• Bernard Birnbaum 1,375
• Steven Thorson 1,370
• Debbie Healy 393
• Matt Fries 320
• Jack Irving 86

Birnbaum and Thorson, both doctors, were re-elected. Read more about them here [pdf]

Some community activists had expressed concern that other candidates were running in order to pad their resumes for a higher office or to further an extreme anti-government agenda. On the first point other opportunities exist ranging from Fort Collins Cat Rescue to Friends of the Library

On the second point:

People who don’t believe in government shouldn’t get to run one
~Rachel Maddow

Related: Shovel-Ready Clinics

Resource: Salud Family Health Centers

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For more information Email Rosemarie Russo

Related: Can Economy Bear What Gas Prices Have In Store?

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Event Details

• Suggested prices for starts are $1 for 2-inch pots and up to $3 for larger plants, but gardeners are free to set their own prices.
• Gardeners can keep up to 75% from the sale of their starts to cover costs.
• Home Grown Food will keep 25% of sales for this fundraiser.
• Larimer County Master Gardeners will be available, along with veteran suburban gardeners, to answer your gardening questions.
• Seed will also be available for purchase.

Who Is Home Grown Food?

Home Grown Food is based in Fort Collins and has evolved from Grow Food Not Lawns. The group now:

• Gives public talks on growing your own food.
• Sponsors public workshops to educate the community members.
• Maintains a Google Group for ongoing discussion and resource lists.
• Holds monthly discussion groups on gardening and local food topics.
• Coordinates publicity and car pools to out-of-town events.
• Works with and through local media to provide perspectives promoting local food issues.
• Mentors new gardeners.

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Illinois Congressman not Florida Congressman

One abiding theme here at the Gypsy Chief Blog is the press always gets it wrong. I was thinking that the other day when I heard Richard Lui of MSNBC say that Joe Walsh [R-IL] shouted “You Lie” at last year’s SOTU speech. Unfortunately the you lie comment was made by Joe Wilson [R-SC] not Joe Walsh. Walsh, in a tough re-election fight against Tammy Duckworth is the child support guy and Tea-Party favorite.

Decided there wasn’t enough to blog about but then today the Coloradoan came up with a doozy of a Tweet. The Coloradoan says in a Tweet Florida Congressman is thrown off House Floor for wearing hoodie [I am paraphrasing]. Sorry Coloadoan, Bobby Rush is from the Chicagoland area of Illinois, not Florida.

Accuracy in journalism is key

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Home Grown Food volunteers pack seeds

First-time and experienced gardeners alike are invited to a free seed
exchange and seed starting workshop Saturday, March 3, from 11 a.m. to
1 p.m. at Avogadro’s Number Restaurant, 605 S. Mason St., in Fort
Collins.
Home Grown Food’s fifth annual seed swap is intended to encourage
backyard food gardening through the exchange of seeds and area-specific
growing information. Participants are invited to bring extra vegetable,
herb and flower seeds to share. Home Grown Food will have packets of
seeds varieties recommended for this area for sale for $1 per packet.

volunteers prepare seed flats

Attendees will also be invited to plant up a flat of seeds for indoor
sprouting, to get an early start to this year’s garden.
The seed swap is free, though donations to Home Grown Food are
appreciated, and participants are encouraged to patronize Avogadro’s
Number, which is donating the meeting space for this event. For more information about the event, call Sue Sullivan at (970) 237-4485 or email contact@homegrownfoodcolorado.org

finished product ready for Seed Swap at Avo's

Home Grown Food, a Northern Colorado-focused offshoot of Grow Food Not Lawns, sponsors a variety of workshops on home food production, from no-dig garden beds to home brewing, and helps to publicize the local, sustainable and home-grown food initiatives of various organizations in the region. For more information about Home Grown Food, visit its website at www.homegrownfoodcolorado.org.

Related: Craig A. Severance, CPA, series on As Growth Fails How Do We Live? We reprinted all three parts. Part I, Part II, Part III. Home Grown Food could be a survival skill in addition to all its other attributes.

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Want to know exactly how City tax dollars are spent? Curious about the specifics of City operations? Are you interested in making Fort Collins a better place? Then CityWorks 101 is for you.

The City of Fort Collins is offering an eight week program, which will give residents a behind-the-scenes look at running a city. CityWorks 101 provides a unique opportunity to learn more about what services the City provides, and how the City provides them. Participants will see first hand how the City makes decisions and allocates funds.

