Author Archive | Sharon Byrne

Milpas on the Move column by Sharon Byrne

By Friday afternoon, we’ll know whether we’ve won a national competition for Neighborhood of the Year 2013.

Lorraine Cruz-Carpinter forwarded me the call for entries from Neighborhoods USA. Lorraine runs the city’s Looking Good program. She gets people to sign up as Adopt-a-Block captains to keep our blocks litter and graffiti-free. She also runs the city’s giant annual clean-ups. Thus she scales up to hundreds of volunteers working to keep our city clean, probably the highest return-on-investment employee in this city.

I realized the Milpas Community Association could be a good fit for the competition’s focus on social revitalization, given all the struggles we’d had, how we stayed unified on fixing the neighborhood, and how the entire community pulled together for the holiday lights and parade last year.

So I wrote up our story, and sent it off.

And I got a letter back.

Neighborhoods USA, headquartered in Minneapolis, put us in the top 5 finalists nationwide for Neighborhood of the Year 2013.

Not because everything is perfect – it’s not. We made the finals because Milpas is indeed revitalizing due to a strong community-based grassroots effort for the past 2+ years. There’s a new sense of connectedness and neighborliness, and neighborhood pride.

There’s a lot to be proud of in this neighborhood:

• The Egg McMuffin was invented at the Milpas McDonald’s.
• Milpas hosts many family-owned businesses that have been here for decades, with one in constant operation for 100 years.
• Franklin Neighborhood Center completed a stunning mural, under the leadership of Ricardo Venegas. This is also where the neighborhood came together for the first time at a contentious Franklin Advisory Committee meeting in August of 2010, and decided that we had something worth fighting for.
• Kids are playing softball again in the Cabrillo ballfield – a welcome sight in our former Ground Zero.
• We have great schools with amazing principals that care deeply about our kids.
• We have incredible restaurants. Super Rica was named one the top 25 Mexican restaurants nationally by Food and Leisure Magazine. Los Agaves, Your Place and The Habit consistently win Best of Santa Barbara. El Bajio won the trophy for the city’s best Menudo.
• Our community police officers hosted the first citywide Menudo competition, at Franklin Elementary. Our beat cops live in our neighborhood, and are invested in our community. We’re proof that community policing works.
• SBHS was named one of the top 10 most beautiful schools in the US, is the 3rd oldest in California, hosts the state’s longest-running school newspaper at nearly 100 years, and is home to the defending US champs in cheerleading! Go Dons!
• The Eyeglass Factory puts on Kids Health Day, and gives out free eyeglasses and exams to kids. We give away kids’ bikes at that event, thanks to John Dixon of Tri County Produce, hands-down the best produce market in this city.
• We started a Halloween Trick or Treat on Milpas, and the merchants really turn it up for the kids.
  We got our holiday streetlights back up, with huge community support, including Milpas businesses, the Sentinel, Franklin PTA, Casa de la Raza, Boys and Girls Club, and Casa Esperanza.
• We throw a holiday parade featuring youth and cars. This year is the parade’s 60th anniversary.
  Boys and Girls Club just won the city’s Spirit of Service Award for Clean Community. They always bring out masses of kids for the clean-ups, and teach them how to take ownership of their neighborhood.
• Casa De La Raza gave us a home for the holiday parade team, and welcomed us to throw a party to greet our beat cops to the neighborhood.
• Our Lady of Guadalupe, shepherded by Father Marin, cranks out the best tamales at Fiesta. The hall, historic home of Franklin Elementary School, has been a great place for us to work on some of our toughest issues.
• We have our own column!
• North Milpas now hosts The Shop for great coffee and food, owned by Eastside residents. Let’s hear it for another local business on the street! Ami (also an Eastside resident) of Jack’s Bistro holds down South Milpas, and always smiles a greeting when you walk in.

This really is an incredible neighborhood, when you step back and look at it.

All the marches, neighborhood clean-ups, meetings, meetings, and even more meetings, Planning Commission and City Council hearings, graffiti removal, neighborhood watch efforts, community policing, and holiday efforts…

Where else have you seen business owners, residents, community organizations, and schools work together with the city to make the area better?

All that effort applied for sheer love of our neighborhood has led us to this point.

To those that worked so hard for so long on this area, and gave so much, you already are winners. You already are the Neighborhood of the Year.

Way to go, Milpas-Eastside neighbors!

