Tag Archives: Noozhawk

CALM’s 22nd Annual Celebrity Author’s Luncheon

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CALM-logoCALM’s (Child Abuse Listening Mediation) 22nd Annual Celebrity Authors’ Luncheon last weekend was, as always, a rousing success, thanks in large part to the dynamic duo of Sharon Bifano and Stephanie Ortale, who have co-chaired the event every year since its inception in 1987.

Board president Meredith Scott gave a lovely tribute to retiring executive director Anna M. Kokotovic, PhD. That, along with a moving video presentation produced by Surf Media Communications, brought the work that CALM does in the community to the forefront of the luncheon–to prevent, assess, and treat child abuse by providing comprehensive, services for children and their families–inspiring the approximately 500 supporters at the luncheon to dig deep into their pockets to help abused children.

Retired KEYT anchor Debby Davison and Borders Books’ Kate Schwab interviewed an interesting panel of authors: Lisa See (Peony in Love), Andrew Klavan (Damnation Street), Deborah Rodriguez (Kabul Beauty School) and Gary David Goldberg (Sit, Ubu, Sit).

See’s book follows the lives of two young Chinese women in remote 19th century China. Her comparison of the tortures of female foot binding to the “plastic boobs” of today’s women (“they’re both painful things done to women as status symbols for men”) had the mostly female crowd in stitches.

When asked about the vivid characters he creates, Klavan said, “I really enjoy the fact that people are immensely different.” Another vivid character was Rodriguez herself, a hairdresser from Michigan who went to Afghanistan as a relief worker and ended up training Afghan women to do modern beauty treatments. “I mean Taliban are but this perm was really bad too,” said Rodriguez, describing the woman who inspired her to start the Kabul Beauty School.

“I couldn’t believe that you could make a living doing what I got to do,” said (Family Ties and (Spin City creator Goldberg, who spoke about writing a memoir about his life as a television writer/producer.

They joined the ranks of more than 70 authors interviewed over the years, including Sue Grafton, Jane Russell, Barnaby Conrad, Michael Crichton, Julia Child, Ray Bradbury, Fanny Flagg, Maria Shriver and Jonathan Winters.

In addition to purchasing books by the interviewed authors (with a portion of the proceeds going to CALM), authors Mindy Bingham, Polly Bookwalter, Joe Bruzzese, Jack Canfield, Kathryn Cushman, William Davis, Karen Finell, David Gersh, Beverly Jackson, Susan Jorgensen, Jennie Nash, Katie Nuanes, Sissy Taran and Flavia Weedn were also on hand to sign books and donate part of the proceeds to CALM.

For more information about CALM, visit www.calm4kids.org.

Originally published in Noozhawk on March 12, 2008.

Leslie Dinaberg Sits Down With Renee Grubb

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Renee Grubb

Renee Grubb

When Renee Grubb and Ed Edick founded Village Properties in 1996, they strove to create a community-conscious real estate agency. Part of that dedication to Santa Barbara involved creating the Teacher’s Fund, a nonprofit that makes it easy for teachers to get much-needed financial support for schools. Now Grubb is paying that community-minded spirit forward even further. As the new chair of the Santa Barbara Chamber of Commerce, she has already begun raising scholarship money for at-risk students.

LD: Let’s start with real estate. How is the market right now? Is it a good time to buy?

RG: Well the market is good. I’ve been busy because the number of sales has increased, but this in the last two and a half weeks. … One of our agents yesterday in the meeting gave a number of how many properties went this year so far, and that’s back from January, and three quarters of them went in the last two and a half weeks. So all of the sellers and the buyers who have been, rightly so, a little nervous about the market, are definitely getting off of that and making offers.

LD: So does that mean it’s a good time to buy right now because prices are lower?

RG: Yes. There are deals and the time to buy is when somebody isn’t already making an offer on a property or something, A lot of people they say, “Oh I want to go back and see it three or four times,” and then by the time they go back and see it the third or fourth time there’s either an offer on it or it’s gone. But we’re seeing more multiple offers. There was a property on Sea Ranch, just outside of Hope Ranch. They put it on the market for $1,990,000. It was kind of a fixer and it had something like 12 offers. It went for $300,000 over the asking. I was like what was that all about. We’re starting to see some of that happening again.

LD: Have you always worked in real estate?

RG: No. Before I got into real estate I was pretty much just raising my children but before that I was in the medical industry. I was actually an assistant for an ophthalmologist.

LD: How did you come to start the Teacher’s Fund? I always thought you must have been a teacher before you went into real estate.

RG: Not me, but teachers can make the best real estate agents because they’re already attuned to service and caring … The Teacher’s Fund started in 2002. When we started Village we made a decision that we were going to pretty much support children and children’s causes because you know, you get so many requests. …What happened was we were doling out money for this and that $50 for that and $500 for that … and then one day we hired a PR person. It was really her idea. Her son had come home from kindergarten and he had this long list of things that he had to bring to school. So she said to this teacher … “How do kids bring all of this if their parents can’t afford it?” The teacher said, “Well I make sure every child has the same. I buy it.” So that’s where the idea came from.

… We started out doing just pretty much South County elementary schools, kindergarten through sixth grade, and we were being able to manage that but we weren’t getting very many donations. We did a couple of fundraisers but then Orfalea Family Foundation actually saw in the South Coast Beacon, that wonderful editorial on the Teacher’s Fund, and they called us and they said “Hey we’re interested in that.” I will be forever grateful for that.

LD: That’s wonderful that Orfalea is working with you.

RG: Since Orfalea came aboard we have gone countywide and we’ve gone to junior high, so we are really covering a lot of classrooms … As of this year, I didn’t count the last month, but we have funded $450,000 to 1,090 classrooms since we started and we’ll definitely hit the $500,000 mark this year.

LD: You’re chairing the Chamber of Commerce too.

RG: I’ve been on the board for four years … a lot of people come and ask for endorsements. … This year we are trying to be supportive of the city with the green awareness we’re trying to inform business people so that they are aware of the different ways that they can do that within their businesses and their homes. So we’re kind of pushing that a little bit, I am also trying to support as many of the new businesses in town as possible.

At my installation on January 31st, we decided that we were going to try to raise some funds for at-risk students. The scholarship is called “Chance for Change,” and we set it up with the Santa Barbara Scholarship Foundation, … it’s basically for students … who choose the better path, rather than going into a gang. … We had a speaker, we had a young man who, his brother is in jail and his dad left him when they were kids, you know pretty typical thing, he was raised by his mom and his sister… so he’s being sent through school by a scholarship and he came and spoke.

