Dracula Meets the General Plan

Just as the Frankenstein monster has no soul, Dracula survives by draining the life blood of the living. This is an apt metaphor for the Summary of Environmental Impacts and Mitigation Measures at the end of part 2 – Executive Summary of the DEIR for the General Plan. In my last posting, I discussed the environmental tragedy of some additional traveler conveniences along the Hwy 88 scenic corridor. Other impacts from that section will now be examined.

While nobody wants the vibrate night sky obliterated by artificial lighting, the plan (2-8) describes everyday occurrences as if they were criminal offenses. Several reasonable suggestions for mitigation measures are described, but they all would make having a business or owning a home more complex and costly. But while the plan decries nighttime lights, it proposes stores along a sidewalk for the Pine Grove town center with parking behind the businesses. This effectively doubles the amount of artificial lighting. It seems that ideological concerns for the European style town centers make their sometimes valid, if overstated, environmental goals moot.

Another significant environmental impact is the conversion of 307 acres of farmland (2-9, 10) to other uses including mining and public facilities. Certainly welfare offices take up less land than productive facilities that employ people. The hoped for normal growth of the economy now has too significant an impact and is advised to be mitigated with costly measures that help preclude it from happening. One of these is conservation easements. This takes more land away from private decision making and, over time, diminishes opportunity for those who come after us. If you add up all these easements and other similar land control schemes nationwide and place them upon a map, it looks like the aristocratic land tenure system of the Middle Ages, not the modern democracy we still think we live in.

The draft General Plan allows some conversion of forest land to other uses (2-11). Not surprisingly this is considered another significant environmental impact that should be met with mitigation measures such as berms, fencing, landscaping and building orientation. So if you want to live in the forest, you have to somehow live apart from it. This recalls the abstraction I noted in my prior installment, the direct opposite of our inherent participation in the natural world. The freedom that dies here is not considered, by their way of thinking, a significant impact.

The document continues with the significant impacts of construction-related emissions (2-12, 13) including everyday dust. They propose 15 mitigation measures such as suspending work when the wind exceeds 20 mph, a posted telephone number for dust complaints and the use of electric rather than fossil fuel equipment. Of course, there is no cost benefit analysis for these sometimes extreme measures. But the document writers are fulfilling the law and providing the cost benefit decision makers, generally the County Board of Supervisors, a laundry list of options. Herein lies the true danger of this document. Almost every one of the proposed or suggested mitigation measures is the basis for a lawsuit. The case is clear: It was recommended to you, and you didn’t require it.

Air pollution, defined as particulate matter, reactive organic gases and mono-nitrogen oxides, is also a significant impact if anything changes (2-14, 15). Ten mitigation measures are proposed under the title of “Implement Reduction Measures for Discretionary Projects”. It seems that your future place of employment or your child’s future home are discretionary in their point of view. Some of these measures are beyond the scope of what the County does. While there already is a thriving solar installation business in Amador County and the County has set a good example with the new county building, a new county only solar program is beyond County resources. The document suggests new solar over “unused… ground space” which at least at this point in the document amazingly has no environmental impact. Another measure is having businesses implement telecommuting and flexible work hours, both of which are beyond the purview of what the County does and probably beyond what the county should do as they clearly interfere with one’s prerogative to run their business or agency efficiently. This idea ignores the fact that most local enterprise is service-oriented, and that we do not have huge traffic jams with hundreds of idling vehicles. These concepts appear to be an outside cookie cutter consultant approach and little else.

Some of their measures are simply over the top in terms of cost benefit, with a significant downside of hassle and hostility such as: “Enforce and follow limits idling time for commercial vehicles, including delivery and construction vehicles.” Are we to have a sheriff’s deputy stand there with a timer? Are they to arrive at the enforcement location by bicycle to prevent further potential pollution?

Other mitigation measures include bike lanes on our roads and “Promote ‘least polluting’ ways to connect people and goods to their destinations.” While that statement may sound innocuous they are asking us to change our entire way of life, something I consider a very significant impact. If this Count Dracula document were to be literally implemented, our new lifestyle would be zombie-like.

These are a few highlights. More to come…

Copyright 2014, Mark L. Bennett

“Papa’s got a brand new bag”

This commentary isn’t about James Brown, the godfather of soul, but about having to pay for bags at grocery stores after the first of the year. When someone leaves the supermarket with a plastic bag that bag often contains four or five other plastic bags with produce, etc. Apparently those ‘inner’ bags somehow don’t count in this environmental equation. What can explain this leave of common sense? One can certainly conjecture politically progressive brownie points as an objective. Referring back to the pop culture word usage of James Brown: What bag are you really into?

