Henkimaa » Mat-Su residents

A box of produce, & homemade sauerkraut

Mel Green — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 08:59:53 +0000

Lucy Cuddy Hall on the UAA campus, one of a number of Glacier Valley Farm CSA's dropoff locations in Anchorage

Yesterday I picked up my second order of produce from Glacier Valley Farm CSA. CSA, again, stands for community supported agriculture; I wrote a long post about it when I picked up my first produce order a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t take as many photos of it this time, but up there you can see it was a pretty good sampling of fresh yummy produce.

This week’s goodies included:

From Alaska’s Glacier Valley Farm, VanderWeele Farm:

Alaska-grown onions
Alaskan-grown potatoes, a whole bunch of ‘em
A big pile of Alaska-grown carrots, which are the best kind of carrots I’ve ever eaten.

This week 13 boxes were delivered by Glacier Valley Farm CSA to the Lucy Cuddy Hall pickup point.

From Outside (all certified organic)

3 Fancy Fuji apples
3 large navel oranges
2 bunches of Rainbow chard. I think one of these was supposed to be romaine lettuce, but that’s okay, I like chard well enough I won’t have problems eating it all.
sunchokes. I don’t have a clue what to do with these, but I’m sure Google will have an answer.
broccoli

And also:

a really big squash. I don’t know whether it came from Alaska or from the Lower 48.

I’ve never liked squash, so I took mine over to my friend Sylvia, who really loves it. I like everything else. Had one of those oranges in my lunch today.

GVFCSA includes stuff from the Lower 48 during the wintertime because, hey, it’s winter in Alaska so a lot of that stuff is out of season up here. The Alaska-grown stuff they include in their produce boxes in the wintertime are storage veggies. Thus, GVFCSA can claim to be the only year-round CSA in Alaska. But there are some other really good CSAs in the Anchorage/Mat-Su area, too, including Arctic Organics, which is the oldest CSA in Alaska & serves about 150 families with its CSA program; and Spring Creek Farm, which belongs to Alaska Pacific University & began a CSA program in 2007. They also have an Environmental Learning Center. Like Glacier Valley Farm, these two farms are located in the Palmer area of the Mat-Su Valley.

If you live in another part of Alaska, you might be able to find another CSA through the Community Supported Agriculture page on the Last Frontier Locavores website (though I don’t know how up-to-date it is). There’s a lot of them in the Fairbanks area! Also check out the website of the Alaska Community Agriculture Association. This is an organization of small Alaska farms which grow food crops for direct sale to the public, whose members are — per their mission statement — “committed to promoting, supporting, and working towards sustainable and regional local food systems. We want to encourage agricultural practices that benefit our environment, our communities, and our customers.” They’ve got a good page of links to CSAs, farmers’ markets, & other community agriculture resources.

My first order of produce from Glacier Valley Farm CSA included a humongous Alaska-grown cabbage. Somehow I didn’t get a photo of it when it was still whole, but take my word for it: it was big & beautiful.

I used it last week to make sauerkraut. I also had some red cabbage that I’d bought at the Natural Pantry, my usual grocery store.

Making sauerkraut is easy, but it can take awhile. Took a long time to chop all that cabbage up, mixed in a bit of salt & caraway seed, then kinda pound it down to bring out the brine. (For lack of anything better, I used my metal Kaladi Brothers car cup: worked great.)

Here’s my sauerkraut the night I made it.

There’s no water added other than about four or five tablespoons of lactic-acid rich “water” from some fruit kimchi my ex-partner Ptery (then named Rozz) made three years ago, that’s still in the fridge (& still good!). All the rest of the fluid is simply the brine from the cabbage itself, which I guess the salt helps to draw out. That kimchi fluid had the stuff to begin the process of fermentation that makes cabbage, salt, & good guy bacteria into really tasty sauerkraut.

I took a bunch of other pictures of the sauerkraut that night because macros of it made some really nice abstract sauerkraut art.

Here’s the same batch of sauerkraut two days later. See all those bubbles? Fermenting nicely.

Fermentation had also caused the cabbage to rise up in the jar (an Italian-made jar with a lid that provides a hermetic seal).

