Market Swings In California Marijuana Prices

California's Emerald Triangle pot market is hitting bottom

By Peter Hecht
phecht@sacbee.com

Published: Saturday, May. 5, 2012 - 12:00 am | Page 1A

Last Modified: Sunday, May. 6, 2012 - 2:47 pm

ARCATA – The pot market is crashing in California's legendary Emerald Triangle.
The closure of hundreds of marijuana dispensaries across California and a federal crackdown on licensing programs for medical pot cultivation are leaving growers in the North Coast redwoods with harvested stashes many can't sell.
Some pot cultivators who sought legitimacy through the medical market are fleeing to the black market. So much cheap weed is getting dumped in the college town of Arcata, some local dispensaries say business is down 75 percent. Even the region's itinerant and colorful bud trimmers are going broke.
By the scores, people have long trekked into the marijuana fields and indoor greenhouses of Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties. Workers used to earn as much as $200 a pound meticulously cutting leaves from marijuana buds, prepping them for display at dispensaries or for sale in a purely illicit market.
These days, a 47-year-old man called Mover, a dreadlocked migrant from Ohio who is a fixture in downtown Arcata, says the tedious work isn't worth his trouble as the per-pound pay rate has dropped to $100 or often just a few nuggets of pot.
"I got paid in weed," Mover, who refused to give his real name, said of his last trimming job. "It's worthless here. You can't give it away. And I'm not going to transport anything. I'm too old, and I don't want to go to jail."
The region's pot pilgrimage had accelerated in recent years as people were drawn by local cannabis traditions and dreams of cashing in on the medical marijuana market. They planted marijuana in the backwoods and in rewired houses with high-intensity grow lights.
But the saturation of pot growers set off a price tumble by 2010, as a pound of prime Emerald weed slipped from $5,000 to the $3,000 range for marijuana grown indoors and to the $2,000 range for product grown outdoors. Lately, prices are in free-fall.
"Last I heard, a pound of marijuana is $800 for outdoor grown," said Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman in Ukiah. "That's plummeting. You might do better with tomatoes."
The marijuana meltdown could have major regional effects. In Humboldt County, a recent study by a local banker estimated marijuana accounts for more than a fourth of the county's $1.6 billion economy.
In recent years, many locals already thought the influx of pot growers exceeded demand in the state's sanctioned medical pot market. When U.S. authorities in October announced a crackdown on medical marijuana businesses that they contended were profiteering in violation of federal and state laws, it darkened growers' fears.

Raid heightened fears

Lelehnia Du Bois, 41, was one who thought she had found a safe niche. A former fashion model in Southern California, Du Bois started growing marijuana indoors in Eureka after rupturing her spinal cord. She supplied her unused home-grown "Sweet God" to a Eureka dispensary, earning $5,000 a year on top of her disability income, she said.Du Bois had spent her childhood in Trinity County and remembers growers having "a big potluck" meal after the outdoor marijuana harvest. She said the weed culture changed markedly as indoor growers in Arcata and Eureka competed for access to the medical market – and many went into illegal trafficking.
As indoor pot prices dropped as low as $1,800 a pound, "People started taking risks. All of a sudden, people were not farmers. They were drug dealers," Du Bois said.
Last year, months before federal prosecutors began targeting California dispensaries for closure, Du Bois got out of the pot business and moved out of Humboldt County. She now lives in Utah.
At Arcata's Humboldt Patient Resource Center, a dispensary that grows its marijuana on site, cultivator Kevin Jodry said fewer people are coming to buy seedlings for this year's outdoor marijuana crop or quarterly indoor yields.
"Many people distributing in the medical marijuana market didn't get into it for the risk situation," he said. "The people who were formerly in the black market were able to stay functioning. People who were not criminals can't move their product."
Pressures on growers intensified after federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents raided a marijuana farm that had been licensed by Mendocino County and was considered a model for establishing local compliance rules for medical cultivation.
The raid prompted Mendocino County supervisors in January to rescind a program that allowed the sheriff to enforce a 99-plant limit on pot farms by attaching $50 zip ties to each plant and inspecting the gardens of nearly 100 growers who provided documentation to show they were serving medical pot users.
The program, which also offered cheaper tags for smaller quantity growers, brought in $630,000 in county fees in two years.
Sheriff Allman said it allowed his department – which spends 30 percent of its $23 million budget on pot enforcement – to target major cultivators who he says are illegally growing thousands of plants, diverting water and fouling the environment.
Humboldt County had sought to put a similar program in place last summer as District Attorney Paul Gallegos called for licensing to ensure "sustainable and responsible cultivation." After the federal government launched its crackdown, supervisors tabled work on the plan, and Eureka and Arcata placed moratoriums on new dispensaries.

Outdoor growers struggle

Among the most worried cultivators are the outdoor growers who increasingly struggle to compete with the exotic strains produced in climate-controlled indoor grow rooms.Alison Sterling Nichols, executive director of the Emerald Growers Association, which seeks to protect the Emerald Triangle's sun-grown pot traditions, said outdoor growers were most directly affected by the collapse of local licensing programs. The group backs legislation to regulate medical marijuana statewide as long as it would preserve growers' ability to supply dispensaries.
"People shouldn't have to sleep with one eye open," Sterling Nichols said. "People should be able to move from the black market into the light. We haven't been able to bridge that gap. We have hills of healthy outdoor product we can't take to the market."
Meanwhile, many worry that the Emerald Triangle will go back to being the hub of California's illegal marijuana trade.
Last month, authorities in Pennsylvania arrested the former operator of a Humboldt dispensary for allegedly shipping more than 25 pounds of pot in heat-sealed packets to a home he was visiting. State officers in Nebraska also stopped a Mendocino County man and a companion with 62 pounds of weed stuffed in duffel bags.
On consecutive days in late February, Humboldt authorities conducted two separate raids on growers suspected of criminal distribution, seizing nearly $700,000 in cash and 7,000 plants.
In Mendocino, Allman said his officers last year eradicated 642,000 plants, some loosely tied to Mexican trafficking networks but most involving Californians or residents from other states who secretly grew on public lands and private property.
With a federal crackdown and a shrinking market, Allman said, many out-of-towners may leave and "everything is going to go underground."

http://www.sacbee.com/2012/05/05/4467516/californias-emerald-triangle-pot.html

Better Living Through Chemistry

April 13, 2013

Think Those Chemicals Have Been Tested?

By IAN URBINA

MANY Americans assume that the chemicals in their shampoos, detergents and other consumer products have been thoroughly tested and proved to be safe.

This assumption is wrong.

Unlike pharmaceuticals or pesticides, industrial chemicals do not have to be tested before they are put on the market. Under the law regulating chemicals, producers are only rarely required to provide the federal government with the information necessary to assess safety.

