Badlands Journal

Badlands owes the community an apology. We published a letter to the McClatchy board of directors last week that complained about an article in the Merced Sun-Star some Valley citizens found extremely offensive to Hispanic neighbors, friends, Mexico and Hispanic culture in general.

We seem to have brought down on the community something almost worse than that letter: a series of lectures on theories of literary interpretation, the main one called, “Column wasn’t meant to offend,” by Sun-Star editor Joe Kieta. Perhaps this new professorial tone the Sun-Star is adopting is yet another wonderful benefit of proximity to a UC campus.

Hermaneutics does Merced!

Central Valley Safe Environment Network, which made the complaint to the owners of the Sun-Star, was bombarded by instruction about satire, irony and sarcasm. The author of the article telling Alma Oseguera to get out of the Valley, Keita, a top McClatchy corporate official, Sun-Star publisher Hank Vander Veen and numerous other important people including some local Hispanic “leaders” took time patiently to explain to members of CVSEN, an old Valley grassroots organization, that its members just didn’t understand what the retired journalism professor and freelance columnist really meant.

“Shocking news events like these are tailor-made for commentary,” Kieta wrote in defense of the offensive piece. “Burke decided to write an ironic column that took the extreme opposite side in an effort to point out what he feels is the senselessness of the agency's actions.”

Later, Kieta explains patiently to Valley dumbbells, “But if the irony is missed, readers can be confused or outraged by the comments.” This is followed by the news that the author had received emails soon after publication applauding his extremist views.

We may be confused by Kieta’s superior literary erudition, but it seems like the people who wrote those praises weren’t the least bit confused. They thought they had a regular Bull White Man to speak their racism.

From there, Kieta goes on to explain that the author is a first-rate man who is neither bigoted nor insensitive, and either is Kieta, Vander Veen or the Sun-Star – and if we dummies just knew about irony, satire, sarcasm and such, this whole misunderstanding would never have occurred.

We just didn’t think it was either funny or in good taste. However, our superiors enlightened us: Valley people don’t have no taste, we can’t think so we should just shut up when a former professor employs the highly refined, esoteric tools of the literary art to tell us something that is so far beyond us we could never understand it anyway.

How could we understand these things? We come from these communities – born and raised in them, among immigrants like undocumented Mexican workers. What could they know about a law that criminalizes them?

I guess we’ll have to see. But, from an agricultural perspective, this HR-4437 looks like using gasoline instead of diesel to stoke up an orchard brush-pile fire.

But we have in the Valley our own little canons of etiquette, too, apparently unknown to The McClatchy Company or its outlets who serve most of us our daily print. One of them is that we tend to speak rather respectfully about immigrants since most of us are immigrants and because the Valley has been a settling area for immigrants – from the US as well as other nations – for a long time. We don’t find immigration is a joke. In fact, we’ve learned through the years that if you aren’t careful and joke about it in the wrong company, you will get your teeth kicked in. Of course, our little canons do not rise to the level of McClatchy literary interpretation because they lack the elegance.

The largest concentration of undocumented Mexican workers in the nation lives between Stockton and Los Angeles. Hispanic people have always lived in the Valley, in fact a number of them lived here before the arrival of the Anglos. In the last 40 years, since the termination of the Bracero Program, the beginnings of the Maquiladora system, the end of the large Anglo migrations out of Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma, and the increasing militarization of the US/Mexican border, the population of undocumented Mexican workers in California has radically increased. Agribusiness loves a large pool of workers, the more vulnerable to intimidation and coercion the better from its corporate point of view. In recent years illegal aliens have moved beyond agriculture and even, during the latest speculation-driven construction boom, into building trades.

These people will not be uprooted from the Valley now. They are part of our social fabric, our neighbors, friends and coworkers, and many are homeowners. We have been aware for decades that the lives of our immigrant neighbors are frequently complicated by inadequate papers. Border Patrol sweeps are hardly news in these parts. It’s an old game of harassment and intimidation the government plays whenever special interests get nervous about the workers’ emotional state. The special interests prefer the workers be afraid. Signs of courage, organizing and that sort of thing alarm special interests, who then instruct the government to “do something about the illegal alien situation.”

Actually, however, our Hispanic neighbors and friends here in the Valley have had some rudimentary literary education in recent years. A colorful fellow in Chiapas, who wears a ski mask, smokes a pipe, and controls a region of that state for the benefit of its indigenous inhabitants (mainly Mayas), has shown novel tastes in revolutionary literature. According to this subcomandante, all people really need to read is Don Quixote, with perhaps a little Shakespeare on the side, to get an adequate sense of reality in the post-NAFTA world in a nation that lacked an ideological vocabulary to describe reality.

The Badlands editorial staff – always seeking the key to understanding reality – has had an on-going Quixote study group for a dozen years. We feel it has improved our understanding of reality, but evidently not enough to grasp satire with sufficient depth to understand the refined sense of humor of the retired journalism professor or his bosses.

What we hear in these particularly brutal Border Patrol sweeps, backed by HR 4437, is an old simile from Hispanic political science: The state is like a violin, the left hand holds it but the right hand plays it.

The author of HR 4437, James Sensenbrenner, R-WI, understands this saying because his congressional district has the largest concentration of Hispanic dairy workers in Wisconsin, until 1993 (when California took the lead) the largest dairy state in the nation. He knows who holds it and who plays it.

You can bet the Grand Old Party of Global Corporations (formerly the American GOP or Republican Party) also knows who holds the fiddle and who plays it. Going down the list of the Immigration Reform Caucus Members for the 109th Congress makes interesting reading: half of the 90-plus members come from former Confederate states and the group’s rightwing fervor is “balanced” by two Democratic Party members.

HR 4437 would:

Make being undocumented a felony rather than a civil offense.

• Expand the definition of smuggling to include dealing with undocumented knowingly or with wanton neglect of their status.

• Make felony record an automatic basis to deny legal status and citizenship.

• Require employers, including union hiring halls to report all employers for federal examination of their eligibility to work.

• Have mandatory detention for suspected undocumented not from Mexico or Canada.

• Militarize the border with a wall of several hundred miles and high tech military surveillance.

• Eliminate due process from many immigration procedures.

• Deputize local and state police to enforce federal immigration laws.

Dennis Cardoza, to his great credit, voted against HR 4437.

This law makes about as much sense as Prohibition but is “good politics” for the GOP-GC because it criminalizes and terrorizes its victims into a position in which they must respond with the only political tactic they have, large public demonstrations. Since non-citizens, by definition, don’t vote, the rightwing political strategy of the year is to scare the hell out of everyone who does vote with another American alien scare, all mixed in together with the eternal war against terrorism. What else can they do? Their president lied to get us into a war we’re losing; his very election in 2000 was the result of highly organized vote rigging in the Southern state where his brother is governor; his regime has begun to spy on everyone they don’t like; he has given monstrous tax breaks to the wealthiest 2 percent in the nation and has stimulated a jobless economic recovery; with the largest national debt ever reached, the dollar is propped up by nervous Asian trading partners China and Japan; and the off-shoring of what is left of essential industries continues. He is so unpopular that in New York City yesterday an estimated 300,000 people braved a huge NYPD gauntlet to march against his war and all the rest of his policies. And gasoline costs more than $3 per gallon and the price is rising – a boon to the American president’s oil company constituents.

So, let’s see if we can get the “aliens” riled up, reason the Texans who rule us.

All the failures of the Bush regime must be the fault of undocumented Mexican workers, right? Nobody is certainly going to even remember, much less believe that seditious little marsupial, Pogo, who declared c. 1955: “We have found the enemy and he is us.”

Blame the undocumented Mexican worker, tack on a fat pork barrel in the form of a Israeli-style wall across the border, and pass another idiotic, unenforceable law terrorizing another in the long line of hard-working immigrant groups who have come to the United States, give the racists something to dream on and maintain control of the Congress by the GOP-GC.

The left hand holds the fiddle; the right hand plays an ugly, monotonous, malevolent tune:

· about learning more hatred;
· about more graft, corruption, oppression and police power;
· a ballad about betraying for the benefit of special interests the justice upon which we stand, without which we fall;
· and about getting more stupid by the month through denying (with help from our media corporations) the multiple dangers lying ahead instead of facing them like the relatively courageous, independently thinking people we have shown ourselves to be from time to time.

It’s not funny at all, when you come to think about it, because this authoritarian regime is above wit, rhetoric, argument, and is especially above humor. The emperor may look ridiculous without a stitch of clothing on, but if you grin, you could end up in Gitmo. This regime speaks only with power, money and force. It makes you really nostalgic for US Sen. Alan Simpson, R-WY, if, of course, you remember Simpson, which requires an inability to erase the recent history of your nation from your mind. The debate between Simpson and Rep. Barbara Jordan, D-TX, is evidence that before the present political nightmare, the US Congress was capable of thought – including analysis, argument, a very high level of rhetoric, wit, humility, humor and wisdom – even on the very difficult issue of the immigration of undocumented Mexican workers.

And, by the way, now that we’ve dispensed with its literary interpretation, does McClatchy by chance know where Alma Oseguera and her 50-plus fellow victims from our community are now? We’ll take the information in simple declarative sentences. Save the hermaneutics for the boardroom where the elites meet.

Happy May Day!

Pedro Conejo-Tonto
----------------------------------

Notes:

http://www.mercedsunstar.com/opinion/story/12086617p-12838624c.html
MercedSunStar.com
Column wasn't meant to offend
By Joe Kieta
… For our part, the Sun-Star will be more careful in the future to make sure satirical columns are clearly labeled as such, which will eliminate any confusion. We could have labeled Burke's column accordingly, but didn't -- and for this, please accept our apologies.
Biting satire shouldn't bite back. We'll do our best to make sure this confusion doesn't happen again.

http://www.mercedsunstar.com/opinion/story/12086617p-12838624c.html
Weekend voices: Liberty, opportunity are for Americans only
By David F. Burke
Last Updated: April 22, 2006
Get out of this valley, Alma Oseguara. Maybe after a few weeks in a Kern County jail you'll finally understand that we don't want you and your kind here in the San Joaquin Valley. … About 300 years ago, his ancestors, named Garcia, came through Texas -- well, it may have been "Tejas" then -- and up into northern New -- I mean Nuevo -- Mexico and southern Colorado.
Then, 150 years later, my ancestors picked a fight with Mexico. We first tried to get what we wanted peacefully, offering our neighbors to the south $25 million for California. But the ignorant Mexicans thought the state was worth more than that.
So, we sent two armies into Mexico and a third to California, by way of New Mexico. The silly Mexicans refused to surrender, so we captured Mexico City and "convinced" our captors to accept just $15 million for the Golden State. The vanquished Mexicans threw in New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and Utah - about half of their country, all told - for free.
And that, Alma, should explain why my brown-skinned son -- who was born in New Mexico -- gets to stay while you -- who were born in Old Mexico -- must leave.
It's not personal. It's the law. If you like, you can think of it as manifest destiny.
Now, get out of my country. And don't come back until you are legal.

Gadamer, Hans Georg, Truth and Method, Continuum, New York, 1994, pp. 190-192, 265-266

http://www.uwrf.edu/news_bureau/0531022.html
Hispanic Workers Impact Increasing in Wisconsin
By Khrysten Darm
UW-RF News Bureau
A recent presentation by UW-River Falls dairy science Professor Dennis Cooper reflected a new reality in Wisconsin: 10 percent of its dairy workforce speaks Spanish.
Cooper spoke at a Hispanic Dairy Labor Conference recently in Kaukauna,Wis. His presentation was titled: "?Que Pasa? What is Happening with Hispanic Workers? Nine Ideas to Improve Your Success with Hispanic Employees." … Ten percent of the workforce in Wisconsin is Hispanic, and although a high concentration is in the southeastern part of the state, there are still Hispanic workers that come to larger dairy farms in this area. "We are trying to serve dairy farmers and they need information on how to manage a multicultural workforce," Cooper said.

tancredo.house.gov/
Check out Members of Congress' Immigration Report Cards at http://www.betterimmigration.com/reportcardintro.html

www.house.gov/sensenbrenner/

http://www.hispanicbusiness.com/news/newsbyid.asp?id=34019&cat=Hispanic+PR+Wire&more=/hprw
Latino Immigrants in favor of May first economic boycott
4/27/2006
Burbank, CA--(HISPANIC PR WIRE)--April 26, 2006--The large majority of Latino immigrants will support the May first economic boycott. More than 70% of the respondents stated that they will support the “Great Latino Stop” by not attending work, buying anything, or sending their children to school, according to a study conducted by Garcia Research made public today.
“The study indicates that even with the differences in opinion that exist amongst leaders and organizations about the best manner in which to make the boycott effective, and the possible negative repercussions like sanctions and unemployment, the immigrant population has received with great enthusiasm the idea of the boycott”, said Cristina Garcia, director of El Pulso Latino, the division of Public Polling of Garcia Research …

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0604280145apr28,1,7557293.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed
dglanton@tribune.com
How immigration roils tiny Georgian town
Calhoun finds itself at the center of national debate over illegal laborers
By Dahleen Glanton
Tribune national correspondent
Published April 28, 2006
CALHOUN, Ga. -- This is carpet country, home to the largest concentration of carpeting factories in the world. It is a place of abundant jobs and affordable housing--magnets for a growing population of Latino immigrants that some longtime residents see as a threat to their way of life.
Calhoun's 13,000 people are mostly working-class whites. But now nearly one out of six residents is from another country. Some whites see immigrants, legal or not, as unfair contenders in the competition for coveted jobs they have held for generations at the carpet mills. For the most part, they have accepted the changing demographics with apprehension, much as they reluctantly took to forced integration with African-Americans in the 1960s.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0429-01.htm
Published on Saturday, April 29, 2006 by the Associated Press
FBI Investigated 3,501 People Without Warrants
by Mark Sherman
WASHINGTON - The FBI secretly sought information last year on 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal residents from their banks and credit card, telephone and Internet companies without a court's approval, the Justice Department said Friday. Confirms our fear all along that National Security Letters are being used to get the records of thousands of innocent Americans without court approval.
It was the first time the Bush administration has publicly disclosed how often it uses the administrative subpoena known as a National Security Letter, which allows the executive branch of government to obtain records about people in terrorism and espionage investigations without a judge's approval or a grand jury subpoena. Friday's disclosure was mandated as part of the renewal of the Patriot Act, the administration's sweeping anti-terror law. The FBI delivered a total of 9,254 NSLs relating to 3,501 people in 2005, according to a report submitted late Friday to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate. In some cases, the bureau demanded information about one person from several companies. The numbers from previous years remain classified, officials said.

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0430-23.htm
Published on Sunday, April 30, 2006 by the Los Angeles Times
A Day Without All-Stars?
by Dave Zirin
May day 2006 is being called the "Great American Boycott" or "A Day Without Latinos."
Across the country, Latinos and their allies say they will neither work nor shop Monday to protest what they consider anti-immigrant legislation before Congress.
Although many industries and work sites may be affected, one multibillion-dollar enterprise would be crippled by such a boycott: Major League Baseball.
Of the top 10 hitters in the National League, six are from Latin America, including Albert Pujols, last year's most valuable player. In the American League, five of the top 10 are Latinos, including batting leader and 2003 MVP Miguel Tejada.
Latinos dominate the pantheon of the game's superstars like never before. Seven of the last 10 MVPs in the American League are Latinos. The new reality was laid bare at this spring's World Baseball Classic: The U.S. team couldn't compete with its Latin American rivals, failing to even make it out of pool play … The growing Latino presence in Major League Baseball is a story of exploitation and opportunity. Club owners set up baseball academies in countries where future prospects can be signed in their early teens for pennies, then fired with little cost if they aren't good enough to play in the big leagues. As one player said to me, "The options in the Dominican Republic are jail, the army, the factory or baseball." Many talented players make it to the U.S. and play minor league ball, then stay illegally if they're dropped from a team to chase the dream of a professional baseball career. The outer boroughs of New York City are filled with semipro teams of men in their 30s still thirsting for that contract and hoping it comes before they are deported.

http://cpusa.org/article/articleview/752/1/105/
2006 Immigrant Rights Club Educational Guide …
Author: CPUSA Education Commission
First published 04/27/2006 15:25
This educational has the goal of upgrading our understanding of the struggle for immigrant rights and against repressive immigration legislation which is taking place right now throughout the country. The goal is to place in bold relief the central problems of inequality, criminalization, and the greed of US corporations. The suggested readings which are attached include the 2006 report to the National Board on immigration, the resolution on immigration passed at the 28th National Convention, and a PWW article.
The club should invite guests to participate in this educational discussion of the immigrant rights struggle and immediately distribute the educational guide with the attached reading materials to all who will be involved. A discussion leader should be selected to facilitate the discussion. At least 45 minutes to an hour should be devoted to the full educational discussion.
Discussion Questions:
1. How have corporate and governmental policies shaped changes in the immigrant population and the challenges facing the immigrant population? How have the conditions for immigrants worsened?
2. What has been and is now the contribution of organized labor to the fight for immigrant rights?
3. What are some aspects of positive immigration reform? What can your club and district do to help advance the consciousness of the working class, nationally oppressed communities, women, and youth on the issue of immigrants rights? What are some obstacles which must be overcome? What can your club and district do to participate in this struggle? …

http://usliberals.about.com/od/immigration/a/RMahony.htm
Catholic Cardinal Mahony Slams House Bill HR 4437
Liberal Politics: U.S. -- Apr 11 2006
Tells Bush That Priests Will Not Verify Legal Status
In response to an immigration bill passed in late 2005 by the US House, Catholic Cardinal Roger Mahony, Archbishop of Los Angeles, the largest US diocese with five million Catholics, wrote this letter to President Bush, decrying the new mandate that organizations first check immigration status before providing services to any person. …

December 30, 2005
The Honorable
George W. Bush
President of the United States
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20500
Dear President Bush:
The House of Representatives recently passed a border-security Bill (H.R. 4437) that has enormous implications and ramifications for all of us in this country.
While I am surely in favor of taking appropriate government action to protect the borders of our country, not every action step is feasible or advisable. Apparently, the recently passed House Bill will require of all personnel of Churches and of all non-profit organizations to verify the legal immigration status of every single person served through our various entities.
In effect, priests, ministers, rabbis, and others involved in various Church-related activities will be forced top become "quasi-immigration enforcement officials." The Catholic Church alone offers a vast spectrum of services for all in need, including education, health care, and social services. Our golden rule has always been to serve people in need--not to verify beforehand their immigration status.
But the Bill imposes incredibly penalties upon any person assisting others' through a Church or a social service organization. Up to five years in prison and seizure of assets would accompany serving the poor who later turn out to be here without proper legal documentation.
One could interpret this Bill to suggest that any spiritual and pastoral service given to any person requires proof of legal residence. Are we to stop every person coming to Holy Communion and first ask them to produce proof of legal residence before we can offer them the Body and Blood of Christ?
Speaking for the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, such restrictions are impossible to comply with. The underlying basis for our service to others ,especially to the poor, is the example, words, and actions of Jesus Christ in the Gospels. The 25th chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel does not simply invite us to serve others in the name of Jesus, but offers such service as a requisite to the Kingdom of God:
"Then the king will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me."
Then the righteous will answer him and say, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you ill or in prison, and visit you?'
And the king will say to them in reply, 'Amen. I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.'" (Matthew 25: 31-46)
This one example in Matthew's Gospel is foundational to our discipleship of Jesus Christ, and all that we do in service to those in need is done in light of our Baptismal commitments.
It is staggering for the federal government to stifle our spiritual and pastoral outreach to the poor, and to impose penalties for doing what our faith demands of us.
Throughout your Presidency, you have encouraged Faith Based Organizations to be strong partners in meeting the needs of the those in our communities. Yet, this Bill will produce the opposite effect.
You must speak out clearly and forcefully in opposition to these repressive---and impossible--aspects of any immigration reform efforts. Your personal leadership is needed to counter such ill-advised efforts.
Thanking you for giving strong leadership in this matter, and with kindest personal regards, I am
Sincerely yours in Christ,
His Eminence
Cardinal Roger M. Mahony
Archbishop of Los Angeles

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/043006B.shtml
In Leak Cases, New Pressure on Journalists
By Adam Liptak
The New York Times
Sunday 30 April 2006
Earlier administrations have fired and prosecuted government officials who provided classified information to the press. They have also tried to force reporters to identify their sources.
But the Bush administration is exploring a more radical measure to protect information it says is vital to national security: the criminal prosecution of reporters under the espionage laws …

PL49-GP Update Polices
May 2, 2006

Merced County Board of Supervisors’ Agenda Item # 55
(Transcribed from Board Agenda for May 2, 2006 – BH, April 29, 2006)

TO: BOARD OF SUPERVISORS
THROUGH: DEMITRIOS O. TATUM, COUNTY EXECUTIVE OFFICER
FROM: ROBERT A. LEWIS, DEVELOPMENT SERVICES DIRECTOR

SUBJECT: General Plan Amendment Policy and Procedures during the General Plan Update

SUMMARY: On February 14, 2006, the Planning and Community Development Department made a presentation to the Board of supervisors, at the request of the General Plan Review Steering Committee, to seek direction for handling developer initiated Guidance packages for major project submittals during the General Plan Update process.

On April 11, 2006, Staff presented four modified options with one alternative to Option 3 for the Board to consider. During discussion, an additional alternative to Option 3 was presented as well. These modified options are:

1. General Plan Amendment Policy Option 1 (Allow All).
Allow any property owner to submit a General Plan amendment whether or not it involves a new or updated Community Plan. Applicants would proceed at own risk and indemnify the County. For Option 1, Staff recommends that applicants pay all staff impact costs for the effort required to process their application or provide contract services for in-house staff sufficient to complete the project.

(Continued on the next page.)

STAFFING IMPACT: The level of staff support required for property owner sponsored Community Plan efforts is minimal if the applicants pay all staff impact costs and positions are filled as required to process their application or provide contract services for in-house staff sufficient to complete the project.

FISCAL IMPACT: No fiscal impact from actions the Board takes regarding property owner sponsored Community Plan projects. The applicant is required to provide for full County costs.

CONTRACT/RESOLUTION/ABSTRACT SUBMITTED: No.

REQUEST REVIEWED BY: County Counsel __________________

ADMINISTRATION RECOMMENDATION/COMMENT: ______________________

REQUEST/RECOMMENDATION/ACTION NEEDED: Staff recommends Option 1, allowing any property owner to submit a General Plan Amendment whether or not it involves a new or updated Community Plan. Applicants shall proceed at own risk and indemnify the County. Applicants shall pay all staff impact costs for the effort required to process applications or provide contract services for in-house staff sufficient to complete the project.

Page 2.

2. General Plan Amendment Policy Option 2 (limit by Date).

Consider holding in abeyance as of May 2, 2006 any new General Plan Amendment application that requires preparation or revision to a Community Plan (generally those applications which require approval of a Guidance Package for processing). For Option 2, Staff recommends that applicants pay all staff impact costs as stated in Option 1. this does NOT include guidance packages previously adopted by the Board or those prospective projects in the works as of May 2, 2006.

3A. General Plan Amendment Policy Option 3A (Agricultural Land).

Consider processing applications for Community Plans and Community Plan updates only where the area is located on non-productive farmland (soil quality is rated lower than Prime, Farmlands of Statewide Importance and Unique Farmland as identified on the State Important Farmlands Map of the Department of Conservation). For Option 3A, Staff recommends that applicants pay all staff impact costs as stated in Option 1.

3B. General Plan Amendment Policy Option 3B (Agricultural Land).

During the time period prior to the completion and final adoption of the updated County General Plan and effective at the signing of a resolution, applications intended as preliminary steps to change the general plan designation from agricultural to non-agricultural or urban uses shall NOT be accepted unless:

· It can be demonstrated that the application will not result in a “leap-frog” development pattern.
· Will not result in a significant change to surrounding existing land uses.
· Will utilize, if granted the existing services of a full service municipal water and sewer treatment facility, and as such could be considered an infill project, causing minimal environmental impacts.

3C. General Plan Amendment Policy Option 3C (Presented 4/11/06 during Board discussion)

Applications previously accepted for processing shall continue and are eligible for amendment as needed or otherwise shall proceed unimpeded during the general plan update process; and those:

· Applications which provide infill opportunity on existing sewer and water shall be accepted, and,
· Applications which provide a timely, clear economic benefit to the county which could otherwise be lost during the ensuing time necessary for the general plan update shall be accepted for consideration.

4. General Plan Amendment Policy Option 4 (Moratorium)

Consider holding in abeyance any and all General Plan Amendment applications by adopting a resolution to hold applications until the General Plan Update is completed and approved.

After Staff’s presentation, the Board Chair opened the discussion to the public and received numerous comments and suggestions. These comments can be grouped into three main recommendations: 1) impose a moratorium on General Plan Amendment applications during the General Plan Update; 2) do not impose a moratorium on General Plan Amendments and allow all applications to be processed; and 3) those who asked the County to take all interests into account during the General Plan update and support sound development and agricultural resource protection.

