Badlands Journal

Nakayama also forgot to mention that the Bush administration has rewritten the very rules used to prosecute those companies. The Bush version of the rules, which would let power companies off the hook, is being challenged in court by numerous state attorneys general, as well as environmental groups.

"It is the height of hypocrisy for the Bush administration to try to take credit today for enforcing the Clean Air Act's new source review provisions,” notes Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. “The Bush EPA has been working overtime to change the underlying clean air rules and prevent such enforcement actions from being brought against dirty power plants in the future."

Nakayama also failed to note that the Bush administration is not only trying to change the rules, but that it recently declared that it would not even enforce the law against the power industry—a move the administration euphemistically described as an effort to “refocus” its activities.

Some big polluters have become so encouraged that they’ve gone to court to seek dismissal of pending charges. It’s as if someone awaiting trial for murder sought freedom on the grounds that prosecutors were going to look the other way in future murder cases. – Frank O’Donnell, TomPaine.com – Dec. 2, 2005

Big polluters and environment destroyers are operating under a new legal theory: if legislation weakening environmental law and regulation might have been pending when they committed their illegal acts under existing law, they might be able to skate. For people interested in rural excursions in Merced County, a trip down White Rock Road in Le Grand from the entrance to the Jaxon Mine all the way to the Madera County line at the Chowchilla River would reveal interesting examples of projects that assume this new legal theory. The idea behind the deep ripping of thousands of acres of seasonal pasture containing protected wildlife habitat seems to be that the Gut-the-Endangered Species Act bill by Congressman R.D. Pomboza, Species Slayer-Tracy/Merced, could get through the Senate, so “let her rip.”

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

Polluter Playtime (1)
Frank O'Donnell
December 02, 2005

Frank O'Donnell is president of Clean Air Watch, a 501 (c) 3 non-partisan, non-profit organization aimed at educating the public about clean air and the need for an effective Clean Air Act.

In a move virtually unnoticed by the press corps, the Bush administration this week quietly dropped a lawsuit against a big electric power company.

The suit against Duke Power Company was brought by the Clinton administration, which accused Duke of illegally spewing too much pollution into the air. The Bush team initially gave lip service to continuing the suit, but it shelved the case after a setback in a lower court.

In the process, the administration demonstrated a phenomenon that is becoming increasingly apparent: For a government seemingly obsessed with promoting the “rule of law” everywhere from Iraq to Mongolia, the Bush administration can be pretty loose when it comes to enforcing the law back home.

Especially when it comes to enforcing environmental laws such as the Clean Air Act.

Whether it’s dealing with coal-burning electric plants in the Midwest or auto emission inspections in Ohio and Kentucky, the administration has decided it won’t even attempt to enforce the law if it seems inconvenient to big polluters or to Republican-controlled state governments.

This isn’t a trivial matter. Hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Americans are dying unnecessarily each year as a direct result of the administration’s cavalier disregard for the law.

The administration’s negligence is perhaps topped only by its brazenly false claims about its enforcement prowess. Consider, for example, the hypocritical assertions made last month by Granta Nakayama, the Environmental Protection Agency’s head of enforcement, as the agency issued a status report on its enforcement efforts.

Nakayama (who, until recently, was a corporate lawyer-lobbyist paid to undermine clean air controls) contended that “EPA's enforcement strategy and accomplishments demonstrate our commitment to achieving cleaner air, cleaner water and healthier communities."

To back his claim, Nakayama cited 10 recently resolved air pollution cases against corporate polluters. Those 10 cases would eliminate 620 million pounds of pollution and bring more than $4.6 billion in public health benefits, including “reductions in premature mortality, bronchitis, hospitalizations and work days lost.”

What Nakayama left out was that half of the results came from cases brought by the Clinton administration. These were prosecutions of electric power companies that violated the law’s “new source review” provisions, which require smokestack industries to modernize pollution controls when they increase emissions.

Nakayama also forgot to mention that the Bush administration has rewritten the very rules used to prosecute those companies. The Bush version of the rules, which would let power companies off the hook, is being challenged in court by numerous state attorneys general, as well as environmental groups.

"It is the height of hypocrisy for the Bush administration to try to take credit today for enforcing the Clean Air Act's new source review provisions,” notes Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. “The Bush EPA has been working overtime to change the underlying clean air rules and prevent such enforcement actions from being brought against dirty power plants in the future."

Nakayama also failed to note that the Bush administration is not only trying to change the rules, but that it recently declared that it would not even enforce the law against the power industry—a move the administration euphemistically described as an effort to “refocus” its activities.

Some big polluters have become so encouraged that they’ve gone to court to seek dismissal of pending charges. It’s as if someone awaiting trial for murder sought freedom on the grounds that prosecutors were going to look the other way in future murder cases.

Take, for example, Cinergy, the conglomerate that provides electric power in Ohio and Indiana. Five years ago—in December 2000—Cinergy reached an agreement in principle with the Clinton administration, which had accused it of violating new source review. Cinergy pledged at the time to reduce 1 billion pounds of pollution—more, in other words—than all the “top 10” cases combined that Nakayama boasted about.

But after the 2000 elections, the company refused to sign the deal. Now, Cinergy is asking a court to dismiss the charges because of the Bush administration’s decision not to enforce the law against other companies. Cinergy no doubt will be encouraged by the administration’s change of heart in the Duke case.

The “refocused” Bush policy of non-enforcement unfortunately is spreading like the avian flu to other sources of pollution.

For instance, the states of Kentucky and Ohio recently decided to abolish auto emission inspections in the Cincinnati metropolitan area even though an American Lung Association report documented the area had 19 days this summer with unhealthful air quality.

Auto inspections do help reduce pollution, and EPA rules stipulate that smoggy states such as Ohio and Kentucky can’t just scrap pollution control programs that they don’t like. Except that, once again, the EPA says it’s not going to enforce the law.

“Illegal and irresponsible,” is how the American Lung Association describes the situation.

So you do have to marvel at the chutzpah of an EPA spokeswoman, who recently declared that, “We will continue to rigorously enforce any violations of the nation’s clean air laws.”

Except, that is, when the Bush administration doesn’t feel like it.

Notes

(1) http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20051202/polluter_playtime.php

A limited partnership of politicians, developers, agribusiness corporations and the University of California, Merced, appear to have established a unified board of directors composed of three divisions: founding members of the UC Merced Foundation board of trustees, the Great Valley Center board of directors and staff, and the California Partnership for the San Joaquin Valley, recently appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In mid-November, UC Merced and the Great Valley Center announced they had merged and that UC Merced Chancellor Carol Tomlinson-Keasey would become the chairman of a downsized GVC board of directors. (1)

Viewed from the perspective of the on-going ecological crisis in the Valley, this group would appear to have been assembled around common interests: the defeat of environmental laws, regulations and local, state and federal agencies mandated to enforce them, dismantling the Valley’s agricultural economy except for its largest agribusiness corporations, and promoting the expansion of UC Merced. This interlocking board of directors is a formidable array of political influence, money and propaganda capacity. Powerful synergies of propaganda, lobbying and funds probably will develop to mold Valley public opinion to accept the worst air pollution in the nation, diminished water supply and quality, the loss of prime farmland, open space and wildlife habitat, the linking of one continual slurb from Stockton to Bakersfield, and UC Merced research guided by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in directions both ethically and ecologically offensive.