Weekly Friday column by Sharon Byrne

Those little prescription containers in your bathroom don’t seem all that threatening. But prescription drug abuse is indeed on the rise, and with it, overdoses and death.

It seems odd that anyone could abuse something that is prescribed by a doctor, and dispensed by a pharmacy. Those two steps would seem to provide barriers that would make this category of drug abuse less likely than others. If it’s harder to simply get something, isn’t it harder to abuse it?

Dr. Julio Diaz in handcuffs

Au contraire. Last year, Dr. Diaz was arrested on Milpas by the DEA for distributing controlled substances outside the scope of professional practice and without legitimate medical purpose. Local law enforcement and doctors working the emergency room at Cottage dealt with multiple prescription drug overdoses, 11 of them fatal, all of them patients of Diaz. Two brave doctors at Cottage realized Diaz was not following the oath to ‘do no harm’, and pursued a complaint with the Medical Board of California, whose job is to license doctors and investigate physician misconduct.

The complaint disappeared down a black hole. That same board is now coming under fire for failing to discipline doctors who recklessly overprescribe. Seems they won’t police their own, so the state is looking to hand that job to the Attorney General.

The Attorney General has her own struggles. The database used to track prescriptions and doctors, CURES, is under-funded, and pretty much defunct.

Some pharmacies refused to fill Dr. Diaz’ prescriptions. But apparently not all…

The SBPD and Sheriff’s Office contacted the DEA, who ultimately arrested and prosecuted Diaz, also known as “The Candy Man”. He was charged with 12 counts of over-prescribing prescription drugs, and stripped of his license to practice medicine.

So clearly people do abuse prescription drugs, with the complicit aid of a doctor, but legitimate users are also dying. They combine pills without understanding that some combinations can be lethal. Your doctor is supposed to advise, but with so many pills flooding the market, how could the average doctor possibly know every single effect from what must be thousands of unique possible combinations?

No one has that vast bio-chemical knowledge and if they did, the odds of them also being your GP are astronomically low.

Then there are pharm parties, where teens raid medicine cabinets at home, dump pills into a big bowl, everything from painkillers to blood thinners to arthritis medications, and scoop out a handful, and down them. The point is to get high without knowing what you’re high on. You get a different high at every party.

The overdose and lethal combination potential isn’t even registering in teen consciousness. A doctor prescribed it, so it’s gotta’ be safe, right?

To me, the major culprit in prescription drug abuse is the creation of pill culture, courtesy of big pharmaceutical companies via enormous marketing campaigns. Watch any TV station with a target-rich audience; Spike, OWN, Fox, and you’ll be bombarded with commercials that promise pills for any condition:
Need to lose weight?
Or not bulked up enough?
Low energy?
Or need to dial it down so you can sleep?
Got a kid with ADHD?
Is your sexual appetite waning?
Need something to protect against pregnancy when your mate is on sexual stimulant pills?
Got mysterious pains?
Feeling down?

Well, hey – we’ve got a pill for that!

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Weekly column by Sharon Byrne

I have always had a healthy respect for the Feds, ingrained at an early age by immigrant parents. They constantly fretted that they might possibly somehow do something that would cause revocation of their hard-won US citizenship. My father overpaid his taxes, documented every bit of government minutiae, and maintained precise, orderly files, ready for inspection, at any time.

He’s British. Nobody excels at bureaucracy, protocols and procedures like the Brits.

I got my US passport in toddlerhood, social security card at nine, and paid my first income taxes at fourteen. As a US-born citizen, I took being square with Uncle Sam for granted far more than my naturalized parents did.

Boy was I wrong.

The IRS notified me in February that they audited my 2011 tax return, decided I didn’t have a child, and now owed stiff penalties. I remember reading they’d hired 1,000 new agents determined to ferret out tax dodgers. Had I somehow landed in their crosshairs?

I went to the IRS to prove my child’s existence. I produced her birth certificate, passport, and social security card. They had transposed the last digit of her social security number, a small clerical error.

With that fixed, I submitted my 2012 tax return electronically, and it was rejected. My birth-date was wrong.

I entered the same birth-date I’ve had since….well…birth. February 9, 1968. A call to the IRS revealed that Social Security has a different birth-date for me – 1/1/1960.

I broke out into a sweat. First the IRS thought I didn’t have a kid who is very much real. Now a different arm of the Feds decided I was born 8 years earlier.

Could this be identity theft?

