The General Plan that Isn’t

I spoke at Tuesday’s hearing to approve our General Plan EIR, and said this:

“Before I begin, I want to remind everyone here that I have a Masters in planning and have worked much of my life in that field. So while some may regard me as a nuisance to their goals, I am an expert nuisance. My sympathies to all you commissioners. Tonight has been one of the most masochist experiences of my life. I wish it were possible to debate almost every one of tonight’s speakers. I turned in numerous pages of plan and plan DEIR criticism. If anyone wants to read them they are all still available on Amador Community News under my blog, Outside the Ivory Tower. The draft EIR reviewers considered my comments to be primarily personal opinion because they did not discuss the adequacy of the General Plan. While technically correct for this EIR review, it was a set up because it’s impossible to discuss a General Plan that isn’t general. A General Plan is supposed to set aside sufficient land for various uses to provide choices for people in the future. Yet the Foothill Conservancy has criticized this plan as vague. They want an even more proscriptive plan than even this proposal.

By what Godlike omnipotence does anyone know what the world will be in the future? No one does know, but after reading the entire General Plan and the Draft EIR it’s rather apparent that this is not a plan in the tradition of freedom but a very specific program to create a very specific future. A future where people are removed from the land into service worker strategic hamlets called town centers. It is social engineering that should include, according to the Foothill Conservancy, even what type of stores people have the freedom to open here. It is an Agenda 21/globalist agenda cookie cutter plan so we can all goosestep to the new world order. A certain political faction with time and financing was able to pack the early committees that selected this consultant. That was a mistake I hope is never repeated.

I am well aware that much of this plan is required by the Sacramento overloads. Included in this is the total fraud of human induced global warming and the degradation of science that has accomplished. The Foothill Conservancy statement on this plan adds to that fear mongering with a laundry list of frightening outcomes they envision if this plan is not even more specific. Personally, if I had a few extra million, I’d give it to the County to start fresh with new plan. In that case, this plan could be put to good use by being recycled into bathroom tissue.

While I may appear to be speaking as an isolated individual, I would not be here today unless I was completely confident that I am representing a large number and possibly a majority of Amadorians. We don’t like losing our freedoms. People have just voted for freedom in the UK and we have the Trump candidacy here. Most likely the plan’s prescriptive future will take hold in a manner similar to that of the abusive EPA. Relatively powerless property and homeowner’s will be picked off one by one when a change in their circumstances trigger a new procedure. Some will sue and others may not be so polite. While I hope and pray nothing truly horrible happens, this plan and its draft EIR are asking for trouble.”

PS: We, the American people, are mostly descended from the n-word people of Europe. Because of this we built a country based on freedom and opportunity. When I listened to people tonight it seemed like they see themselves as little aristocrats. Perhaps Sartre’s statement that "America is Super Europe" was prophetic.

Reality Intruded

This follows in the same vein as my last posting. They started with the suggestion of a writer friend who loved my stories and suggested doing an oral history. So here is another episode of my political evolution from starting adult life as a liberal and learning through reality intrusions. I don’t want this to be interpreted as sour grapes; I’ve had my successes, along with the evitable mistakes.

In the early 1980s, I bought a vacant lot in LA along with a business partner. It was to be politically-correct infill housing, and we hired the absolute best to design and engineer. The building department plan checker was in awe. I can’t imagine the most strident environmentalist objecting to anything. We were then ready for a construction loan, but interest rates soared (the lesson I learned was to never be late in an economic cycle). My partner said to wait, and I couldn’t risk it alone without putting up my home. While we were sitting it out, I received a citation for having an unweeded empty lot. So my partner and I, along with his teenage daughter, worked a long day and manicured the lot, leaving some isolated and healthy green plants. But we then got cited for an incomplete lot cleanup, and therefore were forced to kill those remaining plants (they were edible plants we could have harvested. But this was our private property in theory only). Now in full compliance, but without any vegetation, the winter rains pushed much of this downslope lot into the property below. We then got cited for this problem that was created by our compliance with the previous citation (the lesson I learned here was that while regulation and reality seem like separate worlds, they are not. Regulation is government profiteering). So I put a crew together, and we moved all the dirt back to the vacant lot and built a retaining wall.