Some of the problems The Board faces immediately:

Although UC has built the first phase of its Merced campus, federal environmental regulations forced it off the originally donated land of the Virginia Smith Trust onto the former site of a municipal golf course. UC Merced has yet to get federal approval for its plans under the Clean Water Act, regulated by the Army Corps of Engineers.

The regional water quality board rejected Hilmar Cheese’ proposed solution to on-going violations of water quality standards, provoking the ‘world’s largest cheesemaker’ to announce plans to build an even larger plant in Texas. (2)

The San Joaquin Valley is growing almost as fast as Mexico, considerably faster than either California or the US. (3) The worst air-polluted parts of the Valley, mainly around Fresno, now experience endemic child asthma, the highest rates in the state. (4) Sixty percent of the problem is from mobile emissions, the rest from stationary sources. Lately, it has been admitted that dairies are the leading stationary source of air pollution. The growth of the Valley dairy industry is second only to the growth of suburbanization (building sprawling, low-density residential areas also known as slurbs). What is routinely denied about dairy pollution is the contribution of daily, diesel-fueled milk truck traffic. The San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District also has been looking at charging an air-pollution fee on new construction. And the state Water Reclamation Board recently started to question development on flood plains near Delta levees.

The Valley Board is disturbed by this “unbalanced” regulation.

Then, there is the national political embarrassment of the north Valley congressional delegation, known by local farmers as “O Pomboza," formerly representatives RichPAC Pombo, Buffalo Slayer-Tracy, and Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer-Merced.

A forthright approach to environmental problems was pioneered last spring by board member Greenlaw “Fritz” Grupe, a prominent San Joaquin County developer. Grupe assembled developers at his Lodi ranch for a joint political fundraiser for O Pomboza. Not long after the fundraiser, the two congressmen jointly authored a bill to gut the Endangered Species Act, with particular attention to critical habitat designations, because their joined districts contain extensive critical habitat for 15 endangered species associated with seasonal wetlands. UC Merced is built on and wishes to expand on the densest concentration of vernal pools in the nation.

Beyond the Pomboza problem, the period of one-party Republican rule seems to be running off its tracks and corruption investigations are becoming popular again. These are stressful times for special interests because it may become unpopular as well as illegal again to actually buy a politician. Public opinion may resent, at least for awhile, the daily spectacle of the richest, most powerful interests purchasing votes from elected toadies, "cultivating leadership," and the whole seedy story of how money buys power to make more money. The fathomless propaganda resources of UC could be invaluable at such a time.

The possibilities for networking and "synergy" (this year's replacement for the old standby -- "win-win, public/private partnerships) on The Board are beyond imagination, however its Executive Committee, composed of those who sit on more than one of its divisions, is small.

Tony Coelho, the former Democratic congressman from Merced, is a member of the founding board of trustees of UC Merced and of the board of Great Valley Center. In his position as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Coelho was so spectacularly corrupt that an ethics committee when his own party controlled the House, investigated personal loans he received from Michael Milken. Wall Street Journal reporter Brooks Jackson wrote a book about Coelho, called Honest Graft. (5) It’s not well read in the Valley, but The Board knows the story well because prominent members were involved. Coelho, like Tom DeLay and other House members currently under investigation, was a political entrepreneur. He may have thought of himself as a pioneer in the theory that politics was just another business, but Jackson reminded us that in fact, Coelho and the Republican campaign funders against whom he competed were just reproducing the political conditions of the McKinley Era, so highly prized by Karl Rove 20 years after Coelho left. Jackson said of Coelho: “In a healthier political setting Coelho could well have become Speaker of the House, possibly a great one. He deserved a better system. So do we all.” (6)

However, his career from beginning to end was shaped by the Valley political system, in which Valley special interests contributed large amounts of money, often to coastal liberal Democratic machines, in return for promises of support on key special interest legislation and to keep liberal policies out of the Valley.

Coelho quit Congress and went to Wall Street. Ecologically, he is known for trying to get two projects into the Valley that environmentalists defeated: a United Technologies rocket factory and a super-collider. According to reliable rumor, he was frequently summoned by Valley interest groups to explain complex issues to his successor, Gary Condit, and Coelho was deeply involved, from the beginning, with siting UC Merced.

He is a brilliant, energetic politician whose ambitions drove him to rise and fall and rise again in local and national political systems none of us deserve.

Grupe was also a member of the founding board of trustees of UC Merced Foundation and last month the governor appointed him deputy chair of the California Partnership for the San Joaquin Valley. Since 1966, one of Stockton’s two major developers, Grupe now has other credentials. He is a member of the advisory board of the Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at the University of California, Berkeley; and he was past-president and current member of the Urban Land Institute. But Grupe is on The Board because he's a charter member of the political economic system neither Coelho nor we deserved.

Carol Whiteside, founder and president of Great Valley Center, was also a founding member of the UC Merced Foundation. She served on Pete Wilson’s staff and was appointed by him assistant secretary of the state Resources Agency. As mayor of Modesto, Whiteside presided over that city’s most rapid growth period.

Rayburn Dezember, of Bakersfield, currently serves as a director of the Bakersfield Californian and Trustee of the University of California, Merced Foundation. He previously served as chairman of American National Bank from 1966 to 1990, director of Wells Fargo Bank from 1990-1999, director of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco from 1984 to 1989 and director of Tejon Ranch Company from 1990-2002. The governor appointed him to the California Partnership for the San Joaquin Valley. Plans to develop a $57-billion new city on the Tejon Ranch threaten the habitat of one of America’s most endangered species, the California Condor, along with a host of other wildlife species located on the largest piece of private property left in the state. Dezember’s local newspaper, the Californian, has long had a reputation as one of the most rightwing papers in the state.

By chance, it was avian rehabilitators from Merced who started the original Condor Project to save the giant, nearly extinct birds. To date, $35 million has been spent to rescue the condor from extinction. (7) On paper, Dezember is pro-growth, anti-air quality and environment – bad for Bakersfield, bad for the Valley, but a Republican and no doubt excellent contributor to the Hun.

Frederick Ruiz, in the words of a Hun press release, is from “Parlier, has over 40 years experience in the food processing industry. He and his father founded Ruiz Foods in 1964. He has served as a member of the University of California, Board of Regents since 2004. In addition, Ruiz is currently on the board of directors for the California Chamber of Commerce, a trustee on the University of Merced Foundation, a member of the President's Advisory Board of California State University Fresno and a member of Valley CAN ‘Clean Air Now.’ Ruiz is a Republican.”

The Hun replaced Dolores Huerta on the UC regents’ board with Ruiz. Huerta was co-founder with Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers. Two conjectures: although Huerta looks like a union socialist and Ruiz like an entrepreneurial capitalist, Ruiz Foods received more federal and state grant and loan funding than the UFW ever did; Huerta’s brilliant, committed and sustained community organizing, mainly on behalf of Latino communities in the Valley, did more good for Ruiz Foods than Ruiz Foods ever did for working people who want unions.

Daniel Whitehurst, president, Farewell, Inc. Fresno, was on the founding board of trustees of the UC Merced Foundation and is a member of the GVC board. Whitehurst is a member of a Fresno-based family of extremely political morticians, people of influence since at least the time of late state Sen. Hugh Burns, with old connections to the west side of the Valley.