After a lengthy discussion by the Board, Supervisor O’Banion made a motion to support Option No. 1, Seconded by Supervisor Nelson. Due to the absence of Supervisor Crookham, the Board decided to continue the discussion and the Second to the motion was rescinded. The Board acknowledged that public comment would again be accepted and continued the item to May 2, 2006.
---------------------------------

CVSEN NOTES: The April 11 Board Agenda Item #53 shows that neither Policy Options 3B or 3C were written down prior to the meeting. Supervisor Kelsey orally presented Option 3B at that meeting. Option 3C is yet another, fresh creation of the General Plan Review Steering Committee at some point after April 11.

It is apparent, at least at this stage of General Plan Amendment Policy and Procedures during the General Plan Update, that the Planning Department has forgotten everything about planning except the costs to its office of developer driven projects, and that the County has made sure it will be financially recompensed for its rubber stamping and indemnified against any lawsuits brought against it by the public for violations of environmental law, public process or land-use authority.

Central Valley Safe Environment Network
P.O. Box 64
Merced, CA. 95341
cvsen@sbcglobal.net

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Re: Racially offensive commentary in the Merced Sun-Star

Date: April 25, 2006

McClatchy Officers and Directors:

We write you to protest the publication on Saturday, April 22, 2006 of a column by a regular contributor to the Merced Sun-Star titled “Liberty, opportunity are for Americans only.”

Speaking as citizens of Merced and for citizens of the San Joaquin Valley and of the United States, we will not tolerate racist smears of 18-year-old high school girls in our newspaper; we will not tolerate our newspaper publishing its contempt for an entire ethnic minority; we will not tolerate a vicious attack on a person little more than a child without any means of defending herself, presently in a Border Patrol holding tank in Bakersfield; we will not tolerate our newspaper bullying the weak and defenseless.

We are not asking for or demanding the immediate dismissal of the publisher and the editorial staff of the Merced Sun-Star that published this racial slander and libel against a high school girl. We expect nothing less than their dismissal and an apology from the McClatchy board for publishing material with racial hatred content intended to intimidate and incite.

This newspaper has entirely lost contact with its community and with decency.

Merced Sun-Star, April 22, 2006
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/opinion/story/12086617p-12838624c.html

Weekend voices: Liberty, opportunity are for Americans only

By David F. Burke

Get out of this valley, Alma Oseguara. Maybe after a few weeks in a Kern County jail you'll finally understand that we don't want you and your kind here in the San Joaquin Valley.
Never mind that you spent the last 12 years attending school here, and were weeks away from graduation at Le Grand High School. You and your bleeding-heart classmates need to understand that we expect you to obey the law of the land.
Even six-year-old illegals have to play by the rules and because you entered our country without permission when you were six, our agents were perfectly within their rights to "target" you and to bang on your door at 3 in the morning, demanding that you pack your bags and go directly to jail.
And don't start that old song about escaping from Mexico to get away from an abusive father, Alma.
Do you think we're the kind of nation that would welcome the wretched refuse of another country? Do you think we want more homeless, tempest-tossed masses of tired and poor people like you? Does our border look to you like some kind of golden door?
Forget that idea. We stopped holding the torch for your kind of immigrants long ago.
Liberty and opportunity are for Americans only. Did you imagine that we were talking about Mexicans when we said, "all are created equal?" Get real, Alma. Say goodbye to Le Grand High, to dreams of college and to friends and relatives you've known for a dozen years.
Bienvenidos a Mexico.
Let me explain how it works, Alma. My son looks a bit like you; he has the same skin tone. But Jesse had the good sense not to be born in Mexico - he was born in New Mexico.
About 300 years ago, his ancestors, named Garcia, came through Texas -- well, it may have been "Tejas" then -- and up into northern New -- I mean Nuevo -- Mexico and southern Colorado.
Then, 150 years later, my ancestors picked a fight with Mexico. We first tried to get what we wanted peacefully, offering our neighbors to the south $25 million for California. But the ignorant Mexicans thought the state was worth more than that.
So, we sent two armies into Mexico and a third to California, by way of New Mexico. The silly Mexicans refused to surrender, so we captured Mexico City and "convinced" our captors to accept just $15 million for the Golden State. The vanquished Mexicans threw in New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and Utah - about half of their country, all told - for free.
And that, Alma, should explain why my brown-skinned son -- who was born in New Mexico -- gets to stay while you -- who were born in Old Mexico -- must leave.
It's not personal. It's the law. If you like, you can think of it as manifest destiny.
Now, get out of my country. And don't come back until you are legal.

The Central Valley Safe Environment Network is confident McClatchy officers and directors will do the right thing in a timely manner, removing the “leadership” of this newspaper, which increasingly over the last decade become a source of unjust speech and propaganda.

Sincerely,
Central Valley Safe Environment Network

cc:
Hank Vander Veen
Publisher, Merced Sun-Star
hvanderveen@mercedsun-star.com

Joseph Kieta
Editor, Merced Sun-Star
jkieta@mercedsun-star.com

CENTRAL VALLEY SAFE ENVIRONMENT NETWORK
MISSION STATEMENT
Central Valley Safe Environment Network is a coalition of organizations and individuals throughout the San Joaquin Valley that is committed to the concept of "Eco-Justice" -- the ecological defense of the natural resources and the people. To that end it is committed to the stewardship, and protection of the resources of the greater San Joaquin Valley, including air and water quality, the preservation of agricultural land, and the protection of wildlife and its habitat. In serving as a community resource and being action-oriented, CVSEN desires to continue to assure there will be a safe food chain, efficient use of natural resources and a healthy environment. CVSEN is also committed to public education regarding these various issues and it is committed to ensuring governmental compliance with federal and state law. CVSEN is composed of farmers, ranchers, city dwellers, environmentalists, ethnic, political, and religious groups, and other stakeholders

----Gary McMillen
3 April 2006

High in the February sky, a flock of cranes angle into the maroon sunset and prepare their gliding descent into a nearby rice field. On the ground below this V-patterned formation, a group of students, faculty and employees from LSU Health Sciences Center—New Orleans are huddled next to a plastic shelter for protection from the cold wind. It’s not easy in the Big Easy anymore. After the battering ram sucker punch of Hurricane Katrina, it’s life on the run. Displaced from their jobs and homes, they wait for a yellow school bus that crunches into the gravel parking lot and stops in front of them. A makeshift line assembles. On this forced journey in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, there is no pecking order.

Faculty of all rank, sport coats draped over their arms, punching Blackberries and carrying suit cases, accordion files and umbrellas, step up and into the bus. Students clutching pillows, CD players, boxes of pizza, book sacks and anatomy bone boxes stuff themselves into seats designed for 8th graders. Employees (from custodial workers to Assistant Director of Payroll) drag suitcases, laundry bags, cartons of bottled water and laptop computers down the narrow aisle.
Along a twisting asphalt road, the bus lumbers up the protective levee to a moored Baltic cruise ferry called the GTS Finnjet. Flying the flag of Finland, she is the temporary residence with a rudder for over 600 students, faculty and staff, who are participating in the recovery of an academic, research and patient care organization that, so far, has refused to fail. Water drove them from their homes and jobs and now, each day, they eat, sleep, work and live while floating on the brown, muddy current of the Mississippi River.
* * *
Dockside. A bitter wind, cross current, is whipping up froth on the pre-dawn surface of the river. Corliss Quillens (Accounting Technician), who evacuated her New Orleans 9th Ward home in a National Guard rescue boat and survived a week in the Super Dome, has seen enough water for a lifetime.

This morning, the rising water levels of the river have elevated the boat and passenger departure is precarious. Quillens, who has moved up her retirement date, is bundled in layers of clothes to protect her from the icy blast. Checking for slippery spots, Quillens steps slowly down the steep ramp. Gripping the chain rail with one hand and holding her cell phone with the other, she is in conversation with her insurance agent about a check that has been lost three times in the mail.

“I’m tired. Really tired,” an exasperated Quillens says under her breath. “I’ve moved so much that they can’t find me. Tell you the truth; I don’t know my address anymore. You can’t get mail on the boat and I’m afraid to have them mail it to my job. I tried to rent a post office box but the waiting list was too long.”
* * *
There is no white flag above Cabin 4132. Trying to keep Allied Health (Cardiopulmonary Science) Physical Therapy senior Tricia McDonald from graduating is like trying to drown a shark. When the Finnjet’s gangplank lowered on October 10th, McDonald was the first student to register on the boat. How she got there is a test tube sample of raw determination.

Like other students, McDonald discovered student housing was available on the Finnjet in Baton Rouge through the LSU emergency website. Rumors about the ferry swarmed like mosquitoes on a summer bayou: rooms were small and cramped; roommates were selected at random, first come, first serve. “When I first came on the boat I thought my room (with four beds) was really tiny,” McDonald remembers, “but when I walked around I was really happy with all the space they had to study. The boat was just what I needed.”

McDonald lived at 2316 Trio St in Chalmette, which was Ground Zero for Hurricane Katrina. As the surge of water, mud and chemicals rose with frightening speed (the watermark reached 12 feet), McDonald’s parents put the three dogs and two cats in the attic and swam to a neighbor’s second story house. They broke through a window. Rescued a day later, they were brought to a warehouse where they were given a half a glass of water twice a day. The pets weren’t so lucky.

McDonald had evacuated a day earlier with her best friend and fellow student Kelli Ford. “I went to sleep Saturday night, thinking the storm was Category 1,” McDonald remembers. “Kelli was honking in the driveway Sunday morning and telling me we had 20 minutes to leave. It was a Category 5.” McDonald threw some clothes in a bag, a toothbrush and some deodorant and, like Thelma and Louise, the two girls were off and running.

Using a combination of interstate and back roads, McDonald and Ford reached Shreveport (364 miles to the north) seventeen hours later. They stayed in an unfinished house—two rooms, 12 people. “It was a bare shell,” McDonald recalls. “Without television we didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know if my parents were alive or dead for one week. I couldn’t sleep.”

From a borrowed cell phone that was showing one bar on the battery, McDonald’s father finally reached her a week later. “I started crying when my Dad called,” she says. “I wasn’t sure if they had made it out.”

So much for the kindness of strangers---McDonald and Ford were told that their 5-day stay in Shreveport would come to $500. After coming up with the money, they were off to Bossier City where they lived with a retired RN, who gave the girls the key to her house. Next stop was Houston, where they lived in a pool house behind a couple’s home. The owners gave them money for food, clothes and loaned them a car. Unsure when school would re-open, they signed a six month lease on an apartment (they still owe $5,500 on the lease). With each move calculated to get closer to school, the girls next lived in a log cabin at a campground in Lake Charles, Louisiana, eating MRE’s (meals ready to eat).
“We didn’t know where we were going to stay from night to night half the time,” McDonald says. “Something in me said that I had to keep going. I didn’t work 3-1/2 years to quit at the end.”

Pearl River, Mississippi was McDonald’s eighth city and third state in one month. She commuted two hours each way to attend the opening of classes in Baton Rouge. “Everybody was looking at me like I was a foreigner,” McDonald says about being the first student on the boat. “I felt relieved that I didn’t have to drive so far any more. I was really wore out and doing bad on my tests. I needed to settle down and start studying. I didn’t care how small the room was; I finally had a place to stay.”

Once bunked in, McDonald’s grades went from average to excellent. “The hurricane was a test of our strength, both emotionally and psychologically,” McDonald expounds from the 7th deck study area. “You see the faculty and you know that their offices and labs are gone. We have all shared in the same suffering. If you would have asked me a year ago if I could have been able to go this far I would say definitely not. But when you are put in that position you do what you have to do.”
* * *
If you weren’t there or if you didn’t go back, you just don’t get it. Professor of Anatomy Bill Swartz is on the phone, trying to explain to a colleague at the Mayo Clinic why he had not responded to a September 3rd e-mail regarding revisions to an article he had submitted for publication.

With sarcasm thinly disguised, a frustrated Swartz goes through a list of explanations for his malingering. There has been a flood of Biblical proportions. The entire Health Sciences Center has been re-located ninety miles northwest. Gross anatomy is being taught in a vet school without cadavers. He is living under a bridge on a boat on the Mississippi River. The Health Science Center is close to a financial flat line. He doesn’t have time to read the newspaper.

When Swartz explains that he has not received one piece of business mail since August 24th the fog clears. “The moment he put himself in the position of not getting any mail for three and a half months then it hit him,” Swartz says with a grin. “He couldn’t relate to the actual devastation but not getting mail caught his attention.”

Swartz and his wife evacuated to Atlanta prior to the storm. When called back by his chairman, Swartz (with 31 years of LSU service) could have hung up the phone. He was well past retirement eligibility. “It looked awful on television,” Swartz says. “I thought if anything they would postpone the semester. I was 600 miles away from the action and I could just not get motivated. What eventually changed my mind was that I felt I owed the students something. After all, I had started the semester with them.”

Swartz came to Baton Rouge, completed a payroll deduction for the Finnjet and started hunting around for cadavers. He re-designed tests and prepared curriculum that would catch up for the month lost. In lectures and demonstrations, he asked questions, challenged the students, repeated procedures and reviewed everything under the sun. “I never worked so hard in my life,” Swartz admits. “My concern was that I did not want the kids to feel they were being cheated out of an education or getting a watered down exposure to gross anatomy.”

Something clicked. According to Swartz the numbers of honors in his course increased two and a half times the “pre-Katrina” norm. One particular student scored a 51 on her first exam then got a grip like a bulldog once she got on the boat. “I would come down for coffee every night around 9 o’clock,” Swartz recalls, “and she would be busting her tail studying.” The same student marked a 75 on the next exam and an 88 on the final. “I was shocked,” Swartz explains. “Somebody that gets a 51 on their first exam, you don’t expect them to even pass.”
* * *
According to Melanie Chelette, the variety and quality of the food on the boat is excellent but she misses the traditional New Orleans Monday meal of red beans and rice---Cajun style. “I love to cook and just be in the kitchen,” Chelette says, pausing from her study of estrogen replacement therapy. “I miss my husband. I miss my gym membership and working out. I just miss the normal routines.”
Chelette lived in a condo in Metaire and evacuated to Monroe, Louisiana where her mother got sick and was hospitalized. Chelette stayed next to her mother while texts messaging on her cell phone with fellow classmates from the School of Dentistry while watching the levees break on CNN. Her cabin on the Finnjet is windowless. “It feels pretty weird,” Chelette says. “You take a nap and you can’t tell the difference between three o’clock in the morning or three o’clock in the afternoon.”

Aboard the Finnjet now for over four months, there are slips of the tongue when the third year student refers to the boat as her “home.” Not surprising. Except for time attending class, Chelette is on the boat twenty-four/seven. The Navigator’s Pub (bar closed) on the 6th deck has become her living room.
Fearless when it comes to fashion, Chelette isn’t timid about showing up in her pajamas and slippers. “I’ve learned that I am very low maintenance,” she says with a sudden laugh, “and that I can deal with discomfort. A high maintenance girl can’t make it on this boat. A lot of things are more important right now than having the right shade of make-up.”
* * *
The weather is here. Wish you were beautiful. No one has ever received a post card from Port Allen, Louisiana where the Finnjet is moored to a Port of Baton Rouge wharf. Dockside Port Allen is a jumble of: grain elevators, sulfur dust, rusted refrigerators, weeds, port-o-lets, coils of copper cable, gas cylinders, piles of mulch, discarded septic tanks, conveyor belts, barges of soy beans, stacks of telephone poles coated with creosote, oil tankers, railroad yards, water towers, cement trucks, warehouses, drainage ditches, a man sitting outside PiK-A-Pak Fried Chicken spitting chewing tobacco into an empty cling-peach can while reading a pamphlet on chain saw safety, chemical storage tanks, pawn shops, sand and gravel pits.
* * *
Sitting next to a plastic lemon tree in Robert’s Coffee Shop, Associate Professor of Cardiopulmonary Science Andy Pellett is pushing the envelope. He is smiling, engaging people in nose-to-nose conversation. For the 41 year old Pellett (a career introvert) this behavior marks a radical departure from his usual reserved nature. “I have a tendency to stay by myself,” Pellett says, making eye contact with everybody that walks by. “Work had turned me into a dull boy. I’m much more conversational at this point. If I have something to say I just spit it out.”

Blame the boat. “I can’t stand being in the room by myself,” Pellett explains. “Getting out from behind those walls and talking and helping students has turned into my nightly entertainment. I guess you can call it unlimited office hours.”

With four cats and two kittens at home, evacuation in the face of Hurricane Katrina was a challenge. Unable to find a hotel that would take pets, Pellett and his wife left New Orleans late Sunday in the bumper-to-bumper exodus and headed north. With two teenagers and six cats crammed into carriers, the caravan required both Toyotas. After a minor fender bender to the lead vehicle, hours of blasting horns and ambulance sirens, Pellett’s wife Christine was on the verge of Stage 3 meltdown.

When the nervous goldfish in the front seat began to lose its scales the discussion was over. Pellett’s wife pulled off at the first Baton Rouge exit and offered $20 to a motel clerk so they could sleep in the parking lot. It was a stroke of luck when a conventioneer from Minnesota checked out of his room. The Pellett family moved in. “We were there long enough to get the cats de-clawed,” Pellet says. “They were tearing up the furniture.”

The achievement of Tricia McDonald stands out in Pellett’s memory. “When she came on the boat she was still traumatized,” he recalls. “She was struggling, getting low to average grades. The change was gradual but she eventually got to the point where she is now getting A’s and B’s.”
* * *
With 23 years at sea, handling the barge and freighter traffic on the Mississippi is a piece of cake to ship’s master Juha Rautavirta. Having worked his way up through the ranks, Rautavirta can ratchet mooring cable, lower any of the 3.5 metric ton lifeboats, take a turbine apart and navigate and maneuver the ship through a rocky fjord on the coast of Sweden as narrow as a needle. “There are some inlets where we have ten meter clearance on each side of the ship,” Rautavirta says, “and we are going at full speed.”

With the Finnjet docked, Rautavirta’s job gave way to paperwork, administration and management. The morale of the crew was an early challenge. “In the beginning they were not even allowed to walk in the harbor,” Rautavirta says. “Some of the crew got a bit restless. Now we have two cars and the local Seamen’s Church comes around once in awhile to take us into town.” To keep attitudes in perspective, the 40-year-old master has encouraged his cadre of captains and engineers to travel to New Orleans for “sensitivity training.”
On his favorite watch (midnight to 4:00 a.m.) Rautavirta likes to enjoy a cigarette and look out on the water from the Finnjet’s wheelhouse. With the Baton Rouge night skyline strung out like a flat string of white pearls, he remembers the moment the ship entered the mouth of the Mississippi River. “Mark Twain was quite popular reading for us as children,” Rautavirta says, his eyes sparkling. “When we met the river pilot, I called home, telling everyone that we were following the journey of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.”

Upon arrival in the Port of Baton Rouge it was apparent that a “new normal” would have to evolve for the Finnjet’s crew. Incidents like toasted televisions and smoking hair dryers caused by the 220 voltage were minor. Rautavirta’s focus was on his new cargo---the displaced youth. “The circumstances here are quite different than what we are used to,” Rautavirta says, studying a national weather service report called Advanced Hydrologic Prediction. “European tourists are one thing. They are paying for the trip. Our berths now are filled with students that are in need of a temporary home. It is an important consideration that we keep them safe.”
* * *
It is an hour before sunrise on a Thursday morning and the breakfast buffet is displayed under a motif of fish nets, starfish and plastic seagulls hanging from strings. A miniature Eiffel Tower is centerpiece to platters of sliced watermelon and pineapple. The serving line is an international smorgasbord: yogurt, mandarin figs, apricot halves, pepper liver pate, cream cheese, Rice Krispies, oatmeal, peanut butter, herb omelets, bacon, sausage links, biscuits and white gravy, croissants, blueberry pancakes, bowls of mixed fruit, baskets of green and red apples, assorted Danish, muffins, orange juice and coffee. The music of Nora Jones is piped in over the intercom. A laminated sign by the spiral pyramid of napkins warns: “Do Not Take Food or Silverware Outside of the Dining Area.”
* * *
After the flooding of the campus in New Orleans, there were a thousand reasons not to come to work. Pick an excuse, any excuse. Many individuals took full court advantage of the opportunity. Then there were people like Kathleen McDonough. The Associate Dean of Graduate Studies had no clue what she was going to do but four days after the destruction of an American city, McDonough walked into the LSU Systems Office on the Baton Rouge campus with her sleeves rolled up. “Mass confusion was the first thing that hit you,” she remembers. “There were six tables in the room and a bunch of computers. The phones were ringing off the hook. People were asking all sorts of questions.”
You can take McDonough out of her research but you can’t take the scientist out of McDonough. She noted that each of the seven phones was ringing at the average rate of 40 times per hour. A command phone was set up to filter and coordinate the calls. The operation took on the frenzy of a battlefield MASH unit. Calm and stability were in short demand.

Once in stride, McDonough focused on the re-construction of the graduate school and assisting employees with the online emergency contact registration process. All hands on deck. Her two daughters came in to the Systems Office (volunteers without pay) to assist in answering the phones.

The moored Baltic ferry became a sanctuary for McDonough that helped her find her calm again---almost. “I’ve noticed that I lose my temper more quickly,” McDonough offers about her behavior. “The gap of time where I normally lose my composure is getting smaller and smaller.”
* * *
Keith Washington can rub off on you and that’s a good thing. When it comes to setting an upbeat tone for the day, the 40-year-old Washington is the straw that stirs the drink. Clock work yellow. Starting at 4:00 a.m. and ending at 12 midnight, buses arrive and depart the Finnjet every ten minutes. Chances are it is going to be Washington behind the wheel.

Born at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, Washington could not sit still until he found a way to serve the evacuees that escaped to Baton Rouge. “I was glued to the television when the storm flooded the city,” Washington recalls. “Tears came to my eyes. That’s my roots. Those were my people and I knew I had to find a way to help.”

Washington was awarded the bus contract to shuttle students, faculty and staff to and from the parking lot to the Finnjet as well as hourly trips to the LSU Main Campus, Pennington Bio-Medical Research Center, Citi Place movie theater and the Dental School South Campus.

At Christmas, Washington purchased a souvenir T-shirt for each rider and called them by name. He has given the students his cell and home phone number in the event they get stranded in the city. “I fell in love with these kids,” Washington says, with a smile that could light up a Kentucky cave. “It’s going to be sad when they go back. I’ve been around the block a few times and I’ve never seen such strength. You stop and consider what they have been through and on top of all of that they are staying focused on their school work. They got my admiration.”
* * *
Every refuge has its price. For the single car family of Patrick Gorman, the issue of who would get the 2000 Chevy Prizm came down to a vote between him, his wife Melissa and two teenage daughters. The Director of Student Financial Aid lost in a landslide. Bags packed and resigned to bite the bullet, Gorman came on the boat. “I listen to other people and the commute is tense and draining,” Gorman says, pausing to examine his bowl of lentil soup at the dining table. “The traffic can be horrendous. Living on the ship makes it a relatively short bus ride to the office.”

Gorman and his staff (reduced from seven down to four after resignations and furloughs) work out of a double-wide trailer parked adjacent to the Pennington Bio-Medical Research Center. The trailer has no running water or toilets and is shared with Financial Aid, Bursar and Office of the Registrar. Each day at lunchtime, Gorman walks four miles on a walking trail to ease the stress of the cramped conditions. He is a regular on the boat-to-campus bus shuttle where he spends the 20 minute ride reading the Bible and listening to New Orleans jazz, rhythm and blues.

“This experience is like an educational commune,” Gorman says, sliding his salad plate and fork into position. “Faculty and staff dining together and living in close quarters. You see students coming to breakfast with their hair still wet. When we get back to New Orleans and land on our feet we can put on our resumes--‘Katrina hardened’.”

Gorman thrives on the boat. He brought his family in from Mandeville, Louisiana to have Thanksgiving Dinner on the Finnjet. “The pumpkin pie tasted a little strange but the staff was warm and gracious and it gave us all a sense of normalcy.”
* * *
Hurricane Katrina’s gift to Flora McCoy was a diagnosis of shingles. By the time McCoy got on the boat the accumulated stress had taken its toll. Connect the dots. McCoy (Rambo style) had driven 800 miles from Tampa, Florida to sneak through armed roadblocks to return to New Orleans before the evacuation order was lifted. She dealt with a damaged home that included fighting off a squirrel that had taken up occupancy in her attic. As Assistant Director of Human Resources, McCoy fought to keep her department intact by working wireless from the lid of a garbage can at a coffee shop. When that arrangement terminated, she positioned her laptop in the windowsill of her kitchen to hook into the neighbor’s signal.

“It was just like our parents told us about the Depression,” McCoy says about her early return. “The only way you could tell if a store was open was if there were long lines outside. Food shelves were mostly empty. Making a grocery list was a joke. You just went in and bought whatever they had.”

McCoy, who insists she cannot imagine living anywhere but New Orleans, now stays on the boat four nights a week. “At first I thought I could commute to Baton Rouge,” she says. “It didn’t take long to get over that idea.”