You might also notice how much more purple the lower region of the sauerkraut is than the upper region. That’s because when I first cut up the cabbage, I didn’t think all of it would fit, so I kept about a third of the light green Alaska-grown cabbage out. Then looked like it’d fit after all, so I put in the rest of the light cabbage.

I first tried out some of my cabbage last Friday while I was watching “Caprica” (hence my Daily Tweets post that day, “Caprica w/ sauerkraut”). That was about three days after it was made, & it was pretty good! But sauerkraut is even better after you’ve let it age a bit. Here’s what it looked like tonight, when I had a small bowlful with my dinner. See how the dark purple pigments from the “red” cabbage have mixed all up to make my sauerkraut pink?

Yummy good. And good for you too. Sauerkraut has tons of Vitamin C, & the fermentation process means there’s also lots of good guy bacteria to keep your internal flora all nice & happy.

Please enjoy my Sauerkraut Slide Show:

Local farmers, local food

Mel Green — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 02:06:57 +0000

In the wake of my mother’s death in late 2005 from complications of diabetes, I completely overhauled my diet in early 2006. My growing consciousness food extended not only to what kind of food I was eating, but also how food is produced and marketed — & interestingly enough, turns out that there’s a lot of overlap between crap food that leads to chronic lifestyle diseases like Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, etc. & crap ways of producing foods — for example, the megaindustrialization of food production that has led to the Standard American Diet (SAD indeed) & the preponderance of vending machines, fast foods, & the carbs in a box that fill out our grocery store shelves.

To my mind, the industrialization of the food system is not only just as antidemocratic as the rest of the corporate way of doing things, but is unhealthy to boot. So thank goodness for the farms of the Mat-Su Valley, whose in recent years have been bringing fresh, Alaska-grown produce into Anchorage grocery stores and farmer’s markets. What’s more, now there’s a Mat-Su based community supported agriculture program that weekly (except the first week of each month) delivers boxes of fresh Mat-Su produce to Anchorage subscribers (as well as subscribers in Eagle River, the Mat-Su, Girdwood, & Homer).

I learned about Glacier Valley Farm CSA a couple of weeks ago, & immediately made my first order. Yesterday I went to pick it up.

What’s community supported agriculture? Glacier Valley Farm CSA’s website explains it very well:

A Community Supported Agriculture program is a community of people who pledge support to a farm operation so that the community feels a sense of ownership of and responsibility for the farm. The growers and consumers support each other and share the risks and benefits of food production. Subscribers to the CSA program pledge some amount in advance to cover some of the anticipated costs of the farm’s operation. In return, they receive shares in the farm’s bounty throughout the growing season, as well as satisfaction gained from connecting with the land and participating directly in food production. Members also share in the risks of farming, including poor harvests due to unfavorable weather or pests. By selling directly to community members rather than selling their produce wholesale, the growers receive better prices for their crops and gain financial security, because they have a guaranteed market for their vegetables.

Glacier Valley Farm CSA is operated by Arthur Keyes of Glacier Valley Farm in Palmer — who also started the South Anchorage Farmer’s Market in 2006 with his father-in-law Ben VanderWeele — and Alison Arians, a farmer’s market customer who now runs the CSA’s website (as well as the South Anchorage Farmer’s Market website) and writes the CSA’s weekly newsletter. She’s also has a blog, Alison’s Lunch, about cooking & eating local food, & is the author of the South Anchorage Farmers’ Market Cookbook, which one can buy at the CSA website. Or, I learned last Saturday, from my favorite writing venue, Side Street Espresso, which gets its bread — good stuff! — from the Rise & Shine Bakery owned by Alison & her husband Dan. GVFCSA fills its boxes with produce not only from Glacier Valley Farm, but also from other Mat-Su farms including VanderWeele Farms, Three Bears Farm, Stockwell Farms, Bush’s Bunches, Lewis Family Farm, and (next summer) Kenley’s Alaskan Vegetables. During the winter, when the Mat-Su is under snow, local Alaska produce is mainly of storage vegetables like potatoes, beets, carrots, & cabbage, with greens & other fresh veggies & fruits shipped up from organic producers in the Lower 48.

I was very glad when I checked the CSA’s website to learn that one of its pick-up locations was Lucy Cuddy Hall on the UAA campus — just across campus from where I work. So a couple of weeks ago I placed my first order, & yesterday walked across campus to pick it up.

