AUDIO: Central Valley’s tipping point may be here

MODESTO
March 30, 2009 12:01am

Poverty is the foundation for the worst of the Central Valley’s chronic problems, says David Hosley, president of the Great Valley Center, a Modesto-based non-profit organization that supports activities and organizations benefiting the economic, social and environmental well being.

“Poverty is linked to almost every challenge that we have, even things like air quality,” Mr. Hosley says.

Mr. Hosley is a veteran journalist and executive who marked his first year of leading the Great Valley Center on Feb. 1. Prior to taking the post at GVC, he had been general manager of KVIE in Sacramento, one of the Valley’s three over-the-air public television stations. The others are KVPT, Fresno and KIXE, Chico.

“The past year … has really been a pretty steep learning curve for me,” says Mr. Hosley. “I knew the issues but I didn’t know them in the depth I do now.”

Related to the region’s poverty is ill health, he says, especially childhood obesity.

He has also spent time formalizing the center’s relationship with the University of California, Merced.

“The relationship really wasn’t completed, so a lot of my work in the last year was to be effective within the University of California system – be a good partner with the university,” he says.

Despite the Valley’s long-standing problems of economics, health and pollution, Mr. Hosley says the region can find the solutions to the problems.

“They are not insolvable but they are very, very difficult to break through,” he says. “We spend a lot of our time bringing people together to have difficult discussions about what the problems are and what the choices are to solve them.”

(David Hosley talks about Central Valley challenges -- and solutions – in today’s CVBT Audio Interview. Please left-click on the ling below to listen now or right-click to download the MP3 audio file to your computer or mobile media device for later listening.)

Mr. Hosley says solving the region’s problems is a two-fold effort.

“We’ve got to engage a bigger part of our community in building consensus about what needs to be addressed and how we’re going to go about doing it,” he says.

“The second part of the problem is that we have to find new resources to be able to attack these problems, because the resources we have here in the Valley simply are not great enough for us to be able to do that,” Mr. Hosley says.

But all is not gloom, he’s quick to add.

“There are so many people working so hard to improve the situations here in the Central Valley. That’s exciting in and of itself,” he says. “We are doing better. We are putting the resources to work. Collaboration is improved tremendously. We’re starting to attract resources in ways we haven’t in the past.

“If we can keep this up, we will have a better Central Valley.”

The Great Valley Center will tackle the Valley’s future at its annual meeting, scheduled for May 6-7 in Sacramento.

The conference will focus on five broad areas where short term actions can have longer term effects, including health and community well being; transportation, land use and housing; energy, environment and agriculture; water, air and natural resources; workforce preparedness and education, the Center says.

For more information about the Great Valley Center and the conference, please click on the GVC logo to the left. (CVBT has no connection with the Center but does provide the link at no charge as a public service.)