Badlands Journal

Care, writes one of our best environmental journalists and activists, is at the basis of civilization. Yet, here we sit in a valley, one of the world's richest agricultural places, still largely rural, and its leaders spend their boundless energy figuring out how to replicate the mindless slurb to the south and to the north of it for the profits of finance, insurance, real estate, large landholdings and themselves. Although there is no balance left between man and Nature, as the growing number of wildlife species listed as endangered or threatens indicates, there are still wildlife species and habitat in the Valley. It is absolutely pathetic that the only current check to the speculative real estate boom is massive fraud these special interests have practiced here, which now endangers the international credit system.

Care for the Valley as it is, not the fraudulent "leadership" vision of an urban tomorrow, is what we need. Only care has the power to stop and reverse the race to destruction that is now our path here and elsewhere. Care is the only human power strong enough to defeat the system of greed now devouring the valley under empty, grant-grifting slogans like "economic, social and environmental well-being." This is a quite conscious materialist perversion of the more civilized slogan of Valley environmentalists a dozen years ago: "economic, social and environmental justice." A little real justice, unlike an illusion of well-being, is never achieved by consensus with your grave diggers.

Badlands Journal editorial board

Civilisation ends with a shutdown of human concern. Are we there already?

A powerful novel's vision of a dystopian future shines a cold light on the dreadful consequences of our universal apathy

George Monbiot
Tuesday October 30, 2007
The Guardian

A few weeks ago I read what I believe is the most important environmental book ever written. It is not Silent Spring, Small Is Beautiful or even Walden. It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, figures, warnings, predictions or even arguments. Nor does it carry a single dreary sentence, which, sadly, distinguishes it from most environmental literature. It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it will change the way you see the world.

Cormac McCarthy's book The Road considers what would happen if the world lost its biosphere, and the only living creatures were humans, hunting for food among the dead wood and soot. Some years before the action begins, the protagonist hears the last birds passing over, "their half-muted crankings miles above where they circled the earth as senselessly as insects trooping the rim of a bowl". McCarthy makes no claim that this is likely to occur, but merely speculates about the consequences.

All pre-existing social codes soon collapse and are replaced with organised butchery, then chaotic, blundering horror. What else are the survivors to do? The only remaining resource is human. It is hard to see how this could happen during humanity's time on earth, even by means of the nuclear winter McCarthy proposes. But his thought experiment exposes the one terrible fact to which our technological hubris blinds us: our dependence on biological production remains absolute. Civilisation is just a russeting on the skin of the biosphere, never immune from being rubbed against the sleeve of environmental change. Six weeks after finishing The Road, I remain haunted by it.

So when I read the UN's new report on the state of the planet over the weekend, my mind kept snagging on a handful of figures. There were some bright spots - lead has been removed from petrol almost everywhere and sulphur emissions have been reduced in most rich nations - and plenty of gloom. But the issue that stopped me was production.

Crop production has improved over the past 20 years (from 1.8 tonnes per hectare in the 1980s to 2.5 tonnes today), but it has not kept up with population. "World cereal production per person peaked in the 1980s, and has since slowly decreased". There will be roughly 9 billion people by 2050: feeding them and meeting the millennium development goal on hunger [halving the proportion of hungry people] would require a doubling of world food production. Unless we cut waste, overeating, biofuels and the consumption of meat, total demand for cereal crops could rise to three times the current level.

There are two limiting factors. One, mentioned only in passing in the report, is phosphate: it is not clear where future reserves might lie. The more immediate problem is water. "Meeting the millennium development goal on hunger will require doubling of water use by crops by 2050." Where will it come from? "Water scarcity is already acute in many regions, and farming already takes the lion's share of water withdrawn from streams and groundwater." Ten per cent of the world's major rivers no longer reach the sea all year round.

Buried on page 148, I found this statement. "If present trends continue, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity by 2025, and two-thirds of the world population could be subject to water stress." Wastage and deforestation are partly to blame, but the biggest cause of the coming droughts is climate change. Rainfall will decline most in the places in greatest need of water. So how, unless we engineer a sudden decline in carbon emissions, are we going to feed the world? How, in many countries, will we prevent the social collapse that failure will cause?

The stone drops into the pond and a second later it is smooth again. You will turn the page and carry on with your life. Last week we learned that climate change could eliminate half the world's species; that 25 primate species are already slipping into extinction; that biological repositories of carbon are beginning to release it, decades ahead of schedule. But everyone is watching and waiting for everyone else to move. The unspoken universal thought is this: "If it were really so serious, surely someone would do something?"

On Saturday, for some light relief from the UN report (who says that environmentalists don't know how to make whoopee?), I went to a meeting of roads protesters in Birmingham. They had come from all over the country, and between them they were contesting 18 new schemes: a fraction of the road projects the British government is now planning. The improvements to the climate change bill that Hilary Benn, the environment secretary, announced yesterday were welcome. But in every major energy sector - aviation, transport, power generation, house building, coal mining, oil exploration - the government is promoting policies that will increase emissions. How will it make the 60% cut that the bill enforces?

No one knows, but the probable answer is contained in the bill's great get-out clause: carbon trading. If the government can't achieve a 60% cut in the UK, it will pay other countries to do it on our behalf. But trading works only if the total global reduction we are trying to achieve is a small one. To prevent runaway climate change, we must cut the greater part - possibly almost all - of the world's current emissions. Most of the nations with which the UK will trade will have to make major cuts of their own, on top of those they sell to us. Before long we will have to buy our credits from Mars and Jupiter. The only certain means of preventing runaway climate change is to cut emissions here and now.

Who will persuade us to act? However strong the opposition parties' policies appear to be, they cannot be sustained unless the voters move behind them. We won't be prompted by the media. The BBC drops Planet Relief for fear of breaching its impartiality guidelines: heaven forbid that it should come out against mass death. But it broadcasts a programme - Top Gear - that puts a match to its guidelines every week, and now looks about as pertinent as the Black and White Minstrel Show.

The schedules are crammed with shows urging us to travel further, drive faster, build bigger, buy more, yet none of them are deemed to offend the rules, which really means that they don't offend the interests of business or the pampered sensibilities of the Aga class. The media, driven by fear and advertising, are hopelessly biased towards the consumer economy and against the biosphere.

It seems to me that we are already pushing other people ahead of us down The Road. As the biosphere shrinks, McCarthy describes the collapse of the protagonist's core beliefs. I sense that this might be happening already: that a hardening of interests, a shutting down of concern, is taking place among the people of the rich world. If this is true, we do not need to wait for the forests to burn or food supplies to shrivel before we decide that civilisation is in trouble.
Monbiot.com

Jeffrey St. Clair is in the midst of writing a series of environmental, political and historical reflections from campsites along the Colorado River during a raft trip. They are published on CounterPunch.com (links cited below).

This series is essential reading for Californians interested in water politics and history because what is happening on the Colorado River now has a direct bearing on what is happening in the San Joaquin Delta. The combination of drought on the Colorado Plateau, growth of its region's cities and the diminished allotment of Colorado River water flowing into Southern California has direct impact on the extinction of the Delta Smelt and the Hun our Governor's campaign for a peripheral canal and two new dams.

St. Clair is a prolific writer on the environment, mainly in the West as far as I have read, although his Grand Theft Pentagon is well worth reading, too. His experience goes back to working with David Brower of the Sierra Club and Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire, The Monkey Wrench Gang). In articles like "The War Club Torquemadas in Birkenstocks," (www.counterpunch.org/stclair1212.html), St. Clair described in familiar detail the ethically disadvantaged policies of state and national environmental corporations (non-profit, of course) and he recently noted that war, as in Iraq, is the worst environmental catastrophe, particularly when depleted uranium is involved (http://www.counterpunch.com/stclair10252007.html). St. Clair understands the environment of the West, he understands the politics behind it and he maintains an old Western journalistic tradition by telling it as it is from a real point of view.

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

October 26, 2007
The Dam That Isn't There
Going Down on the Rocks in Dinosaur
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
http://www.counterpunch.com/stclair10272007.html
(this article provides links to the previous parts of the series)

Part One: Dams, Oil and Whitewater.
Part Two: Through the Gates of Lodore.
Part Three: At Disaster Falls.
Part Four: A Half Mile of Hell.
Part Five: Greetings from Echo Park.
Part Six: The Dam That Isn't There

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book is End Times: the Death of the Fourth Estate, co-written with Alexander Cockburn. This essay will appear in Born Under a Bad Sky, to be published in December. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net.

The Valley has always been a hard place, no doubt of that. Merced County probably hasn't been better than the fifth hungriest county in the state at the best of times in the last decade (given poverty statistics on California counties), but now, in the wake of the greatest building boom in its history, it ranks as the third hungriest county in the state and its foreclosure rate is tops in the nation. One in ten go to bed hungry and one in 68 are in some stage of home foreclosure.

For shame -- if only the decision makers in Merced County had any shame. But in the county, for a period of nearly 15 years, decision makers have paid no attention to anything but the arrival of UC Merced and the residential development it induced. The finance, insurance and real estate special interests behind local landowners, developers and the campus employed legions of propagandists to confuse the Merced public to the extent that today, it cannot connect three dots a millimeter apart: UC Merced=speculative housing boom=concealment of chronic poverty. Now,that UC development didn't pan out to universal rising of all ships, the news of chronic poverty is back along with the big hand out to the state and federal government. It's just the latest version of the Great Valley Whine. But it would have been better if all the prominent Valley plutocrats who donated to UC Merced for the magnificent Blue and Gold Future had instead devoted their excess wealth to alleviating the Present Poverty. This is particularly true in the case of some of our wealthiest citizens, who make so much of their money off government subsidies, like Gallo Farming Co., which hauled down $855,000 in federal subsidies between 2003-2005 with a reported annual income of around $50 million from the largest dairy operation in the US. How much of the $996,000 subsidy over those years to the Nickel Family LLC state Senate candidate Wiley Nickel use for that dismal excuse for a campaign against the incumbent in 2006? Whatever that ridiculous excuse for a political campaign cost, it would have been better spent on school lunch programs.

At the risk of stalling the flow of invective, the editorial board thought at this point it might be interesting to take a trip down UC Bobcatflak Memory Lane to get a better look at the real leaders who jerk the chains of elected officials in Merced and other counties in the San Joaquin Valley. Although UC Merced now chooses to keep the membership of its foundation board of trustees concealed from the public, they were appointed with great fanfare and pride. It is a rare gathering of the wise Valley leaders, many of whom personally profited from inside information on the UCM campus location in the speculative real estate boom centered in the north San Joaquin Valley. In fact, UC Merced could be described as long-term blarney and short-term land boondoggle. These wise leaders of finance, insurance and real estate are responsible for the foreclosure rate in Merced County of one in 68 households and for moving the county from fifth to third place in the poverty/hunger scale statewide. Although space does not permit discussion the ironies of any particular notable, Valley people will get some dark, retrospective chuckles out of the list. UC Merced should have adopted a Rattle Snake as its mascot. The time is Spring, 2000. Carol Tomlinson-Keasey, the Cowgirl Chancellor, is in full cry:
(see Herself in full cowgirl regalia at http://www.ucmerced.edu/news_articles/09302003_uc_merced_board_of.asp)

March 17, 2000

CONTACT: Ron Goble, Interim Communications Director, University of California, Merced, (209) 724-4400 or (559) 734-9046, ronald.goble@ucop.edu

UC Merced introduces foundation board of trustees
http://www.ucinthevalley.org/articles/2000/march1700.htm
MERCED -- University of California, Merced Chancellor Carol Tomlinson-Keasey has unveiled the university's 82-member Foundation Board of Trustees composed of some of the most prominent individuals in the San Joaquin Valley and beyond.

The founding UCM Board of Trustees will meet in an advisory capacity and offer counsel and direction to Chancellor Tomlinson-Keasey and her Vice Chancellors.

"Our Trustees are some of the most respected and highest profile corporate and professional leaders representing such vital valley interests as agriculture, oil, technology, medicine, law, education and science," said Tomlinson-Keasey. "We are overwhelmed that so many San Joaquin Valley and statewide leaders have chosen to join the UC Merced family. Their enlightened and insightful advice will be invaluable to me and help assure the success of the new campus."

Chancellor Tomlinson-Keasey explained: "Initially, we were contemplating a much smaller board of trustees. However, when we realized the interest of Central Valley leaders and the needs of the new campus, we thought we should start with a full complement of trustees. Thus, the UC Merced founding board will be the size and status of other UC campus boards."

The blue-ribbon board consists of several Silicon Valley executives from such companies as Lucent Technologies and Sun Microsystems. Several current and former members of the UC Board of Regents included in the UC Merced Board of Trustees are current UC Regent chairman, John Davies, former chairs Leo Kolligian, Meredith Khachigian and Roy Brophy, current Regent Odessa Johnson, former Regents Carol Chandler and Ralph Ochoa. In addition, UC President Richard C. Atkinson, and Emeritus Presidents David Gardner and Jack Peltason are members of the new board.

Tomlinson-Keasey noted that several board members were valley natives, but now reside elsewhere in California, such as former Olympic decathlon champion Rafer Johnson, actor/producer Mike Connors and former U.S. Congressman Tony Coelho.

The majority of the UCM Trustees, approximately 50, are CEOs of their corporations or organizations. All are prominent, but many have national and international prominence such as Robert Gallo of E&J Gallo Winery in Modesto, developer Fritz Grupe of Stockton, John Harris of Harris Ranch in Coalinga, President Eugene Voiland of Aera Energy in Bakersfield, and William Lyons Sr., agriculture leader from the Modesto area.

The first meeting of the new board will be held March 22 at the County Bank in Merced. The board is representative in size and structure to other UC campus boards which have traditionally taken years to put in place, said Tomlinson-Keasey.

The roster of all members of the board, their titles, affiliations and locations are:

Chuck Ahlem, Partner, Hilmar Cheese Company, Hilmar;

Richard C. Atkinson, President, University of California, Oakland;

Joseph Barkett, MD, Chairman of the Board, Sunset Corp., Acampa;

Dr. Kelly F. Blanton, Founder and Chairman, Epylon.com Corp., San Francisco;

Robert Bliss, Senior Vice President; NEC/BCS (West), Inc., Van Nuys;

Calvin Bright, President and Chairman, Bright Development, Modesto;

Roy Brophy, Former Chairman, UC Board of Regents, Fair Oaks;

Jim Burke, chairman, Jim Burke Ford, Bakersfield;

Bob Carpenter, President, Leap, Carpenter, Kemps, Merced;

Carl Cavaiani, President, Santa Fe Nut Company, Ballico;

Carol Chandler, California Women for Agriculture, Chandler Farms, Selma

Tony Coelho, Chairman, C/O Gore 2000, Washington, D.C.;

H.A. "Gus" Collin, Chairman, Sunsweet Growers, Inc., Yuba City;

J.F. Collins, President, J.F. Collins Co., Inc., Merced;

Mike Connors, Actor/Producer, Encino;

Roger Coover, President and Publisher, The Stockton Record, Stockton;

Dean Cortopassi, President/CEO, Santomo, Inc., Stockton;

Bert Crane Sr., President, Bert Crane Ranches, Merced;

Jim Cunningham, owner, Cunningham Ranch, LeGrand;

Frank Damrell Jr., Judge, United States District Court, Sacramento;

John Davies, Attorney-at-Law, Allen Matkins, Leck, Gamble & Mallory, San Diego;

Rayburn Dezember, Bank Board of Chairman, Bakersfield;

Diana Dooley, Attorney at Law, Paden & Dooley, Visalia;

James Duarte, President, Duarte Nursery, Inc., Hughson

Ben Duran, President, Merced College, Merced;

John Evans, Chairman of the Board, Evans Communications, Turlock;

Ted Falasco, President, Central Valley Concrete, Los Banos;

Robert Foy, Chairman of the Board, California Water Service Company, Stockton;

Robert Gallo, President, E&J Gallo Winery, Modesto;

John Garamendi, Yucaipa Company, Washington, D.C.;

David Gardner, President Emeritus, University of California, San Mateo;

Lewis Geyser, President, Destination Villages, Santa Barbara;

Price Giffen, President, Giffen Company, Fresno;

Mark Grewal, Vice President and Director, Boswell Company, Corcoran;

Fritz Grupe, Chairman/CEO, Grupe Company, Stockton

Ann Gutcher, Retired 1/28/00, Kern County Board of Trade, Bakersfield;

John Harris, President, Harris Farms and Harris Inns, Coalinga;

Joe Hartley, Director, Global Technology, Sun Microsystems, Palo Alto;

Daryl Hatano, Vice President, Public Policy, Semiconductor Industry Association, San Jose;

Tom Hawker, President/CEO, County Bank, Merced;

Odessa Johnson, Modesto Junior College, Modesto;

Rafer Johnson, Chairman, Special Olympics, Culver City;

Art Kamangar, Kamangar Ranches, Merced;

Edward Kashian, Chairman, Lance Kashian & Company, Fresno;

George Kelley, founder, Stevinson Ranch, Stevinson;

Meredith Khachigian, Former Chairman, UC Board of Regents, San Clemente;

Dorothy Kolligian, Civic Leader, Fresno;

Leo Kolligian, Former Chairman, UC Board of Regents, Fresno;

Joe Levy, Chairman of the Board, Gottschalks, Inc., Fresno;

Paul Lo, Attorney at Law, Allen Polgar, Proietti & Fagalde, Merced

Robert Luster, President/CEO, Luster Group, Inc., San Francisco;

William Lyons, Sr., President, Lyons Investments and Mapes Ranch, Modesto;

George Martin, Attorney at Law and Civic Leader, Borton, Pettini & Conron, Bakersfield;

Harold Meek, President, Three Way Chevrolet, Bakersfield;

Ginger Moorhouse, Publisher and Chairman of the Board, The Bakersfield Californian, Bakersfield;

Tapan Munroe, President, Munroe Consulting, Inc., Moraga;

John Myers, Attorney at Law and Rancher, Beverly Hills;

Kate Nyegaard, Civic Leader, Board of Directors George Lucas Foundation, Modesto;

Marilyn Ohanian, Psychologist & Civic Leader, State of California, Fresno

Ralph Ochoa, President, Ochoa & Sillas, Sacramento;

Richard Otter, Senior Vice President, Salomon Smith Barney, San Francisco;

Ashit Padwal, Director, Global Public Affairs, Lucent Technologies, Fremont;

Jack Peltason, President Emeritus, University of California, The Donald L. Bren Foundation, Newport Beach;

Samuel T. Reeves, President, Pinnacle Trading Inc., Fresno;

Curtis A. Riggs, President, VIA Adventures, Merced;

Kenneth Robbins, Attorney at Law, Mason, Robbins, Gnass & Browning, Merced;

Guillermo Rodriguez Jr., Assistant to the President, PG&E, San Francisco;

Fred Ruiz, Chairman of the Board, Ruiz Foods, Dinuba

Thomas Smith, President, CALCOT, Bakersfield;

Edward Spaulding, Director of Government and Public Affairs, The Chevron Companies, Bakersfield;

Jerry Stanners, President, Stanners Consulting, Bakersfield;

Timothy Steele, Vice President, Siemens Information and Communications Networks, Inc., Santa Clara;

Cleveland Stockton, Attorney at Law, Stockton & Sadler, Modesto;

Gerald Tahajian, Attorney at Law, Gerald Lee Tahajian, Inc., Fresno;

Ann Veneman, Attorney at Law, Sacramento;

E.J. (Gene) Voiland, President/CEO, Aera Energy LLC, Bakersfield;

Daniel Whitehurst, President, Farewell, Inc. Fresno;

Carol Whiteside, President, Great Valley Center, Modesto;

Roger Wood, Vice President, J.R. Wood, Inc., Atwater;

O. James Woodward III, Attorney at Law and Civic Leader, Fresno;

Stewart Woolf, President, Los Gatos Tomato, Inc., Huron;

Michael Zagaris, President, Zagaris Companies, Modesto.

