washing it. Wash hands before eating. Wash work clothes separately. Change clothes before getting in your car, entering your home, or hugging your kids.

Planned Parenthood staffers use brightly colored comic books, produced by the Texas-based Migrant Clinicians Network to drive the message home.

At a Salinas clinic, 26-year-old Lourdes Dominguez, who is expecting her first child in July, said she was picking strawberries in Ventura County until she stopped working in her fifth month of pregnancy.

“I stopped eating the strawberries [in the field],” Dominguez said. “I washed my hands before eating. I would change into sandals when I’d get in the car after work.

But some of the advice is tough to follow. For Dominguez and most farm workers there is no place to change clothes at work before going home, so pesticide residues inevitably remain in their cars and homes.

Employer-provided gloves and coveralls would protect workers, according to the results of a 2003 experiment by Dr. Asa Bradman, one of the authors of the UC Berkeley study. The research, published in the Journal of Exposure Science and Evironmental Epidemiology in 2008, found much lower skin exposure to malathion, an organophosphate pesticide, in strawberry harvesters who wore the protective gear. Bradman said he is discussing his findings with growers and regulators.

But current laws don’t require protective clothing for harvesters, and employers don’t generally provide it.

“The things that drive regulation are risk and cost,” Bradman said. “If there’s not a risk that people recognize, people aren’t going to implement something.”

Indeed, the Monterey Farm Bureau’s Norm Groot contended that there is little cause for concern because workers are only allowed to enter fields recently sprayed with pesticides after an interval determined safe by state regulators. And, he pointed out that organophosphate use has decreased in the last decade.

“The compounds used are not nearly as harsh. The effects are not what you’re seeing ten years ago,” Groot said.

The Watsonville-based Alliance for Food and Farming, a grower-financed PR group, is also downplaying the current dangers of pesticides. It has published a counter to the Berkeley study on its website. Like Groot, spokeswoman Teresa Thorne argued things have changed in the past ten years. And she contended the study used an imprecise method of measuring organophosphate levels in the body.

Celina Trujillo of CHAMACOS said the measurements weren’t foolproof. But she said the study’s conclusions are solid, pointing to the similar findings by Columbia and Mt. Sinai researchers. She added that while only the most sensitive individuals are likely to get sick immediately from pesticide exposure at work, the recent studies underline the danger of prolonged exposure, and thus the need for workers to take precautions.

While the debate over pesticide safety continues, Planned Parenthood staffers say they will help at least a few women take precautions.

“Some of the women I’ve spoken to say ideally, I’d have some other job and I’d be healthier,” Dieseldorff said. “What we’re working on is harm reduction.”

Heather Tirado Gilligan

A recent partnership between the Oakland Police Department and a local not-for-profit is giving police sophisticated data about crime trends in the city. The data isn’t just changing policing methods – it’s offering residents detailed information about what’s going on in their neighborhoods.

The OPD contracted with Urban Strategies Council to perform data analysis in late March after a two-year trial run. OPD has been collecting and analyzing its own data for 10 years as part of their policing strategy. What Urban Strategies brings to the table, however, is more than what the police alone can do, said OPD captain Ersie Joyner, the watch commander of Area III, which includes East Oakland.

Urban Strategies runs Alameda County’s data clearinghouse, InfoAlamedaCounty.org. They have access not only to police records through their partnership with OPD, but also to probation and parole records, liquor store licenses and foreclosure rates – information that the police don’t have at hand, Joyner said.

“For every move I make in crime fighting strategies,” Joyner said, “they are paramount in my decision.”

Mapping crime and trends

On a weekly basis, Urban Strategies develops a set of maps for each neighborhood that gives commanders a quick understanding of complex data.

Crime isn’t consistent across the city, and watch commanders have changing needs, said Steve Spiker, Research and Technology Director for Urban Strategies. Command Area II may want more information about street robberies, for instance, while Area III may need data to help solve a spate of shootings.

That’s the kind of specificity that’s needed to really understand crime trends in the city, Joyner said.

The police department, Spiker said, has come a long way since using pins on a map to understand trends.

In-depth information, Spiker said, eliminates guesswork and explains the nuances of what’s going on in the neighborhood, such as confirming, for instance, that foreclosures really do actually attract crime.

The information has changed his approach to policing, Joyner said, adding that he can use his knowledge about what’s going on in the neighborhood to “put the cops on the spot.” Urban Strategies also looks at year-to-year data to see if particular areas where policing efforts have been concentrated actually have less crime.

