valley is excluded from aid plan
You may have read in today's Bee an article about how, once again, the valley has been ignored by Washington.
I have included the text of the article below, but I wanted to highlight something not included in the article. My office at the Fresno Workforce Board was involved in writing the grant, but Ashley Swearingen at Fresno State deserves loud and frequent kudos for putting this thing together.
She is one of the many Fresnans who are catalysts in our community, who somehow maintain a positive attituide despite the usual Fresno rancor and discord. (It's interesting how most of these positive elements are women, Ashley Swearingen, Pam Lassetter, Suzanne Bertz-Rosa, Julie Griffiths, etc...)
Even though this application did not come through, hats off to her.
Blake
aka Loyolalaw98
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"Valley is excluded from aid plan - WIRED grant under Bush's Competitiveness Agenda will not go to San Joaquin Valley despite lobbying."
By E.J. Schultz / The Fresno Bee
The Valley was overlooked again.
Despite having some of the highest jobless rates in the nation and a well-documented list of economic woes, the San Joaquin Valley will not partake in a major part of President Bush's Competitiveness Agenda, an initiative he announced in his State of the Union address as a way to build a more highly skilled work force.
The U.S. Department of Labor announced on Wednesday recipients of a $195 million grant program known as WIRED, or Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development.
Thirteen regions made the cut and will get $15 million each over a three-year period. But the Valley was left out, despite a well-coordinated effort by local officials to go after the money.
On the list instead is the "California Coast," a 13-county region including Oakland, Los Angeles and San Diego, and other regions such as coastal Maine, the Florida Panhandle and metropolitan Denver, according to the Labor Department.
"I cannot imagine a region, all things considered, that would be more deserving and more investment-worthy than ours," said a disappointed Ashley Swearengin, chief operating officer of the Regional Jobs Initiative, a Fresno-area volunteer effort to create jobs.
The RJI teamed with the California Partnership for the San Joaquin Valley on the 20-page grant application. The partnership is a Gov. Schwarzenegger-appointed task force for economic improvement comprising Cabinet secretaries and local business and government leaders. About 40 agencies had input on the application, including community colleges and county economic development departments, said Swearengin, who helped coordinate the effort.
The state submitted two other regions for the grant : the coastal region and rural Northern California, Swearengin said. State officials, she said, had told Valley officials that the region was considered "a favorite" for the grant. As late as Tuesday, Valley leaders had expressed confidence that the region would be picked.
Swearengin speculated that, in the end, the Labor Department might have looked to include a more "glitzy and technology oriented" region from California.
The "California Coast" application was submitted by the nonprofit California Space Authority, and the region includes inland areas such as Kern, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, according to the state Employment Development Department.
U.S. Labor Department officials did not return calls for comment Wednesday afternoon.
The goal of the WIRED initiative, according to a Labor Department statement, is to "transform regional economies" through research and strategic planning to "prepare workers for high-skill, high-wage opportunities in the coming years and into the next decade."
It would be hard to argue that many regions are more in need of transformation than the Valley.
Fresno County, the heart of the agricultural-dominated region, had a jobless rate of 8.5% in December. Los Angeles County, by contrast, had a rate of 5.1%. The Denver-Aurora-Boulder region had a jobless rate of 4.5%, according to state of Colorado data.
A comprehensive report by the Congressional Research Service released last year determined that "by a wide range of indicators, the San Joaquin Valley is one of the most economically depressed regions of the United States."
The 365-page regional report card compared the eight-county Valley to the 68-county area known as Central Appalachia. It found that per-capita income was lower in the Valley and public assistance rates were higher; Fresno County's per-capita income is $19,247, according to the latest census data. Yet, per-capita federal spending overall was lower in the Valley than in the Central Appalachian subregion, the report concluded.
Valley leaders had hoped to use the grant money to train workers for employment in industries such as food processing, logistics and health care, a sector plagued by a qualified worker shortage.
Without the federal grant, Swearengin said, "We can move forward on that with elbow grease and help from the state."
By our bootstraps...
This just reaffirms what I've said. Fresno should not expect help from anyone. That is not to say we shouldn't compete for assistance, but any action on our part must be predicated on lack of assistance from outside sources. This is why it is so important that we utilize the resources we do have effectively. The rest of the country benefits from the problems we experience here, where are largely attributable to the prevalence of ag in the valley. They get cheap food, we get low income jobs, a undereducated workforce, and a lack of business investment. It's kinda like how we outsource the environmental damage that goes along with our consumption to other countries. China despoils their environment so we can get cheaper consumer goods. The middle east under invests in resources other then oil and stays politically unstable so we can get cheap gas. Jobs are not the only things that get outsourced, hidden costs of our lifestyle do too.
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