We had decided that we would try to raise $20,000, which would send five young people to City College for two years. We talked about it and had this young man speak and raised $114,000 that night.

…. It’s just been amazing. It was 250 people in the room and we had donations from as high as $20,000 down to $100, and it felt like almost everybody in the room gave something. It was great. It was an amazing evening.

LD: He must be a great speaker.

RG: I’m telling you, he was so sincere and you knew and his mom was there. It was very exciting. They were just like in amazement that we were able to do that in one evening, but that just shows the generosity in this town.

LD: If you could be invisible anywhere in Santa Barbara, where would you go and what would you do?

RG: Well this is going to sound silly, but I love movies and if I see movies a year in a theatre I’m lucky, so I would love to be able to go to the movies and not have to worry about my cell phone and in the middle day. I would love to do that. That would be just a real treat for me.

Vital Stats: Renee Grubb

Born: January 22, Long Beach, CA

Family: Husband Ed, Daughters Erin and Natalie, and grandchildren Sydney (6), Kelsey (3), Hope (2) and Luke (18 months)

Civic Involvement: Chair of Chamber of Commerce, Founder of the Teacher’s Fund, Montecito Union Education Foundation, Business and Technology Awards Committee, California Association of Realtors Director, Budget and Finance Committee for Santa Barbara Association of Realtors, City of Santa Barbara Infrastructure Financing Task Force.

Professional Accomplishments: Co-Founder and Owner of Village Properties, has sold real estate in Santa Barbara since 1983.

Little-Known Fact: “My husband and I have been married 37 years and we’ve lived in 32 homes. So we fixed and flipped. And I’ve been in my current house ten years, so you can imagine how many houses we lived in.”

Originally published in Noozhawk on March 10, 2008.

American Riviera Wine Auction to Benefit Direct Relief International

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Foxen Winery’s Bill Wathen and Dick Dore will be honored with the “Santa Barbara Vintners’ Foundation Humanitarian Award” at their biannual 2008 American Riviera Wine Auction weekend, March 14 and 15, with all proceeds benefiting Direct Relief International.

John Cleese will be presented with the “Santa Barbara Vintners’ Foundation Wine Diplomat Award,” and Andrew Firestone will host the event. Firestone, who will soon marry Serbian model Ivana Bozilovic, has also asked his friends to make donations to Direct Relief International in lieu of gifts.

The two-day event will include a weekend of wine tasting and elegant dining involving Santa Barbara County’s finest winemakers and chefs, in addition to highlighting the humanitarian work being done by Direct Relief International. Both nights will feature wine tasting and auctions featuring wine lots and winery parties at renowned local vineyards.

The weekend starts Friday night with “Viva Vino,” featuring entertainment from Cuban band Somas Son and salsa dancing at the Direct Relief International Warehouse in Goleta. Hungry Cat, Brothers at Mattie’s Tavern, and Seagrass will provide food, with wine tasting provided by eight Santa Barbara Vintners.

Saturday night is the black-tie gala “Wine, Dine and all that Jazz!” at the Four Seasons Biltmore. It will include a gourmet dinner created by nationally renowned chef Suzanne Goin, paired with an array of the region’s award winning wines, and entertainment provided by the Nate Birkey Jazz Group and a live auction led by celebrity auctioneer Ursula Hermacinski.

The American Riviera Wine Auction is part of an eight-year collaboration between Direct Relief International and Santa Barbara’s wine makers. This partnership has helped raise $1 million for the efforts of Direct Relief International, a Santa Barbara-based nonprofit organization focused on improving the quality of life by bringing critically needed medicines and supplies to local healthcare providers worldwide. Recently, Direct Relief International played an integral role in providing aid to victims of the San Diego Wildfires, Cyclone Sidr in Bangladesh, and victims of the storms which ravaged the Southeast United States and took the lives of 52 people just weeks ago.

Tickets for Friday, March 14th can still be purchased by contacting Mann Productions at Mann.Productions@sbcglobal.net or by calling 323 314 7000. Tickets for Saturday, March 15th are sold out (wait list only).

Originally published in Noozhawk on March 3, 2008.

Backstory: Behind the Scenes of “Citizen McCaw”

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Citizen McCawThe implosion of the Santa Barbara News-Press newsroom 18 months ago sparked a labor battle, which led to the departure of dozens of staffers, the creation of a union, and a swarm of legal actions. Now the story is reaching the big screen, with the March 7th world premiere of Citizen McCaw, a full-length documentary examination of the past year and a half at the local daily and its effect on the community.

For the film’s co-producers–Rod Lathim, Charles Minsky, Peter Seaman and Sam Tyler, all locals–the project has been a time-consuming, pro bono, labor of love.

Asked what made them decide the events at the News-Press would make a good topic for a documentary, Tyler said, “It’s a great story. … You have a newspaper, you have a community, you have the courts, you have national voices, national interests, and they are all involved in this really bizarre and very, very unusual meltdown of a hometown daily paper. … You have a wealthy woman. You have her boyfriend, you have people quitting into an uncertain job market, you have community protesters, and you have judges and lawyers. I mean it’s just a wild, crazy scene, and all of the elements of a really interesting story.”

It was Tyler, the producer of documentaries such as In Search of Excellence and Good to Great, who got the ball rolling.

“He called me up one day and we had coffee and he mentioned it was a shame what was going on with the News-Press and wouldn’t it be great if we made a documentary about it? I could tell he was passionate about it, and it turned out, so was I,” said Minsky, director of photography for films such as Pretty Woman and The Producers. “What has happened to the News-Press hit me hard. I like getting up and reading the paper every morning and we had a very good paper here, before all this happened. So I guess I was a little mad as well, and wanted to find out what everyone else thought about our situation.”

“You can’t write this stuff. … If you made up all this stuff, people would go ‘Oh, c’mon, you’re trying too hard to come up with something,'” said Lathim, a fourth generation Santa Barbara native who founded Access Theatre and spearheaded development of the Marjorie Luke Theatre. “They are writing the story. It’s not our story, although we are a part of it because we live here. … Another reason why we’re doing it is that whether we want to be part of the story or not, we are because we’re Santa Barbara residents. We care about our community. We want to know what the news is and we want to make sure that people are treated fairly and that we can trust our news and get our news in places where it’s trustworthy.”