In addition to the obvious nonsensical nature of this new law for those sincerely concerned about plastic bag pollution, it will cost consumers more money. And coincidentally, or not so coincidentally, this new expense is regressive, like so many environmental regulations, and unequally punishes those least able to pay. I remember when everyone carried their own cloth bags to the store having spent my early childhood in an inner city neighborhood about 60+ years ago. We were not affluent enough to give out free bags.

Given the depression, the war and some personal tragedies, my grandmother didn’t smile a lot. But one day she was beaming when I walked into her kitchen. She was washing out, to save, a plastic bag that some produce had came in. “Look what they gave me at the market for free!” she exclaimed in amazement at the prosperity we had achieved.

We have now lost that prosperity, and use other idioms to express what we are afraid to say.

Copyright 2014, Mark L. Bennett

Frankenstein Meets the General Plan

After printing out (one sided) the Draft EIR for the General Plan, I had a stack almost six inches tall on my desk. Others refer to this as “The 2,000 Pages”. All this is in addition to the General Plan itself, and to the Housing Element of the General Plan, which also must go through a separate EIR process. My first question should appear obvious: Is this expense of money and human effort justified?  Historically, the EIR processes followed the General Plan/Zoning process, so it got tacked on as a separate undertaking given the governmental bureaucratic point of view. But both the modern planning and conservation movements started about a hundred years ago in response to industrialization and rapid urbanization. Aren’t both the General Plan and the EIR about essentially the same thing: preventing mistakes? Do we really need two or more studies for the same end?

Ironically, this document - a program EIR - exists to “Allow reduction in paperwork” (1-2) and “Avoid duplicative reconsideration of basic considerations” (1-2).  To accomplish this end, the document, despite being called “general”, is very specific. As an example, any development along the Hwy 88 Scenic Corridor would have significant environmental impacts (2-7). So a restaurant, general store, service station or a motel at the entrance to hiking trails would threaten the Sierra scenery. Most people would find that these establishments enhance their enjoyment of the Sierra because of their convenience. An earlier study done before the environmentalists prevented the Ironwood skiing area from reopening found that tourists don’t like Hwy 88 because it lacks these conveniences. Unlike the ordinary people enjoying the Sierra, but like the Frankenstein monster, this plan has no human soul. The environment is an abstraction where in all human activity is a threat. But humans have been shaping the environment and acting in symbiosis with it for probably a million years. Their detached attitude gives me chills. This is why Alternative Three-Restricted Growth is the Environmentally Preferred Alternative (2-5, 6).

However, all this specificity and the EIR for a General Plan process do intend to make future development less controversial since they are conceptually pre-approved (1-2).  Ideally, this should inhibit the relatively pandemic litigation now plaguing our small county. But the document states: “…unless new information arises that changes the impact analysis” (1-3), “later documents need only focus on new impacts that have not been considered before” (1-4) and “agencies may utilize this…” in “…approval of subsequent implementation activities” including such unsympathetic bodies as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the California Department of Conservation (1-5, 6). The document also states: “…commentators should also focus on the document’s sufficiency in analyzing possible environmental impacts” (1-10). So anyone of the well funded environmental elite should have no problem suing and adding unnecessarily to our county’s expenses and growing anti-business reputation.

The seemingly benign goal of this entire effort “…is to accommodate population growth, housing and employment in an orderly manner” (2-1, 2).  But growth is never orderly. Look at history or into our own lives. We all have experienced periods of expansion (or defeat) followed by periods of consolidation. Orderly growth bears no relationship to reality; it is strictly an intellectual construct. Again, like the Frankenstein monster, or Agenda 21, it has no soul. The document also realizes the improbability of the plan with: “Specific economic, legal, social, technological, or other considerations, including provisions of employment opportunities for highly trained workers, make infeasible the mitigation measures or project alternatives identified in the Final EIR” (1-3). The EIR for our General Plan is not about guiding growth, but rather from preventing anything from happening. Since anything one would do has an impact, its best to do nothing. Our General Plan EIR is not a plan for development but rather a prescription for paralysis.

Note: The citations given are from the document. As I read through this monster, I will post my thoughts since it seems improbable that they can summarized into a few paragraphs.

Copyright 2014, Mark L. Bennett