News of theWeek Task Force cont’d from page 11
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KILLING WITH LAUGHTER: “When I graduated from the police academy, my father asked, ‘Are you trying to kill me?’” joked Officer Adrian Gutierrez.
news briefs cont’d
Sample Sale August 9th-llth
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with pollen from the titan arum that recently bloomed in Washington. Though the flower will wither away in the next day, greenhouse manager Danica Taber has enjoyed all the attention it’s getting, despite the rotten fumes. She’s worked with other weird and funky plants, but said of this strange botanical specimen, “It’s the smelliest I’ve smelled without question.” Schools in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties will split up $8.5 million to spend on energy efficiency, according to State Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson. The funds are a result of Proposition 39, which closes a corporate tax loophole and earmarks half the resulting revenue for energy-saving and job-creation efforts. School proceeds are based on a formula that takes into account daily attendance and poverty. The big winners on the South Coast, according to estimates by Jackson’s press officer, are Santa Barbara Unified, Goleta Union, and Carpinteria Unified, with $750,000, $190,000, and $120,000, respectively. The other area districts are expected to receive roughly $50,000 each.
Plans to build a third fire station in Montecito seemed to be completely off the table earlier this month, but after a Montecito Fire board meeting on 7/22, it appears the proposal may eventually move forward. AMEC, a consulting company, drafted an environmental impact report (EIR) for the station, but it was rejected by a judge a few months ago. Now, AMEC said it could modify the original EIR for $8,000. The district hopes AMEC will cover these costs. Even
There seemed to be only four teenagers — not gang members — in the room, two representing the Academy of Healing Arts and two representing the Santa Barbara County Youth Corps. Any solution to gang violence, the emotional Luis Rodriguez said, would need to include the gangs themselves. “There is a way for us to work with law enforcement as members of the same family,” he said, soon before he broke into tears. “These tears,” he said, “are only because I want you to come alive.”
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if AMEC does cover the rework, however, some boardmembers expressed concern that the required legal expenses to keep the ball rolling could cost the district tens of thousands of dollars.
ENVIRONMENT New Orleans–based reporter Mike Ludwig delivered an eye-opening article on the Santa Barbara Channel last week, when he published a special investigation on offshore hydraulic fracturing, a resource-extraction technique better known by the nationally controversial term “fracking.” After learning that Venoco Inc. had fracked offshore in 2011, Ludwig filed a series of Freedom of Information Act requests, and found that Ventura-based DCOR, which runs 11 of the 24 rigs off of California, had also received permission to frack. The report was seen by a number of agencies around the region and state, and it may lead to revisions in how experimental offshore drilling is permitted. See independent .com/truthout for a link to the story. The Santa Barbara chapter of 350.org, a global movement to solve the climate crisis, rallied cyclists, environmentalists, and other supporters at Linden Field in Carpinteria on 7/27. Wearing colorful signs criticizing fossil-fuel industries and shale oil production, more than 100 participants called for a more urgent transition to renewable energy. The event included workshops about fossil-fuel divestment, the dangers of fracking, how to ban certain fossil-fuel practices on the municipal level, and how to put a price on carbon. Rally par-
Tribes Seek Recognition
People of Native American ancestry from all over California converged in Solvang last week to take part in a hearing hosted by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is updating its process for how tribes become federally recognized. Among other tribes speaking out for a more transparent, streamlined, and affordable process was the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation, a group with about 2,500 members from Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, and Ventura counties that formed in the early 1980s and has been working toward federal status ever since. The band’s tribal chair, Michael Cordero, a retired teacher who can trace his lineage all the way back to the West Beach village of Syuxtun, said that the band filed a “letter of intent” decades ago and has been working to prove each member’s status since. “It’s quite expensive,” said Cordero, noting that they must hire archaeologists, anthropologists, and other experts to establish their case. “Basically, they want the tribe to have genealogical records of their members completed to show that they can prove their descendancy.” He said that’s particularly challenging in California, where many indigenous peoples were shuffled around and/or grouped together during the mission period. Though some of last week’s speakers had things to say about the status of the Santa Ynez Band of Mission Indians — the tribe that achieved recognition more than a century ago and now operate the Chumash Casino — the Thursday afternoon hearing did not deal with their status. “Since the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians was federally recognized in 1901,” said the tribe’s government affairs officer, Sam Cohen, “the revisions — Matt Kettmann don’t apply to the Santa Ynez Chumash tribe.”
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THE INDEPENDENT
augusT 1, 2013