Thoreau Center Brown Bag: A Strategic Approach to the Fiscal Crisis of California

Presenter: Lenny Goldberg, Executive Director of the California Tax Reform Association (CTRA)
Wednesday, February 2, 12:30pm to 1:30pm
Pacific Room at Tides, Thoreau Center for Sustainability

Lenny Goldberg will address the ongoing fiscal crisis of the state of California, where the government must operate within the limitations of its existing property tax regime. A major challenge is confronting the irrational and dysfunctional commercial property tax, which costs our cities, counties, and schools billions of dollars each year and makes little sense as law, economics, fiscal policy, or land use. Lenny will describe the California Tax Reform Association's long-term strategy to expose this problem and make it so apparent that a solution can be achieved.

The mission of the CTRA is a fair tax system in California, in order to provide the foundation for a healthy public sector and a successful economy. Founded in 1976, CTRA has been involved as an advocate for fair taxation in virtually every major tax policy debate in the legislature and at the state tax agencies. It has also been involved in many statewide ballot measures involving tax policy, and have provided our expertise in many forums, presentations, articles, and in the media.

Brown Bag events are free informal mid-day learning sessions hosted at Tides. Friends, neighbors and colleagues are welcome. Visitors, please sign in at the front desk.

New Books - January

Here is a look at some of the books we have added in recent weeks. Also, as you prepare for your spring cleaning or get rid of your old books as you replace them all with ebook copies for the reader you got over the holidays, we'd like to remind you of our relationship with Better World Books, which collects and sells books online to fund literacy initiatives worldwide. Those books they can't sell, they recycle. Our last shipment of 223 pounds of books they estimate to have saved three trees, 1,710 gallons of water, and 232 pounds of greenhouse gases. So if you're thinking of getting rid of something they might be able to sell, feel free to drop it off at the library, and we can get a new shipment ready. Thank you.

Jamie Court. The Progressive's Guide to Raising Hell: How to Win Grassroots Campaigns, Pass Ballot Box Laws, and Get the Change We Voted For. (2010) “How can progressives get what they believe they voted for?” Jamie Court is president of Consumer Watchdog, an award-winning, nationally recognized consumer-advocacy organization with offices in Santa Monica and Washington DC, and he has a long history of organizing successful ballot campaigns and reform initiatives in California. This book is his guide to using these tools and others for mobilizing public opinion, challenging special interests, and seizing the opportunities for change when elected officials disappoint. His five steps for creating change: Expose, Confront, Wait for the Mistake, Make the Mistake the Issue, and Don't Let Go.

David Abram. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. (2010) A book about exploring our entanglement with the rest of nature and reclaiming our sensual awareness of the whole of the living world around us in order to save it. “This directly experienced terrain, rippling with cricket rhythms and scoured by the tides, is the very realm now most ravaged by the spreading consequences of our disregard. Many-long standing and lousy habits have enabled our callous treatment of surrounding nature, empowering us to clear-cut, dam up, mine, develop, poison, or simply destroy so much of what quietly sustains us. Yet few are as deep-rooted and damaging as the habitual tendency to view the sensuous earth as a subordinate space...”

Laurie Garrett. Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health. (2000) Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Laurie Garret's landmark examination of the decline of public health around the world. Through extensively researched and vividly detailed accounts of pubic health failures, she portrays a system that at the dawn of 21st century is incapable of dealing with outbreaks of disease and of providing people with the basic tools of physical well-being.

Peter North. Local Money: How to Make It Happen in Your Community. (2010) For centuries, people have responded to financial crises by creating their own local currencies. The latest crisis, having exposed the vulnerabilities of our financial system on a global scale, has been no different. Local currencies are just one of the tools with which communities are experimenting in order to build deeper local resilience and unleash the potential of their local economies. This book delves into the complicated issues surrounding these currencies and serves as a practical guide for those of you out there thinking about creating your own local money for local people.

Jan Gehl. Cities for People. (2010) In this work, architect Jan Gehl explains the concepts and tools he has used to transform sterile, modernist, and dysfunctional cityscapes around the world into lively, safe, sustainable, and healthy places. For Gehl, cities should be considered through the five senses so that they can be designed on a human scale that takes into account the ways people actually use the spaces where they live, work, and interact. Strengthening walking opportunities, creating inviting spaces to linger, ensuring opportunities for social and cultural diversity are a few of the methods he details, and even if you're not an urban planner, you will learn to look at your urban landscape in new ways. Extensively illustrated with over 700 photos and drawings of examples from Gehl’s work.

Dave Forman. Rewilding North America: A Vision for Conservation in the 21st Century. (2004) “The central reality of our era is extinction. Nothing is more important. Mass extinction is our legacy as a species so far. No other moral challenge is so great as controlling our destructive power over nature,” writes Dave Forman, director of The Rewilding Institute. But he remains hopeful that the causes of extinction and ecological wounds can be halted. In response to the challenge, he lays out a bold vision and a practical strategy for restoring and reconnecting wilderness areas across North America based on recent insights from conservation biology and the historical experiences of the citizen conservation movement.