The command staff wants to know where to send resources, but they want a sense of trends over time too, Spiker said. Property crimes increase in the winter, for example, and violent crimes are more frequent in the summer.

“If you don’t have that in the back of your mind,” Spiker said, “then your planning will be off.”

Homicide and property crime rates dropped about 10 percent between 2009 and 2010, and Joyner attributed such improvements in part to data analysis.

Safety First

The point of the data analysis isn’t for Urban Strategies to become an extension of law enforcement, but rather an acknowledgement that changing the chances of low-income areas means improving public safety first, Spiker said.

Low-income communities in Oakland, he said, trust Urban Strategies Council. The organization works on issues like reentry, education and foreclosure in addition to their data analysis, and they believe more information will help communities hold police accountable for their failures and successes.

“We are very strong proponents of open government and open data,” Spiker said.

Part of their agreement with the OPD specified that Urban Strategies would be able to share much of the data they analyzed with the community, he added.

“The primary idea is to help the OPD, but we also want to help the community,” Spiker said. “This is information for them to say—this is a consistent problem in this community. And we want you to deal with it.”

Residents can look at a data map showing the number of arrests at a particular hotel, for instance, and urge police to close the hotel, or can see if crimes are occurring near a school and encourage police to make a quick response.

Urban Strategies agreed in turn to release data to the public in a way that doesn’t interfere with police work, Spiker said. With some crimes, such as sexual assaults, data that might compromise the identity of the victim won’t be released to Urban Strategies at all.

They’ll often hold onto information for a few weeks if it might compromise an ongoing investigation, though per their agreement with OPD, they typically release data within two to three weeks.

The mission of Urban Strategies is to improve the quality of life in low-income areas. “We want families to have better access to wealth and community stability,” Spiker said. “The safety issue really runs through a lot of what we do.”

Urban Strategies sees their work with the OPD as very much in line with this mission, because such improvements are not possible without a feeling of safety in the community, Spiker added. Residents need to feel secure walking the streets before reforms in areas like education can truly take hold.

By Jessica Portner

It’s harvest time, and the Long Beach Peace Garden’s assistant manager Stephen Du Prey is zipping down the rows of raised beds bursting with organic red chard, carrots, peas, asparagus and collard greens. A Cambodian family tends to the Chinese broccoli in their plot. A Long Beach police officer unearths a bunch of radishes from another bed while a group of Boy and Girls Club kids are getting a lesson on the origins of corn.

“Children now are so detached from food sources and they’re so dependent on the modern market to provide foods,’’ said horticulturist Du Prey. “The thrust of this is to let children be amazed by the miracle of planting seeds.”

Tucked into a corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Park in a high-crime Central Long Beach neighborhood, the Peace Garden has become a community-gathering place and popular outdoor classroom since far-flung neighborhood groups and city leaders built the verdant patch last year. The Long Beach Weed & Seed program hired neighborhood youth to construct the organic, pesticide-free garden and greenhouse with the oversight of the Central Neighborhood Advisory Council and South Wrigley Neighborhood Action Group. The young people also helped design the raised beds, which are four feet wide by ten feet long, that are easy for children, seniors and people with disabilities to access. There’s also a learning center in one corner, with benches and a chalkboard, where students from across the city come with their schools or clubs.

The construction was supported by $14,000 grant from the California Gang Reduction, Intervention & Prevention program.

A Peaceful Spot

Virgia Wade, 80, one of the neighborhood leaders and founders, said that having African-American, Cambodian, and Latino youth cart soil and sow seeds was a very effective way to ease racial tensions in and outside the park. The young people organized the garden into special plots devoted to the indigenous foods of different cultures. The Latino garden boasts jalapeno and cilantro; the Cambodian garden has Taro root and Edaname Daikon; The African American garden is home to bushels of collard greens and turnips.

“We had to get them to work together so they didn’t get out there and fight,” said Wade, noting that the park had been a flashpoint for violent clashes in recent years. “So this is where we came in. To teach these youth how to get along.”

Long Beach Police Department’s plot—labeled as the “guardian’s garden”—is symbolically placed near the entrance as protection. The LBPD Youth Division applauds this innovative concept for “promoting peace and wellness at the same time.”

The garden was recognized with the 2011 Peacemaker Award from the Long Beach City Council and is now one of four finalists for Neighborhood of the Year Award, for Neighborhoods USA, which honors community beautification and revitalization efforts.