The Garamendi family presents nearly a two-fer because John Sr., the state Insurance Commissioner now running for state Lt. Governor, is a member of the founding board of the UC Merced Foundation and John, Jr. was appointed vice chancellor for University Relations at UC Merced in June. Family values are important in the Valley.

Agribusiness holds only single memberships, mainly on the UC Merced Foundation board. (8)

Chuck Ahlem, Partner, Hilmar Cheese Company, Hilmar
H.A. "Gus" Collin, Chairman, Sunsweet Growers, Inc., Yuba City
Robert Gallo, President, E&J Gallo Winery, Modesto
John Harris, President, Harris Farms and Harris Inns, Coalinga
William Lyons, Sr., President, Lyons Investments and Mapes Ranch, Modesto
Thomas Smith, President, CALCOT, Bakersfield
Ann Veneman, Attorney at Law, Sacramento (former Secretary of the USDA)
Roger Wood, Vice President, J.R. Wood, Inc., Atwater;
Stewart Woolf, President, Los Gatos Tomato, Inc., Huron

There is a scattering of agricultural producers on the UC Merced Foundation board, along with local businessmen and large landowners:

Carl Cavaiani, President, Santa Fe Nut Company, Ballico
Bert Crane Sr., President, Bert Crane Ranches, Merced;
Jim Cunningham, owner, Cunningham Ranch, LeGrand
James Duarte, President, Duarte Nursery, Inc., Hughson
Price Giffen, President, Giffen Company, Fresno
Art Kamangar, Kamangar Ranches, Merced

Other members include retired UC officials, Silicon Valley executives, lawyers, developers, other educators, investors, public officials and local business people. The Board includes no one from any local, state or national environmental organization. In fact, The Board looks like a special interest reaction against environmental, public health, economic and agricultural concerns to protect its rapid growth strategies. It also looks like a non-elected government.

Bill Hatch

Notes:

(1) http://www.mercedsun-star.com/local/story/11495660p-12233968c.html
(2) http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/story/13919592p-14757777c.html
(3) Dr. Michael Teitz, presentation at Merced City Council Chambers, Dec. 1, 2005
(4) http://www.valleyairquality.com/
(5) Jackson, Brooks, Honest Graft, Knopf, 1988.
(6) Jackson, p. 6
(7) http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/13/features-zakin.php
(8) http://www.ucinthevalley.org/articles/2000/march1700.htm

It must have been a rough day of lobbying for the old man, because when I ran into him in the basement bar of the old Senator Hotel, across from the Capitol, he looked beat as he nursed a drink, thinking about driving back to Modesto in the tule fog and milking the cows the next morning.

If you stick around in one place long enough, what goes around comes around.

He’d probably, in his quiet way, had more to do with me being in that bar that winter afternoon in the late 1960s than anyone, so we sat together for awhile. There’s a dreamy quality to the conversation of dairymen at the end of the day, add a little whisky and it can get positively ruminative.

The old man was ruminating on a number of political issues pertaining to irrigation districts and milk prices. So, the whole conversation was basically metaphysical anyway.

After talking about pools and grades and river flows for awhile, however, he got concrete. I gathered the Legislature that year was “tighter than a bull’s ass at fly time,” on water and dairy issues.

He said he’d always been very grateful for the opportunity Modesto, CA had given him, a poor West Texas farmer, and he’d always tried to give back.

I was only one of a large number of young men from his town who had been the beneficiary of his generous attention. He’d load up his Buick with athletes from my high school and barrel off to visit athletic directors in colleges from Chico to Fresno every chance he got. There were a lot of guys that got to college because of the old man.

I remember in particular a fast linebacker on a championship team, who went no more than 145 pounds soaking wet. The cross-town rivals thought he was the hole through which they would march a huge fullback to victory one night; and that little linebacker gave the town a lesson in stone guts, throwing himself on those jackhammer knees play after play until they quit trying to destroy him. I caught up with him at halftime, face bruised, maybe a tear or two of pain, full of bitterness, fear and courage.

The old man found a place for me – a fast-talking kid on the college track -- easily. First it was the Key Club, junior Kiwanis, a lunch off school grounds once a month to listen to local civic leaders speak (impenetrable gobbledygook then as now). Later, after college, a slot in politics. But the linebacker was just a poor, tough kid from the wrong side of the tracks, not even a farmer. Nevertheless, the old man either saw or heard about that football game and what the linebacker did, and I can just hear him today, like it wasn’t 45 years ago, talking to football coaches about him: “More guts, pound-for-pound, than anyone on your team. He’s a good kid, he needs a scholarship, and you won’t go wrong on him.”

He always said – and was emphatic about it again that night in the Senator bar – that he was grateful and, despite momentary obstacles, he would go on trying to help.

That’s why it interested me that Hilmar Cheese, the largest single cheese factory in the world, a day after its water-pollution negotiations broke down with the regional water quality control board (1), announced it was opening a new cheese factory in the Texas Panhandle, near the site of the famous XIT cattle ranch. (2)

Texas Governor, Rick Perry, comes from a poor West Texas town himself, he apparently understands poverty and has tried to do something about it with enterprise funds, including paying Hilmar Cheese close to twice the amount the water board is asking in fines for the cheesemaker’s continual pollution of local groundwater. Hilmar Cheese is investing 47.5 times the amount of the $4-million fine in its Texas plant.

DALHART – Gov. Rick Perry today announced that Hilmar Cheese Company, the largest single-site cheese and whey products manufacturer in the world, will build a state of the art cheese factory in Dalhart, bringing nearly 2,000 jobs to the Texas Panhandle over the next decade.

“This expansion will bring 2,000 new jobs to the Panhandle and pump $190 million into the Texas economy thanks to a $7.5 million grant from the Texas Enterprise Fund,” said Perry. “As a rural West Texan, I am particularly proud that this amounts to the largest investment of Enterprise Fund dollars for a rural expansion.”

To secure the Hilmar investment over competing locations, the state offered the company a $7.5 million incentive package from the Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF) and additional funding for transportation improvements and workforce training. The state is expected to reap a return of more than 600 percent on its investment.

The company will make a capital investment of $190 million to build a new processing plant in Dalhart that will create new jobs for more than 350 area families. As part of its contract with the state, Hilmar Cheese Company has committed that new independent milk producers and new dairies across the region will create an additional 1,600 jobs over the next 10 years.

Once complete, the facility will have the capacity to process up to 5 million pounds of locally produced milk into high quality cheese and whey products each day, with the potential to double that capacity in the future …

As one of California’s largest agricultural exporters, Hilmar’s Dalhart plant will add to Texas’ reputation as the top exporting state in America. (3)

The old man was a builder, but he built community at least as much or more than he built industry. Community meant jobs, which meant industry, so it all worked together in his mind, but it came back to people. I don’t know if the 12 founding Jersey dairies behind Hilmar Cheese (4) were ever in it for anything but the money and the prestige of building the biggest cheese plant in the world. I’d like to believe that at least in the beginning they were in it for more than that.

Hilmar Cheese environmental commitment

Hilmar Cheese Company was California’s only processor to provide an incentive program to its producers who certified under the environmental stewardship component of the California Dairy Quality Assurance Program (CDQAP).

