The Buzz 04.26.18

WHO’S IN TOWN?

Life for undocumented community members has been complicated and overshadowed by fear recently. It’s a challenging time, but also a time of awakening for action.CSU Monterey Bay is hosting the Undocu-Success: Visibility and Change Conference this week to educate and inspire students, parents, educators and community members about issues facing the undocumented population. Former CSUMB professor Alberto Ledesma – now a graduate diversity director at UC Berkeley, and author of Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer: Vignettes from my Pre-American Life – is the keynote speaker. The 2017 book shares his early life as an undocumented child growing up in Oakland, and his journey to becoming a college student and professor.

8:30am-4pm Sat April 28. Tanimura & Antle Family Memorial Library, 3054 Divarty St., Seaside. Free. csumb.edu/undocumentedstudents.

FREE SPEECH

The city of Seaside has made strides in the past few years improving the transparency of city business, the focal point of which has been an overhaul of the city’s website. That effort, hatched by City Clerk Lesley Milton-Rerig, has been moving forward at a rapid clip since the arrival of City Manager Craig Malin, who is an outspoken advocate for transparency. The latest manifestation of their vision is a section on the new website (launched in March) that’s titled “Transparency.” It lays bare a cache of documents Rerig-Milton and her colleagues have been assiduously scanning and digitizing for years. It’s a hugely helpful feature for residents – and journalists – trying to stay on top of what’s what, and in this election year, a great way to easily see who’s running for office and who’s funding whom without having to go through paper records. Milton-Rerig says she’s still working to improve the functionality – make it more searchable, perhaps – but it’s already a vast improvement. “Seaside wants to be transparent,” she says.

GOOD WEEK / BAD WEEK

GOOD:

The State Bar Committee of Bar Examiners delivered good news for the next generation of Monterey County lawyers this week when they approved a new program atMonterey College of Law. Students will be able to earn a J.D. by taking up to 70 percent of their classes online, starting for the class that enrolls in the fall of 2018. The first year of coursework will be in person, and there will be an option to complete the remaining two-and-a-half years remotely, which President and Dean Mitch Winick says will open up the pool of prospective attorneys, especially important for a school like MCL, where most students work full-time and classes are in the evenings. “Legal education has been slow to embrace distance education,” he says. “Accreditors have been reluctant to allow law schools to use it. This is a big deal for legal education as a whole.”

BAD:

It’s been a bad week for consumers and romaine lettuce growers after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control warned consumers to stay away from the leafy green in all forms if it comes from the Yuma, Arizona growing region, or if they can’t be sure where the lettuce came from. The warning came after more than 50 people in 16 states became ill with E. coli O157:H7 between late March and early April. Of those, more than 30 were hospitalized and five suffered kidney failure. (No deaths have been reported.) The romaine growing season is now over in Arizona and has shifted back to California, including the Salinas Valley, where in 2016 growers produced $507.5 million worth of romaine. Monterey County Farm Bureau Executive Director Norm Groot says it’s too early to tell what the retail impact will be on the industry.