Congressional candidate for California’s First District, Audrey Denney, mentioned Yuba College’s Working Lands certifications!
In an interview with North State Public Radio, Audrey Denney responded to a question by NPR’s Andre Byik (at about the 1:49 mark).
“That brings us to economic opportunity, which as you mentioned, can be limited in rural areas like this 1st District. How would you address economic opportunity in this district?”
Denney pivoted by recalling a conversation she and I had months ago (see Nov 21, 2005 announcement). Rural districts and working lands were the topics of our conversation, and how Yuba College is facing that challenge. Here is Audrey Denney’s response to Andre’s question.
In our part of the world, in the new California’s 1st District, the post-Prop 50 map, there’s 41.7% federal land. For me, this is really the biggest opportunity to not only create economic opportunity for rural residents, but also to help keep our communities safe from wildfire and to restore our natural ecosystems. All of these kind of come together in our federal forest land. For me, I think it’s really important to recognize that not everyone wants to go to college, needs to go to college.
What we need desperately is folks who can get to work in our forests, to do the forest management work, the ecological and watershed restoration work that needs to happen, and they can get one-year certificate degrees through programs — like at Yuba College, where they have a certificate in forest management and soil health that you can get in a year. And if we can get the workforce trained to do that work, whilst coupling that with a Forest Service budget that will allow it to work with RCDs [Resource Conservation Districts], fire safe councils, and our tribes, and then hire local contractors to actually get to do that work, we can really create a regenerative economy that’s keeping us safe, keeping local, rural folks employed, and also restoring our ecosystems in our watershed so we can have and use the water and the natural resources that we need.
Audrey Denney is on the June ballot for District One, vacated by the passing of Congressman Doug LaMalfa.
Let’s congratulate ourselves, all of us, the agencies that work in the rural enclaves of the Sierra Nevadas, all those involved at Yuba College, who are involved in addressing a prescient economic and ecological needs for our region. We are very much on the minds of congressional candidates for the work that we are currently doing.