I went to Social Security, arriving to a packed lobby resembling the Bradley International Terminal at LAX. I took a number and chatted with a nice German couple (Ich spreche ein wenig Deutsch). I brought my US passport, social security card, and tax returns.

I then entered the realm of Government Uh.Oh. Turns out that Social Security had changed my name to my married name (I divorced in 1998) and changed my birth-date. They had no record of authorization from me to make these changes.

So, ok, it’s their mistake. They could just fix it, right?

Er, no. I must now produce my birth certificate to get my date of birth fixed. Or a baptismal record. Something showing I was actually born. But wait, I had to produce my birth certificate to get my US passport. Here’s my passport, right here, with my correct birth-date, and my social security card.

The agent rolled her eyes. “Anyone can forge US passports these days”, she said. Same with Social Security cards. Even kindergartners know this, apparently.

Isn’t it easier to forge birth certificates or Baptismal records???? To this novice, US passports look fairly arduous in comparison. Besides, why doesn’t ID issued by the feds satisfy federal scrutiny?

I also have to produce my divorce decree, with embossed seal of the state of Texas, for a divorce that happened 15 years ago.

The alternative is to call Homeland Security to sign off on whether my passport is actually valid.

HOMELAND SECURITY?!?!?!?!?!

Summing up:
1.    Dad is right – always have every document that you might ever need to prove your citizenship certified, in triplicate, ready for inspection at any time.

2.    US Passports and social security cards, issued by the feds, are suspect to those same feds as valid ID, but other easily forged documents are fine.

3.    There’s no central database for US citizens. Apparently, there are now entire suburbs in Virginia and Maryland populated solely by federal employees of defense and security agencies of the 3-letter acronym variety. Their databases are not linked. Cross-communication is strictly prohibited – everything’s classified. They can’t even talk shop at back-to-school night. Makes you wonder how that War on Terror is going.

4.    A federal agency can alter your records at any time, and it’s on you to prove your identity, even when it’s their mistake.

5.    I could just give up trying to fix their error, and start collecting Social Security 8 years early.

6.    I’m beginning to question my existence.

A reader asked me to elucidate what Government 2.0 could look like. Given this round of Federal Government Uh.Oh, maybe a centralized database would prevent hurling citizens down the government wormhole when one arm arbitrarily decides to alter their records. Why do federal workers administering isolated, inscrutable databases whirring away in the bowels of the FBI, IRS, SSA, NSA, HSA, CIA or DOJ have supreme authority to randomly alter the facts of our existence, and then require that we prove them wrong?

On the other hand, while a bureaucratic nightmare to navigate, maybe it’s preferable that the various sprawling arms of the federal government operate in silos. Maybe it’s too Orwellian-scary to contemplate a centrally coordinated federal government. If some hung-over federal technocrat accidentally deleted you, then it would be as if you never existed.

At all.

By Sharon Byrne

I passed by the grunge set hanging out on the brick “art” structure in the 500 block of State, and this is what I got:

“How bout you give me 5 bucks for sitting on my ass?” one calls out.

‘How bout you get a $%*! job!’ I responded. Not very ladylike, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let them bully me. When they started taunting and threatening me, I stopped, and said I am calling the police while taking their picture. One of them hid his face:

Most people don’t want the hassle, understandably. Better to just hurry by, or avoid the area altogether, so the louts win, effectively. They have control of the block.

This continual occupation of the public-art-brick-bench by the lout set is starting to boil. It’s long been a problem, but recent violent incidents, including an assault on a shopkeeper and a guy waving a machete while demanding money, have upset people. Citizens want something done.

Suggestions put forth, with some attempted:

1. Police them out of here. I see Officer Beutel hover over them like clockwork around lunchtime, which curbs some of the nastier behaviors, but the cops can’t legally order them off the brick thing. It’s public art. Maybe not your taste, and maybe you don’t think taxpayer dollars should have funded it. But we have no ordinance against loitering, nor do we have a time limit on public spaces, so sitting there all day is legal. Cops can only make an arrest for illegal activities.
2. Stop them from panhandling. Courts have ruled that anyone can be in a public space with a sign soliciting alms, protected as free speech, even if the sign contains offensive expletives. Strong-arm tactics are not legal, but tourists don’t know that, and few of us would make a citizens’ arrest and press charges.
3. Repurpose it. I called the Chamber of Commerce and the Visitor and Convention Bureau and suggested we make it a temporary tourist kiosk, put out pamphlets, and have some volunteer tourism ambassadors sit there. ‘Er, well, um, we really don’t do that,’ was the awkward response. I even called groups to do voter registration drives there, but they’re only active during elections, and would they need a permit? Scratch that idea. This thing actually was an MTD stop, but because of the lout occupation, MTD drives on by.
4. Put plants there. Preferably cacti.
5. Move it. The artist disagrees. We’re just displacing the problem. It’s happening in front of Yogurtland too, so see, they’ll just find some new spot to take over. Physically, this one’s not going to be easy to move.
6. Citizens reclaim it. If we sit there all day, they can’t, right? Shift sign-up lists, anyone?
7. Get rid of it. The Arts Community is decidedly against this. Can’t the police deal with it? See #1 and 2 for limits on police power.
8. Stop Wall St Greed, and end the disparity between rich and poor to solve homelessness. Sure, we’ll get right on that. No one’s solved it in decades, but let Santa Barbara lead the charge!

To the homeless advocates itching to plead these are mentally ill-drug-addicted-alcoholic-veterans-deserving-of-our-compassion…

…Stop.

They’re 20-somethings traveling the Seattle-Portland-California circuit. They’ve dropped out to hang out and do the sidewalk-sprawl that has driven Haight-Ashbury and Berkeley crazy for years. They pull in generous handouts from State St visitors, with the Bank of Mom and Dad for back-up. Offer them shelter and services, and they’ll laugh at you. They aren’t homeless. They’ve just decided to forgo the expense of lodging for camping freely in your town. They view employment as capitalistic penal servitude, utterly beneath them. They’d rather you keep handing over $5 to them for ‘doing nothing’, extortion for not harassing you.

So this isn’t about whether Santa Barbara has to sacrifice public art or public space to the homeless. The bench occupiers aren’t homeless.

This is about how tolerant we are, as a city, to packs of traveling youth who decide to camp here, take over our public space, and intimidate us for money for today’s grub, booze, and smokes. Some even chase or assault us, as happened recently, when we don’t willingly fork it over. We’ve been far too tolerant, apparently.

We whine that we won’t go downtown anymore because this crowd has taken over. Why did we hand it over to them in the first place? When we avoid State, we are indeed handing it over. Worse, we’re punishing local businesses, people who actually ARE our fellow citizens.

Whose city is it, anyway??? Ours, or the out-of-town youth grunge set’s?

There’s a saying:

Live in New York, but leave before you get too hard.

Live in California, but leave before you get too soft.

We’ve been way too soft on this one, people.

Weekly Column by Sharon Byrne

My column two weeks ago got a lot of feedback. My examples in that piece contrasted unpunished criminal acts with city regulations, fees and fines for minutiae, all leveled against the dutiful citizen. That is selective justice, where the net effect is that we increasingly enforce those in our society who can pay.

When it comes to criminal justice, that’s a state issue, and it’s there I want to focus now.

First, the obvious: law-breakers cost money to arrest, try in court, and incarcerate. Governments are still feeling downward pressure from the recession and shrinking budgets. They must cut expenses, and generate new revenues. Doesn’t take a Harvard MBA to see that criminal justice sucks money like a Hoover, and generates little revenue, a net budget drain.

The two largest states, California and Texas, also have the largest prison populations, and have pursued two very different models.

California was court-mandated to reduce prison overcrowding, and offloaded prisoners to the jails, reducing our prison population from its former high of 170,000 to 134,000. Burglaries and assaults are going up, hitting neighborhoods that don’t normally see crime. The reason is that supposedly victimless-crime offenders, having gotten an early release courtesy of the federal court mandate, often go right back to re-offending. When they are caught and arrested, our jail is full from housing the offloaded prisoners and those awaiting trial for violent offenses. So lesser offenders go right back out onto the streets. Enforcement tries to keep track of the more dangerous ones via electronic monitoring. The LA Times just reported electronic monitoring ankle bracelets have a 45% failure rate, so don’t buy stock in that solution just yet.

However you thought the criminal justice system works, or is supposed to work, it’s just been effectively kneecapped. California put a lot of criminals back out onto the streets, where we encounter them repeatedly.

The ripples are spreading through all aspects of the system. Governor Brown wants to charge for court records for criminal proceedings. The DA is bunching offenses together in the hopes of getting appropriate treatment for a repeat offender in court.

Now, typically California leads the way, so this isn’t good news for states watching their future hurtle towards them from the left coast.