The old man might have said that was pretty slick, requiring (because the county requires it) the dairies to comply with the “environmental stewardship component.” He’d say it was pretty slick how Hilmar Cheese presents itself as a great environmental steward but has been out of compliance with the regulations that govern the plant for years. The sweetheart deal between the water board and the company came unglued because of some Sacramento Bee articles, the board levied the fine, one of the founders of the company had to quit his job as assistant secretary of the state Department of Food and Agriculture, company lawyers began threatening to sue the board and the company hired Bill Roberts’ old PR firm to run the propaganda (the old man would have known Roberts), and a day after the water board rejected Hilmar’s proposal, the company announced the Texas Panhandle deal.

The old man would say that’s a mess. But then he’d see what the Bee didn’t: more than 270 dairies, milking around 120,000 cows, that could lose their processor if Hilmar walks out of California. He’d look at the paper and see what Hilmar said about the Panhandle investment:

Hilmar also said it was influenced by the state's (Texas’) "positive business climate" and "reliable regulatory environment." (5)

I’m guessing he might have said he thought it looked like the Hilmar boys were about to cut and run, blaming California environmental regulation all the way to the Panhandle, and leave their dairies to fend for themselves in California, unless they want to make Dalhart their new home.

Five-day weather forecast for Dalhart:

Sunday: 39 degrees/5 degrees, snow
Monday: 45 degrees/16 degrees, partly cloudy
Tuesday: 27 degrees/10 degrees, partly cloudy
Wednesday: 20 degrees/8 degrees, snow.

Five-day weather forecast for Hilmar:

Sunday: 54 degrees/30 degrees, partly cloudy
Monday: 56 degrees/32 degrees, sunny
Tuesday: 57 degrees/41 degrees, partly cloudy
Wednesday: 59 degrees/42 degrees, partly cloudy

The old man was a builder. That generation generally believed that bigger was better. But, speaking from an ecological standpoint that would not have disgusted him, it seems to me that bigger has meant more concentration in fewer hands. When less than half a dozen cling peach processors pulled the plug in the mid-1960s, it was a very bad time for a whole lot of growers from San Joaquin to Fresno counties. When Gallo moved into Sonoma County, Sonoma grape growers learned about “Valley prices.” More corporate wineries from around the world made things even worse.

Recommended Pricing Considerations: For the past few years grapes prices have been suppressed to the extent that a significant number of growers have been unable to receive farming income sufficient to cover their farming costs. While this situation clearly is unsustainable for growers, it is equally unhealthy for the industry as a whole. To maintain the reputation that North Coast wines have achieved requires that high quality fruit be available from the vineyards. This cannot be accomplished without adhering to rigorous viticultural practices and control of crop sizes, both of which are labor intensive and expensive to sustain. Any degradation in vineyard integrity – a condition that would be forced upon growers if their compensation were insufficient to cover expenses - will ultimately lead to degradation in the quality of our wines – North Coast Grape Growers Association (6)

When Tri-Valley Coop announced bankruptcy a few years ago – after planting but before harvest – thousands of acres of processing tomatoes rotted in the fields.

Most devastating to growers was last year's bankruptcy of San-Ramon-based Tri Valley Growers. Farmers were left in a glut in July when the state's second-largest fruit and vegetable producer announced it would curtail its production due to lack of financing. Growers were left with thousands of acres of tomatoes rotting in the fields. (7)

The recent speculative real estate boom in the San Joaquin Valley has served to illuminate the underlying mother of all problems in Valley agriculture: the relation between the producer and the processor/packer – the seller and the buyer. We’ve had the infrastructure for generations: the land, the water, the financing, the workers and the skills behind the gigantic Valley agricultural output. But now the land, the water and the financing are becoming questionable under the impact of real estate development.

The only overarching concern between these two radically antagonistic industries is the environment, which returns us to the community, at least in terms of public health. But, apparently, Dalhart TX isn’t thinking in those terms.

The old man would be tickled by the High Plains Dairy Council blurb:

The High Plains Dairy Council was established in 2002 to promote the Dalhart area as a dairy relocation opportunity. The HPDC is made up of Dalhart area farmers and business'. Dalhart Texas is a unique community in that the vast majority of agricultural producers did not start their agricultural life in Dalhart. They have come here from all over the country. Dalhart is perhaps the most progressive agricultural area in America. Newcomers are instantly welcome. We are a community-minded group of people who truly enjoy and appreciate the quality of life that Dalhart has to offer. The land is good, the water is plentiful, the environment is friendly, the weather is pleasant and the people...we invite you to judge for yourself. If you are interested in relocating your dairy or business, we hope you will visit Dalhart before you make that important decision of where you and your family will make their home. We think you will be glad you did. Take some time and check out the stats page for more information on the Dalhart area and the vast number of opportunities it has to offer.

DALHART

Where Opportunity and Success are a Way of Life

The old man would say that that was what he’d been saying about Modesto all those years.

Maybe all there is to the Hilmar Cheese story is that what goes around comes around, and it’s time for Valley farmers to go to Texas. From an ecological standpoint, however, it’s becoming fairly clear to people of ordinary intelligence that what goes around comes around for awhile, but eventually stops. From a community – rather than strictly a corporate – standpoint, it would be better if Hilmar paid the fine and figured out how to run a cheese plant that didn’t pollute groundwater. They could begin their new research on the funds they’d save by laying off lawyers and public relations firms to fight reasonable environmental regulations.

It seems doubtful that could happen, however. It seems like they’d rather leave California with their reputation of having built the largest cheese factory in the world intact. And it’s much easier to scare employees and dairymen with threats to leave, hire lawyers and flakmen to threaten and try to intimidate regulators and to try to buy politicians, than it is to figure out how to be the largest environmentally, socially and economically sustainable cheese factory in the world. It also seems like they are financially in over their heads in their meteoric rise in 20 years to being the largest cheese factory in the world. It seems like they now have to listen to investors, lawyers and propagandists more than to engineers, plant managers, dairymen and their own neighbors.

People ought to at least challenge them to live up to their own word.

Corporate Responsibility

Being a successful company goes well beyond onsite, daily operations. For Hilmar Cheese Company, it’s about giving back to the community and industry that supported a dream…the dream of our 12 founding dairy families who established the company in 1984. Our owners – most of whom are second and third generation members of the local Hilmar community – live and raise their families here.

At the forefront of Hilmar Cheese Company’s efforts are community and industry involvement and support. Our owners and management team give of themselves above and beyond their roles at Hilmar Cheese Company. They’re familiar faces and respected members of many dairy industry groups and civic organizations. Throughout the years, the company has donated thousands of dollars and countless cheese baskets to support local schools, charitable causes and the dairy industry.

As we look to future generations, Hilmar Cheese Company is deeply committed to protecting the environment and bettering the lives of our employees, their families and our neighbors by acting responsibly both onsite and in our surrounding community. (8)

This looks good, sounds good, and there is no reason for anyone to doubt that when it was written it was a sincere expression. But, aside from the Panhandle announcement, people might begin to feel that things have changed at Hilmar Cheese, for some reason, and that its word isn’t what it used to be. At least the water board might have felt so, when it voted unanimously last week to reject a proposed settlement of the fine.

Hilmar officials expressed optimism on resolving differences.

"We remain committed to working with the board and staff to address the few remaining questions that have been raised," John Jeter, Hilmar's president and chief executive officer, said in a prepared statement following the Sacramento hearing.