The Badlands Journal editorial board, focused on social, economic and environmental justice, is frequently challenged in sneering tones by elected officials and their staffs to provide positive solutions to the questions it raises. Numerous warnings have appeared through the years on this site. None were heeded by the decision makers and certainly none by the puppetmasters behind the elected officials. In fact, decision makers are more hostile than ever. Presumably, that is their method of sublimating shame. They are human, they must see what is happening, but shame is an inconvenient emotion in the heart of American leaders at any level of government.

The litany: five of the seven Merced City Council are realtors; three of the five county supervisors are large landowners (one representing some of the nation's top recipients of farm subsidies), a fourth (failed dairyman) represents farmer/landowners (brother-in-law of the county farm bureau executive director and future president of California Women for Agriculture), and the fifth represents Atwater realtors (whose greed belies their size). We don't have the data on the Atwater and Livingston councils. The state senator is from Salinas and the assemblywoman is from Stockton (both with Livingston addresses at the moment). On behalf of UC Merced, finance, insurance and real estate special interests, landowners and members of his family and friends, the congressman led three attacks on the federal Endangered Species Act in his short, disgraceful term of office, most of it spent in former Rep. RichPAC Pombo's back pocket. These days, he seems to be leading unsuccessful attempts to subsidize fruit and nut growers, no doubt attempting to forestall the consequences of massive overproduction of almonds and the little problem with the Honey Bee.

For shame. These leaders, backed by the culture of Fat City easy virtue provided by the UC/Great Valley Center, spent 15 years focused madly on future residents of Merced, ignoring those who lived here now. They conducted a massive propaganda campaign against the Present Tense, which fed effortlessly into a speculative housing bubble that, in its aftermath, has caused a global credit crisis. It is a record of so nearly perfect social, economic and environmental injustice that it recalls a comment:

How can one defend a system that creates wealth by making the majority poor?
– Henry C. K. Liu (quoted by Mike Whitney) in Market Oracle:
http://marketoracle.co.uk/Article2481.html

It has taken a world credit crisis to slow our leaders down. They aren't stupid. They are quite cunning, calculating and subtle in the pursuit of wealth -- so much so, so nakedly in accord with what our congressman calls in reverent tones,

"the Valley Way of Life."

In fact, local government in Merced County (as is it in most places in California) is totally controlled by wealthy special interests. It is the planet on which our leaders have chosen to live, as opposed to where we live. If it weren't for the consequences of their 15 years of purely speculative thought, we might call it pathetic because it is veering so far so fast from the Earth of pain, suffering and the real, so long ignored economy of this county, agriculture, in irreversible decline because farmers have become primarily landowners in their minds.

It's hard to measure all the government aid that comes into this county. Between 1995-2005, the Environmental Working Group estimates that $186 million came to Merced farmers in subsidies. EWG admits that its records so far are only partial, but it has made strides recently on pass-throughs to individuals from agribusiness corporations. Still, with all that federal aid (not including publicly subsidized irrigation and all the other little things government does for our "family farmers," they are selling their land for subdivisions and commercial sites. This is the growth that kills. If land stays in agricultural production, the society has an opportunity to improve the farming system. Residential and commercial real estate development kills the option, not to mention what it does to the environment.

As for the public funds flowing into UC Merced, who can tell? What is the price for a well pimped, witless virgin ? All her relatives from the village in Mindanao are surrounding her to support her career in Manila to get their handouts.

Pathetic. Cruel. But Very Pacific Rim.

Badlands Journal editorial board
---------------

10-20-07
Modesto Bee
Jobless numbers ratchet up for Stanislaus, Merced, San Joaquin
Housing crisis cited for construction work loss in three counties...Christina Salerno
http://www.modbee.com/local/story/98241.html
Unemployment rates in Stanislaus, San Joaquin and Merced counties swelled above last year's averages, the result of a shaky economy and deepening housing crisis. The three counties each gained at least a percentage point from the previous year, with Stanislaus County recording the biggest jump. The county went from an unemployment rate of 6.6 percent in September 2006 to 8 percent last month, according to state Employment Development figures released Friday. The construction sector, reeling from the downturn in home sales, posted the steepest decline over 12 months, 28,600 jobs statewide.
Modesto Bee
10-11-07
Valley home prices continue to plummet
Merced takes turn at top for lost homes
1 in 68 houses in county got foreclosure notices; SJ, Stanislaus not far behind...J.N. SBRANTI
http://www.modbee.com/local/story/90253.html
It's a title no one wants, but counties in the Northern San Joaquin Valley keep passing around the undesirable honor of having the nation's highest home foreclosure rate.Merced County is the latest to get that title, pushing Stanislaus County into the No. 2 spot and San Joaquin County into No. 3.September filings show Merced County had the nation's highest percentage of homes in the foreclosure process. An estimated 1 in 68 homes there received some type of foreclosure notice last month, according to RealtyTrac, which monitors such statistics. That's more than eight times the national rate of 1 in 557 homes...
Merced Sun-Star
County ranks third in country for hunger
Food summit brings together several groups to try to solve the nutritional problems facing Merced's poor residents...Scott Jason
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/167/story/60283.html
Merced County may be a thick slice of the Central Valley breadbasket, but more than a third of its poor adults scramble to eat the crumbs.
Yet 25,000 low-income adults here face that problem regularly, and an estimated 38.2 million Americans have trouble putting food on the table.
Though the statistic may drop jaws, it's not filling stomachs. That challenge has been undertaken by the Merced County Hunger Task Force. With Merced County ranked as the third-highest population in the country that has trouble feeding itself, the group of community service agencies met Friday for its second annual all-day summit about the hunger crisis.
While the idea of chronic hunger may conjure images of homeless residents, the problem afflicts seniors, children, students and, most surprisinglyMerced's working class that struggles to survive.
...one out of 10 Merced County adults faces the prospect of going to bed hungry.
$1.1 million grant awarded to UC Merced...Victor A. Patton
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/167/story/60280.html
Called the Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program, the grant will allow eligible students to receive up to $2,800 in the summer to support research related expenses. The funds will also let the students attend national and international conferences with their professors.
The program will provide about $220,000 to UC Merced each year for the next five years and is expected to benefit at least 50 students during its funding cycle
Environmentally friendly house going up -- made of straw...Dhyana Levey
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/167/story/60272.html
Hay is for horses, straw is for houses.
That's what Jean Okuye of Livingston says.
Okuye, 67, began looking about three years ago for a way to build an energy-efficient home with sustainable products. "I wanted to work with nature as much as possible," she said. "A house with materials more cradle-to-cradle than cradle-to-grave."
That means she'd rather see her home products recycled and reused than end up at the bottom of a landfill. She has the future in mind -- five generations of family members have lived on her 78 acres of land, which was just put in a conservation easement. After researching her options online she connected with the eco-friendly Bay Area design and construction firm Skillful Means and learned all about the uses of straw bales.
Part of her inspiration may have been genetic. In her ancestors' Japan, as well as today, at least one room in many homes is made of tatami, straw mats, for flexibility and comfort. About 160 bales of rice straw now make up the walls of her new dwelling, which will be 1,370 square feet when it's done...
The straw provides effective insulation, which was a selling point on this project, said Okuye, an almond farmer and president of the Valley Land Alliance, which seeks to protect local farmland. Her goal was to conserve energy by creating a house without air conditioning or central heating.

Badlands Journal editorial board replies to Chancellor Kang's October 5 Message to Faculty and Staff

 Read More »

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the bill to expand the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District board from 11 to 15 members on Oct. 14. The board would add two more city council members to the three already included and would add two members with expertise in the health issues of Valley air pollution, to be appointed by the governor with the advice and consent of the state Senate. Eight county supervisors, one from each of the Valley counties, would continue to sit on the board. One of the two "public" members must be a physician with expertise in the health effects of air pollution; the other must be a member of the public with scientific expertise on the problem.

Badlands Journal talked with Mary-Michal Rawling, program manager for the Merced-Mariposa Asthma Coalition, a strong supporter of the bill (SB 719, authored by state Sen. Mike Machado, D-Linden). Rawling said the bill has had quite a history. This is the fifth year Machado has introduced it.

"We kept supporting it," she said. "He saw a lack of political will on the Valley air board."

Originally, four public members were proposed, but later versions of the bill dropped two proposed appointees with expertise in environmental justice issues and land-use planning. In the interest in creating a bill that faced considerable opposition in the state Legislature, the advocates for it, including the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition (an umbrella group including Rawling's asthma coalition), agreed to drop back to two public members on advice from state Assembly members who supported the bill.

The two new city council members will represent cities larger than 100,000 people. Under the former rules, the three city council seats were rotated among three regions in the Valley, causing a lack of consistent representation by the Valley's largest cities -- Bakersfield, Fresno, Modesto and Stockton.

There is nothing radically groundbreaking about having governor-appointed members of air pollution district boards. Assembly committee staff analysts note that

State appointments to air districts are not unprecedented. On the South Coast Air Quality Management District board the Governor, the Speaker of the Assembly, and the Senate Rules Committee each have the authority to appoint one member.

This year's successful attempt to pass the legislation got through the state Senate without much problem but got bottled up in the Assembly. However, on the floor vote, a combination of supporters voted for it and others, like Assemblywoman Cathleen Galgiani, D-Livingston, abstained rather than voting against it. The bill was controversial in Galgiani's district. Opponents with ties to her district included the air board itself, Merced County, the Merced County Farm Bureau, associations of cotton ginners, dairies, food processors, the Wine Institute and the state Association of Counties. However, there was strong support as well: Lee Andersen, Merced County Superintendent of Schools, Jim Sanders, Merced City Councilman, the county asthma coalition, the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition Steering Committee, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Union of Concerned Scientists, the American Lung Association of California, Sierra Club and Latino Issues Forum among others.

Statewide opponents included the California Farm Bureau and the California Council for Environmental and Economic Balance.

Rawling said that the practical effect of the board expansion would give more voice to advocates for clean air, a larger voice for health issues and would be a more broadly based board. More debate about the health issues arising from Valley air pollution is needed, she said, as the Valley air board is directed by its own mission statement:

The San Joaquin Valley Air District is a public health agency whose mission is to improve the health and quality of life for all Valley residents through efficient, effective and entrepreneurial air quality-management strategies.

Rawling said a lot more debate is needed and that currently, the board tends to rubber stamp staff recommendations.

Badlands Journal suggested that the quality of debate would be largely a function of the quality of these additional appointments. Rawling replied, "It is our responsibility to get someone we need. The public avenue is through due diligence to get the state Senate to approve responsible people and to give the governor a good slate of candidates and make sure he nominates good people."

The Merced-Mariposa County Asthma Coalition, Central Valley Air Quality Coalition Steering Committee and their supporters have been very effectively diligent this year and the San Joaquin Valley Air Quality District, controlled by Valley county supervisors, has been blatantly remiss.

On April 30, the SJVAQD voluntarily downgraded the status of Valley air quality through three intermediate categories of pollution from "serious" to "extreme," forestalling the federal test for attainment of 8-hour ozone levels out until 2024. Already, "every year we duke it out with LA basin for worst air quality in nation," Rawling noted.

In the view of Badlands Journal, this was but one in a long series of squalid sellouts by the board to finance, insurance, real estate, agricultural, petroleum and the state Department of Transportation special interests at the cost of clear, widely documented public health and safety dangers arising from increased Valley air pollution.

In addition to pushing the deadline out to 2024, forestalling a possible freeze in federal highway funds until that time, which will produce yet more population growth and real estate development, which will in turn produce yet more air pollution, the Valley air board pulled a new trick out of its arcane, special-interest driven regulations: the Black Box. Evidently, about half of the pollution awakes unknown new technology to be remedied.

Valley clean air advocates showed up at the California Air Resources Board meeting on June 14, where the district's decision had to be approved, with black coffins labeled "Black Box," they wore only black clothing and carried stickers with a line through "2024." CARB dutifully approved the district's decision. However, state board member Dee Dee d'Adamo, top staff for Rep. Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer-Merced, called for formation of a task force to explore the possibility of more rapid attainment. The task force will convene in Merced on Nov. 7, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at Tenaya Middle School. The task force will report to CARB later next month.

The governor fired Robert Sawyer, chairman of CARB, shortly after the state board's decision, replacing him with Mary Nichols, former secretary of the state Department of Resources during the Gray Davis administration. Rawling said that so far, Nichols has been "responsive." Other members of the Merced public remember Nichols' orchestration of the railroading of environmental permitting process for UC Merced, under pressure from d'Adamo's previous employer, former Rep. Gary Condit, and her present employer, Cardoza, then a state Assemblyman, and the governor's office, where both of Condit's children were employed.

Rawling said the goal of Valley clean air advocates is to keep pushing for more rapid attainment and to get an enforceable commitment in writing for an earlier date.

Diana Westmoreland Pedrozo, executive director of the Merced County Farm Bureau said the reason the Farm Bureau opposed the board expansion was because there wasn't much faith in some quarters in the governor's appointees. She said the interests she represents have had much more success explaining their positions to the air board than they have to the Valley water quality control board, which is composed entirely of political appointees. While Pedrozo said she "applauded public members," she and the interests she represents don't believe most physicians or other scientists know much about the field of health and air pollution. She said that in the Valley air board, she saw much evidence of staff and board-member interaction. "It doesn't look like the staff is in total control." By contrast, her experience with the water board suggested total staff control of the board.

Pedrozo's basic point was that "political" appointees aren't as responsive as appointees from elected local legislatures (county supervisors and city councils). In the debate over this legislation, opponents present the latter group as less politically appointed than appointees of the (elected) governor.

Rawling said she thought the additional board members would serve to make the board less "politicized." We thought it might have the opposite effect, at least under certain circumstances. The public experts could challenge air board staff's data more effectively than the ordinary county supervisor, who, on the other hand, would be a familiar face for Farm Bureau staff to lobby on the changes being forced in agricultural practices by both air and water pollution regulations in the Valley. Perhaps, someday Pedrozo could be negotiating with her brother-in-law, a former farmer and current chairman of the Merced County Board of Supervisors. It's hard to imagine adding two more city council members would be good news for agriculture, but the supervisors of what remain for the meantime the most productive agricultural counties in the nation still control the Valley air board with eight appointees.

For a public tired of seeing more letters to the editor from the executive director of the air board extolling the healthiness of our air whenever local breezes shove the pollution elsewhere for a few days, this is a victory. Sen. Machado and the clean air advocates in the Valley are to be thanked for their consistent, long-term effort.

However, euphoria is not called for. Adding two city council members to the three existing city council members and the eight county supervisors simply makes a board with 13 members marinated in the pro-growth/smart growth/balanced growth dogmas that nearly all elected officials of municipal and county land-use authority councils and boards must espouse in order to be acceptable to the special interests that dominate their jurisdictions. The two public members, presumably not already absorbed into the growth ideology, will have their hands full arguing against doing the "hard, right thing" on every vote the air board takes. They will be under great pressure to adopted a "balanced" view in a region where there has not been any balance for years. And they will be under an equal amount of pressure from air quality advocates to speak and act on behalf of public health and safety. May the advocates, the governor and the senators find people of sufficient integrity and strength of character to fulfill the role to think out of the Black Box.

Fresno Bee
9-7-07
Ruling will damage region's water future...Mike Villines Rep. 29th Assembly District
A recent ruling handed down by a federal judge in Fresno places a significant portion of the water our region receives from the San Joaquin Delta in jeopardy, which could devastate our region's economy and public health.
U.S. District Court Judge Oliver Wanger has entered a ruling that has been called the largest court-ordered water supply reduction in state history, all to protect the delta smelt, a tiny species of fish found in the Delta.
Thirty-five percent or more of the water pumped through the Delta each year --enough water to supply nearly 4 million homes -- could disappear overnight as a result of this ruling.
This irresponsible decision will have a very damaging impact on ouragriculture industry. Water from the Delta is a critical source of water forhundreds of local farms.