Planting the Seeds of Nutrition Education

Every visitor to the Peace Garden will eventually have the nutritional benefits of fresh produce planted in their heads. These healthy food lessons dovetail with Network for Healthy California, a statewide movement working toward improving the health status of low-income Californians through increased fruit and vegetable consumption. The California Department of Health Services says only 38 percent of Latino adults eat the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables a day, with more than one-third eating two or less servings a day. About 44% of African-American adults, by comparison, eat two or fewer servings of fruits and vegetables a day.

That is something Wade would like to change. Standing over a tall bush of collard greens, Wade recalls that her mother grew veggies in the garden for her 8 siblings to eat. “This is what we call soul food.”

“We didn’t go to the store when we wanted something. We worked in the garden,” she said. “These kids don’t know about raising vegetables —one wanted to grow macaroni and cheese!”

On a recent spring day, Du Prey spent time telling more than a dozen elementary school kids in the Boys and Girls Club about food in it’s natural state. As the children sat in the garden’s learning center—wooden benches with a big black chalkboard—Du Prey handed each student a freshly picked ear of corn. On his instruction, the students identified the husk, silk and other parts and then ate the cob raw. Du Prey then brought them to a corner of the garden where he dug a 20-square-foot patch for them to plant and tend the sweet corn this summer, which will be pollinated by the wind.

“Children come into the garden and for the first time in their lives, they’re eating raw foods,” he said.

The Peace Garden also bolsters California’s Shaping Health as Partners in Education program’s goals of promoting efforts to help young people eschew junk food and learn the benefits of healthy eating.

Annie Greenfeld-Wisner, chair of the Central Project Area Committee and a founder, said it was very important for those who built the garden to see a tangible result of their labors. “I think that’s what makes them proud,” said Greenfeld-Wisner. “We said they were going have a garden and they have a garden.”

She is proud of the statistics: Two dozen community members now participate in the upkeep, oversight and maintenance of the garden; at least 15 youth each week are taught urban farming techniques; and over 200 children, youth and families have visited the Peace Garden since its opening last summer.

Greenfeld-Wisner expects that the garden will continue to yield more than healthy vegetables for the community. An initial $5,000 grant from State Farm Insurance has blossomed into donations and materials worth more than $57,000. Timothy Collier, the owner of the Green Plumber, for instance, donated water lines and labor materials for the water irrigation system.

Tracy Colunga, the Site Director for the Long Beach Weed & Seed Program said this neighborhood restoration project, with it’s multi-agency approach, is already a showcase for the rest of the city on how to revitalize high-crime areas.

Looking around at the gardeners tending the crops recently, she smiles at everyone harvesting in the sun.

By Paul Eakins

Fontana resident Deborah White has spent most of her life fishing along the Los Angeles County coast.

“I’ve been fishing down here since I was knee-high to a duck,” she said this month while fishing at the Belmont Veterans Memorial Pier in Long Beach.

And for most of her life, White and her husband Ray – along with other anglers – have had to be careful about which fish they eat.

The nearby underwater Palos Verdes Shelf is one of the largest contaminated sediment sites in the United States. The contamination stems from decades of DDT and PCB discharge into the local sewer system, which emptied into the ocean off the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

Although the shelf is just off the coast of the peninsula at Los Angeles County’s southernmost tip, the contaminated fish that frequent the area range all along the county coastline and into neighboring Orange County’s coastal zones. That includes the waters off of Long Beach east of the peninsula.

On any given day, dozens of anglers – some with dozens of fishing poles – line the Belmont Veterans Memorial Pier for recreation or to get their next meal.

Oscar Gonzalez, a 56-year-old San Pedro resident, said that on the rare occasions that he fishes in Long Beach, he has noticed that the dangerous fish aren’t publicly listed anywhere.

“There are people that don’t know and they eat them,” Gonzalez said in Spanish. “Here they don’t have signs like in San Pedro. There they have signs that tell you which fish are OK.”

The Long Beach Department of Health and Human Services is looking to change that.

The department has been a partner in the EPA’s outreach program since 2005 and is in the process of putting up warning signs about contaminated fish at the pier, said environmental health specialist Monica Cardenas.

She said the department also does outreach at health and community fairs, does quarterly inspections with the California Department of Fish and Game to ensure that contaminated fish aren’t reaching local markets, and provides fish contamination education to nurses, among other education steps.

The dangerous chemicals that contaminate local fish are no longer dumped into the sewers, but since 2003 the Environmental Protection Agency has operated an expansive public outreach and education program called the Fish Contamination Education Collaborative. The EPA partnered with numerous local agencies, from health departments to environmental groups to community organizations, to spread the word about the dangers of local fish.