As I arrived, three other women were had just finished transferring their produce from boxes to their own bags:

Here’s what my box looked like when I opened it:

The lettuce & arugula were hiding some of the other goodies in the box, so I lifted them out of the way to get another photo:

I transferred the whole works to my pack, using a plastic bag as an inner liner.

Glacier Valley Farm CSA resuses the boxes, so before I left Cuddy Hall I did as as people before me had done — broke down my box to make it easier for the CSA to pick them up. There were still a number of boxes that hadn’t yet been picked up. I counted a total of 13 boxes, both broken down & still full. It’s possible that some people had taken the full boxes, to be returned later — but basically looks like about 13 people in the UAA community (faculty/staff/students) or who live/work in the university area are getting fine quality produce through community supported agriculture. Glacier Valley Farm CSA has another 18 or so pick-up locations for its produce in Anchorage, Eagle River, Girdwood, the Mat-Su, & the Kenai (in Homer).

I take the bus to & from work, so it was important to me that my boxload of produce be something I could carry. No problem! — though I got quite a bit sweatier humping it on my back across campus to my office (since I still had another hour at hour at work). Not so bad going home — the cold outside more than took care of the heat I generated from carrying it. Good exercise, I reckon. Once I got home with it, I put my pack on the scale & found I’d carried 25.2 pounds — of which probably about 22 pounds was the produce.

Here’s what was in my box:

From Glacier Valley Farm and VanderWeele Farm in the Mat-Su:

5 onions
10 potatoes
1 large head of cabbage
3 beets

From the Lower 48 (all certified organic):

3 Pink Lady apples
3 Cara Cara oranges
3 kiwi fruit
1 large head of green butter lettuce
1 big bunch of arugula
1 bunch of watermelon radishes
4 garnet yams
1 box of grape tomatoes

Not bad for $35 — & all of it of very high quality. Here’s some of it after I unpacked it at home onto my kitchen counter.

Here’s a closer look at the radishes. Big, plump, & gorgeous. Not only that, but attached to them are those great radish greens. It’s incredible to me that I used to just throw away radish green. It wasn’t until three or four years ago that it occurred to me that, hey, might they not be edible too? Well, of course they are! They can be used just like any other greens in salads, soups, etc. It’s a good idea, though, to separate them early from the radishes themselves — they’ll keep a bit longer that way, but will get slimy & yucky pretty quickly if you store them with the radishes still attached. (I also use carrot greens — not in salads, as their kind of ropy for that; but they go well in soups, as the heat makes them more tender.)

A closer look at the onions. These were grown right here in Alaska. Onions are a staple in my diet, so I’m very happy to have these.

The little plastic produce box of grape tomatoes from a organic farm in California were a nice surprise — they were an addition to what Glacier Valley told us would be in this order.

Here’s a couple of the Alaska-grown beets.

I’ve never been a big beet fan, but they’re so damn good for you (see what the World’s Healthiest Foods website has to say about them — which is a powerful motivator for me to learn to like them more), & I don’t actually hate them… so darned it I’m going to let them go to waste. I decided to include some grated beet in a salad.

Here’s the salad I made last night, making use of several items from my order: butter lettuce & arugula, radishes, grated beet, the entirety of a small onion, & a few of the grape tomatoes. I made enough for dinner last night & lunch today. For last night’s salad I added in some canned tuna & a small handful of mixed nuts & seeds (sunflower & pumpkin seeds, almonds, walnuts, brazil nuts). Today’s lunch has the mixed nuts & seeds, but the protein addition today was salmon.

Last night’s dessert: a kiwi fruit. Mmmmm was it good — I didn’t realize I liked kiwi fruit so much! Isn’t it nice they’re good for me too? — Issue #56 of the Glacier Grist (Glacier Valley Farm CSA’s weekly newsletter) informs me that kiwis “contain about as much potassium as bananas, and also contain 1.5 times the Daily Reference Intake for Vitamin C. It is also rich in Vitamins A and E. “

And then I couldn’t help myself, & also had one of the Pink Lady apples. Dessert for lunch today is one of the oranges.