When McCoy first arrived on the boat, the television in her room offered one channel. There was no sound so she made up her own dialogue. A radio knob on the headrest of the bed leaked music that you could not completely turn off. “With that quality of an entertainment system, it wasn’t hard to go to sleep around 8:30,” McCoy says.

Despite the cloistered ambiance of her room, McCoy is an advocate for the boat. “It speaks volumes to what we can do if we set our minds to it,” she says. “How many other institutions could have reacted in such a quick and positive way?”

After dinner, McCoy decompresses from work by reading a novel. A bookmark protrudes from Chapter 19 of The DaVinci Code. She pulls it out. The bookmark is from the Campus Assistance Program and lists seven bullets on identifying symptoms of depression. “Somebody gave this to me today,” McCoys says holding the strip up as evidence. “Do you think they were trying to tell me something? I read the list and I got all eight of them.”
* * *
“I don’t have time for the hurricane,” Xiao-Cheng Wu explains about the morning of August 27th. “At that time, I have a class to teach. I must prepare and not think about the storm,” Wu says, unblinking. “My friends call and plead for me to go but I hang up the phone.” With her husband in Boston, attending parents’ orientation at M.I.T., Wu busied herself around the house, vacuuming and doing the laundry.

A second call from another friend made her uneasy. “Now I have some trouble concentrating so I pray,” Wu remembers. “I ask God to tell me what to do. I tell God I don’t want to go away from home. I walk around and pray to help me make the decision but God does not answer.”

The message may not have come in the form of a divine lightening bolt but Wu’s friends pulled up in the driveway and insisted she evacuate with them. Wu packed one blouse and a pair of slacks. “I keep on the same pair of shoes and take my lap-top to prepare for the class,” she says of the hasty departure.

Left behind, both of the Wu cars were totaled in the storm. With a daughter enrolled at M.I.T to the tune of $45,000 in tuition and living expenses, the Wu’s were pressed to become a single car family and move onto the boat. Sometimes it’s the little things that people miss. “For a married couple, the one car is very stressful,” Wu says, dipping her tea bag into a glass of hot scalding water. “Of course we want to have some time alone but we cannot.”

An assistant professor in the School of Public Health, Wu reports to work at the Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center every morning. Her husband (also a LSUHSC faculty member) has a temporary assignment at the Health Care Services Division Headquarters across the interstate from his wife.

“We don’t know how long the boat will be here,” Wu says, “but we are very grateful to have home even if temporary. Not to have to cook or wash dishes is more time to work.”

* * *
As a first year student in Allied Health, Kim Phuc Nguyen is determined to improve her grades---even if it means not sleeping. Wearing hospital scrubs and sitting at her favorite booth in the Ocean Club Casino Lounge, Nguyen appears to be in meditation. Tonight (Feb 12) is her birthday and messages are popping up on the chat room screen that is minimized on her computer screen. Under normal conditions, Nguyen would be out celebrating with friends but tomorrow’s exam is on Molecular Diagnostics and the 22-year-old Nguyen expects to stay up all night to prepare.

“Everyday, everybody is trying to make it on this boat,” Nguyen says, lowering the volume on her pink IPOD. “It make me feel like I have to get in and study with them. It gives me courage.”

Focused on Clinical Lab Sciences, Nguyen relates having a new respect for her instructors, “You see them night and day and you know something has happened that connects you to them. There have been a lot of changes in our lives. You learn that it is not all about you.”

When Nguyen could not find an apartment within 50 mile radius of Baton Rouge she came to the Finnjet. Nguyen was told by the information desk that she could not look at the room first and then decide. “I was warned that the room was small but when I opened the door I was shocked. It was hard to walk in. I asked myself if I really wanted to do this.”

Disruption of family routine may be contributing to Nguyen’s academic struggle. “I miss eating dinner each night with my family,” Nguyen says. “It is very traditional thing with us.”

* * *
The colder the winter, the sweeter the plum. For Associate Dean for Student Affairs Joe Delcarpio, the low point of post-Katrina events was the Chancellor’s decision to furlough his fellow faculty. “The impact was like getting hit in the face,” Delcarpio says. “It happened right before Thanksgiving break. It was a pretty sobering event to see your friends being taken off the payroll just before the holidays.”

“We already knew the city had been changed forever but when we had to furlough tenured faculty it was a galvanizing moment. You knew the institution was in emergency status. We all understood that decisions had to be made. It was not a time for forming a bunch of committees.”

As a Professor of Cell Biology and Anatomy, Delcarpio has taught Nursing, Dental, Allied Health and Medical students over the years. Since living on the boat, the blinders have come off as far as his total range of vision. “The boat takes away the barriers,” Delcarpio says. “You discover there is so much resilience in these kids. We started with 186 freshman medical students. So far we have lost one to illness, one an older student that lost his home and his wife lost her job. A third student came in and resigned. Under the worst conditions on the face of the earth we have only lost three students in the freshman medical class. Unbelievable.”
* * *
When Elizabeth Fontham registered for occupancy on the Finnjet many of her peers in administration were surprised. They didn’t have a clue.
Scattered like a leaf blown in the wind, the Dean of the School of Public Health had sought shelter in three different locations in the weeks following Hurricane Katrina. Carrying her belongings around like a migrant worker, Fontham was in and out of the Faculty Club on the LSU Baton Rouge campus. She lived with her daughter in Lafayette, Louisiana and alternate weekends with her sister and ailing mother in Crowley. Fontham’s transient existence reached the breaking point when she could not recall any of the zip codes. “I welcomed the boat with open arms,” Fontham says. “It was a Godsend. Working 12 hours a day and then sitting in traffic for three hours was killing me. There were times when my car was running on fumes.”

Because of her rank, Fontham drew a riverside cabin on the 9th deck. Savoring a cup of coffee (two creams) Fontham is the happiest of campers. “Life on the river is reduced to bare essentials,” Fontham says. “As strange as it sounds, I like my room. It’s nice to return to a place that is mine even if it is temporary. I put the window shades up and watch the barges in the evening and the sunrise in the morning.”
* * *
Catch me if you can. Christened in Katajanoka, Finland on April 28, 1977, the GTS Finnjet was billed as the fastest ferry in the world. Nine stories tall and over 700 feet in length, the ferry can reach speeds of 33 knots (about 61 km/h). The more observant passengers see irony in the fact that the boat has moved once (200 yards upstream) in the past four months. Pushed by two harbor tugs, the Finnjet changed berths to accommodate a freighter loaded with sheetrock.
There are ghosts on board. For 30 years the FinnJet has been transporting tourists (not always sober) from Helsinki to ports in Russia, Estonia and Germany. The inner sanctum of the hull can accommodate 400 cars. In 1978 the ferry hosted the Miss Europe Pageant and competition. 1982 saw the millionth passenger come on board. On July 7, 2002 a waitress disappeared from the ship sometime after midnight.

Latvia meets Las Vegas. The nightclubs, lounges and entertainment bars on the FinnJet with names like Ocean Club, Commodore Lounge, Club Stardust have been transformed to study halls where students spread out their piles of paper and colored pens on the dance floors and casino stage.

Languages can be assimilated just by using the elevator. The words engraved in stainless steel (Hissi, Hiss, Aufzug) tell passengers they are going up. A crate labeled “Helicopter Net” bolted to the stern makes a perfect card table for gin rummy on a Sunday afternoon. Each of the 11 life boats hoisted in metal racks weighs in at 3.5 metric tons. At the Information Desk you can check out hair dryers or an iron. For $5 American currency, your laundry can be washed and folded.
* * *
Pride and prejudice. Cheng Sshan Jiang feels there is a dangerous undertow to his personal and professional life in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. A Research Associate in Biochemistry for 15 years, Jiang returned to his apartment in uptown New Orleans to find everything piled out on the street. His prized master’s degree from Fudan University in Shanghai went out with the garbage. “When we come back,” Jiang explains, “already a month passed. The landlord pushes everything out. I am a very long resident there and never fail to pay the rent.”

Jiang looks for the best in human nature but doubts are creeping in. Delayed repairs, raising rents as leases expire are a common theme in New Orleans for people in Jiang’s position. He sees trouble on the horizon. “The salary for a research associate is low and I worry about the rent going high,” Jiang points out. “This is a very serious matter. Where are we going to live? My car is 1994 and will be difficult to drive long distance. We will need money to buy furniture. Maybe someone is considering what will happen to us.”

The 59-year-old, who has brought his wife with him on the boat, is proud of being called back to work. “The first thing I make contact with the university,” he emphasizes. “I know this part is essential and is my responsibility. I need my job. I am a hard worker and good at publications.”

Before dinner each evening Jiang takes 15 minutes of exercise, walking around the 7th deck. “I heard that there is a gym, a swimming pool and a sauna on the boat,” Jiang says with a furrowed brow. “I wonder why these kinds of facilities on the boat but we cannot use it. It would tremendously reduce our stress.”
* * *
Information Technology Analyst Greg Prusiewicz is the boat’s resident expert on curfews. He has missed two of them. Monday Night Football and four Abita Amber draft beers was the culprit on both occasions. When Prusiewicz looked up, the witching hour of the boat had past. “If you don’t make midnight curfew, you got two options,” Prusiewicz says, staring at the bar graphs on his laptop. “You sleep in your car or go to Waffle House.”

Prusiewicz is the only staff member that both lives and works on the boat. His job description is to keep tabs on the computer networks, monitor and manage wireless performance in different locations on the boat. Leaning up against the wall behind him is a styro-foam sign that says “LSU Computer Support.”
Providing technical assistance and trouble-shooting are his nightly chores.
The 23-year-old’s world revolves around power source converter boxes, VPN connections and e-mail viruses. His office is a circular couch, well positioned to view the ladies. “I’ll be here. I’m not going anywhere,” Prusiewicz says to a girl with a pony-tail that has raced back to her room to get her charger cord. “I’ve got the best seat in the house.”
* * *
Living in a hotel in Shreveport, Louisiana and constantly engaged with LSU payroll processing, it was early October before Valencia Stimage had the time and courage to return to her home in New Orleans East. There were three dead fish on the brittle leather seats of her pick-up truck and water in the glove compartment. “Where we lived looked like a ghost town. All you would have needed for special effects would have been some wind and tumbleweed,” Stimage remembers. “Mold was everywhere. My mother’s sermons, bills and recipes were pasted to the floor and there were flies and gnats thick around the refrigerator and freezer.”

One of the unknown soldiers of LSU Health Sciences Center’s recovery, the Assistant Director of Payroll evacuated not to save herself but to establish an off-site presence and run “vanilla” processes to insure over 5,800 employees got paid on time. Hours were brutal. Four trips a day to local bank branches, she assisted employees in getting their checks deposited into their accounts. “We had a job to do and we did it,” Stimage remarks without lagniappe. “Payroll is used to working under pressure. Sometimes our mistakes show up more than our accomplishments.”

Being stranded in Shreveport for five months was a wild ride. She worked 14 hours on Labor Day. Thanksgiving flipped over on the calendar like it was just another Thursday. She swallowed lunch (Nachos Bell Grande from Taco Bell) everyday while sitting in front of the computer and answering phone calls from employees scattered across the United States from Atlanta to San Francisco. In one stretch Stimage pulled 35 straight days before taking a Sunday afternoon off to attend church services.

Stimage came on the Finnjet during the Christmas holidays when there was a break in payroll processing. Facing deadlines, Stimage often works from the boat at night. She says that meals on the ship were fine in the beginning. “Now everything is beginning to taste the same,” she says, arranging a stack of time-sheets on the dining table. “If the main seasoning is not curry then its ginger. What happened to just plain old soul food?”

Keeping a brave face has been a challenge for Stimage, who maintains a cheap hotel room on the weekends just to get away from people asking questions about work and to slowly transition back to a shorter commute when facilities re-open in New Orleans. Returning to live at her 70127 zip code is not an option. “In a way, I’m still in denial about our home,” she says. “I keep occupied all the time so I haven’t stopped to cry. One thing for sure, we can’t go through this again. I’m not convinced the levees are fixed.”
* * *
Professor of Physiology Barry Potter has seen worse things than Hurricane Katrina. Near the end of World War II, German V-2 rockets were pounding London to rubble. For families living in the city, evacuation and dislocation became a way of life. Finding shelter and rationing was the norm. Potter’s parents were no exception. They foraged for food, picked blackberries from the outskirts of the forest. Potatoes, never in short supply, were boiled, mashed and baked in every possible way. “This is nothing,” Potter says, waving his hand as if to encompass the entire boat. “I remember my uncle going out to shoot rabbits so we could eat. There was a lot of muttering and spitting out buckshot at the dinner table.”

Potter’s childhood transitioned into the life of a gypsy, moving from town to town, living with one aunt and then another. “Relatives seemed to stay with us an awful long time and I never quite understood why,” says Potter, who played castle games on bomb sites.

Like clockwork, the 60-year-old Potter is one of the first disembark the boat each morning. His first class (Patho-Physiology to Nursing Students) is held at a United Artists movie theater in Baton Rouge. In describing the teaching conditions, Potter comes across as being happy as a flea at the Westminster Dog and Kennel Show. “The slides for lecture are projected on a screen that is 80 feet across,” he exclaims with admiration. “The acoustics are awesome. If there is a problem it is that the seats recline and the lighting is subdued. At half past seven in the morning, it can be a challenge for some of the kids to stay awake. Class is revitalized at about ten-thirty when they start popping popcorn in the lobby. You can smell the butter.”

Potter (his father’s name was Harry) views the boat in the perspective of his academic discipline. “Physiology is about how things work. How people work,” he instructs. “We start with a simple cell and work up to the whole system. The boat is a little bit like a transplanted organ. The ship is a transplant and we are not sure if it would be accepted or rejected. The faculty and students are like transplants and we are not sure if the boat will accept or reject us. The officers and staff on the boat are trying hard to adapt to our culture as we are forced to adapt to theirs. Tensions are created.”

Two students stop at Potter’s favorite night station in a corner of the Commodore Lounge. They beg for mercy in understanding a chapter on Signal Transaction Pathways. They get the unexpected. Potter distills the highlighted pages down to a simple description of the gastro-intestinal tract. “If it is moving too fast it is diarrhea,” he points out. “If it is moving too slow it is constipation.” Everyone has a chuckle before they get down to a more complex analysis.

“Teaching is an acting job,” Potter offers. “Basically anyone can present material but in order to get through in a meaningful way you have to change something. It boils down to more than just passion. You’ve got to care. That’s what the whole profession is about. All the technology in the world will not save the patient if you don’t care.
* * *
By the time Joe Moerschbaecher gets to the “Sun Deck” it is has been dark for over five hours. It’s been a long day. Awash in a tsunami of research demands, animal care issues, priorities on facility occupancy and the North American record of 700 e-mails in one day, the Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs’ face exhibits what (in Vietnam) was called the “the thousand yard stare.” Setting his plastic cup of Scotch on top of a metal container labeled Pelastusliivit Livvastar Schwimmwesten (Finnish for “life jacket”) Moerschbaecher lights up his favorite Macanudo cigar. “Adequate provisions,” Moerschbaecher laughs. “Sailing teaches you never to leave port without adequate provisions.”

A man that has found the balance between art and science, Moerschbaecher is hosting a humorous discussion with faculty friends. Like a crab escaped from a trap---the jokes, local news, gossip, information and anecdotes jump back and forth from topic to topic. Moerschbaecher guides the banter with tales of enraged baboons, the mating habits of lobsters, his Mardi Gras membership in the Half Fast Marching Club and the Rules of Engagement as they pertain to ocean going vessels. He points out a harbor tugboat that is churning upriver. “Knowing the passing lanes and direction is important at night,” he says, inviting the group to the rail. “Red light is for port side; green for starboard.”

Realizing they are with a man that has bumped into his fair share of piers, the select group of professors presses for more navigational answers. The terms “stern” and “bow” become fixed in everyone’s vocabulary. But the difference between “flotsam” and “jetsam” gets muddled in the slur of emptied glasses of Scotch and tabled for further research.

Don’t be fooled. There is a serious side to this academic renegade.

Moerschbaecher begins a winding path of discussion about universities in Spain and Italy in the Middle Ages and how it illuminates the experience on the boat. “Nobody in the country knows this is going on,” he says, extinguishing his cigar into the required canister. “Instead of dispersing in different directions at the end of the day, we have this incredible community where you see faculty members spending two hours with a student after dinner. It speaks to what universities were all about when they were first founded. They were essentially a community of scholars. We have come back to that on the boat. What was unheard of five months ago has become routine.”

Moerschbaecher is concerned about life after the boat. He predicts going back to New Orleans will be more difficult than the sudden jolt of departure. “The bridges to our old environment have been burned,” he says. “We are going to be smaller but better. If we have been paying any attention, these new relationships and patterns of behavior on the boat will be valuable lessons.”

A version of this article was published in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Sunday, April 23, 2006

One of the nation's greatestest Christians, William Sloan Coffin, died a week ago and the eulogies have been coming, one by one, from the great people whose lives he touched. We're thankful for the blogs of conscience -- CommonDreams, Truthout, Counterpunch, and others -- for making them so easily and generally available.

Even in death Coffin reminds us, through these eulogies, of real Christian spirit, which is no fantasy of purity. They have the effect of urging us to remember William Sloan Coffin and go forth. Coffin's favorite prophet, several eulogists remark, was Amos. A number of Mercedians have heard Rev. Robert Ryland speak on the subject of Amos, whom he calls the "farmworker prophet." I don't remember Coffin having as large a presence in the West as he did in the East and the South, but everything he said was suffused with the spirit of "Si, se puede!" the farmworkers' battle cry for justice.

What I remembered most clearly about Coffin during the 1960's was that his very name would change the tone of any conversation on a university campus. He spoke for your own conscience. He defended your conscience against the empire of lies about you. He had a reference book you could find in any motel room in America.

My favorite eulogy to William Sloan Coffin so far is the following remarks by Bill Moyers at the funeral at Coffin's church, Riverside Memorial Church in New York City.

Bill Hatch
---------------

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0421-20.htm
Published on Friday, April 21, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
Remembering Bill Coffin
by Bill Moyers

The following remarks were delivered by Bill Moyers at the funeral service for William Sloan Coffin on Thursday, April 20, at Riverside Memorial Church in New York City.

There are so many of you out there who should be up here instead of me. You rode with Bill through the Deep South chasing Jim Crow from long impregnable barriers imposed on freedom.

You rose with Bill against the Vietnam War, were arrested with him, shared jail with him, and at night in your cells joined in singing the Hallelujah Chorus with him You rallied with him against the horrors of nuclear weapons. You sang with him, laughed with him, drank with him, prayed with him, grieved with him, worshipped and wept with him. Even at this moment when your hearts are breaking at the loss of him, you must be comforted by the balm of those memories. I envy your life-long membership in his beloved community, and I am honored that Randy, his wife, asked me to speak today about the Bill Coffin I knew.

I saw little of him personally until late in his life. We met once in the early 60s when he was an adviser to the Peace Corps which I had helped to organize and run. He spoke to the staff, inspired us to think of what we were doing as the moral equivalent of war, and told us the story of how as a young captain in the infantry following military orders at the end of World War II. he had been charged with sending back to the Soviet Union thousands of Russian refugees made prisoners by the Germans. Some of them he had deceived into boarding trains that carried them home to sure death at the hands of Stalin. That burden of guilt sat heavily on Bill’s heart for the rest of his life. He wrote about it in his autobiography, and raised it forty years later when we met in the waiting room of the television studio where I was about to interview him. That’s the moment we bonded, two old men by now, sharing our grief that both in different ways had once confused duty with loyalty, and confessing to each other our gratitude that we had lived long enough to atone -- somewhat.

“Well,” said Bill, “we needed a lot of time. We had a lot to atone for.”

I had called him for the interview after learning the doctors had told him his time was now running out. When he came down from Vermont to the studio here in New York, I qreeted him with the question, “How you doing?” . He threw back his head, his eyes flashed, and with that slurred (from a stroke) but still vibrant voice, he answered: “Well, I am praying the prayer of St. Augustine: Give me chastity and self-restraint….but not yet.”

He taught me more about being a Christian than I learned at seminary. His witness taught me – he preached what he practiced. But his writings taught me, too –Once to Every Man, Living the Truth in a World of Illusion, The Heart is a Little to the Left, Credo, Letters to a Young Doubter, and of course that unforgettable eulogy to his drowned son, Alex, when he called on us to “improve the quality of our suffering.”

During my interview with him on PBS I asked him how he had summoned the strength for so powerful a message of suffering and love. He said, “Well, we all do what we know how to do. I went right away to the piano. And I played all the hymns. And I wept and I wept, and I read the poems, like A.E. Houseman – ‘To an Athlete Dying Young.’ Then I realized the folks in Riverside Church had to know whether or not they still had a pastor. So I wrote the sermon. I wanted them to know.”

They knew, Bill, they knew. This will surprise some of you: Not too long ago Bill told Terry Gross that he would rather not be known as a social activist. The happiest moments of my life, he said, were less in social activism than in the intimate settings of the pastor’s calling – “the moments when you’re doing marriage counseling…or baptizing a baby…or accompanying people who have suffered loss – the moments when people tend to be most human – when they are most vulnerable.”

So he had the pastor’s heart but he he heeded the prophet’s calling. There burned in his soul a sacred rage – that volatile mix of grief and anger and love that produced what his friend, the artist and writer Robert Shetterly, described as “a holy flame.” During my interview with him he said, “When you see uncaring people in high places, everybody should be mad as hell.”

If you lessen your anger at the structures of power, he said, you lower your love for the victims of power. I once heard Lyndon Johnson urge Martin Luther King to hold off on his marching in the south to give the President time to neutralize the old guard in Congress and create a consensus for finally ending institutionalized racism in America. Martin Luther King listened, and then he answered (I paraphrase): Mr. President, the gods of the South will never be appeased. They will never have a change of heart. They will never repent of their sins and come to the altar seeking forgiveness. The time has passed for consensus, the time has come to break the grip of history and change the course of America.” When the discussion was over Dr. King had carried the day. The President of the United States put a long arm on his shoulder and said, “Martin, you go on out there now and make it possible for me to do the right thing.” Lyndon Johnson had seen the light: For him to do the right thing someone had to subpoena the conscience of America and send it marching from the ground up against the citadels of power and privilege.

Like Martin Luther King, Bill Coffin also knew the heart of power is hard; knew it arranged the rules for its own advantage, knew that before justice could roll down like water and righteousness like a flowing river, the dam of oppression, deception and corruption had first to be broken, cracked open by the moral power of people aroused to demand that the right thing be done.

“In times of oppression,” he said, “if you don’t translate choices of faith into political choices, you run the danger of washing your hands, like Pilate.”

So he aimed his indignation at root causes.

“Many of us are eager to respond to injustice,” he said, “without having to confront the causes of it…and that’s why so many business and governmental leaders today are promoting charity. It is desperately needed in an economy whose prosperity is based on growing inequality. First these leaders proclaim themselves experts on matters economic, and prove it by taking the most out of the economy. Then they promote charity as if it were the work of the church, finally telling troubled clergy to shut up and bless the economy as once we blessed the battleship.”

When he came down from Vermont two years ago for that final interview, we talked about how democracy had reached a fork in the road – what Tony Kushner calls one of those moments in history when the fabric of everyday life unravels and there is this unstable dynamism that allows for incredible change in short period of time – when people and the world they are living in can be utterly transformed for good or bad.

Take one fork and the road leads to an America where military power serves empire rather than freedom; where we lose from within what we are trying to defend from without; where fundamentalism and the state scheme to write the rules and regulations; where true believers in the gods of the market turn the law of the jungle into the law of the land; where in the name of patriotism we keep our hand over our heart pledging allegiance to the flag while our leaders pick our pockets and plunder our trust; where elites insulate themselves from the consequences of their own actions; where ”the strong take what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

Take the other fork and the road leads to the America whose promise is “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for all Bill Coffin spent his life pointing us down that road. in that direction. There is nothing utopian about it, Bill said; he was an idealist but he was not an ideologue. He said in our interview that we have to keep pressing the socialist questions because they are the questions of justice, but we must be dubious about the socialist answers because while Amos may call for justice to roll down as waters, figuring out the irrigation system is damned hard!

He believed in democracy. There is no simpler way to put it. He believed democracy was the only way to assure that the rewards of a free society would be shared with everyone, and not just elites at the top. That last time we talked he told me how much he had liked the story he had heard Joseph Campbell tell me in our series on “The Power of Myth” – the story of the fellow who turns the corner and sees a brawl in the middle of the block. He runs right for it, shouting: “Is this a private fight, or can anyone get in it?”

Bill saw democracy as everyone’s fight. He’d be in the middle of the fork in the road right now, his coat off, his sleeves rolled up, his hand raised – pointing us to the action. And his message would be the same today as then: Sign up, jump in, fight on.”