Regulators, doctors, environmentalists and the chemical industry agree that the country’s main chemical safety law, the Toxic Substances Control Act, needs fixing. It is the only major environmental statute whose core provisions have not been reauthorized or substantively updated since its adoption in the 1970s. They do not agree, however, on who should have to prove that a chemical is safe.

Currently this burden rests almost entirely on the federal government. Companies have to alert the Environmental Protection Agency before manufacturing or importing new chemicals. But then it is the E.P.A.’s job to review academic or industry data, or use computer modeling, to determine whether a new chemical poses risks. Companies are not required to provide any safety data when they notify the agency about a new chemical, and they rarely do it voluntarily, although the E.P.A. can later request data if it can show there is a potential risk. If the E.P.A. does not take steps to block the new chemical within 90 days or suspend review until a company provides any requested data, the chemical is by default given a green light.

The law puts federal authorities in a bind. “It’s the worst kind of Catch-22,” said Dr. Richard Denison, senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund. “Under this law, the E.P.A. can’t even require testing to determine whether a risk exists without first showing a risk is likely.”

As a result, the overwhelming majority of chemicals in use today have never been independently tested for safety.

In its history, the E.P.A. has mandated safety testing for only a small percentage of the 85,000 industrial chemicals available for use today. And once chemicals are in use, the burden on the E.P.A. is so high that it has succeeded in banning or restricting only five substances, and often only in specific applications: polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxin, hexavalent chromium, asbestos and chlorofluorocarbons.

Part of the growing pressure to update federal rules on chemical safety comes from advances in the science of biomonitoring, which tells us more about the chemicals to which we are exposed daily, like the bisphenol A (BPA) in can linings and hard plastics, the flame retardants in couches, the stain-resistant coatings on textiles and the nonylphenols in detergents, shampoos and paints. Hazardous chemicals have become so ubiquitous that scientists now talk about babies being born pre-polluted, sometimes with hundreds of synthetic chemicals showing up in their blood.

It often takes a crisis to draw attention to how little the government knows about industrial chemicals in circulation. After the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, at least two million gallons of chemical dispersants were spread to break up the slick. But federal officials could not say they were safe because minimal testing had been done.

The current presumption that chemicals are “safe until proven dangerous” stands in marked contrast to how pharmaceuticals and pesticide companies are handled. Companies making these products have to generate extensive data demonstrating the safety of pharmaceuticals or pesticides before they are sold.

This was not always the case. Pharmaceutical companies used to be able to sell drugs with minimal prior testing, but that changed after a drug called Thalidomide, given in the 1950s to pregnant women for morning sickness, was found to cause severe birth defects the public outcry helped push the medical field to take a precautionary approach to introducing new drugs.

Federal reform of the toxic substances act may be coming. Last week, Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, and Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, Democrat of New York,  introduced a bill called the Safe Chemicals Act of 2013, which would require the chemical industry to demonstrate that a chemical is safe in order for it to be sold. The bill, which has more than 25 Democratic co-sponsors, would put limits on trade secret practices and requires industry to reduce use of the chemicals designated by the E.P.A. as being of “greatest concern” because they are most toxic. 

The bill has strong support from environmentalists but opposition from the chemical industry. It has some similarities to rules that went into effect in the European Union in 2007.

Rather than adding more regulations, Calvin Dooley, president of the American Chemistry Council, said in testimony that the “E.P.A. should take advantage of the massive amounts of data and information that the agency already has access to.” His organization has also argued that the bill risks raising costs, squelching innovation and putting American companies at a competitive disadvantage.

Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, is expected to introduce a competing bill that is likely to win the support of the chemical industry. While details about the bill are sparse, it aims to be less of a burden on industry. It would probably not require prior testing on many chemicals, and it would demand less data of companies than would Mr. Lautenberg’s bill.

The competing bills may end up splitting the Senate down party lines, which could doom reform altogether.

In the absence of federal action, more than 20 states have created their own toxic-substances programs to police chemical safety. Many business owners say this trend is creating a confusing patchwork. Health and environmental advocates counter that, pending effective federal reform, these programs are better than nothing at all.

For now, consumers and companies looking for safer products are largely on their own.

Ian Urbina is an investigative reporter for The New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/sunday-review/think-those-chemicals-have-been-tested.html?pagewanted=all

Upscale Veg In NYC

Escapes: New York’s vegetarian restaurant scene

By Joe Yonan,May 10, 2012

 

Back in the day, the meat-avoiding traveler had to pack plenty of trail mix, because even an urban vacation could feel like a hike along the Appalachian Trail when mealtime rolled around. Even a place such as New York, with its falafel chains and ubiquitous Indian restaurants, raw-food cafes and even vegan diners, could seem like a wasteland if a vegetarian tried to move into a higher-end dining room.
Or so I’ve heard, anyway. My own move toward less meat eating, if not full-on vegetarianism, has coincided with a boom in plant-centric restaurants, particularly in the Big Apple. Even though some of the city’s trendiest places don’t even serve a veggie option (I’m looking at you, Momofuku Ko), other chefs have made it particularly easy — pleasurable, even — to eat meat-free. The last couple of times I’ve spent a weekend in the city, I’ve made a point of seeking out some of the more creative approaches, especially since I’m working on a vegetable-focused cookbook and can always use some inspiration.

At a place called Dirt Candy, I got it in spades, if you’ll pardon the gardening pun. Soon after a friend and I squeezed into chef Amanda Cohen’s 18-seat place on the Lower East Side for a 10 p.m. reservation, we were grinning. That’s partly because the staff members’ energy was infectious as they danced around one another in the cramped space but also because we got such a kick out of merely reading the menu. Carrot buns? Fried cauliflower and waffles? Popcorn pudding? Yes, please. Our favorite: the Asian-style steamed buns made with the juice of three different varieties (and colors) of carrot, with caramelized carrots inside instead of the requisite pork belly.
Turns out that one of those energetic staff members was Cohen herself, and when we asked her how she comes up with her dishes, she smiled mischievously and shrugged. “I just have crazy ideas,” she said. Then she told us about the finishing touches that she and her collaborators were putting on a cookbook due out this fall. It’s illustrated comic book-style, which seems to suit her personality perfectly. After all, this is someone whose Web site proclaims, “Anyone can cook a hamburger, but leave the vegetables to the professionals.”
Just down the street but at the opposite end of the spectrum is Kajitsu, one of the most reflective restaurants I’ve been to outside Japan. The cooks here celebrate the ancient Buddhist tradition of shojin cooking, a precursor to formal kaiseki cuisine. After my friend and I raced there in separate cabs through rainy traffic, frazzled and almost 20 minutes late for our reservation, the smell of cedar incense and the minimal space’s earth-tone decor immediately set us at ease. The word kajitsu means “fine day,” and soon enough, we’d forgotten about the not-so-fine weather outside.
The place has gotten two Michelin stars, and Momofuku’s pork-worshipping chef, David Chang, included it on his list of places to eat in 2012. We happened to go on the first day of a brand-new chef, which had us worried that the praise would be misplaced, but it wasn’t. Everything that came our way was exquisite in presentation and often in flavor, too. In true Japanese tradition, as much attention was paid to the dishware as the food, with stunning pieces of sometimes old (and, in Buddhist style, repaired) pottery chosen to complement the carefully cooked and arranged ingredients.
Take the dish our waitress announced as “spring vegetables”: It was a cherry leaf fried on just one end to look like frost, covering up a nest of Brussels sprouts, asparagus, zucchini and oyster mushrooms. Oh, and what’s that little pinkish white thing? Nama-fu, steamed wheat gluten. Trust me: It’s better than it sounds.
The multi-course menu, punctuated only by our waitress’s lilting voice, included compositions of chewy, crunchy, crisp and sometimes slimy ingredients. The dish that made us swoon was a matte white square bowl filled with a bright green pea broth and a single quarter of a fennel bulb, super soft but with caramelized, slightly chewy edges, along with a few sparsely placed snap peas, sansho pepper flower and little rolls of yuba, the creamy skin formed when making fresh tofu.
The next-best dish came at the tail end of the run. The new chef, Ryota Ueshima, fresh from Japan, “has prepared a special course to celebrate his first day,” our waitress announced: apple chunks topped with plum jelly. Tart and sweet, simple yet amazing. And yet we couldn’t help imagining a decidedly non-vegan application: It would be perfect on ice cream.