Losing this water will hurt production of the California-grown agriculture that feeds the world and employs thousands of workers. Without enough water fromthe Delta, farmers may be forced to take more farmland out of production or lower-quality groundwater that can cause lasting damage to their land.
The court's ruling will also threaten the public health of millions of people who live in the Central Valley, who rely upon water from the Delta as their primary source of clean drinking water.
Water officials will be forced to tap into limited reserves to make up for the lost water, and could lead to mandatory rationing in communities across the state. Even worse, the ability to transfer water from one part of the state to another will diminish with the pumps slowing down, making California more
vulnerable to future droughts.
It is very disappointing that state officials would be forced by extremeenvironmental groups to take such an outlandish step just to protect one species of fish. Protecting the health and well-being of human beings should be the first priority of policymakers and the courts when considering actions that will
affect the water supply of our region.
While we must take responsible steps to protect the environment and preven the extinction of endangered species, we must never take any action that could cause such a heavy toll on the health and safety of Californians or the economy, radical changes that will force people to change how they earn a living or live
their daily lives, but rather to take the responsible steps required to strengthen California's water future.
The responsible step is to build more water storage, because the state hasn't
built a dam in the past 40 years.
It's time to get serious about building more above-ground water storage capacity and water conveyance projects across our state. Lawmakers must prioritize the additional resources required to build increased water storage, so we can capture more rain each winter and more melting Sierra snow each spring
before it flows into the ocean.
More water storage capacity means more water available for drinking and agriculture, and more water collected in wet years to get us through the dry ones. It will allow us not only to meet human needs, but environmental needs as well.
While conservation is an important component of any comprehensive plan for our water future, it is only part of the solution. California cannot conserve itself out of this situation because we have 500,000 new residents moving to our state every year.
Building more water storage is a critical step that must be taken soon if we are to avoid having to resort to rationing or more Delta pump shutdowns.
Lawmakers had a golden opportunity earlier this year to dedicate the resources required to build more storage capacity by passing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposed water storage bonds, but environmental politics and shortsighted thinking stood in the way. We cannot continue to ignore our lack of water storage much longer without consequences.
Going forward, we must not let concern for the delta smelt stand in the way of clean drinking water for millions of people and an important water source that fuels our local and statewide economy.
We must act to improve the flow of clean water across our state and build the additional water storage capacity required to meet our growing water needs.

Assembly Republican Leader Mike Villines of Clovis represents the 29th
Assembly District in the California Legislature, which includes parts of Fresno
and Madera counties.
--------------------------
'Shameless demagoguery'

The Sept. 7 commentary by Assembly Member Mike Villines labels federal Judge Oliver Wanger "irresponsible" for ordering the federal government to take steps to protect the Bay-Delta fishery, including seasonal pumping reductions.
Two things are certain: Assembly Member Villines is little familiar, if at all, with the requirements of environmental law or the thousands of pages of scientific evidence in the case, and he is shamelessly pandering to narrow western San Joaquin Valley agribusiness interests and cares little for Delta
farming or fishing interests.
Had Assembly Member Villines attended the hearing in which Judge Wanger announced his decision, he would have learned the judge was required to follow the law.
There is a disturbing propensity for any special-interest group nowadays to attack federal judges as "irresponsible" when the judges decide cases based on the rule of law, not on the desires of the losing party.
The irony is that Judge Wanger has ruled many times for agricultural interests. When the law required him to rule otherwise, attack dogs like Assembly Member Villines start the mud-slinging.
If Assembly Member Villines doesn't like the environmental laws, he should lobby Congress to change them. Ignorant attacks by know-nothings on judges areshameless demagoguery.

Lloyd Carter
California Save Our Streams Council
Clovis

Testimony of Robert Kuttner
Before the Committee on Financial Services
Rep. Barney Frank, Chairman
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, D.C.
October 2, 2007
Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee:

Thank you for this opportunity. My name is Robert Kuttner. I am an economics and financial journalist, author of several books about the economy, co-editor of The American Prospect, and former investigator for the Senate Banking Committee. I have a book appearing in a few weeks that addresses the systemic risks of financial innovation coupled with deregulation and the moral hazard of periodic bailouts.

In researching the book, I devoted a lot of effort to reviewing the abuses of the 1920s, the effort in the 1930s to create a financial system that would prevent repetition of those abuses, and the steady dismantling of the safeguards over the last three decades in the name of free markets and financial innovation.

Your predecessors on the Senate Banking Committee, in the celebrated Pecora Hearings of 1933 and 1934, laid the groundwork for the modern edifice of financial regulation. I suspect that they would be appalled at the parallels between the systemic risks of the 1920s and many of the modern practices that have been permitted to seep back in to our financial markets.

Although the particulars are different, my reading of financial history suggests that the abuses and risks are all too similar and enduring. When you strip them down to their essence, they are variations on a few hardy perennials -- excessive leveraging, misrepresentation, insider conflicts of interest, non-transparency, and the triumph of engineered euphoria over evidence.

The most basic and alarming parallel is the creation of asset bubbles, in which the purveyors of securities use very high leverage; the securities are sold to the public or to specialized funds with underlying collateral of uncertain value; and financial middlemen extract exorbitant returns at the expense of the real economy. This was the essence of the abuse of public utilities stock pyramids in the 1920s, where multi-layered holding companies allowed securities to be watered down, to the point where the real collateral was worth just a few cents on the dollar, and returns were diverted from operating companies and ratepayers. This only became exposed when the bubble burst. As Warren Buffett famously put it, you never know who is swimming naked until the tide goes out.

There is good evidence -- and I will add to the record a paper on this subject by the Federal Reserve staff economists Dean Maki and Michael Palumbo -- that even much of the boom of the late 1990s was built substantially on asset bubbles. ["Disentangling the Wealth Effect: a Cohort Analysis of Household Savings in the 1990s"]

A second parallel is what today we would call securitization of credit. Some people think this is a recent innovation, but in fact it was the core technique that made possible the dangerous practices of the 1920. Banks would originate and repackage highly speculative loans, market them as securities through their retail networks, using the prestigious brand name of the bank -- e.g. Morgan or Chase -- as a proxy for the soundness of the security. It was this practice, and the ensuing collapse when so much of the paper went bad, that led Congress to enact the Glass-Steagall Act, requiring bankers to decide either to be commercial banks -- part of the monetary system, closely supervised and subject to reserve requirements, given deposit insurance, and access to the Fed's discount window; or investment banks that were not government guaranteed, but that were soon subjected to an extensive disclosure regime under the SEC.

Since repeal of Glass Steagall in 1999, after more than a decade of de facto inroads, super-banks have been able to re-enact the same kinds of structural conflicts of interest that were endemic in the 1920s -- lending to speculators, packaging and securitizing credits and then selling them off, wholesale or retail, and extracting fees at every step along the way. And, much of this paper is even more opaque to bank examiners than its counterparts were in the 1920s. Much of it isn't paper at all, and the whole process is supercharged by computers and automated formulas. An independent source of instability is that while these credit derivatives are said to increase liquidity and serve as shock absorbers, in fact their bets are often in the same direction -- assuming perpetually rising asset prices -- so in a credit crisis they can act as net de-stabilizers.

A third parallel is the excessive use of leverage. In the 1920s, not only were there pervasive stock-watering schemes, but there was no limit on margin. If you thought the market was just going up forever, you could borrow most of the cost of your investment, via loans conveniently provided by your stockbroker. It worked well on the upside. When it didn't work so well on the downside, Congress subsequently imposed margin limits. But anybody who knows anything about derivatives or hedge funds knows that margin limits are for little people. High rollers, with credit derivatives, can use leverage at ratios of ten to one, or a hundred to one, limited only by their self confidence and taste for risk. Private equity, which might be better named private debt, gets its astronomically high rate of return on equity capital, through the use of borrowed money. The equity is fairly small. As in the 1920s, the game continues only as long as asset prices continue to inflate; and all the leverage contributes to the asset inflation, conveniently creating higher priced collateral against which to borrow even more money.

The fourth parallel is the corruption of the gatekeepers. In the 1920s, the corrupted insiders were brokers running stock pools and bankers as purveyors of watered stock. 1990s, it was accountants, auditors and stock analysts, who were supposedly agents of investors, but who turned out to be confederates of corporate executives. You can give this an antiseptic academic term and call it a failure of agency, but a better phrase is conflicts of interest. In this decade, it remains to be seen whether the bond rating agencies were corrupted by conflicts of interest, or merely incompetent. The core structural conflict is that the rating agencies are paid by the firms that issue the bonds. Who gets the business -- the rating agencies with tough standards or generous ones? Are ratings for sale? And what, really, is the technical basis for their ratings? All of this is opaque, and unregulated, and only now being investigated by Congress and the SEC.

Yet another parallel is the failure of regulation to keep up with financial innovation that is either far too risky to justify the benefit to the real economy, or just plain corrupt, or both. In the 1920s, many of these securities were utterly opaque. Ferdinand Pecora, in his 1939 memoirs describing the pyramid schemes of public utility holding companies, the most notorious of which was controlled by the Insull family, opined that the pyramid structure was not even fully understood by Mr. Insull. The same could be said of many of today's derivatives on which technical traders make their fortunes.

By contrast, in the traditional banking system a bank examiner could look at a bank's loan portfolio, see that loans were backed by collateral and verify that they were performing. If they were not, the bank was made to increase its reserves. Today's examiner is not able to value a lot of the paper held by banks, and must rely on the banks' own models, which clearly failed to predict what happened in the case of sub-prime. The largest banking conglomerates are subjected to consolidated regulation, but the jurisdiction is fragmented, and at best the regulatory agencies can only make educated guesses about whether balance sheets are strong enough to withstand pressures when novel and exotic instruments create market conditions that cannot be anticipated by models.

A last parallel is ideological -- the nearly universal conviction, 80 years ago and today, that markets are so perfectly self-regulating that government's main job is to protect property rights, and otherwise just get out of the way.

We all know the history. The regulatory reforms of the New Deal saved capitalism from its own self-cannibalizing instincts, and a reliable, transparent and regulated financial economy went on to anchor an unprecedented boom in the real economy. Financial markets were restored to their appropriate role as servants of the real economy, rather than masters. Financial regulation was pro-efficiency. I want to repeat that, because it is so utterly unfashionable, but it is well documented by economic history. Financial regulation was pro-efficiency. America's squeaky clean, transparent, reliable financial markets were the envy of the world. They undergirded the entrepreneurship and dynamism in the rest of the economy.

Beginning in the late 1970s, the beneficial effect of financial regulations has either been deliberately weakened by public policy, or has been overwhelmed by innovations not anticipated by the New Deal regulatory schema. New-Deal-era has become a term of abuse. Who needs New Deal protections in an Internet age?

Of course, there are some important differences between the economy of the 1920s, and the one that began in the deregulatory era that dates to the late 1970s. The economy did not crash in 1987 with the stock market, or in 2000-01. Among the reasons are the existence of federal breakwaters such as deposit insurance, and the stabilizing influence of public spending, now nearly one dollar in three counting federal, state, and local public outlay, which limits collapses of private demand.

But I will focus on just one difference -- the most important one. In the 1920s and early 1930s, the Federal Reserve had neither the tools, nor the experience, nor the self-confidence to act decisively in a credit crisis. But today, whenever the speculative excesses lead to a crash, the Fed races to the rescue. No, it doesn't bail our every single speculator (though it did a pretty good job in the two Mexican rescues) but it bails out the speculative system, so that the next round of excess can proceed. And somehow, this is scored as trusting free markets, overlooking the plain fact that the Fed is part of the U.S. government.

When big banks lost many tens of billions on third world loans in the 1980s, the Fed and the Treasury collaborated on workouts, and desisted from requiring that the loans be marked to market, lest several money center banks be declared insolvent. When Citibank was under water in 1990, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York personally undertook a secret mission to Riyadh to persuade a Saudi prince to pump in billions in capital and to agree to be a passive investor.

In 1998, the Fed convened a meeting of the big banks and all but ordered a bailout of Long Term Capital Management, an uninsured and unregulated hedge fund whose collapse was nonetheless putting the broad capital markets at risk. And even though Chairman Greenspan had expressed worry two years (and several thousand points) earlier that "irrational exuberance" was creating a stock market bubble, big losses in currency speculation in East Asia and Russia led Greenspan to keep cutting rates, despite his foreboding that cheaper money would just pump up markets and invite still more speculation.

And finally in the dot-com crash of 2000-01, the speculative abuses and insider conflicts of interest that fueled the stock bubble were very reminiscent of 1929. But a general depression was not triggered by the market collapse, because the Fed again came to the rescue with very cheap money.

So when things are booming, the financial engineers can advise government not to spoil the party. But when things go bust, they can count on the Fed to rescue them with emergency infusions of cash and cheaper interest rates.

I just read Chairman Greenspan's fascinating memoir, which confirms this rescue role. His memoir also confirms Mr. Greenspan's strong support for free markets and his deep antipathy to regulation. But I don't see how you can have it both ways. If you are a complete believer in the proposition that free markets are self-regulating and self- correcting, then you logically should let markets live with the consequences. On the other hand, if you are going to rescue markets from their excesses, on the very reasonable ground that a crash threatens the entire system, then you have an obligation to act pre-emptively, prophylactically, to head off highly risky speculative behavior. Otherwise, the Fed just invites moral hazards and more rounds of wildly irresponsible actions.

While the Fed and the European Central Bank were flooding markets with liquidity to prevent a deeper crash in August and September, the Bank of England decided on a sterner course. It would not reward speculators. The result was an old fashioned run on a large bank, and the Bank of England changed its tune.

So the point is not that the Fed should let the whole economy collapse in order to teach speculators a lesson. The point is that the Fed needs to remember its other role -- as regulator.

One of the odd things about the press commentary about what the Fed should do is that it has been entirely along one dimension: a Hobson's choice: -- either loosen money and invite more risky behavior, or refuse to enable asset bubbles and risk a more serious credit crunch -- as if these were the only options and monetary policy were the only policy lever. But the other lever, one that has fallen into disrepair and disrepute, is preventive regulation.

Mr. Chairman, you have had a series of hearings on the sub-prime collapse, which has now been revealed as a textbook case of regulatory failure. About half of these loans were originated by non-federally regulated mortgage companies. However even those sub-prime loans should have had their underwriting standards policed by the Federal Reserve or its designee under the authority of the 1994 Home Equity and Ownership Protection Act. And by the same token, the SEC should have more closely monitored the so called counterparties -- the investment and commercial banks -- that were supplying the credit. However, the Fed and the SEC essentially concluded that since the paper was being sold off to investors who presumably were cognizant of the risks, they did not need to pay attention to the deplorable underwriting standards.

In the 1994 legislation, Congress not only gave the Fed the authority, but directed the Fed to clamp down on dangerous and predatory lending practices, including on otherwise unregulated entities such as sub-prime mortgage originators. However, for 13 years the Fed stonewalled and declined to use the authority that Congress gave it to police sub-prime lending. Even as recently as last spring, when you could not pick up a newspaper's financial pages without reading about the worsening sub-prime disaster, the Fed did not act -- until this Committee made an issue of it.

Financial markets have responded to the 50 basis-point rate-cut, by bidding up stock prices, as if this crisis were over. Indeed, the financial pages have reported that as the softness in housing markets is expected to worsen, traders on Wall Street have inferred that the Fed will need to cut rates again, which has to be good for stock prices.

Mr. Chairman, we are living on borrowed time. And the vulnerability goes far beyond the spillover effects of the sub-prime debacle.

We need to step back and consider the purpose of regulation. Financial regulation is too often understood as merely protecting consumers and investors. The New Deal model is actually a relatively indirect one, since it relies more on mandated disclosures, and less on prohibited practices. The enormous loopholes in financial regulation -- the hedge fund loophole, the private equity loophole, are justified on the premise that consenting adults of substantial means do not need the help of the nanny state, thank you very much. But of course investor protection is only one purpose of regulation. The other purpose is to protect the system from moral hazard and catastrophic risk of financial collapse. It is this latter function that has been seriously compromised.

HOEPA was understood mainly as consumer protection legislation, but it was also systemic risk legislation.

Sarbanes-Oxley has been attacked in some quarters as harmful to the efficiency of financial markets. One good thing about the sub-prime calamity is that we haven't heard a lot of that argument lately. Yet there is still a general bias in the administration and the financial community against regulation.

Mr. Chairman, I commend you and this committee for looking beyond the immediate problem of the sub-prime collapse. I would urge every member of the committee to spend some time reading the Pecora hearings, and you will be startled by the sense of déjà vu.

I'd like to close with an observation and a recommendation.

My perception as a financial journalist is that regulation is so out of fashion these days that it narrows the legislative imagination, since politics necessarily is the art of the possible and your immediate task is to find remedies that actually stand a chance of enactment. There is a vicious circle -- a self-fulfilling prophecy -- in which remedies that currently are legislatively unthinkable are not given serious thought. Mr. Chairman, you are performing an immense public service by broadening the scope of inquiry beyond the immediate crisis and immediate legislation.

Three decades ago, a group of economists inspired by the work of the late Milton Friedman created a shadow Federal Open Market Committee, to develop and recommend contrarian policies in the spirit of Professor Friedman's recommendation that monetary policy essentially be put on automatic pilot. The committee had great intellectual and political influence, and its very existence helped people think through dissenting ideas. In the same way, the national security agencies often create Team B exercises to challenge the dominant thinking on a defense issue.

In the coming months, I hope the committee hears from a wide circle of experts -- academics, former state and federal regulators, financial historians, people who spent time on Wall Street -- who are willing to look beyond today's intellectual premises and legislative limitations, and have ideas about what needs to be re-regulated. Here are some of the questions that require further exploration:

First, which kinds innovations of financial engineering actually enhance economic efficiency, and which ones mainly enrich middlemen, strip assets, appropriate wealth, and increase systemic risk? It no longer works to assert that all innovations, by definition, are good for markets or markets wouldn't invent them. We just tested that proposition in the sub-prime crisis, and it failed. But which forms of credit derivatives, for example, truly make markets more liquid and better able to withstand shocks, and which add to the system's vulnerability. We can't just settle that question by the all purpose assumption that market forces invariably enhance efficiency. We have to get down to cases.

The story of the economic growth in the 1990s and in this decade is mainly a story of technology, increased productivity growth, macro-economic stimulation, and occasionally of asset bubbles. There is little evidence that the growth rates of the past decade and a half -- better than the 1970s and ‘80s, worse than the 40's, 50's and ‘60s -- required or benefited from new techniques of financial engineering.