(An added irony to this was that, in my much earlier appearance before some environmental board, I had to promise to replace imaginary former trees. I told them I had approved plans without trees and that there were never any trees on the property beforehand. A board member then quietly told me that I was being naive, and that I should understand that this is necessary for approval despite everyone knowing that it’s total bull. Agree and forget it.) While we watched the interest rate climb, I had to renew my approvals. But the building and planning departments kept giving me different answers since each was controlled by a differing attitude and probably involved in an inter-agency power struggle. I also went before a property tax reduction board. I might as well have been a priest being entertained at an ISIS camp. By this time, a new tenant had moved into the building next door and decided my lot needed fertilization. So they threw their child’s diapers there. So now they really had me. Raw sewage. The citations became so frequent I forgot how many there were because I quickly discarded them (but not by tossing them into a vacant lot).

So why did these situations occur? It probably wasn’t because they were mean and nasty; most people aren’t, and I have no reason to assign those motives. But it’s possible that they saw me as a capitalist pig that was OK to abuse. And while there is truth to that possibility, the likelihood wasn’t as overwhelming then as it may be today (I was certainly a bootstrap capitalist; my capital was saved up living in a studio apartment and later working two jobs). But the real reason was obvious. They got promoted on the number of supposedly valid violations and citations they wrote up. Those inspectors are probably now retired with fat pensions. That is how the system is set up. It benefits its enforcers and designers at the expense of everyone else.

In the name of the poor or the unprotected, the Progressives steal from the middle class and share the take between themselves, the expert and enforcer class, and the governing elites. I see this consciousness all around me. Some people believe that taxing poor people five cents a bag at store checkout will cleanup ocean pollution. Others think that a sales tax increase for roads that subsidizes Cal Trans corruption is the way to go. And some feel that our one railroad is so unimportant to our economic well being that they are willing to sacrifice it for an imagined Utopian future. 

So I started out being considered a liberal, and now I’m considered a conservative. But in many ways, I don’t see where I’ve changed. My sentiment is the same. I’ve always been for the everyday person, the average citizen, “the little guy”. When I planned the bus system in Modesto, I increased service in black and Hispanic areas. I asked my assistant if I did this because I’m a bleeding heart liberal and I believe that these people deserved it, or did I do this because I’m a hard-nosed conservative who believes that bus service should go where more people put money in the fare box. “Good question,” she answered.

Finally my partner said that he not only wanted out of the development project, but that he’d totally had it with the liberal tyranny and was leaving the United States. At his time many of my other friends were leaving LA and scattering across the map. This added to my growing decision to leave. No one would buy the project until finally an immigrant from Iran purchased the land and plans. We took a huge loss. He must have bought it under the illusion that America was the place presented on Voice of America broadcasts. I picked up the pieces of my finances and bought a cheap house in Amador County. And I never returned to that site to see what happened.

PS: Where and when I grew up was in arguably the most organized crime controlled community in the US.  At first California startled me with how clean everything was. But it didn’t take me long to see that what the Mob skimmed off in Buffalo is the government take in California. And while I can hardly condone organized crime, I do appreciate their honesty about themselves compared to the sanctimonious attitude of the experts and bureaucrats here.

Copyright 2016, Mark L. Bennett

Bathrooms and Changing Perceptions

The recent controversy over the “right” of transvestites to use women’s restrooms has understandably made me recall the changing perceptions regarding my own masculinity. I grew up in the 1950’s. The most admired children on our block had fathers who owned Lugers and Mausers from German officers they had killed and ID’d. If I had a time machine I would have joined 14 year old Johnny Tremaine and the Sons of Liberty dumping British tea into Boston harbor. Davy Crockett was another of my heroes. My father was a strong male figure who had kept his own while having to deal with organized crime to make a living since he was 14. I was quite secure in my maleness. But at the same time I was raised by three feminists, my mother and both grandmothers.

My mother’s mother was a suffragette and had traveled around the country before the First World War as the secretary to a leading suffragette. Her picture may even be in some history books. She raised my mother to be a trailblazing female journalist. In college my mother was in freshman Introduction to Journalism with Mike Wallace who she said grilled the instructor in the same style he used years later on 60 Minutes. But my mother was not allowed to continue. The scene with her advisor sounded just like the scene in the Autobiography of Malcolm X when his 8^th grade guidance counselor asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. Malcolm said a lawyer and his guidance counselor answered by asking if he had ever considered a carpentry apprenticeship.

