WHO’S IN TOWN?
Crisis intervention in the produce industry takes lots of experts, including lawyers. United Fresh Produce Association hosts a two-day intensive workshop on recall preparedness, still an urgent matter for Salinas Valley growers and salad packers who vividly remember the 2006 outbreak of E. coli outbreak in spinach that killed three and sickened another 200-plus people. The workshop wraps with simulated crises, giving company reps a chance to try out response plans and show how far they’ve come in protecting consumers (and themselves) from a 2006 repeat.
8am-5pm April 9, 7:30am-noon April 10. Steinbeck Hall, Hartnell College, 411 Central Ave., Salinas. $895/United Fresh member; $1,395/non-member. (202) 303-3402, www.unitedfresh.org/recallready#training.
WHAT’S UP WITH THAT
Readers wondered what happened to the KIDD radio towers in Marina. Last month the two 350-foot-high transmission towers in Locke-Paddon Community Park came down using a “cut-and-drop” method. At 60 years old, they couldn’t be safely climbed for maintenance.
OVERHEARD
“I went and saw Furious 7 and I started crying. Everyone was tearing up and there were thugs there watching too.”
- Man at Monterey Sports Center discussing his sorrow at seeing the late Paul Walker’s final film, Furious 7.
GOOD WEEK / BAD WEEK
Good:
Monterey’s Cooper Molera adobe will soon see historic changes, but ones in keeping with history: Doug Wiele, the developer who brought the Trader Joe’s shopping center to Monterey, won unanimous approval from Monterey’s Historic Preservation Commission to allow his company Foothill Partners to share the historic site with The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit. Foothill Partners and the Trust estimate spending $6 million to renovate the site, including two barns that are currently condemned. It’s a bid to make the adobe financially sustainable, as it was willed to the Trust with only $50,000 and no endowment. The plans call for an event space, retail and a restaurant, as well as maintaining current historic functions and structures.Bad:
This week’s rainstorms won’t solve California’s drought. There was a flicker of good news for the chronic water supply problem when Gov. Jerry Brown announced a mandatory 25-percent reduction for urban water users by Feb. 28, 2016, and the national news seemed to notice the West is scorching. But Brown’s order isn’t a complete solution to the bigger problem, which is the bad news. The ag industry, while facing its own new restrictions and the state’s first-ever groundwater regulations that might end a long-standing pump-as-you-please norm, got a free pass. Ag uses about 80 percent of California’s water. That means a 25-percent cut by municipal users has only a 5-percent effect overall. Then there’s the bigger picture: Climate change is real and reduction in water consumption won’t fix it.
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