Someone sidled up to me the other night at another gathering where Bill’s death was discussed. This person said, “He was no saint, you know.” I wanted to answer: “You’re kidding?” We knew, alright. Saints flourish in a mythic world. Bill Coffin flourished here, in the cracked common clay of an earthly and earthy life. He liked it here. Even as he was trying to cooperate gracefully with the inevitability of death, he was also coaching Paul Newman to play the preacher in the film version of Marilynn Robinson’s novel Gilead. He enjoyed nothing more than wine and song at his home with Randy and friends. And he never lost his conviction that a better world is possible if we fight hard enough. At a dinner in his honor in Washington he had reminded us that “the world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.” But as we left he winked at me and said, “Give’em hell.”

Faith, he once said, “is being seized by love.” Seized he was, in everlasting arms.

“You know,” he told me in that interview, “I lost a son. And people will say, ‘Well, when you die, Bill, Alex will come forth and bring you through the pearly gates.’ Well, that’s a nice thought, and I welcome it. But I don’t need to believe that. All I need to know is, God will be there. And our lives go from God, in God, to God again. Hallelujah, you know? That should be enough.”

Well, he’s there now. But we are still here. I hear his voice in my heart: “Don’t tarry long in mourning. Organize.”
----------------
http://en.thinkexist.com/quotes/william_sloan_coffin/
Coffin quotes:

“Hope arouses, as nothing else can arouse, a passion for the possible.”

“The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.”

“The cause of violence is not ignorance. It is self-interest. Only reverance can restrain violence - reverance for human life and the environment.”

“It's too bad that one has to conceive of sports as being the only arena where risks are, [for] all of life is risk exercise. That's the only way to live more freely, and more interestingly.”

“I'm not OK., you're not OK., and that's OK.!”
------------------

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0416-26.htm
Published on Sunday, April 16, 2006 by The Nation
In Pursuit of Justice, In Search of Peace
by John Nichols

The Nazarene whose resurrection is celebrated Sunday preached a gospel of justice and peace. His sincere followers recognize him as a man of action, who chased the money changers from the temple. But they recall, as well, that he rejected the violence of emperors and their militaries and he abhorred harm done to innocents.

Some years ago, in an effort to promote moral values, Christians of a particular persuasion began wearing wristbands imprinted with "WWJD?" -- the acronym for the question, "What Would Jesus Do?"

After George W. Bush -- who once identified the prophet as his favorite philosopher -- initiated a preemptive attack on Iraq, killing tens of thousands of civilians, critics of the president and his war offered a variation on wristband slogan. They printed bumper stickers that asked: "Who Would Jesus Bomb?"

The absurdity of the notion that the Nazarene would sympathize in any way with the violent invasion and occupation of Iraq was not lost on one of the greatest Christian spokesmen of our time, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin. The longtime chaplain of Yale University and pastor of New York City's Riverside Church, who marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the early days of the civil rights movement and came to national prominence as one of the most outspoken moral critics of the war in Vietnam, died last week at the age of 81.

Active to the end, Coffin explained in one of his last interviews that, "There are two major biblical imperatives: pursue justice and seek peace." Honoring those imperatives, he campaigned consistently and loudly – even as his own health failed -- for the quick withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq ...

---------------
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0415-20.htm
Published on Saturday, April 15, 2006 by the Boston Globe
The Legacy of William Sloane Coffin
by Scotty McLennan

There was a great biblical prophet holding forth on campus, it seemed, when I arrived at Yale in 1966. The Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr., who died this week, was a giant of a man -- physically, intellectually, and spiritually. It was impossible not to notice him and be affected by him.

I took a life-changing ''Seminar for Friendly Disbelievers" with him in my freshman year, learned about deep religious confrontation with racism and war in my sophomore and junior years, and by senior year was a student deacon of Battell Chapel at Yale and on my way to divinity school. ''Justice, not charity," was one of Coffin's constant refrains, which I now try to teach to a community service-oriented college generation that often seems politically unaware and inactive.

Coffin's contention was: ''Many of us are eager to respond to injustice, as long as we can do so without having to confront the causes of it. There's the great pitfall of charity. Handouts to needy individuals are genuine, necessary responses to injustice, but they do not necessarily face the reason for injustice. And that is why so many business and governmental leaders today are promoting charity; it is desperately needed in an economy whose prosperity is based on growing inequality. First these leaders proclaim themselves experts on matters economic, and prove it by taking the most out of the economy! Then they promote charity as if it were the work of the church, finally telling us troubled clergy to shut up and bless the economy as once we blessed the battleships" ...
-----------

http://www.counterpunch.org/nader04152006.html
Weekend Edition
April 15 / 16, 2006

"With Him, We Were Changed Forever"

Remembering Rev. William Sloane Coffin

By RALPH NADER

One of his Yale students, famed cartoonist Garry Trudeau, said of Yale University Chaplain, Williams Sloane Coffin, during those heady years in the Sixties; "Without him, the very air would have lost its charge. With him, we were changed forever."

Who was this former Army Captain, ex-C.I.A. agent, talented musician, linguist and motorcycle rider? How did he become one of the most influential clergymen of his time by focusing public attention on the essential moral questions so often avoided in times of war, strife over civil rights and the perilous nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union? Most clergy do not roam so far from their Church.

When challenged to stick with his ministerial duties, this great speaker of sweeping vision and public virtue replied:

Every minister is given two roles: the priestly and the prophetic. The prophetic role is the disturber of the peace, to bring the minister himself, the congregation and entire social order under some judgment. If one plays a prophetic role, it's going to mitigate against his priestly role. There are going to be those who will hate him.

And with that definition, the Rev. Coffin became the outspoken activist and doer of nonviolent civil disobedience directly from the principles of his Christian faith. He wrote, spoke, organized, marched, protested, was arrested, jailed and prosecuted. He inspired the struggles against the Vietnam war, Jim Crow laws, the military draft, poverty here and abroad, and the planet-threatening atomic arms race. He did all this with an historical frame of reference, biblical wisdom, and humor which was almost always witty and informative...

Americans too young to remember the Vietnam War or those who have an iron-clad case of amnesia do not know how bad a really rotten war can get on the home front of the invader, passing over the millions of the invaded such wars kill. You are only beginning to get a taste of it. An immeasurable aid to national complacency about the Iraq Disaster is that it is being fought be other peoples’ children, almost exclusively from the nation’s less fashionable, less politically influential neighborhoods. But, eventually, the taste of this Iraq Disaster will be like rancid pork in your mouths.

Pete McCloskey, Republican, and Jerome Waldie, Democrat, were two Bay Area congressmen who were morally present for Vietnam and they didn’t blink. McCloskey fought his party’s leadership and Waldie fought his. Both demonstrated admirably that the only political course in the face of ruinous policy is determined, fierce resistance. Any other course rots your soul.

Both took their licks and kept on ticking. They had what you’d call “ethics.” Ethics were no more politically popular then and they are now. Hacks of both parties hated them, but they spoke the simple truth and eventually everything they said was proved to be very accurate. In matters like unjust wars, morality and courage are required to get at the truth, which is always buried below mountains of the best flak the rotten regime can buy.

These two congressmen cut through to the truth of things. It would have been good to have had Waldie in the 18th congressional district, running against the rear end of the Pomboza while McCloskey takes on the front end in the 11th. Perhaps we could write him in at the June primary. It’s a little more to the point than Mickey Mouse.

McCloskey and Waldie were adults way back then. Now they have that rarest quality, some wisdom and the guts to share it in this blind moment. Reading and listening to them is a constant reminder that covering politics today is like recording the minutes of a third graders' liars club.

Bill Hatch
---------------------

Contra Costa Times
Posted on Fri, Apr. 21, 2006

JEROME WALDIE

Tough old war hero seeks to clean up mess

HE IS 78 years old, a tough as nails former Marine and Korean War hero and a legendary, maverick former Republican congressman who has "had it up to here" as he so delicately puts it, with the present Republican leadership as exemplified by Tom Delay and Central Valley Republican Congressman Richard Pombo

.Pete McCloskey is, in some circles, which includes me, a national hero. He was awarded the Navy Cross, the Silver Star and two Purple Hearts for heroism in combat in Korea where he served as a Marine Rifle Platoon Leader. That is a lot of heroism.

He began an outstanding congressional career in a campaign that was of national interest. Though a decided underdog, the young war hero defeated the favorite candidate in that Republican Primary, former child movie star, Shirley Temple. That campaign brought McCloskey to national prominence.

His service in congress added luster to the reputation his military heroism in Korea and his successful campaign against Temple had begun. McCloskey was known in Congress as a highly intelligent, fiercely outspoken, hard-driving, Republican. He was held in high esteem on both sides of the partisan aisle.

I had arrived in Congress as a Democrat a few months before Republican McCloskey and was instantly attracted to his demonstrated integrity and maverick political positions. When he believed that his party leadership was in error, he courageously said so on the floor of Congress much to the chagrin of the embarrassed leadership.

My personal admiration for McCloskey was enhanced when he and I made a congressional tour of Vietnam and Laos during the war. McCloskey, as a Marine combat hero, was widely known and respected by the troops we met in Vietnam. McCloskey was adamantly convinced that the Nixon team was unable to handle this increasing tragedy.

He left Congress when he unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. Senate against Pete Wilson several decades ago. Since then, he has been practicing law and farming near Rumsey. Our friendship has continued through the years. McCloskey, his lovely wife, Helen, and I, often went backpacking in the Sierra. And I have participated in the harvesting of olives at his farm, as well as handily defeating him in many games of horseshoes.

McCloskey is now close to 79 years of age and has become very critical at the lack of respect shown by the Republican majority in Congress for the Republican values he had so long cherished such as a balanced budget, ethical conduct and a commitment to protect the nation's natural resources.

And, very personally, he is angry over the failure of Pombo to adequately support wounded veterans from all of our past wars, including Iraq, and for his unwillingness to support efforts to properly equip our forces in Iraq with protective armor and body equipment.

When Pombo recently proposed to sell off some of our national parks to mining interests to reduce our national debt, McCloskey was outraged. He sought a more ethical Republican to run against Pombo, but was unsuccessful in that effort. Reluctantly, McCloskey announced that he would take on Pombo in the primary election.It is not easy for even a tough, old, gray-haired, combat Marine to endure the rigors of a congressional campaign. Pombo already has a huge campaign fund of hundreds of thousands received from corporate contributors and lobbyists such as the infamous, indicted Jack Abramoff. But, at this early stage, McCloskey seems to be doing well. Though he has refused any special interest contributions from lobbyists, hundreds of contributors are sending him small amounts from the district and from all over the nation.

Most importantly, 78-year-old McCloskey has been there and done that. He detests what is happening in Congress today consisting, unfortunately, of mostly the bad and the ugly. He has pledged that he would serve no more than four years. He clearly has no further political ambition to hold higher office. This tough, old Marine only seeks to clean up the terrible mess that now pollutes our nation's capital.

Jerome Waldie is a former Democratic congressman representing East County. Reach him at jeromew@innercite.com. The opinions in this column are those solely of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the newspaper.
------------

Notes:

4-21-06Merced Sun-StarUCM students vie for political seats...Corinne Reillyhttp://www.mercedsunstar.com/local/story/12080522p-12833519c.htmlIt's campaign season at University of California, Merced...first campus party, LEAD (Leadership, Empowerment, Achievement and Development)...second party on campus, LAID (Lyons and Duckham Advocate Improving Da school). Candidates all say they have developed strong platforms focusing on the most pressing issues...extracurricular activities and student involvement are top concerns...presidential hopefuls addressed needs for wider choices in the dining commons, more meeting space for campus clubs and better connections between students and the community. "We have pretty low student morale," said junior Mehrdad Rasolipour, the only presidential candidate living off campus. "The academics here are great and I can't say enough about the faculty. But the lack of student life on campus could be our real downfall. LEAD threw a campaign party open to all voters Thursday night

Stockton Record
Democrats help fund Pombo challenger...Hank Shaw
http://recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060421/NEWS01/604210324/1001
SACRAMENTO - Pete McCloskey may be a Republican, but you sure can't tell by looking at his benefactors. A Record analysis of the congressional candidate's campaign finances shows that McCloskey is being bankrolled largely by Bay Area Democrats and supporters of former Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry - an unusual thing for a Republican. "This whole thing with McCloskey is nothing but a Democrat drill," he said. "It's obvious he has no support in the district, and the people who are giving him money are not Republicans." Regardless of where McCloskey's cash came from, his $255,000, which includes a $50,000 loan to himself - makes him the most well-funded Republican Pombo has faced since he took office.

… but you can’t.

Yes, you’d like to believe a prominent local businessman whose opinions are almost professionally written and with great authority and the appearance of logic and reason.

But, I think it would be unwise to take a recent letter in the Merced Sun-Star, “Keep to linear plan,” (April 12) at face value.

It begins, as we often do begin our analyses in the Valley, with a mythical Golden Age of universal harmony:

Editor: The city of Merced has begun its general plan update. In the 1980s the community consensus was to only allow growth north of the city. This was known as the linear city plan.

Like most such conjured moments, the myth doesn’t hold up very well under scrutiny.
The population has grown 20% from 1980-2004 . – about half of that between 2000-2006. (www.consrv.ca.gov/DLRP/fmmp/time_series_img/merced.htm - 24k - Cached -
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/0646898.html).
Half the growth in 20 years, half in six. In other words, the planning horizon of the City of Merced in the 1980’s resembles Merced today about as much as it resembled north Modesto then.

The land on which the city was planning to expand – whether farm, ranch or wetland bog – was in county jurisdiction. While the city began some planning in the 1980’s, the county had to be sued to write its first general plan, in 1990, and has fought tooth-and-nail ever since against revisions, despite remarkable changes in the velocity of its growth, especially around the City of Merced. We don’t mention Los Banos. Generations of wide-eyed idealists who have asked questions – any questions – about the West Side, are told the Stories. The Big Story is how they will end up in their wretched investigative journalist car, at the bottom of either the California Aqueduct or the Delta-Mendota Canal, their skeletons waving ambiguously at the fish that ate their flesh away.

Those Westside Boys really lay it on. They get vivid on you, excite your imagination and such.

Nevertheless, let us give the businessman his sweet moment in the past: there was agreement about a direction for planning and people in Merced were a great deal more civil to one another than they are today. That’s a good enough Golden Age for me. Actually, they were a great deal more civil eight years ago than they are today. But, then, 10-percent growth in six years will irritate a lot of people, while enriching remarkably few.

With the advent of the University of California campus it (the city’s general plan) was amended to include just that land east of Lake Road, but north of Yosemite Avenue.

Perhaps, as the county found, trying to “amend” the University of California into a general plan made in and for Merced city and county is like a garter snake trying to swallow a Holstein on growth hormones. The city later broke its own ordinance about not providing sewer and water services outside its corporate limits to UC Merced. When sued, its defense boiled down to, “We’ve done it before, we can do it again, it’s UC.” Both superior and state appellate courts bought this reasoning, which amounting to the garter snake saying, “I’ve got the hoof, now I’m going for the knee.”

Apparently, the current City Council has completely abandoned the linear city plan without any public debate. The study area they designated encompasses 40,000 acres of farmland, which does not even consider developing to the north of Merced.

The reason for the linear city is to allow development on the least productive ground, which in Merced's cases lies north of town. Most cities grow in all directions like an expanding balloon. By directing growth in a responsible way, we avoid eroding the agricultural industry, which is our economic base.

Yessir, you’re undoubtedly correct on that. The shortest way between two points for a 7-member city council, four of whom are realtors, is straight out in all directions at once. But at least some of that prime farmland you are talking about is on the city-side of the Campus Parkway, anchored at the academic end by UC Merced, anchored at the financial end by Wal-Mart’s proposed distribution center, which the same council shows no political inclination to reject. Merced air quality! Love it or leave it (if you can). If you can’t, well, you really don’t amount to much, do you.

Going north of town there are eventually vernal pools. Unfortunately an unbalanced importance has been placed on protecting them. There are 1.7 million acres full of them in California so by definition, how threatened can they be? There are 30,000 acres of easements protecting them adjacent to UC Merced, which should be enough mitigation to allow development north of town.

Now, we’re getting into it. It reminds me of interviews I used to have to do of deeply ideologically twisted public officials for their local newspapers. You could get a few minutes of fairly rational conversation out of a congressman like John Doolittle or a state Senator like Dick Monteith before it was “message time,” whereupon, with nary a blink of eye, off they went into a never-never land that could make a person feel guilty for trying to think at all.

In this instance, our code words are brought to us care of the Ol’ Shrimp Slayer himself, Rep. Dennis Cardoza. In Merced political discourse, whenever that word “balance” or its negative appears, the Slayer is nigh. Then, here comes that 1.7 million acres full of vernal pools.

Folks, guys that make a living in propaganda make a good living off figures like that. However, that old reality, like the pool-table team of Old Age and Treachery against Youth and Beauty (the bull rider and his bar tenderness), is gonna beat you in 8-ball and political history, pal.

As a result of a lawsuit brought against the US Fish & Wildlife Service by the Butte Environmental Center, Defenders of Wildlife and other groups, the Service declared a critical habitat designation of 1.4 million acres in California and southern Oregon for 15 endangered and threatened species residing in vernal pools.

The Pomboza, with whom we feel our local businessman communes, was outraged because you just can’t have the federal resource agencies poking their noses into development on rangeland containing vernal pools, particularly in eastern Merced, Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties.

The Pomboza, for readers new to Badlands, is a one-headed beast with four outstretched, cash-grasping claws, whose domain runs contiguously from Merced County west and north through Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties to San Benito and parts of Santa Clara and Alameda counties.

It is a proud and pompous Pomboza, at once rubbing elbows and shaking down the special interests in its districts (the 11th and 18th congressional districts of California). Although mythical figures – Pombo the Buffalo Slayer (for potting a grazing buffalo in South Dakota while attending a casino shakedown to fund Democrat Tom Dacshle’s opponent), and Cardoza the Shrimp Slayer (who vows eternal vigilance for private property rights against creatures most of which don’t live more than two months a year or go more than an inch long) – they came in on the stinking wind of special interests that brings subdivisions to farmland, not harmony, not soil fertility or economic stability.

As for the famous 30,000 acres protected by easement in Merced County, 148,000 (down from 194,000 acres) are presently under the jurisdiction of the federal critical habitat designation of the Endangered Species Act. But this was no gift from the government.

When Merced received its designation of 194,000, all hell broke loose and political pressure was applied to the Fish & Wildlife Service. The Shrimp Slayer, successor to Condit (Gary, wannabe first president from Ceres), rallied eastern Merced County landowners, with a lot of help from county Supervisor Kathleen Crookham, an eastern Merced County ranch landowner, into a real foam-mouthed moment on private property rights. This hate rally in the chambers of the county Board of Supervisors was interrupted by the critical comments of one Bryant Owens of Plainsburg, in a display of courage that is honored in the underground annals of county history.

The political pressure in Washington produced fabulous results: Merced, Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties were relieved of their burden to consult with federal resource agencies regarding the tedious subject of vernal pools if projects to wipe them out involved federal funding.

The Butte Environmental Council, Defenders of Wildlife and the California Native Plant Society, however, struck again in court. While the case lurched along, Cardoza the Shrimp Slayer, introduced two bills to strike down the critical habitat designation of the ESA. Failing twice, about the time of the ruling on the case, the Pomboza introduced the Gut-the-ESA bill, now languishing in the US Senate. One of that bill’s strongest parts is the utter destruction of the critical habitat designation for endangered and threatened wildlife species. The federal court decision restored 148,000 of the entirely lost 194,000 acres of vernal pools in Merced County that require federal resource agency oversight if federal funds are involved in projects to develop it. At least that is apparently what the designation and the ruling imply for the regulatory agencies, which would probably function more efficiently without a rightwing radical one-party House of Representatives harassing them constantly.

By not developing onto the foothills and off of the Valley floor, precious farmland will
continue to be paved over until there isn't enough left for packing sheds and processors to
stay in business. We need to be able to feed our own people. Depending on other countries for our food is suicide. Being at the mercy of the Middle East for our oil is bearable; going without food is impossible.

Lord, I love a pitch for agriculture in the spring around Easter, when rains and mists still bathe the fecund soil. But I have this strange, perverse tic in my mind: the rains and mists I see are extending the season of the dry pasture land on both edges of the Valley. I see all those calves and their mamas out there in that high, rich grass, and I wonder what the hell a cattleman has to do to qualify as an agriculturalist in this Valley. Presumably, the prominent local businessman is concerned primarily with vegetarians who take dairy products and has momentarily forgotten beefeaters. Ah, Swami Businessman, such purity! You are a credit to the Ashram of the Invisible Hand.

By not developing onto the foothills and off of the Valley floor, precious farmland will
continue to be paved over until there isn't enough left for packing sheds and processors to
stay in business. We need to be able to feed our own people. Depending on other countries for our food is suicide. Being at the mercy of the Middle East for our oil is bearable; going without food is impossible.

Also, California has the safest food in the world because it is the most regulated. With the
world's population growing exponentially, taking the best farmland out of production is
irresponsible.

It makes better business sense to retain our market share in the state's number one industry than to keep eroding it. The San Joaquin Valley's farmland should be preserved because it is the main source for the world's food supply; it should not be used simply for cheap housing.

As a great swami of the invisible hand of the free, free, free market, you give us beautifully consistent mythology, for which we, the bewildered, should be eternally grateful.

Ah, precious farmland! Yes! I believe! I see The Way!

But,Swami, I have doubts. May I discuss them?

(Hearing no answer, I will express them.)

We are so at the mercy from the Middle East for our oil, I don’t know how it can possibly end. Could we, with Israeli help, do unto Arabs as we did unto Native Americans and they are experimenting with doing unto the Palestinians, and call it something else but genocide? We are rich in propaganda resources. We can surely find new language to describe what it is we are doing to the ragheads and camel jockeys. Surely we can find a story so powerful, so good, that it will forever obliterate our conscience about, well, all those dead people over there, lying “on top of a pool of oil,” as a Catholic priest from Baghdad said just before the invasion, on pretenses that, frankly, Swami my Swami, look thinner by the day).

But, Swami, I have doubts. I used to live on an Indian reservation. They weren’t all dead. If you don’t kill every one of them, they keep talking, you see.

Also, California has the safest food in the world because it is the most regulated.

Now, Swami, I know that as your humble student of reality that you just throw that out for me to object to and that -- even if you don’t show it in your cruel, Swami way -- you will be proud of your humble student for his doubts.

The Shrimp Slayer just got finished voting for the National Uniformity for Food Act of 2005. From a people’s point of view, this thing was a real meadow muffin, brought to us by a combination of special interests irresistible (at least to the Shrimp Slayer) including the biotechnology industry, the pesticide industry, your public research universities and agribusiness, to wipe out local and states’ rights on food labeling.

It’s what you call a “pro-active special interest” bill (lots of money to be made on it by an enterprising young shrimp slayer).

But our Shrimp Slayer, the One and Only, distinguished himself even further as a moderate, “balanced” proponent of the measure. He introduced an amendment, the Shrimp Slayer’s amendment to the National Uniformity of Food Act of 2005.

Beginning with the humility that is his calling card, the Slayer said on the floor of the House:

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume to offer my amendment to H.R. 4167, the National Uniformity for Food Act.

The vagueness of the time element was to be the key to the amendment. Ostensibly, an amendment that would allow states to petition to the Federal Drug Administration sooner than the bill’s leisurely time frame of four months, if a food danger were immanent, our Slayer suggested language that would allow states to petition the FDA to approve a national standard for new food labeling requirements, or to exempt a State from certain requirements of national uniformity – in a timely manner.

Yet, under questions from the floor, the timeliness of the manner disappeared up the spout of Pombozoism.

Ms. ESHOO. So maximum is 120 days?

Mr. CARDOZA. And this allows the FDA to act even quicker; in fact, mandates it.

Ms. ESHOO. But they have up to 4 months?

Mr. CARDOZA. In the underlying bill.

Ms. ESHOO. But that is your amendment, not the underlying bill.

Mr. CARDOZA. No, the underlying bill is 120 days.

Ms. ESHOO. And what does your amendment do?

Mr. CARDOZA. It says that it must be the quickest possible.

Ms. ESHOO. But without any specificity?

Mr. CARDOZA. Correct.

Oh, Shrimp Slayer, my Shrimp Slayer, pompous though you be, surely you are such a creep you embarrass the continuing if oppressed intelligence of your district.

Swami, you really shouldn’t listen to the Slayer. You should not borrow his lingo for letters to the editor. He is bad for your mind and for ours. But, many times, we have seen the like of the Shrimp Slayer, although usually at county fairs, down there with the games of chance, the bearded ladies and the drunken, two-fisted carnies.

It’s quaint, but is it real politics?

These are the questions you must answer, my Swami. These are my doubts. You are my teacher. Help me in my bewilderment.

It makes better business sense to retain our market share in the state's number one industry than to keep eroding it. The San Joaquin Valley's farmland should be preserved because it is the main source for the world's food supply; it should not be used simply for cheap housing.

The highest and best use for farmland is for producing food. The situation that vernal pool areas cannot be developed on must be challenged. This confines development to farmland on the Valley floor. Our starving descendants won't understand how our generation made such shortsighted idiotic choices as to pave over their safe dependable food supply in order to protect a minute percentage of the fairy shrimp.