Texas is pursuing a different path, though also in the direction of selective justice.

Checking in with my ex in Texas (don’t go there), it’s still a big law-and-order state, but they have changed up the order of law. Like California, Texas has realized that criminal justice is a costly enterprise, so they followed the lead of Corporate America, and outsourced. I don’t mean they followed the old British model of exporting prisoners offshore (hello, American colonies and Australia). No, they paid corporations to build and run their prisons. On its face, it makes sense. Government is slow, inefficient and expensive. Pay someone else to do it cheaper, faster, better, and sidestep those expensive prison guard unions while you’re at it.

Create a prison boom, boys!

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Weekly Column by Sharon Byrne

I attended the Common Ground briefing Monday on the data from the point-in-time count undertaken in late January. This year, more than 600 volunteers participated countywide, the largest volunteer turnout nationwide, according to the mayor.

The mayor noted “we have perceptions of what we see, but have to put that in context. That’s why it’s important to have the data.”

I completely agree. Otherwise, it’s all anecdotal evidence and hyperbole.

Maybe it was the 2:00 PM timeframe, but while I saw a lot of who’s who in homeless services and government in attendance, I didn’t see as many from the general public.

The survey is a bi-annual HUD requirement to receive federal monies by doing a homeless count, a snapshot at a point in time with all the flaws you can imagine built in. You have to train volunteers to knock on cars with coverings in the windows, and hunt through shrubbery to find people.

The vulnerability index (the detailed survey) aims at getting information needed to prioritize services. It requires getting someone to answer 50+ questions about their health, jail time, and more. So there are limitations to how good this data really is, as it’s collected by volunteers, and relies on self-reporting.

One of the goals is to rank order the most vulnerable at risk of dying prematurely on the street. Even with limitations, some data is better than no data, and at least gives a starting place.

Some statistics of note:

• 1,111 surveys completed countywide, 1,446 total contacts (includes refusals, inability to administer, and duplicates. One guy took the survey 4 times!)
• We found fewer people this time compared to 2011 when we interviewed 1,536, a drop of 4.56%
• In Santa Barbara, 946 were interviewed, representing 64% of the county’s homeless. In 2011, it was 1,040 individuals, about 67%.

Regarding numbers moving up or down: the restorative police got 120+ individuals off the street last year. The Housing Authority reported 181 had been housed, representing 92 households. Is there overlap in these numbers? We counted about 100 less homeless in Santa Barbara from 2011-2013. If there is some overlap between Restorative Police and the Housing Authority, then counting 100 less makes more sense, but also implies we still had an overall increase. If there’s not much overlap, then after moving about 300 people out of homelessness, we picked up an additional 200 from somewhere. We need to figure that out.

Other stats of interest:
Living situations:
Street: 31%
Vehicle – 16%
Shelter – 32%
Transitional – 12% (includes hospital and jail)

Male: 68%
Female: 32%
Veterans: 14%
Youth 25 and under: 10%
Elderly 65+: 9%

Average age: 43
Average time homeless: 6.4 years

COSTS (annual, estimated):
ER visits– 732 at $732,000
Hospital admissions– 685 at $4,110,000
Jail: 72% – $977,900
Prison: 25% – $12,318,750

Rob Fredericks, Deputy Director of the city’s Housing Authority, pointed out that it makes sense to re-orient resources away from the revolving door of prison and jail and use them somewhere more productive.

Reasons for becoming homeless:
Economy / Home loss – 19%
Health – 18.5%
Loss of Job – 26.1%
Military Discharge – 9 1%
Other – 31.3%
Unknown – 4.2%

Alcohol abuse: 51%
Treated for substance abuse? 44%
Mental illness: 56%.
Prescribed meds: 42%
Tobacco: 58%
Illicit Drugs: 45%

Why Santa Barbara?
Climate: 11.5%
Family: 16%
Friends: 6.5%
Not listed: 35%
Services: 4.4%
Note: with self-reported data, there’s always a caution as to veracity.

Funding sources:
Continuum of care: $1.69 million
HOME Investment Partnerships Act Program: $792k
General Fund to shelters: $370k
CDBG – $232k

One of the pragmatic solutions coming out of this effort was the creation of the Housing Placement Work Group. They meet weekly to work down the list of the most vulnerable to move them into housing. Another pragmatic step will be to get the non-profits to the table and figure out how to make some progress working together. Rob Pearson mentioned that Casa Esperanza is looking at moving to a sobriety-based model.