I went out into the world during the women’s movement in the 1960’s. Many women I met assumed that I had a sister and were shocked when I answered no. Later when I had my first professional job all the female assistants were assigned to me because most of the other men there had treated the women as if their wife had burnt the morning toast. It was disgusting. But much of the women’s movement for equality and freedom degenerated into a man hating radical feminism. In today’s news we see a parallel with Black Lives Matter and the New Black Panther Party. When I listen to them I remember the desegregation sit ins and hearing the arrested sing: “Black and white together, we shall not be moved.”

A type of woman has emerged that Rush Limbaugh as aptly called feminazi. They always sense a 1950’s maleness in me, and hate me immediately. This even happened in my own congregation in LA. Once some chit chat while waiting in line at a chain store turned into a glare so hateful that I swear she would have killed me given the opportunity. When my bank account got transferred to another branch the female manager’s instant dislike was so intense I had to threaten violence in a subtle way to conclude a transaction. That was the only time in my life I ever had to act like that in a commercial transaction and the memory still unsettles me.

But I still believed in the American Way. I was hired as a part time instructor at ITT Tech in Lathrop. I worked hard, won every award they gave, and got promoted to full time instructor followed by a promotion to chair of two academic departments.  Then the accrediting association visited and I was interrogated by a feminazi with a definite political agenda. She asked me to lie and I refused. As a result I lost my position. Aside from the financial loss and the ending of career advancement, others suffered. I was counseling a student working three jobs to pay her tuition along with a crippling math anxiety. We got her finances straightened out and weekly meeting began to conquer her math anxiety. But that ended when I lost my academic chair position. She responded by dropping out.  Obviously this feminazi didn’t care about what she did to people, her political agenda was far too important. This seems standard today. Once upon a time liberal meant liberal minded. Then it became Liberal which transformed itself into Progressive. That means it’s acceptable and perhaps even noble to sacrifice the individual to the collective.

Recently a women interested in me told me that she liked my shirt. I answered by saying I always wear green because it lights up my eyes.  Her countenance changed with a certain realization of who I was. I have never hidden my “feminine side” or my 1950’s maleness. I’ve not changed, but the attitudes of the world around me have been in maelstrom mode.

Copyright 2016, Mark L. Bennett

Gone, or Rebirth Possible?

Every day when I taught economics I would first write on the whiteboard: Market Rules! While markets are subject to distortion and manipulation, in the end they always tell the truth. Gold is soaring around the world. Analysts I trust are saying that it’s a response to the Clinton Crime Family exoneration. While we all know this a watershed event, the whole world is seeing it that way, too. Here is what one foreign news media now says about us: http://www.xyz.net.au/clinton-cleared-end-of-rule-of-law-in-america/

If we become weaker internationally, we must depend upon our internal strength more. The economy, while seemingly slow but steady from most government numbers, has endured deteriorating internals. Politically, we are in a pre-civil war like polarization.

In a recent Facebook discussion, Katherine Evatt built a case to preserve certain former PG&E land along the Mokelumne River, prompted by my statements about the Mother Lode Land Trust. But do we want this land to be governed by an unelected body? And do we need another organization to manage public or semi public land? We now have a service economy based upon borrowing money from often hostile foreign powers. We produce less and less of what we consume. We don’t use our own resources. How many Saudi oil presidents have we had? I see in the Mother Lode Land Trust existence both the internal economic decline and the political attitudes that defend self destruction.

PS: Does anyone know of a county with lots of unmined gold?

Copyright 2016, Mark L. Bennett

Land Grab becomes Word Grab

Yesterday I posted here and linked to Facebook a commentary entitled “Today’s Wild West Land Grab” about the expansion of the Mother Lode Land Trust. This engendered an endless discussion about the PG&E land deal and its constrained and complex circumstances. While I don’t question the legality of the decision, I question the system that preordained that outcome. Since my Facebook introduction referenced the Homestead Act, is not surprising that one response noted that most land in the USA was a transfer from government to people or businesses. While this is generally true, there is more to the story.

Many of the Colonial period people who settled the Appalachian Mountains weren’t proper enough people to enter through Charlestown or other ports. They landed in the more tolerant Philadelphia, traveled inland and then south into the hills of the Carolinas, etc. The far west was settled extensively by escaped slaves. In the 1850’s some feared that Colorado was to become the first black state. What these two groups have in common is that they were both squatters and both loved freedom. What title did the Oregon Trail pioneers have to the land they settled considering that Oregon wasn’t US territory then? Not all land rights come from the government. Although despised by the globalist and globalist environmental elite, there is a long American tradition based on freedom and private property. As I’ve noted before, this country was originally settled by people who had lost their grazing rights under the Enclosure Acts and understood this relationship.