I once did some calculations on what benefits securitization of mortgage credit had actually had. By the time you net out the fee income taken out by all of the middlemen -- the mortgage broker, the mortgage banker, the investment banker, the bond-rating agency -- it's not clear that the borrower benefits at all. What does increase, however, are the fees and the systemic risks. More research on this question would be useful. What would be the result of the secondary mortgage market were far more tightly subjected to standards? It is telling that the mortgages that best survived the meltdown were those that met the underwriting criteria of the GSE's.

Second, what techniques and strategies of regulation are appropriate to damp down the systemic risks produced by the financial innovation? As I observed, when you strip it all down, at the heart of the recent financial crises are three basic abuses: lack of transparency; excessive leverage; and conflicts of interest. Those in turn suggest remedies: greater disclosure either to regulators or to the public. Requirement of increased reserves in direct proportion to how opaque and difficult to value are the assets held by banks. Some restoration of the walls against conflicts of interest once provided by Glass Steagall. Tax policies to discourage dangerously high leverage ratios, in whatever form.

Maybe we should just close the loophole in the 1940 Act and require of hedge funds and private equity firms the same kinds of disclosures required of others who sell shares to the public, which in effect is what hedge funds and private equity increasingly do. The industry will say that this kind of disclosure impinges on trade secrets. To the extent that this concern is valid, the disclosure of positions and strategies can be to the SEC. This is what is required of large hedge funds by the Financial Services Authority in the UK, not a nation noted for hostility to hedge funds. Indeed, Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway, which might have chosen to operate as private equity, makes the same disclosures as any other publicly listed firm. It doesn't seem to hurt Buffett at all.

To the extent that some private equity firms and strategies strip assets, while others add capital and improve management, maybe we need a windfall profits tax on short term extraction of assets and on excess transaction fees. If private equity has a constructive role to play -- and I think it can -- we need public policies to reward good practices and discourage bad ones. Industry codes, of the sort being organized by the administration and the industry itself, are far too weak.

Why not have tighter regulation both of derivatives that are publicly traded and those that are currently regulated -- rather weakly -- by the CFTC: more disclosure, limits on leverage and on positions. And why not make OTC and special purpose derivatives that are not ordinarily traded (and that are black holes in terms of asset valuation), also subject to the CFTC?

A third big question to be addressed is the relationship of financial engineering to problems of corporate governance. Ever since the classic insight of A.A. Berle and Gardiner Means in 1933, it has been conventional to point out that corporate management is not adequately responsible to shareholders, and by extension to society, because of the separation of ownership from effective control. The problem, if anything, is more serious today than when Berle and Means wrote in 1933, because of the increased access of insiders to financial engineering. We have seen the fruits of that access in management buyouts, at the expense of both other shareholders, workers, and other stakeholders. This is pure conflict of interest.

Since the first leveraged buyout boom, advocates of hostile takeovers have proposed a radically libertarian solution to the Berle-Means problem. Let a market for corporate control hold managers accountable by buying, selling, and recombining entire companies via LBOs that tax deductible money collateralized by the target's own assets. It is astonishing that this is even legal, let alone rewarded by tax preferences, even more so when managers with a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders are on both sides of the bargain.

The first boom in hostile takeovers crashed and burned. The second boom ended with the stock market collapse of 2000-01. The latest one is rife with conflicts of interest, it depends heavily on the perception that stock prices are going to continue to rise at multiples that far outstrip the rate of economic growth, and on the borrowed money to finance these deals that puts banks increasingly at risk.

So we need a careful examination of better ways of holding managers accountable -- through more power for shareholders and other stakeholders such as employees, proxy rules not tilted to incumbent management, and rules that reward mutual funds for serving as the agents of shareholders, and not just of the profit maximization of the fund sponsor. John Bogle, a pioneer in the modern mutual fund industry, has written eloquently on this.

Interestingly, the intellectual fathers of the leveraged buyout movement as a supposed source of better corporate governance, have lately been having serious second thoughts.

Michael Jensen, one of the original theorists of efficient market theory and the so called market for corporate control and an advocate of compensation incentives for corporate CEOs has now written a book calling for greater control of CEOs and less cronyism on corporate boards. That cronyism, however, is in part a reflection of Jensen's earlier conception of the ideal corporation.

I don't have all the answers on regulatory remedies, but people smarter than I need to systematically ask these questions, even if they are beyond the pale legislatively for now. And there are scholars of financial markets, former state and federal regulators, economic historians, and even people who did time on Wall Street, who all have the same concerns that I do as well as more technical expertise, and who I am sure would be happy to find company and to serve.

One last parallel: I am chilled, as I'm sure you are, every time I hear a high public official or a Wall Street eminence utter the reassuring words, "The economic fundamentals are sound." Those same words were used by President Hoover and the captains of finance, in the deepening chill of the winter of 1929-1930. They didn't restore confidence, or revive the asset bubbles.

The fact is that the economic fundamentals are sound -- if you look at the real economy of factories and farms, and internet entrepreneurs, and retailing innovation and scientific research laboratories. It is the financial economy that is dangerously unsound. And as every student of economic history knows, depressions, ever since the South Sea bubble, originate in excesses in the financial economy, and go on to ruin the real economy.

It remains to be seen whether we have dodged the bullet for now. If markets do calm down, and lower interest bail out excesses once again, then we have bought precious time. The worst thing of all would be to conclude that markets self corrected once again, and let the bubble economy continue to fester. Congress has a window in which restore prudential regulation, and we should use that window before the next crisis turns out to be a mortal one.

On October 10, the Merced Land Alliance, Merced Alliance for Responsible Growth, Citizens for Intelligent Growth and the Merced County Farm Bureau co-hosted a presentation by Holly Hart, executive director of the Smart Growth Coalition of Kern County. Diana Westmoreland Pedrozo, executive director of the farm bureau, introduced Hart, “a dynamic presenter.” Pedrozo set the stage by noting that a number of parallel planning processes were going on around Merced County at the moment: the California Partnership for the San Joaquin Valley, the Merced County General Plan Update, the Blueprint for the San Joaquin Valley, city general-plan updates, lawsuits and legal decisions regarding the Friant Dam and the Delta Smelt. These processes are going on simultaneously, but is there any coordination among them, she asked. Pedrozo concluded her introduction of Hart by saying that the sponsors of the presentation and Hart are offering an alternative to lawsuits.

Hart described the Smart Growth Coalition of Kern County as a 15-year-old group of representatives from agriculture, oil, insurance, banks and former politicians that had met their original goals by 2004 and have developed a new strategic plan, taking note of their mistakes. The essence of the new strategic plan Hart announced, presumably the key to the elusive grail of Smart Growth: design communities, don’t plan them.

“If you change one thing, you change all …” she said. (She meant if you change from planning communities, to designing them, all things will change.)

The Badlands Journal editorial board out of idle curiosity did a short web search on Hart, discovering among other things that she is listed by the state Labor Market Information service as the owner of a firm called Giraffix Design and Productions, whose business involves “organizing, promoting, and/or managing events such as business or trade shows, conventions, conferences and meetings …”

Hart is also a school board member in her community, Tehachapi, a city of about 8,000 that is 4,000 ft in altitude on the Tehachapi Pass between the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert, about 50 miles east of I-5 and the Grapevine. While air quality is not great in Tehachapi, neither is it in the bottom five in the nation, like its county seat, Bakersfield, or the worst in the nation, like Arvin at the foot of the Grapevine.

Hart is also an active Kern County Democrat and a graduate of the UC/Great Valley Center’s Institute for the Development of Emerging Area Leaders (IDEAL).

Hart said the Kern County smart growth group has four current goals.

First, is integrating all global information systems (GIS) maps so that different planning (or designing) jurisdictions will have access to all GIS data produced about their regions.

Second was something she called, “Infrastructure First!” However, she qualified this by saying that this infrastructure must accommodate the needs of people in the 21st century: high-speed access (computers, railroads or both); movement of goods and commuters; high quality libraries (the artists in Tehachapi require film labs and recording equipment, presumably available in publicly funded libraries).

Fourth (third got lost in the dynamism somewhere): Outreach. According to Hart’s information, planners are saying that they need “grassroots outreach.”

Hart believes that “we” (an unclear reference in this context) have become accustomed to fighting against (whether things, development, plans was not clear) and we need to start fighting for something. The Central Valley has been left behind “forever,’ Hart said. Yet, today, it has more resources and attention than it has ever had. “Use it, act on it, don’t question it!” Hart urged us.

The San Joaquin Valley is the epicenter of an international credit crisis caused by a huge speculative real estate boom that busted, caused in turn by the availability of relatively cheap farmland for sale to build subdivisions for commuters to the Bay Area and LA. It has indeed received a great deal of attention from developers and their bought-and-sold state Legislature in recent years. As for its degraded and rapidly deteriorating natural resources and environment, which has become – emphatically so in Kern County—a public health and safety issue, the only attention that aspect of the Valley has received has been thanks to lawsuits. In a sense, however, Hart is right: there are no questions left. The only solution is all-out citizen resistance to finance, insurance and real estate special interests and to the politicians and local land-use authorities they control, which created the perfect economic vortex: the highest foreclosure rate in the nation.

We need the information to change our future, Hart said, launching into her biography: a degree in industrial design with an emphasis in the design of public space. Her first job was at the Epcot Center at Disney World. “We can build great cities,” Hart said she realized on that, her first, project. Later she worked in Singapore, for a Houston-based firm, 3D International. Starting in the 1950’s 3D grew up with Houston, rapidly merged and acquired different companies to become an international construction, architecture and design company. According to Hart, 3D “helped (Singapore) find its vision … now it is a first-world country.”

Badlands Journal editors scratched their heads but could not come up with a country less like the San Joaquin Valley than Singapore, a city state, second most densely populated country on the globe, dominated by Chinese immigrants on sixty-three islands at the end of the Malay Peninsula -- although several argued that the Epcot Center at Disney World, FL was actually more unlike the San Joaquin Valley.

However, Hart was announcing the grand theme of the evening: Smart Growth! “We’ve been given the opportunity to control our own destiny,” she said. “If we believe it, it will be so.” Therefore, we should embrace the Valley Blueprint, the Partnership, etc. (and not question them because we’ve been given the opportunity to control our own destiny and if we believe that, it will be so.”

Next, Hart took us for an exhilarating flight through the History of Planning, starting with the Industrial Revolution, complete with pictures of slums beside satanic mills. A bizarre twist in HartHistory was a lurch to 1934 and Hart’s report that 5 million cotton pickers moved from the South to northern cities that year. Some in the room briefly wondered how many other people were on the move in the depths of the Great Depression, included a large number coming from the Dust Bowl to the San Joaquin Valley. Hart characterized these northern industrial cities as “black.”

Residents of the north San Joaquin Valley forget how acceptable racism is in Kern County, where as long as 40 years ago, Whites lived in terror of an invasion from Watts. Ronald Reagan used the fear quite successfully in his 1966 gubernatorial campaign.

In 1926, Hart said, the US Supreme Court decided a case called Euclid v. Amber Realty that established zoning laws, “the solution for pollution” being to put factories on the edges of cities. The next station on high-speed HartHistory was the federal bill that established GI loans for education, mortgages and business loans. Then we were on to Levittown, where the developer used the Henry Ford technique of building houses, creating the first modern subdivisions. (The same thing was going on in Daly City.) The “solution to pollution” failed because people had to commute to work, which required cars, leading to “building cities and towns for cars,” like they have been doing in the San Joaquin Valley for 30 years. “Cars are now more important than people, communities and land,” Hart noted. She described Kern County (with graphics of locusts devouring crops) – people now running from cities, now mega-dairies running from Chino because LA County decided to discontinue its dairy park and open the area to developers to build more subdivisions for commuters. Hart said: “We know you don’t want the Southland in the Valley.” Her visual aids include pictures of poor Black youth (gangs) and graffiti.

What “we,” Badlands editors wondered. Who is the “we” that Hart is dynamically presenting here? We do however remember an actual infestation of grasshoppers in Avenal once.

“We are creating globalisation,” she said. Forty-seven million Americans are moving within the US annually to follow work, she said. Youth today will be changing jobs every three or four years.

Don’t question government, Hart implied, because government has empowered us, in the form of a 2004 state law called AB1268:

LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL'S DIGEST

65302.4. The text and diagrams in the land use element that
address the location and extent of land uses, and the zoning
ordinances that implement these provisions, may also express
community intentions regarding urban form and design. These
expressions may differentiate neighborhoods, districts, and
corridors, provide for a mixture of land uses and housing types
within each, and provide specific measures for regulating
relationships between buildings, and between buildings and outdoor
public areas, including streets.

While Badlands editors could see how someone who owned a design and production company in Tehachapi would be terribly impressed by this brilliantly progressive insert into the Government Code guidelines for general plans, we were a little bit more impressed by the following:

65302.1. (a) The Legislature finds and declares all of the
following:
(1) The San Joaquin Valley has a serious air pollution problem
that will take the cooperation of land use and transportation
planning agencies, transit operators, the development community, the
San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District and the public to
solve. The solution to the problem requires changes in the way we
have traditionally built our communities and constructed the
transportation systems. It involves a fundamental shift in
priorities from emphasis on mobility for the occupants of private
automobiles to a multimodal system that more efficiently uses scarce
resources. It requires a change in attitude from the public to
support development patterns and transportation systems different
from the status quo.
(2) In 2003 the district published a document entitled, Air
Quality Guidelines for General Plans. This report is a comprehensive
guidance document and resource for cities and counties to use to
include air quality in their general plans. It includes goals,
policies, and programs that when adopted in a general plan will
reduce vehicle trips and miles traveled and improve air quality.
(3) Air quality guidelines are recommended strategies that do,
when it is feasible, all of the following:
(A) Determine and mitigate project level and cumulative air
quality impacts under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA)
(Division 13 (commencing with Section 21000) of the Public Resources
Code).
(B) Integrate land use plans, transportation plans, and air
quality plans.
(C) Plan land uses in ways that support a multimodal
transportation system.
(D) Local action to support programs that reduce congestion and
vehicle trips.
(E) Plan land uses to minimize exposure to toxic air pollutant
emissions from industrial and other sources.
(F) Reduce particulate matter emissions from sources under local
jurisdiction.
(G) Support district and public utility programs to reduce
emissions from energy consumption and area sources.
(4) The benefits of including air quality concerns within local
general plans include, but are not limited to, all of the following:

(A) Lower infrastructure costs.
(B) Lower public service costs.
(C) More efficient transit service.
(D) Lower costs for comprehensive planning.
(E) Streamlining of the permit process.
(F) Improved mobility for the elderly and children.
(b) The legislative body of each city and county within the
jurisdictional boundaries of the district shall amend the appropriate
elements of its general plan, which may include, but are not limited
to, the required elements dealing with land use, circulation,
housing, conservation, and open space, to include data and analysis,
goals, policies, and objectives, and feasible implementation
strategies to improve air quality.
(c) The adoption of air quality amendments to a general plan to
comply with the requirements of subdivision (d) shall include all of
the following:
(1) A report describing local air quality conditions including air
quality monitoring data, emission inventories, lists of significant
source categories, attainment status and designations, and applicable
state and federal air quality plans and transportation plans.
(2) A summary of local, district, state, and federal policies,
programs, and regulations that may improve air quality in the city or
county.
(3) A comprehensive set of goals, policies, and objectives that
may improve air quality consistent with the strategies listed in
paragraph (3) of subdivision (a).
(4) A set of feasible implementation measures designed to carry
out those goals, policies, and objectives.
(d) At least 45 days prior to the adoption of air quality
amendments to a general plan pursuant to this section, each city and
county shall send a copy of its draft document to the district. The
district may review the draft amendments to determine whether they
may improve air quality consistent with the strategies listed in
paragraph (3) of subdivision (a). Within 30 days of receiving the
draft amendments, the district shall send any comments and advice to
the city or county. The legislative body of the city or county shall
consider the district's comments and advice prior to the final
adoption of air quality amendments to the general plan. If the
district's comments and advice are not available by the time
scheduled for the final adoption of air quality amendments to the
general plan, the legislative body of the city or county may act
without them. The district's comments shall be advisory to the city
or county.
(e) The legislative body of each city and county within the
jurisdictional boundaries of the district shall comply with this
section no later than one year from the date specified in Section
65588 for the next revision of its housing element that occurs after
January 1, 2004.
(f) As used in this section, "district" means the San Joaquin
Valley Air Pollution Control District.

Hart presented more evidence of how our government is reaching out to us in the Valley: the 2006 California Partnership for the San Joaquin Valley, co-chaired by Fritz Grupe, top Stockton developer and 2005-2006 bankroller of the Pomboza’s last attempt to gut the Endangered Species Act, with particular attention, as always, to the habitat for endangered species in eastern Central California.

Ed. Note: the Pomboza refers to a congressional partnership, broken up by a vote of the people in 2006, between former Rep. RichPAC Pombo, Buffalo Slayer-Tracy and Rep. Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer-Merced.

The Partnership was a response to a congressional report embarrassing to the state, demonstrating by a number of economic indicators, that the San Joaquin Valley is poorer than Appalachia, Hart said. Sustainability principles and balance is what the Valley needs, she added. But, then, leaving poverty behind for a moment, she leapt on to AB 32, the global warming bill passed last year. What will it mean for one of the most economically depressed areas in the nation? We wondered.

Not much, some say, because it’s kinda toothless. But Hart argued that it was very important because without local planning attention to global warming, state funds will dry up.

Would that be like the Education Reform Augmentation Fund? Would that be like our leaders telling us we won’t get those federal highway funds if we don’t agree to increase our sales taxes for local matching funds? And what does Merced do with the anchor tenant for its terrific real estate boom/bust, UC Merced, out there on the golf course claiming to be the “green” campus? Part of the mind-boggling contradictions we face here is the utter hypocrisy of power: the UC creates the growth that contributes to the global warming and air quality disaster, and then receives grants of public funds to study both. This hypocrisy lies buried deep in the culture of power, where they keep nuclear weapons research (a UC monopoly) and biowarfare research, a UC specialty that it wanted to expand greatly with a biodanger level 4 biowarfare lab near Tracy, fortunately unsuccessfully this time. Strangely, either by “design” or ignorance, Hart made no mention of UC Merced. It is possible she didn’t know where she was, evidenced by one reference to “Modesto County.” Nor did she once mention Mexico or Hispanic residents in the Valley, a curious oversight considering La Paz, headquarters for the United Farm Workers, in close to Tehachapi and that the union’s strikes began in Kern County. But HartHistory, as we were learning, is a very curious narrative.