There are dire long-term consequences to our decisions. I strongly encourage you to immediately contact the City Council and convince them to adhere to the linear city plan, which was adopted by a consensus of the community.

DANIEL F. MCNAMARA

“Our starving descendants won’t understand ….”?

Help me with my doubts, oh my Swami of economics, my main reality man.

So, the Bank of America gets into 20-25-percent loans in Latin America and Eastern Europe. They start pulling the plug on San Joaquin Valley packers. The bank – oh well – the bank is now owned by something in North Carolina. The growers? Some went to Latin America.

Where was the loyalty, Swami my economic guru? Where was the solidarity when the bank figured it could make back its principal in five years on 20-percent interest in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina or Poland, when a lowly Valley packer couldn’t pay anything like that?

Where was the sanity in the bank when they dispatched MBAs wet behind the ears but full of serious, malevolent intent, to the Pink House in Las Lomas in Mexico City, back then, in the moment when it all mattered very much, and you were selling Major League baseball caps and not thinking about much else at all, and even the shrimp slayer, was as yet unmanifested then in that long-gone Golden Age, at the time a mere impresario of lady mud-wrestling at a low-life bowling alley.

Do you know Las Lomas and Pedrigal, Swami, my Swami? Do you know the mountains of Michocan, Swami my Swami? Do you know Coahilla? Do you know the border towns? Have you ever seen the wall or the fence? Entiendes Jaripo o Rancho San Miguel?

I look left, oh my Swami. I look right. Wherever I look, I cannot find any economic system – especially in agriculture – that had any stability. But this is because of my doubt, Swami, my Swami, of which I hope you can relieve me.

Swami, my Almond-Cotton-Vegetable Munchkin Swami, save me from my doubt!

I keep thinking – it must have been some old book I once read in an unguarded moment – that economic systems require that justice run through the relations of the participants or else they collapse some day. And on that day, it doesn’t matter how good the land is. It is definitely in the wrong hands. I know that you, my Swami, never read old books in unguarded moments, so you must know the truth.

Teach me. I have doubts.

Bill Hatch
----------------

Notes:

Your Views: Letters to the Editor: Keep to linear plan
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/opinion/story/12045268p-12801495c.html
Last Updated: April 12, 2006, 02:01:03 AM PDT

4-18-06
Merced Sun-Star
Merced leaders look at possibly updating the city's charter...David Chircop
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/local/story/12067545p-12822084c.html
City charter, Merced's guiding document...29-page charter was established in 1949, and has been amended several times. Changes include the direct election of mayor (the council used to appoint the mayor) and term limits (two four-year terms for council members and two two-year terms for the mayor)... it can establish unique criteria for city office, doesn't face salary ceilings, can establish its own election dates and is not required to comply with competitive bidding statutes, gives city leaders more authority over land use. City Council discussed the need to revise the charter, and to include the public in the review process

http://news.fws.gov/newsreleases/r1/455D1EAE-2FD6-4048-850C7613CBF17849.html

Service Designates Critical Habitat for Threatened and Endangered Vernal Pool Species News Releases Home Page Search the News ReleasesU.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Home

ContactsJim Nickles, Sacramento FWO (916) 414-6572 The U.S. Fish and

http://www.becnet.org/nodes/issues/vernalpools/en_2005_critical_habitat_designated.htm
Home : Issues and Activism : Vernal Pools : Critical Habitat Designated
Critical Habitat Designated
Editor’s Note: This important story has received incredible press across the state.

The Interior Department (Interior) released their second, final Vernal Pool Critical Habitat (VPCH) Rule for 15 vernal pool species found in California and southern Oregon. This Rule (www.becnet.org) is a result of litigation filed by Butte Environmental Council, the California Native Plant Society, and Defenders of Wildlife over the elimination of more than one million acres of VPCH in 2003 for the 15 endangered and threatened vernal pool plants and animals.

In this Rule, some acreage was restored to counties indiscriminately omitted in the 2003 rule. For example:
“We are pleased that Interior was able to include some lands in counties previously excluded in the 2003 rule, yet their analysis leaves them vulnerable to further legal challenges,” stated Barbara Vlamis, Executive Director of Butte Environmental Council.

http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/local/states/california/14341553.htm
Today in the Times
Posted on Fri, Apr. 14, 2006email thisprint this
White House reduces size of habitat set aside for frog
By Michael Doyle
McCLATCHY NEWS SERVICE
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration on Thursday dramatically shrunk the land deemed crucial for survival of the California red-legged frog, a threatened amphibian paddling at the center of a national debate.

City sued over homes approval...Loretta Kalb
http://www.sacbee.com/content/community_news/elk_grove_laguna/v-print/story/14245198p-15063462c.html
A group of Elk Grove homeowners and a state agency each have sued the city of Elk Grove over its approval of a 670-home project that one lawsuit claims will "pave over.. vernal pools and wetlands." One suit, filed March 24 by a group of homeowners at Quail Ranch Estates, adjacent to the planned Vintara Park project, says the city violated the California Environmental Quality Act when it declared that an environmental impact report was not needed for the site...the city declared that the environmental effects of the project by Centex Homes would not be significant. The lawsuit filed by the Quail Ranch Homeowners Association said the effects of the project would be significant, and that the project "will pave over significant areas of vernal pools and wetlands." The other suit was filed by the California Department of Transportation on March 27 and contends the city violated CEQA by failing to study the project's impacts on the state highway system. The Quail Ranch suit cited Centex Homes and Sacramento County Sanitation District 1, which owns the land and has as one of its board members City Councilwoman Sophia Scherman, as having a stake in the issue. The homeowners' attorney, Donald B. Mooney of Davis, said the next step is a mandatory settlement meeting, which should be scheduled later this month or in early May.

Bill would block housing inside 200-year floodplains...Jim Sanders
http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/v-print/story/14245560p-15063711c.html
Assembly Bill 1899..."It asks local governments to make responsible decisions when approving new homes behind levees in the Central Valley," said Assemblywoman Lois Wolk, D-Davis, who crafted the measure...bill would require cities and counties, before approving new subdivisions, to receive clearance from the state Reclamation Board that the houses would be outside the 200-year floodplain within five years of approval. "We think it's an anti-growth bill," said Michael Webb of the California Building Industry Association. Valerie Nera, representing the California Chamber of Commerce, said AB 1899 could slow construction of much-needed affordable housing. Countered Wolk: "I believe that affordable housing that's under 10 feet of water no longer is affordable." AB 1899's next stop is the Assembly Natural Resources Committee.

Democrats, GOP at odds over proposed food safety bill...Dogen Hannah
http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/email/news/14385396.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
At issue is a bill the House passed last month that opponents contend would do away with stringent food safety standards that many states, including legislative trend-setter California, have had in place for years...bill would pre-empt much of California's 20-year-old Proposition 65, which requires food containing chemicals that cause cancer or birth defects to bear warning labels, contend opponents. Feinstein. If the bill becomes law, "the precautions that now exist in California and dozens of other states would be dumbed-down." Opponents counter that states' attempt to set their own standards or to push for tougher national standards would be subject to a Byzantine and open-ended approval process. The bill's proponents, including Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Tracy, contend that uniform, national standards set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration would protect people in every state and bolster consumer confidence."He believes that consumer protection throughout the country is paramount," said Pombo spokeswoman Nicole Philbin. "This law is important because it protects citizens equally."

http://www.vote-smart.org/speech_detail.php?speech_id=158791&keyword=&phrase=&contain=

Public Statements

Speaker: Representative Dennis A. Cardoza (CA)
Title: National Uniformity for Food Act of 2005
Location: Washington, DC
Date: 03/08/2006

NATIONAL UNIFORMITY FOR FOOD ACT OF 2005 -- (House of Representatives - March 08, 2006)

Bill would block housing inside 200-year floodplains; Assembly panel clears proposal that critics say will stifle Valley growth
Sacramento Bee – 4/20/06
By Jim Sanders, staff writer

Large swaths of Central Valley floodplain could be barred from future housing construction under a proposed state law that cleared its first legislative hurdle Wednesday.
Assembly Bill 1899 would not allow new Central Valley subdivisions on levee-protected lands likely to be inundated by a severe flood with a one-in-200 chance of occurring in any given year.

"It asks local governments to make responsible decisions when approving new homes behind levees in the Central Valley," said Assemblywoman Lois Wolk, D-Davis, who crafted the measure.

We used to have some self-respect and pride in the Valley. We worked hard, weren’t rich, but were deeply involved in our communities, in our agriculture, our economy, and in our environment.

The greatest threat to that self-respect – based on a sense of reality and truth – that we have ever seen is UC Merced-Pomboza. And all that is pathetically distorted about this land scheme masquerading as a university is epitomized in its first “Family-Oriented Fairy Shrimp Festival” to be held on Earth Day, Saturday, April 22.

This event is so twisted it is very difficult to get one’s head around all that is wrong with it. Symbolically devouring all you can eat of an endangered species (sea shrimp as surrogate for fairy shrimp) is a grotesque idea and yet it expresses perfectly the aggression of the University of California. UC, an institution under major, prolonged attack for political and financial corruption and sheer administrative incompetence, must spin, duck, dodge, divert attention and manifest its omnipotence. This is an institution that claims infallibility and will never admit any error. It is after all, the UC: it claims universal scientific validity and creates and designs the most awesome weapons of mass destruction ever known, even if its security scandals on two of its three national laboratories in recent years it nearly lost its bid to retain Los Alamos.

To a large extent, the San Joaquin Valley has been free until recent years of institutions and even political leaders claiming infallibility. We aren’t used to it; it doesn’t make sense to us; and we don’t believe in it.

First, let us think about the students, but not, for a moment as our famously “underserved Valley Hispanic population of students” who won’t move away from home and therefore must have a UC campus in Merced. Although there are some people who fit this description, the years spent beating this symbol to death before opening UC Merced doors to a small group of undergrads, the majority from urban Southern California, was a classic exercise in propaganda, complete with busloads of brown-skinned third graders dumped in the state Capitol corridors. It trivialized Hispanics and it trivialized education from K-PhD. It was abominable. But infallible UC commits no errors of taste, judgment or science.

Instead, let us consider the real, existing students at UC Merced as students, people more children than adult, trapped out there on the former golf course, playthings of the UC flaks, surrounded by seasonal pasture lands full of vernal pools and 15 endangered species, including four or five varieties of fairy shrimp and an amazing assortment of bees, some of which are specific to only certain pools.

In fact, the majority of children at UC Merced come from metropolitan Southern California. They don’t know anything about the Valley, ecologically or otherwise, and they don’t care. There is no criticism here. They have their own urban agendas that will guide their educations and good luck to them. It is fortunate for them that they don’t care, because they won’t learn a thing about Valley ecology at UC Merced beyond a few random, disconnected “facts.” All of that information is “political,” therefore it will be kept in the most fragmented form imaginable. Ask UC biologists who found the Merced campus an atrocious site but were silenced.

The vernal pools of eastern Merced are amazing tiny wildernesses full of species that represent the last remnants of native grasses and animals in the Valley, including varieties of bees some of which are specific to single ponds.

UC Merced-Pomboza, which loudly, insistently, continually, with completely consistent deceit, announces itself as the first “environmental campus” in the UC system, must deny and trivialize the endangered species that remain legal obstacles to its plan to develop the land bought for it by the state and private foundations. UC Merced-Pomboza must deny its own scientists, who remain appalled at the grotesque environmental destruction of this campus site, the political corruption behind it, and the railroading of state and most federal resource agencies to sign off on it. UC Merced-Pomboza must continue forever its campaign to obliterate any notion that it is profoundly involved in the drive to extinguish several endangered species in this region.

In short, the UC Merced-Pomboza administration, backed by the UC administration and its board of regents, are infallible liars, just another gang of real estate developers scoring in the Valley, who will never admit any error because they are UC. In the face of all reality and truth, UC officials deny with consistent deceit that they are the largest developer in the region and the anchor tenant for the growth that is extinguishing the endangered fairy shrimp. They are liars and they are weak. They have dived into the pockets of the regional developer consortium (introductions thoughtfully provided by regents in on the land deal from the beginning). They have borrowed from the twisted rhetoric of local developers like the chairman of the county Planning Commission, whose new towns, Fox Hills I and II, lie in the habitat of the endangered San Joaquin Kit Fox.

The first annual UC Merced-Pomboza Fairy Shrimp Festival (all the shrimp you can eat), a perversion of Earth Day if there ever was one, is a direct assault on endangered species. Even this has a particular political meaning this year, when Pete McCloskey, one of the founders of Earth Day and authors of the Endangered Species Act, is running for office. He is running against Rep. RichPAC Pombo, Buffalo Slayer-Tracy, the front end of the Pomboza. The Pomboza is the duo of congressmen who are the principle authors of the Gut-the-ESA, now languishing in the US Senate. The rear end of the Pomboza is Rep. Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer-Merced, who has tried twice already to gut the critical habitat designation section of the ESA because it interferes with UC and other developers’ plans to rip up and pave over the eastern side of the San Joaquin Valley, home of the richest vernal pool complexes in the nation, in which live – you guessed it – federally listed, endangered fairy shrimp species.

But it is both more and less than an assault on endangered species. First of all, it is an arrogant assertion of UC’s power to get away with acts of species extinction without having to admit any responsibility, culpability or agency. Second, it is a pathetic little fiction cooked up by a third-rate institution dominated by the most shortsighted, narrow, anti-environmental profit motives. It uses all the right words and simultaneously empties them of all their right content by placing them in degrading context.

The UC Merced-Pomboza development scheme is also destroying the watershed coming out of the Sierra foothills. If you think we have floods now, just wait a few years when more of that upland region is paved and roofed over.

The corruption of public education for private profits behind this event is gagging, morally and intellectually insulting. Adult Americans realize that higher education, particularly research science, frequently prostitutes the Public Trust, public health and public safety for corporate profits. We know that when Bush regime rattles nuclear weapons at Iran, UC is profoundly, morally, inescapably involved through its two weapons of mass destruction laboratories in Livermore and Los Alamos. We should not be naïve.

On the other hand, our self-respect is revolted by the site of UC Merced-Pomboza exploiting relatively innocent and certainly ignorant students in our own backyard, peddling them as future political leaders, pimping their developing student government, all under the banner of fairy shrimp. This is not how we would wish college students to be treated in our region – as weapons against genuine local environmental concern.

Satire is silenced by events. The Valley doesn’t need more satire; it needs less reason for it.

Partly, UC Merced-Pomboza students are being marketed by the UC Bobcatflaksters as a future generation of political leaders. We, the public – at least we, the family-oriented public, whatever the hell that means -- are being invited to contribute to their student government. One would have thought that would be part of the normal operating expenses of any UC campus except, when we read the press on the on-going scandals of UC executive pay, we realize where those political enrichment funds are going, right along with higher tuition fees.

What do we get out of this fundraiser, I wonder. Is there any influence on the UC Merced-Pomboza student legislature one would want to purchase as this mock political bazaar? A bill to forbid students from vehicular homicide of Hispanic pedestrians around campus, at least after dark, perhaps?

Do we wish to encourage the idea in a potential new generation of political leaders that the first law of politics is fundraising? One would prefer something a little bit more intellectually challenging, like justice, honor, honesty, truth – something like that.

But the moment we think that idealistic thought, we encounter serious cognitive dissonance.

How can we ask a university that features a Tony “Honest Graft” Coelho government policy institute such a question? How absurd to question this approach to politics in the congressional district of Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer-Merced? How could anyone who has ever watched a UC Merced-Pomboza official or any other UC administrator testify before a state legislative committee imagine that politics at UCM-P would be conceived in terms of justice, honor or honesty? How naïve could one be after listening to UC Merced-Pomboza lawyers argue dead against environmental regulation where it applies to UC Merced-Pomboza? Who could ever have heard UC officials casually dismiss Valley social and natural history or deny that UC Merced-Pomboza is the area’s largest developer – heard them dismiss and deny everything that ever happened before they arrived – and continue to imagine this is an institution committed to justice, honor, honesty and truth?

And how about courage? The cabal of local rightwingers attacks a couple of faculty spouses for perfectly legitimate political activity and suddenly – political spouses vanished from public view – the campus celebrates Earth Day as a “family-oriented” (fairy) shrimp feed? We have deep, abiding experience here in the Valley with rightwing demagogues and nobody ever got anywhere cowering in the dark to hide from them.

Family-Oriented Fairy Shrimp Festival Makes its Debut on Saturday, April 22, reads the headline on the UC Merced press release.

Shrimp Feed Also Hosted to Raise Funds for Student Government

The Office of Student Life at UC Merced invites everyone to join in a celebration of the creative spirit and sustainable living at the first-ever Fairy Shrimp Festival on Saturday, April 22 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

In conjunction with the free festival, students will host an all-you-can-eat shrimp feed and silent auction from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. to raise funds for the Associated Students of UC Merced with a dance to follow immediately afterward.

"We are launching what will become an annual springtime event, with a program designed to showcase both the arts and environmental issues in a fun and family-friendly atmosphere," said Jim Greenwood, Fairy Shrimp Festival coordinator and student affairs officer. "This is a great opportunity to bring the campus and community together for a festival that we hope will continue to grow and evolve over the years."

This is puerile flak. While we expect undergraduates to be puerile, we can object to puerile adults guiding their education.

First, there are the code words “family-oriented.” But how much does the event cost?

Shrimp feed tickets will be available at the door for a cost of $10 for UC Merced staff members and students, $20 per person for non-staff/students, $35 per couple and $45 for a family with two adults and two children.

That’s quite a bit more than the cost of going out to Lake Yosemite and having a family barbecue.

We have a “family-oriented,” all-you-can-eat “shrimp feed” under the symbol of the Fairy Shrimp. There are four or five species of fairy shrimp on land UCM-P would dearly love to build on but has encountered difficulties building on because these species are endangered along with 10 associated plant species and a fascinating assortment of bees. UC moved the first phase of its campus onto the site formerly occupied by the municipal golf course. It has not yet applied for its Clean Water Act permit, which includes an analysis of the least environmentally destructive site. The taxpayers and two private foundations paid the Virginia and Cyril Smith Trusts millions for property and for easements to mitigate the destruction of fairy shrimp habitat. UC Merced-Pomboza denials that it will have to move later phases of the campus onto the Hunt property, officially slated for a “university community,” have now reached a state of complete incoherence, which will soon manifest itself in court where they will argue for the adequacy of an environmental review process for a project they will not be building, without being able to admit the project they will be building. The only thing likely to be more incoherent than UC lawyers’ arguments will be the local judge’s acceptance of them, because, after all, UC said it so it must be – if not true – at least more career enhancing for a local judge than the truth.

The myth is simple: UC is infallible and cannot admit error. Yet it doesn’t have its proper federal environmental permits. Congressman Shrimp Slayer does not seem to be able to crush all criticism in the federal resource agencies and has not yet been able to crush the Endangered Species Act. So, naturally, UC Merced-Pomboza, “the environmental UC campus,” throws the first annual all-you-can-eat shrimp feed under the banner of Fairy Shrimp.

This stinks like “sushi in Barstow,” as one local resident put it.

The “family-oriented” term is perhaps a sop to the rightwing cabal that is the local front for real estate interests. On the other hand, there may be a much simpler explanation for the emphasis on a family orientation: corrupt nepotism.

The event coordinator, James Greenwood, 43, was mentioned in a San Francisco Chronicle article late last year about his mother, former UC Provost M.R.C. Greenwood. Provost Greenwood, the second highest official in the UC administrative hierarchy, was forced to resign when confronted with the evidence of conflicts of interest in real estate.

James Greenwood, who has a background in youth ministry, previously applied for three student affairs positions at UC Merced and UC Davis, using contacts provided by his mother. He did not make it to the interview round for any of the jobs, UC's auditor said in the report released Wednesday.

On his resume, Greenwood listed Goff (the provost’s real estate business partner and employee) and two UC Davis professors as references. Public records show that one of the professors owned property with Greenwood's mother, and the other professor had worked with her.

After James Greenwood's unsuccessful search for a job, Doby asked UC Merced Vice Chancellor Jane Lawrence this past July whether she would create an internship for him if the campus had the funding.

A day or two later, Doby informed UC Merced that his office would provide funding for an internship position for Greenwood, the report said. Greenwood was then hired as the only candidate for the $45,000-a-year internship.

So, Greenwood’s mother’s office, no longer occupied by Greenwood’s mother, is paying for her evidently unemployable son to run an all-you-can-eat shrimp feed at the first annual UC Merced-Pomboza Fairy Shrimp Festival. Meanwhile, Mother Greenwood, 62, got off with a 15-month leave at $300,00 plus a promise to return as a tenured faculty member at UC Davis at $168,000 a year plus $100,000 in research funds.

Now we are at last on familiar (sic) grounds: UC corruption. We are expected to accept this because UC is infallible and never errs? If we object, in our simple, self-respectful way, we are told that we are so inferior and caught up in things as plain as the noses on our faces, that we cannot see the grand vision (in which UC is infallible and without error). If we don’t participate in this myth-for-idiots, we are marginalized like the fairy shrimp. And this is how it is done:

Young Greenwood is billing this shrimp feed as everything right.

Coinciding with the national observation of Earth Day 2006, this year's festival also introduces a focus on environmental concerns, the bobcatflak intones piously. Representatives from UC Merced and civic organizations will be on hand to promote environmental awareness, describe campus and community environmental stewardship initiatives and share tips on sustainable living.

The authorities will express environmental concerns, promote environmental awareness, environmental stewardship initiatives and sustainable living.

By promoting an event that features an all-you-can-eat feeding frenzy of another kind of shrimp, under the symbolic banner of the endangered shrimp whose habitat the authorities are destroying physically and politically, they strip environmental concern, awareness, stewardship of all meaning. It’s clever propaganda, befitting of an institution claiming absolute infallibility.

By wrapping itself in Green Babble, UC Merced-Pomboza continues to try to divert local public attention from the huge environmental damage it has caused locally. Behind the back of the local public it supports politically the gutting of the Endangered Species Act because the ESA got in UC’s way. It continues to run roughshod over the California Environmental Quality Act and it perverts the process of public participation in local land-use decisions wherever and whenever the public might question a UC project. Next month the state Supreme Court will hear arguments on a case in which UC has taken a strong, wrong position. The question that will be before the court is whether a state agency must pay to mitigate the impact of its project on areas and communities beyond the physical site of that project. UC’s amicus brief argued that if state agencies must pay for these off-site mitigations, UC Merced-Pomboza would have to pay an estimated $200 million for mitigation for its off-site impacts.

In the end, a lot of UC behavior toward its surrounding communities and natural resources is understandable simply as the behavior of one more arrogant, greedy corporation like Hilmar Cheese. But when the public sees continual whoring of the university’s fundamental, core function – offering first-class, publicly subsidized, higher education with a strong emphasis on scientific research – a disgust sets in along with contempt for a university so corrupt now that all it believes is its own propaganda myth, beginning with the proposition that it has a right to unlimited public funds to go on violating the Public Trust.

So far this campus has shown us nothing but that it is what it has been labeled by critical, unfrightened defenders of the public treasury: a boondoggle and a land deal.

That is unacceptable. Badlands urges a public boycott of this event. Badlands does not care whether anybody follows this advice or not. In our opinion, the first annual UC Merced-Pomboza Fairy Shrimp Festival is an absolutely inexcusable waste of public funds in a time of serious flood threat, and cannot help but be bad for the minds of those who attend it.

Bill Hatch
--------

Notes:

Family-Oriented Fairy Shrimp Festival Makes its Debut on Saturday, April 22
Shrimp Feed Also Hosted to Raise Funds for Student Government
April 12, 2006
http://www.ucmerced.edu/news_articles/04122006_family_oriented_fairy_shrimp.asp

Conflict of interest found for UC provost
Despite violations, she got paid leave and offer of new job
Tanya Schevitz, Todd Wallack, Chronicle Staff Writers
Thursday, December 22, 2005
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ c/a/2005/12/22/MNG60GBT611.DTL - 34k

UC MERCED ISSUES FINAL ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT REPORT;
EXTENSIVE VERNAL POOL HABITAT TO BE PRESERVED
THROUGH INVESTMENT OF MORE THAN $50 MILLION
Jan. 7, 2002
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:YZt2jr6qbIQJ:www.vernalpools.org/UCMerced/EIRs/pressrel.pdf+uc+merced+foundation&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=10

Representatives Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer-Merced, and George Radanovich, Bankrupt Winemaker-Mariposa, are proposing a National Agricultural Science Center for Modesto and have introduced a bill in Congress for funding. They argue that because Modesto has produced more ag politicians since World War II than any other city in the US, Modesto deserves this national center.

In order to shore up his political standing, the one-party, rightwing House of Representatives leadership recently appointed Rep. RichPAC Pombo, Buffalo Slayer-Tracy, vice-chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture. Congress is debating a new, 5-year Farm Bill, Pete McCloskey is nailing Pombo’s corrupt hide to every Grange Hall and political club wall in the 11th Congressional District, and Pombo’s handlers have moved the cattle trailer that used to sit one field west of Tracy’s last subdivision that announced “Pombo’s Real Estate Farms.”