There’s vegetarian, there’s vegan, and then there’s raw vegan. Pure Food and Wine caused a sensation in New York when it opened in 2004 to serve the latter, something more common on the West Coast. The tenets of raw food hold that heating anything above 118 degrees destroys important vitamins, minerals and enzymes. I don’t know that I agree with the philosophy — after all, there’s a compelling argument that cooking led to civilization — but none of that really mattered when my friend and I slid into the sleek, dark dining room near Union Square. The food would speak for itself.
When it did, it wasn’t as playful as that of Dirt Candy, but it sure had its moments. We had seen lasagna made of zucchini ribbons before, but other dishes surprised us. A crunchy, spicy, fresh Philly roll combined avocado, kimchi and a faux cheese made of cashews. The pistachio topping on a portobello mushroom dish tasted as pungent and funky as if it had blue cheese in it, but it must have been miso or something else fermented. Miniature mushroom tacos were so deconstructed we couldn’t quite tell what was going on, possibly because we gobbled them before we had a chance to analyze, or ask.
Near us, a loud table gathered for a birthday celebration seemed segregated by gender, and the female side was in a better mood than the male. As the women took pictures and everybody clinked glasses of sangria, one of the guys shouted out: “Next year we’re going to Atlantic City!” Why? “Because there are no vegan restaurants in Atlantic City.”
I felt a pang of sympathy for two women staffing the host station just a few feet away, but I’m sure they’ve heard it all before. On our way out, I tried to make up for our neighbors by praising the food. “Which was your favorite?” one asked.
“The Philly roll,” I said.
“Oh, I love that one,” she replied, “especially with that cream cheese.” And she winked as if to put quote marks around “cheese,” and I returned the gesture when I said, “Yes, that’s really good cheese.” And there we stood, winking at each other as if vegan food were some kind of code. Which, now that I think of it, might just be true.


Yonan is on book leave from The Washington Post in southern Maine this year. His Web site is www.joeyonan.com. Follow him on Twitter: @joeyonan.

Capiatalist Vision: Work Until You Are 80

      Retire at 80? This is the vision of the capitalist elite? This is not about "take that burden off the youth" - it is about corporate profits. The rich get richer and the working people just get to keep working.......

AIG Chief Sees Retirement Age as High as 80 After Crisis

By Boris Cerni and Zachary Tracer - Jun 4, 2012

American International Group Inc. (AIG) Chief Executive Officer Robert Benmosche said Europe’s debt crisis shows governments worldwide must accept that people will have to work more years as life expectancies increase.
“Retirement ages will have to move to 70, 80 years old,” Benmosche, who turned 68 last week, said during a weekend interview at his seaside villa in Dubrovnik, Croatia. “That would make pensions, medical services more affordable. They will keep people working longer and will take that burden off of the youth.”
The crisis, now in its third year, threatens to destroy Europe’s 17-nation currency union as Greece contemplates exiting the euro and Spain sees its bond yields rise and banking industry falter. German Chancellor Angela Merkel hardened her opposition to joint debt sharing in the euro region as U.S. President Barack Obama singled out Europe’s leaders for not doing enough to arrest the crisis.
Greece abandoning the euro could be a disaster for the country and Europe must work to keep that from happening, said Benmosche, whose company was the world’s biggest insurer before it took a U.S. bailout.
“People in Greece have to see there is no easy way out of this” and the government must get them to work longer, he said in the June 2 interview on the Adriatic coast. “If not, and if they go to their own currency, I think they will see huge inflation and it will be devastating for people on fixed incomes.”

Life Expectancy

Greece, where the average life expectancy is 81.3 years, has an effective retirement age of 59.6, among the lowest in Europe, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. French President Francois Hollande, the Socialist who was sworn in last month, has pledged to cut the retirement age to 60 from 62 while increasing corporate and bank taxes and introducing a 75 percent levy on earnings of more than 1 million euros ($1.2 million).
Peter Hancock, CEO of AIG’s Chartis property-casualty unit, said last week the insurer has assigned staff from Argentina to advise their counterparts in Athens as the company prepares for a possible Greek exit from the euro, with the common currency at its lowest against the U.S. dollar since June 2010. Argentina defaulted on a record $95 billion of debt in 2001 and later abandoned a decade-long 1-to-1 peso peg to the greenback.
“We have gone through the crisis in Argentina and other countries over time, so we have experience,” Benmosche said.
The short-term nature of some of the company’s insurance contracts would minimize disruption if Greece stopped using the euro, he said.

Local Currency

“Our premiums would convert to the local currency, but if they do, so will our obligations,” he said. “We will deal with the rules at the time.”
Benmosche has sold non-U.S. life insurers, a consumer lender and other businesses to pay back its taxpayer rescue, which swelled to $182.3 billion as the U.S. extended more credit and lowered the interest charged. The Treasury Department has cut its stake to 61 percent from 92 percent through three share sales totaling about $17.6 billion. In the most recent two, AIG bought back a total of $5 billion in stock.
AIG still seeks to divest its plane-leasing unit and sell its remaining stake in Hong Kong-based insurer AIA Group Ltd.

