CGA member Northgate Gonzalez Market was one of four winners of the Food Marketing Institute’s 2014 Community Outreach Awards. The awards recognize the creative, charitable programs established and carried out by food retailers to enhance the lives of those in the communities they serve.

“In an industry experiencing tumultuous change, the generous spirit and community-focused attitude of food retailers remains a constant,” said David Fikes, FMI’s vice president of communications and consumer affairs. “Our 2014 awardees, and all nominees, demonstrated great creativity and dedication in finding new ways of fulfilling the food retailer call to feed families and enrich the lives of those they serve.”

Winners were selected across four categories: programs addressing food insecurity, youth development, neighborhood health improvement programs and community engagement. FMI added a community engagement category in 2014 in order to recognize the retailer who best engaged their online social community and received the most fan support for their program on Facebook.  FMI’s judging criteria included participation, community need and impact.

Each winner will receive $1,000 from FMI to further their program:

Neighborhood Health Improvement Programs: 
Northgate Gonzalez Market Viva la Salud 
Northgate Gonzalez Market created “Viva La Salud Program a Community Partner” to provide affordable, quality health products and services, including in-store mammograms and health screenings.

Programs Addressing Food insecurity: 
Food Lion Feeds 
Food Lion launched “Food Lion Feeds” with a commitment to donate 500 million meals to families in need by the end of 2020. In 2014, over 40 million meals were donated.

Youth Development Programs: 
Hy-Vee/Sanford Legends
Since 2005, the Legends Grants Program has helped local nonprofit sports organizations build facilities, purchase equipment and improve their programs. The program has raised $1,298,000 to date.

Community Engagement: 
Russ’s Market Russ’s Community Rewards 
This program allows customers to use points earned through in-store shopping to support local organizations. 2,700 households have used their community points to redeem over 11,000 offers for community organizations.

Sacramento Bee Editorial

A new academic study out this week, and published in the journal PLOS ONE, for the first time gives a hard number to the amount of plastic garbage littering our oceans. It’s a sobering figure: 5.25 trillion particles of plastic.

That’s a number so large as to be incomprehensible. So, picture it this way: 269,000 tons of water bottles, Lego pieces, disposable pens and lighters, take-out coffee lids, Barbie heads, detergent containers and, of course, lots of plastic bags floating atop the sparkling blue horizon.

That’s a helpful image for people to recall should they run across one of the petitions being circulated by the plastic bag industry trying to stop California’s ban on single-use plastic bags.

A group of plastic bag makers, most of them outside of the state, are spending millions on misleading ads and paid signature gatherers to get a referendum on the bag ban on the November 2016 ballot.

If the referendum qualifies for the ballot, it will postpone the July 15 bag ban implementation date until after the 2016 election. We don’t think the ban would be overturned by voters, who, according to polls, are mostly supportive. The plastic bag industry probably doesn’t either, but qualifying a referendum will give them more than a year reprieve.

It’s impossible to say how many more plastic shopping bags will be added to the Pacific Ocean during that time, but it’s a fair bet that a good portion of the 14 billion plastic grocery bags used in the state each year will end up in storm drains that flow into the ocean.

Though the bags can be recycled in California, hardly any are. Some are used a second time, especially by dog owners, but most end up in landfills where they will sit for generations before breaking down. Many of those, however, will escape their confines, catching the wind in their unique parachute design until they end up strewn about the state’s wild places – clogging up rivers flowing through the Valley, wrapping around Joshua trees in the desert and tying up manzanita bushes in the mountains.

There are ways for Californians to derail the plastic industry’s fight to keep profiting from polluting our state. The first, anyone can do: Don’t sign the petition.

The plastic bag industry is pulling every trick out of its, er, bag of them to win back waning public support of plastic bags: spurious claims that it’s no more than a crooked deal between politicians and the grocers, who can charge a fee for paper bags; baseless job-loss claims; and even absurd warnings that using reusable bags will spread disease.

The second way is for elected leaders in cities that have held off on enacting local bans to do so now.

Mayor Kevin Johnson has started this process for Sacramento in case the referendum qualifies. If the City Council passes a ban, it would join more than 130 other cities and counties in the state already covered by one.

It also would send a strong message from the capital to the main supporter of the bag ban referendum, South Carolina-based Hilex Poly, that Californians are done being complicit in the trashing of our precious natural resources.

We don’t expect a single-use plastic bag ban in California to stop the flow of plastic trash into the oceans altogether. Opponents of bag bans rightly point out that plastic bags are just one of the many sources of trash. But every difficult journey begins somewhere. Stopping the flow of one significant source of garbage is a great way to begin.