What began as a warning in 1985 against eating white croaker – a bottom-feeding fish that ingests DDT and PCB from the sediment on the ocean floor and whose fatty body tends to more easily store the chemicals – has since expanded into a list of five “do-not-eat” fish. In addition to the white croaker, those fish are the barred sand bass, black croaker, topsmelt and barracuda, while people should limit their intake of certain other fish species.

“Many fishermen from the piers know that white croaker is one of the most contaminated fish in the red zone, from Santa Monica Pier through Seal Beach Pier, but many still refuse to believe that we have more fish we should avoid,” said Frankie Orrala, angler outreach coordinator for Heal the Bay, one of the organizations that has partnered with the EPA.

Thanks to the outreach program and simple word of mouth, area anglers interviewed recently at the Long Beach pier seemed well aware of the risks that come with eating some species of fish. That doesn’t seem to stop them from casting their lines, however.

“I don’t worry about it,” said White, a 60-year-old retired security guard who fishes more for fun than food. “I can always go to the fish market.”

Albert Murillo, a 37-year-old Los Angeles resident, has been fishing at the pier for 10 to 15 years, he said. He eats the fish that he can and throws back the contaminated ones, which he can identify by sight, but mostly he just enjoys the sport, he said.

“If you come down here to fish, you’re gonna have fun, and maybe you’ll take some food home,” Murillo said.

He said it doesn’t bother him that some fish are contaminated, so long as education efforts continue.

“It’s good that we’re aware,” Murillo said. “They’re letting people know what’s going on.”

Anglers ignore health officials’ warnings at their own peril, though they may not immediately realize that they are being affected, Cardenas said.

“Eating fish contaminated with DDTs and PCBs does not make people sick right away,” Cardenas said. “The more contaminated fish you eat, the greater the amount of chemicals that build up in your body over time.”

Health problems associated with increased exposure to these chemicals include cancer, liver disease and developmental effects, as well as effects on the immune and endocrine systems, she said. During pregnancy and lactation, mothers can pass DDTs and PCBs on to their infants.

Because chemicals affect development, children through adolescence, elderly people and women of childbearing age are more sensitive to the chemicals and should be especially careful, Cardenas said.

These warnings are likely to continue for years, health officials say.

DDT production in Los Angeles County ended in 1983 – 11 years after the EPA banned its use in the United States, although it was still being exported – but the chemicals remain in the Palos Verdes Shelf sediments.

Since 2000, the EPA has been experimenting with how to cap and contain the contaminated areas. A permanent solution has yet to be found.

“DDTs and PCBs are toxic mixtures of chemicals that are very slow to break down in … nature,” Orrala said. “Dumping DDTs and PCBs into the ocean ended decades ago, but more than 100 tons of these contaminants still remain in the ocean bottom sediments near Los Angeles, where they continue to contaminate fish, birds and other animals in the coastal environment.”

For more information about the outreach program and fish contamination, go to www.pvsfish.org.

FISH CONSUMPTION GUIDELINES

DO NOT EAT: White Croaker, Barracuda, Black Croaker, Barred Sand Bass and Topsmelt
1 Serving Per Week: California Halibut, California Scorpionfish (Sculpin), Kelp Bass, Sardines, Sargo, Shovelnose Guitarfish, Rockfishes
2 Servings Per Week: Corbina, Pacific Chub Mackerel, Queenfish, Opaleye, Surfperches and Yellowfin Croaker
4 Servings Per Week: Jacksmelt

– Source: Fish Contamination Education Collaborative

By Tim Moran

Tito Sanchez likes the quiet nature of the Livingston subdivision he moved into six years ago – except when the farmer in the adjacent almond orchard shakes the trees during harvest. That’s pretty noisy, he admitted. And then there’s the fertilizer they use on the vegetable field to the west of his home. “Man, let me tell you, it stinks,” Sanchez said.

Sanchez has learned what many urban dwellers find out when they move into homes on the edge of farming areas: the promise of a bucolic life near open farm fields gives way to the reality of modern industrial farming.

Noise, dust, odors, flies, chemical spraying and night operations are as much a part of modern farming as green fields and neat rows of orchard trees.

The situation isn’t much fun for the farmer, either. They complain about domestic pets trespassing on their property and harassing farm animals or workers, according to county agricultural commissioner David Robinson. Increased vandalism, theft, garbage dumping, traffic and speeding on rural roads are issues too, said farm advisor Maxwell Norton, as are children wandering into farm fields.