The board took issue with a term in the proposed settlement that would have used $1 million of the fine to fund a Hilmar-directed study to offer "possible solutions for management of salinity in food processing wastewater discharges."

Some board members said the study, which would have been conducted by two Hilmar-commissioned agricultural economists, appeared to be self-serving. It would have focused more on industry's desire to lower pollution control costs than on the public goal of protecting groundwater, said Christopher Cabaldon, a board member and mayor of West Sacramento.

"There's no consideration of water quality," Cabaldon said.

Bill Jennings, a water board watchdog, said the food-processing industry would have used such a study "as a hammer to bludgeon the board."

Jennings said, "It's like allowing a cigarette company to conduct a study on the health effects of smoking." (9)

“Cheese baskets,” the old might have said, getting up to drive down 99 in the fog. “Cheese baskets.” You would have had to hear it to know how he’d meant it.

Bill Hatch

Notes:

(1)http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/story/13919592p-14757777c.html
(2)http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/states/california/northern_california/13295666.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
(3)http://www.governor.state.tx.us/divisions/press/pressreleases/PressRelease.2005-11-30.3550
(4) www.hilmarcheese.com
(5) http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/view.php?StoryID=20051201-011439-7310r
(6) http://www.northcoastwinegrowers.com/prices.html
(7) http://www.cfbf.com/agalert/2001/aa-021401b.htm
(8) www.hilmarcheese.com
(9) www.sacbee.com (1)

The Merced County League of Women Voters held a workshop at Merced City Hall last week on several general plan updates going on around the county.

The first speaker, Dr. Michael Teitz, is an emeritus professor at UC Berkeley who said he had consulted with UC Merced recently. He was introduced as a scholar who had studied the Valley for years.

In view of what Teitz said about the urbanization of the Valley, it would have been interesting to have heard from him some time sooner than after the “UC Merced done deal” was really done. But, like UC biologists largely muzzled during the planning and development stage, Dr. Teitz was not a household word in Merced when what he had to say might have had some influence.

He had a slide show/power-point presentation called “Future Urbanization of the San Joaquin Valley.” There can be no greater concern than the future urbanization of the Valley, he said, but failed to say why.

He announced that nobody can tell the future, but from the past certain deductions might be made and certain patterns observed and then reported on some possible scenarios generated by computer models at UC.

Only 2 percent of the San Joaquin Valley was urbanized in 2000, according to Teitz’ figures, but, due to the location of the county seats along railroad routes adjacent to prime farmland, most of this urbanization has occurred on prime farmland. Yet, in the last 30 years, the Valley has growth at a rate of 300 percent, its population now exceeds that of 20 states and by 2040, if this rate continues, it will equal the population of the greater Bay Area.

Yet, this will not be urbanization in the classic sense of cities, but the suburbanization of farmland. The Valley is growing at a rate nearly equal to Mexico, exceeding the Central Valley as a whole, California and the nation by widening margins. Valley growth is, for example, much higher than growth in the metro Sacramento area.

It will be the greatest transformation the Valley has seen since the coming of irrigation, Teitz said. To what effects, he asked.

Increasing asthma (especially among children); more competition for water; loss of wildlife habitat and environmental quality; encroachment on agriculture; increasing conflicts over land use; it raises a profound, unanswered question about what will the future economic base be for this increased population; and growth itself does not seem to address the problems of endemic poverty (“as bad as anywhere in the US,” he said) and high unemployment in the Valley.

Assuming (without admitting he was assuming) this growth is “inevitable,” Teitz presented data from four computer models, to show where this growth might occur over the next 45 years.

Assuming things go on as they are going now, the “let it rip” scenario, the model foresaw a slurb from Fresno to Bakersfield, which Teitz compared with what is happening on the 101 corridor from San Rafael to Ukiah. This scenario presents us with a suburb on prime farmland expanding outward from 99 through most of the Valley. Since it is the most likely scenario, it explains why the Great Valley Center has expended so much attention on the beautification of 99.

The second model assumed there would be no construction on prime farmland. Teitz dismissed it an entirely unrealistic model.

The third model introduced the high-speed railroad and claimed that growth would be denser and clustered around the stations along the route, as if someone knew where those stations might go.

The last scenario assumed major improvement of roads, particularly east-west roads, in the Valley. This one seemed to have less impact on prime farmland than the present growth pattern, Teitz said. Throughout the performance, the professor seemed more interested in the models than in the problem.

But there appear to be several problems with the most likely scenario – “let it rip” growth, what we have today. First is the question: how much asthma is too much asthma, here in the worst air quality basin in the nation? Second, is global warming, which seems to be producing more and more dramatic effects in the world despite its denial by the Bush administration and California developers. Considering global warming, it ought to be the planning principle that – barring evidence the addition of millions of people and their automobiles will not harm the Valley environment – we ought to plan not to grow, to protect what we have. Third is mounting evidence that the world is approaching or has reached the peak of its oil supply and fuel will become scarcer and more expensive as the years go by. This would seem to be an excellent argument for stopping the growth of bedroom communities in the agricultural Valley, when coupled with the complete economic mystery of how the additional millions would be employed in the Valley. In mentioning competition for water, Teitz failed to mention a more immediately pressing problem: water pollution.

It was not even whispered by the planners that California’s population has so far exceeded its resource-carrying capacity that what is called “growth” today, providing a few more billions for a very few billionaires, is entirely at the expense of natural resources the region cannot afford to lose on any account, least of all for the non-human species whose rights to live and evolve have been bulldozed away along with the environment that is intrinsically valuable. Growth in California has damaged the quality of life for everyone and everything.

A classical economics based on human needs rather than desire will either be reinvented in theory, by government and by planning, or it will be forced on us all by events, without any theory, government awareness or planning. At the moment, growth in the Valley is occurring primarily through flight from the more expensive real estate markets of the coast, where the jobs are, rather than any real need or attraction on the part of new residents for the Valley. This is causing and will cause more social friction as good ag land is destroyed to build homes for people who really don’t want to be here.

City planners from Los Banos, Livingston and Merced followed Bill Nicholson, director of the county Planning and Community Development to the podium. Fred Goodrich, the Los Banos planner, remarked that, based on his 26 years of professional planning, growth would go right on, “unfortunately,” because prime farmland is cheaper than Bay Area land and there are enough willing sellers.

Nicholson explained that most of the new growth in the county has been on prime farmland because, although there is political support for preserving it, there is law and regulation in support of preservation of wildlife habitat and endangered species on the rangeland borders of the Valley. He carefully qualified this support as state and federal, not local government. It is certainly true that thousands of acres containing state and federally protected wetlands and endangered species have been deep-ripped in Merced County in recent months without a peep out of Nicholson’s department to federal and state regulating agencies. In fact, so much rangeland habitat and wetlands is going so fast that federal maps of critical habitat and vernal pool recovery plans are quite out-of-date, thanks to the pro-growth attitude of the county, led by the O Pomboza team of Endangered Species Act gutters in Congress.

Both Goodrich and Nicholson indicated the only limitation on growth in the Valley they could foresee would be the costs of the public works projects necessary to provide sewer, water and roads for the new residents. Already, the capacity of the county’s sewers lag far behind its growth.

Donna Kenny, the Livingston planner, announced that Livingston’s new general plan was funded by its two major developers. Her solution to the employment problem was that once the rooftops were built, commercial business would follow.