What will I do with the rest of my order? Well, I’ll want to use the lettuce & arugula pretty fast, so they don’t go bad before I eat ‘em — so more salad for the next couple of days. I took two yams, two potatoes, & one of the beets over to my friend Sylvia last night, since she has a limited income & doesn’t often have opportunity to get good produce. The other two beets will go into salads, soups, whatever… I usually have to mix them with other stuff because I find them too sweet on their own. (Kiwi fruit are sweet — why do I have no problem with them on their own? Beats me.) I have to figure out how I’ll use the potatoes and yams — since overhauling my diet in early 2006, which included learning all about the glycemic index, I’ve tended to avoid starchy vegetables. But it shouldn’t be a big deal to just space out my consumption of them. The head of cabbage — which for some reason I didn’t get a picture of — I think I’ll make into a jar of homemade sauerkraut.

Glacier Valley Farm CSA delivers every week except the first week of the month, which works out fine for me because it’ll probably take a couple of weeks for me to eat all this stuff anyway (along with the produce I still had in my fridge from my last trip to Natural Pantry). But I only have to order anyway when I want to. Since I (mostly) live alone, a box every other week will probably suit me pretty well.

I’ll be making another order tonight, which will be delivered February 10. Per GVFCSA, that order should include:

From Alaska’s Glacier Valley Farm & VanderWeele Farm: Alaskan red or yellow onions – Farmer’s Choice | Alaskan Red or Yukon potatoes-Farmer’s Choice | Alaskan Spaghetti squash or from Outside certified organic butternut | Alaskan carrots |
From Outside: certified organic Fancy Fuji apples | certified organic large navel oranges | certified organic kumquats | certified organic romaine lettuce | certified organic Rainbow chard | certified organic sunchokes | certified organic broccoli | certified organic Butternut squash or Alaskan Spaghetti squash-Farmer’s Choice

Yum. Mat-Su carrots are the best. I’m not as thrilled about the squash — I’ve never liked squash — but Sylvia likes it, so it’s all good.

Already, having eaten just two meals from my first produce box, I feel that same sense of fulfillment that I get from farmer’s market food in the summertime. It’s partly because Alaska-grown food is so good. As Arthur Keyes writes:

Alaskan agriculture is the pinnacle of quality and cleanliness. Alaskan carrots have three times the sugar content of the carrots that are being shipped up here, and you can taste the difference! Alaska’s water is pure and our soils are clean. We lack the vast majority of pests that our southern neighbors deal with on a regular basis.

But it’s also that it feels good to support local business & local farmers — contributing to their success, just as their food is contributing to mine. It feels altogether different from buying & eating some kind of boxed food-like product manufactured by some megacorporation, or even getting from buying produce from Carrs or Fred Meyer or even the Natural Pantry, where I don’t have any real sense of connection with the people who grew it. When you buy & eat local, you really are forming a connection and a sort of gift exchange with other people in your community, which is good for our health politically, economically, & spiritually too.

And I’ve gotta say that after last summer’s import of people from Wasilla to testify against equal rights in Anchorage, it’s awfully nice to enjoy & celebrate the real goodness & bounty that is native to the Mat-Su.

Thank you, farmers of Mat-Su. You rock!

Debbie Ossiander & the Christianist filibuster

Mel Green — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:56:23 +0000

Into my email inbox about an hour ago came the following Anchorage Daily News breaking news item:

Breaking News

Gay-rights ordinance appears doomed

The prospect of a gay rights ordinance passing look dim as Anchorage Assembly Chairwoman Debbie Ossiander says she will continue to allow testimony from anyone who wants to speak on the issue, effectively preventing passage of the ordinance under the watch of a supportive city administration.

If you click through to the story now, you’ll find that it’s been retitled “Prospects dimming for gay-rights ordinance” — a renaming which occurred about 11:54 AM between me posting my first comment on the article (at 11:53:39 AM) & my second (at 11:55:03 AM).

The story is by ADN reported Megan Holland — the same person whose earlier story, entitled “Residents demand to air views on gay-rights amendment”, prompted me earlier today to cancel my electronic subscription to the ADN. Why? Because the story failed to make any mention whatsoever of the long-brewing issue of nonresidents from Mat-Su being permitted to testify — just more evidence that the ADN is falling down on the job when it comes to actually investigating news stories instead of acting as mere stenographers for whatever they’re being told by the people they talk with.