Pombo and Cardoza, known collectively by local farmers as the Pomboza, have made a career for themselves whipping up private property-rights rage against the federal Endangered Species Act. Cardoza and the rest of Merced County’s farm-loving political leadership graciously bestowed the Williamson Act on all unincorporated Merced County, claiming deceitfully that it was to be “mitigation for UC Merced.” Merced is the last major agricultural county in the state to get the Williamson Act, which is proving to be a boon for developers buying up ag land at reduced property taxes all over the county.

The Modesto and Turlock irrigation districts, so highly praised for being pioneers in Valley irrigation in the early years of the last century, every year convert their historic mission more and more to water and electric utilities to slurb development. The smaller Merced Irrigation District dreams the same dream.

The hypocrisy and greed for prestige, credit and honorifics displayed in this proposal is preposterous. Developers, aided every step of the way by local political leadership, are paving over north San Joaquin Valley agriculture as fast as the next “guidance package,” “programmatic EIR,” and quicker than a county planner can say “mitigated negative declaration.” In the process, they are creating an air pollution disaster that is already costing millions in lost production on the remaining agricultural land.

Yet, as a world-class laboratory for everything wrong with agribusiness, no place could be better suited than Modesto (if the former site of the Shell ag chemical lab in Ripon is not a contender). Here is a farming region with no more farms. There is no sense of distinct place left in this farming region. Nobody who farms this land can afford to love this land anymore. Although estates and mansions rise from some of these fields, there is little evidence of real care for real place left. Essentially, there are no more farms, only acreage. In this region you can’t hear the cows moo on the mega-dairy factories, the meadowlarks warble, or the sounds of tractors or crop dusters for the constant background roar of commuter traffic and the real estate adding machine in town, dinning the air with the Great Kah-Ching as it calculates the development value of each acre of farm and ranch land for future slurb.

What the Shrimp Slayer and the Bankrupt Winemaker are proposing is a science museum that will obscure the truth of the disaster of agribusiness even when it is all slurbed over. The McClatchy Chain is enthusiastic.

But the real reason Modesto deserves the center is because of the leadership roles county residents have had in state and national agriculture, Wenger said.

Richard Lyng and Anne Veneman served as U.S. agriculture secretaries as well as state agriculture secretaries, Wenger noted. Henry Voss, Clare Berryhill and Bill Lyons all served as state agriculture secretaries.

"No other county in the country has had that kind of leadership," Wenger said.

You bet. And if any other county had that kind of leadership, they might not have been quite as quick to brag about it. Lyng wasn’t a farmer, he was a rich, politically connected seed dealer. Veneman, daughter of a state legislator, gained the nickname “Mad Cow Annie” when, during her tenure as secretary of the USDA she managed almost to completely bury the mad cow disease story and any serious investigation of it, probably with health consequences it will take many years to realize. Voss and Berryhill were farmers, and -- if memory serves --gentlemen of proto-Pombo political orientation. Lyons failed to get the UC campus on the Mapes Ranch, which he inherited. So he bought 530 acres in the path of development of UC Merced. Asking for annexation to the City of Merced, he appeared before the city council in jeans and plaid shirt as a simple family farmer; but he had his suits handle the deal at the county Local Agency Formation Commission. Lyons is a developer, not a rancher, who bought his state ag secretary post fair and square with a huge fund-raising effort on behalf of Gray Davis’ campaign.

About the only thing the Badlands editorial staff could contribute to this monument to agricultural ruin in the San Joaquin Valley would be to suggest that outside the national center there should be a statue of a Holstein cow about two stories high. “Annie,” the blurb might read. “She lived one year. She made much milk and fast food. Before she died, she wasn’t quite herself.”

Talking it over further, the Badlands editorial staff came up with a counter proposal, a wax museum dedicated to the superb San Joaquin Valley agricultural political leadership from which agriculture has so greatly benefited. Although there are many possible names, the staff decided that, in the vernacular at least, it probably would be called simply, “The Lagoon.”

Pombo’s recently disappeared cattle trailer would be parked outside, proclaiming again, “Pombo Real Estate Farms.” (There is no more completely sound bitten mind in the Valley than the ol’ Buffalo Slayer’s.)

In the lobby, we see a superhuman sized figure -- one hand outstretched to receive, the other full of cash to bestow – a wax likeness of Tony “Honest Graft” Coelho.

Entering the darkened hall, at the first exhibit, backlit behind glass, the visitor would encounter the Mr. and Ms. UC Merced Gallery and would be plunged into the Science Motif, but in a folksy style. This would be an old-timey musical scene, as befits our agricultural heritage, subtitled, “One Voice for The Great Kah-Ching.” At the center of the ensemble would be a barbershop quartet labeled “The Bobbies” (Ayers, Carpenter, Rucker and Smith). The conductor would again be ol’ Honest Graft himself. Musicians would include former Rep. Gary Condit, Lover-Ceres, on fiddle, the Shrimp Slayer on bass, and former state Sen. Dick Monteith, Halfback-Modesto on guitar, conducted by Mike Lynch, with a buggy whip.

Motion-activated, the Bobbies would break into an original song in four-part harmony with one word: “Kah-Ching,” sung to the tune of Abba’s 1960’s hit, “Money.”

Beside them would be an all-woman choir, dressed in white robes, each with a golden halo. Although the wax here would be melted into an angelic blob, a few faces would shine out with holy grace: Supervisor Kathleen Crookham would be the most distinguishable, one hand tastefully strangling a fairy shrimp.

They would be accompanied on harp by Carol Tomlinson-Keasey, the Cowgirl Chancellor herself. Her hat would be of that very, very special shade of royal blue issued to UC administration officials in lieu of the indictments for fraud and corruption they should receive. Her blouse would be of royal blue and golden stripes. Her authentic cowgirl vest would be made of bobcat fur. Her square-dance skirt of royal blue would be decorated with golden dollar signs interspersed with medical cadeusises. Her boots would be made of black bear-cub hide.

The landscape painted on the curved wall behind them would be filled with depictions of subdivisions completed and under construction with Phase One of the UC Merced campus, radioactively glowing on a low hill, like a Ronald Reagan holy city for all the right Americans and none of the rest of us. There would also be artistically rendered swollen creeks and our Mr. and Ms. UC Merceds would be standing knee deep in dirty water.

In the corner would be only a sign but no wax figure – “Our Governor, the Hun, Who Didn’t Come to the UC Merced Opening.”

The next exhibit would be strobe lit and flickering, but there would be enough intermittent light to make out the figure of former Gov. Gray Davis, an electrical plug in hand.

The third exhibit would be nothing but glass enclosed smoke. The sign would read, “Air Quality.” There would be a black box with a button on it, marked “High-Tech Fix.” When visitors push the button, they would hear the sound of a hospital ward of children coughing, but the smoke would not disappear. Sponsors of this exhibit would be the Gentlemen Start Your Engines Association, the Arkansas/China Trading Hong, the International Foundation for the Preservation of Dirty Diesel Engines, the Make Me SuperRich Developers Association, the Maybe Someday UC Merced Medical Institute for the Study of Childhood Respiratory Disease, the Alliance of Fully Indemnified San Joaquin Valley Local Land-Use Authorities, and the huge membership of the San Joaquin Valley We Don't Give and Damn and Can't Do Anything About It Anyway Society.

Another exhibit would be labeled “FALFA – We Are Always on the Winning Side.” This would be a single, monumental, lumpy piece of wax from which the faces of our prominent spokeswomen for agriculture and smart growth would vaguely emerge – Carol Whiteside, Holly King, Merced County Supervisor Diedre Kelsey, Diana Westmoreland Pedroza, etc.

Yet another exhibit, labeled “Almost the First President from Ceres and Family,” would show the interior of an ice cream franchise in an Arizona strip mall and the Condit family, capped and aproned, scooping ice cream to a group of unemployed construction workers.

The “42-Inch Sewer Trunk Line from Livingston” would be an artist’s rendering of a long line of Ranchwood earth-moving equipment digging and covering a ditch from the Livingston sewer plant to Stevinson, across county roads and a Merced Irrigation District canal. When visitors push a red button, marked “Merced County Planning Process,” the following message is played:

Mrs. Crookham, this is Greg Hostetler calling. My cell number actually is 704-13** if you need to call me. I’m on a cell phone cause my other battery I’m trying to save that, preserve it you know. I’m into preserving things too from time to time, but anyway, uhm, I’m just calling you, uh, to let you know that…ah if you don’t already know… that we’ve had a lot of drama and trouble in the county … everywhere I do business [inaudible] apparently I guess because of Mrs. uh…Mrs. Deirdre Kelsey ah… thinks staff may need some help, because she’s climbing all over them… using [inaudible] staff for her personal pit bulls…trying to bite our people, and our staff — this is my opinion — causing a lot of drama in Livingston, for the City of Livingston and we’re trying to uh in the progress of uh in the process of installing a sewer line over there. If you haven’t talked to Dee Tatum, he could fill you in on what’s going on over there. But uh this probably will not end any time soon. So, I just wanted to give you the update, and if you could give staff any help I’d appreciate it… Thank you!

“Village of Geneva Meets Planada Natives” would depict a touching scene in contemporary rural class relations. The above-mentioned Hostetler, top dog in the Geneva deal, in US Calvary officer drag, surrounded by assorted lesser developers in golf clothes, is seen presenting a snow-cone machine (marked “$600 or more”) to local officials of the unincorporated town of Planada, attired in buckskin and feathers with smiles painted on their faces.

Visitors seeking more information on this exhibit would push a button and hear a short dialogue.

Question: What do you get when you cross a school board with a sewer district board?

Answer: A piss poor receptacle for slush fund contributions! Or as Robert Frost might have opined: Something there is that doesn’t love a snow cone machine that sends a chilling public records act request through frozen coils and spills its donors’ check stubs in the sun, exposing accounting gaps big enough to squeeze through the whole ball of wax.

In “DC Does Deacons of Merced,” visitors observe a wax phallus representing male members of the Merced County unregistered, tax paid lobbyists of the “One Whine” crowd in Washington. After a hard day of pimping for federal highway funds for the UC Campus Parkway, they are artistically rendered priapic while ogling strippers, getting the real feel of Beltway politics.

“The Milking String Shakedown” abstractly represents the Valley dairy industry as a doleful, huge-headed Giant garter snake, its mouth full of money, coiled at the feet of the Pomboza, a one-headed creature with four hands reaching down to grab the cash. The huge head is composed of suits decorated with brands – United Western Dairymen, Hilmar Cheese, Gallo and assorted other mega-dairycrats. As the visitors’ eyes follow the snake back toward the tip of its tail, rubber boots begin faintly to emerge in the design, as back-to-front the entire industry is neatly packed and arranged according to the sizes of dairy herds. Pushing the informational button, visitors hear a simple statement: “No 3-cent per hundredweight tax!”

“The Lagoon: A Wax Museum of San Joaquin Valley Leadership” is a work in wax and in progress. However, we think our concept is sound and already more fully realized than its competitors, and we humbly petition the Pomboza for federal funding for this public, grassroots project.

Bill Hatch
--------------

Notes:

Ground broken on ag center bill...Tim Moran
http://www.modbee.com/local/story/12041403p-12797891c.html
The bill is in the hopper to authorize spending federal money for the proposed National Agricultural Science Center in Modesto. Cardoza, D-Merced is co-sponsoring the bill with Rep. George Radanovich, R-Mariposa... ag center is proposed as an interactive, high-technology exhibit designed to explain to people of all ages where food comes from, and agriculture's relationship to the environment and to technology. "I believe it is important for the community to invest in this," Cardoza said. As for when federal money might become available, "It will take a little while," Cardoza said. Allocating new federal money for the center probably isn't realistic, he said. "We are going to have to find an existing pot of money," Cardoza said.

At their June 13 meeting, supervisors will take a vote on one of five options for how to handle developer-driven growth. Those options range from leaving the system as it is to enforcing a moratorium on any growth that requires changing the general plan. – Chris Collins, Merced Sun-Star, April 12, 2006

Although the general reader of the Merced Sun-Star would not have been able to figure it out, the supervisors had a proposal to vote on Tuesday and they continued the hearing on the issue in the face of determined, well-organized resistance. Local resistance is mounting against incomprehensible and destructive planning idiocy brought about by the arrival of UC Merced and its induced speculative growth boom. The particular idiocy the supervisors were discussing Tuesday is a scheme to simultaneously hire consultants to update the county General Plan – the countywide planning guidance package – while continuing to approve amendments to the existing, out-dated general plan. The latter amendments are developer-written planning guidance packages. This creates a race between county land-use planners trying to create policies and rules for the development of unincorporated, largely agricultural land, and private developers breaking existing and yet unformulated policies and rules for private profit by slurbing farm and ranch land.

It must be added that California planning idiocy is not unique to Merced. The City of Oakley approved a 4,000-unit development six feet below sea level and under a Delta levee, recently. Oakley is being sued by environmentalists. However, the collectively destructive behavior of California local land-use authorities makes their decisions no less idiotic. From a public viewpoint, one could say there is danger in numbers in this planning insanity. The sytem is completely broken from a public health and safety perspective, but it will keep on going on until the public has the guts to stand up against the developer bullies.

Everyone has their favorite examples of this process. Our favorite is the 42-inch sewer trunk line emanating from Livingston, headed for Stevinson without a speck of environmental review to blemish its perfect sheen of greed and political corruption between the City of Livingston, its benighted sewer plant beside the Merced River, a large, terribly influential local landowner and the most gonzo developer in the county. Another is the deep ripping of thousands of acres of seasonal pasture land near Le Grand full of vernal pools and tributary streams to navigable waters of the US done without any permitting or notification of state and federal resource agencies, which it was the obligation of the county to do.

Below is a letter to the county Board of Supervisors from attorney Marsha Burch, who has tried several environmental cases in recent years in Merced County, on the plan proposed to the supervisors by the county General Plan Steering Committee. The public has so far been unable, through a state Public Records Act request, to view documents that would explain who are the members of this committee or the minutes to its meetings.

Below Burch’s letter, we have included the Coalition Statement on Merced County Planning Process, which calls for a moratorium on growth not already permitted until the county General Plan is updated, and an end to the corrupt practice of developers paying local land-use authorities legal bills when the public sues the land-use authorities for rubber-stamping slurb.

Bill Hatch
-----------------------------

April 11, 2006

Via Email and Facsimile (209.726-7977):
Merced County Board of Supervisors
2222 M Street
Merced, CA 95340

Re: Proposed General Plan Amendment Policy and Procedures During the General Plan Update Process – set for public hearing April 11, 2006, Item No. 53

Dear Supervisors:

This office, in conjunction with the Law Office of Donald B. Mooney, represents the San Joaquin Raptor Rescue Center, Protect Our Water and other groups, and these comments supplement comments previously submitted regarding the above-referenced agenda item. Thank you for this opportunity to provide you with these comments. These comments are submitted just prior to the hearing in large part because our clients have been working to obtain documents relating to the above-referenced item, and have been entirely unsuccessful. The general plan steering committee is apparently meeting, having discussions and making recommendations, and our clients have been unable to obtain a single document regarding the dates or times of the meetings, nor have they been able to locate any minutes or written records of the meetings. The public has not had an opportunity to understand what choices are actually before the Board today. Additional information must be obtained in order to inform the public, and it would seem that the Board would also be interested in receiving all relevant information before making a decision on this important policy issue.

1. It is unclear what is before the Board

It is unclear whether the Board is being asked to select a policy from the four proposed by staff, or to approve the Guidance Packages that apparently triggered discussion of these policy issues. If the Board intends to approve any Guidance Package(s), the public has not received notice of that fact, and has not had an opportunity to comment. Further, if the Board intends to approve any application or request that would grant a right or entitlement, CEQA review has not been undertaken. It is difficult to comment on an agenda item so vague that it is impossible to determine exactly what is being proposed.

In addition to the confusion resulting from the agenda item itself, our clients have attempted to obtain documents relating to this item, including making Public Records Act Requests, and have not been able to get a single document. We do not have enough information at this time to make form an informed opinion on the subject, but it appears that the steering committee “meetings” may be in contravention of Brown Act requirements. This issue must be thoroughly considered in the light of day, and the public deserves the opportunity to understand, consider and comment upon the various options available to the County with respect to conducting a cost-effective and legally adequate update to the General Plan.

Finally, this item was continued from the February 14, 2006, meeting, and it would seem that additional information would have been gathered in order to inform your deliberations. There appears to be no staff report or additional information. We request that you continue this item in order to obtain the information you need to inform your decision, and to allow the public to receive information necessary to understand the issues.

2. Processing General Plan Amendments During the General Plan Update Process will Result in Staff and Consultants Working at Cross-Purposes

With respect to the substance of the policy issues, allowing privately funded general plan amendments to proceed during the time when County staff and consultants will be working on a comprehensive general plan update will result in the public purposes of the update process being contradicted by profit-driven efforts to amend the outdated General Plan before the update is completed. We urge you to fully support the General Plan update effort by protecting it from potentially contradictory plan amendment efforts.

At this time, we do not believe that the Board or the public has sufficient information to make a determination on this issue. In fact, this is one of the most complicated issues currently facing the County, and you have not even received a staff report. If the item before you today involves approval of specific applications, that has not been made clear, and necessary materials have not been available. If this truly is consideration of a policy to be adopted for use during the General Plan update process, adequate information regarding the number of projects in the pipeline that will be effected by this policy, and there has not been an honest evaluation of the negative impact the privately funded General Plan “update” will have on the County’s General Plan update. We urge you to continue this item, or adopt a policy that will protect the General Plan update process.

Very truly yours,

Marsha A. Burch
Attorney at Law
131 South Auburn Street
Grass Valley, CA 95945

cc: Clients
-------------------------------

Coalition Statement on Merced County Planning Process

We call for a moratorium on County General Plan amendments, variances, minor sub-divisions changes to existing projects, zoning changes, and annexations of unincorporated county land by municipal jurisdictions, MOU’s and developments with private interests and state agencies, until a new County general Plan is formulated by a fully authorized public process – and approved locally and by the appropriate state and federal agencies.

The continual process of piecemealing development through amendments, willfully ignoring the cumulative impacts to infrastructure and resources, for the benefit of a small cabal of public and private special interests, is illegal and reprehensible conduct on the by elected and appointed officials of local land-use authorities.

We also call for a permanent moratorium on indemnification of all local land-use jurisdictions by private and public-funded developers.

Indemnification is the widespread, corrupt practice in which developers agree to pay for all legal costs arising from lawsuits that may be brought against their projects approved by the land-use authority — city or county. Without having to answer to the public for the financial consequences of decisions made on behalf of special interests, local land-use authorities can be counted on to continue unimpeded their real policy: unmitigated sprawl, agricultural land and natural resource destruction, constant increases in utility rates, layering of school and transportation bonds on top of property taxes, and the steady erosion of the county’s infrastructure.

Adopted 2006

San Joaquin Raptor/Wildlife Rescue Center
Protect Our Water
Central Valley Safe Environment Network
Merced River Valley Association
Planada Association
Le Grand Association
Communities for Land, Air & Water
Planada Community Development Co.
Central Valley Food & Farmland Coalition
Merced Group of Sierra Club
Citizens Committee to Complete the Refuge VernalPools.Org
California Native Plant Society
Stevinson Citizen’s Group
San Bruno Mountain Watch
San Joaquin Valley Chapter of Community Alliance with Family Farmers

CENTRAL VALLEY SAFE ENVIRONMENT NETWORK
MISSION STATEMENT

Central Valley Safe Environment Network is a coalition of organizations and individuals throughout the San Joaquin Valley that is committed to the concept of “Eco-Justice” — the ecological defense of the natural resources and the people. To that end it is committed to the stewardship, and protection of the resources of the greater San Joaquin Valley, including air and water quality, the preservation of agricultural land, and the protection of wildlife and its habitat. In serving as a community resource and being action-oriented, CVSEN desires to continue to assure there will be a safe food chain, efficient use of natural resources and a healthy environment. CVSEN is also committed to public education regarding these various issues and it is committed to ensuring governmental compliance with federal and state law. CVSEN is composed of farmers, ranchers, city dwellers, environmentalists, ethnic, political, and religious groups, and other stakeholders.

P.O. Box 64, Merced, CA 95341
---------------------

Notes:

4-12-06
Merced Sun-Star
Some call for moratorium until general plan is updated...Chris Collins
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/local/story/12045253p-12801466c.html
Merced County's comprehensive "general plan" approved in 1995 to guide the county's development is outdated and practically useless; it's irresponsible to continue to use it to direct new growth in the county. But large developments are moving forward and more are on the way. The county is in the beginning phase of a three-year process to form a new general plan that will reflect the current population and level of development in the area...supervisors are trying to figure out how to handle development under the wings of the 11-year-old plan. Deidre Kelsey..."I'm disappointed it's not already completed. We have a general plan that doesn't reflect the realities of our county." O'Banion said roadblocks to new development would hurt the county. Nelson said "We know we need to preserve our prime farmland, but we already have protections in the general plan." Representatives from the building industry and the Merced County Chamber of Commerce don't want the system to change and oppose a moratorium on growth. At their June 13 meeting, supervisors will take a vote on one of five options for how to handle developer-driven growth... options range from leaving the system as it is to enforcing a moratorium on any growth that requires changing the general plan.

Environmental group sues to block below-sea-level housing tract...Patrick Hoge
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/04/12/BAG2PI7JVS1.DTL&hw=environment&sn=008&sc=545
Oakley's plan to allow 4,000 new homes on land that is behind levees and 6 feet below sea level. In the suit filed in Contra Costa County Superior Court, the Greenbelt Alliance said Oakley failed to adequately consider the potential for levee failures or to require mitigations for numerous likely impacts of urban development on the Hotchkiss Tract in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The suit also says that urban storm water, which under the development plan would be captured and treated in artificial lakes, could contaminate drinking water supplies used by millions of Californians. Critics, including state officials, environmentalists and academics, say that urbanizing such floodplains is unwise. Developers are nevertheless pushing to build in numerous flood-prone areas around the state, with nearly 40,000 homes planned behind levees in the cities of Lathrop (San Joaquin County), Oakley and Stockton alone.

Lydia Miller, President
San Joaquin Raptor Rescue Center
P.O. Box 778
Merced, CA 95341

Steve Burke
Protect Our Water
3105 Yorkshire Lane
Modesto CA 95350

County of Merced
2222 “M” Street
Merced, CA 95340
(209) 385-7654
(209) 726-1710 Fax

Dee Tatum
Chief Administrative Officer
ceo@data.co.merced.ca.us

Robert Lewis
Director of Planning and Economic Development
rlewis@co.merced.ca.us

Ruben Castillo
County Counsel
rcastillo@co.merced.ca.us

Merced Co. Board of Supervisors
dist1@co.merced.ca.us etc.

Re: Item # 53 on April 11 Board meeting agenda

Dear Supervisors,

We would like to register our objections to Item # 53, General Plan Amendment Policy and Procedures during the General Plan Update Process, and direction on how property-owner sponsored General Plan Amendment applications should be treated during the General Plan update process.

Our objections include but are not limited to:

· It is unclear what guidance packages are or how they will be used; however, guidance packages cannot be used as a substitution for an adequate and updated General Plan, because they have undergone a public review process or environmental review under California Environmental Quality Act
· This is piecemeal development
· It goes against the direction of the existing, outdated General Plan
· It streamlines the conversion of agricultural land
· The need today is to update the General Plan before proceeding with growth
· The procedures surrounding this policy and procedure violate public process
· This policy and procedure invites development to define the next General Plan
· Public testimony on this policy and procedure at the Feb. 14 board meeting is not reflected in the nearly identical April 11 proposals or in a staff report, which both proposals entirely lack
· This policy and procedure violates the Lesher Consistency Rule under California Environmental Quality Act and is an open invitation to inconsistent planning
· The General Planning Steering Committee has violated and continues to violate the Brown Act (please see attachment) in direct, specific ways including but not limited to being unable to obtain steering committee minutes or agendas at the front desk of the Board office or being able to obtain a file on the steering committee at the front desk of the Planning Department (copies of request forms submitted at public hearing).

Because of these fundamental flaws in the proposal presented in Item 53 of the April 11 board agenda, we urge the board to take no action or adopt the Coalition Statement on Merced County Planning.