Reprinted from The Los Angeles Times (12/1/2014)

Stung by losses in the November election, the California Legislature’s Democratic majority arrives for the first day of a new session Monday facing a political terrain more hostile to tax increases and other priorities of liberal lawmakers.

The Democrats’ failure to win a supermajority in either the Senate or Assembly, after capturing both just two years ago, is expected to produce a more centrist agenda and give more clout to moderate Democrats and Republicans.

The political shift probably dooms the long-proposed revision to Proposition 13, the 1978 initiative that capped property tax hikes, said Larry Gerston, a political science professor at San Jose State.

“The Democrats had their chance with the bulletproof, absolute two-thirds majorities last year, but they were unwilling to pull the trigger,” Gerston said. “That window is now shut.”
Assemblyman Henry T. Perea (D-Fresno), who leads the moderate Democrats, said the subtle shift to the middle will be felt when energy issues come to the forefront during the upcoming, two-year legislative session.

Last year, he led a high-profile but unsuccessful effort to delay the inclusion of transportation fuels in the state’s cap-and-trade program to limit carbon emissions. He said to expect more “robust debate” about the state’s efforts to address climate change in the coming session.

“Nearly half the [Democratic] caucus could be considered more moderate than in the past, but I do think that, for example, a moderate in Fresno is going to be very different from a moderate in the Bay Area,” Perea said.

State law requires the Legislature to meet for one day in early December to convene the new session, swear in newly elected members and elect the leadership. Members will get a 2% pay raise Monday and can begin introducing bills, but the Legislature adjourns at the end of the day until Jan. 5, when the session begins in earnest.

Both houses will see some new leadership. Sen. Kevin De León (D-Los Angeles) is the new president pro tem of the Senate, and Assemblywoman Kristin Olsen of Modesto becomes the new Republican leader in the Assembly.

Senate Democrats start the new session with 25 of the 40 seats in the Senate, when 27 are needed for a supermajority; Republicans have 14. The Democrats have a 52-28 majority in the Assembly.

There is one vacancy in the Senate, caused by the resignation of Democratic Sen. Roderick Wright over criminal charges, and a Democrat is expected to win the Dec. 9 special election.

“I expect there will be a more deliberate pace with respect to policy-making next year, largely because the makeup of the Senate has changed,” said Senate Republican Leader Bob Huff of Diamond Bar.
“The voters sent a message by electing Republicans in key swing districts, which eliminated the Democrats’ supermajority, and it forces them to continue working with us,” he said. “And they clearly do not want any tax increases.”

When Democrats held a supermajority in both chambers in 2012, they had enough votes to approve tax increases or place proposed constitutional amendments on the statewide ballot without a single Republican vote.

De León said Democrats would have to collaborate with Republicans on the state’s problems. “It’s about getting things done together,” he said.

Along with the changing political dynamics, the new Legislature will see a record number of African American and Asian American members, including the first Vietnamese American member of the state Senate.
Republicans have been touting the diverse backgrounds of their newly elected members. Three new GOP lawmakers come from Asian backgrounds: Sen.-elect Janet Nguyen (R-Santa Ana) was born in Vietnam; incoming Assembly members Ling-Ling Chang of Chino Hills and Young Kim of Fullerton were born in Taiwan and South Korea, respectively.

They help swell the membership of the California Asian & Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus from 11 to a record 12 members. That could stymie efforts to roll back the state’s ban on affirmative action in public colleges and universities. A proposal to do so was pushed by Latino and African American Democrats last year, but it stalled after heated pushback by some Asian American communities.
In addition, the California Legislative Black Caucus will have a record 11 members for the first time in its 47-year history and will probably increase to a record 12 if former Assemblyman Isadore Hall (D-Inglewood) wins the special election for Wright’s Senate seat, as expected.

The Legislative Latino Caucus and the Legislative Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Caucus will both see slight drops in memberships in the new session.

The departing LGBT members include former Speaker John A. Pérez (D-Los Angeles), the first openly gay speaker, and Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco).

“We’ll feel their losses, there’s no question,” said Assemblyman Rich Gordon (D-Menlo Park), the caucus’ chairman.

Although their numbers are slightly diminished, Gordon was bullish on gay rights and other priority issues in the coming years, in part because they have increasingly been embraced by moderate lawmakers.

In both parties, he said, “you’re seeing folks — even if they’re labeled more moderate — understanding the equity issues.”

Another change in the new Legislature is the departure of lawmakers embroiled in scandal.

Wright was convicted of voting fraud and resigned in October. Democratic Sens. Leland Yee of San Francisco and Ronald Calderon of Montebello were indicted by federal grand juries on separate public corruption allegations. Both left office Nov. 30 as their terms expired.