When the British said no more settlement beyond the Appalachians we fought a war for the right to move west. These were not Eric Winslow’s hobgoblins, but people who dreamed of a homestead instead of a city factory job. A century later immigrants would give up education to work and save money to buy land. This country has always followed the policy of maximum land and home ownership. From FDR setting up national mortgage pools to Richard Nixon authorizing additional cutting in National Forests to reduce the price of lumber and therefore housing, this has always been our national policy. But in recent years the globalists and environmentalists have found common ground in schemes to tie up land ownership and use. The rich get richer and many environmentalists glorify saving the earth from its inhabitants.

Copyright 2016, Mark L. Bennett

Today’s Wild West Land Grab

The Mother Lode Land Trust is now hiring a full time director and a half time assistant to that director. According to their website the impetus for this is: “MLLT is posed to assume a total of eight additional conservation easements (8,000 acres) from the Stewardship Council as part of the PG&E bankruptcy settlement.” Whose land and, therefore, whose money does this really belong to? The stockholders? The bond holders? The ratepayers? The taxpayers? Isn’t this environmental theft of our private property rights a far greater scandal that the worst case scenario of the Human & Health Services Building vividly and biasedly portrayed by Eric Winslow in his latest editorial disguised as a Ledger Dispatch news article?

The land tenure system of the United States is increasingly regressing to the Middle Ages. The super rich are sheltering their wealth through a system of conservation easements, land banks, tax credits and carbon capture forests. These environmental aristocrats will increasingly determine our future. I can’t help but recall Bob Dylan’s song about the outlaw Pretty Boy Floyd: “…through this world I’ve rambled, I’ve seen lots of funny men, Some will rob you with a six-gun, And some with a fountain pen.”

Do we have the will to fight powerful outside forces with seemingly endless funds? Do we want to remain free in Amador County?

Copyright 2016, Mark L. Bennett

The (Im)Possibilities of Planning

I just read all the responses to all my submitted comments, most of which were posted here on Amador Community News, to the General Plan Draft Environmental Impact Report. The planners are correct in saying that many of my comments don’t directly relate to “the adequacy of the General Plan”. My comments were critiques of the General Plan itself and its new restrictions on freedom. My primary intent was to inform County residents about ‘what is coming down’. With other of my comments they responded by citing wording that I had read as if I didn’t understand it. But I did and my thrust was lack of trust in how certain wordings of intent and rules would work in the real world along with the broader implications of over regulation. But most of my comments were relegated to their personal opinion category. It seems like what was once commonly called the American way of life is now personal opinion and no longer national consensus.

This entire costly process ignores the uncertain difficulty of knowing the future and committing resources to projections that aren’t yet realities.  I once attended a meeting of long range planners for the Grant Line Road corridor. This narrow rural road without safe shoulders and no turn pocket intersections had become an Elk Grove-Folsom rush hour nightmare. So based on a problem area that emerged almost a decade before, an expensive body of planners and engineers were assembled to design a solution 20 or more years into the future. This included an express bus system with origin and final destination shuttles on each trip end. They did not know what they were doing.  Americans only transfer once. People transfer far more when they don’t have other choices as in Third World countries. Is that what we are becoming as the “expert” class thrives and the road remains dangerous? While I don’t have hard figures handy, common sense would dictate fixing those intersections with frequent high speed collusions first, before the long range studies are financed. Our resources are being misappropriated, ironically creating a long range problem as the misappropriation mistakes cumulatively snowball. But the planning profession has been successful in convincing the politicians that they are the answer and the more the better.

In geology there is the concept of multiple working hypothesizes but in planning all too often the plans and projections take on a life of their own. About 25 years ago I redesigned the Modesto bus system, and as required, used the official plans. They included a significant residential development to the northeast. This happened and went bust in the housing crisis. But even if it hadn’t, there would be no transit potential until a teen age population emerged there in another 15 to 20 years.  However, the bus system’s form was altered to easily plug in a future service from the development area giving one transfer access to most of the city. As common sense awareness dictated no ridership demand has emerged from those developments and there is presently no bus service there. While I solved the problem I’d been given, I often wonder if those changes in the system had become just an inconvenience for most riders. So here the plan became the new reality, but only with a ghostly presence.