Respectfully,

Lydia M. Miller
Steve Burke

Cc:

Badlandsjournal.com
Interested parties
---------------

Coalition Statement on Merced County Planning Process

We call for a moratorium on County General Plan amendments, variances, minor sub-divisions changes to existing projects, zoning changes, and annexations of unincorporated county land by municipal jurisdictions, MOU’s and developments with private interests and state agencies, until a new County general Plan is formulated by a fully authorized public process – and approved locally and by the appropriate state and federal agencies.
The continual process of piecemealing development through amendments, willfully ignoring the cumulative impacts to infrastructure and resources, for the benefit of a small cabal of public and private special interests, is illegal and reprehensible conduct on the by elected and appointed officials of local land-use authorities.
We also call for a permanent moratorium on indemnification of all local land-use jurisdictions by private and public-funded developers.
Indemnification is the widespread, corrupt practice in which developers agree to pay for all legal costs arising from lawsuits that may be brought against their projects approved by the land-use authority -- city or county. Without having to answer to the public for the financial consequences of decisions made on behalf of special interests, local land-use authorities can be counted on to continue unimpeded their real policy: unmitigated sprawl, agricultural land and natural resource destruction, constant increases in utility rates, layering of school and transportation bonds on top of property taxes, and the steady erosion of the county's infrastructure.

Adopted 2006

San Joaquin Raptor/Wildlife Rescue Center
Protect Our Water
Central Valley Safe Environment Network
Merced River Valley Association
Planada Association
Le Grand Association
Communities for Land, Air & Water
Planada Community Development Co.
Central Valley Food & Farmland Coalition
Merced Group of Sierra Club
Citizens Committee to Complete the Refuge VernalPools.Org
California Native Plant Society
Stevinson Citizen’s Group
San Bruno Mountain Watch
San Joaquin Valley Chapter of Community Alliance with Family Farmers

CENTRAL VALLEY SAFE ENVIRONMENT NETWORK
MISSION STATEMENT

Central Valley Safe Environment Network is a coalition of organizations and individuals throughout the San Joaquin Valley that is committed to the concept of "Eco-Justice" -- the ecological defense of the natural resources and the people. To that end it is committed to the stewardship, and protection of the resources of the greater San Joaquin Valley, including air and water quality, the preservation of agricultural land, and the protection of wildlife and its habitat. In serving as a community resource and being action-oriented, CVSEN desires to continue to assure there will be a safe food chain, efficient use of natural resources and a healthy environment. CVSEN is also committed to public education regarding these various issues and it is committed to ensuring governmental compliance with federal and state law. CVSEN is composed of farmers, ranchers, city dwellers, environmentalists, ethnic, political, and religious groups, and other stakeholders.

P.O. Box 64, Merced, CA 95341
-------------------------

Relevant Provisions of the Brown Act
§ 54953. Requirement that meetings be open and public ...

(a) All meetings of the legislative body of a local agency shall be open and public, and all persons shall be permitted to attend any meeting of the legislative body of a local agency, except as otherwise provided in this chapter...

Joiner v. City of Sebastopol (1981), 1st Dist. 125 Cal App 3rd 178 Cal Rptr 299
... The exclusion from the definition of"legislative body" under former Gov C § 54952.3, of a committee composed solely of membersof the governing body of a local agency which were less than a quorum of such governing body,had no application under the circumstances.

San Diego Union v City Council (1983, 4th Dist) 146 Cal App 3d 947, 196 Cal Rptr 45.
Although a charter city has complete control over its municipal affairs and has direct constitutional power to determine the compensation of its officers and employees (Cal. Const., Art. XI, § 5, subds. (a), (b)), the Brown Act (Gov. Code, §§ 54950 et seq.), requiring open meetings of the city council when salaries of nonelected city officers or employees are discussed and determined, does not impermissibly infringe in any manner upon this authority. Rather, the procedural nature of the Brown Act's guaranty all meetings of a governmental body be open to the public unless expressly exempted by statute, designed to eliminate much of the secrecy surrounding the deliberations and decisions on which public policy is predicated, addresses a genuine and pure matter of statewide concern...

Water's high and the visioning is easy
So cry, l'il baby
Things done gone awry.

Anonymous
Locke CA

Our governor, the Hun, and the Democratic leaders of the state Legislature, who recently failed to pass an infrastructure bond to finance the public works projects the state needs to catch up with its speculative real estate mania, hand-in-hand this week, are ennunciating a new California vision on how to combat global warming. They're going to "break from the Sacramento gridlock" and lead the nation.

"Nobody from the White House to most state capitals has wanted to face the politically risky choices needed to curb industrial emissions, driving habits and everyday life. That's where California aims to be different," San Francisco Chronicle editorialists intone hopefully.

"The controls aim mainly at industry: oil refineries, cement kilns, dump sites -- even manure ponds on big dairies, which give off lung-clogging gas. State law has already begun mandating caps on power plants. Cleaner tailpipe rules approved in 2004 are tied up in a lawsuit brought by automakers and joined by the Bush administration," they add,problematically.

Vision. Leadership. Smart growth. Win-win public/private partnerships. Environmental stewardship. Consensus! California, the world's 12th largest emitter of greenhouse gases will -- with leadership -- drastically cut those emissions by ... you pick a date, the Hun likes 2020.

These are the politics of an over-populated region that has grown beyond the carrying capacity of its resources, devouring its incredible agricultural capacity, where developers own leadership, lock, stock and barrel, and so we must be led into paths of denial to keep the development based economy afloat at all costs ... without raising taxes.

In the various cults of leadership elites "workshop" weekend-by-weekend, paying enormous attention to "visioning," (what used to be called "discovering and following your passion," and in an earlier, far, far more honest time, "getting stoned.")

These visions fall upon a discontent and anxious populous like an immaterial fog of WD-40. The only difference is that they don't fix anything.

Why not fix something? Anything. Start small. Work your way up to global warming after you get the deficit down. Why not make something work beside the next greased permit for the next subdivision?

Bill Hatch
--------------------

State steps up on combatting global warming

San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, April 9, 2006

IF WASHINGTON won't, then Sacramento will. This state has set its own course many times over: on car tailpipe emissions, a ban on coastal drilling and abortion law. Now comes the biggest go-it-alone bet in a long time: greenhouse-gas controls.

Both Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, an avowed greenie, and pro-environment Democrats have produced comparable plans that would put California on a tough pollution diet. By 2020, the state must roll back greenhouse gas emissions -- mainly carbon dioxide -- to 1990 levels.

It's a drop of 25 percent that will bring changes across the state in the ways people work and play. But it also sends a message to the rest of a nation that is neglecting mounting danger signs and passing the buck to future generations.

Other plans to rein in California's air pollution are already underway from farms to freeways, but the attack on global warming goes after greenhouse gases left largely unchecked. These emissions form a heat-trapping ceiling in the atmosphere and are blamed by most scientists for weather swings, higher temperatures, changes in vegetation and wildlife, and future rises in sea levels. In recent years, California state researchers have reported more rain, less snow, floods and beach erosion traceable to a warmer climate.

Nobody from the White House to most state capitals has wanted to face the politically risky choices needed to curb industrial emissions, driving habits and everyday life. That's where California aims to be different.

What makes change possible is a break from Sacramento gridlock. Both the Republican governor and Democratic leaders are on the same wavelength in proposing a major goal and directing state agencies to get there. Heard this before? The governor's vaunted infrastructure package, pegged at $222 billion over 10 years, splintered when it landed in a suspicious Legislature.

And it could happen again with greenhouse controls, which have already come under attack from the state Chamber of Commerce. But the governor's staff has vetted the plan in public meetings ad collected 15,000 comments, mostly favorable. Democrats likewise have sounded out their plan in a bill (AB32) carried by Assemblymember Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills. Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez has made the bill a top priority.

The plans are more alike than not. Both establish a definite deadline and call for a cap on emissions. The plan by the governor's team leans on trading pollution credits that reward clean businesses while costing dirty ones more. The Democratic plan leans on flat cap on emissions and turns over the regulatory rules to the state smog board. Both plans avoid a tax on fuel to raise research funds, an idea that Schwarzenegger opposed.

The controls aim mainly at industry: oil refineries, cement kilns, dump sites -- even manure ponds on big dairies, which give off lung-clogging gas. State law has already begun mandating caps on power plants. Cleaner tailpipe rules approved in 2004 are tied up in a lawsuit brought by automakers and joined by the Bush administration.

The car emission lawsuit illustrates the problem. Washington isn't about to do anything on global warming. President Bush is a famous non-believer when it comes to the science behind the greenhouse effect.

Last June, Schwarzenegger broke with this antediluvian view and declared the greenhouse effect was real in a speech in San Francisco. He directed Alan Lloyd, head of the state Environmental Protection Agency, to come up with a plan. After fits and starts, including the dropping of a politically touchy tax, this plan emerged.

On Tuesday, from the same perch in City Hall, the governor will explain his year-later outlook on global warming controls. He'll do it before an audience of enviros, scientists and skeptical business leaders.

There's no question that the subject is loaded. Raising clean-air standards will impose costs. Chamber of Commerce President Allan Zaremberg believes the state will lose jobs and end up importing products from high-polluting competitors, a double whammy that will punish California.

But supporters have a twofold answer. First, states or countries that have neglected the problem will, over time, follow California's lead because of local pressure. If this state, now the planet's 12th largest emitter of greenhouse gases, can reform, so can others. Secondly, the conversion to a cleaner industrial landscape will churn out more jobs, not fewer, as new businesses develop to meet the 2020 goals. A UC Berkeley study predicts 20,000 new jobs from such work.

Business may not be united in opposition. Silicon Valley is backing the initiative with notables from Sun Microsystems, Google and the venture capital world writing the governor. Several major oil companies, such as Shell and BP, are already on a voluntary state reporting list of greenhouse emissions.

There remain serious risks in redirecting the state's economy. The suggested system of trading pollution credits is still in its infancy. Policymakers have ducked the question of money for research, enforcement and new programs. Lawsuits may surface as state rule-making enters new areas.

But the governor and Democrats are right to take on these risks. They haven't dodged a future challenge and are working together. California has a shown way to be a leader once again.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Why do anything at all?
A study ordered by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger predicted these effects of unchecked greenhouse gas emissions:

Average temperatures would rise by 3 degrees within 100 years.

The state's snowpack, which is half the water supply, would diminish by 75 to 90 percent.

Los Angeles and the Central Valley, which already have the worst smog levels in the nation, would see a jump from 25 to 75 percent in pollution-heavy bad days.

Rising sea levels in the Bay Delta, water shortages and hotter weather would damage California crops.

Floods would strain the state levee system.

Higher temperatures would damage forests and increase chances of wildfires.

Warmer weather would push demand for air conditioning, driving up prices and demand for more emission-producing power plants.

Source: www.climatechange.ca.gov

Facing the peril of potential flooding of many new subdivisions built on flood plains, Assemblyman Dave Jones, D-Sacramento, introduced a bill to make it mandatory for homeowners to buy federal flood insurance for homes built where there is an annual one-in-200 chance of flooding. Presently, the state is on the hook for flood damage. Jones' bill required mortgage lenders to make certain homebuyers had flood insurance.

Mortgage banking lobbyists defeated the bill's enforcement provision in the Assembly Insurance Committee Wednesday. They argued that, as a result of Katrina, the federal flood insurance program was probably bankrupt so why buy federal flood insurance.

It's an absurd argument but lobbyists at public meetings have to come up with something to conceal the deal going down in private. Evidently, bankers believe they have a right to profits from their "creative" mortgages and to an endless speculative housing boom, more of it inevitably encroaching on flood plains in the Central Valley.

While developer sharks circle the Legislature daily, we don't often see the killer whales come up the river and dance on their tails. Jones, regardless of the fate of his bill, should be thanked for flushing out a bit of the financial system behind CalGrowth, Inc, which rules this state today in an absolute style not seen since the days of The Railroad.

Nine of the 10 members of the committee are from Southern California. They watched safely from the riverbank as Jones' bill and political reason were devoured by greed. While this is a perfectly normal spectacle at the state Capitol, some interest was added by the rising level of the river in which the lobbyist feeding frenzy occurred.

Seal count:

How they voted against the critical enforcement provision of AB 1898.

Yes

Ron Calderon, D-Montibello
Dario Frommer, D-Los Angeles
Betty Karnette, D-Long Beach
Sally Lieber, D-Santa Clara
Pedro Nava, D-Santa Barbara
Tom Umberg, D-Santa Ana

No

John Benoit, R-Riverside (vice chair)
Russ Bogh, R-Beaumont
Dennis Mountjoy, R-Monrovia

Abstained

Juan Vargas, D-San Diego (chair)

------------

Meanwhile, the local whining industry goes on per usual. Local government permits building on flood plains and goes whining to state and federal governments for "relief" when flood plains flood. Poor little Merced, whose city and county governments constantly raise the salaries and benefits for, at least, their "top" employees -- it just can't buy protection from floods, no matter how much money its public officials are investing in real estate.

Our leadership, in an economy fatted on every kind of government funding from cotton subsidies to UC Merced that still cannot produce enough work for its citizens, is adamantly against any government intervention except one kind: when state or federal funds flow into local coffers like Mariposa runoff.

The flood game is going to get worse due to the number of acres uphill and upstream from Merced that have been paved over and roofed over by the UC Merced-induced building boom.

Local leadership's first play in the flood game is to try to convince itself and the
remaining speculators that they are trying to do something and that floods will never,never happen again in Merced.

Its second play is going to be to blame environmentalists and natural resource agencies for floods. About the only people dumb enough to buy this are going to be real estate speculators still in this market, going nuts losing money. But a lot of them work for the county so this fable has a good start. Rep. Dennis Cardoza, Vernal Pool Shrimp Slayer-Merced, is going to be whining to the leaden heavens as the rain comes down that flood damage is anyone's -- absolutely anyone's -- fault but his, beginning with railroading the UC campus through without proper environmental protection.

Local leadership is going to disappear behind its pointing fingers. You'll see a strange creature, something like a Sea urchin, rolling in and out of the county administration building, all fingers, no faces, no names. Or perhaps you'll see it floating down an MID canal, because MID isn't a flood control agency.

Absolutely the only thing real about this farce is flood water.

Bill Hatch
-------------------

Merced Sun-Star
Estimates at $9.72M for flood damages...Doane Yawger
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/local/story/12026735p-12784522c.html
First estimates from flooding earlier this week in Merced peg damage at $9.72 million...total is certain to go up as more homes, farms, businesses and public facilities are assessed.

County still awaiting disaster relief from governor's office. Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Merced, told Schwarzenegger that flooding was overwhelming local response capabilities...state assistance is needed and warranted. Ted Selb said the MID's canals sustained considerable damage...city crews were cleaning out culverts and removing obstructions from pipes to open up waterways, cleaning mud and debris off streets...water rose into streets and into some yards this week...crews Thursday morning cut a 40-foot swath in Sandy Mush Road to let water
drain on wetlands and nonproductive farmland.

Builders, schools can't reach deal...David Chircop
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/local/story/12026741p-12784550c.html
On Tuesday, four school districts and the 26-member Building Industry Association of Central California walked away from the negotiation table again without a deal. In recent months, every major housing project before the city and county have been met with calls from educators to impose building moratoriums. March 10 offer by builders to pay the Merced City School District $3.55 per square foot for new developments. State law requires at least $2.48
per square foot...district made a counteroffer of $4.39, which was turned down by the BIA. In the meantime, construction and land costs have climbed substantially, and the buying power of funds collected for new schools has diminished...district says it will face an $88 million shortfall needed to build new facilities in the next 10 years if fees aren't increased.

We can prevent floods in future...Our View
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/opinion/story/12026750p-12784512c.html
We have a sense that the finger-pointing has just begun. Merced Irrigation District officials and County Supervisor Deidre Kelsey say the disaster could have been avoided if the federal government and the Army Corps of Engineers had finished water control projects. It's clear that a flood like Tuesday's can be avoided if the right people get together and make important decisions. Next time, a flood could be more catastrophic and cause injuries and even deaths. Our leaders must find a way to make sure there isn't another "next time."

http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/story/14240239p-15060058c.html
Editorial: Banking on clear skies
Mortgage industry weakens key flood bill
Sacramento Bee -- April 7, 2006

Mortgage banking in California is a multibillion-dollar business. It has thrived with the state's real estate boom and the proliferation of homes built in the low-priced floodplains of the Central Valley.

This industry also is enormously exposed. If and when a major flood occurs, the banking industry will be saddled with waterlogged, worthless homes. As in New Orleans, foreclosures will be rampant. Someone will be left holding a very soggy bag.

You might think that mortgage banks would support - or at least want to discuss - a measure to require flood insurance on vulnerable properties. Instead, the industry is using the same deceptive tactics it employs to sell questionable products (such as zero down payment, interest-only loans) to kill a bill by Assemblyman Dave Jones of Sacramento.

Before Wednesday, Jones' AB 1898 made federal flood insurance a condition of obtaining a mortgage in areas with a one-in-200 chance of flooding in any given year. Jones' bill would have required mortgage lenders to enforce the provision, which made sense because lenders have as much to lose as homeowners.

Unfortunately, the banking industry seems more concerned about short-term profits than long-term survivability. Mortgage bankers worry that an insurance requirement would scare off prospective home buyers. They used some highly deceptive arguments to effectively gut AB 1898 ...
---------------

GOP lawmakers revive Auburn Dam debate; SAVING SACRAMENTO DURING FLOOD AT ISSUE
San Jose Mercury-News – 4/7/06
By Erica Werner, Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Key Republican lawmakers said Thursday that building a dam on the American River

at Auburn is the only way to protect Sacramento against catastrophic flooding that might occur once every 500 years.

But the head of the California Department of Water Resources cautioned against losing focus on flood-control projects now under way that are meant to give 200-year protection to the region.

Sacramento is now protected at only the 100-year level -- the lowest of any large urban area in the nation.

``Our focus right now in the state is that we need to be sure we get these improvements and not get distracted by the next debate over Auburn Dam,'' Department of Water Resources Director Lester Snow testified at a hearing of the House Resources Committee's subcommittee on energy and water.

``The debate in the past has actually delayed investment in flood improvements in the region,'' Snow said.

Before Snow spoke, committee chair Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Stockton, and subcommittee chair Rep. George Radanovich, R-Fresno, both spoke in favor of an Auburn Dam, underscoring growing congressional interest in reviving the controversial project years after it seemed to be abandoned for good ...
----------------

San Joaquin River Continues To Rise; Mossdale Mobile Home Park Evacuated
KCRA Channel 3 (Sacramento) – 4/7/06

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Heavy runoff from recent storms is expected to tax the San Joaquin River in the coming days, state water officials said Thursday.

The river near Vernalis west of Modesto will likely reach flood stage within about five days or so, said Gary Bardini of the state Department of Water Resources.

At the Mossdale Moblie Home Park, near Manteca, a residents are packing up their belongings and moving out as the river continues to rise. A mandatory evacuation is in effect for the area.

"We've got good weather and that's going to make people wait as long as possible ... sometimes you have to get your feet a little bit damp before it's time to move," Lathrop-Manteca Fire spokesman Jim Monty said.

Reservoirs that feed the San Joaquin are nearing capacity in many cases, making significant water releases necessary. ..

"Our goal is to try to maintain flows at a level that the flood control system should perform adequately," said Bardini, noting that officials are most concerned about the San Joaquin.

But officials are also expecting more wet weather. Another storm will hit the region late Friday, with rain lasting off and on over the weekend.

Longer-range forecasts show more rain in the coming week as well.

"The good news, of course, is that we are in a break right now," said Elizabeth Morse of the National Weather Service. "The bad news is that it ends tomorrow."

Morse said the coming storm will hit hardest in Central California south of Interstate 80.

Thunderstorms are possible, posing a problem for some areas that are already saturated.

"The problem with showers and thunderstorms is that you can drop quite a bit of precipitation in a short period of time," Morse said. "Half an inch of rain in 30 minutes is going to be a real problem in some of the areas where we already have standing water."

Snow levels from this cold storm in the Sierra will remain relatively low, so officials do not expect the problem of huge runoff caused by rain falling on snow.

"Overall, this is a much more gentle system," Morse added. "Unfortunately, it's coming right on the heels of a pretty potent system."

In Calaveras County, those evacuated from about 100 houses in the La Contenta subdivision earier in the week were allowed to return home on Thursday.

A small dam at La Contenta, located near Valley Springs, threatened to fail on Tuesday. Crews have reinforced the dam with sandbags and plastic sheeting.

Thanks to calm weather Wednesday night, the Tuolumne River crested below flood stage in Stanislaus County Thursday morning.

People in the area were particularly worried about the area where Cry Creek meets the Tuolumne. The water, which surpassed levels seen during huge January storms, rose to within feet of a few homes.

In the Sierra, resorts reported a heavy blanket of new snow. At Mammoth Mountain in Mono County, the resort reported 23 inches of fresh snow, resulting in total depths of up to 264 inches in some places. #

http://www.kcra.com/money/8511490/detail.html

I was into the County Administration Building today with another active citizen to look into what the County Counsel’s office had produced on a California Public Records Act request.

We were examining the documents and discussing them in a conference room. The conversation with the assistant counsel was going pleasantly, in fact in such a civilized fashion I was beginning to become disoriented and a little dizzy.

Only for a moment, however.

Soon enough the County Counsel barged into the room imperiously and told us we could not meet in that conference room, but had to go to another conference room. I felt more relaxed immediately.

He marched ahead and we followed to the other conference room. There he left us, with the door open onto the second-floor elevator lobby.

The rest of the meeting conducted amid lobby clatter after the obligatory petty county harassment of the public, I realized my pulse had returned to normal.

Returning home to peruse the daily news clips, I came across the following in the Merced Sun-Star:

Black Rascal Creek dam hasn’t made it past drafting table
By Leslie Albrecht
LALBRECHT@MERCEDSUN-STAR.COM
Last Updated: April 5, 2006, 06:20:51 AM PDT

A long-delayed reservoir could have prevented the major flooding that soaked the county Tuesday, according to Merced Irrigation District officials.
Five dams protect Merced from floods, and local officials have been lobbying Congress for decades to get a sixth dam constructed.
"If that project would have been in place today that could have mitigated or completely avoided the problems that we have," said MID Assistant General Manager Ted Selb. "The projects that we do have in place worked perfectly."

These people have only one speed: blaming another level of government for their own version of planning, which is to violate the laws of all superior jurisdictions as long as they can get away with it. Yet these same local officials are always lobbying Congress for more, more, and more infrastructure so that they and their friends can make big boodle on more and more growth. You could get the impression that they felt entitled, although they all have the dimmest views of entitlement. But when they don't get exactly what they want, they stamp their petty feet. Local leadership is really quite bewildering from a public point of view. I guess we're just suckers for a good comedy show.

Over the past 60 years the Army Corps of Engineers has built five flood retention projects surrounding the city. They include dams on Owens Creek, Burns Creek, Mariposa Creek and Bear Creek, and a reservoir near the former Castle Air Force Base.
Those dams stay dry for most of the year, said Selb. Their sole purpose is to intercept and store water during "high runoff events" and meter the water out through a pipe.
The only major stream without a dam is Black Rascal Creek.

Aha! Learn well, Merced. If the flooding gets worse – and the fabrications in this story suggests at least some local officials believe there is a strong likelihood it will – blame it on the Army Corps of Engineers, the very agency that has said, in essence, the University of California built the first phase of its Merced campus at its own risk because it did not even apply for the Clean Water Act permit required, and administrated by the Army Corps of Engineers, which ought to know, you see.

The Corps of Engineers has been in the process of building a flood control project for Black Rascal Creek since the early 1980s, but the project has never made it past the design phase, said Supervisor Deidre Kelsey.
The reservoir could have prevented the flooding this week, said Kelsey, as well as the serious floods in 1997 and 1998.
"Unfortunately the federal government never finished this series of water control projects and left the locals holding the bag," said Kelsey.
Called the Haystack Reservoir, the reservoir was slated to be built on land now set aside as part of the University of California, Merced's environmental mitigation.

Oh my! Two unpleasant sounds: fingernails scratching at cliff face on the way down; and the scratching of reckless rewrites of history. Kelsey’s only problem with UC Merced was that her husband’s ranch wasn’t included in the area suitable for getting fat conservation easements from the state because state officials evidently felt that vernal pools did not frequently occur amongst the Snelling dredge tailings. Since the famous university was in its planning stages, Kelsey’s fundamental political contribution to the massive speculative growth surrounding the campus has been to tell a group of influential farm leaders anything and everything that would keep them from looking at what was happening to Merced County agriculture – in the name of preserving Merced County agriculture.

She’s very good at this kind of double-talk and is only rarely caught in an out-and-out lie. But now local officials for the first time are facing the consequences of their catastrophic speculative growth boom in a valley, which among its other indubitable charms, on occasion floods. That’s where the rich agricultural soil comes from.

Now, listen to truly vintage One Merced Whine, delivered by a talented local lark, who, frequently leads One Merced Whine delegations to choir tours to Sacramento and Washington to lobby the very agencies that here she treats here with her county manners.

