Posts Tagged: Don Klingborg

First multi-county partnership finalized

UC Cooperative Extension Central Sierra, the office serving Amador, Calaveras, El Dorado, and Tuolumne counties, received final approval from the last county last week, making it ANR’s first official multi-county partnership.

Over the past year, ANR leaders have been working with county governments to identify a new structure for county-based Cooperative Extension that would maintain the strength of the programs, while reducing costs. The result is a collaborative agreement between the four counties that will consolidate administration to meet budget cuts without reducing services to residents.

“Central Sierra Nevada residents will continue to have access to educational programs and expertise in nutrition, healthy living, youth development, agriculture, home gardening, animal husbandry, forestry and natural resources,” said Scott Oneto, director of the Central Sierra Cooperative Extension office.

“This was complicated,” said Don Klingborg, director of ANR Strategic Advocacy and UC-County Partnerships. “Scott Oneto and Dorothy Smith are to be commended for negotiating the details within their communities and creating new policies so that the final package was strongly supported by county partners and stakeholders. Through this effort, we have established some guiding principles that will provide best practices for other multi-county partnerships.”

ANR will maintain an office in each county to support its county-based programs and staff, which include 4-H Youth Development, CalFRESH, Master Gardeners, Master Food Preservers, Natural Resources, Agriculture and the Nutrition, Family and Consumer Sciences Program. The UCCE office in El Dorado County at 311 Fair Lane in Placerville will serve as the administrative hub for the four counties and will be open full time. The other three counties will be open part time.

The 4-H Youth Development, Master Gardener and Master Food Preserver volunteers will continue to serve in their respective communities. Likewise, 4-H clubs and projects will maintain their county identity.

“This has been a long and challenging process,” Oneto said, “It has taken over a year to get to this point, but it has been worth it. The changes we have already made just in the last month are already resulting in significant savings in both time and money. We are fortunate to have a team of staff that is willing to pull together and make significant changes to their programs and job duties for the betterment of UCCE and clientele. A number of staff members have gone from working in just one county to now working in four. I am privileged to have such a strong and dedicated group of professionals who see the bigger picture.”

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This announcement is also posted and archived on the ANR Update pages.

Calaveras County considers consolidation

The Calaveras County Board of Supervisors expressed some concerns on Tuesday about plans to reorganize the UC Cooperative Extension service on a regional basis, reported the Calaveras Enterprise. The board took no action, but the issue is expected to be brought forward for a vote in June.

Under the plan, UC Cooperative Extension in Calaveras, El Dorado and Amador counties would be consolidated. Satellite offices would be maintained in each county and the main office located in the El Dorado County community of Placerville.

“The UC system has been hammered with budget cuts, we know you’re getting hammered with budget cuts and we’re looking at ways to keep the programs that we have,” the director of ANR Strategic Advocacy and UC-County Partnerships Don Klingborg told the board. By making administration more efficient, the consolidation could save each county about 10 percent of their contribution to the program.

Supervisor Steve Wilensky took issue with the Placerville location, the newspaper reported.

“I’m not interested in an unequal partnership,” Wilensky was quoted.

The board was also concerned with the possible job loss for clerical staff.

Nominations sought for county structure task forces

ANR is forming task forces to evaluate UC Cooperative Extension structure in the counties. Cooperative Extension advisors and county-based program representatives are being asked to nominate one person per county to join the county director for their respective county on a county structure task force. The deadline for nominations is Friday, May 20.

The county structure task forces will be charged with collecting the data on staffing, facilities, transportation, information technology and administration for their county CE programs, including funding from UC, county government, grants and other sources. This information will be organized and will serve as the basis for evaluating our future structure of local delivery. The task forces will be organized around counties with historical affinities, and in some cases from declarations by the counties that they want to pursue a multi-county partnership within the grouping. The ultimate structure of our county programs will be informed from evaluation of the data provided by these task forces and other study groups within ANR.

The county groupings for each task force are as follows:

• Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo, Santa Clara
• Butte, Tehama, Glenn, Sutter, Colusa, Yuba
• Fresno, Madera, Tulare, Kings, Kern
• Humboldt, Del Norte, Mendocino, Lake
• Marin, Sonoma, Napa
• Imperial, San Diego, Riverside
• Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino
• Mariposa, Merced, Stanislaus, San Joaquin
• Modoc, Siskiyou, Shasta, Trinity
• Monterey, San Benito, Santa Cruz
• Placer-Nevada, Sacramento, Yolo, Solano
• San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura

Each task force charge will be finalized and communicated as soon as the task force members have been identified.