“Personally, I got angry every time I went to the end of my driveway here in Carpinteria and picked up my News-Press. I’d been doing that every morning for the last 15 years and, like a lot of people in Santa Barbara, got very attached to the paper and its writers. Suddenly everything changed. Where’d Barney Brantingham go? John Zant? Melinda Burns? What the hell happened to the paper I used to know?” said Seaman, writer of films such as Shrek the Third and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. “So that’s where the interest started for me. Plus I knew Sam Tyler and Rod Lathim and Chuck Minsky, and their own interest in doing the film fed mine.”

The story is told in a timeline, started with Thomas Storke and the history of the News-Press, and then on through Wendy McCaw’s reign. “What’s happened here in Santa Barbara is a cautionary tale for comparable issues potentially around the country,” said Tyler. “It hasn’t exploded this way anywhere else, When Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal, ” there wasn’t one-hundredth of the smoke around there that there is here in this inferno around Santa Barbara. They’re comparable issues.”

While the documentarians are clearly passionate about their subject, “we don’t insert ourselves in this film. We never intended to and we didn’t,” said Lathim. “The story is told onscreen by the people involved in the story. Our role in this really is to piece all the pieces of the puzzle together.”

Those pieces include interviews with national leaders in journalism, such as Washington Post Executive editor Ben Bradlee, former NBC News reporter Sander Vanocur, and Harvard’s Alex Jones. The ex-News-Press staffers are represented, as is McCaw, although not willingly.

“She refused half a dozen requests for interviews, had her lawyer send us four nasty letters and subpoenaed our footage,” said Tyler. With that caveat, the filmmakers insist her point-of-view is still represented. “I think she’s probably in it six times herself, her own words in black and white, put fairly up in context representing her point of view,” he said. “She actually appears speaking a couple of times, and her lawyers are in two or three times. So she has at least a dozen presentations of her point of view in this film, directly countering the other. Like Jerry Roberts said, ‘I quit because of ethics,’ Wendy McCaw said, ‘No he didn’t. That’s a lot of bull.’ What goes on here is the same thing that goes on in newsrooms everywhere. I mean viewers make up their own minds.”

Originally published in Noozhawk on March 1, 2008.

Noozhawk Talks: Leslie Dinaberg sits down with Nancy Harter

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Nancy Harter, courtesy photo

Nancy Harter, courtesy photo

After eight years of service of service on the Santa Barbara School Board, Nancy Harter has earned some reflection time. She talks about what it was like to sit on the board, and what she has planned for the future.

Leslie Dinaberg: How did you get interested in running for school board?

Nancy Harter: In March of 2000 when the secondary bond (a $67 million bond to
improve the infrastructure and modernization of aging campuses)
was on the ballot, Irene Falzone and I co-chaired the campaign. She was a
Santa Barbara High parent at the time; I was a Dos Pueblos parent. Once I got
through that election I started to become a regular at board meetings, then I
decided to run in November.

LD: Are your kids out of the school system now?

NH: Yes, long since. People run who don’t currently have kids in the system and
I think that they can do a terrific job, but for me, a big part of being on the school
board was having that network and knowing at least a couple of staff members
on every single campus and on some campuses knowing a lot of the staff
members, so when issues would come up you had people to call, people to
network with and find out what would be the impact would be on the school.

LD: I think you get less agenda-driven information if you’re calling them as
someone that you’ve known for a while, as opposed to as a board
member.

NH: Right, for me it made a big difference. Actually one of my favorite columns of
yours was the one about going to the PTA meetings because that’s what
happens, you start going to the PTA meetings, you take on more and more
responsibility, the next thing you know you’re the president and then low and
behold, the next thing you know you’re running for school board.

LD: The whole thing has been interesting to me because I started covering
school issues before my son was in school. My perspective definitely changed
having been involved on the inside.

NH: Yes, your perspective changes. You personally have a lot more invested and
there’s just that unbelievable personal connection.

LD: That probably gives you a good insight too.

NH: I think it did. My kids attended the Goleta Elementary Schools but for
secondary, I was a secondary parent from 1992 until 2005, so for 13
years.

LD: Were you ready to be done?

NH: I wouldn’t say that, because there are still issues simmering on the stove
that I would really like to be a part of but, you know, better to leave a day early
than a day late was how I felt about it. I really was not anxious to do another
campaign. Sort of the upside and the downside of school boards in Santa
Barbara is that really good people always run, but it’s an election. You can’t just
assume that you’ll be able to retain your seat without running a
campaign.

LD: What were some of the highlights of your school board experience?

NH: … A big part of it was building relationships, creating a bigger network,
creating relationships with other agencies. The City of Santa Barbara for
instance, we’ve got a great relationship with them now and it was virtually non-
existent when I came on to the board.

… Another big piece for me was the whole paying it forward sort of piece. When I
came on to the board it was a great board-Fred Rifkin, Claire Van Blaricum,
Bob Noel, Steve Forsell-and Claire really helped me with my campaign and
mentored me as a new board member. I took that responsibility really seriously,
so there wasn’t a single election cycle that went by in my eight years where I
didn’t encourage somebody to run, help them with their campaign and then help
them get started on the board.

LD: Are you going to stay involved in local politics or local school issues?

NH: For me it’s about educational policy. I’m not interested in running for
anything else, I’m really happy to be involved in the nonprofit world and efforts
surrounding the schools but I don’t think I’ll ever run for anything again. (Laughs)
It’s a really different skill set to put yourself out there and sell yourself to
somebody with that tape running in your head of your mother saying that the
least interesting topic of conversation is yourself, it’s just hard to put yourself out
there. But I find it very easy to work with other people and collaborate with other
people over issues to come to resolution. I’m not a natural born campaigner,
that’s for sure.

LD: When we scheduled this interview I thought it would be completely non-
controversial, but I did read your op-ed piece in Noozhawk and I have to ask you
about the Bob Noel editorial. Why did you finally write that?

NH: You know, I’m not interested in rehashing it. I stand by what I said and I
don’t need to keep beating the drum. It really had to do with calling for the
superintendent’s resignation and then not participating in the process. … it was
more about the method than about the message.

LD: Is there anything you wish you would have said or done differently in
retrospect?

NH: … I’m not a regretful person, so I would say no. I think I worked really hard
to keep a high level of discourse, and that was the kind of board that I came on
to, and I think I succeeded.

LD: So what’s next?

NH: I have always been involved in the nonprofit world and I’m taking on some
new nonprofit responsibilities and I would just really like to pour myself into that in
the short term and then see how things play out. There’s no grand plan in place.
You acquire this incredible body of knowledge about educational policy and then
you go off the board and it’s like, so now where do I take this? So hopefully there
will be some opportunities that allow me to tap into that expertise, but I don’t
know what they are yet.