Hart then launched into her experience on the Tehachapi school district board, full of people living on ranchettes, which ends up costing a lot of money for school buses. The utilities for the ranchette culture are subsidized by cities and towns, she said …

This is real old news.

The reporter is not certain – his notes do not reflect it fully – that at this point Hart actually thanked God for the existence of the Hun, our governor, but she came close. She dynamically presented regional planning as an act of his personal genius. Her illustration was poor Arvin, with the worst air quality in the nation. “Arvin cannot fix its air quality,” she said. She also mentioned that none of the major natural resource issues follow the lines of political jurisdictions, so regional planning is a must.

It looked to Badlands editors like ol’ section 65302.1 of the state Government Code sorta made it mandatory, at least for the Valley, but we aren’t lawyers and Hart outlawed contemplation of lawsuits early in her dynamic presentation.

And if you believe the governor cares about air quality in Arvin, Badlands has a heretofore undiscovered gigantic aquifer under Sunset Blvd. to sell you, dirt cheap.

“We are going to have to accommodate it. Growth is inevitable. If you don’t like it, leave,” Hart said.

OK. Everyone in Kern County can go live in Tehachapi.

The Blueprint is the Holy Grail, Hart dynamically presented. It will cover watersheds, roads, conservation corridors and air pollution issues, she said.

Meanwhile, back to Valley poverty: higher poverty rates than the state average, lower college education than the state average, higher rate of violent crimes than the state average, lower access to health care than the state average and the worst air quality.

Then we got the Three E’s of the Partnership: Economy; Environment; and Equity. “If you want it, you’re going to have to work for it,” Hart intoned.

Nobody in the Valley ever considered working for anything. That’s why we’re so poor, dumb, sick, crime-ridden and that’s why our air quality is the worst in the nation. We just don’t work. No wonder our government scolds us so, in the dynamic voice of Ms. Hart. But, wait, it’s because we don’t know how to work. We don’t have the right concept.

What we need is REGIONAL DESIGN, said Designer Hart. We need to design our regions, our city blocks, our neighborhoods. But, an obstacle is that the Valley is “a whole mess of different cultures.”

Worse than Singapore. Worse than the Epcot Center at Disney World. Badlands always considered it a privilege to live in an area of such diverse cultures.

But, somehow, DESIGN PRINCIPLES – from our inner cities to our rural preserves – are going to save us (if we work real hard), according to Hart.

“Kern County is taking charge of its own destiny. It is finding its vision.” Kern County contains two major goods movement corridors. Kern County wants food security. It wants energy security. It is promoting emerging technologies (a huge windpower project on the Tehachapis, possibly as large as the Altamont projects). Kern County wants water security and has a water bank to prove it.

The one thing Kern County has produced since the farm labor union is Government Code section 65302.1, which the Dynamic Presenter ignored.

Kern County is going to stop growth, develop vision and design its communities (no more of that tacky planning). Kern County is going to have Smart Growth. Hart can’t define it, but she knows what it is. Smart Growth is Outcomes, which we have to focus on instead of “inputs …”

Or “incomes” of finance, insurance, real estate, agribusiness and the oil companies?

Now, to the central point and on to liberation: planning v. design.
Plans outline a process and produces general plans.

Ah, but DESIGN! Design produces an illustrated document showing the community how it will look, enabled by AB1268, which according to Hart creates the breath-taking breakthrough of “form-based codes.”

The illustrations will be brought to the attention of all because – although planners still live in the era of Donkey Kong and maps – today’s technology can create really cool pictures of exactly the kind of city block you want or neighborhood by the same technologies that have produced our modern video games.

We need local government to help us see our vision, Hart dynamically announced. Then we can show it to developers, farmers, etc. Design documents show all the elements, all the outcomes, with lots of pictures. Ventura County has an outcome-based, form-based design document, Hart said.

Members of the defunct Merced County Agriculture Futures Alliance will recall that Ventura can do no wrong. They may also recall that the group was terminated by UC officials and developers when members put forth a coalition statement calling for a moratorium on new growth projects until the county general plan had been updated.

But – to make it even more perfect and free of conflict – Hart says that “we” aren’t telling the developer what to do on his private property. However, the public owns the streets, sidewalks, alleys and schools – the infrastructure. The public must start to design its own public spaces.

That should not take so long. Special interests have been swallowing public spaces for decades, starting with local, state and federal government.

Hart mentioned that the Tehachapi City Council declared a moratorium on new growth until its form-based planning was finished. The developers agreed, according to Hart. Hart has tender feelings for developers. She says some of them are investors in your communities and plan on 2030-year buildouts. Some even live in your communities. If they build low-quality housing products in the beginning, they create a problem for themselves later on in their buildout. Speculators hate form-based design, Hart said. But, developers who live in your communities will support it. In Tehachapi, developers supported it but speculators slinked out of town.

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!

Hart said that non-government organizations need to start working together.

The Badlands reporter regrets to say that no warm hand reached out to grip his own in the audience and scarcely a line of “Kumbaya” was sung.

You must bring people together, get to the Blueprint process, get community workshops started in the neighborhoods – Get them excited! Hart exhorts us undynamic listeners. Even get “bums” excited. BUT – dynamically weaving her diversity of themes – Hart reminds us that we don’t design private property but only public spaces.

Which is where you find homeless people, aka “bums” in HartSpeak.

Visualize your future! Hart exhorted us. We have NEW TOOLS! Hart explained. New computer tools that can create planning scenarios as fast as CMI forensic cops can whip up the face of a suspect. The room is silent. We all sense that this is the center of the Dynamic Presentation. New tools! People think about the air board, perhaps with help from UC Merced, creating the Black Box that will clean the air. New tools. Magic!

We suddenly grasp the principle of HartHistory: Time goes backwards from her future design, zooms in reverse at top speed through the present and into the past and those Southern cotton pickers up to Detroit, when Ford Co. goons were dangling the Reuther brothers, auto-worker organizers, over the frozen Detroit River from a bridge.

In Hart’s first demonstration of the NEW TOOLS, she chose a picture (projected on a screen by computer as is obligatory in all serious public discussion these days), of a street corner. It was a real Valley street corner. It was funky. It reminded me of street corners from Stockton to Bakersfield, where a Democratic Party voter registrar might set up table, make his pitch, and end up talking to a long-legged, sultry working girl in a red mini-skirt who would give her name as Joy d’Amor and say she only voted for Jesus for King. The scene contained a corner lot strewn with the remnants of failed enterprise, perhaps the last being a dead-end used car lot.

NEW TOOLS intervened as quick as a police artist on CMI whips up a portrait of a perp from a victim’s description. We have an attractive four-story apartment building with retail on the sidewalk, on the lot of the former defunct car lot kitty-corner to the “Checks Cashed Here” establishment.

So, according to Hart, the design freak, the turned-on citizens all the NGOs have gathered will redesign this guy’s lot. He couldn’t make a living selling hot clunkers there, but he has the money to build a four-story apartment building with retail on the floor. No more funky Valley neighborhood, full of “bums” and proprietors of sketchy establishments, no more of the real communities that thrive in such places all over America. We just erased the community that actually existed on that street corner – so unsightly to the eyes of Hart and the rest of the Yuppie Design Police – and we did 4th Street, Emeryville or downtown Sebastopol, without the income base to support it. And was the former used-car salesman a willing seller?

HartWorld is not about real people. It is about design fantasy, which always occurs out there in the future, receptacle for the subjunctive of greed. But that future is tough territory. While Hart demands local NGOs settle their differences and work together, a war is going on between planners and designers for control of the future, a time and a place – when you think about it – that does not exist. The nation’s present negative savings balance, the mortgage crash, and a decade of living in a community whose public officials have talked about nothing but housing people who do not know they will live here yet, from the Great Valley Center’s “Housing the next 10 Million” through all the UC flak about “tidal wave 2,” should be enough to make Mercedians think twice about Mom’s advice about planning for the future. If that is not enough, look at our business leaders, whose policies are to rip off the present as if there were no tomorrow. Consider our political leaders, who permitted nearly every subdivision they were asked to so speculators could try their hand at flipping Merced real estate.

If your local planners aren’t using SCENARIO PLANNING – these virtual pix – your local government is not helping you! Hart states flatly.

Does she have a contract to sell the technology, manipulate the technology, or does she get a cut for its promotion?

We now enter Hart’s nightmare and it’s no longer “we” (she, the Hun and the smart people) and now it is “you” (us living in this unspeakable squalor here on the Valley Floor).

“Your houses are unaffordable. Where is the water coming from?” she intones, flashing a photo of a boulevard with businesses on it with huge lawns between them and the street. Instantly, she creates a whole new SCENARIO of sidewalk boutiques crowding the boulevard, eliminating costly lawn watering. This only presumes that the insurance companies and high-tech firms that have the large lawns will sell the land to a developer to install the row of boutiques and that anyone will rent boutiques in space that reminds us of the road between Napa and American City or somewhere on the outskirts of Fremont or Fairfield.

Hart almost rants about being a “single mom” raising her children in a “real” neighborhood, saying (un-singly) that “we built a house we could afford in a neighborhood …” She waxes poetical about real neighborhoods before blasting ranchettes. Bakersfield College students did a study on ranchette living, found the lock-key children of two-income earners, and declared that ranchettes were creating “Lord of the Flies” SCENARIOS.

You need to build real communities!

We have real communities. They are being overrun by new subdivisions, which are of course neither real communities nor even neighborhoods yet. Retiring Placer County CEO Don Lunsford, put it quite well in 2001, saying that if all the subdivisions built in Roseville don’t become neighborhoods, “we will have failed.”
“We” failed and Roseville remains the model for growth in the Central Valley and that failure is a generous goldmine to all developers. That’s what happens when finance, insurance and real estate special interests own every local, state and federal politician in the state.

Close Big Box Retail! Build real shopping centers! Hart declares. Build creative clusters for creative workers! Build walkable communities to impede obesity (the killing illnesses of today have a direct relationship to how we build our communities)! Senior citizens in ranchettes are a disaster for everyone involved, from the seniors to their families to the public services they require, sometimes real quick.

Pictures designed on a computer screen are going to lead to the reform of the state tax code after the developers spent 30 years designing it exactly to their specifications?But, don’t you worry, we’re in the future now and the future does not exist so just go along for the ride and BELIEVE!

Again, from the annals of a reporter formerly covering government in Placer County, where all the magnificent fruit orchards have been carved into ranchettes – many for retiring couples – one of the main worries of government was the response time of ambulances and fire departments.

STOP PLANNING!
FIND VISION!
START DESIGNING!
INCENTIVIZE DESIGN!
DISINCENTIVIZE PLANNING!

The developer wants to know what you think! He doesn’t want to spend all that money planning something you don’t want. He needs to know what you want. With NEW TOOLS, you will be able to communicate with him.

Peace through graphics?

“That’s it,” she said.

But, it wasn’t quite it. At the very end, we learned that “government doesn’t want to fight you.”

Not “us,” it’s all “you” again that is receiving this immeasurable crock of the well-known substance.

Pedrozo was enthusiastic. “We can get these tools from you,” she said. But there are problems, at least here locally and DESIGN-FORSAKEN Merced. Developers get infill projects and their permits don’t make it through the process. A lot of the downtown housing is actually zoned commercial. We spend our tax dollars for public infrastructure but development has not paid its way.

IT’S OUR FAULT FOR NOT ASKING GOVERNMENT TO DO MORE! Pedrozo declares.

The public refuses to accept the blame for not demanding more of government by this inside wheeler-dealer, executive director of the local farm bureau, sister-in-law of the chairman of the county Board of Supervisors, soon-to-be president of the California Women for Agriculture and past executive director of the county Chamber of Commerce. Pedrozo long ago passed over to the realm of local fixers who read no documents but decide their views solely on backroom chats with officials, weighing who is less important to offend in any given political situation.

Planning Commissioner Cindy Lashbrook said that the lack of communication between cities and the county … the cities choose the largest footprints … are there any tools for not growing …sloppy …
“Cities grow. Counties don’t.” Ed Abercrombie, former Atwater city councilman.

Hart replies to her fellow UC/Great Valley Center IDEAL program graduate: there are issues like how land percolates, where farmland is – cities can be formed, can weave, can be concentric, or can organize as connected villages, which is more organic.

Like Village One in Modesto, the illegitimate brain child of Carol Whiteside, then mayor of Modesto, later founder of Great Valley Center and its IDEAL program of emerging scam-artist development.

“You have to find out what your people like, what makes them comfortable,” Hart said.

This sort of grasping for grassroots by government and its paid lapdogs like Hart is strong evidence of total desperation. The San Joaquin Valley is dying of government-sponsored growth.. Growing parts of it become public health and safety dangers, which is a liability issue for government. Therefore, OUTREACH!

Councilman Osorio makes a critical remark about design review committees. They just fiddle with little stuff, he said.

Would that be little stuff like printing a union bug on “Osorio for Mayor” lawn signs made by non-union printers and then trying to bribe a union printer$3,900 to say he printed the signs?

Hart asserts a NEW POLITICAL MODEL: What we gotta do is get us together in a “big old messy group with a good design team for a week taking “your” input and …”

…making cool video-game graphics out of it. “Big old messy groups” have gotten together with planners in a number of California counties to make county plans in the past. But, they didn’t have HartTech, so of course it didn’t work out--setting aside remorseless pressure from building industry associations, fronting for finance, insurance and real estate special interests.

Hart is full of wisdom and the Merced audience has evidently pushed her into root principles: “We’re not going to get consensus.” “You” have to build to a point where they will not oppose. It’s called “informed consent,” Hart explained. “Work for informed consent.”

In HartWorld there are always six people in any community who are against, and they can stop projects when they get together. In DianaWorld, however, these people do not do ask government to do enough. In the politics brought tonight to Merced County, all the non-governmental groups are required to join forces and go out into the neighborhoods to get people excited about redesigning themselves, while finance, insurance and real estate special interests go right on going on with the same-old, same-old.

East Merced Resource Conservation District Board Member Glenn Anderson attempted to ask a question of his usual global nature. Although a nut grower, Anderson’s questions always involve both fruits and nuts. He was trying to say something about local fruits and nuts and fruit and nut security. He never had a chance. Hart grabbed the theme and ran with it. Local growers and packers send their fruit out of the Valley and the Valley gets worse produce back. She lurches forward, imagining a fruit and vegetable peddler working our neighborhoods like the Good Humor men on their bicycles or the ladies who sell good tamales door-to-door.
Only true Valley vernacular can respond to this: it is horseshit. Our produce in Merced is just fine, thank you, and we bet it’s better in Bakersfield, a much larger city.

All this was too much for mayoral candidate Osorio, who said,: “We cannot build apartment lofts downtown by eminent domain."

Buggy as Osorio is, that wasn’t a bad statement.

Hart polls the audience for support of high-speed rail. Few hands go up. “That’s not enough at all,” she mutters.

How will she explain it to the Hun?

Hart nearly wails that we’ve abandoned 2,000 years of city planning for Levittown. Pedrozo replies that we’d support high-speed rail if we though the Valley would look like Europe as a result, but we know it is just going to look like LA. Hart says that it is the perception of staff planners that there is a problem communicating with the people. But there is all this growth. What are planners to do? What is the disincentive for more population growth in California.

Several members of the audience say, another Great Depression, possibly caused by the credit crisis brought on by fraudulent mortgage loans, like the credit situation in Merced, Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties.
A questioner enters the global space of overpopulation in the Valley and global warming. Hart replies that AB 32, the state’s global warming bill looks like an unfounded mandate but is actually an unfunding mandate.
Pedrozo, executive director of the county farm bureau, veers away from global-warming chat, saying that we can build wonderful communities and keep good farmland, too.

Hart lays down the Kern County dogma on food security: Do you want to depend on a foreign nation for your food like we depend on the Middle East for our oil?

Speak Memory of how long ago it was when a large Delano packer was fighting President Reagan’s embargo of Nicaragua, with which he was doing a lot of import/export business in farm commodities—and became a darling of the Sandalista set for a season for his efforts. How many acres of row crop land does it take a family to make a living on in Kern County today? The benchmark in 1970 was 800 acres.

Maureen McCrorry asked how we could encourage infill projects rather than urban sprawl. Hart replied: hire design firms rather than planning consultants. “We’re building housing rather than communities.”

“Hire me rather than those nasty old planning consultants in the audience.”

A farmer remarked that the county has no zoning for agricultural preserves. Hart replies that you need to study your water, prime ag land, etc.

Most of the people in her audience have been involved with efforts to get government to do that for years. Some in the room have been successful at getting federal agencies to do just that. Hart, who thinks Modesto County is just to our north, has no clue who she is talking to.

Pedrozo announces that the county has required 1:1 mitigation for farmland on the Delhi and Santa Nella plans. No one is there to contradict her so it must be true, right? Pedrozo asks Osorio and other city officials present: Why couldn’t the city increase the density a bit and build out on its previous urban boundary without expanding it by 22,000 acres? Osorio replies that there is zoning for apartments but no one is building now. There are lots of empty houses in Merced, in case no one is looking, he added.

Badlands editors briefly imagined a Singapore skyline in Merced, its upper stories filled with the very wealthy entrepreneurs of UC Merced-inspired high-tech, bio-tech businesses, in entirely self-enclosed environments including virtual parks and 24/7 zebra snuff movies on the screens with no need to go outside to hear the rumble of goods movement, gangs and homeless panhandlers in public spaces, and to experience the health and safety hazards of breathing the air.

Hart, a fanatic advocate for mixing except perhaps in Tehachapi, asks if the zoning requires mixed income groups. Osorio replies that it has to be that way by state mandate. There is resistance to smaller footprints.
The Badlands Journal editorial board conjectured that Hart’s vision is of skyscraping apartment complexes with poor folk below, the wealthy above and discretely separate elevator shafts with stop and go servants constantly delivering locally grown fruits and nuts to the upper floors.

Nick Robinson, Scourge of WalMart, comments that nay-saying is important for community self-defense.