‘The Overhang’

“The overhang from the government’s ownership interest in AIG is in the process of going away,” Paul Newsome, an analyst at Sandler O’Neill & Partners LP, wrote in a May 30 research note. “AIG should have sufficient enough capital to facilitate the Treasury Department’s exit.”
Treasury raised $5.8 billion in the first offering in 2011, selling for $29 a share. At the same time, AIG sold 100 million shares for $2.9 billion to demonstrate access to the capital markets and satisfy a condition of its bailout. The insurer bought half of the $6 billion in stock the department divested at $29 apiece in March and $2 billion of a $5.75 billion offering that went for $30.50 a share in May. The government needs to average $28.72 to break even on its investment.
AIG slid 6.8 percent on June 1 to close the week at $27.21 after U.S. employers created the fewest jobs in a year and the nation’s jobless rate rose to 8.2 percent. Reports also showed manufacturing grew less than estimated in the U.S. and China, and contracted for a 10th month in the euro region.
Benmosche said people and businesses in the U.S. lack confidence and are hesitant to invest as financial regulation and tax policies remain unsettled.
“I am optimistic that we’ll continue to grow, and if we get past this period of uncertainty and gain confidence again in the U.S. economic system, that will help lead the world out of the situation we are in today,” he said.
To contact the reporters on this story: Boris Cerni in Ljubljana at bcerni@bloomberg.net; Zachary Tracer in New York at Ztracer1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Dan Kraut at dkraut2@bloomberg.net

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-03/aig-chief-sees-retirement-age-as-high-as-80-after-crisis.html

Corner Stores Feeding The City

Will Philadelphia’s experiment in eradicating ‘food deserts’ work?

By Sarah Kliff, Published: June 8, 2012

Philadelphia has the highest obesity rate and poorest population of America’s big cities. It also has an ambitious plan — launched out of 632 corner stores — to put healthy food on every table.
The $900,000 investment in better health depends on apples and oranges, chips and candy, $1,200 fridges and green plastic baskets. The results could steer the course of American food policy.
Philadelphia is trying to turn corner stores into greengrocers. For a small shop, it’s a risky business proposition. Vegetables have a limited shelf life, so a store owner must know how much will sell quickly — or watch profits rot away. He also lacks the buying power of large supermarkets and is often unable to meet the minimum orders required by the cheaper wholesalers that grocery stores use.
With shelf space at a premium, shop owners must pick and choose the products they think will sell best. Chips and candy and soda are a sure bet. Eggplant? It’s hard to know.
Access to healthy foods has been a cornerstone of the Obama administration’s food policy, dedicating hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds to projects like this one. The goal is to eradicate food deserts — low-income areas that lack access to nutritious foods — by 2017.
“More parents will have a fresh food retailer right in their community — a place that sells healthy food, at reasonable prices, so they can feed their families the way they want,” first lady Michelle Obama said when she launched the White House’s $400 million Healthy Food Financing Initiative.
More than just a drain on families, obesity is a huge economic drag: The United States spends $147 billion each year treating the condition.

But even as the White House has scaled up such efforts, a growing body of research has questioned its basic assumption: that people will eat better if given better options. Multiple studies have scoured local, state and national data looking for a causal relationship between weight and access to healthy food. None has found it.
“It’s a theory that makes sense, and it’s intuitive,” says Helen Lee, a policy fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, whose research focuses on racial disparities in health outcomes. “But my concern would be that we’re investing in a strategy that may not be very promising. If you’re investing government money, you should carefully be evaluating how much you’ve invested and how much you’re getting out of that.”
That’s where Philadelphia comes in. Along with building the country’s largest network of healthy corner stores, the city is conducting the largest study to date of what happens when nutritious options are introduced into neighborhoods that have traditionally gone without. It’s measuring what people bought before, what they’re eating now and whether that improves.
“Availability of these products is definitely changing,” says Giridhar Mallya, director of policy for the Philadelphia Department of Public Health. “Now we’re waiting to see what is actually happening with people’s purchases.”
The Obama administration is watching, too.
“Research hasn’t caught up with all the interventions, because collecting evidence and evaluating it takes time,” Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Kathleen A. Merrigan said. “That’s why we’re excited about efforts like the one that they’re undertaking in Philadelphia.”
Changing habits is a hard sell
The term “food desert” is a relatively new one in public health policy, tracing to a 1995 paper from a government work group in Scotland. Various definitions exist today, and all describe parts of the country, both urban and rural, where there is inadequate access to affordable nutritious foods.
Public health researchers have long known that lower socioeconomic status correlates with worse health, including higher levels of obesity. Numerous studies have also noted connections between access to healthy foods and lower weight. A 2011 article in the Journal Obesity Review found that “greater accessibility to supermarkets or less access to takeaway outlets were associated with a lower prevalence of obesity.”
If governments could improve proximity to healthy foods, the theory went, it could reduce a rapidly rising obesity rate.
“In the U.K., we’d started making policy about this before there was any empirical evidence,” says Neil Wrigley, a professor of geography at Southampton University in England, who works on urban planning research. “Time to time, this happens, where you get policies that outstrip the evidence. Then the evidence needs to catch up.”
Wrigley conducted one of the first studies of a food desert intervention, looking at what happened when a grocery store was brought into an underserved part of Leeds, an industrial city in northern England. Of shoppers surveyed, 45 percent switched to the new store. Their habits, however, barely changed: Consumption of fruits and vegetables increased by one-third of a cup per day — about six grapes or two broccoli florets.
“The results came out quite small, a very modest increase in consumption of nutritious foods,” Wrigley says. “It seemed an almost nonexistent improvement.”
Similar research in the United States shows much the same.
Ohio State University’s Janne Boone-Heineman published a 2011 longitudinal study of food access in Birmingham, Ala., Chicago, Minneapolis and Oakland, Calif. Over 15 years, she traced obesity levels alongside the introduction of healthy food options (grocery stores) and unhealthy venues (fast food restaurants). Her study found no connection between a new grocery store and better health outcomes.
In March, the California institute’s Lee published a paper looking, nationwide, for a connection between proximity to grocery stores, fast food and obesity. RAND Institute’s Roland Sturm published a separate paper this year, one that compared food sold in a neighborhood and children’s diet in California. Neither could find a relationship.
“While some studies find a correlation between food accessibility and BMI and obesity, the causal pathways are not well understood,” the Agriculture Department concluded in a 2009 review of food desert research, noting elsewhere that “interventions aimed at increasing access to healthy foods may not be successful in addressing obesity.”
To date, no study has found a causal relationship between improving access to healthy foods and improving health outcomes. “You have more people starting to poke holes into what’s a simple thesis, that poor people are overweight because they lack access to healthy food,” Lee says. “My concern is that we might be investing in something that might not be very promising, at the cost of not investing in something that works.”
Candy vs. cantaloupe
One pervasive theory of why food access interventions have not worked has to do with what, exactly, corner stores sell. Even when they offer fresh fruit and produce, they also stock chips and candy. The latter are often less costly, more calorie-dense and require little to no preparation — just the sort of thing, in other words, that people will grab on the run.
Others question whether proximity is a good metric for defining access. Adam Drewnowski at the University of Washington recently surveyed Seattle residents on where they bought groceries. He found that most people don’t shop where they live — access is determined as much by price and public transit, for instance, as proximity.
“If you live next to a Mercedes dealership, that doesn’t mean you’ll buy a Mercedes,” he says. “And it’s the same with living next to a grocery store: That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll start eating salads.”
Others point to a lack of rigorous study of planned interventions: Most have been small in scale, involving a handful of stores. A 2012 review article looked at efforts in 16 cities to improve food access. Only four measured impact on weight; none found any change. And often, after a city’s initial investment, there was no follow-up.
“One big gap in much of the work has been a lack of detailed evaluation,” says Joel Gittlesohn, a public health researcher at Johns Hopkins University who has published extensively on food access issues. “Programs are often implemented by local departments with very little evaluation of what’s going on.”
Philadelphia’s study, distinct in scope and scale, may deliver a breakthrough.
The city has, in many ways, been the epicenter of American efforts to improve food access. Of the country’s 10 largest cities, its population is the lowest-income, and it has higher obesity rates than New York City and Baltimore. It’s home to The Food Trust, a nonprofit that has risen to national prominence as an advocate for increasing food access for low-income Americans.
Working with Food Trust, in the late 2000s Philadelphia began piloting healthy corner stores. In 2010, it ramped up efforts significantly when it received $25.4 million in stimulus funds meant to combat obesity and tobacco use. That initial grant was bolstered with $1.5 million more in funding from the Affordable Care Act’s Prevention and Public Health Fund, a $15 billion commitment to projects that promote preventive health.
“It was a historic investment in public health,” says the public health department’s Mallya, who oversees the initiative for Philadelphia. “I don’t know if we’ll ever get that level of investment again. So for us, it’s very much been transformative.”
‘Just one piece of the puzzle’
The city has recruited 632 corner stores — of 2,500 overall — to its Get Healthy Philly initiative. Of those, 122 have gotten more intensive support, been supplied with new fridges to store produce and connected with wholesalers from whom they can buy at lower prices. It is also working with schools to improve nutrition and helping neighborhoods launch farmers markets, a multifaceted approach officials hope will improve public health.
“Access to healthy food is just one piece of the puzzle, and we are committed to doing the work to help improve public health,” Merrigan, of the USDA, said.
Anecdotal reports from shop owners suggest that sales of fresh produce have indeed increased alongside the surge in supply.
“Almost every day, people grab lettuce or something,” says Catalina Morrell-Hunter, who has owned her corner store in North Philadelphia for 15 years. Apples and oranges go fastest, and cilantro has proved popular in the largely Hispanic neighborhood. “I don’t say I sell like an entire market does. But when people are short a carrot, they can come to the convenience store.”
But whether that will have a health impact remains to be seen. Temple University’s Center for Obesity Research is working with the city to study how shopping habits do, or don’t, change when healthy options are introduced. Last year, before stores added nutritious options, researchers stopped 7,000 shoppers on their way out of the store to look at their purchases. With the new foods now available, researchers are doing another 7,000 stops.
“I don’t think we know much about how well this works,” says Gary Foster, director of the center. “It’s a field in its infancy  . . . nobody has really done at such a big scale.”
Foster expects the research on urban corner stores to publish in about a year and, when it does, it will be “the largest study by a long shot.”
When kids come into Guillermo and Denise Rodriguez’s store, they often buy the bananas at her urging. “It’s not a problem getting them to buy the fruit,” Denise says. “It’s a problem trying to get them to keep buying the fruit, and stay off the junk food. You have people who buy what they want to buy.”
Sometimes they’ll hand out fruit for free, to encourage kids to try it. The goal, says Denise, is to familiarize kids with healthier foods.
That’s a hard way to run a business.
“It’s all good but, you know, when the moment this money stops flowing, things go back to normal,” Drewnowski says. “There needs to be a longer-term business model.”
The Rodriguezes say they are committed to the business; aside from the equipment they received from the city, the sales of fruit and vegetables make the new venture sustainable, if not quite profitable right now.
“There’s not too much of a profit,” Denise says. “We’re not really worried too much about the profit right now, not until we see a profit later on. Right now, we’re just selling the fruit and making things healthier for other people. That’s good enough for us.”

