[Scpg] Cox Gives $9,000 to Cover Last of Fairview Gardens’ Debt to City of Goleta CA

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

Cox Gives $9,000 to Cover Last of Fairview Gardens’ Debt to City of 
Goleta CA

The donation comes after the city agreed in April to forgive $38,000 of 
nearly $47,000 the 12-acre organic farm owed in back fees
By Lara Cooper, Noozhawk Staff Writer | @laraanncooper | Published on 
06.06.2012
http://www.noozhawk.com/article/060612_cox_9000_fairview_gardens_debt_goleta/

Tuesday evening marked a new beginning of sorts for Goleta-based 
Fairview Gardens.http://www.fairviewgardens.org/

The 12-acre organic farm has been working for several years to bring its 
operation into compliance with city ordinances, and it owed nearly 
$47,000 to the city in fees. Those fees stemmed from a combination of 
unpaid balances for the processing of several permits, including those 
for a farm labor camp and commercial poultry operations.

In April, the City Council agreed to forgive nearly $38,000 of what the 
farm owed if Fairview could pay the remaining $9,000 payment by the end 
of the fiscal year.

Thanks to a donation from Cox Communications, the farm now stands in the 
clear. Cox stepped up to cover the remaining $9,000 that was owed to the 
city, and presented the check Tuesday night.



“This is a wonderful opportunity for Cox to step up and really make an 
impact in the community,” said Sarah Clark, public affairs manager for Cox.

Clark said that when she heard about the need, she did her research first.

“That’s why this is a worthwhile donation,” she said. “I was so 
impressed with all the steps they’ve taken over the past year to get to 
where they are.”

The farm has completed and implemented a new business plan, a huge part 
of which centers on the reopening of its roadside produce stand, which 
it expects to open by July 1. It has also worked to revamp the layout of 
its fields and orchard for better agricultural yield and, hopefully, a 
better bottom line for its organization.

Doug Steigerwald, board president for Fairview Gardens, thanked the 
council and Cox, saying that the opening of the produce stand will be key.

Councilman Roger Aceves commended the two groups for the effort.

“I’m really pleased you guys have raised the money,” he said. “It’s just 
exceptional.”

Aceves also made the motion to accept the payment in honor of Selma 
Rubin, with his voice wavering.

Rubin, a longtime supporter and board member of Fairview, died in March. 
Aceves’ motion passed unanimously.

The farm also would have owed an additional $5,000 in permits in order 
to reopen its produce stand. That permit would allow the stand to sell 
organic goods not grown on the property.

After a somewhat protracted discussion, the council voted 4-1 to approve 
that waiver and get the stand up and running.

Though Councilwoman Margaret Connell initially said she would like to 
see the farm pay that fee in installments, she later relented.

“I do think down the road when we come to the next permit that the FV 
board has to look at underwrite it,” she told Fairview board members.

“Let’s move forward and get that thing open yesterday,” Aceves said.

Councilwoman Paula Perotte voted against the $5,000 waiver. She said 
that though she supported the farm, “I feel like we’ve been very 
generous,” adding that payments would be better.

— Noozhawk staff writer Lara Cooper can be reached at 
lcooper at noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, 
@NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.




















The Design Economy: How to Meet the Challenges of the Next Economic Era
Joe Costello, author of the book "Of, By, For: The New Politics of 
Money, Debt & Democracy," has a message for America: our political 
economy must be democratically reformed.
June 4, 2012  |

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Joe Costello, author of the new book Of, By, For: The New Politics of 
Money, Debt & Democracy, has a message for America: our political 
economy must be democratically reformed. As we confront a moment of 
massive historical change, Costello explores, among other things, how 
electronic information technologies are transforming industrial 
economies. He explains how the understanding of this shaping process, or 
design, can help us meet the challenge of the next economic era. Hint: 
We're going to have to wake up to our power as citizens to get there.

The following is an excerpt from Of, By, For: The Politics of Money, 
Debt & Democracy, by Joe Costello (SmashWords, 2012).


"The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even 
without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. 
A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried 
about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on 
machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching 
packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it 
would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism 
of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods." -- 
Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man

Humanity's great agrarian era produced agrarian government systems, 
economies, and cultures. Human life and human identity derived 
overwhelmingly from the processes of farming. The much shorter 
two-centuries old industrial era redefined life. The processes of 
production and consumption became the overwhelming dual identities of 
individuals and our institutions that evolved to foster the processes of 
unlimited industrial growth. As we move into the design economy, 
increasingly the most imperative questions will be what are the roles, 
identities, institutions, and processes of design.

Design has been part of human history before the beginning of 
civilization. It has at times played an instrumental role with the 
designing of hunting tools, farming implements, and industrial 
technologies. However today, information, the raw material of design, is 
becoming not simply ubiquitous but fundamental to every aspect of human 
life. For example, with our knowledge of DNA comes the ability to 
manipulate the very information codes of life itself.

Presently, many of the processes of design - the creation of 
information, its editing communication, and finally decision making for 
its utilization - are in turns both centralized and insufficient. We 
need to evolve our institutions, organizations, and individual roles to 
understand that design is increasingly the primary value of political 
economy, ultimately creating a value shift from industrialization's 
quantitative value of infinite growth based on unlimited production and 
consumption to design's more qualitative values of participation, 
efficiency, elegance, and enough.

If we look at the processes of design today, we see rapid change. 
Companies, governments, NGOs, and individuals each year produce an 
exponentially greater amount of information. In the distribution and 
communication of information, paper is in great decline as electronic 
media explodes. Creation and communication of news and public affairs, 
once the exclusive domain of print, was supplanted by electronic 
broadcast media by the mid-20th century, and is now rapidly being 
replaced by the networked microprocessor, creating both a plethora of 
real and potentially valuable information, but also an unprecedented 
amount of noise, with little or no value. Noise grows as what could be 
useful information is communicated with no ability for the individual or 
organization to place it in meaningful context.