A few weeks ago I queried ACGA membership via listserve about the wisdom of our gardens administrator (City of San Ramon, CA) deciding to drastically change the current procedure of assigning our garden plots on an indefinite duration basis. The City now proposes to rotate assigned garden plots among community gardeners each year on a “lottery” basis; ostensibly to satisfy a long "waiting list." [although in fact more than 10 percent of the garden plots remained vacant for the past year and were not assigned to anyone on any waiting list.] The ACGA listserve response was unanimous and specific: Forcing gardeners to participate in a lottery each year to see if they will get a garden plot for the following season is against all principles of community gardening and the more appropriate municipal answer to a waiting list was to build more gardens. After discussing this issue with the City for the past several weeks, however, some chilling insights have been gained among the gardeners. What we local community gardeners initially thought was simply an innocent, perhaps incompetent, ignorance of organic gardening processes on the part of the City has now evolved into a suspicion that the City administrators know exactly what they are doing. By demanding implementation of such ludicrous and inappropriate gardening procedures the City knows full well that it will ultimately chase off all serious organic gardeners, allowing the City to have an unfettered hand in utilizing the land now dedicated to community gardening for other, more “ municipally-desirable, tax-generating” pursuits such as office buildings, commercial enterprises, etc. [In fact the majority of gardeners, many of whom have been here for decades, have indeed indicated they will leave, rather than try to garden under such a "merry-go-round", rotational type of environment.] Has anyone in the membership dealt with such political situations before? If so, what are the most effective tactics we can employ to preserve our community gardens against such municipal expansion? Put another way, how can we get the City to embrace community gardening? Thank you. Jim Conner, Community Gardener Crow Canyons Community Gardens
**************Start the year off right. Easy ways to stay in shape. http://body.aol.com/fitness/winter-exercise?NCID=aolcmp00300000002489 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://list.communitygarden.org/pipermail/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org/attachments/20080111/f25b3d28/attachment.html _______________________________________________ The American Community Gardening Association listserve is only one of ACGA's services to community gardeners. To learn more about the ACGA and to find out how to join, please go to http://www.communitygarden.org To post an e-mail to the list: [email protected] To subscribe, unsubscribe or change your subscription: http://list.communitygarden.org/mailman/listinfo/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org