So what’s the solution? The slump in new home sales has allowed some breathing room to think about the issues. Everyone from city zoning officials to animal nutritionists are working on easing urban-rural conflicts.

Bucolic expectations

Norton, who works with the University of California Cooperative Extension office in Merced, has studied the problem of residential land use butting up against farming, looking at two Merced County communities, Livingston and Los Banos. Both communities have subdivisions building into what has previously been farmland, but the reaction of the residents was markedly different: homebuyers in Los Banos had far more complaints about subdivisions encroaching into farmland than did those in Livingston.

Norton speculates that the difference stems from the fact that many of the new Los Banos residents are coming from large urban areas like San Jose, while the Livingston homebuyers tend to be from the valley, and have grown up around agriculture.

The conflicts fall into a couple of broad categories, Norton said: nuisance complaints about things like noise, dust, odors and night operations; and a perception of health risk from farm spraying of pesticides.

Agriculture is an industrial land use, Norton noted, and it can frequently be incompatible with residential uses. Farms can peacefully co-exist with other industrial uses or commercial development, but “most people are pretty picky about their surroundings,” he said.

Animal operations, like dairies and poultry farms, are a particular problem. In addition to odors, animal operations can attract additional flies and even birds that can annoy homeowners.

Pesticide spraying raises health concerns for nearby residents – especially if they can see the activity, or smell something, Norton said. Farmers are prohibited by law from allowing spray to drift off their ranches, he added, and application instructions spell that out.

Complaints from residents about farm operations are handled by different agencies, depending on the nature. The Merced County Agriculture Commissioner’s office handles pesticide complaints, said county ag commissioner Robinson.

“It runs the spectrum. We investigate them all. Some have merit, some don’t,” Robinson said. “If someone is having a pesticide issue, we want to hear about it and look into it.”

The complaints are seasonal, starting with spring when farmers are establishing their crops, and tapering off as harvest approaches, Robinson said. Insect and dust complaints peak in the summer, and winter is pretty quiet, he said.

The county Department of Public Health handles many of the odor complaints, and fields between 30 and 50 complaints a year, said Ron Rowe, supervising environmental health specialist with the department.

Most odor problems are from animal farms, and are weather related, he said. Odor complaints rise when weather is wet in the spring followed by heat, Rowe said. High wind can cause more odor complaints, but it can also diminish the smell and the complaints. Air inversions common in the valley can amplify the problem. “It’s very much driven by the weather, and unpredictable,” Rowe said.

The Public Health Department tries to respond to complaints within 24 hours, and interviews both parties, Rowe said. Some of the complaints aren’t valid, but most are, and the department works with the farm owner or operator to alleviate the problem.

“There are a variety of different motives behind complaints. It might be an old feud, you never know,” Rowe said. “We take them all seriously. Some require a significant amount of time to get resolved. It may be an old (farm) facility that is failing or struggling. We try to be reasonable with the time lines, but if it needs to be corrected, we are mindful of that too.
“We are not necessarily the favorite person on the block all the time.”

Noise complaints can fall under the purview of the Sheriff’s Department, and dust is an air quality problem falling under regulations enforced by the San Joaquin Valley Unified Air Pollution Control District.

Is farmland really open space?

Cities are looking at requiring buffer zones between agricultural and residential land, Norton said, although who pays for it and who maintains it in perpetuity could be a stumbling block.

Valley cities are also contemplating denser development to minimize the encroachment of residential development on agriculture. Something as simple as making city boundaries straight rather than zig-zag cuts down on the number of homes abutting farm land, Norton said.

Some counties have passed “Right to Farm” ordinances that try to establish the farmer’s right to conduct his business in the face of changing land uses around him. Norton doesn’t think they are effective, however.

“You cannot take a person’s right to complain to a regulatory authority away, if they feel a regulation has been violated. And the regulatory agencies are required to investigate,” Norton said.

Some of the problem stems from the different ways cities and counties view farmland, according to Norton. Counties see farmland as an industrial use that generates taxes and jobs. Cities generally view agriculture as a holding category for future urban growth, he said. “Historically, cities haven’t viewed the conflict or preserving farmland as their problem.”

Some cities are changing that attitude, however, Norton noted. Cities are creating farmland easements to maintain a rural character or to preserve the identity of a smaller city threatened with being swallowed by a larger one.

Dealing more directly with the cause of the complaints, odors can be managed with the right farming practices, Rowe said. Corrals can be groomed and graded so they do not accumulate waste that becomes airborne, for instance. “The general rule is to keep wet things wet and dry things dry,” he said.