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This announcement is also posted and archived on the ANR Update pages.

Dan Dooley makes the case for more advisors

Vice President Dan Dooley wants to grow the UC Cooperative Extension advisor ranks to 300, according to an article in Capital Press. Writer Tim Hearden reported on comments by Dooley and Don Klingborg, of ANR advocacy and county programs, that were shared at a Hat Creek, Calif., gathering of Farm Bureau and cattlemen's organizations.

"We really believe we've got to restore the capacities of our cooperative extension programs," Dooley was quoted in the story.

In the 1980s, there were about 500 UCCE advisors in California. Today, the number is 225. Dooley's goal is to bring the number up to 300.

In his remarks, Klingborg noted that the need for vibrant agricultural industries will only intensify as the population increases.

"One of the things I'm reminded of is that by 2050 we're going to need twice as much food as we need today," Klingborg was quoted. "The challenge is, how do we prepare ourselves today?"

County partnerships and UC Cooperative Extension

Dear Colleagues,

Across California, county governments continue to face a funding crisis.  Last year, many local budgets were balanced with the help of one-time federal stimulus money. This year, the major difference between those counties that are “stable” versus those that are facing huge deficits is the use of any available contingency funds.  Indicators suggest next year will be an even bigger challenge for our county partners and will directly impact our county programs.

Some of us hope that economic recovery is in our immediate future and that we will return to the early 1980s when Extension was at its peak in funding and political support. Others are convinced that we must chart a new course, and that the future requires change to prepare for the opportunities that will exist given new economic, social and political realities.

While a number of our counties that faced major county budget cuts or complete elimination have been rescued by hard work from county directors, advisors, program reps, staff, supporters and with ANR support, we believe that the evidence pointing to continuing funding issues for California counties and to the need for new partnership models is overwhelming and that we must move quickly.

As we move forward, we are working to implement county models that will deliver the relevant, high-quality programs that define UC Cooperative Extension, stabilize funding, maximize resources going to programs and deliver essential long-term savings to the counties and UC. A multiple-county administrative partnership changes the funding dialog and will make our programs more competitive for UC, county and other funding.

Following our meeting with county directors in Davis last June, we have presented this concept to county administrative officers or their representatives from Calaveras and neighboring El Dorado, Amador and Tuolumne counties. The concept was well-received and discussions continue. After publication of local news stories about the preliminary meeting, we received e-mail from some people expressing concern about 4-H, Master Gardener and the nutrition programs. We have assured them that the plan is designed to retain and enhance programs. In addition, we are happy to report that about half the e-mail received has been positive – thanking us for looking hard at ways to save administratively, focus resources on programs, and build a stable model for UC Cooperative Extension.

Our Cooperative Extension program is a statewide system that brings the research and education power of the University of California to people in their local communities. While we are a sum of our parts, there is an essential synergy by being a system that is even more important now as we serve a demand for research and education larger than our resources.  A functional system requires viable programs across the state.

Even as we wrestle with the challenges facing California counties, the future is very bright for an evolved Cooperative Extension and, at the time of this writing, we anticipate investing in hiring the largest group of county advisors and campus specialists in many decades. By any assessment, we will have been extraordinarily successful if, in the near term, we can build advisor numbers toward the 300 level with a proportional increase in specialist positions.

The decisions associated with identifying, prioritizing and allocating these resources must be fundamentally different than “backfilling position vacancies” that have occurred since we were 500 or even 300 advisors strong. Doing the hard work to strategically define and place them to meet current and future needs will help us grow even more in the long-term, and placing them into multiple-county administrative units maximizes their visibility and potential impact on our stakeholders.

Over the next several months, we will explore the benefits and costs of restructuring CE in counties that are interested in strengthening their partnership with UC and with their sister counties facing similar issues. California has changed and as a statewide program we will adapt in order to serve it well in the future.

Dan Dooley, Senior Vice President
Don Klingborg, Director, Strategic Advocacy & UC-County Partnerships

View or leave comments for the Executive Working Group

This announcement is also posted and archived on the ANR Update pages.

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