Hart replies that those same old six people can shut down anything. You’re going to have to move them. The goal is not consensus but informed consent. Robinson replies that asthma has become a health and safety issue in the Valley. Hart says that if you are going to build communities that cause asthma, you have to say, No. It is the only moral thing to do.

The distinction between the moral and the political, fomented by today’s Nobel Prize winner, Citizen Gore, is simply more evidence of the psychotic cracks in DemocratThink, the metaphysics of a level of political corruption so deep and pervasive it has destroyed itself. As former Rep. Tony Coelho, D-Merced, told Brooks Jackson, author of Honest Graft: Big Money and the American Political Process, “the process buys you out.” Evidence since Coelho’s resignation in the 1980’s mounts that it also rots your mind.

Lisa Kaiser-Grant asks what about a moratorium on growth – simply oppose it to stop proactive (pro-development) planning? Responding to an earlier quibble by Osorio to the effect that he wants citizens not merely to oppose projects but to offer positive solutions, Kaiser-Grant added that she didn’t have time to propose positive solutions. “What I have time to do is to oppose.”

Hart pitches her NEW TOOLS. Get the design information out there, get your GIS cooking. Planners need to reeducate themselves. They need to SEE by using those new, cutting-edge graphic technologies that only design firms can properly be employed as consultants to provide.

Hart replies to the emerging moratorium mood in the audience that the only problem with moratoria is bankers (people we stupid Mercedians are never supposed to have heard of).

“FIRE!” cries the Badlands editorial board. “At last we are being read: Finance, Insurance and Real Estate special interests have ruled us since UC Merced was prematurely promoted as a “done deal” by the politicians, and became the anchor tenant for an incredibly destructive speculative real estate boom, which achieved its final form two days after this dynamic presentation: number one in the nation for foreclosure activity.

Pedrozo said Merced dairies did a three-year moratorium while negotiating the county animal confinement ordinance. But then she went lunatic: “We must give the government our vision! We need more dialogue like this.”

Actually, the evening was not a dialogue. It was a Dynamic Presentation followed by a little Q&A.

Osorio, a realtor, mortgage broker and insurance broker, determined to get the last word during his campaign for mayor, said “you” need to have the local politicians tell you what the constraints on your (crazy) ideas are. But, don’t think these are really local restraints. It is all the state’s fault…

The following is a report on a meeting held between top US Fish & Wildlife Service officials in Sacramento and representatives of non-government organizations concerned with California water issues and public employee responsibility for the environment. It was written by Felix Smith, retired USFWS fish biologist, representing the Save the American River Association.

Sense of the Meeting

Meeting with Mr. Steve Thompson and John Engbring of the California - Nevada Operations Office of FWS at 2800 Cottage Way, Sacramento, CA. October 1, 2007 at approximately 1:00 PM. Attending were Lloyd Carter (California Save Our Streams), Lisa Coffman (Executive Director, California Water Impact Network), Bill Jennings (Director, California Sports Fishing Protection Alliance), Karen Schambach (California Director, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility) and Felix Smith (Save the American River Association).

This meeting was in response to my letter of August 21, 2007, to Mr. Thompson with copies to FWS Director Dale Hall and others. Mr. Engbring called me and we set up the meeting.

The purpose of the meeting was to help open communications with the interests sitting around the table and to help ensure that the brightest and most knowledgeable FWS scientists are able to speak good science, the truth to the public at large and to congressional committees, State Boards and commissions, independent bodies, etc.

Mr. Thompson is a member of the Senior Executive Service (SES) and is a career Fish and Wildlife Service employee. Mr. Thompson emphasized that the Service’s Sacramento staff is hard working. We have on staff some of the best biologists in the Service. Our field people are working along side Bureau staff with good results for fish and wildlife. He stressed that he does not like biologists working projects / investigations who are advocates for the resources or solutions. Mr. Thompson also stated that his office would continue to change documents / reports that did not measure up to established positions or didn’t “connect all the scientific dots”. He said that a report must stand on it own biological merits before the Service will support it. He advised that he was the lead person for the Klamath River water quality -fish issue. He added that the Klamath River issue was a little blown all out of proportion (Mr. Jennings commented -the fish kill?). Mr. Thompson commented there are a couple of issues here. The issues are dam impacts and removal, and water for salmon and endangered species. Regarding the Delta, Mr. Thompson stated this issue has developed over a long time and will not be solved over night. The 20 to 23 million people will get their drinking water; shutting down the pumps to protect the Delta smelt is not the solution. He did not offer a solution.

Mr. Thompson, when reminded about what FWS Regional Director Mr. Spear was told by a Congressional Subcommittee responded, he was aware, but would continue making decisions he has to make and is not worry about considering non-biological impacts. Mr. Jennings added there was an issue involving FERC and EBMUD and the Mokelumne River (See Summation).

Members of the group indicated that a Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act is a biological / ecological report on impacts to trust resources by a water development project or activity. And the same issues hold here as it does with Endangered Species Act reports. Considering non-biological information is not a part of a field biologist reporting process or in proposing recommendations to conserve and protect fish and wildlife.

· The public expects that Service biologists will speak the truth and the whole truth to the public, its representatives, independent bodies and individuals as well as helping to educate the layperson of fish and wildlife needs.
Mr. Thompson. Service managers will select the best person for the situation to represent FWS. Mr. Thompson did not want Joe Skorupa at the Senator Feinstein meeting regarding the selenium / drainage issue. Mr. Thompson made his thoughts known to FWS Washington. He believes that while Joe is a good scientist, he is too much of an advocate. The Service needs a more neutral person, not a data biased person or a person that gets in the press. He stated Joe Skorupa has been gone from California for a couple of years now and is no longer the most knowledgeable about the selenium drainage issue in California. Selenium or related issues in California are not really Mr. Skorupa’s job. Mr. Thompson will select the person that he believes will best represent the FWS interests given the situation. Mr. Thompson went on to add that the Service does not seem to have selenium or mercury drainage issues in Nevada that we have in CA.

Mr. Carter asked if the selenium issue in Nevada was studied to the degree that it was in CA? Mr. Thompson responded that the Service does not have the resources or staff to do the work. The Service must depend on USGS researchers to do so. Mr. Thompson stated that if he got 10 staff biologists in a room and asked their opinion, (I took it as being about selenium.) that he would get 10 different answers.

The group quickly stated, if the issue were selenium and avian toxicity, there would not be 10 different answers. The consensus would be quick and decisive. They would agree with Mr. Skorupa probably knows more about selenium and avian toxicity than anyone one in FWS.

· Are there any impediments that keep FWS employees from speaking or presenting ideas, science and scientific theory at meetings when representatives of the Bureau of Reclamation are in attendance and the issue is a Bureau operation, facility or management? All too frequently it looks like FWS is running flack or is a shill for the Bureau. Others have said that FWS and the Bureau, while having different duties and responsibilities, look like they are attached at the hip. There appears to be little independence exhibited by FWS biologists at meetings with the Bureau.
Mr. Thompson. Service employees can speak all the science they want they just can’t be advocates for a position. It is my job to establish the agency position and to work with the Bureau to see that the agency position is carried forth. The Service and the Bureau work very well together. Kurt Rodgers and I get along well.

· What is the FWS position on the selenium drainage issue in the SJV?
Mr. Thompson. We haven’t got there yet. There is much work to be done before a solution to the problem can be put forth. This is what Senator Feinstein and her draft proposal / legislation is all about. The FWS is waiting for the Bureau to come up with the plan. When that plan is put forth that will be the time for the Service to prepare its comments and position on the Selenium drainage issues of the SJV.

· Can FWS correspondence, data, etc., with the Bureau of Reclamation especially about the selenium drainage issues be made freely available to the public?
Mr. Thompson. Copies of all correspondence with the Bureau can be made available to any one who wants it. Just let us know. Business cards were exchanged so addresses can be put on the mailing list. He did say he meets regularly with several groups. We stated how did you miss us. He followed up with; maybe we should do this again sometime. He added however that he will not voluntarily provide and information to any organization that is suing the agency, even if the lawsuit involves an entirely different subject that the information requested.

· What can this group do to help you do a better job and to help ensure that fish and wildlife will get fair and just treatment in any agricultural drainage or other negotiations?
Mr. Thompson. Just do not bring a lawsuit against us. We are spending way too much time and money with lawsuits. This is time and money that we should be spending on improving or making things better for fish and wildlife.

Lisa Coffman reminded Mr. Thompson and stressed that when an agency takes an action inconsistent with the research data / findings, this could bring on a lawsuit. A lawsuit becomes a tool because the public has no other way to try to correct a politically driven or pressured mistake by natural resources managers.

Mr. Thompson a couple of time mentioned that the Bush Administration is doing all it can for fish and wildlife. Almost in unison the group stated this meeting is not about the Bush Administration, it is about getting good science and good decisions based on science.

Summation with additional background material.

I was a field biologist and staff biologist, a project leader and a Field Supervisor with the US Fish and Wildlife Service. I retired with than 34 years of service.

My understanding of Mr. Thompson’s message is that FWS biologists can speak science (down load tables of data), but should not help analyze the data so the layperson can understand what the data means in practical terms. This concept is foreign to me. He claims that FWS biologists are not to discuss with the public or policy–makers possible solutions to a problem is also foreign to me. Biologists can talk science all they want but they can’t develop or propose solutions. If a biologist explains too much about his or her science and possible resource impacts, a biologist risks becoming an advocate and that according to Mr. Thompson is when the person loses his or her credibility. This in turn harms the Service because only Service managers know the breadth of the activities and what is best for the Service. To me, what Mr. Thompson is saying is “I will do what is best for my career and the Service”, not “I will do what is best for the resource, the long-term public interest and future generations”.

Mr. Thompson was aware of what Mr. Spear (FWS Regional Director Region 2) was told by a Congressional Subcommittee concerned the Mt. Graham Red Squirrel. Mr. Spear was aware of the biological concerns in reports prepared by his staff and reports of the State of Arizona. He just was not convinced. He didn’t think a small loss of critical habitat would harm the squirrel’s survival. Mr. Spear told a GAO investigator he had to make an expeditious decision: the University needed the Emerald Peak facility: in court the University would win; and in his perception the telescope would be world class.

Mr. James Duffus III of the General Accounting Office, on June 26, 1990 presented Mr. Spears testimony to members of several committees of the House of Representatives relative to the Mt. Graham red squirrel Endangered Species issue. Mr. Duffus stated “We do not believe that it is appropriate for an FWS official to consider non-biological information in reaching opinion that could jeopardize a species existence”.

Mr. Spear effectively undercut his staff in a couple of FWS field offices. This engendered Sierra Club involvement and also involved affidavits by FWS staff. The staff was quickly demoralized.

A few years’ later Mr. Spear was now the RD of FWS Region 1 and Sacramento biologists were working with EBMUD regarding flows on the Mokelumne River. While Sacramento FWS and CDFG staffs, along with the Committee to Save the Mokelumne were negotiating the flows, Mr. Spear was making a deal with EBMUD people in Portland. That deal undercut the efforts of the Sacramento Field Office and others. He did not support his field biologist’s reports or findings. Mr. Spear’s actions quickly demoralized staff and left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.

It has been a long standing FWS policy that biological reports prepared under the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act and ESA are stand alone products. Recommendations are not to be tampered with non-biological considerations, other to ensure that recommendations are reasonable and can be implemented.

Mr. Thompson’s thinking relative to selenium seems to be how much damage and risk can the migratory bird resource take (so we lose a few birds forever) until just before there is catastrophic resource or population collapse. To me the issue is or should be how much stress, harm and mortality to migratory birds can be prevented. To say it another way, what is needed to prevent damages to the sustainability of public trust resources such as migratory birds and wetlands and what actions are needed to protect water quality and the viability of that resource?

I believe a major part of science is understanding and interpreting data. The next big part of science (and that of FWS) is letting the people know, i.e. educating them, as to just what the data means and the potential benefits and impacts to fish and wildlife. I believe that it is up to a manager to tell the public the information they need or should know to better understand an impact on a resource or understand an agency’s position. To not tell them important information about impacts is irresponsible. To ignore one set of data or the resultant impacts in favor of another because it fits a preconceived notion or fits a certain predetermined political solution, is bad science and management and is bad for public confidence in FWS managers.

When Mr. Thompson stated that all his people can talk science all they want, but they could not to be an advocate for their research data, or a solution to protect or make conditions better for fish and wildlife; --- it was like a kick to my gut and very foreign to me. In my opinion without having advocacy for one’s project, research activity and data to protect fish and wildlife, a manager can effectively kill imagination, innovation and the esprit de corps of his agency. Fish and wildlife biologists like talking science and ecology. They like defending their study findings against all attackers. Such challenges and discussions lead to improved science and understanding of the problem and to formulating possible solutions. During the early days of the selenium / drainage issue, I was told by an SES, “I do not like your science and your reasoning”. I answered, “Then the best references on the subject and associated findings need to be changed”. He responded, “don’t use those references”.

I believe that people working for FWS do not give up the right of freedom of speech. I also believe that these same people believe that educating the public and decision-makers about fish and wildlife needs is an integral part of their professional duties and responsibilities.

There is little doubt in my mind that the entire FWS Sacramento field staff is confused about what they can do and can not do relative to their projects / investigations and data. I also believe the field biologists are receiving mixed signals regarding what they can say in public or at meetings when the dominant Interior agency, Bureau of Reclamation, is represented.

Mr. Thompson does not want FWS biologists explaining or interpreting data and what it means to the future of fish and wildlife. In my opinion when FWS data and analysis becomes confidential information, the people and public trust resources are put in jeopardy. This is what happened in the early 1980s when the Bureau had the selenium / water quality data relative to the San Luis Unit drainage. FWS biologists questioned the Bureau data. FWS – SES managers said they (field biologists) had to respect the Bureau’s data. It was revealed to FWS biologists a few months later that the Bureau data were cleansed. The high values were ignored as being rogue data. Only low values were reported. After a few months of questioning the data, USGS obtained its own data to reveal gross misrepresentation of the selenium data. The USGS also reviewed the Bureau’s protocol for testing for selenium and found it in error. The USGS then evaluated the Bureau’s lab. The lab failed to pass or meet USGS standards. I was told the lab flunked miserably. There needs to be full public understanding of the selenium / drainage data and public airing of all options. It should not be solely the province of the FWS and Bureau SES managers.

I see the day when FWS employees will be subpoenaed and requested / asked to testify or present technical information and discuss possible solutions involving selenium and drainage issues. FWS employees could be asked to prepare affidavits regarding his or her involvement with selenium, drainage, endangered species, or Delta water quality issues. The Service will probably choke on the idea. This could happen at a trial or before a government committee.

Mr. Thompson is a SES. As such he is graded on making deals. He can also receive a sizeable bonus. I believe that he is first a public trustee. The first duty of a trustee is to manage trust assets for the future benefit of those assets and for the people. However, the “lets make a deal” mentality is engrained in the SES and is going to be around for a long time. Mr. Thompson apparently believes that “lets make a deal” is the way to go. All too frequently that cuts out the public from overseeing how managers work and why they do the things they do. And all to frequently action is taken with little if any paper trail.

One thing is true. Scientific findings will continue to prove “lets make a deal” decisions wrong. However the deal cutters are seldom around to pick up the mess. They have received their bonuses and promotion and have moved on. This is why lawsuits are a necessary tool and should be filed against the deal cutters.

I believe that the Code of Ethics for Government Service (PL 96-303) is still valid and applies to all those in government service. This code is a minimum standard. Integrity, professional ethics, and scientific credibility must be the bottom line, but it must start at the top. To me effective government means that the Nation’s laws will be faithfully carried forth without prejudice. It means that career scientists responsible for conserving and protecting our nation’s environmental resources, uses and values, will be allowed to do their jobs without fear of partisan political pressure or reprisal.

If the people do not demand the highest level of scientific integrity, professional ethics and scientific truths from FWS managers or if the people do not or no longer trust the agency officials to tell the truth, our system of government of serving the people, will fall to one of special favors for special interests. When that becomes evident, then it is time for a lawsuit.

Respectfully

Felix E. Smith – FWS retired 1990.

ThomMeetSumOct107 Oct 7, 07 ---7:30 PM

Below, find two comment letters on the public minutes of the last East Merced Resource Conservation District board of directors meeting. The Badlands editorial board has received several comments, actually, but declined comparison with 1950s French theater of the absurd. We wish to point out to the second correspondent that Lydia Miller has never conducted a "circus" at any Merced River Stakeholder meeting and one credible witness to that is Pat Ferrigno, representing the Bettencourt family ownerships on the river. Nor have river property owners created circuses at the MRS.

The EMRCD, which represents largely self-serving, grant-funded interests of its out-of-control staff, intends to destroy the collaborative, non-voting strength of the MRS. To that end, after stakeholders successfully killed an EMRCD grant on the basis that the studies were redundant, the staff salaries were models of conflict-of-interest and the EMRCD attempted to ram the grant down the MRS throat unread, the EMRCD summoned a bogus meeting of the MRS, presided over by an illegal quorum of its own board members, while the MRS held its legitimate meeting elsewhere.

The strength of the MRS lies in its non-voting governance, which has permitted -- uniquely for a decade -- widely divergent interests of farming, ranching, mining, environmentalist, resource agencies and others, to meet and continue to share vital information about our river. MRS has no intention of surrendering to some flak attack by the "one voice" crowd, fronting for finance, insurance and real estate special interests that aim to take away riparian water rights from property owners and destroy riparian habitat.

Badlands Journal editorial board

Bill: I read the lengthy email from the Badlands Journal about the EMRCD and the inside struggles for transparency. I am not a property owner there but do read. It is refreshing to know that transparency and openness of our local government will be fought for. Thank you. Charles Ulmschneider

Bill, I thank you for the recent e-mail sent regarding the meeting of MRS.
I do represent my own 200 acres in the Snelling area. I have several
partners in the property and I was asked to attend these efforts from the
start. Several years ago, I was informed that Lydia Miller was to attend
the next meeting and at that time my group decided that she would simply
create another circus costing Merced citizens too much bounty. I do try to
stay informed but refuse to entertain frivolous discussions by those who
simply want to stop all landowners from the enjoyment of their rights. I'm
still not sure where you stand on any matters but atleast you share
information well. Repectfully, Kevin Collins

Press release: For Immediate Use !! ******* Press release: For Immediate Use !!