Recent research at the University of California at Davis has made great strides in identifying sources of odors in animal operations, Rowe said, and best practices management can greatly reduce the problem.

All dairies are required to develop waste and nutrient management plans, Rowe said, and they are required to work with specialists like agronomists, engineers and animal nutritionists to reach a sustainability plan.

Merced County developed software in 2006 to help dairies comply. The program includes goals and objectives, and allows dairymen to work toward and become certified as in compliance with state law. The software is online and free, and is being used by at least 1,100 of the central valley’s 1,600 dairies, Rowe said.

The air district has imposed regulations to keep dust down with techniques like watering areas where farm equipment might kick up dust.

“Cities have spheres of influence around them, and there will always be some growth into the ag areas,” Robinson said. “We have to come up with strategies to all get along. “

Sometimes, the solution is just better communication, he said. “Some times it takes an intermediary to smooth things over. The farmer might let neighbors know, ‘On this day I will be spraying, or making noise with harvesting.’ The homeowner might say, ‘As long as I know, I can leave for the day.’”

Just three weeks ago, Trelena Thomas was learning the computer basics—the difference between right and left mouse clicks and what a URL is. Now, in the second installment of our three part series, watch as Thomas and her daughters bridge the digital divide with their first home computer, a former County of San Diego desktop refurbished by the San Diego Futures Foundation. Now come the bigger questions: who gets to play games first and is Facebook allowed? See the latest in this video series by Robert Knauf and Megan Burks.

Bridging the Divide from robertknauf on Vimeo.

By Derek Walter

California’s high-speed rail project has the potential to revolutionize the state’s railways. A promise of a two-and-a-half hour journey from San Francisco to Los Angeles should tempt those tired of fighting clogged freeways or flight delays. But for the city of Fresno, the stakes are even higher.

The rail would link Fresno to the rest of the state, when the city has often been left off the map when it comes to travel options. San Joaquin Valley’s Interstate 5 was built to bypass Fresno as well as Bakersfield and Merced. Traveling to San Francisco from Fresno usually means driving, as there is no direct train route. Fresno’s airport has far less options than California’s larger cities. For a city that was born on railroad lines, it finds itself often disconnected.

California High Speed Rail Authority Deputy Director Jeff Barker said it is cities like Fresno that have the most to gain. Others are more guarded in their optimism as they watch the rail project develop and slowly start to change the city.

“A system like this will inject major money and has a positive impact on the economy. The Central Valley gets that more than the rest of the state,” Barker said. “They felt the pain of the economy more than other parts of the state.”

Craig Scharton, Fresno’s director of downtown community revitalization, sees the project as an essential component of changing that situation. The new foot traffic that a high-speed train station would generate could continue the rebirth of Fresno’s downtown.

Long neglected by developers, downtown now reflects some signs of growth. Its Triple-A baseball stadium, Chukchansi Park, saw season ticket sales increase by 20 percent this year. Other positive signs include the newly built Iron Bird Lofts boasting 100 percent occupancy, with another residential project nearby underway, Scharton said. A modern station, he said, would connect riders to a downtown with historic architecture that is ripe for growth.

“That is the best possible world, the character of the old; it’s where Fresno was really created,” Scharton said. “And it would connect us to the rest of California. It’s a pretty compelling story.”

The road to a finished project still has several stops. Last week the High-Speed Rail Authority board voted to remove miles of proposed elevated tracks, which city officials argued could have been an eyesore as well as too costly. The station location may also move further west to avoid conflict with existing rail lines. A draft Environmental Impact Report is due by the end of this summer.

Funding for the project primarily comes from Proposition 1A, which was passed in 2008 to provide $9.95 billion in bond money. Also, California recently applied for $2.4 billion in federal funds that was returned to the U.S. government by Florida.

The city hopes to celebrate groundbreaking some time in 2012, Scharton said. From there, it would likely be several years of construction before service could actually begin to either Merced or Bakersfield, he said.

A project of this scale could certainly change the dynamic of the neighborhood. For some of the tenants of a nearby building, it could change them quite dramatically.

The Academy for Civic and Entrepreneurial Leadership (ACEL) charter high school in downtown Fresno leases part of a building that would be incorporated into the new station. It occupies the site of Fresno’s original train depot, a historical fact not lost on Scharton and other city planners.

The current building is in no danger of being demolished or relocated, Scharton said, but it does have some following the site’s progress closely.

