First lady Maria Shriver to make appearance at Watsonville market

California's first lady Maria Shriver is scheduled to visit the Watsonville Certified Farmers Market in the second week of July, to promote the health benefits of fresh produce and encourage more people to use their food stamps and electronic benefit cards at farmers markets across the state.

Nancy Gammons, the director of Watsonville's market, said Shriver's visit has been tentatively scheduled between 4 and 6 p.m. July 14, but she added: "Anything can happen or change at the last minute in politics."

The impending visit would be just another in a series of public appearances to promote California Connect, a relatively new statewide campaign to help California families gain more access government assistance programs that aren't used enough, said Sabrina Lockhart, a spokeswoman for the Governor's Office.

"So often people don't know how to cut through the maze of programs that exist in California," she said. "And the first lady is trying to make them as easy as possible for everybody involved."

Lee Mercer, director of education and outreach for the Watsonville-based Second Harvest Food Bank, has been instrumental in setting up the visit.

"We've been having a series of conference calls with the governor's office," Mercer said. "But right now the first lady is in Costa Rica, so everything is extremely tentative. But things are looking good. We're just trying to figure out when."

Doug Mattos, promotions and communications director for the city of Watsonville, said the possibility of a personal visit by Shriver is "really exciting."

It would be "fantastic," he said, for the farmer's market, local growers and the very people affected: low-income folks who live in poverty and rely on a multitude of government assistance programs.

"This is going to be a huge shot in the arm for everybody involved," Mattos said. "I think she Shriver has an interest in the people in mind and she cares about nutrition. She doesn't get paid for it, and she certainly comes from her own money."

Shriver, whose mother Eunice Kennedy Shriver founded the Special Olympics, has roots in America's royalty, the Kennedy family. John F. Kennedy was Eunice's older brother. Earlier this year in March, Shriver launched the California Connect campaign, urging 750,000 California residents to claim the roughly $1 billion in uncollected tax refunds, according to the California Connect Web site.

Shriver is no stranger to the agricultural communities or impressing upon Californians the importance of eating nutritious food.

In September 2005, Shriver and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger campaigned against obesity in the state by urging schools to get rid of the snack machines and eat more California grown fruits and vegetables.

Obesity, they said, is an epidemic in the state, with Californians in the past decade gaining 360 million pounds collectively.

In Watsonville, Shriver will promote what Second Harvest Food Bank has been trying to bring to the farmers market in the past year: A machine that accepts the so-called electronic benefit transfer cards.

The machines, similar to debit machines found in grocery stores, are long past due, and Mercer believes it only fair that they be set up at the farmers markets up and down the state of California.

As it is now, Gammons, as market director, has to issue wooden tokens to the customers who qualify for government assistance, and the transfer takes as long as five minutes and involves Gammons dialing numbers on her cell phone, according to Mattos.

This is not the first time that Watsonville's farmers market has been in the spotlight, Mattos said.

Last year, a famous Spanish television show based in Los Angeles, "Despierta America," or "Wake Up America" was filmed at the market, Mattos said.

Calls to the governor's office for more particulars on Shriver's visit were not returned.

California's first lady Maria Shriver is scheduled to visit the Watsonville Certified Farmers Market in the second week of July, to promote the health benefits of fresh produce and encourage more people to use their food stamps and electronic benefit cards at farmers markets across the state.

"So often people don't know how to cut through the maze of programs that exist in California," she said. "And the first lady is trying to make them as easy as possible for everybody involved."

The impending visit would be just another in a series of public appearances to promote California Connect, a relatively new statewide campaign to help California families gain more access government assistance programs that aren't used enough

According to this article, California Connect was about internet access--for housing projects. It's pretty scary that she goes to San Francisco to get ideas for the rest of California.

San Francisco Sentinel, May 16, 2006

The Alice Griffith Housing Project yesterday became the first low-income housing site in the nation to receive internet wireless connection.
California First Lady Maria Shriver attended the launch to gather ideas for state efforts to close the digital divide, known as California Connect.
California Connect aims to enroll working families across the state in affordable internet use.
"I look forward to working with you and your team as you connect San Francisco," Shriver told Mayor Newsom.
"Everything is ahead of its time in San Francisco but we're all one state - we're all one community," stated Shriver.

Shriver Shouted Down In Watsonville

http://www.newwestnotes.com/shriver-shouted-down-in-watsonville/

The first definitively ugly event of the 2006 general election for governor of California occurred with no fanfare this past Friday. Uncannily mirroring a similar event in the 2003 recall, First Lady Maria Shriver was shouted down and forced to leave a public event in Watsonville.

Shriver was in Watsonville -- a city 95 miles south of San Francisco in an agricultural area near Monterey Bay -- for an event to encourage families that are eligible to sign up for food stamps. Several hundred people were on hand to see her. According to the Santa Cruz Sentinel, the event was going very well with the first lady touring some 80 booths set up in the city plaza to educate about nutrition and health care, then helping low-income families sign up for the food stamp program. Then a dozen members of a group called the Watsonville Brown Berets began loudly shouting at her, calling her a “racist” and thoroughly disrupting the event.

Watsonville Mayor Antonio Rivas tried to quiet the group, but had no success. With tensions escalating amidst the noisy harassment, on the advice of security, Shriver departed.

The group, Rivas told the Sentinel, "deliberately interfered with Shriver's ability to talk with the public." One member of the group confirmed to the Sentinel that that was indeed their goal. “We were trying to make Maria Shriver feel unwelcome in Watsonville,” he said. "What we need is not the promotion of food stamps. We don't want a welfare state, we want better wages and jobs."

The incident was strikingly similar to a notorious event during the 2003 recall. Then a group of labor protesters, orchestrated by then state Democratic Party honcho Bob Mulholland, disrupted and shut down Shriver’s very first campaign event on behalf of her husband, now Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Shriver had come to Sacramento for an event registering voters, but another dozen protesters, some wielding bullhorns, shouted her down and made it impossible to continue. Many major Democrats, including then Governor Gray Davis, were offended by the shouting down of Shriver, niece of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy.

Mulholland, now senior strategist for Schwarzenegger’s Democratic challenger, Treasurer Phil Angelides, refused to comment on the latest incident.

However, Angelides advisor Steve Maviglio decried the incident, calling it “tragic and totally inappropriate.”

“The first lady is doing a great job,” said Maviglio, who is on loan to the Angelides campaign for a few weeks from Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez to improve the campaign’s operations.

The Watsonville Brown Berets, a group little known outside the area, emerged in 1994, spurred in part by the Proposition 187 anti-illegal immigration initiative, taking their name from the famous Brown Berets Chicano activist group of the 1960s.

They did not return calls for comment on their activities and connections.

The group sponsors an annual march through Watsonville, a small city of some 50,000 with a 75 percent Latino population. Though the original Brown Berets were focused on Chicano nationalism, at one point attempting to claim Catalina Island for Mexico, this version is actually heavily networked in the liberal activist community in the Santa Cruz and Monterey region. One of the group’s projects is urging the naming of schools after Dolores Huerta, a prominent Angelides backer, and the late Cesar Chavez. (There is no reason to believe that Huerta was involved in the incident.) Watsonville Brown Beret members traveled to New York in 2004 to join the coalition of liberal groups protesting the Republican National Convention.

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