You might recall that I wrote a post about the Outside influence issue last week. Fascinatingly, finally now in this doomsaying article, Megan Holland finally mentions the problem — the first time I’ve seen it mentioned in the ADN (unless I missed something — & I am willing to be corrected). Holland writes:

Opponents of the measure have been organized, showing up by the hundreds, bringing in Christian youth groups, and busing in churchgoers from Mat-Su, some of whom work in Anchorage.

Wow, finally some acknowledgment from the city’s newspaper-of-record!

A few days ago a friend of mine wrote to the Assembly objecting to permitting the testimony of non-Anchorage residents. He received a reply back from Assembly Chair Debbie Ossiander, which he shared with me. The pertinent parts (emphasis added):

The decisions on how best to conduct the hearings are made by the chair. I have taken into consideration the requests to limit testimony to residents of the municipality and have decided against that for several reasons. Many, many of the people who work and play in our town live in the Valley. Anchorage is a true regional city in the sense that its impact extends beyond its physical boundaries in many ways.

And so therefore those people who work & play in Anchorage but do not pay Anchorage taxes or vote in Anchorage elections should have the right to influence our elected representatives to permit discrimination against Anchorage citizens?

Try it this way:

Many, many of the people who work and play in our country live in Canada or Mexico, or hold green cards from other nations. The United States is a true regional power — in fact a world power — in the sense that its impact extends beyond its physical boundaries in many ways.

So let’s let Canadian, Mexican, & other foreign citizens come testify before Congress to influence U.S. lawmakers’ decisions about how to govern U.S. citizens!

I think not.

Then there’s the other issue the article mentions:

Some backers of the proposed law have accused opponents of filibustering — packing the hearing with opposition voices to stall the proposal until it falls in Sullivan’s term. Ossiander said she has suspected that at times but she has also heard very impassioned testimony that convinces her the issue is deeply important to people.

Jerry Prevo at Wednesday evening's Anchorage Baptist Temple picnic on the Loussac Library lawn. Prevo canceled ABT services that night in order that ABT members could attend the Assembly hearing.

Sure: the same impassioned testimony heard over & over from the same small subset of the Anchorage (& let’s not forget the Mat-Su) population, repeating the same talking points over & over again ad nauseum from the filibustering Christianists. As John Aronno of Alaska Commons wrote in his account of Wednesday night’s testimony before the Assembly — the same night, you might recall, that Anchorage Baptist Temple pastor Jerry Prevo canceled evening services so that his congregation could head over to the Loussac to overwhelm the Assembly —

I was there from the beginning of the meeting at 4pm, and left shortly after nine-thirty. The “voices of the people” are not sending any new messages that need to be put on record. The “voices of the people” are now a loop.

And later,

I don’t know where we go from here. If there is an upside, it is in the clarity that the Assembly has offered us. They have made up their minds. They’re not telling us how they’ve made up their minds, but it is clear that the time for changing their minds has solidly run out. The first attempts to filibuster the discussion and subsequent vote on this ordinance continue. But, even more prevalent is the new tactic to literally strong arm the law. The anger. The bully mentality.

One should add that most of the people who testified Wednesday night were the last of the people who originally signed up to testify on the night of Tuesday, June 9 — & thus probably included at least some of those persons originally bused in or carpooled over from the Mat-Su. Noncitizens that Debbie Ossiander persists in giving ear to. Because the repetitive testimony, principally from congregants brought to the Assembly en masse from Anchorage Baptist Temple & other fundamentalist or evangelical churches, and some of whom are noncitizens of Anchorage, is — y’know — impassioned. Well, filibusters usually do have something with group’s passion — including a passionate desire to run out the clock.

Debbie Ossiander is only cooperating in that, whether knowingly or unknowingly. One rather suspects the former. As a Facebook contact of mine wrote after the ADN doomsayer story came out,

I hate to say it, but I call it like I see it. It seems to me Ossiander is prolonging it so we can’t get it passed.