Merced City planner, Kim Espinoza, explained that Merced was growing.

At the end of the lectures, Susan Walsh, the League official facilitating the meeting, announced that there were many interesting questions from the packed house, but there was no time to answer any of them. So, urging everyone to contact elected officials, she read each question, as if the public mattered in Merced County.

Walsh reads quite well, after having opined earlier in the League workshop that there was no way to stop growth.

Bill Hatch

Letters from the River, 1

by Gary McMillen

Last night we had our LSU Human Resources Christmas party in the lounge of the hotel.

Pure coincidence but the owner (and his wife) of the Best Western Richmond Suites chose last night to drop by and inspect the property. They opened the door to the lounge and stood in amazement.

Tamara walked up, introduced herself and gave them a plate of fried chicken, a bowl of gumbo and bought them a drink.

Pam and Valencia had fixed delicious Swedish meatballs, jambalaya and two types of chicken in addition to finger sandwiches for 100.

The cash bar set a single night record for sales.

Nancy, the manager of Best Western, walked around, mingling with the crowd, shaking her head, calling the night an "epic."

It was freezing cold but about 20 Human Resources and Payroll staff from Shreveport Medical Center came. Along with any and all hotel guests that showed up, it was hard to find a place to sit. We turned off the wide-screen plasma television and played CD's of The Iguanas, Ernie K-Doe and Professor Longhair.

A group of engineers from Iowa and Minnesota (in town to repair pumps from the hurricane) could not believe what they were seeing. "Man, did we come to the right hotel," one of them said, scooping up his second plate of dirty rice and sausage.

Most of the evening Frankie Lee sat by the fireplace, drinking straight shots of Jose Cuerva, talking to Christy the bar-maid about her modeling career and just telling all manner of lies into the night.
------------

Gary McMillen, my oldest friend (we met at Lincoln School, Modesto, in the 5th grade), is currently working for a state agency personnel office in Shreveport and Baton Rouge, sorting out problems for thousands of employees in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He lost a house in the 9th Ward and an apartment in another section of New Orleans. He has been writing about horse races in the South for 30 years.

He told me today, about this party: "You can take Gary out of New Orleans, but you can't take New Orleans out of Gary."

Letters from the River, 2

Gary McMillen

Enough Doppler radar. It was Saturday afternoon when I drove out to Lake Pontchartrain to gather my thoughts and make a decision. Sitting on the seawall, listening to the splash of waves on the concrete steps, I noticed there were no seagulls. That's when I decided to evacuate. If the birds didn't want to be in New Orleans, I sure as hell didn't want to stay, either.

I soon became part of the human wave, looking for hotel rooms at any exit off Interstate 10. Standing in lobbies for hours, getting on a list to take a shower, chasing after rumors of vacancies and shelter, I began to accept that "normal" was something that did not exist anymore. On the outskirts of Lafayette a Vietnamese fishing family took me in. For three days and nights, we ate boiled crabs spread out on newspaper on the floor, drank beer, and watched the destruction of an American city unfold on CNN. Sleep was fitful. My son had promised he was evacuating to Atlanta, but I had not heard from him.

Excuse me for rambling, but in the days and weeks in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, thinking is a dull throb. The blurring effects of the storm's sucker punch have me wobbly. The rational mind, numb from the frantic pace of dislocation, avoids thinking of what was left behind: a home that got nine feet of water, books, business records, laptop computer, a samurai sword, music, and tapes. Levees can be repaired but not that photograph of my dad fly-fishing in a trout stream in California.

"Goodbye" to e-mail. "Hello" to life of the wandering gypsy. I live at the Best Western in Shreveport now. I eat biscuits, smoked sausage, and white gravy at the breakfast buffet before going to work. One morning, at the entrance to the Louisiana State University Medical Center there was a cardboard box at the door with a sign: "For Victims of Hurricane Katrina." I hate the word "victim," but went up and peeked in the box. At the bottom were a pack of diapers and a tube of toothpaste. I looked in both directions to see if anyone was watching and snatched up the Colgate. I am the first in the McMillen-Gallagher clan of Scots and Irishmen to have applied for food stamps.

In the midst of crisis, I have learned there are two kinds of people in the world. There are people who tell you that they have an extra room off the garage where you can stay for the weekend, and then there are people who throw you the keys to their house. There are people who bring you boxes of clothes that don't fit, and then there are people who ask for your waist size. There are people waiting for me to call them, and then there are people like New York trainer Danny Peitz, who kept punching my number into his cell phone until he reached me.

I'm drinking much more than usual: Old Forester, straight up, no ice. I have observed my state of mind and it's not all pretty. The dry wit, the smile, the appreciation for jokes and just plain silliness have dissolved. Pounded by the stress of uncertainty, I have turned into Joe Friday. "Yes," "No," "OK" are standard expressions from my new robotic personality.

My son and I found each other. That was a celebration with relief. But there is a long list of big and little things that I miss and am concerned about losing. I had some horses on my Virtual Stable. I imagine them all winning and paying $36.40. I wonder if I had flood insurance. I wonder if the Fair Grounds is still there. I miss my Q-tip moment after taking a shower. I'm still puzzled about why I threw my golf clubs in the trunk of the car instead of some socks and a comb. Here I am with one pair of sandals, some jogging shorts, three shirts, two pair of underwear and a 7-iron. If you want to go deep, what I am really afraid of is losing contact and not seeing my friends again.

If anyone from Enterprise reads this, I still have your rental car. It's a 2005 Ford Taurus, assigned to my Visa card and scheduled for return on Aug. 29. Bringing it back to New Orleans would have been a mistake for both of us. I think the Super Derby (gr. II) is coming up soon at Louisiana Downs. Maybe I'll hit the trifecta and we can settle up when I get back.

More Katrina aftershocks; Levee analysis delivers bad news for Californians

Ventura County-Star – 12/8/05

By John Krist, staff writer

When the levees protecting New Orleans failed catastrophically in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, flooding 85 percent of the city and killing about 1,000 people, the devastation also focused attention on the West Coast's own nightmare-in-waiting: the flood-prone Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, where a fragile network of earthen levees stands between California and disaster.

Like New Orleans, the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta is below sea level and under constant threat of inundation. New Orleans has the Mississippi River, Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico to contend with; California's delta is beset by San Francisco Bay and the mingled waters of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, which together carry nearly half the state's runoff.

Delta levees protect the pumps driving the state's two biggest water-delivery systems, as well as critical power lines, highways, oil and gas pipelines, and deepwater shipping channels. Widespread levee failure like that in New Orleans would deal a severe blow to the California economy and threaten thousands of people.

The danger in the delta has long been recognized, at least by those in California's water and flood-protection agencies. They have called repeatedly over the past decade for the state to address the problem, but the magnitude of the task has proved to be a paralyzing hurdle.

Katrina knocked some gaping holes in that barrier. And now, three months after the hurricane transformed New Orleans into a soggy rubble heap, preliminary conclusions of the expert team assigned to investigate the levee failures there are being made public. Those findings ought to demolish any remaining political obstacles to California levee rehabilitation.

The team's final report has not been released, but the draft conclusions were reported last week by the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which interviewed the engineers and university professors hired by the state to analyze the levee failures.