Kliff wrote this article with the assistance of the Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism, which is administered by the California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships, a program of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/will-philadelphias-experiment-in-eradicating-food-deserts-work/2012/06/08/gJQAU9snNV_blog.html?tid=pm_pop

Perhaps This Is Part Of The Problem?

      The nuts and bolts of corporate government culture. If nothing is to be gained/gamed by hiring a former staffer, then why do corporations do it regularly? Let alone for high salaries...... Corporations tend to do what is best for themselves, expecting a return on an investment.

Tax Lobby Builds Ties to Chairman of Finance Panel

HARRY REID, MAX BAUCUS, WASHINGTON DC, TAXES, US: NEWS, INSIDE WEALTH, MCDONALD'S CORP, ALTRIA GROUP INC, VERIZON COMMUNICATIONS INC, FEDEX CORP, GENERAL ELECTRIC CO, BUSINESS NEWS

By: Eric Lipton

The New York Times | Sunday, 7 Apr 2013 | 12:00 AM ET

Restaurant chains like McDonald's want to keep their lucrative tax credit for hiring veterans. Altria, the tobacco giant, wants to cut the corporate tax rate. And Sapphire Energy, a small alternative energy company, is determined to protect a tax incentive it believes could turn algae into a popular motor fuel.
To make their case as Congress prepares to debate a rewrite of the nation's tax code, this diverse set of businesses has at least one strategy in common: they have retained firms that employ lobbyists who are former aides to Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which will have a crucial role in shaping any legislation.
No other lawmaker on Capitol Hill has such a sizable constellation of former aides working as tax lobbyists, representing blue-chip clients that include telecommunications businesses, oil companies, retailers and financial firms, according to an analysis by LegiStorm, an online database that tracks Congressional staff members and lobbying. At least 28 aides who have worked for Mr. Baucus, Democrat of Montana, since he became the committee chairman in 2001 have lobbied on tax issues during the Obama administration -- more than any other current member of Congress, according to the analysis of lobbying filings performed for The New York Times.
''K Street is literally littered with former Baucus staffers,'' said Jade West, an executive at a wholesalers' trade association that relies on a former finance panel aide, Mary Burke Baker. ''It opens doors that allow you to make the case.''

Like Ms. Baker, many of those lobbyists have already saved their clients millions — in some cases, billions — of dollars after Mr. Baucus backed their requests to extend certain corporate tax perks, provisions that were adopted as part of the so-called fiscal cliff legislation in January. Baucus aides who later became lobbyists helped financial firms save $11.2 billion in tax deferments and helped secure a $222 million tax benefit that is shared with the liquor industry.

