No matter your opinion of it, tourism brought a whole lot of people into the county in 2021 and they spent $2.5 billion which was a drop of 22% from 2019. On the flip side of the proverbial coin, I have heard cries of dismay at lack of tourism in South County. I have read and heard peninsula residents complain for years about the negative (to them) impacts of some of the larger events held throughout the area the annual Contours de Elegance held in various locations and motorcycle races at Laguna Seca are two easy targets for local complainants. Tourism can be both a blessing and a bane, depending when and where it exists. That is one healthy agricultural landscape. In 2020, prior to the pandemic shut downs, the sales figures for vegetables, fruits and nuts, livestock and poultry, nursery crops, field crops and seed crops and apiary totaled $3,910,135,000 that does not count the $4.4 billion in cannabis products sold to consumers. The county provides the nation with a cornucopia of agricultural products from lettuce, providing one-third of the nation’s total, and broccoli to cattle and wine just a few of the vast exportations. There are right around 437,000 people living in this county and they inhabit from Big Sur and the Monterey Peninsula to Salinas to the Valley and such far-flung areas as Bitterwater and Parkfield to Jolon and Bryson Hesperia areas where financial, social and cultural diversity is the norm. Monterey County does not have a state representative living within its boundaries. Instead of taking a dramatic approach where I would ply you with many facts and figures in a staccato cadence of nouns with myriad descriptive adjectives leading up to one climatic denouement sentence, I will just give it to you straight from the top. ![]() Joe writes the California Connected column for Arizona State University’s publication Zocalo Public Square (which is redundant as a zocalo is a public square, but I digress). For today’s column I cite Joe Mathews as main source.
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