The team found that only one of the New Orleans levees failed because the hurricane-driven storm surge washed over its top. Most of the flooding, the investigators found, was caused by the collapse of levees as their foundations were undermined by seepage and soil liquefaction, even though their concrete-armored tops remained well above the water level.

The reason for the foundation collapse was faulty design by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, according to the investigators. Steel sheet pilings that should have been driven deep into the ground to anchor the levees and prevent water from seeping through the weak soil underneath them were far too short to be effective.

The relevance of this to the situation in California's delta has little to do with the steel pilings but everything to do with the unstable nature of the ground beneath the levees and its potential to compromise an otherwise robust structure.

The ground beneath the New Orleans levees, the investigators noted, is mostly marshy soil and peat -- a very porous and weak medium. This is precisely the situation in the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta. The levees there typically rest on peat, and the embankments are largely constructed of muck dredged from former marsh.

When flood experts talk of bringing the delta levees "up to Corps of Engineers standards" -- the costly goal of most rehabilitation scenarios being discussed -- that simply means making them a little bigger and using concrete to armor their surfaces against erosion.

But as Katrina demonstrated, none of that matters when a levee's foundation is undermined. And that's precisely the greatest threat facing California: that a moderate earthquake on one of the many faults west of the delta would liquefy or deform the ground beneath the levees, causing them to collapse.

The likely consequences of such a quake were described to California water managers at a conference last week in San Diego: at least 30 levee breaks, which would flood 3,000 homes and 85,000 acres of cropland, close the Port of Stockton and two highways, disrupt electricity and natural-gas supplies, and send 300 billion gallons of sea water toward the pumps supplying drinking and irrigation water to two-thirds of California.

It would take at least 15 months and $6 billion just to repair the breaches and restore a third of the water export capacity. The total repair bill over five years would be $30 billion to $40 billion. As many as 30,000 jobs would be lost, and some parts of the delta might never be reclaimed.

The chances of such an event? About one in 300, according to Department of Water Resources Director Lester Snow.

"That was about what Katrina was," Snow said. #

http://www.venturacountystar.com/vcs/opinion_columnists/article/0,1375,VCS_223_4297715,00.html

The study just released by the University of California, “Return on Investment: Educational choices and demographic change in California’s future,” (1) is a particularly specious bit of UC/corporate flak, reminiscent of the campaign for UC Merced. The study argues that if you have more college-educated people in your society, you will have less crime and more high-paying jobs. Many economists would suggest that job demand has something to do with the equation – but they didn’t get this grant. A supply of college-educated people of working age less than the job demand for them could be a recipe for extreme job competition, lower wages, higher rates of turnover, social discontent and emigration of a significant portion of a workforce whose education was subsidized by taxpayers. Since what is meant by education in this study is technological training, it’s fair to ask how Californians with technological training compete today with Indians and Asians with comparable training. Ask Silicon Valley, which has been off-shoring California jobs to India and Asia for several decades, as well as importing foreign high tech workers to the Peninsula. San Jose is today a true city of the world, a place larger than California, attracting the best and brightest technological workers of the world.

Training, inventiveness, intelligence and education aren’t the problems facing California. Funded by a group calling itself the Campaign for College Opportunity, which appears to be a front group for the California Business Roundtable, once again, UC is taking an opportunity to recycle unreliable demographic data to make a case for more public spending on UC, with a bit left over for the lesser public institutions of higher learning.

People are tired of this nonsense. It is highly conspicuous waste, meant to doll up a class of “leaders” for their next honoraria. The study was commissioned by the business roundtable, a cabal of banks, insurance companies, developers, land companies, energy companies, construction and engineering firms and miscellaneously wealthy companies like Gap and J.G. Boswell, involved in the world, cotton trade, and the J. Paul Getty Trust, headed by Barry Munitz, former Charles Hurwitz associate and (“chainsaw”) chancellor of the CSU system. The intervening group, Campaign for College Opportunity, is headed by the roundtable’s president, includes a San Francisco Chamber of Commerce vice president, several university officials, a UC regent, union officials and minority group representatives. But the state taxpayers paid for the salaries of the UC researchers to pimp the next college/university building boom, based on demographic assumptions already dubious when they were used to sell UC Merced (2). But, at least then, we knew they were just the usual state Department of Finance figures to support the coming speculative housing bubble. That is now rapidly fading. Evidently, the study indulges in them only because it can. Apparently, it is a UC affectation to demand more public funds, pay exorbitant executive salaries (3), sell its services to whatever the corporate buyer demands, and all without any responsibility to the public that pays for the salaries, the maintenance, repair, and for the thousands of other services, plants and equipment that go to making up public institutions of higher learning from the community college outpost in the remote rural town to UC Berkeley.

Perhaps the cogent business reason for promoting another higher education building boom, paid for by the public, is because new colleges and universities, particularly if located in remote areas, attract suburban development like stables attract horse flies.

Perhaps, the state’s enlightened business roundtable, representing 56 corporations, almost half on the Fortune 500 list, believe that it is essential for us to pay for enough new public higher education institutions so that not one – not one! – potential bio-technician or computer engineer escapes his or her destiny to be trained for entrance into the “new economy;” so that not one potential mortgage lender, predatory credit-card enabler, insurance agent or realtor will slip through the system to become a bum, a mechanic or a handiman in this economy, which our business leaders assure us will continue, generation after generation, through levee breaks, global warming, oil peak, waves of immigration and global competition. We should pay through taxes, tuitions and living expenses to educate the next generation so that not one, but five or ten shall be trained identically, to cut each others’ throats in the high-tech job marketplace of the eternally affluent future of technocracy, sure to continue if only we believe our universities, our business leaders and those they employ in elective governmental posts.

Since the propaganda is coming down so hard on us from this source, I think it might be fair for the public to request that California corporations clean up our air and water, stop building more slurbs, build colleges and universities in other states, subsidize our deprived youth to attend them, pay off the current state budget deficit, and provide adequate energy supplies as long as possible at non-profit rates.

At a time when the state treasury rests firmly in the hands of Wall Street, when rich Californians are not even taxed at the normal level prior to 1993, our business leaders urge more public investment in higher education. Following a period of immense profit-taking, unable to wrap themselves in the flag (sullied by total failure in Iraq), they wrap themselves in the Blue and Gold, the priestly garb of a public university reported to have misplaced 600 pounds of plutonium (3), another $6 million of public funds at Los Alamos National Laboratory (4), and the “distribution of hundreds of millions of dollars in administrative stipends, bonuses and other hidden cash compensation to employees” to be investigated by the Legislature in January (3).

Education as if the state’s youth mattered might begin by designing a curriculum around what they will need to survive the economy bequeathed them by our business leaders? This would involve the question: what does California society need from business rather than what business needs from society? This might lead to concerns about the problem of quality of life rather than income levels, in world where even stolen resources are rapidly shrinking and life satisfaction might well have to be found in living a life “simple in means, rich in ends,” as philosopher Arne Naess puts it. The problem of how to educate a generation of youth to face – not just the diminished expectations of our generation – but the radically diminished expectations compelled by resource depletion on theirs – would be worthy of a public university. But that might require a university that felt itself under some obligation to tell the truth to the people of the state rather than to flak its corporate funders’ line. It would require a look at where we are, rather than at the “statistical fantasies” offered by this study. (5)

By contrast, “Return on Investment: Educational choices and demographic change in California’s future,” seems redolent with privileged irresponsibility, people saying things because they can merely because they are who they are – the ones who got the grant. Perhaps it is a fashionably conspicuous form of madness cultivated in leading academic circles these days.