Yep, looks like it to me, too. Assembly Chair Ossiander has been uncertain in her own support or nonsupport of the ordinance, and by doing this “everybody should get heard even if they don’t live in Anchorage and even if they’re all repeating the same talking points over & over again,” she’s effectively also making it so that she perhaps won’t have to vote, and can escape unscathed from making a choice that will get her in trouble with either her conscience, or the conservative portions of her constituency. It’s questionable, to say the least, if this is a responsibly neutral way to handle the chair’s responsibilities.

As Celtic Diva (Linda Kellen Biegel) wrote, the first of the reader comments on the Megan Holland’s doomsayer story:

If this doesn’t pass, I hope Alaskans will remember that Debbie Ossiander is the reason why:

1) She allowed all of the bussed in Valley people to sign up and testify. Gee, I wonder what would happen if I wanted to testify on and Ordinance in Wasilla or Palmer?

2) She continued to allow people to sign up for testimony every day they’ve had it. Since I was one of the last people to sign up on the first day and I testified Thursday, they’d be done by now and voting on Tuesday.

Darn betcha I’ll remember — and I’ll be doing my best to ensure other people remember as well.

(P.S. You must’ve been in a hurry, Linda: I think you mean Wednesday. Though it was probably so late on Wednesday that it felt like Thursday!)

Outside influence

Mel Green — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 20:42:49 +0000

I was going to use my lunch hour today to write my account of the Assembly meeting last night. But that’s going to have to wait: there’s something more important to say at the moment.

We learned midway through the Assembly hearing that numerous red-shirted ordinance opponents had been bused in from the Mat-Su Valley — and some of these non-residents were coming forward to testify. Assembly Vice-Chair Harriet Drummond objected during the meeting to permitting their testimony but Assembly Chair Debbie Ossiander decided to permit it, on the grounds that many Valley residents work or shop in town.

But Mat-Su residents are citizens of Mat-Su Borough, and the governments there. The Anchorage Assembly is supposed to be the government for Anchorage citizens, Anchorage voters. Why are people from outside being permitted to testify in an attempt to influence our government’s decisions about us?

John Aronno of the relatively new blog Alaska Commons, sitting just a couple of people away from me, was recording the entire proceedings, and intends to post transcripts as the week progresses. He was also paying close attention to the “testimony from non-residents” issue. In the wee hours of the morning, he had this to say:

[S]hould we be concerned that anyone was allowed to give testimony, regardless of resident status? Going into today, the vast consensus was that we would not reach a vote. The confirmation of this was not a surprise. However, only getting through eighty out of 300 plus three minute testimonies? There was, unquestioningly, some legitimate points made on each side that should be paid attention to, from people that reside outside of Anchorage. But, should they not be bringing their points, beliefs, and testimonies to their own assemblies? If everyone on the “waiting list” shows up again on June 16th to speak, we’re looking at easily another ten hours of testimony. And, as you’ll see when I am able to upload the transcripts from tonight, easily one third (a conservative estimate) was from out of town.

I will grant you that both sides had out of town representation regarding a bill restricted to Anchorage city limits, but for anyone who was there, and as I believe the transcripts will show, it would be very difficult to argue that it was even in displacement. While one out of state doctor argued the merits of the original wording of the ordinance and the importance of protection for transgenders, and four or five parents spoke on behalf of children who had left the state claiming discrimination on account of being gay, there was a heavy contingent from the Mat-Su Valley, who reportedly arrived in buses, that helped bolster the ranks of the Jerry Prevo, Ron Hammon persuasion. In effect, it looked more like a fillibuster than a string of testimonies.

Besides which, the four or five parents who spoke about their children who left the state were all themselves, from what I heard last night, Anchorage residents. The only person identified as a non-Anchorage resident who testified in support of the ordinance was the doctor to whom John refers.

Celtic Diva asks Assembly chair Debbie Ossiander why she permitted testimony from nonresidents of Anchorage

There were a few Mat-Su supporters of the ordinance present last night, to be sure — Phil Munger of Progressive Alaska, for example, and Linda Kellen Biegel of Celtic Diva’s Blue Oasis [see correction below]. I saw Linda after the Assembly adjourned for the evening, when she came into chambers to ask Assembly Chair Ossiander why she’d permitted the non-resident testimony. (She received the same explanation we’d been given earlier, including Ms. Ossiander’s frank statement that other Assembly members had objected but that as chair, it was her prerogative.) Phil posted last night with photos of the Anchorage and Mat-Su children, some as young as ten, that had been bused in by Anchorage and Mat-Su fundamentalist churches to help front the outside-the-chambers propaganda battle; today, he points out how the Don Hunter, in his Anchorage Daily News story about the hearing, is “totally incurious as to where all those kids in red came from.” But — neither Phil nor Linda attempted But Phil made no attempt to testify. I doubt it even occurred to them him to try.