So the projections become plans and then morph into prescriptions. These then take on a life of their own and have entered the General Plan discussions here in Amador County. Some people imagine that an alleged exodus of software writers will choose Amador County out of a whole world of possibilities and make us the new beacon of prosperity. While believing in possibilities is basic and essential, it is now a prescription requiring adherence. The belief of these people is so strong that the survival of our railroad which is here and now could be sacrificed to an unlikely vision. A vision based on an activity cauldron that almost always occurs in big cities but in their way of thinking will preserve our rural way of life. This muddled mindset allows our General Plan to have adherents. But its far more than a strict prescription, it is an edict to goosestep into Agenda 21 and the new world order.

What will this new prescriptive planning produce? Many years ago in Amsterdam I took several of their light rail lines from Central Station to their far terminal and back.  When I saw the first few stations in new development areas they seemed like good planning. One got off their train at a plaza with dry cleaning, day care, retail food, etc right there. Americans often run their errands driving home from work and therefore find that a transit trip often necessitates an inefficient second auto trip. However my delight faded rapidly as all the new station areas looked alike. Finally I wanted to scream at the banality. But now these are emerging all across America, with financial backing from Obama, including Sacramento. I worked with those planners on TOD’s (Transit Oriented Developments) and asked this question: a new development at current costs would attract only, for example, a corporate chain dry cleaner over an owner/operator. The convenience would draw customers from the independent dry cleaner a few blocks away who would probably go out of business. Is this what you want? They never answered. But we all know that most unique businesses grow from a small business that is the vision of a single individual. Trader Joe’s, which many locals desired for the Pine Grove Dollar General site, started that way.

Are we talking about ignored factors, unintended consequences or a globalist/Agenda 21 plan? Ultimately it doesn’t matter since the outcome is the same and that outcome is the globalist/Agenda 21 plan. We now have prescription, not freedom. While the individual expressions may seem like clutter to those with overly compulsive desires, the hodge podge can develop its own distinct character. Built environments that succeed and delight are fine grained. This is vastly different that deciding between a rustic or alpine look for the Buckhorn Town Center. Is uniformity safer than freedom now?  Along with general planning morphing into prescriptive planning, the basic assumptions have changed.  Large public parks have always been considered land banks. This can provide a needed site without having to eminent domain someone out of their home or business. Gene Autry’s Museum of the American West endured a herculean struggle to occupy its site in Los Angeles’s Griffith Park in 1988. Just recently George Lucas’s Star Wars Museum got rejected for Chicago’s lakefront collection of public buildings because its site, a parking lot, was deemed critical open space. So we have moved completely from planning that provided for the future to one that contains it. When I got my master’s in planning it was essential to understand that the goal of planning was to create opportunity and zone enough land for affordable choice knowing that future demand will probably change. The context was freedom. That was a democratic attitude I endorsed. But planning has been usurped for very different outcomes.

Certainly, it is common sense to plan for the future. Big problems and bad decisions can be avoided.  Underneath the skyscrapers of downtown Buffalo, NY lies what was judged in the 1960’s as the world’s largest deposit of high grade construction gravel. Apparently the founding French fur traders of the 1750’s didn’t file their EIR. That won’t happen today. But we have situations like Galt allowing new homes too close to our only rail link and inhibiting or constraining current and future use. Not surprisingly the planning establishment’s answer to this is more planners and more regional planning powers. The regional agencies are run by “experts” who know what’s best for us and governed by appointed officials not elected for their specific posts. This is often a new tyranny and the implementation means of the new world order/Agenda 21. These are the people that see our future changing the bed linen of Bay Area tourists and living in service worker ghettos. More regional planning is obviously not the answer. It most likely would not preserve our railroad’s future, but rather endorse its destruction as part of their utopian deindustrialization. The ideological beliefs of the participants are paramount, whatever form the decision making process takes.

The beliefs enshrined in our General Plan and its prescriptions to achieve them are simply people removal. That means you and I. Not all at once, because that would engender public protest, but one by one we will be picked off. Wait until your septic fails or some similar circumstance. Yet some in our community are alarmed over the handful of unmitigatable impacts. Preventing any change, essential if we are to prosper, for a future that is unknown (excepting unforeseen events) reveals a belief in stasis. But that doesn’t exist and only leads to stagnation. Planning should not, and in reality can’t, proscribe a future. But it should, and can, prepare for the future. That is why the General Plan is called general.

Copyright 2016, Mark L. Bennett