A note to the reader: I went through this course last year. I found it to be very worthwhile, informative, and inspirational. Highly recommended.

Classes take place on Thursday evenings, 6-9 p.m., March 22 – May 10 and cover the following topics:

• Ready, Set, Gov – an introduction to Fort Collins local government explaining how decisions are made, introducing resources to stay informed and opportunities to get involved
• Creating a Vibrant Community – featuring information on economic health and community planning
• To Serve and Protect – a behind-the-scenes look at police operations
• The Way You Move – focusing on transportation planning, street operations, and transit
• The Utility of it All – an inside look at Fort Collins water, wastewater, stormwater, and electric utilities
• Let’s Play – an in-depth look at parks and trails, recreation, cultural services, and the hard work behind having fun
• Go Green – learn more about our natural areas, environmental programs, and sustainability efforts
• Pay it Forward – bring it all together and see how the topics discussed over the eight-week session join to form the City’s budget

Each session will be held at a different location creating a mini-tour of City facilities. The program also includes a graduation ceremony on May 15 and optional Saturday tours of the Water Treatment Facility and Poudre Fire Authority Training Center.

“I thoroughly enjoyed the hours spent getting to know the City’s different departments and service areas,” said one CityWorks 101 graduate. “I now have an understanding of the big picture – what city government does and how it gets done.”

To be considered for CityWorks 101 you must live within the Fort Collins Growth Management Area (GMA). Class size is limited to a maximum of 30 people; priority is given to applicants who will attend all eight classes. Apply online at www.fcgov.com/cityworks or call 416-2738 to receive a hard copy. Applications are due Feb. 24, 2012.

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from Ukiah, CA Community Blog

by Michael Shulman Published in Business Alliance For Local Living Economies.

Even though these are tough times for tens of millions of Americans, there’s reason for hope. That’s the message of my new book from Chelsea Green, Local Dollars, Local Sense: How to Shift Your Money from Wall Street to Main Street and Achieve Real Prosperity, which showcases dozens of ways individuals, businesses and communities are reinvesting their money locally and creating new jobs. To give you a little taste of what’s in the book, let me share my Top 10 Reasons for Optimism.

10. Wall Street’s Decline – Fortune 500 companies have long enjoyed an unnatural competitive advantage as all of us have unquestioningly forked over some $30 trillion of our retirement funds into their stocks and bonds. This lemming behavior is now coming to a close. Occupy Wall Street has been so effective that even Newt Gingrich is questioning our fealty to “vulture capitalism.” My book documents that the long-term historic rate of return for U.S. stocks has been an astonishing 2.6% per year. Against that record, all kinds of many local investment opportunities seem fabulous!

9. Main Street’s Rise – Evidence continues to mount that local small businesses are the best job producers in the U.S. economy, at least as profitable as their global competitors, and becoming increasingly competitive (thanks in part to groups like BALLE). Local investment can pay off, big time, if we can figure out how to create, pool, trade and evaluate local “securities” more efficiently.

8. The Crowdfunding Revolution – The bad news is that archaic securities laws have made it impossibly expensive for the 99% of us who are “unaccredited” to put money into the 99% of businesses that small. The good news is that a remarkable coalition led by Tea Party Republicans and Occupy Democrats, and supported by President Obama, is on the verge of overhauling these regulations. Even if the weakest of these legislative alternatives are passed, local businesses will be soon be able to take small investments ($100-1,000) from millions of unaccredited investors with little legal cost.

7. Cookie-Cutting Offerings – If crowdfunding reform stumbles, the revolution will still happen. Companies like Cutting Edge Capital are designing DIY websites so that you can go through the legal hoops to sell stock within one state at a tiny fraction of the previous cost. For example, my colleague Jenny Kassan recently helped Workers Diner, based in New York City, do an affordable stock sale to raise capital from its employees, customers and neighbors.

6. Better Understood Loopholes – Not every kind of investment requires a securities filing. Some companies seeking local loans, like Equal Exchange, have partnered with their banks to create specialized CDs that allow their unaccredited depositors to invest. Cooperatives have long borrowed from their members, with many delivering annual rates of return over 5%. Awaken Café in Oakland raised tens of thousands in capital from its customers by preselling coffee (offering $1,200 advance purchases for $1,000).