Dave Childers, the principal of ACEL, said he is hopeful that his school can continue to operate where it is.

“Like many others, we have serious concerns and grounds for those concerns,” he said. “We invested a lot of time, energy, and taxpayer money into securing our current location. Obviously, by signing a 10-year lease, we were anticipating a great deal of stability – which is a key to the overall success for a charter school.”

The train depot itself that would bring about such stability, Scharton hopes. For example, the site is only about a block from the baseball park that has sparked some, but not enough, life into downtown. In order to make the station a further driver of revitalization, the city must capitalize on getting travelers to spend their time and money there.

“Obviously more foot traffic and foot activity adds more vitality,” he said. “It definitely connects us to the major world powerhouses of the Bay Area and Los Angeles.”

The location is not the only concern. Assemblyman David Valadao, whose south Valley district includes Hanford and Bakersfield, said inconsistent cost estimates and a potential “detrimental effect” on agriculture are on his radar screen.

“I have yet to get a serious answer as to the costs of the project, they range from $60 billion to over $150 billion,” Valadao added. “When originally sold to voters, High Speed Rail supporters claimed the project would not require a taxpayer subsidy outside of the original capital investment. No one believes that will be the case now.”

Director Barton and others hope that with solid urban planning the impact on agriculture would be minimal.

“Around the world you see a smart land use pattern that promotes urban development around high speed rail stations,” Barton said, “so you end up protecting a lot of your agricultural land and open space because of the building patterns that happen around the stations.”

Next, the state legislature must weigh the Environmental Impact Reports as well as cost for service. While funding is available for construction, Barton said, the state still must decide how to fund running the system.

By Rosa Ramirez

California’s state prison population has remained stubbornly high over the past decade. The new Alameda County Chief Probation Officer wants to lead his department in a new direction, one that focuses on prevention. David Muhammad, an Oakland native, favors an approach that promotes incentives to good behavior, rehabilitation and alternatives to incarceration. These are the kinds of methods, according to Muhammad, that get the best results – fewer people in prison and on probation and parole.

“Basically, if we assess you to be low risk, we are going to leave you alone,” Muhammad said in a recent talk to journalists at UC Berkeley. “If the person is high risk, we want to provide services and opportunities, not just the old trail you, nail you and jail you.”

“I’m a reformer. The only reason I’m in this job is to reform and improve the system,” Muhammad added in an interview with healthycal.org after the event. “When I interviewed for this job with the board of supervisors, I told them if you want business as usual, do not select me.”

Muhammad was tapped for his position after the agency spent eight months without a chief probation officer. Donald Blevins, the former chief probation officer, left the agency in April 2010 to lead the Los Angeles County Probation Department, the largest probation office in the country.

Muhammad helms a department that has 2,000 juveniles and 15,000 adults on probation. Eleven thousand of those adults are without a probation officer because of budget cuts. The remaining officers are overworked – each one has caseloads ranging from 100 to 105 people.

“Obviously there’s very little supervision,” Muhammad said.

His challenge now will be to convince stakeholders that targeted supervision of the highest risk cases is the best use of limited resources.

Models that work

Since returning to the East Bay nearly five months ago, Muhammad has met with community leaders, advocates, residents, and youth in Alameda County to generate support for the new direction of the department.

Key projects include creating a token program where youth can get time off from probation if they, for instance, obtain their high school diploma or raise their grade point average. He wants probation officers located in community service centers across the county so people can get services when they check in with their probation officer.

An advocate of rehabilitation programs that include peer and professional counseling, Muhammad pointed to the Missouri Model, a system that juvenile justice advocates across the country tout as a promising alternative to detention centers, as a model that can work in Alameda County.

The Missouri Model centers are small. The staff is trained in youth development. There’s a strong focus on giving teens job and life skills so they can transition back into society. Teens are held responsible for each other’s behavior. They also undergo deep treatment to understand what caused the delinquency.

“You have to perform well in school. That’s how you can earn your way out of the facility. It’s not just doing the time like most places,” Muhammad said. “Your really have to earn your way out by engaging in treatment and rehabilitation.”

Youth offenders who go through the Missouri Model have a lower recidivism level. Seventy percent of teens released in 1999 didn’t return to any correctional program three years later, compared to a 45-to75 percent of the re-arrested rate country wide, according to a study by the Youth Transition Funders Group, “A Blueprint for Juvenile Justice Reform.”