Sean Neary, a spokesman for Mr. Baucus, said the senator had regularly rejected requests from those lobbyists for provisions benefiting their clients, like an appeal from one former aide, Pat Bousliman, now working as a wind industry lobbyist, to extend an alternative energy loan guarantee program that expired in 2011.
Mr. Baucus's decisions are based on the merits of the policies, Mr. Neary said, not on who is advocating for them. ''The fact is, oftentimes good policy can indirectly benefit someone,'' he said. ''That doesn't mean it shouldn't be done.''
The debate over the tax code — which has emerged as part of the two-year effort to stimulate the economy and reduce the deficit — could turn into a battle royal. While many members of Congress talk about lowering the corporate tax rate, replacing that lost revenue would require eliminating many tax loopholes that legions of lobbyists, including many who had worked for other prominent lawmakers, make a living laboring to expand or defend.
Mr. Baucus, 71, the son of a wealthy Montana rancher, is somewhat of a wild card in the tax debate: he is the top Democrat in what arguably is the Senate's most powerful committee seat. The finance panel helps dictate how the government raises almost all of its money, and spends nearly half of it.
But he often bucks his party's leadership. Last month, for example, he voted against the Democrats' budget proposal for 2014, which included nearly $1 trillion in new revenues. He also favored the Bush administration's tax cuts in 2001 for Americans including the wealthy, putting him at odds with many Democrats.
Mr. Baucus, who has spent nearly his entire professional career in Congress, declined a request for an interview. But Mr. Neary said that every action the senator takes is motivated by his commitment to voters.
''Every vote has to answer one question for him and that is: How is it impacting Montanans?'' Mr. Neary said.
Several veteran Capitol Hill aides said it was naïve to suggest that former aides could extract special favors from their one-time bosses — unless what they were pushing for had broad support. But the former aides still bring an advantage to the corporations that hire them.
''It does mean you will have someone who knows how the levers of power are pushed or how to push the levers, and who can describe to you how situations are going to play out based on their years of experience,'' said Jim Manley, a former aide to Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader. Mr. Manley now works at a Washington lobbying and communications firm, QGA Public Affairs.
In recent interviews, four former aides to Mr. Baucus said that their ties to him heightened their appeal to potential clients. The link also helped justify their salaries, in some cases $500,000 or higher, more than double or triple their Capitol Hill paychecks.
Former Senate aides who become lobbyists must wait a year before they can contact Mr. Baucus or his staff on behalf of a client, according to Senate ethics rules.
Staying active in their circle, one former aide said, also requires that they help Mr. Baucus's political career, through fund-raising and other assistance.
Several of the lobbyists regularly fly to Big Sky, Mont., for weekend fund-raising retreats that Mr. Baucus hosts, or attend more intimate events in Washington like a gathering last month near the Capitol, where Paul Wilkins, Mr. Baucus's chief of staff, talked about the millions of dollars Mr. Baucus will need to raise for his re-election campaign next year.
Among them, the top givers include Jeffrey A. Forbes, Mr. Baucus's former Finance Committee staff director, who has donated a total of at least $25,000 to Mr. Baucus, his political action committee or the Montana Democratic Party. He attended the retreat in February at the Big Sky resort, which included skiing, snowmobiling and a big family dinner at Buck's T-4 Lodge. The totals grow much bigger — to hundreds of thousands of dollars — when donations from Mr. Forbes's clients, including Verizon and Altria, and other partners at his lobbying firm, are counted.
Mr. Wilkins said that the donations and fund-raising had been vital, noting that the nearly $4.6 million expected in hand by the end of this month would rank Mr. Baucus's campaign chest among the top 10 in the Senate.
''It allows us to scare off opponents,'' Mr. Wilkins told the group, which included former Baucus aides turned lobbyists, at a Capitol Hill townhouse owned by Federal Express. ''It is the basis of everything that we do. So thank you for your support and everything you have done for Senator Baucus.'' A New York Times reporter in attendance was asked to leave the private event.
Asked later about his comments, Mr. Wilkins said, ''There is no expectation that former staffers do anything related to the office. They are private individuals, if they want to donate fine. If they don't want to donate, that is fine, too.''
Mr. Baucus's office points out that the former aides who now work as tax lobbyists are a small fraction of those whose who have worked for him over the years. Still, several colleagues who have served more than two decades on the finance panel -- including Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, and Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, both as ranking Republican or chairman — have much smaller networks of former aides who are tax lobbyists, according to the data collected by LegiStorm and the Center for Responsive Politics.
Republicans, though, imposed term limits on committee leadership posts more than a decade ago to help deter the creation of a so-called iron triangle among the chairman, federal officials and corporate lobbyists.
Mr. Baucus is viewed as an important ally when it comes to including corporate tax priorities into legislation. Last year, he introduced a plan — most of which was eventually passed into law as part of the fiscal cliff deal in January — that contained more than a dozen tax breaks, some of them pushed by clients who had retained Washington lobbying firms that employ his former aides or political advisers.Shannon Finley, who served as a political consultant and fund-raiser for Mr. Baucus before joining a lobbying firm in Washington, was hired in late 2011 by Beam, the liquor industry giant, to protect a federal tax break that it gets a cut of for producing its Cruzan rum in the United States Virgin Islands. Despite protests from fiscal conservatives that it was a giveaway, the provision was included in Mr. Baucus's package, costing $222 million over the coming decade. Ms. Finley declined to comment.
The National Restaurant Association, whose board includes a senior McDonald's executive, had three former aides to Mr. Baucus working on tax-related matters, including Patrick Heck, who once held the post of chief tax counsel to Mr. Baucus. The association helped secure three provisions in the January deal, worth an estimated $5.9 billion over the next decade to restaurants and other companies. Elizabeth Garner, a Restaurant Association lobbyist, said Mr. Heck had expertise and relationships that proved helpful in their push.
With a debate on rewriting the tax code to streamline and simplify it expected to start this year — leaders in both the House and the Senate are working on their own drafts — lobbying could reach levels like that of the 2009 debate over health care, which also was overseen in part by the Senate Finance Committee, with Mr. Baucus at the gavel. His staff is already hosting meetings with industry lobbyists, academics and outside parties to get advice on the tax package that the Senate Finance Committee is trying to create.
Mr. Baucus's former aides will almost certainly be pushing competing plans. Some large corporations with relatively high corporate tax rates, like Verizon and Altria, have retained Mr. Forbes to help push for the overall cut in the tax rate, while others, like General Electric, which pays a relatively low rate, have a team of lobbyists including Ms. Finley to try to protect their various federal tax advantages.
Mr. Baucus's office said the senator's actions on the tax rewriting effort would be based on the bipartisan consensus that he was trying to build among the committee's members, not any special favors that individual industries wanted, even if they were represented by his former aides.
Bob Packwood, the former Republican senator from Oregon who was the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee in 1986 — the last time Congress passed broad legislation rewriting the tax code -- said in an interview that former aides tended to have access to lawmakers, though he questioned how much influence they really had.
But one thing is certain: they will try.
''The lobbying will be tremendous,'' he said. ''As it was last time.''
—Kitty Bennett contributed research.


http://www.cnbc.com/id/100621726

Baltimore - Synagogues and Corned Beef

   A small intro on Jewish life and history in Baltimore from The New York Times Travel section.

