Page 12 - Sonoma County Gazette 11-19

3,100 North Bay Teens Get a Bite of Financial Reality
On October 14, when many financial institutions closed for the federal holiday, Redwood Credit Union (RCU) closed for a different reason—to send its entire workforce out to give North Bay high school students a “bite” of financial reality.
COAST cont’d from page 11
RCU has been presenting its Bite of Reality financial education program at local high schools since 2013, but never on such a large scale. This year, more than 3,100 Sonoma, Marin, and Napa high schoolers gained practical financial skills in one impactful day.
Commercial fishing was acknowledged by the drafters of the original LCP as a priority land use in our coastal towns, and should remain so. When the “powers that be” talk about building extensive affordable housing at the coast, we need to first see the specific details about where and how this would occur, lest it all ultimately wind up as just another big vacation rental expansion scheme.
Elsie Allen students try to stay within their budgets as they “purchase” household goods and groceries from RCU staff during the Bite of Reality program.
Next, they visited table-top stations, staffed by RCU employees, to purchase such everyday essentials as housing, transportation, food, clothing, household necessities, and daycare.
The rapid unforeseen transition away from relying on policies developed long ago to support stable cohesive neighborhoods means that we need to see the emergence of the much different kind of planning needed for ever- changing commercial enterprises like clustered vacation rentals.
At each school, students were assigned a fictional occupation, salary, spouse and family, student loan debt, credit card debt, and medical insurance payments—which they had to factor into fixed monthly budgets.
Appropriate flexibility in how our local public services are funded to meet new kinds of non-resident demands should be considered in the revised LCP as part of this changing social and economic equation. These types of policy issues as we see them reflected in the final LCP will help to guide what kind of place the Sonoma County coast will become.
During the process, many teens were surprised that balancing the cost of daily needs (food, gas, utilities, clothing, and childcare) against dreamy “wants” (fancy sports cars, trendy clothes, high-end housing, and vacations) was harder than expected. Those who found themselves broke or in debt were sent to the credit union station for reality checks and help with balancing their budgets.
There is no shortage of imminent threats to our coastal lands and our nearshore waters and “Save the Sonoma Coast” is very much a verb that calls for our own timely active participation.
“I like how we had to pay off our credit, and how the credit union helped throughout the process,” one student said. “It was interesting, and I think every high school should do it.”
Is the traffic gridlock now experienced on holiday weekends in Bodega Bay and along the coast beaches, and Jenner’s pedestrian safety and parking challenge, now providing a premonition that spending more public money to recruit even more tourism as a cash cow for County coffers may not be such a good idea if we cannot figure out how to accommodate already-expanding visitor impacts in an orderly fashion?
And while not all students may immediately apply their new financial insights, RCU employee Roger DeBeers—who attended an RCU Bite of Reality event as a student when he was in high school—is confident they will use it eventually.
The Offshore Drilling Threat to the Sonoma Coast:
“During high school, my concept of finance was limited to saving quarters in order to buy a bag of Hot Cheetos,” said the Maria Carrillo High School graduate. “When Bite of Reality came to my school, it didn’t suddenly give me financial literacy—but it did sow the seeds. When the time came to start making my own financial decisions about things like credit cards and car loans, I remembered what the program taught me.”
In response to decades of threats of expanded federal offshore drilling within our nearshore coastal waters, the Sonoma County LCP has long included a 1986 voter-adopted “Onshore Facilities Ordinance”.
For more information about RCU’s Bite of Reality program, visit: http://bit.ly/RCUbite.
12 - www.sonomacountygazette.com - 11/19
This ordinance requires the consent of our voters before approval by the County of any industrial oil and gas processing plant or staging area for offshore drilling along our coast. This same protective ordinance must, of course, continue to be part of the local coastal land use policy in the updated LCP, and will likely become increasingly important to the survival of our proactive coastal land use priorities. COAST cont’d from page 10
“We’re so pleased with the positive community response
to this program,” said Brett Martinez, RCU President, and CEO. “Money management is
an essential life skill for young people to learn, but because it’s not a high school graduation requirement, financial education differs greatly between schools. The Bite of Reality program helps fill in gaps.”
In addition, as agricultural-related uses are defined in the update of the LCP, there should be no place for new or expanded event centers in rural coastal areas where compatible land use designations are nonexistent, there is no adequate road access, and the availability of emergency first responders is wholly inadequate to support such facilities.
State Senator Mike McGuire, Congressman Mike Thompson, and Congressman Jared Huffman were among elected officials attending the program presented by all 700 RCU employees across 15 North Bay high schools.
As a result, new kinds of demands are being placed on transportation, on public services, and on emergency agencies by the resulting dramatic increase in transient visitors. New and uncharacteristic incidents of concern, some involving violence in Old Town Bodega Bay and in Bodega Harbor, highlight the fact that our coastal communities need to at least preserve the option of designating appropriate “No VRBO” zones, as have become a high priority in other Supervisorial Districts, particularly near Sonoma.
While the revised LCP does not overtly propose that significant large-
scale new development be added along the Sonoma Coast anytime soon, transmigration of some of the more concerning aspects of the controversial countywide “General Plan 2020” over into the LCP should not be the preferred option. As one example, the updated LCP draft seems to open the door to conversion of longstanding measures intended to protect commercial fishing- related residential opportunities into unidentified affordable housing that would no longer necessarily be prioritized for fishing families.
Martinez believes the program also sparks conversations
at home about finances and household budgeting—important conversations and learning opportunities that might not happen otherwise.
We can all see rapid changes already taking place on our coast, and what’s being called the “Malibuization” of the Sonoma Coast is obviously unfolding, representing a social and cultural transition from small family-based fishing communities toward predominantly temporary accommodations often operated by distant absentee owners as high-end vacation rentals with very short-term unscreened rotating occupancy.
Big Changes Coming for the Character of Our Coast:
The unfairly-brief public review period for the LCP update raises a host of other important questions. Should such a broad definition of agricultural operations be granted a blanket exemption from the strict protection of
ESHA? Is the LCP mandate going to still be in place for the preservation of our amazing coastal viewsheds and open space?