LD: Do you have any advice for anyone considering local public office?

NH: I think a lot of people don’t run because they think that as a school board
member that you have some sort of legacy building obligation, that somehow you
need to create some new program or accomplish some grand achievement and I
really think that that is a mistake. I think that you can build a legacy by coming
really well prepared to every single school board meeting, by talking to your
friends and neighbors about issues and getting different opinions. I don’t think it
has to be something physical left behind when you’re done with your
term.

I think that there are a lot of really smart capable people out there who have a
really passionate interest in schools and then talk themselves out of it. And we’re
lucky in this area in Santa Barbara and in all of our surrounding school districts;
there are a lot of really smart people who are willing to run for school board. But
you know I don’t think that people should be, certainly they shouldn’t be scared
away by the issues. You know you’re involved in group think, you’re problem
solving with other people, the burden isn’t solely on you. But also, I think people
get scared away when they read in the paper about the occasional inflammatory
public comment and that’s not every board meeting.

LD: I would imagine you would have to get used to that somewhat too, not that it
would ever become easy.

NH: Well if you have a good internal compass you know which public comments
to pay attention and to take to heart, and you know which to just flip the switch
and just not pay any attention.

… I think we’re lucky, especially in the secondary district, we’re one of the few
areas where everybody takes advantage of the public school system with a
handful of exceptions and I think the secondary is one of those school districts
where you probably have the biggest group of haves and have nots who come
together every school day. And that doesn’t happen in a lot of communities.

… When you have a really bad night at a school board meeting, the best antidote
is to get to a school campus some time before the end of the week because the
energy is just unbelievable on any of the campuses. I really like it.

Vital Stats: Nancy Harter

Born: San Francisco, April 29, 1953

Family: Husband Larry; daughter Anne, age 28; son Jake, age 25; and daughter
Julia age 21.

Civic Involvement: Santa Barbara School Board; Santa Barbara Education
Foundation; Future leaders of America, Berkeley Alumni Association’s
Achievement Award Program; joining the Planned Parenthood Action Fund in
January.

Professional Accomplishments: Eight years on the Santa Barbara School Board;
Masters Degree in English, taught freshman English at the University of
Nebraska; has a law degree but never practiced law. “My oldest was born my
third year of law school, so my involvement in the world has almost always been
nonprofits.”

Best Book You’ve Read Recently: Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of
Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, by Tracy Kidder, but I
usually read fiction.

Originally published in Noozhawk on February 29, 2008.

Leslie Dinaberg Sits Down With Chris Mkpado

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“Saving the world, one piece of trash at a time,” is the motto for Textile Waste Solutions. Since Christopher Mkpado founded the company in 1995, he has quietly recycled tens of millions of pounds of textiles that would have otherwise ended up in our local landfill.

Leslie Dinaberg: Tell me about Textile Waste Solutions (http://www.twaste.com/).

Chris Mkpado: Basically … it is a new kind of trash company. The difference between what we do and what the regular trash companies do, the big difference, is they take trash from homes or from wherever they pick it up, take it straight to the landfill and bury it. We have a different idea. The idea is to take this specialized stuff that is recyclable and recycle it so that it doesn’t go into the landfill.

Textile waste is about eight percent of our total waste; it’s a very valuable number in the sense that 95 to 98 percent of textiles are recyclable. The economic benefit from that is huge. It outweighs other recyclables. … Let’s take our immediate environment, Santa Barbara County. The need for industrial rags in Santa Barbara County is huge. Santa Barbara County will spend up to $1 million every year on rags.

LD: Wow. That’s a lot of money.

CM: So here you have $1 million of product that is used in this county that used to come from outside of the county. The raw material was right here, but in the past it was buried in the landfill. You lose on tax revenue when you do that too. … When a contractor … picks up a bag of rags or a box of rags, he pays sales tax, right? Where does that sales tax end up? It goes back to Orange County or San Diego or wherever. Basically it goes out of the county. So look at the $1 million industry that the county must pay on rags, $75,000 of sales tax is lost.

LD: My speculation is that most people probably don’t realize that the product is actually available locally. They’re probably patting themselves on the back thinking, “Oh, this is recycled.”

CM: You’re correct. We’re very happy to hear about the green movement now and all this excitement that people are getting into, but thing is we’ve got to do it and do it right. … We want to do it where we can reap the most economic advantage. That’s what it’s all about.

… When I started, my business was export-based … now I realize there is this local need for this product. We can serve this market in this county. The county will be making extra tax dollars.

LD: How did you start this business?

CM: We started when I came to this country (He’s originally from Cameroon). My wife Sharol (Mulder) and I were married in Korea. We came to Santa Barbara, her hometown, when she was pregnant with our son Christian (now 15). … I was looking for what I could do and I have a background in export. … So I decided I would start looking for things that I could export.

LD: And you started out sending used clothes to third world countries?

CM: Jim DePew (who lived in Montecito and owned thrift stores all over) had been trying to export used clothing and failed. …. That’s how it all got started.

… But he couldn’t supply us the quantity we needed. So then I started looking into how else can I get extra supplies. And I found that there are thrift stores all over the place, right here where I live. So then I decided to approach all these thrift stores and introduced myself. Some of them were kind of lukewarm about the whole idea. Some of them embraced the idea right away, Alpha Thrift Store being one of them. And so we … started taking from thrift stores and decided hey, we need a warehouse, we need this, we need that, and that’s how the whole thing came about.

LD: So at that point in time, your goal was to find stuff that was reusable?

CM: Right.

LD: And assuming there was stuff that wasn’t reusable, was that then being recycled at that point or was that being thrown away?

CM: At that time it was being thrown away. … About 30 percent of everything at that time went to the dump.

… When the idea of the industrial rags came, I said why not. If we can recover 30 percent of this material we turn over it’s going to balance what we’re losing on export. And that’s why we are where we are today.

LD: And now all your materials come straight from thrift stores.

CM: That’s true. … Thrift stores dispose of about 80 percent of all donations. … At Alpha Thrift Store, for example, … every week we are there with a seven-ton truck.

LD: Wow.

CM: Yes, every week seven tons. And that’s one store.

LD: Now I know the city of Santa Barbara has started to buy your product through Buena Tools, and you’ve got the city of Santa Maria on board.

CM: Yes, actually we’ve gotten the most help from the city of Santa Maria. The city of Santa Maria took leadership from day one.

LD: Can you talk a little bit about why textile recycling is so low impact compared to other types of recycling?