Yes, there’s still a lot of work to do, but this is the most progress I’ve seen on this front.

The presentation should be up soon at www.commongroundsb.org.

Another positive development is the successful Coffee With A Cop program, started by Officer Beutel. This week’s coffee was at the Santa Barbara Roasting Company.

Brinkerhoff neighbor Carl Hightower talks with Beat Officer John Reyes

I can’t say enough good things about the community-based approach now in SBPD. The 4 beat officers, covering Eastside, beachfront, downtown and Westside, are doing a great job as community police, yielding a constant presence and familiar face that knows your neighborhood issues up close and personal. The Restorative Police are very effective at working with the chronically homeless. We’ve seen improvements with focused patrols in the Milpas corridor.

There are always going to be urban problems to be dealt with, but it’s refreshing to see pragmatic people step up and try to fix them with a community-based approach, a positive turn in the road.

Councilman Dale Francisco, Officer Adrian Gutierrez and neighbor Shana Savage.

Milpas on the Move, by Sharon Byrne as featured in today’s Santa Barbara Sentinel

Last weekend, Eastside Beat Officer Adrian Gutierrez did a wonderful thing. He pulled off the First Annual Menudo Festival in Santa Barbara, as a fundraiser for the SBPD Youth Explorers program. Explorers are youth aged 14-20 interested in a career in law enforcement. They have to pass written exams, physicals, and do a lot of community service. The program is run by Beat Officers Beutel, Gutierrez, Reyes and Wojo. Explorers have always been polite and helpful at the Milpas Holiday Parade and neighborhood clean-ups.

Officer Gutierrez with some of the Explorers working the event

For the Menudo Festival, Adrian pulled together 12 stellar Mexican restaurants eager to submit their treasured Menudo recipes in the hopes of winning the title of Best Menudo in Santa Barbara. Here’s the line-up:

Now maybe Menudo is not your thing. I am admittedly a Menudo novice, but have long been intrigued by the particular genius of cooks who take unpalatable, worthless, and discarded meat products, and turn them into something zesty, delicious, and then much coveted. The South has BBQ –stringy, gristly cuts of pork in danger of going off are stewed into something tangy and delicious that people line up to eat. Texas gave us chili –a poor harried camp cook, short on supplies on the trail, has to figure out how to make beans appetizing for yet another night The French made bouillabaisse and the Italians came up with zuppa di pesce for the fish no one particularly wants to buy, but is still edible, and they serve it up in a righteously spicy, fragrant tomato-laden stew. The Hindus have curry, and so on. Everyone was trying to kill a number of birds with one stone: a) take less-than-premium ingredients and stew them into something appetizing, b) feed people on the cheap, and c) conserve scarce food resources.

In other words, if you’ve got nothing else to eat, concoct something incredible out of something people tend to throw away. Cooking up the premium stuff like lobster and filet mignon is easy. Taking tripe, kidneys, or other throw-away parts, and making them into a highly sought-after flavorful dish takes some genius. Consider it a form of early recycling. Nothing gets wasted, people get fed, and it tastes great. What was reviled now becomes a delicacy.

Enter Menudo, Mexico’s much beloved entry onto this global field.

For the bargain price of $10, this gringa novice was going to get to try 12 samples of the best Menudo in the city. Surely this was about the best possible option to venture forth into trying Menudo.

Held at Franklin Elementary, with lively dance music blaring, the crowd was huge, and as diverse as the Menudo itself. Turnout was excellent, picture left.

Turns out everyone has a prized, sacred Menudo recipe, handed down by a revered ancestor. No two Menudos are exactly alike. I was stunned at the differences between the dishes I tasted. It was a wide spectrum: heavy, rich, spicy and complex versions, to clean and simple, but still tasty concoctions.

Pedro Nava about to tuck into a taste of Menudo

Pedro Nava kindly showed me some of the ropes: I learned to sprinkle oregano liberally, and squeeze some lime in. Turns out honeycomb tripe is premium. The broth should be reddish brown in color. Taste it first, and then add some condiments.

Chief Sanchez danced to a little salsa, clearly not encumbered by all the rich Menduo!

