May 8th 2009
California Sinks A Little More Into Its Sunset
T
his morning, Capt. Ed took a macro view of California and pronounced, “Maybe Escape from LA wasn’t so far-fetched after all.” Well, taking a much more micro view, I suggest we add Escape from Ventura as well, because what just happened there is emblematic of how tarnished the Golden State is.
By way of background, I draw your attention to the most recent news release by Santa Barabara Channel Keeper about water quality in the Santa Barbara channel. Channel Keeper, a spawn of Robert Kennedy’s River Keeper franchise, is an environmental group that crusades for better water quality because, you know, our water quality just sucks so bad. So here’s what the release said of the waters off Ventura County:
Ventura County beaches also fared better this year than last, showing a 37 percent decrease in the number of beach closing and advisory days – 452 in 2004, down from 720 in 2003. In California overall, the number of beach closing/advisory days decreased by 26 percent in 2004 to 3,985, from 5,384 in 2003.
Wow! That’s great! Maybe we could slack off a bit on the over-regulation and enjoy our considerable success at protecting our water quality.
Not on your life.
After a hearing that involved 11 hours of public comment, the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board (RWQCB) adopted a raft of tough new stormwater pollution rules for Ventura County aimed at keeping local waterways and beaches clean. The considerable financial burden the unelected RWQCB imposed will fall on taxpayers and land developers, two segments of the population that are just rolling in dough.
Taxpayers are getting creamed because the RWQCB is requiring the city and county of Ventura to step up water quality testing along the ocean beaches because, you know, the ocean’s getting cleaner. Here’s the Ventura County Star on the action:
The board added language just before the vote that calls for weekly, year-round beach water quality testing along county shores. The county and cities now have to figure out how to pay the tab.
Local officials estimated the cost of compliance at $20 million to $33 million annually, or $60 to $100 per household per year.
Current fees generate about $3 million a year, far short of what’s now needed – and any increase in the fees will require a vote of the electorate, thanks to California’s initiave system (Prop. 218). Like that vote’s going to pass. So local government will be stuck – forced by non-elected enviro-bureaucrats to spend money, and probably having to cut cops and firefighters to come up with the scratch.
Developers are getting creamed because the new permit requires all new development be low-impact development, as in:
Under the language, new development and redevelopment projects would have to be designed to capture virtually all runoff and treat the water on-site during most rain events. On projects, particularly infill, where that wasn’t feasible, the runoff would have to be mitigated downstream in the stormwater system to prevent pollution from reaching the oceans.
Got that? Imagine a downpour cascading down on a large subdivision. Virtually every drop will have to be contained and treated before it can leave. Or a shopping center. Or a hospital. How is this done? Well, you could build a huge reservoir under the parking lot at considerable expense, or you could slice off a few acres of perfectly developable land and put in a retention basin.
Then you’ll buy some expensive to purchase and expensive to maintain equipment to filter the storm water, or carve off even more acreage for a natural treatment system – a manmade wetland. And you’ll price your homes, set your rents, charge for your surgeries, sufficiently to recover the extra costs. Meanwhile, all the developed lands all around you – which produce vastly more runoff than your subdivision, shopping center or hospital – get off without a nickel’s impact since even unelected enviro-bureaucrats are afraid to impose any costs on established residents.
Oh, and this being California, the Building Industry Association of Southern California was not invited to the hush-hush negotiations that resulted in the low-impact development rules.
Of course, it would have been wiser by far to build a regional stormwater treatment plant, paid for by all the taxpayers to clean all the taxpayers’ runoff, but such ideas are not even considered by RWCQBs throughout the state – because they want gutters, storm drains and flood channels to have good water quality. As if anyone cares.
Bottom line: For all that money, the quality of water that reaches the ocean to be tested in those weekly tests won’t change all that much, and California, already home to the greenest metropolitan areas in the country, just got less competitive and more expensive because no one here can control our environmental extremists.