CM: Textile recycling is the only recyclable that does not consume a lot of energy to be able to develop it for reuse. It is the only recyclable that you may not need water to make it useable. You don’t need any chemicals to recycle textiles, compared to say plastics, where you need tons of powerful chemicals to recycle plastic. Not that I’m against that, but I’m trying to point out the advantages of recycling textiles. Textiles use the least amount of resources. …. after recycling about three million pounds of textiles, my electric bill every year is under $1,000.

LD: That’s phenomenal.

CM: That’s the energy consumption to recycle about three million pounds. Go recycle three million pounds of cans and see how much you pay in your electricity bill. … You just need the machine to compress it, a little bit of wire, and send it out. … The beauty of this whole thing is that right now as we speak there is a need for industrial rags. This product is going to come from somewhere.

Take the city of Santa Barbara for example, the city was bringing in close to 80,000 pounds a year of rags. And that 80,000 pounds went into the landfill. It’s a disgrace. And now by changing the way things are done, the city has prevented an extra 80,000 pounds from going into the landfill, without even hiring anybody to do the job. I mean how much would it cost the city to divert so much waste?

LD: Your enthusiasm is so infectious. What do you like do when you’re not working?

CM: I like to coach AYSO soccer, that’s my passion. … I can’t wait for the next soccer season.

Vital Stats: Chris Mkpado

Born: Cameroon, West Africa; July 29, 1963

Family: Wife Sharol Mulder; children Christian, 15, Alexandra, 10, and Kele, 10

Civic Involvement: Coaching AYSO soccer; Santa Barbara County Foster Parents Association (http://www.fosterfamilysupport.org/index.htm)

Professional Accomplishments: Worked in the international export business throughout Asia, creating markets in China, Africa, the Philippines, and the former Soviet Union, among others; owner and founder of Textile Waste Solutions

Little-Known Facts: Chris’s middle name is Udodi, which means “peace.” Chris and Sharol adopted their daughter Alex through the foster care system.

 

Originally published in Noozhawk on February 18, 2008.

Grief Book Benefits Hospice and the Temple

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The sun shined on Hospice of Santa Barbara and Congregation B’nai B’r61DjnDCK+3L-1._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_ith Sunday afternoon at a special event honoring the publication of Sissy Taran’s new book, The Sun Will Shine Again: Life Lessons from a Year of Grieving, (www.thesunwillshineagain.com) with all proceeds going to support the two organizations.

“This is the first time in history of Hospice of Santa Barbara that we’ve ever sponsored a book,” said Executive Director Gail Rink, who interviewed Taran and Rabbi Steve Cohen about their experiences working together. Taran and Rabbi Cohen wrote the book–which documents Taran’s first year of grieving the death of her husband Bernie–through a series of conversations. They met once a week for seven months, primarily at the Breakwater Restaurant, to share the journey Sissy went through.

Rabbi Cohen said he viewed the project as a unique opportunity to learn more about the grief process. He was with the Taran family when they learned of Bernie’s cancer diagnosis, and with them shortly afterward when he passed away. “It was a wonderful but very short-lived period of intimacy,” which he welcomed the opportunity to extend through collaboration on the book project.

He initially decided to become a rabbi because it was important to him to be close to people in key moments of their lives, and saw this project as a rare opportunity for that type of closeness.

One of the most important lessons he learned was that there is not a linear progression from devastation to happiness, Rabbi Cohen said.

“We walk it all differently, but it’s our individual walk. So this, somehow, and I don’t know why, this book was burning within me. Somehow. Because I’ve never written and if I had to sit down at a computer I still wouldn’t have written a book,” said Taran, who taped all of her sessions with Rabbi Cohen and pieced together the book from the transcripts, with the help of editor Laurie Deans Medjuck. “We ended up throwing out about 75 percent of it,” said Taran.

Even though she was, and still is grieving, Taran said she doesn’t feel sorry for herself. “How can you have pity for yourself when you have someone who’s there for you with so much love,” she said of her collaboration with Rabbi Cohen.

“I don’t know how I or Sissy or any of us would have faced this journey alone,” said

Congresswoman Lois Capps, who was widowed in 1997. “You’ve created a beautiful thing out of most deep and personal pain. What a lesson and what a gift!”

Through writing this book I found something within me that wanted to help myself and other people, said Taran. “Today’s benefit is my way of giving back to two organizations close to my heart.”

Originally published in Noozhawk on February 12, 2008.

Behind the Scenes at the Election Office

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If the seventh and eighth grade students from Anacapa School are any kind of a barometer, then, as the national media predicts, young people are engaged in this presidential election with an extraordinary level of interest.

County Clerk, Recorder and Assessor Joe Holland took the students on a behind-the-scenes tour of the election office on Thursday to demonstrate what happens to the 35,000 absentee ballots that had already been received by that day (he expects that 50,000 of the 183,000 Santa Barbara County registered voters will have voted by mail by election day).

With the increasing numbers of people that vote by mail, “election day is actually 29 days long now,” Holland explained to founding headmaster Gordon Sichi’s American History and Society class.

The first step in the envelope’s journey to being counted is the signature on the outside, explained Holland. “There’s a bar code on there that tells us who you are. So when we receive that envelope back, we send it through a machine that’s called an ASR, automatic signature recognition machine. It goes through and compares your signature with the signature that we have on file for you with your voter registration card, and if it matches then it accepts it. If it doesn’t match, like for me, I’m Joseph E. Holland, if I leave out the ‘E’ it won’t match. So then what we do with the ones that don’t match, we’ll actually have a person pull that up, oh look at it’s the same J and the S and the PH, and accept it. But this machine actually accepts about 80 percent of all the envelopes that are returned,” he said.

If someone sends in an envelope without a signature, the elections office tries to contact him or her in order to have him or her sign the ballot so that it can be counted. Once the signatures are verified, the next step is to open the envelopes. The eighth grade students who had taken the elections office tour the year before were impressed to see that a new automated ballot-opening machine had replaced the tables of people with letter openers.

“How much did the new machine cost?” asked a student.

“We’re leasing it right now, but it’ll cost us about $80,000 to buy,” answered Holland.

“Is it worth it?” asked another student.

Holland thinks it is. The machine, which can open about 5,000 envelopes per hour, cuts them open on three sides to make sure that no ballots are stuck inside. Part of the reason for this security measure, he explained, is that in the 1992 primary there was a really close race for county supervisor (between Willy Chamberlin and Bill Wallace, who eventually won the seat). The recount results found that about ten absentee ballots were still in their envelopes and had not been counted. In addition, there are also privacy issues with having the envelopes opened by hand which are avoided by using the machine.