I begged each of the restaurants to give me just a small sample – I had 12 of these to get through! But they all loaded me up, and of course, the home-made soft, warm tortillas (which I cannot resist) were not helping my cause. 6 bowls in, I was too full to continue. My partner, a determined Menudo enthusiast who’d arrived in a fairly famished state, was overwhelmed by his 7^th bowl. He carried his 8^th around for a while, nursing it along, but finally gave up the ghost. I was feeling for the judges, one of whom was Chief Sanchez. How’d they make it through 12???

I hugged Adrian as I was leaving. He was one happy beat officer. The First Annual Menudo Festival was a raging success. All the beat cops and Explorers had worked really hard to pull it off. They were tired, but happy.

We’ll definitely do it again next year,” he grinned.

El Bajio, an excellent tacqueria on Milaps St and an Eastside home-team, was judged to be the best Menudo in Santa Barbara. Congratulations to Santos Guzman, and his daughter Alicia!

Milpas on the Move by Sharon Byrne. This one’s dedicated to El-Smurfo.

Last week, I popped in to see the manager at the Chapala Market on Milpas with Pablo, our new Community Service Liaison from the Police Department. The manager complained the green box on his property was causing a lot of problems. It ate up the sidewalk in the parking lot, and people were scattering clothes all over.

What green box? Who put it there?

The manager said some guy turned up with a big metal clothing donations box and said the city permitted him to put it there. He made it sound like a city mandate. Who was the humble Chapala Market manager to argue with the great-and-powerful city? But now it was causing him a lot of grief. Could the city please remove it?

Pablo and I looked at each other. The Chapala Market parking lot is private property. It’s true that our city does extend tremendous reach over what we can do with our private property. You can’t trim certain trees on your property without checking in with Parks and Recreation and the urban arborist. You can’t add a bathroom to your home without getting all your neighbors to sign off. Just one miscreant dissenter can kill off your hoped-for lavatory, I hear.

But the city doesn’t mandate the placement of big green metal clothing collection boxes on your property.

We checked out the box in the parking lot…

I’d never heard of ‘Gaia Movement.” I wrote down the phone number on the box, and told the Chapala Market manager I’d check into getting it removed.

Back at my desk, I looked up Gaia Movement. Their website was feel-good stuff: collect gently used clothing and sell it to thrift stores. The funds go to support local and international environment projects.

A check with the Better Business Bureau revealed GAIA failed the non-profit test because “according to the organization’s audited financial statements for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2007, it spent 1% of its total expenses ($1,140,881) on program service activities.” According to the American Philanthropic Society, a charity watchdog group, Gaia-Movement has an “F” rating.

It took the boxes a while to get out here. They started in the northeast, and spread to Chicago, according to several articles. The clothes and shoes dropped into the boxes are not given away, like most givers would expect. They are sold, depriving local charities of donations of clothing that could help their community. Sometimes the company doesn’t bother with the ‘city permit’ ruse – big metal boxes just mysteriously show up outside unsuspecting businesses.

Gaia Movement recently built a $10m retreat in Mexico. There’s a lot of profit in used clothing, apparently.

Gaia Movement was founded by Tvind, a cultish group in Denmark. The boxes have changed labels a few times: PlanetAid, Campus California, etc, but the scam is worldwide. Tvind’s high-ranking members are under criminal investigation in Europe for embezzlement, tax evasion, and money laundering schemes.

And now their boxes are in Santa Barbara, the home of Earth Day, land of supreme enviro-consciousness.

I called the number on the box, and of course went straight to voice mail, no legitimate non-profit manager handy. I left a message with the box location, and stated they have 24 hours to remove it, or go hunt for it in its new home in the landfill.

(Note to real environmentalists: No, I wasn’t really going to put it in the landfill. That thing is near capacity, I know. But THEY don’t know that. I figured those big metal boxes cost a pretty penny, and they’d rather not lose their investment. If they refused to remove it, I’d have given the clothes to a local charity, and recycled the box for scrap metal. But it didn’t get to that point – read on…)

I got an immediate call back from a guy in Bakersfield. He had no idea how it got there, how they pick sites for placement, or why they lie to businesses by telling them the city permits them to put a box there.
He’s just a driver, and his boss told him to call. Where’s the box, again?

They removed it the next day. This is the second time this has happened on Milpas. Joe from Santa Barbara Kitchens took care of the last mysterious box, using pretty much the same tactic.

I emailed the mayor and city attorney about it. If companies are using the city’s clout to intimidate businesses in a scam, I figured the city ought to know about it.

Net: just because it’s labeled ‘green’ doesn’t automatically mean it’s golden.