April 5, 2013

Glimmers of Jewish Glory Days in Baltimore

By JENNIFER MOSES

I grew up on stories about the glory days of Jewish Baltimore, when, in my father’s telling, Jews were really Jews. He told stories about walking to shul, or synagogue, with his father and uncles, seeing men and women in their Shabbat finery promenading after services, and sitting in awe as the great Viennese-trained cantor, Abba Yosef Weisgal, cried out to the heavens under the soaring ceiling of Congregation Chizuk Amuno in Reservoir Hill, the Baltimore neighborhood that my forebears called home.

But by the time my siblings and I came along in the late ’50s and early ’60s, all that was gone. The elegant “in town” neighborhood of my father’s childhood memories had long since decayed, and attending High Holy Days services at Chizuk Amuno was an exercise in watching an urban congregation on life support as the Jewish community relocated to the suburbs.

Happily, Jewish Baltimore is on the rebound, and not just in the suburbs. On a cold day in February when I went in search of the settings of my father’s stories, I landed in a place where perseverance, preservation and memory have conspired to keep that vanished world available.

Turns out that I’m hardly alone. The Jewish Museum of Maryland welcomes some 7,000 schoolchildren yearly, not to mention thousands of curious adults. Situated between the historic Lloyd Street Synagogue and its slightly more junior former rival, B’nai Israel, the entire complex is a tribute to what once was. The surrounding East Baltimore neighborhood itself was not only the first stopping-off place for German Jewish immigrants, but was also, from as early as the 1830s to about 1920, a teeming immigrant enclave, known to its own citizens as Jewtown. What Orchard Street was to the Lower East Side, Lombard Street was to Jewish East Baltimore: blocks so crowded with people hawking everything from dry goods to produce to poultry that merely navigating them required a dollop of chutzpah. The street was lined with storefront cheders (Jewish elementary schools, usually for boys), Talmud Torahs (religious schools), overcrowded tenements, outhouses and gutters running with the blood of recently slaughtered animals for the kosher market. The place was home not only to Jewish immigrants, but also to Italians and African Americans. Washing was a luxury, Yiddish was the language of haggling and a stretch of Lombard Street was known as Corned Beef Row.

Corned Beef Row has dwindled to a mere two delis, Weiss and Attman’s. Attman’s, which opened in 1915, is still owned by the Attman family, and still serves enormous old-fashioned corned beef sandwiches with Russian dressing and a side of slaw, as well as everything else fattening, salty and delicious. Though the place is no longer kosher, the walls themselves proclaim its kosher yesteryears, with framed photographs of generations of Baltimore’s Jewish machers (big shots). Well past lunchtime, it was packed.

The real story, however, isn’t in the matzo ball soup, but in the museum, which, in recreated rooms, taped conversations, street scenes, pushcart displays and photographs, tells the story of a century of life in the neighborhood that was originally called Jonestown after the nearby Jones Falls, and is still, in some quarters, referred to as Jewtown. Particularly stirring for me were the re-creations and photos of garment makers, first in sweatshops, and later in factories, because it was in just such places that my great-great-grandparents, whose portraits now hang in my dining room, got their start — eventually moving out of the immigrant neighborhood, ending up in far more luxurious Eutaw Place in north Baltimore, “designed after the Champs-Élysées,” according to one description. It was their generation of upwardly mobile German-Jewish community members who eventually founded the Jewish Educational Alliance, night schools that helped primarily Russian immigrants assimilate, and the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, “the Y.” Their stories are recounted here, as well as the stories of succeeding waves of immigrants.

If it’s bricks and mortar you’re after, the place to go is next-door, to the Lloyd Street Synagogue, designed by Robert Carey Long Jr., and built in 1845 with a handsome but inconspicuous Greek Revival facade. The third-oldest standing synagogue in America, according to the Jewish museum, Lloyd Street functions today primarily as a section of the museum, with exhibits in the basement, as well as two archaeological mini-digs: the first revealing the original ovens that would ensure that the matzos eaten at Passover would conform to strict kosher standards; the second, of one of the oldest mikvahs (ritual baths) in the country, also dating to the mid-1840s. It was here that its first rabbi, Abraham Rice, sermonized in German from the bimah (raised platform) set in the middle, rather than at the end of the room, in accordance with European synagogue design.

But in the 1870s a rift grew between the synagogue’s founding, German-speaking Orthodox members (including my forebears) and newer upstarts who pushed to modernize worship services in accordance with the liberal ideas coming out of Germany. The founding members took their business elsewhere, building a new Orthodox synagogue, the Chizuk Amuno, at the end of the block. It is this building — the original Moorish Revival one that opened its doors in 1876, with one of the first American-born ordained rabbis, Rabbi Dr. Henry Schneeberger, at its helm — that continues to operate as a full-time modern-Orthodox synagogue, now B’nai Israel.

Entering on the first floor, the visitor is greeted by a warm room filled with books and plaques, but it is upstairs, in the sanctuary, that glory reigns: two tiers of seating (with a gallery for women), a raised center bimah, the original gas lamps (converted to electric) and a gorgeous, carved oren kodesh (ark) in the Moorish style, with palm fronds and gilded accents, and the Hebrew Decalogue, the Ten Commandments, in tabletlike form at the apex, as if to proclaim: we’re here, and we’re not going away.

There were dozens of other synagogues in East Baltimore as well, of course, and some of them still stand, including the long-abandoned, brick-faced Adath Israel on East Baltimore Street, and Adath B’nei Israel, a red-brick building that could easily be mistaken for a row house, also on East Baltimore Street and currently used as a church.

The good news is that, in a small but real reverse exodus, Jews are returning to the city. According to Rabbi Etan Mintz of B’nai Israel, some 5,000 have returned over the last few years alone, so much so that his own synagogue is busy year-round, and a new, if limited branch of the Jewish Community Center recently opened — downtown.

The old center (now an apartment building) is in central Baltimore, between the old neighborhood and the newer German-Jewish enclave just to the south of Druid Hill Park that my own ancestors moved to in the 1890s. Though long since cut up into separate apartments, my great-greats’ home, at 1826 Eutaw Place, looks exactly as it does in old photographs. As do most of the stately, elegant buildings in this “uptown” neighborhood that was the center of Baltimore Jewish life until around the 1930s. Here too is what my father calls “the family shul,” the same Chizuk Amuno building (now the reinvigorated Beth Am) that I’d been dragged to as a girl, with its original austere beauty and pale pink-and-blue glass-paneled windows intact. So too the Eutaw Place Synagogue (1892), with its soaring domes reminiscent of the Great Synagogue of Florence, maintained today by the Masons. A few blocks away, on Liberty Heights Avenue, stands the stunning Shaarei Tfiloh, famous for its stained-glass windows and large copper dome.