Once the ballots are opened they unfold them and run them through the tallying machines, which are the same machines found in the county’s 215 precincts on Election Day. The results will not be available until 8:05 p.m. on election night. Until then they are then stored on a computer, which is kept under high security. Only two people have access to the machine, and there are cameras all over the office to make sure no one tries to get in the locked room where it is kept, said Holland.

“What about a hacker getting into the results?” asked a student.

That’s a good question, acknowledged Holland, explaining that there is no Internet access allowed in the room, for that very reason. Another new security measure in place for this year is the secretary of state has given a directive to all counties not to modem results over phone lines, as was done in the past. Instead the results will be driven in to the elections office, which in the case of far away precincts like New Cuayama, may delay the tallying of the final results by as much as two and a half hours.

“If the election is really close, we may not know who won in California until all of the absentee ballots are counted,” said Holland. He has up to 29 days to certify the final results of the election.

The students got to vote in a mock election, where Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Franklin D. Roosevelt vied for president. Roosevelt and Kennedy tied with only four votes each, but there were 11 write-in votes, which weren’t officially counted.

“I wrote in Barak Obama,” said eighth grader Emily Welkowitz, who wore an “Obama ’08” bumper sticker on her back.

“I think it’s totally interesting,” said eighth grader Jessica DiMizio. “I like all the new machines and stuff. Last year we saw them opening the absentee envelopes and it was just a bunch of people sitting around a big table.”

Part of the philosophy of Anacapa School is to bring the students into the community, said Sichi. “I can go anywhere in this town with a little notice and people will open up their businesses to us. People in Santa Barbara are so generous.” He planned to follow up the field trip with a lesson on voting machines and a discussion of the controversies surrounding them.

When asked if they talked a lot about the presidential primary in class, eighth grader Haley Yuhas said: “Oh yeah, that’s all we talk about. It’s great. It’s really, really interesting.”

Originally published in Noozhawk on February 5, 2008.

Leslie Dinaberg Sits Down With Sissy Taran

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Author Sissy Taran, courtesy Noozhawk

Author Sissy Taran, courtesy Noozhawk

A combination of laughter and tears helped Sissy Taran survive the sudden death of her husband Bernie, in June 2005. “There aren’t any magical answers to survive the loss of a loved one,” says Sissy, but she hopes to help others by bringing that same bittersweet combination of humor and compassion to her new book.

Leslie Dinaberg: Tell me about The Sun Will Shine Again: Life Lessons from a Year of Grieving? How did you come to write the book?

Sissy Taran: People kept asking me how I was doing, and I had no answer. Usually I’m not shy and I’m not at a loss for words … Finally I came up with, “Well I’ll just write a book.” (laughs) That was my response to “how are you doing” because I didn’t know how to say it any other way.

So (five months after her husband’s death) I’m at the temple…and I see the Rabbi’s door open and I decide I’m going in and I’m going to ask the Rabbi to write a forward for this book that I’m going to write.

Now I have no idea how to write a book. I don’t have the foggiest idea how to write a book. But the door was open, so I went in and I spent an hour with him and when I was through, I said, “Gee, do you want to co-author this book with me?” … Then I went home and I called my neighbor (Laurie Deans Medjuck) to ask her how to write a book. … She ended up being the editor.

…The Rabbi started to interview me, he interviewed me for seven months, an hour and a half, every week, and I spoke, we spoke, 500 pages, 100,000 words. … The whole book came from the transcripts.

LD: Did you feel like in reflecting on what you had said originally that your feelings about some things had changed?

ST: What happened was I didn’t feel like the same person anymore. When we started writing it and making it into the book, it was this person I watched grow. This person I watched from the very beginning of her baby steps. It was almost like taking myself and putting myself over here and being totally removed and watching the growth and how she became empowered and looking at it now, two years later, I still look at her as another human being. It’s fascinating.

LD: How much of how you feel now do you think has to do with the act of writing the book, as opposed to going through the whole grief process?

ST: Well, interesting enough, I didn’t think of the book as being cathartic. It was only after I did it, it was like visiting a therapist, but I didn’t know that.

… We were doing something for somebody else. It wasn’t for me. I was writing this because there was nothing available I felt that people could relate to. So I had a project and I like projects.

LD: One of the things that really struck me was how you always think about someone grieving the big things like holidays, but not how many little day-to-day reminders there are.

ST: I think probably the turning point for me was putting in the new driveway. … when we make a decision we bounce it off of people. … But in the driveway I didn’t do that. In the driveway I shook hands with the person that put in the driveway. I didn’t have a contract, I didn’t bounce it off of anybody and I said, this was it. Now I didn’t know at the time that that was going to be as monumental in my life … when I drive up to the driveway every single day … and I drive up to those rocks. Those are MY rocks. I did that.

… we walk it all differently, but it’s our individual walk. So this, somehow, and I don’t know why, this book was burning within me. Somehow. Because I’ve never written and if I had to sit down at a computer I still wouldn’t have written a book.

LD: But it’s interesting how you came up with a way that worked for you and you were able to do it and it felt comfortable and it reads like you too. And I think there are a lot of levels to relate to it.

ST: The interesting part was that I thought that it would be much more about Bernie and it ended up not being. It started out where the rabbi and I were co-authors. It didn’t turn out that way, because he’d ask a question and I’d spend an hour talking. And then it turned out that it became a legacy to my mother.

So it changed its direction. Bernie was the vehicle for me to experience all of this, but the lessons that I learned as a child and the things and the sayings that she taught me, that was really the bread and butter of it. … Throughout this book you will find quotations from my mother, Buddie Shrier. Some of these I found after she died, written on lists or pieces of paper and collected in a small wooden box. Others were simply things I heard her saying on an everyday basis. The life lessons they express form the foundation of my life and had an enormous influence on how I coped as I mourned the loss of my husband. … So for me, this is really a tribute to her. So as it started it out, where it was co-authored with the rabbi. Didn’t happen. Where it was about Bernie, didn’t happen. It’s my journey.

LD: It’s interesting too that you say that because that’s something that has struck me about people that I’ve known that have lost a spouse. One of my friends lost her husband when she was pretty young and she’s gone to accomplish things professionally that she would never have done if she were married, because she wouldn’t have had to. It’s definitely an example of one of those one door closes another one opens kind of thing. …

ST: That’s right. And it’s a choice, Leslie. It’s really, really a definite choice and you can watch those who do it and you can watch those who don’t do it and I think we’re born genetically with our certain DNA that we’re positive or we’re negative and then you have a choice after that. And my choice and was to do this, to make a difference.

