Episode 011... Steelhead Festival 2007

As something completely different from the past 4 OLPA episodes about the Santa Barbara City election, this one features the Second Annual Santa Barbara Steelhead Festival and a few bonus items about the latest status of endangered Steelhead Trout recovery planning and a visit from one of their salmon sisters.

The Festival is organized by Community Environmental Council (CEC) and was held 20th May 2007 at Stearns Wharf. A central event of the Festival was the 8 Steelhead Trout sculptures painted and adorned and displayed for a couple of months along State Street in downtown Santa Barbara. The Unveiling Party to debut these 6-foot fish sculptures happened the prior, perfect spring night.

Steelhead Recovery Plan Outline. To project forward in the southern California Steelhead universe, the first interview in this OLPA episode is with Craig Fusaro, who describes the Steelhead Recovery Plan Outline, which was recently released by National Marine Fisheries Service as a major step towards defining how many Steelhead and where are necessary so this fish legally can be considered recovered from the brink of extinct. Fusaro is a member of the Technical Recovery Team of scientists working on the scientific basis of the southern California Steelhead Recovery Plan Outline (http://swr.nmfs.noaa.gov/recovery/Steelhead_SCS.htm). Santa Barbara Independent wrote about the recovery planning for the newspaper issue of 29Nov.2007.

During her interview, Suzanne Feldman describes details of the Festival and its prospects for a third one next year. Feldman is CEC Watershed Program Associate and principal organizer of the Steelhead Festival.

This episode includes an cameo appearances by Iya Falcone, Mike Marzolla, and Ed Robinson, in addition to the throngs of Beautiful People at the Unveiling Party on the wharf.

photo by Suzanne Feldman of Vision Quest

Artists in this video describing their fish sculptures include (in this order): Rebecca Stebbins, Rick Tontz, Tara Fadenrecht, Barbara McIntyre, Susan LeVine, and Michael Irwin.

Towards the end of this video, Fin the Chinook Salmon and her human driver Jeremy Nickel went shopping at Paseo Nuevo on 12 July 2007, while telling all about their public outreach for Columbia River salmon habitat improvements.

As a bonus not included in the TV replay version of this OLPA episode, the video at this website posting (below) includes an extra 20 minutes showing Steelhead trout in Mission Creek, recorded in May 2006 in downtown Santa Barbara.

This episode made its TV-17 debut on 10Nov.2007 and it ended on 02Dec.2007. It enjoyed a few extra replays during the Thanksgiving holiday week and following the time-consuming agony and ecstasy of the City election earlier in the month.

Production Notes. This episode was the first solo video production by David Pritchett, who learned video editing mainly by watching Cathy Murillo while she edited the past 10 OLPA episodes. Except for Fusaro recording him for the opening introduction, Pritchett recorded all the video in this episode. The video from the Steelhead Unveiling Party was recorded with a still camera (Panasonic FZ-20) having a secondary function for low-res video recording, and it shows. Special bonus included with slightly out-of-sync audio in one clip. Longer clips of this video from the Unveiling Party were posted at Google Video shortly after the event.

Watch the Video of this show!
For a FULL SCREEN option, link on the Google label and once there be sure to select the lower right arrow icon for the Smooth Video option.

Episode 007... U Plan SB: Santa Barbara as the Hinge of History

This second installment in the U Plan SB saga applies to the Santa Barbara City General Plan Update, now occurring with a series of public meetings and staff reports and associated studies. Considering where Santa Barbara has been can help with good decisions about where Santa Barbara should go in its General Plan Update, called Plan Santa Barbara. The first OLPA episode was about some of these public meetings, and so will be future episodes.

Accordingly, this OLPA episode features a lecture by Harvey Molotch entitled Santa Barbara as the Hinge of History. The lecture was the main event at the annual meeting of SBCAN (Santa Barbara County Action Network), held 18 July 2007 at Karpeles Manuscript Museum in downtown Santa Barbara. In 2 of her Looking Forward commentary columns in Santa Maria Times, SBCAN Executive Director Deborah Brasket wrote about this meeting and its applicability to what can be learned for Santa Maria.

Molotch is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, but for 35 years between 1968 and 2003 he was Professor of Sociology at UCSB, when he was quite active in local Santa Barbara planning affairs, as he describes in his remarks.

The TV-17 cablecast started Monday, 08 October, and ended its 8 replays on Sunday, 21 October, pending any schedule adjustments for the 2 Special hour-long OLPA episodes in October about the upcoming Santa Barbara City Council election, entitled Chewing on the Candidates.

Watch the Video of this show!!
For a FULL SCREEN option, link on the Google label and once there be sure to select the lower right arrow icon for the Smooth Video option.