California Endangered Species and Habitat Alliance

Butte Environmental Council * California Native Plant Society * Defenders of Wildlife * Protect Our Water * San Joaquin Raptor and Wildlife Rescue Center * San Joaquin Valley Conservancy * VernalPools.Org

October 5, 2007 Contacts:

(916) 452-5440 Carol Witham, VernalPools.Org

(916) 201-8277 Kim Delfino, Defenders of Wildlife

(530) 295-8210 Sue Britting, California Native Plant

(530) 891-6424 Barbara Vlamis, Butte Environmental Council

(209) 723-9283 Lydia Miller, San Joaquin Raptor/Wildlife Rescue Center

CESHA COMMENTS ON PROPOSED NEW UC MERCED FOOTPRINT

MERCED, CA (Oct. 5, 2007) –

The California Endangered Species and Habitat Alliance (CESHA) is a coalition of national, statewide, and local groups working to protect endangered species and habitat in California. We are committed to effectively and strategically advocating for and educating towards changes in California’s policy, politics, and public awareness that will enable protection of California’s endangered species and threatened habitats.

Members of CESHA, including Butte Environmental Council, Defenders of Wildlife, California Native Plant Society, Protect Our Water, San Joaquin Raptor/Wildlife Rescue Center, San Joaquin Valley Conservancy, and VernalPools.Org, have been meeting with UC Merced officials, plus federal and state resource agency officials for more than two years in a dialogue about the Merced campus impacts on the habitat for endangered species.

“VernalPool.org supports the UC’s announcement today regarding the reduced footprint” said Carol Witham of VernalPools.org, “because it is environmentally more balanced than the original proposal and reduces impacts to vernal pools and endangered species.”

“We look forward to seeing new plans and participating in the public review process on the new campus,” said Lydia Miller, president of the San Joaquin Raptor/Wildlife Rescue Center.

“CESHA’s open discussions with UC may prove beneficial for the species, habitat, and the Merced campus, which has been a collaborative opportunity too good to miss,” stated Barbara Vlamis of Butte Environmental Council.

CESHA has been in continual dialogue with federal and state resource agencies concerning the impacts to and disappearance of endangered species habitat, most notably in the eastern Central Valley. Among CESHA achievements is the California Rangeland Conservation Coalition, a group of environmental organizations and cattle-ranching groups that work together for the preservation of working cattle ranches and endangered species habitat in California.

UC Merced’s announcement may be found at
http://www.ucmerced.edu/news_articles/10052007_uc_merced_modifies_plans.asp.

This is a letter from a Merced River stakeholder/river landowner that provides another viewpoint on the recent East Merced Resource Conservation District board meeting. -- Badlands Journal editorial board

From: pferrigno@elite.net
To: Brwade@aol.com
CC: xxxx@bigvalley.net; billhatch@hotmail.com; xxxx@aol.com; xxxx@mercedschoolcu.org; xxxx@mercedriver.k12.ca.us; xxxx@santafeaggregates.com; dlevey@mercedsun-star.com; xxxx@ca.usda.gov
Subject: Post EMRCD Meeting
Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2007 18:28:15 -0700

Bernie: I am conflicted as to what to do next. I have never been subjected to such thinly-veiled hostility as was experienced at the EMRCD Board meeting.

I’m not a big fan of process, per se, and most of this public records stuff drives me crazy….but it is offensive to me that the Board spent so much time yesterday discussing ways in which to make access to public records difficult and expensive … specifically for the Raptor group. People like Lydia Miller keep us honest; we are all just a little bit more careful to cross our t’s and dot our i’s because of them. The entire matter would be a moot point if this stuff could be put on the web site where it belongs so anyone could look at it whenever they wanted.

As a citizen of Merced County attending a public meeting of a Merced County Board I am once again embarrassed by these proceedings. As a private citizen with a need for representation I am horribly frustrated to the point of not being able to function. If water were not so important to the farmers on the River, I would walk away from the whole thing and have a much better quality of life.

The snide remarks, innuendo, and blatant misstatements from Cindy Lashbrook are very troublesome: point in fact, my brother was never invited to sit on the EMRCD Board although Cindy announced to one and all that he had been invited and had refused; point in fact, I never “shouted down” anyone who wanted public access at any MRS meeting (Cindy said that someone present at the Board meeting yesterday had done that; as it wasn’t you and wasn’t Lydia I guess that leaves me)—Lydia is probably the only person I have raised my voice in anger to at a meeting and it was at the Board of Supervisors not MRS; point in fact, the previous water monitoring training program, organized by Teri Murrison, was a bust—Mike is the only person who walked out of that training program with a water monitoring kit and that was only because he knew the Fish and Game rep who was doing the training. The lies promulgated by Ms. Lashbrook become fact when they are not refuted.

Has the impropriety of the way in which the grants are administered not occurred to anyone on the Board? It is not appropriate for beneficiaries of grant funds to sit on the Board: it is a concept called “arms length “ objectivity; without it the EMRCD can be seen as being politicized, chasing the board members’/grant beneficiaries’ biases rather than the legitimate policy concerns of the citizens. Instead of attacking the messenger, it would be more prudent to examine the actions of your staff in this regard.

The stakeholders (no matter with what group—or no group—they are affiliated) are citizens. We, the Merced River Property Owners, had legitimate concerns about the grant. Whether it was submitted by the MRS, the EMRCD, or the Rand Corporation, we would have opposed the grant as it is adverse to the interests of the majority of the River farmers.

Cindy’s contention that the grant really wasn’t concerned with public access to private property; and, her further statement that the access issue and all of the other things in the grant which were the basis of our opposition were only included because they were a part of the RFP is ridiculous. It is also fraud. I was a grant administrator at UC-SF for several years; you cannot state you are going to do something in order to get a grant and then not do it. If Merced County has other grants which were obtained on this same basis… what were they thinking?

I don’t believe the EMRCD Board is guilty of malfeasance or misfeasance; I believe you are all doing the best you can do in the situation where you are running your businesses and volunteering your time for the EMRCD. I do object to the level of personal hostility which was in evidence. We (the Bettencourt family) tried to defuse this whole thing before we resorted to setting up another MRS meeting. We offered to meet anywhere, with anyone; we offered to host the meeting at one of our homes or at a restaurant. The offers were ignored.

You need to put aside your defensiveness and notice that there is a pattern here: your facilitators were too busy meeting the grant deadline to get the grant concept proposal out to MRS members (did you notice that the grant is dated February 1, 2007; which would have allowed more than adequate time for MRS review); your facilitators were too busy getting ready for the River Fair to get the grant out to Lydia and me on a timely basis; your facilitators were too busy going out of town for four days to reconsider the UC-M location even though our prediction of significant parking problems and lost attendees was right on.

It would be appropriate for us to try, once again, to defuse the issue but I really don’t have the energy and the Property Owners I represent would not ask me to be subject again to being scolded, like an errant schoolgirl, by the EMRCD Board. We will continue the MRS once your paid facilitators are gone. We don’t need to be paid to do the right thing for the River.

Pat Ferrigno

Abbreviations:

RCD=East Merced Resource Conservation District
MRS=Merced River Stakeholders
MRA=Merced River Alliance
NRCS=USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service
DOC=state Department of Conservation
DWR=state Department of Water Resources

#1. Introductions

Gwen Huff, EMRCD/MRA staff/MRS facilitator
Cindy Lashbrook, Merced County Planning Commissioner/EMRCD/MRA staff
Susan Pettis, USDA Soil Conservation
Malia Hildebrandt, USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service
Bill Hatch, San Joaquin Valley Conservancy
Lydia Miller, San Joaquin Raptor/Wildlife Rescue Center
Pat Ferrigno, representing the Bettencourt Family, Lower Merced River property owners
Dyhanna Levy, Merced Sun-Star
Bernie Wade, president RCD
Glenn Anderson, RCD board member
Cathy Weber, RCD board member
Karen Barstow, RCD board member
Bob Bliss, RCD board member
Karen Whipp, RCD/MRA grant administrator (and her husband)

#2. Communications

Lydia Miller submitted a letter and the oral testimony of Bryant Owens and David Corser, presented at the RCD/MRS meeting held on Sept. 24 at UC Merced.

Anderson denied that meeting was an RCD meeting and asked how the board should receive Miller’s submissions. Bliss said, “We never had a board meeting,” adding that he only talked to two board members.

There were four identified RCD board members at the UC Merced RCD/MRS meeting, which made a quorum. The RCD board members present were advised by a state official that in fact this was an RCD meeting. No RCD board members attended the real MRS meeting, held at Washington School simultaneously.

Weber suggested that Miller’s submissions be accepted by the board plus board comments.

Miller said they were presented by Owens.

Lashbrook: “Read by him anyway …”

Anderson said that the MRS has no governance therefore the submissions were made by a person.

Miller said the submission weren’t written by Owens or Corser but were presented by and for several groups in MRS that signed the submitted letter.

Barstow said the proper name for the RCD/MRS meeting was “MRS at UC Merced.”

Miller requested the words “oral and written” be added.

The board found that acceptable.

Anderson asked, “But for which meeting?”

The board replied in unison, “The meeting at UC Merced.”

Whipp suggested that the submissions be labeled “by some stakeholders.”

In other words, the RCD board interjected itself into the time on its agenda reserved for oral communications from the public, interrupting the public repeatedly in the process.

Wade proceeded to Item #4, forgetting Item #3, Corrections and Additions to the Agenda.

Miller pointed out the mistake.

Busy at work trying to suppress public comments at a public meeting, Lashbrook and Bliss sneered at Miller’s suggestion, saying it wasn’t true.

Wade, recognizing his mistake, returned to Item #3, Corrections and/or Additions to the Agenda, and Miller submitted the “Public Minutes to the EMRCD Meeting, August 15.”

Whipp refused to accept them.

Miller requested that they be submitted under Item #2, Oral Communications.

Wade agreed.

Bliss: “Time’s up.”

In fact, “individual comments may be limited to 5 minutes each by the board president,” not Bliss, who isn’t the president. There was no one keeping time on whether Miller took five minutes to explain the board’s mistake, Whipp’s refusal and Miller’s subsequent request.

Weber noted that there is one error in the submitted public minutes and asked if the board could comment.

Weber’s problem was that the letter in opposition to the RCD grant was titled “Merced River Stakeholders,” a true title. Weber’s objections were well-covered in the public minutes just submitted. When she realized that a separate MRS meeting had been held at Washington School while the RCD was holding an official RCD meeting at UC Merced, erroneously called an MRS meeting, she dropped her opposition to the public minutes.

The MRS has never suppressed information or demanded that anyone support our position. At its meeting at Washington School, as usual, the MRS had an open agenda. This meeting was attended by Commissioner Lashbrook’s husband, Bill Thompson. MRS members have heard from several sources that Thompson, a Farm Bureau director, like his wife, has been bullying people into taking a position against the MRS. MRS would welcome his interpretation of its meeting. Meanwhile, the MRS wishes to make it clear that it is not out bullying anyone to support its position.

Miller said the proper place for board comment on the submitted public minutes would be at the next meeting.

It is fascinating that having first rejected minutes offered by the public for RCD meetings, now RCD board members wanted to correct them.

Whipp said the public minutes weren’t written by someone hired by the RCD to write them, therefore should be called “public comment.”

The RCD board then moved on to Item #4, the Consent Agenda, but Whipp wasn’t finished with the public minutes issue, submitted under Item #2 after the board refused to consider them under Item #3. Whipp said the official RCD minutes are written according to Robert’s Rules of Order and that p. 451 of Robert’s states that official minutes “should never reflect opinions or reasoning of the board…Minutes will show action, reports made, but no comments … that’s not what minutes are about…If more detail is required, you are asking for a transcription.”

Whipp’s interpretation would seem to founder on two questions: are RCD minutes public or private? and Are they published or not published? – at least according to Robert’s Rules of Order. In fact, the RCD is a public board, appointed by the Merced County Board of Supervisors, and its main business, well-known to Grant Administrator Whipp, is the administration of public grants from public agencies for public purposes and the minutes are published on the RCD website after they have been adopted.

The RCD treasurer, Barstow, referred the board to written reports on the RCD grants.

There was discussion of an additional $16,000 granted to the RCD or the MRA “until December 2007” and it was reported that 70 percent of the MRA personnel budget has already been spent. The work on that grant will be done by June 2008 and MRA staff Nancy McConnell and Whipp will continue working 2 months longer.

Item #6, Written and Oral Updates.

Hildebrandt of NRCS reported on the status of the General Order on Waste Discharge Requirements for Existing Milk Cow Dairies, issued in May by the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board. Workshops for dairymen have been scheduled for public dairy assessments on water quality due in December 2007. In October, visual and photographic assessments should be taken. Two hundred forty Merced County dairies are covered by this order. They include “those dairies in existence as of October 17, 2005, that have not expanded by more than 15 percent AND have submitted a complete Report of Waste Discharge to the Board.”

The deadline for application for EQIP grants is November 2, Hidlebrandt reported. So far, there are 80-85 applications. Per the new Farm Bill, funds not allocated will be returned to the federal government and subjected to the new regulations coming out of the new Farm Bill. At the moment, the new Farm Bill contains no provisions for orchard removal but it is “on the list” (for final Farm Bill negotiations).

There are new developments in pest management, she said.

Meanwhile, there will be high school speech contests for the RCD to consider. (Is this a cross-grant with existing FFA programs long in place?)

Hidlebrandt reported on the University of California Integrated Pest Management program, which elicited questions from the board.

Bliss and others groaned about the difficulty of this new program. Anderson wondered how difficult it would be to keep records for such a program. Hildebrandt said that most growers would let a PCA do the record keeping, noting that growers already in the program will not be eligible for this new program. Anderson asked if new adoptees were easier or harder to find, guessing they would be easier to find. Hidlebrandt said NRCS had not yet administered the new program. Yet, typically, the sort of guidance the program would offer would include: “Don’t just automatically spray after a rain; at least do the other things first.” Air quality and integrated pest management programs are funded by the states, she added.

Pat Ferrigno asked Hildebrandt if the air quality program was new. Hidlebrandt replied they have been going for seven years. Ferrigno remarked that it would have been appropriate for the RCD-funded facilitator of the MRS to have informed the MRS stakeholders of it.Hildebrandt said she had been to the MRS.Lashbrook said something about “advertising to the MRS.”Hildebrandt said that not everyone knows about the program. Ferrigno said that that was her point.

Hildebrandt explained that it was an offshoot of an older USDA program with a more environmental emphasis.

Next, under this Item came the Watershed Coordinator report.

Huff, the watershed coordinator, announced she was resigning on Friday, adding that Lashbrook and Whipp would make sure that her leftover responsibilities were taken care of. She said the Fall MRA newsletter was complete. Huff was enthusiastic about educational fliers announcing a water-quality monitoring program for junior high school students and the opportunities for outreach to junior high science teachers. Her parting theme was: “Do more outreach!” Weber raved about the extra credit junior high science instructors were offering for this program.

Huff announced that Sierra naturalist Jack Muir Laws would be offering a lecture and workshop on the Upper River soon. Lashbrook annotated that Laws was “a direct descendent” of John Muir. Weber said his book was “great.”

In other business under this Item, Huff reported that there had been no response from the state Department of Water Resources on why the RCD grant proposal had been rejected. But, she noted, the state Department of Conservation would be offering new watershed grants later this year. The RFPs were not out yet but stakeholders would be notified, she said. There will be six weeks to submittal and the stakeholders will have three weeks to respond. Lashbrook and Whipp will be working on it, Huff added.

A board member handed out regional water board non-point-source pollution RFPs for grants. This would involve landowner workshops, Huff said. Lashbrook and Whipp have time on the Department of Conservation grant to write some grants, she added. There will be a webcast from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. on Sept. 27, Lashbrook said, at least it is “most likely.” An urban streams program will also be offering grants, Huff said. The RCD/MRS facilitator grant will end in November 2007, she said. The RCD still has money and Huff suggested two replacements for herself.

Huff said that MRS had elected to meet at the Merced County Agricultural Commissioner’s meeting hall because at UC Merced parking was hard to find (and might cost money). Or, alternatively, the MRS could continue to meet at UCM but at 6:30 p.m., when parking was easier to find.

Weber asked if the non-point-source grants apply to riparian vegetation, too, and if they could link with NRCS grants. Huff said, “It’s a perfect fit.”

Next, the board turned to the issue of how the MRS could possibly continue without RCD-paid facilitators. What would they do with the mailing list and the website? Where would it go? That subject dangled as Huff returned to the money: she said she would write the next draft report to the state Department of Conservation on the grant budget. Lashbrook and Whipp will continue her work on these reports after she leaves (on Friday, Sept. 28). Huff said the MRS facilitator is a half-time position and that Lashbrook and Whipp will pick up more hours after her resignation.

Will the DOC approve of this change or will it suck up those hours? Whipp asked. Lashbrook attempted to explain but the reporter was unable to make any sense of her comment. Huff said that the MRS account was billed for eight hours per month. Whenever the watershed coordinator worked for the MRA on the river, she was partnered over to the MRA newsletter but only billed eight hours to the MRA.

President Wade said that there would be a new facilitator for the MRS in November, but asked if Huff would write up the minutes for the RCD/MRS meeting at UC Merced.

Huff replied that she was using a $1,600 Toshiba laptop computer and offered to buy it from the RCD for $500. “If not,” she said, “you could sell it on eBay.” Lashbrook said that the new price for this model had dropped to $500-$600.Huff said it had had to be repaired four times. Anderson asked what records were in it.

Huff replied that Lashbrook and Whipp probably already have all the records or will have after the “turnover” on Sept. 27. Anderson suggested erasing the hard drive and starting all over. Huff said the laptop had crashed “a few times.”

This computer was purchased with state funds. It should stay with the entity for which purchased. But, was that entity the RCD, the MRA, MRS? It was not purchased by an individual, Huff or anyone else. Sounds like a subject for another state Public Records Act request.