… I’m just along for the ride and wherever it goes, it goes.

LD: Well it’s a great accomplishment to have written a book and have it sitting in front of us here, even if it never goes anywhere else. The fact that you wrote it and you got everything you got out of writing it. And the product itself is a whole other journey.

ST: I did it and I love it. You know it’s interesting, I look at it, and just like they can’t ever take your education away from you, I am always going to be a published author.

Vital Stats: Sissy Taran

Born: Detroit, Michigan, November 26, 1944.

Family: Three grown daughters, Tiffany, Francine and Nadine; Son-in-laws Scott and Zach; and grandchildren Ethan and Blythe.

Civic Involvement: Mentor to two children in the Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse’s Fighting Back program; CALM; Anti-Defamation League; Coalition Against gun Violence; Hadassah; B’nai B’rith Temple.

Professional Accomplishments: Former elementary school teacher who has been honored with outstanding service awards from the Beverly Hills and Santa Barbara PTAs.

Little-Known Fact: “My dad was part of the Kennedy administration and I was raised on a ranch outside of Bakersfield.”

Benefit for Hospice of Santa Barbara and Congregation B’nai B’rith

On Sunday, February 10, from 2 to 4 p.m., Hospice of Santa Barbara’s Executive Director Gail Rink will interview Sissy Taran and Rabbi Steve Cohen about their experiences working on “The Sun Will Shine Again: Life Lessons from a Year of Grieving.” Then refreshments will be served and all book sales from that day will go directly to Hospice and the Temple.

Originally published in Noozhawk on February 3, 2008.

Leslie Dinaberg Sits Down With Joe Holland

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Joseph E. Holland, courtesy photo

Joseph E. Holland, courtesy photo

With three elections scheduled in Santa Barbara County this year–including the presidential primary on February 5–one would think that the county’s election chief Joseph E. Holland has his hands full. The elections office staff of 12 will ramp up to about 1,200 by Election Day. Luckily, he’s used to multi-tasking. County Clerk, Recorder and Assessor since 2003, Holland manages a $13 million budget and four divisions: Assessor, Elections, Recorder and Information Services.

Leslie Dinaberg: This is a big year for you guys with the early presidential primary, the spring primary and then the presidential election. What does that mean for your office in terms of work?

Joe Holland: …Most people don’t understand how complicated elections really are, which is good, that’s what we strive for. People want to come in, vote their ballot and have their ballot counted…that’s all that they need to worry about or need to think about. But behind the scenes, it starts with voter registration. When you register to vote, you, of course, register by your address and that determines what type of ballot you will have. What jurisdiction you are in. Are you in the city of Santa Barbara, the Goleta Water District, what congressional district are you in? It’s a lot of work just making sure that every one of the 183,000 registered voters gets the proper ballot on election day…that’s where the first level of complexity starts.

Then…you’re designing the ballots…we handle candidate filing. You’re making sure that all the candidates are properly signed up for their office …we have to hire poll workers, we have to calibrate voting machines, we have to deliver polling supplies, and we have to train poll workers…We have 215 precincts at the polling places and so…there’s nine hundred to 1,000 poll workers you have to hire across the county.

LD: Do you try to get the same people for each of the three elections?

JH: Yes we try to and a lot of them will work for all three elections. You know that’s quite a challenge … with these three major elections in 2008 it means we have to do all this work three times and that’s the first time we’ve ever had to do that…. Three major, statewide elections in one calendar year, I think this is the first time in history that’s ever happened…

LD: That’s a big job.

JH: …Most people don’t understand, but we send out ballots 60 days before the election to overseas voters in the military, so really although everybody knows the election is February 5th, it really started for us December 5th.

LD: Speaking of absentee ballots, how many permanent absentee voters are there?

JH: There are 90,000. …

LD: Are there any cost savings when people vote by mail?

JH: No, because we’re running two elections. We’re actually running a poll-based election and a mail ballot election. As long as we’re doing both, it really isn’t saving us any money because I still have 215 precincts and I still have to hire poll workers for all of those precincts. So it really doesn’t save money, it actually costs more money, but it does lead to a higher voter turnout because it makes voting easier.

LD: What is the rate of return of people that register to vote by mail versus the other registered voters?

JH: …If you look on average over the last 13 countywide elections…75 percent of people who receive a ballot in the mail return their ballot. For those people that vote at the polls, on average, 50 percent return. …The more people I can get to vote by mail the higher turnout I’m going to have…the turnout in Santa Barbara County has been going up.

LD: That’s good. I would assume that the presidential election years are typically a much better turnout than the off years.

JH: Yeah. In November 2004 we had an 80.5 percent turnout in Santa Barbara County. That was the highest turnout since 1976. … For this primary election, here we are as of January 11th, we’ve had the Iowa Caucus and the New Hampshire primary and it looks like both the Democratic and Republican contests are still very much undecided, wide open.

In March 2004 we had a 55 percent turnout for the presidential primary, but it was pretty much decided by March 2004 who was going to be the nominee for both major parties.

LD: It will be interesting to see how long it takes to come to a consensus.

JH: This ballot doesn’t have senate, congress, state legislature, all that March 2004 did have. So what going to happen on February 5th? My guess is it’s going to be a very big turnout….I’m going to guess it’s definitely going to be higher than 55 percent. It probably won’t be as high as 80 percent but it might approach 70 percent.

LD: When you’re in your crunch time, do you have deputies in the other areas you’re responsible for, that you can delegate more stuff when there’s an election going on?

JH: Yes. I have excellent staff…they do a great job so I spend my time doing this kind of stuff (interviews). And I sit in meetings and have them report to me and make decisions.

You know what’s fun? On Election Day, I actually drive around to all the various precincts, check on all the poll workers, and that’s a lot of fun.

LD: I would imagine you probably have some poll workers that have been doing it for years.

JH: Oh yeah. It’s great to go see them every Election Day. What I like about elections is they are so positive. People are there because they want to be there. Because they want to vote because they want to make a difference. And even the poll workers, they are there because they want to be part of this making a difference, and it’s pretty exciting.

LD: It’s fun. We always like to take our son, who is 8. He loves to go and get the little sticker.

JH: You know that’s the one thing about vote by mail, you don’t get the sticker. I love those stickers.

LD: I love the efficiency of it and the convenience of voting by mail, but there’s something kind of nice about going in there and casting your vote.