5. Small Town Initiative – Communities with fewer than 10,000 people have proven that local investment can be a successful economic development tool. The Local Investment Opportunities Network (LION) of Port Townsend, Washington, has woven a network of “preexisting relationships” among dozens of businesses and investors, facilitating $2 million of investment since 2008. Fairfield, Iowa, has mobilized about $300 million over 25 years into so many startups that it’s known as Silicorn Valley.

4. Community Pools – While securities laws have made it difficult and expensive for unaccredited investors to participate in diversified local investment funds, there are exceptions. Innovative revolving loan funds for local business are open to unaccredited investors in New Hampshire, North Carolina and Ohio. A terrific investment club in Maine affiliated with Slow Money, called No Small Pototoes, allows unaccredited investors to participate.

3. Local Stock Exchanges – In the next few years, perhaps even sooner, unaccredited investors will be able to buy and sell shares of local companies on electronic exchanges. Early prototypes can now be seen in the platforms of Mission Markets of New York and the LanX of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Once shares of local companies have some liquidity, it will be possible to assemble diversified portfolios, and mutual and pension funds might finally be convinced to begin investing locally.

2. Self-Directed IRAs – If you want to invest your retirement funds in these options above right now, there’s no need to wait. For a fee in the neighborhood of $100-200 per year, you can hire a custodian to oversee your IRA and designate almost any local investment opportunity imaginable, including municipal bonds and local real estate. Alternatives Credit Union in Ithaca, New York is exploring how to facilitate such investments by its members.

1. Self-Investment Opportunities – Perhaps the most intriguing, readily available and safe local investment opportunity is to invest in yourself. Buying a home, condo or co-op house you can afford generates a better return than Wall Street. So does paying down your mortgage faster. Or investing in energy efficiency in your home or a wind machine for your subdivision. In fact, for most Americans, the high-return opportunities for investing in oneself are so many that they perhaps should stop investing in IRAs and 401(k)s altogether.

If you’re interested in learning more about these ideas, here are four things you can do:

• Read Local Dollars, Local Sense
• Attend BALLE’s monthly webinars on community capital, which have featured many of the projects I wrote about.
• Check out future blog posts I’ll post here and on the Post-Carbon Institute’s site.
• Consider partnering with me to hold an all-day workshop in your community on “Everything You Wanted to Know About Local Investment” (please email me if you’re interested at shuman[at]igc.org).

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Location of Bean Cycle

For the 4th year in a row, The Bean Cycle/Matter Bookstore is hosting a Food Town Hall meeting, led this year by The Growing Project. The purpose of this event is to inform, inspire, and educate about issues associated with food in our community. Anyone involved in growing or producing food in Northern Colorado, or with social justice issues surrounding food, is encouraged to attend and present their projects, ideas, and goals to the community.

After community presentations and a general Q&A, we will have three break-out sessions so people can network and learn more about the issues they are most concerned with.

The Break-Out Sessions are as follows:

1. Policy

   Part of this break-out session will focus on the potential formation of a food and agriculture coalition, led by The Growing Project.

2. Education & PSD

   This break-out session will focus on changes within the Poudre School District Food System.

3. Farmers, Growers, Producers

   This break-out session will allow the public to network and interact with the people who grow food in our region.

When: February 21st, 2012, 6:30 pm – 9pm

Last year a child of about eight or nine brought the house down by asking how kids could be encouraged to eat carrots instead of hamburgers at school. Story here.

Beth Kopp of Matter Daily blog wrote the best story about last year’s Food Town Hall so instead of trying to duplicate that I just put in a link to that. The Matter Daily blog is now history, by the way.

From www.cheapvegatablegardner.com

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OFC Shows Off New Banner

OFC Gets Help From Raggedy Andy

Fundraiser at Avo’s

The Occupy Fort Collins fundraiser “Coats, Cans, or Cash” will be held at 6.0225 × 10^23 which is also known as Avogadro’s Number. In addition to being a famous constant having to do with molecules in gas this Avo’s is a bar and restaurant at 605 S. Mason Street, Fort Collins. That is where you will find today’s fundraiser, starting at 7:00 pm.

Coats, Cans, or Cash: A
Bailout for Those who really Need it

Live Music and Fun
Sunday, January 29th—7pm
Avos 605 South Mason
Featuring D – Money and
the Funky Tunk Heores, Dunptruck Butterflies and More
Bring a Coat(s),
Non-Perishable Food Item(s), or Cash Donation.

Thanks to Aaron at Cathcart Photography for permission to use copywrited video.

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Home Solar Power Discounts – One Block Off the Grid

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