Lashbrook presented her report. She said she’d spent “very few hours this summer” on water-quality monitoring, a long-term MRA goal. “The Upper Merced River has been doing it all along,” she said. Originally, the MRS wanted water monitoring. MRS facilitator Teri Murrison, waste water treatment plants and the Merced Irrigation District, along with other entities, wanted “learning centers” along the river, Lashbrook said, and there was agreement with the parks along the river for regular water-quality monitoring.

Huff said that there was no funding for citizen water-quality monitoring.

Lashbrook attempted to put the monitoring issue in perspective by saying something about how we pollute and how these people (perhaps she meant farmers) won’t be a problem anymore because of this monitoring.

Wade reported on a UC Merced freshman tour of Lake McClure, mentioning it was “painful” to ask how restoration would be done.

Ferrigno, representing the private ownerships along the lower Merced River, said that former MRS facilitator Teri Murrison discontinued a water-quality monitoring program half-way through due to farmers’ opposition to what amounted to a bounty program in which citizen monitors were promised half the fines levied against (farmer) polluters.

Lashbrook remarked that it sounded like Teri. Huff said she didn’t remember that program.

Ferrigno reiterated a point often made: the lower river is mostly privately owned and permission is not given to cross private property to do monitoring.

Lashbrook commented that part of the MRA program was to share the practices of the upper river group.

The Merced River Alliance is composed of staff for upper and lower river groups, from Yosemite on down to the San Joaquin River.

Ferrigno brought up an example of how even agency water-quality monitors get it wrong, saying that it took her family three years, including 15 hours in September to clarify for the monitoring agency that the water they were testing came from tail waste, not Jones Slough – in other words, the wrong source.

Hildebrandt and Lashbrook explained that records are kept of tests on the upper river and that if MRA found funds for a full program, it would send tests from all along the river to labs. Huff said the lower river is already monitored. Lashbrook said MID doesn’t monitor all the water, that a full monitoring program would or should include all irrigated lands and that MRA would make sure all the information would be correlated.

Whipp presented the report of MRA staff (from the upper river), Nancy McConnell, stressing that “deliverables” on grants included tours, watershed outreach and the annual MRA dinner. She also presented the report of Terry McLaughlin, MRA staff for Yosemite, announcing that McLaughlin had developed a new water-quality monitoring kit for middle school science curriculum (7th and 8th grades).

Barstow commented this was a “good thing for our children who are our future.” Anderson asked Barstow if she was present when the kits were used by the 7th and 8th graders. Barstow said no. Lashbrook commented that “Snelling students will be our mentors on water-quality monitoring protocols” at an upcoming event there.

Lydia Miller asked why the Monitoring Plan and Quality Assurance Program Plan received an exemption from the California Environmental Quality Act. Barstow or Whipp (not sure) replied that it was because the plan was just a study. Lashbrook commented that McConnell had done all the work on that.

Item #7 Recording EMRCD Board Meetings

Weber said that the RCD needed to record its meetings so that “we can verify what we said other than what it is reported that we said.”

Barstow objected, saying she did not want the “give and take on opinions before making a decision” recorded, however “points of clarification and the Yea or Nay” were OK. The conclusion is the significant thing, she added. Anderson quizzed the group on what equipment and special technology would be necessary, agreeing with Barstow on recording deliberations, because he was “not always especially proud on the lack of information” on certain things. Barstow said that if the meetings were recorded board members would have to identify themselves.Whipp said the board would “have to do all of it.” Bliss said he liked to sit around, “freelance,” and talk to each other (freely, seemed to be his implication).

Wade mentioned that the Board of Supervisors and the Planning Commission record their meetings. Weber replied that those were “public hearings.”

Lashbrook said that the state association of RCDs told board members that recordings would have to be kept for five years and did not recommend the RCD record their meetings. However, Merced County Counsel said it wouldn’t hurt but that they would have to keep the tapes and that all meetings or no meetings would have to be taped.

The board voted unanimously to table the issue for this meeting and reconsider it later.

Item #8 Procedure for Requesting Public Information

Whipp requested adoption of standardized procedures for keeping and sharing RCD public information. She expressed irritation at members of the public who had received information from the RCD and then wrote to request the same information be sent again. State Department of Conservation and the state RCD association both recommended the RCD adopt a policy, she said.

Barstow: “What information?”

Whipp: “Minutes and reports sent out to those who request it. I need more structure … there is a policy under the Freedom of Information (Act) to charge for copies …”

Anderson asked if there was any guidance in the state RCD handbook.

Hildebrandt began to look through the handbook.

Lashbrook explained that the RCD state staff recommended a policy and pointed to the difficulties of finding “historical stuff,” rather than “current stuff.”

Whipp said her main interest in a policy was to be able to show that she’d already sent information if she had. Therefore, she was asking for a log of all requests and that the requests must specify documents.

Anderson asked that action be held off until the board sees if the state RCD handbook has specific guidance.

Lashbrook advised: “This is your time to set policy. This would be the day …It’s happening statewide but state RCD staff says not everywhere …You have pressure now. It wouldn’t hurt you to adopt (a policy).”

Barstow moved to develop a policy by the time of the board’s October meeting.

Bliss also wanted to make a motion.

Anderson objected.

Weber asked that if she were to second a motion, wouldn’t it open it to discussion?

Bliss offered to amend Barstow’s motion to charge $1/page for RCD documents “like other boards are doing …”

Hildebrandt read from the state RCD Guidebook that all records are open to public inspection during office hours, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.

Anderson expressed concern for additional overhead costs to the RCD.

Bliss urged the board to pass his $1/page motion immediately.

Weber and Wade brought up some qualifications.

Lashbrook commented that some of the qualifications were according to statutes.

Anderson asked what would happen if we took action now, based on what other RCDs are doing.

Bliss said that it had all been explained, it covered all kinds of information and that “there’s a leak in the dam.”

Lydia Miller raised a point of order.

Bliss refused to hear it.

Wade asked that it be heard later.

Weber asked if the board would start charging $1/page now.

Bliss: “Now.” He argued that the board has to pay Whipp for her time to fulfill these requests. “These people (meaning the public requesting the public information from the public RCD) ask for the moon. We’ll charge then $1/page.”

Barstow asked where would this decision go in the RCD’s own guidance and offered to withdraw her motion if Weber would withdraw her second.

Wade suggested that the information continue to be distributed until a decision is reached.

Lashbrook advised the board to adopt a policy immediately. She added that Miller sounded like she had some serious public information requests that she would be making of the RCD.

Barstow changed her motion, moving that the RCD policy should be that information requests be made in writing to the administrator (Whipp) and that the $1/page charge should be adopted.

Lashbrook said 50 cents/page was as high as they could go.

Bliss said the state RCD staffer had said they could go to a dollar.

Whipp said the county administration and county counsel charge 50 cents a page. The procedure is that after a written request is filed, the agency has 10 days to gather the documents, it calculates its costs, receives the funds from the requester and releases the documents, she said. It must all be done in 10 days unless there is a lot of research involved, she added.

Lashbrook commented: “That’s the law. You can’t deviate.”

Barstow said that if someone wanted backup documents, “that’s not appropriate,” because the RCD is a contractor and that the proper place to make requests would be to the state agencies that make the grants administered by the RCD.

Lashbrook advised that without making that change, “you’d be having to work three or four days straight (on these requests).”

Whipp declared that neither she, Huff nor Lashbrook were staff of the RCD. “We are contractors, not staff. We contract with the board. We don’t have to do what others direct us to do…We are being asked to distribute documents that we didn’t author … e-mails are public information and I have been distributing them in a timely manner … but it has been inferred that there is something unethical.”

Anderson asked if 50 cents or a dollar is actually enough to cover the overhead.

Whipp said “we” could not charge for her time, only for her leased copy machine.

Lashbrook intoned that now the board is exposed to state Public Record Act (PRA) requests.

Barstow modified her motion to “50 cents.”

At this point it was very clear that the board couldn’t distinguish between a request for public information and a request under the state PRA. Meanwhile, Whipp, who has to handle all the requests and distribution of information, responded to a comment by Miller about “inappropriate e-mail.”

Whipp said that every time she has to search board e-mails, she has to charge the RCD. She added that if documents on financial matters were requested, she would ask county counsel or refer the request to state agencies.

Barstow said the RCD was a private contractor.

Lashbrook again intoned that an immediate policy “wouldn’t hurt you.”

Whipp asked for a policy just to clarify what the public has a right to know and what it doesn’t have a right to know.

Lashbrook declared that the RCD had no responsibility to distribute e-mails at public request. This “has been clarified by four attorneys,” she said.

Anderson asked about the present state of the different motions.

Whipp said there were a lot of different motions at that moment.

Barstow said she would have liked to have seen this (perhaps this policy) earlier. But she withdrew her motion and Weber withdrew her second.

In fact, the agenda packet for the RCD board members contained a sample – admittedly an inaccurate document confusing a public information request log form with a PRA request—of what Barstow was complaining she had not seen.

Bliss moved for 50 cents “for every page disseminated” and for the same “time-line procedure the county follows.” Weber seconded the motion.

Ferrigno suggested that the RCD just put up the material on its website.

Whipp said that minutes are posted after they are adopted. The problem is with background information, she added.

Ferrigno asked how far back the website went.

Hildebrandt went to check.

Lashbrook declared that the RCD doesn’t want to “stop transparency.”

Right!

Someone mentioned the problem of Internet access. Someone else mentioned that the public library provides Internet access.

Bliss called for the question.

Miller told the RCD board that they hadn’t even read their own guidebook (available on the Internet), their agenda items were illegal for lack of adequate description, they had no staff reports, and that a state Public Records Act request was different form a public information request and log. “Your whole agenda doesn’t meet the Brown Act standards,” she said, “and the public has problems with your whole process.”

Bliss said Miller had exhausted her two minutes. “All those in favor – come on, let’s get ‘em,” he added.

Hildebrandt raised an issue about minute’s availability.

Miller, who had copies of the county public information act request forms, told the board to get their own county public information documents. “You have a county planning commissioner on your staff.”

County Planning Commissioner Lashbrook remarked: “Today’s staff job.” She added that the board “better cover yourself.”

Miller said the board’s agenda and motions were unclear and that they have to make coherent statements in their agenda of the actions to be taken.

Barstow replied that the board was appointed and volunteers. “Please let’s go on and not fall into this razzle-dazzle,” she added. “I’ve got a business to run.”

Barstow’s business was recently fined for non-compliance with pollution standards.

President Wade summarized: motion, second, discussion and public comment.

The vote was unanimous for 50 cents a page and a 10-day preparation period for dissemination of public documents to the public.

During the discussion, Miller had distributed to President Wade and Staff Whipp a genuine, authentic state Public Record Act request. Bliss snatched out of Wade’s hands, looked at it, rolled his eyes and passed on the Barstow.

Barstow asked for a point of clarification on Miller’s PRA, saying it was not what she thought it would be. It is formal and needs to be drafted in a formal way of receiving mail, she said.

The PRA was quite formal and was drafted according to the PRA law.

Whipp said Miller handed it to her without explanation.

Item # 9 CAL-Card Contract Addendum

Discussion on this item centered on a purchase card issued for funds from a Prop. 13 grant, which had to be approved before the card was used. Huff said it worked well for staff because they didn’t have to use their own credit cards for such purchases. Whipp said the card was used by McConnell, Lashbrook, Huff and herself, all members of the MRA-- for example, for things like a digital camera, she added.

Then Whipp read the PRA request from Miller and Steve Burke, which had nothing to do with staff credit cards. Lashbrook began to mumble and Huff tried to shut her up.

Barstow said Miller’s submission of the document showed “obvious hostile intent,” and the board needed to take it to the county counsel for advice.

Lashbrook advised that board members should accompany Whipp to the county counsel.

Anderson said the board needed to make a motion on that.

President Wade said the board could direct Whipp to go to county counsel.

Barstow said, “Some of these things were out of the board’s hands and involved agencies.”

Weber said that two board members should accompany Whipp to the county counsel’s office.

Item #10 Response letter to Department of Water Resources in Regard to Letter of Opposition of Grant Proposal

Apparently, Barstow was supposed to write the request to the DWR. She didn’t. The issue was tabled by the board. Lashbrook said there needed to be a committee on that.

Item #11 Future Relationship between EMRCD and Merced River Stakeholders

Weber set the stage by saying the grant funds were running out and that now there were two groups of stakeholders and the RCD no longer had the money to support the MRS.
Huff said that if MRS agreed, the RCD should seek more funding. Weber asked if that would be decided at the November meeting.

Which meeting was unclear: one of the two MRS meetings, the RCD meeting or the MRA annual dinner meeting.

Anderson said that if other entities believe they can do a better job, let them. He said he saw a better river, less tail water and less drainage, than before. He was very concerned about downstream issues.

Bliss said it was fine if there was someone to do it better. He said he was “big time pissed off. I have a life to live and can live it.”

Anderson said he could do anything but something that suggested confrontation. The board should wait for the next meeting but the RCD could say, “No more, let someone else run with it. I am totally delighted with the whole river alliance. I’m not that sort of person – no fights with people.”

Barstow said she was “dismayed and discouraged” by the fact that this has gotten to this point. “Heart-breaking.” It is important to have relationships with the river people. But what the board was getting in her view was “razzle-dazzle.”

Bliss declared himself a “conservationist.” He mentioned his grandchildren and even future great-grandchildren. He said he was “infuriated” watching people get hurt by “vindictive people.”

Anderson, saying he was reading a lot of books these days, announced his personal quest, a la David Korten’s The Great Turning. “Do we stay on this course and watch well-intentioned people get beat up? It makes me sick.” He said he wanted to be a part of that “new movement” to make it all better. “We have no time to fight,” he said. “Malia has a new baby.”

Barstow said that the board was good because it had balance between conservation and farming.

Lashbrook said she too came to the stakeholders before the RCD took over facilitation. The landowners met separately. Now they are doing it again, meeting the same day as the RCD/MRS meeting and calling themselves the MRS. She mentioned a grant for recreation and how, according to her, landowners shouted down recreation people at an MRS meeting. But, the MRS is supposed to be “diverse,” she said. “I am also an environmentalist,” she said. “This whole conflict has nothing to do with the river, nature or resources. I understand where Pat (Ferrigno) is coming from. I don’t understand the others.”

These would be the people she publicly declared war against at the July 20th RCD meeting and has been bullying people all over the county to take a stand against since they wrote in opposition to a grant that would have paid her something between $60,000-$75,000 and would continue to subsidize her other ventures, including her farm, her blueberries, her consulting business, her workshop schedule and expenses.

Wade said there were some “misguided things” in the relationship. Jennifer Vick, of the state Department of Fish and Game didn't let the RCD say anything in the MRS. He mentioned the Robinson riparian restoration project. He read from a document that the RCD initiated the MRS in 1998, along with the CDFG, Stillwater (consultants), Merced County, landowners, the US Fish & Wildlife Service, the public, etc.

Lashbrook commented that “the RCD got narrowed down to the river.”

Wade said either the MRS or the RCD didn’t have an aggregate committee. (Wade has an aggregate project he is trying to get a permit for). Maybe the state doesn’t want an MRS, he said. Maybe CalFed doesn’t want it. He said there were other things that the RCD could look into, like, for example, water pollution in Hilmar.

Anderson said he lived in Hilmar and that, “We must be careful of what we say.”

Barstow said that this was undocumented information.

Lashbrook said there were two reporters in the room.

Miller said: the San Joaquin Raptor/Wildlife Rescue Center, of which she is president, has been in the MRS since 1998 and that RCD participation began in 1999. She said she had been through RCD missteps involving the bogus UC habitat conservation plan, Vick, Mike Fuller and Teri Murrison, before Huff became facilitator. She said she was there for the UMPUG grant, the CAFF grant and the oversight issues with biologist John Vollmar. She said her group has been a consistent stakeholder and participant in RCD meetings throughout this period. She said she resented this lecturing and hostility from the RCD board. The RCD board doesn’t understand its own mandate and hasn’t read its own guidebook, available on the Internet (where Miller had read it) and CDs are available from their state association, she said. She added that she and others had told them there were problems with the RCD grant proposal this spring. She said she and others had suggested meetings with Huff and Lashbrook and other grant writers. These offers were rejected. Miller said the MRS and the RCD are not on the same page. The RCD is a stakeholder. “Until you sort that out we will continue to suppress your grant funds,” she said.

Weber asked how the RCD and the MRS could get together again and work for the river.

Ferrigno said the opposition to the grant was clearly expressed, but the RCD staff did not respond. She said that she represented farmers who owned 37,000 acres on or near the river and they had no representation – not in the RCD, a municipal advisory council or on the board of supervisors, or the planning commission (she was saying that planning Commissioner Lashbrook, who lives on the river, does not represent the interests of the river landowners Lashbrook did not attend the MRS meeting at Washington School, attended by most river landowners, including her husband).

Lashbrook said that the RCD asked Ferrigno’s brother to serve on the RCD board. (Later, Ferrigno having checked that out, reported it was a lie.) Lashbrook also said that the Raptor Center had so many members, it could have a representative on the board.

Later, Miller said there was no chance at all that the Merced County Board of Supervisors would appoint any member of the Raptor Center to any board. It was a hollow statement made by Lashbrook, an appointee to the Planning Commission and to the RCD board. And she knew it was a hollow statement.

Lashbrook nearly wailed that the RCD had never tried to keep anyone out.

Ferrigno said that her group had pointed out the downside of the UC Merced meeting place but the RCD had not listened, so the MRS held a separate meeting at Washington School. “To put that controversial meeting in an unknown location showed very little cooperation” between the MRS and the RCD-paid facilitator, she said. She concluded that she had no time to sit here and be lectured to by the RCD board.

Lashbrook wailed that Huff was going out of town when the decision to hold the meeting at UC Merced was made and “your complaint came in.” She added that Brad Sameulson, UC Merced environmental compliance officer, said “farmers come in to the campus all the time.”

Barstow said the funding for MRS facilitators runs out in November but “we’d like to see it continue.”

It was 4 p.m. so President Wade asked to table the last four items on the agenda, and the meeting was adjourned.

In conclusion we wish former MRS facilitator, Gwen Huff, the best of luck in her new position with the state Department of Water Resources as an event coordinator. We can’t wait to see how well her work will “fit” with local events like Lashbrook’s River Fair and McConnell’s outreach “deliverables.”