[Community_garden] The City Hates Community Gardening

[Jamie4fish at aol.com]

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



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