JH: I’m not vote by mail, so I vote at the polls. …That way, I get all the candidates materials mailed to me all the way up to Election Day. If you just vote by mail and you turn in your ballot they stop sending you stuff.

LD: That’s efficient data management. You must have really powerful technology to manage all the data.

JH: It starts with the vote registration database, 180,000 registered voters. We anticipate that we’ll probably get a good amount of people registering to vote before January 22nd, which is the last day to register to vote.

If you look back to 2004, we got 25,000 new registrations right before the November 2004 election. So how do you process 25,000 voter registration applications? It’s quite an undertaking. We had a whole bunch of people working late at night trying to get that done by the deadline. Now we’ve got what’s called ICR, intelligent character recognition, so when you fill out your voter registration card, you’ve hand written all of your data in there. We actually can scan that in and this machine will read your handwriting. … We don’t have to do that data entry. So what we’re hoping is that this presidential year if we get a whole bunch of those in, it’s going to go much quicker because all they’re doing is just verifying what’s right.

LD: Sounds pretty high tech.

JH: When you return your absentee ballot you sign the outside of the envelope, and there’s a bar code on there that tells us who you are. So when we receive that envelope back, we send it through a machine that’s called an ASR, automatic signature recognition machine. It goes through, it tells us that we’ve received Leslie’s ballot on this date at this time, and that it compares your signature with the signature that we have on file for you with your voter registration card, and if it matches, then it accepts it.

…(Before June we’ll have a new technology so that) when your ballot is received you’ll be able to go on the Internet and type in your name and it’ll tell you whether or not your ballot was received and on what day. So if you’re voting by mail you can verify that indeed our ballot made it to our office.

…Another machine that we have for the first time this year is we have an automatic envelope opener. … We get all these ballots that are accepted, ready to go. Now we need to open them. We used to hire a whole bunch of extra people to sit around a big table and just open the envelopes.

LD: Sounds like a lot of carpal tunnel.

JH: Yeah. This year we have a machine that actually can do 5,000 envelopes an hour and will open them on three sides, lay out the envelope, and plop the ballot into a bin. And by opening up three sides of the envelope, … the reason why you need to do that is to make sure that you didn’t leave any ballots inside of an envelope.

… The average voter should not be thinking about these things. They don’t need to, we’re thinking about them, because if there was a close race and two or three ballots were stuck in those envelopes, then that’s not good.

LD: When do they start tabulating the vote by mail ballots?

JH: We can start opening and processing them and tabulating them ten days before the election. We have a secure room that’s behind glass walls, with video cameras in there, with security cameras, and the public is welcome to come watch this process. We’ll actually start running ballots through vote tabulation machines and then in another room we have the computer that has place where those results will go. Now no one can look at the results but then on election night we will…. every ballot that we have in our hands prior to Election Day is tabulated and the results go up on the Internet at 8:05 on election night.

LD: That’s definitely a change with the technology. I can remember when they would be counting absentee ballots for days after an election.

JH: It’s a huge change. …

LD: What is the approximate cost to the county for each of the three elections?

JH: Each one will cost roughly a million and half dollars. The primary election, the special primary election that the state legislature added statewide, that’s probably costing $100 million. The estimates have been up to $100 million.

… The governor did say …that the state intends to reimburse the counties for it…however we’ve been looking through the budget and we can’t find where he put the money in.

But remember the statewide special election in 2005; they did not fund that ahead of time. They waited until all the costs came in and then they funded it. So we’re hoping that this will be reimbursed similarly.

LD: But just the February election?

JH: Right.

LD: Do you still like this job?

JH: Oh yeah, it’s a lot of fun. It’s a little scary because we’re only human and you know people are going to make mistakes and there’s not a whole lot of room for mistakes when you’re running elections. We just knock on wood. We have made mistakes but nothing serious and we’re doing everything we can to see that it doesn’t happen, but you know, we’re human.

LD: Can you tell me a little about the other things you do, besides elections?

JH: As recorder we record all official records, grant deeds, trust deeds, when you buy a house. … Birth and death certificates. … I’m the civil marriage commissioner…we issue passports and we do that in three offices, Santa Barbara, Santa Maria and Lompoc, which is very unique. I don’t know that there are any other counties that do that.

…Then as assessor, which is my other hat, I describe and assess all taxable property in the county of Santa Barbara.

LD: What are the property taxes looking like?

JH: We have a $57 billion assessment right now for the county and with the current foreclosure situation; the increase in the assessment is not as high as it’s been in the last few years. It’ll still be an increase. We may go to three or four percent increase this year. Last year it was seven percent. Two and three years ago it was ten, eleven percent. It you multiply that by $55 billion that’s a lot of money.

The county right now is facing layoffs because the property tax assessment is not going up as high as it was in the previous years. That plus the fact that they had to make some adjustments in retirement that is causing layoffs.

…I lowered the assessment on 7,000 houses last year because of the economy. These are people that bought at the height of the market and their house is no longer worth what it’s assessed at. So I went out and all my staff went out under my direction, and we identified those 7,000 homes and we lowered their assessment to the fair market value as of January 2007. We’re going to do the same thing this year as of January 1, 2008 and my guess is the number of homes we’re going to lower the assessment on may go up to as much as 15,000. It’s mostly in the north county. Places in the south county such as Hope Ranch and Montecito have not gone down in value, at all, they continue to go up.

LD: That’s another tough job. What do you do when you’re not working?

JH: I’m involved with the Courthouse Legacy Foundation … there are some areas of the courthouse where there really has been some severe degradation of the actual structure where it has fallen into disrepair. It’s too beautiful to ignore and have it fall apart. …This courthouse legacy foundation is hopefully a vehicle that can take private and public and mix the two together and try to come up with solutions.

LD: When you do get the time to relax, what do you like to do for fun?

JH: My daughter Michelle plays water polo for Dos Pueblos. …I like to go watch her play sports. That’s a blast.

Vital Stats: Joe Holland

Born: April 24, 1957 in Los Angeles

Family: Wife Kathy and children Scott (21), Bridget (20) and Michelle (14)

Civic Involvement: Courthouse Legacy Foundation, United Way Board of Directors

Professional Accomplishments: Elected to the Office of the Clerk, Recorder, and Assessor in 2002; former Audit Section Supervisor and Real Property Appraiser for Santa Barbara County

Little-Known Fact: Joe met his wife Kathy when he was a student at UCSB and they were both working at Vons on Turnpike Avenue.

Originally published in Noozhawk on January 28, 2008. Read the original story here.