Chaotic life

Welcome to spring, where everything this year is as wildly alive as I've ever seen it. Our seemingly endless rain has taken the day off but it seems reasonable that it'll be back.

I'd read somewhere earlier this week that the county community college system was going suspend horticulture courses and today we learn that Janet Wall has stepped up to fund the program for another year. As Colleen Cason points out, this seems like absurd step for a county with a growing horticulture industry and a long term, county wide commitment to retaining our agricultural history and attachment. One wonders, where are we focusing the funds if not on industries that are actually important in the county?

Perhaps administrators have fallen under the kool aid long passed around that we live in a high tech corridor. Certainly, we have some industry leaders (it's pretty hard to ignore the likes of Amgen) and if you hope for it long enough and often enough, it might come to pass, but not without educational commitment. The driving force behind the Boston, San Jose and to a lesser extent, Austin tech zones are the local universities, the companies which grew out of them and an accelerating feedback loop between the two. Looking at the east county, the driving force isn't particularly high tech. Home prices in the last six years have been driven mostly by expansion of Amgen and the relocation of Countrywide (a financial services firm) on top of the usual factors.

I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't endeavor to build a solid technology base here, but we do need to be somewhat realistic about where we are on the growth path. And while we grow our new technology based identity we need to maintain and nurture our current agribusiness economy.