Correction! Linda informs me (in comment below) that I am in brain-fart-land — well, actually she didn’t use that term, I do. In any case, I was wrong in my belief that she now lived in the Valley. She’s an Anchorage resident, has been nonstop since 1984, & is on the list to testify. Way down on the list. #313. I wonder just how many bused-in Mat-Su residents are on the testimony list ahead of her?

Might there be legitimate reasons for a non-resident to testify? The testimony of the pro-ordinance doctor from out-of-state suggests one reason: expert information. She testified specifically about the medical standards of care for transgender people undergoing transition, relevant in particular to the problematic “bathroom language” in the current draft of the proposed ordinance. It would also seem a no-brainer that visitors to Anchorage might be victimized by the types of discrimination and bias that are at question in the ordinance, in public accomodations at least; and former residents might have stories to tell too — as indeed Linda Kellen might have: she received harassing phone calls and all four tires of her car were slashed simply because of her support for a similar ordinance in 1992. (I believe she later wrote that the tire-slashing was investigated as the Municipality’s first case under a hate crimes law put in place around that time.) Another reason I can think of for why a nonresident might legitimately testify would be if they ran a business in Anchorage, and would therefore be subject to the ordinance’s nondiscrimination provisions in how they treat their employees.

Did any of the Mat-Su residents who testified last night have reasons of that nature? It’ll be interesting to analyze, once John Aronno gets those transcripts posted, what exactly the Mat-Su residents imported into this Anchorage question testified to. Are they among those who claimed that there religious freedom was somehow being violated if Anchorage passes this ordinance — in spite of the fact that their churches are based in the Valley?

But the bottom line remains: the Anchorage Assembly is, in the final analysis, answerable to us, not to Mat-Su residents.

And one must wonder: why did Jerry Prevo & company feel the need to ship in resources from out of town?

In 1998, proponents of Ballot Measure 2, which resulted in the amendment to the Alaska constitution which defined marriage as being between “one man and one woman,” were able to win the battle for advertising in no small part because of huge influxes of money from Outside. As explained at the time by Dan Carter, treasurer of Alaskans for Civil Rights/No on 2, in a letter to Alaska newspapers dated October 30, 1998:

While Alaskans for Civil Rights has received $35 from Outside gay/lesbian organizations ($25 from the Philadelphia Task Force and $10 from Pride, Inc. from Macon, GA), the proponents of this unnecessary measure were receiving almost $560,000 from Outside groups trying to rewrite Alaska’s constitution. When you look at how much money each side has raised from INDIVIDUAL ALASKANS, the financial reports are even more revealing. For every dollar raised by the NO on 2 campaign, 89 cents has come from individual Alaskans. On the other hand, for each dollar raised by the so-called Alaska Family Coalition, less than 9 cents has come from individuals living in Alaska. That’s the real issue in this campaign. Why should Outsiders determine if Alaska’s constitution should be amended? What is their agenda?

One can phrase a similar question now: Why should Mat-Su residents determine the fate of Anchorage’s equal rights ordinance? What is their agenda?

In this battle, the opposition is not just borrowing outside expertise or outside money — they are using actual outside bodies. All those bright young kids in red t-shirts bused in by Mat-Su fundamentalist churches who stood outside the Loussac Library last night waving signs. All those Mat-Su adults who spend time in Anchorage part-time at best, recruited by Prevo & company in order to try to affect the laws governing the citizens of Anchorage who live here full time.

But there’s another question we can ask too. If this ordinance is as bad for Anchorage as Jerry and company claims — why do they have to bring in people from outside the Municipality to fight it? Can it be that ordinance opponents simply don’t have as much support as they claim to in Anchorage? And if they don’t — why are they trying to sabotage the democratic process of Anchorage government?

(Silly question, I know. Since when did Prevo & company care about democratic process?)