Now local officials are starting from scratch with an alternate project, said Kelsey, with $200,000 scraped together by Congressman Dennis Cardoza.
The alternative project could divert water from Black Rascal Creek and Bear Creek, carry it around Merced, then move it toward the grassland south of Merced where the water could flow back into the Merced and San Joaquin rivers.
One possible source of funding could be the governor's bond initiative, said Kelsey.
With at least 10 agencies involved in the next phase of the project, it could take years for the flood control system to be built, said Kelsey.
Working with federal government has been a slow and bureaucratic process, said Kelsey, who first met with the Corps of Engineers about the Haystack Reservoir in 1995.
Kelsey said she's seen seven engineers cycle through the project over the course of 10 years. It took 10 years of negotiations to install a new head gate on Edendale Creek, said Kelsey.
"I'm trying to work on it, but it's been very frustrating, because it's an inevitable situation that we'll flood again," said Kelsey. "But we're not prepared because we don't have jurisdiction over waters of the United States and we need cooperation from the federal government as well as numerous departments at the state level."

She just don’t have jurisdiction over the waters of the United States. If she just had that, everything would go better, particularly out in Snelling where ground water associated with Kelsey aggregate mining just keeps rising to the surface and flooding the neighbors.

Columns in both the Sacramento Bee and the Los Angeles Times this morning hit another, more owlish note, however, on behalf of the state’s taxpayers, presently on the hook for bailing out local jurisdictions that just don’t have authority over flooding surface waters of the United States.

Dan Walters, the Bee columnist, who lives in Roseville where creeks rise as rapidly as subdivisions sprawl, put it bluntly:

If locals want land-use power, they should share flood liability
Sacramento Bee – 4/5/06
By Dan Walters, Sac Bee columnist
http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/story/14239018p-15059259c.html

Everyone knows that it's risky to build large tracts of homes beside flood-prone rivers, but developers and local governments, especially in the fast-growing Sacramento area, are continuing to do it with little regard for the potential consequences - because financially and legally, they are protected from the consequences.
As long as the subdivisions comply with very outdated federal floodplain maps, or the promoters have obtained some sort of exemption from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, there are no restrictions or flood insurance requirements. And under a recent state appellate court decision, if a levee fails and nearby homes are flooded, the state of California is liable, not developers or the local governments that approve the housing plans.
That court decision, involving a 1986 levee break in Yuba County that cost the state nearly a half-billion dollars, put the bifurcation of authority and responsibility in sharp focus. Local governments can approve all the housing they want next to levees in full knowledge that the state alone is liable for any flood damage, even though the state has no authority over development decisions. ...

Editorial: Before the levees break
Los Angeles Times – 4/5/06
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-ed-flood05apr05,1,3169028.story?coll=la-news-comment

IMAGES OF THE LINGERING devastation in New Orleans should be enough to persuade anyone not to bet the safety of their house or business on aging levees.
But Assemblyman Dave Jones (D-Sacramento) doesn't want to rely on voluntary efforts in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river valleys. His bill, AB 1898, would require all property owners in those watersheds to buy federal flood insurance if they faced at least a 1-in-200-years chance of flooding.
That mandate goes far beyond the current requirement, which applies only to those who obtain a mortgage or home-equity loan in areas with at least a 1-in-100-year risk.
The 1,600 miles of levees in the Central Valley are aging and vulnerable, and the low-lying area they protect — from Sacramento to the Bay Delta — floods with alarming frequency. Just Tuesday, levees broke in Merced and south of Sacramento, flooding a trailer park and fields.
It's not clear how many homes and businesses in the area are insured, but Jones offers a disturbing snapshot of North Natomas, a booming Sacramento district ringed by rivers. According to Jones, only 16% of the properties there have flood insurance.
The point isn't simply to protect property owners against their own shortsightedness. It's to protect taxpayers who'll probably have to bail them out when the floods inevitably come. The insurance requirement not only would create a pool of federal money for repairs but would prod developers to raise buildings above ground level and choose safer plots.
More important, the bill asks property owners to shoulder some of the cost and risk of living in an area that state and federal taxpayers are being asked to spend billions to protect. On Monday, the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee added $22.3 million for California levee projects to an emergency funding bill. Meanwhile, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who declared a state of emergency Feb. 24 over the levees, has called for at least $2.5 billion for upgrades.
The levees do more than protect property owners' investments; they help safeguard critical supplies of drinking water for the whole state. And they have enabled a boom in developments such as North Natomas, where houses have been built on top of what used to be flood-prone farms and wetlands...

To return to the fable told in the final paragraph Merced Sun-Star,

It will also take cooperation at the local level, said MID officials. There is no flood control agency in eastern Merced County, said Selb, and the response to this week's flooding was a coordinated effort involving MID, the county, and the city.
"MID is not a flood control agency, we're an irrigation district," said Selb. "Because of our expertise and because of our equipment, we collaborate and work closely with the county."

Public documents suggest another story. The Merced Sun-Star, which never reads public documents, could not, of course, have been expected to know.

In addition to providing irrigation water the District also uses its existing irrigation distribution system for local flood control by routing local foothills runoff and stream flood waters away from populated areas. The district formed the Merced Irrigation District Drainage District #1 in 1994. At the end of 2004, there were approximately 11,000 residential, commercial, industrial and governmental parcels located primarily within the urban area of the District that received drainage and flood protection service.

Merced Irrigation District audited financial statements
www.mercedid.org/_images/2004_annual_report.pdf –

Exert authority!

Badlands suggests that if the local officials want to do something really useful, having caused to much absorbent pasture uphill to be paved over and so many more homes to be built so close to unruly creeks, they ought to follow the great Persian king, Xerxes, and go out to Black Rascal Creek with whips and lash it, while supervisors Kelsey and Crookham curse it back into its banks. Then do the same with any other creek that dares rise in Merced, home of the first, environmentally friendly, UC campus of the 21st century, and all its attendant subdivisions – all of it built in violation of state and federal environmental law.

Meanwhile, the rest of us will stay home and dry and contemplate why environmental laws were ever written at all. Could at least some of the motive behind these despised acts have been the protection of life and property against rampaging local officials, development corporations, greedy large landowners, realtors and lending institutions, as well as floods?

Bill Hatch

The Republican race between Pete McCloskey, R-Lodi, and RichPAC Pombo, Buffalo Slayer-Tracy, is worth a great deal more attention than it is getting. When rightwing flaks were babbling on about "progressive Republicans" when they were busy replacing Gray Davis with the Hun, I went on an interesting search one day in the state Capitol. Accompanied by another middle-aged friend, both of tracing our California Republican roots back to great-grandfathers (ripped up in our generation by Nixon of Southern California) we seached among the pictures of California governors for a long time before we found Hiram Johnson stuck in a side alcove far, far from public view.

A few years later, the living article has showed up for real in Lodi, to remind us all of what political courage has been and could be again if, of course, if we have the stomach to take it back from the special interests and send one half of the Pomboza back to the turkey farm from which it came.

Bill Hatch
------------------------

Former Rep. Paul “Pete” McCloskey, Lodi
Biography
http://www.petemccloskey.com./

"Pete McCloskey is] the best thing that could happen for the district, the state, the nation and possibly the Republican Party" – LA Times (1/25/06)

Why Retire Pombo?

• Pombo has been named by non-partisan watchdog groups as:

"One of the 13 most corrupt members of Congress"-COMMITTEE FOR RESPONSIBILITY AND ETHICS IN WASHINGTON (CREW)

"One of the first six inductees to the Congressional Hall of Shame" - PUBLIC CITIZEN

• Richard Pombo is among the top recipients of money from admitted felon and former lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his associates. (Source: Time)

• Pombo owes his chairmanship of the House Resources Committee to indicted former majority leader Tom DeLay. Pombo, who votes in lockstep with DeLay 92% of the time, actively tried to change House Ethics Rules to protect DeLay (House Resolution 5) and donated thousands of dollars to the DeLay legal defense fund.

• Pombo used his official powers to protect a large donor, Charles Hurwitz, thwarting a Federal investigation in what federal regulators called, "a seamy abuse of the legislative process." (Source: LA Times 1/8/06)

• At a time when the average yearly income in San Joaquin County is $20,682, Pombo has funneled over half-a-million dollars in campaign funds to his wife and brother. As Chairman of the House Resources Committee (which oversees Native American affairs), Pombo has received over $500,000 in donations from Indian tribes, many with ties to Abramoff.

• He has joined DeLay in voting to absolve the manufacturers of the toxic gasoline additive MTBE from any responsibility for cleaning up an estimated $20 billion worth of polluted water in Northern California -water that our entire state needs for agriculture and economic growth.

• Pombo, a member of the congressional leadership, has helped move us from budget surpluses in 2000 to trillion-dollar deficits.

• Pombo, who never served in the military, claims to support our troops but has repeatedly voted against VA and health care benefits for returning veterans, including prosthesis research for amputees (House Resolutions 1815, 2528, 1268, 27, HconRes 95 and HJRes 107).

• Though his district has higher than national average gas prices, Pombo supported giving $8.6 billion in tax subsidies to oil and gas companies (House Resolution 6). It's no surprise that Pombo's largest political donations come from these same companies.

Service to his Country

Pete McCloskey enlisted in the US Navy V-5 program at the age of 17 in the spring of 1945 and was discharged as a Seaman First Class in December, 1946. He went through the Marine Corps Platoon Leaders program in 1948 and was called to duty in 1950 for the Korean War. As a rifle platoon leader, he was awarded the Navy Cross, Silver Star and two Purple Hearts. As a 38-year-old Marine Reserve Lieutenant Colonel in 1965, he volunteered for active service in Viet Nam.

His Navy Cross citation reads: "For extraordinary heroism as commander of a rifle platoon in Company C, First Battalion, Fifth Marines, First Marine Division, in action against enemy aggressor forces in Korea on 29 May 1951. Assigned the difficult mission of assaulting a strongly defended enemy hill position from the flank, Second Lieutenant McCloskey skillfully lead his platoon through a vicious hail of automatic weapons, small arms and grenade fire into the heart of the hostile position.

Although painfully wounded in the initial charge, he resolutely continued to spearhead the assault, coolly directing and encouraging his men and personally moving into the enemy-held bunkers to seek out and destroy their occupants.

By his daring initiative, aggressive determination and inspiring leadership he was responsible for the success of the attack which left 40 of the enemy dead and 22 captured, and for the seizing of a strategic position from a numerically hostile force."

McCloskey's Silver Star Citation Reads:

"Second Lieutenant McCloskey, acting as a platoon leader, was assigned the mission of giving infantry support to a tank patrol in the vicinity of Inje. At about 2100, while the patrol was moving up an open valley, it was subjected to an intense artillery and mortar barrage, wounding eight men, two of them corpsmen. Directing the remainder of his platoon to cover, he crawled through the hail of fire and began to administer first aid to the most seriously wounded. When he himself received a severe wound in the leg, he disregarded the intense pain and loss of blood and continued to treat the casualties. When a stretcher party was able to reach the area, he directed the evacuation of the casualties and returned to his platoon. Only upon the direct order of his battalion commander and senior medical officer did he allow himself to be evacuated for treatment. Second Lieutenant McCloskey's alert actions and courageous devotion to duty undoubtedly saved the lives of four critically wounded comrades."

McCloskey’s citation given to him with the Navy Cross

For extraordinary heroism as commander of a rifle platoon in Company C, First Battalion, Fifth Marines, First Marine Division, in action against enemy aggressor forces in Korea on 29 May l951. Assigned the difficult mission of assaulting a strongly defended enemy hill position from the flank, Second Lieutenant McCloskey skillfully lead his platoon through a vicious hail of automatic weapons, small arms and grenade fire into the heart of the hostile position.

Although painfully wounded in the initial charge, he resolutely continued to spearhead the assault, coolly directing and encouraging his men and personally moving into the enemy held bunkers to seek out and destroy their occupants.

By his daring initiative, aggressive determination and inspiring leadership he was responsible for the success of the attack which left 40 of the enemy dead and 22 captured, and for seizing of a stragtegy position from a numerically superior hostile force.

Service to His Community

Mr. McCloskey, an attorney specializing in land use and condemnation, was first admitted to practice in 1953. After serving as a Deputy District Attorney in Alameda County, California, he opened his own law office in 1955 and later founded the firm of McCloskey, Wilson & Mosher which, after his election to Congress in 1967, evolved into the present Palo Alto firm of Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati. This firm, with over 600 lawyers, is now the largest law firm in California.

Mr. McCloskey has tried over 50 condemnation jury trials, and in the landmark case of Contra Costa Water District v. Kent (Contra Costa County) obtained a verdict of $9.3 million, over 3-1/2 times the condemnor’s offer. The verdict was upheld on appeal.

Mr. McCloskey has served as President of the Palo Alto Bar Association, Trustee of the Santa Clara County Bar Association and President of the Conference of Barristers of the State Bar of California. He has taught Legal Ethics and Political Science at both at Stanford and Santa Clara Universities. He has served as a Trustee for the Monterey Institute of International Studies, the Population Action Institute, and the U.S. Marine Corps Academy and as President of the Council for the National Interest, an organization advocating a balanced U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Mr. McCloskey was elected to the House of Representatives in a special election in 1967 and was re-elected seven times representing the San Francisco Peninsula area. He initiated the effort to repeal the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1969, and made the first House speech suggesting the impeachment of Richard Nixon for obstruction of justice in June, 1973. He played a leading role in enacting the Capital Gains Tax Reduction Act in 1977 and in abolishing the Renegotiation Board in 1978, the first government agency abolished in 22 years. He served six years as Congressional Delegate to the International Whaling Conference, and as Congressional Advisor to the Law of the Sea Treaty Delegation. He was the Republican Co-Chairman of the first Earth Day in 1970, and ran for the Presidency in 1972, challenging President Nixon's Viet Nam War policy, and receiving one delegate to the Republican National Convention.

Mr. McCloskey was appointed by President Bush to the Board of Directors of the U.S. Commission on National and Community Service in 1991, and served as the first Chairman of the Board until the inauguration of President Clinton in 1993.

He has written four books: Guide to Professional Conduct for New Practitioners, California State Bar (1961); The U.S. Constitution, BRL (1961); Truth and Untruth, Simon & Shuster (1971); and The Taking of Hill 610, Eaglet Books, (1992).

Deep Roots in the Central Valley

Pete McCloskey’s great grandfather, John Henry McCloskey was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1837. He was orphaned in the great potato famine, and at the age of 8 put on a boat for America in Galway by two surviving uncles. After working as a carpenter’s apprentice in New Orleans he sailed for San Francisco, arriving in 1853. He worked as a carpenter in Yreka and in the 1870s took up farming in Merced County. His son, Henry Harrison McCloskey, was born in 1858. The Merced Star mentions in 1890 that John Henry and Henry were two of the twelve members then serving on Merced County’s Republican Central Committee.

Henry Harrison McCloskey moved to San Francisco in 1895 and practiced law there for many years, representing among other clients the ill-fated Ocean Shore Railroad and the Schilling Salt Company.

Henry’s son, Paul N. McCloskey, Sr. was born in Merced in 1890, and attended Lowell High School in San Francisco. He attended Stanford University and Law School and practiced law in Southern California until 1942, when after Pearl Harbor, at the age of 52, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He made only one political speech in his life, at Snelling in Merced County where he stated he had “been born a Republican and would live and die a Republican.” He died in 1974. His son Paul N. McCloskey, Jr. was born in San Bernardino County in 1927, registered as a Republican in 1948 and was admitted to the practice of law in 1953.

The junior McCloskey’s maternal grandfather, Samuel McNabb was born in Iowa, and moved to San Bernardino County in the late 1800s where he served successively as Deputy Sheriff, Mayor of San Bernardino and U.S. Attorney for Southern California. Mr. McNabb was Captain of the San Bernardino National Guard Company which was sent to San Francisco in 1906 to control rioting after the Great Earthquake. His Guard company was reported to have shot 18 looters before returning to San Bernardino several weeks later.

Mr. McCloskey’s son, Peter, worked as a Deputy District Attorney in Santa Clara County, and in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. He is presently one of the U.S. prosecutors at The World Court at The Hague. Mr. McCloskey’s other son, John, works on the family farm at Rumsey, Yolo County, California.
---------------------

Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Tracy
Biography
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pombo

Portuguese heritage

Pombo is a descendant of Portuguese immigrants. He has hosted prominent visitors of Portugal to the United States and is the co-founder of the Portuguese Caucus, a coalition of Members of Congress who promote positive Portuguese-American relations.

The Portuguese government bestowed Pombo with the Grand Order of Infante D. Henrique, Portugal's highest civilian honor, in recognition of his efforts to improve Portuguese-American relations.

Early life and political career

Pombo was born in Tracy, California; just outside Stockton.

Pombo served as a Councilmember for the City of Tracy from 1990-1992. In 1992 he was elected to Congress to replace outgoing Republican Congressman Norman D. Shumway.

With a Republican seat open in a strongly Republican district, Pombo faced several candidates in the Republican primary in 1992. His strongest opponent in the Republican primary was moderate-Republican Sandra Smoley. Smoley was serving at that time as a State Assemblywoman. The more conservative-leaning Richard Pombo was able to defeat Smoley at the primary. Richard Pombo was elected during the general election of 1992, defeating Democrat Patti Garamendi (wife of current California Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi). Pombo was asssisted greatly by his family's name recognition in the Central Valley. His late uncle Ernie Pombo's real estate and land development firm, Pombo Real Estate, made the Pombo family the largest land owner in the 11th district.

Just two years later the Republican revolution occurred whereby the Republicans seized control of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years under Newt Gringrich's Contract with America. Pombo was a signatory participant in the Contract with America.

Private property rights sparks interest in politics

Richard Pombo is especially known for his defense of private property rights. This was spurred by the Southern Pacific Railroad's abandonment of the Altamont Pass route through Tracy, California. Richard Pombo owned land adjacent to the abandoned railroad line. Pombo argued that the abandoned easement should legally revert to the adjacent property owners (such as himself) rather than to the local park district. He argued that as the easement was granted based on a promise that the land would be used for railroad purposes only, that the easements ended entirely when they were abandoned. Pombo's case resulted in Congress passing the Rails to Trails Act.

Pombo has written a book with Joseph Farah about private property issues, entitled This Land Is Our Land: How to End the War on Private Property. Farah is currently founder of WorldNetDaily and headed the Western Journalism Center linked to the Arkansas Project.

Pombo was a co-founder of the San Joaquin County Citizen’s Land Alliance. This organization was a group of farmers and other landowners who advocate private property rights and oppose government encroachment on these rights.

Ranching & Politics

Richard Pombo is a rancher, continuing to own a 500 acre ranch near Tracy and returning to it every week. Closely related to Pombo's background are his House committee assignments. Pombo is presently serving as powerful Chairman of the House Resources Committee. The committee has oversight and sets policy on matters involving natural resources, Indian Country and Indian gaming. He is also a member of the House Agriculture Committee.

Congressman Pombo and his political action committee RICH PAC[1] are among a dozen leaders in the House of Representatives reportedly under investigation as part of the corruption and influence pedalling scandal centered around confessed millionaire lobbyist Jack Abramoff and policy issues including Indian gaming. Fundraisers organized by Indian gaming interests and tied to the 2005 MLB All-Star Game are among those activities under scrutiny.[2]

Pombo is also a co-Chair of the House Energy Action Team (HEAT). This team's goal is to find alternative energy solutions. Pombo's home town of Tracy, California has a large wind farm on Altamont Pass.

Pombo is a member and former Chairman of the Congressional Western Caucus. The Western Caucus is made up of Western State members of Congress concerned about Endangered Species Act reform, water rights, private property rights and other issues affecting the western states. Pombo is anti-environmentalist, supporting drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), as well as proposing legislation to sell roughly a quarter of the land managed by the National Park Service. The legislation was later described by his chief of staff as a "bureaucratic exercise" designed to evaluate the costs of not drilling in ANWR. He has also led an effort to build a multilane freeway (California State Route 130) through the mostly uninhabited Diablo Range to facilitate Bay Area-bound commuting from the greater Tracy, where the congressman and his family own hundreds of acres coveted for housing development. [3] [4]

Corruption and Tom DeLay/Jack Abramoff

On January 8, 2006, the Los Angeles Times reported that Congressmen John T. Doolittle and Richard W. Pombo joined forces with former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas to oppose an investigation by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) into the affairs of Houston millionaire Charles Hurwitz. When the FDIC persisted, Doolittle and Pombo used their power as members of the House Resources Committee to subpoena the agency's confidential records on the case, including details of the evidence FDIC investigators had compiled on Hurwitz, resulting in the termination of the investigation.

The Times alleged that in important aspects, the Hurwitz case followed the pattern of the Abramoff scandal, where politicians use their offices to provide favors for a well-connected individual who returns the favor by donating to the politician's campaigns. However, the Times said, even in Washington, it is rare for Congressmen to block or hinder an ongoing investigation. members of Congress using their offices to do favors for a politically well-connected individual who, in turn, supplies them with campaign funds. The Times also alleged that Pombo helped one of Jack Abramoff's clients, the Mashpee Indians in Massachusetts, gain official recognition as a tribe. In return, Pombo received campaign contributions from both the tribe and Abramoff. [5]

In the 2006 cycle, Abramoff was one of the top donors to his political action committee. (see [6]). Several of Pombo's top five donors are political influence brokers from Detroit, Michigan who mingled gambling with major league baseball when they hosted several $5,000 per person fundraisers for Pombo in their owners box at Comerica Park during the 2005 MLB All-Star Game. News reports indicated contributions from the two day fundraising event would go to RICH Political Action Committee; however, FEC reports filed by RICH PAC show only one such contribution and apparently contributions were diverted to some other entity making it difficult to track who attended and contributed.

As it is, the Ilitch family, owners of the MLB Detroit Tigers and Detroit's MotorCity Casino, are also financial backers of various Indian Tribes including one (Shinnecock Indians) seeking to build an Indian casino in the Hamptons, Long Island, New York. Various issues and tribal disputes involving the Shinnecock were before the House Resources Committee chaired by Pombo just days after the fundraiser (see [7]).

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington released a report in January 2006 naming Pombo as one of the ten most corrupt members of the House of Representatives. [8]

Pombo's staff has attempted to excise critical information regarding his ties to Abramoff from Wikipedia. [9]

Acccording to High Country News, as reported by the Argus, a newspaper in California's East Bay area, this was not just an attempt, but an actual "scrubbing/sanitizing" of his Wiki entry, done during the 2006 Super Bowl weekend.

In March 2006, it was revealed in Environmental Science & Technology that Pombo has been coordinating efforts with Pac/West Communications to weaken the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Pac/West has created the Save Our Species Alliance, an anti-environmental front group that is campaigning for Pombo's bill to change the ESA. [10]

2003 RV trip

In August 2003, Pombo and his family rented an RV and "spent two weeks on vacation, stopping along the way to enjoy ... our national parks." [11]. The 5,000-mile trip included stops in the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Joshua Tree, Sequoia-Kings Canyon and Mount Rushmore, the Badlands and other parks. The $4,935 cost of the rental was charged to the federal government.

When asked in February 2006 about the trip -- rules forbid government-funded travel for personal vacations, but allow lawmakers to bring family members on official trips, Pombo said that he had looked into flying into the parks by commercial air or charters, but found the costs to be excessive, and that after choosing to travel instead by RV, he invited his family along with him. [12]

At Yellowstone, Pombo had a lengthy meeting with the park superintendent, which a spokesman charactizered as non-official. Pombo's visit to the Badlands National Park is in dispute: the secretary to the superintendent said he did not show; a spokesman for Pombo said that Pombo was certain he was there and met with a group of Native American tribal leaders nearby. Reports concerning Pombo's visit to Joshua Tree are also contradictory. The Los Angeles Times was told that Pombo had shown up for his meeting but "they were not there." The Tracy Press was told that Pombo met with the park's acting superintendent.

Officials from Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks did not return calls seeking comment. [13][14]

2006 elections

On January 23, 2006, Pete McCloskey announced at a press conference in Lodi, California, that he will return to the political arena by running against Pombo in the Republican Party's Primary election for California's 11th Congressional district.

Pombo, 45, a six-term lawmaker who heads the House Resources Committee, is considered one of the key lawmakers behind efforts to weaken McCloskey's original 1973 Endangered Species Act.

Pombo is also being challenged by Democrat Steve Filson, an Eagle Scout who served as a fighter pilot in the Navy for 20 years.

Reference
Richard Pombo and Joseph Farah (founder of World Net Daily), This Land is Our Land: How to End the War on Private Property, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1996. ISBN 0-312-14747-3

External links
· official website
· LA Times: "A Donor Who Had Big Allies" Article about corruption and ties to Jack Abramoff.
· Indianz.com: Tribe's backers are Pombo's Donors
· 2006 Candidates for CD-11
· Common Cause: Pombo no 'All-Star' in watchdog group's eyes
· topix.net: Richard Pombo News
· Wall Street Journal article on Pombo's position as "public enemy number 1" for environmental groups
· ABC News: Congressman's donors tied to tribal dispute
· High Country News: Will the Real Mr. Pombo Please Stand Up? (Profile of Richard Pombo)
· Profile in San Diego Union Tribune
· Paul D. Thacker, "Hidden ties: Big environmental changes backed by big industry Lobbyists and industry officials who once pushed for the president’s Healthy Forests legislation now collaborate with Rep. Pombo to alter the Endangered Species Act", Environmental Science & Technology, March 8, 2006.
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