The probation department oversees two juvenile justice facilities: Juvenile Justice Hall and Camp Sweeney. Youth who sent to Camp Sweeney for become wards of the state, and learn anger management and employment skills. Camp Sweeney in San Leandro trains youth ages 15-to-18, who are wards of the state, in anger management and employment skills. But the county, Mohammad said, should have programs that incentivize good behavior.

Muhammad also plans to implement a progress-tracking system similar to CompStat, called ProbStat. ProbStat would collect and analyze data in each probation division. Muhammad would meet once a month with division managers. “[They would] answer to me,” he said, “if they didn’t meet the measure, or be congratulated by me if they met the measure.”

Alameda County has also implemented alternatives to locking up youth and adults, including GPS monitoring and home supervisions. Some programs aimed at persona growth—yoga and literature courses—are being used for those who are in custody.

And in 2007, the county created a multidisciplinary team including heathcare workers, judges, probation officers and child advocates to direct offenders to existing resources. The Alameda County Juvenile Collaborative Court, for instance, helps youth with mental illnesses get the help they need, including mental health screenings, individual and family counseling, and medication.

Studies have found that a host of social conditions affect a person’s health, including where a person lives, occupation, education, and income level. Youth in the juvenile justice system, Muhammad said, need a range of services to support their health, behavior and education. He wants to partner with community groups to streamline services, and create a place where youth can get, for instance, academic tutoring and visits to their probation officer in the same location.

“It’s a place where it’s their space, instead of going to the offices downtown, where it can be a scary place and they can be waiting forever for their probation officer who may or not be there,” said Jackie Johnson media relations associate for Youth Uprising. Their center and the probation department have partnerships that are working well, Johnson said.

Challenges ahead

The first priority of the chief probation officer, Muhammad told a crowd during the March 17 gathering at YouthUprising in Oakland, is to keep the public safe. Once public safety needs were met, however, the next priority is “to turn people’s lives around,” he said. During that event, the auditorium was filled with youth, juvenile justice advocates, law enforcement and judges. People lined up outside the auditorium for the chance to hear him speak.

“Muhammad comes with a lot of ideas, a lot of energy and it’s unusual, it’s different,” said Lori Jones, director of the Alameda County Social Services Agency. “It’s not what you typically see from a probation chief.”

Muhammad seems like credible leader for this turnaround – he experienced poverty, life in foster care, and the juvenile justice system in his early teens. He credits Omega Boys Club in Oakland with helping him turn his life around. Muhammad also served as Deputy Commissioner of New York City’s Department of Probation before taking the Alameda County position.

Yet youth advocates acknowledge that despite the pledges of support he’s received from community agencies and service providers, he’ll need to get total buy-in on his proposals. Change doesn’t come fast or easy, even when there are a significant number of people rallying behind the projects, they said.

“His biggest challenge will be to get people to see that change is needed,” said Jones of the county’s social service agency. “He comes from the community, which helps him. People will listen to him. Changing perceptions of probation’s role- getting stakeholders to accept a probation department that’s not about “trail, nail and jail” will be Muhammad’s challenge, she said.

Muhammad agreed. “I need the support to be tangible as well. I’m going to need support with the budget, with partnerships to help on various levels.”

Kaina Walker, mentoring program director with Youth Justice Institute, said Muhammad will also need to focus on re-entry.

“One of the challenges that Muhammad will have to deal with is what to do with juveniles who will be returning from the DJJ system. Who will be monitoring them?” Walker said. “In the meantime, these kids are left out without any jobs, without appropriate housing, without appropriate education.”

Adults returning home from jail or prison, or supporting at-risk kids, will also need jobs – a hard problem to solve.

“People who are highly educated are having a hard time getting job opportunities. For a lot of people who are coming back on probation or parole, they have it worse,” Walker said. “It has a trickle effect. It directly affects the kids. If you mom or dad is coming home those are huge tremendous stressors. The kids feel they have to take over to help.”

Reaching out to the community

Muhammad said he wants to ensure residents’ ideas are heard. One way he plans to involve them is through public town halls starting this summer.

The town halls would be held in various parts of the county and stakeholders, including parents, youths, advocates and service providers would get a chance to “not just be at the table, but be fully engaged,” Muhammad said.

He has already created similar meetings with non-managerial staff his department, something he’s calling “listening tours.” The tours work like this: Muhammad meets with line employees who speak candidly on what’s working and not working in their respective offices. The staff shares with him their ideas on how to improve it. Muhammad then meets with managers to talk about how to correct those issues.

“We’ve got deeply entrenched problems. It’s not going to take a week, a month, a year,” he told the crowd.