I had started out on a journey into my ancestors’ world. I ended up in the Baltimore Hebrew Cemetery to pay my respects to their lives. It was late winter, and the great old looming trees were bare, the grass was brown and sparse, and the traffic sounds coming from the other side of the cemetery’s stone walls seemed out of time. After placing small stones on the gravestones of my forebears as the traditional mark of my visit, I wandered into what appeared to be the cemetery’s oldest part, in the southeast corner. Here the gravestones slant into one another as if for comfort, their Hebrew inscriptions all but worn away. What lives were these? What hardships? What dreams?

IF YOU GO

Jewish Museum of Maryland, 15 Lloyd Street; jhsm.org. Nonmember admission $8.

B’nai Israel Congregation, 27 Lloyd Street; bnaiisraelcongregation.org.

Beth Am, 2501 Eutaw Place; bethambaltimore.org.

Eutaw Place Synagogue, 1307 Eutaw Place.

Shaarei Tfiloh Synagogue, 2001 Liberty Heights Avenue.

Baltimore Hebrew Cemetery, 2100 Belair Road.

Attman’s Deli, 1019 East Lombard Street; attmansdeli.com.

http://travel.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/travel/glimmers-of-jewish-glory-days-in-baltimore.html?pagewanted=all


B'nai Israel synagogue, Baltimore, Maryland
photo by Michael Temchine for The New York Times

The Future Of College Sports? Go Spelman!!

   From The New York Times - Spelman College rethinks college athletics to expand participation and more efficiently use resources - financial and physical.

 

 

April 13, 2013

At a College, Dropping Sports in Favor of Fitness

By MIKE TIERNEY

ATLANTA — The softball bats and golf clubs have been stored away. All is quiet, too, at the basketball gymnasium, the volleyball courts and the soccer field.

Only the tennis team endures at Spelman College, and after the Great South Athletic Conference tournament the last weekend of April, it will also be done. Then Spelman, a historically black women’s college with alumnae who include former slaves and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, will become the second college in the last decade to leave the N.C.A.A. altogether, the other being the New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn.

Officials at the college, whose 2,100 students make it the size of some high schools, decided last year to eliminate the athletic department. The college had 80 athletes spread across seven sports, but the athletic budget was roughly $900,000 for the 2012-13 academic year — from an overall operating budget of roughly $100 million.

“I was startled,” Spelman’s president, Beverly Tatum, said. “It seemed like a lot of money for 80 students.”

The highly unusual move by Spelman comes when few institutions seem to be able to resist the lure of intercollegiate sports, even as one scandal after another has tarnished the reputations of universities throughout the country.

The decision to shut down Spelman’s athletic program followed the announced intention of several colleges to leave the Great South, meaning the conference would have too few members to remain viable. For Spelman, joining another conference would have meant incurring higher travel costs, making improvements to the college’s athletic sites and fielding teams in additional sports.

While watching a basketball game in the Jaguars’ 62-year-old gymnasium, where a shorter-than-regulation court has necessitated a waiver from the N.C.A.A., Dr. Tatum began to wonder what the players would do for exercise after their eligibility expired.

Dr. Tatum had become alarmingly aware of data showing that young black women were prone to diabetes, heart disease and other ailments linked to poor diet and exercise. Observing candles being lighted on campus at 10-year reunions in memory of alumnae who had died was chilling and revealing.

A remedy seemed obvious: disband N.C.A.A.-level sports and reallocate the money devoted to them toward establishing a wellness program that could take advantage of the college’s gym, courts and fields.

The college’s board of trustees approved the plan a year ago. The difficult part was informing the administrators, coaches and athletes. Sports has long maintained an integral, if muted, role at Spelman since its establishment 132 years ago in a church basement. So Dr. Tatum was neither capricious nor joyful with her decision to discontinue sports. The university’s seven teams learned their fate last year at an emotional assembly.

“It was a rough day,” Dr. Tatum said. The announcement was met with gasps, displays of anger, cries of “What?”

“I was absolutely shocked,” the tennis player Leah Howard, a junior, said.

Protocol at Spelman calls for sustained applause after a president’s speech. When Dr. Tatum finished, she told the audience: “I know you’re not happy. It is not necessary to clap.” She was mostly met with silence.

Sara Redd was a captain of the tennis team in 2006, when it won its only conference title. Now she is its coach, the last still active at Spelman.

She called Dr. Tatum’s original announcement “kind of devastating and sad,” but now says, “I think it’s a good idea,” provided that students take advantage of the expanded opportunities for physical activities, from Zumba to kickboxing.

Germaine McAuley, Spelman’s athletic director and the chairwoman of the physical education department, echoed that notion, despite her 25 years of college coaching experience and the breakup of her staff.

“It truly makes sense,” she said.

As part of the new initiative, the physical education department will be offering additional courses; the campus gym, Read Hall, is undergoing a renovation to improve its fitness facilities; and fitness and intramural programs on campus will emphasize activities that students are more likely to continue after leaving college, like golf, swimming, tennis, yoga and Pilates. Spelman also plans to promote those activities on campus more heavily, though not to make student participation mandatory.

As for the athletes, the underclassmen on the tennis team all plan to return to the college for the next academic year, according to Ms. Redd, even as opposing coaches mention the possibility of asking them to transfer. Ms. Howard, for one, expects to play intramurals, along with her sister, a rising freshman who intended to play tennis for Spelman and, even though that is no longer possible, still plans to attend.

The role of athletics at Spelman had been limited. Recruiting was largely confined to phone calls and e-mails. Scholarships and financial aid were based on need and academic achievement, per Division III rules. Incoming athletes generally cited the quality of the education as the main reason they chose to attend, with sports far from the core of campus life.

Now Dr. Tatum finds herself fielding calls from other university presidents who must justify the high price of athletics and its role in the mission of higher education. Ms. McAuley said she was approached by a few athletic directors at the most recent N.C.A.A. convention who suggested that their institutions were looking into the possibility of ending intercollegiate sports.

“All of us have to look at everything we are doing — what’s the value being added to the university and at what cost?” Dr. Tatum said.

When Dr. Tatum hears from her fellow presidents, she said, the conversations usually begin with them saying, “That took some guts.”

Her stock response is, “It would take more guts if it were the University of Michigan.”

By coincidence, Michigan was competing in the men’s basketball Final Four last weekend, about a mile from Spelman’s campus. On that Saturday, as the Wolverines prepared to take part in one of the marquee events in college sports, roughly 800 students jogged or speed-walked five kilometers on Spelman’s campus.

It was the inaugural event of what Dr. Tatum termed the Wellness Revolution, her strategy for educating students about sustained physical activity.

“I envision a culture of movement on the campus that includes greater physical activity for students, faculty and staff,” Dr. Tatum said, adding that many of the participants in the 5K “had never done anything like that before.”

“Now they are asking, ‘When can we do it again?’ ” she said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/sports/at-spelman-dropping-sports-in-favor-of-fitness.html?_r=0