Bill Hatch

Notes:

(1) http://www.collegecampaign.org/CalROI-ExSum.pdf
(2) http://www.csun.edu/~hfoao102/@csun.edu/csun97_98/csun0223_98/features/wave.html

Said Paul Warren, director of the LAO's education division, "The academic world is saying, 'Panic, panic, panic.' We're saying it's not time to panic.

(3) www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/ c/a/2005/11/30/BAGGQFVT7J1.DTL
(4) www.californiaaggie.com/article/?id=7299
(5) http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/columns/walters/story/13949532p-14784215c.html

The notion of studying the costs and benefits of public higher education is plausible. We should know what maintaining the system is costing taxpayers, what economic benefits flow to society and students from those dollars and what the eventual return to taxpayers might be. We should also be told how the public colleges and universities fit into the state's largely private economy - whether they are training the right number of professionals in the right kinds of fields, for instance, or whether their research is enhancing job creation.

Finally, we should know whether higher and lower education systems, maintained by taxpayers at immense cost - well over $60 billion a year - are meshing well or are wasting money on turf battles and incompatible priorities.

UC professors Henry Brady and Michael Hout, however, merely assume that attending college is a societal benefit and amass their synthetic evidence.

"California is sliding from exceptional to ordinary, from 'great' to 'good enough' (and) our study shows that educational investments can help restore California's greatness and preserve its high quality of life while returning more benefits to the state than they will cost the taxpayers," Brady said in a statement.

Brady and Hout don't tell us whether the economy could absorb the increased number of college attendees and graduates they advocate, or even whether there are substantially more youngsters capable of doing college-level work. While decrying the decline in California's high school graduation and college education rates in relation to other states, they don't explore the factors, such as the huge increase in non-English-speaking students or the immense changes in the California economy, that contribute to those trends. They assume, more or less, that there are many millions of Californians who would attend college if only the taxpayers would foot the bill and that expansion would generate big economic returns.

Finally, Brady and Hout fail to explain this phenomenon: There's no apparent shortage of college-trained workers in California (except in a few highly technical fields), but employers are having a heck of a time recruiting cops, carpenters, nurses, electricians, auto mechanics - even truck drivers. Who's going to do the real work if everyone is getting a college degree?

This week here in Merced we got into our drama about the proposed Riverside Motorsports Park. RMP chief, John Condren held informational meetings in Atwater and Merced and the Board of Supervisors voted to extend the comment period on the project draft environmental impact report, but not as long as opponents wanted it.

On Tuesday night, a group of track opponents expressed their passion with boos, hisses and catcalls when Board of Supervisor Chair Jerry O’Banion, whose district is across the Valley from the project, said the only reason he voted for any extension was because the applicants had already agreed to it. The comment period for this project, O’Banion reminded the crowd, is now longer than it was for the DEIR on the UC Merced Long Range Development Plan, and the track EIR is about half the size the UC document was. O’Banion, the Westside’s hereditary supervisor, had a lot of fun, I thought.

Condren made the same point during his pitch at the Boys and Girls Club in Merced on Thursday evening. Both O’Banion and Condren challenge track opponents for their hypocrisy of supporting one huge anchor tenant for growth, UC Merced, while opposing another, the racetrack.

Everyone followed their passions in a well-orchestrated manner. High quality rhetoric swirled in the storm of this absurd project, a Temple to the Automobile in the nation’s worst air quality basin and richest farming area. One teacher opposing the project noted that Tuesday was a critically bad air quality day and children were asked to stay indoors at school. On Thursday, one teacher in favor of the project said the racetrack brings hope to her students, who do not see UC in their future. Both statements are true.

O’Banion and Condren made much of the fact that racetrack opponents were in favor of UC Merced. In other words, after the university should come the circus. In fact, both projects are all about outside corporate investment for outside corporate profit. Merced was ripe for it. From the standpoint of local government, this is all good.

I oppose both projects because the east side of the San Joaquin Valley was where I learned the intrinsic value of nature as it is and because the doctrine of Public Trust is one of the oldest Western legal principles.

Bill Hatch

December 13, 2005
Broad Coalition of Conservation Organizations Challenges Inadequate Habitat Protections for Wetland Species and Habitats
Note: A PDF copy of the complaint is available at: http://becnet.org/documents/complaint_vernal_pool_200512.pdf

Chico, CA – Butte Environmental Council, the California Native Plant Society, Defenders of Wildlife, San Joaquin Raptor/Wildlife Rescue Center, Vernalpools.Org, and Sierra Foothillls Audubon Society have filed a complaint against the U.S. Department of the Interior over its second, Final Vernal Pool Critical Habitat Rule for 15 endangered and threatened vernal pool plants and animals found in California and Oregon. On August 11, 2005 Interior designated 858,846 acres of critical habitat in the Final Rule, eliminating almost 900,000 acres that were proposed in the original 2002 Draft Rule. The 2005 rule is a result of litigation also filed by some the current plaintiffs over the elimination of more than one million acres of VPCH for the 15 species and five entire counties.

In the 2005 final critical habitat designation, Interior unlawfully relied upon a flawed analysis of economic impacts that overestimated potential costs of critical habitat designation, as well as underestimated and disregarded potential benefits of designation. Additionally, Interior unlawfully excluded many areas, including National Monuments, National Wildlife Refuges, and lands overlapping with habitat conservation plans, based on inadequate existing protections.

“While Interior added some VPCH to the five excluded counties, others like Placer and Stanislaus were decimated based on a political agenda, not economics, which leaves them open to this legal challenge,” stated Barbara Vlamis, Executive Director of Butte Environmental Council (see charts below). “Not only did Interior’s Economic Analysis overstate economic costs, it also ignored the economic benefits associated with the protection of vernal pool grasslands, such as providing educational and recreational opportunities, infrastructure support services, ranching, tourism, and economy of scale by covering 15 species in one rule,” declared Vlamis.

To illustrate the overstated conclusions in the Economic Analysis, Butte County’s projected costs were $152 million over 20 years. Even if one accepts the economic methods used, which the plaintiffs do not, this translates into a microscopic 0.17% per year when compared with the annual economic output of the county, $7.36 billion (IMPLAN 2001). “Excluding any of the proposed VPCH is not justified by the economic analysis that led to this Rule,” stated Carol Witham, President of the California Native Plant Society.

Designating critical habitat for federally listed species is important for the recovery of listed species because it clearly identifies the areas essential for their recovery. These critical habitat maps are essential to providing information for statewide and local conservation planning efforts. “The decision to eliminate nearly 1 million acres of vernal pool critical habitat, including lands in Fresno, Placer, San Luis Obispo, Stanislaus, and Tehama counties, may very well prevent the recovery of these 15 imperiled species,” stated Kim Delfino, California Program Director, Defenders of Wildlife. “At a minimum, it means its open season again for developers for those excluded vernal pool grasslands,” continued Delfino.

If recovery is to occur, the remaining range of the 15 vernal pool species must not only be protected, it must expand. Vernal pools are unique depressional wetlands that fill and dry every year. The eight endangered and seven threatened species are currently listed due to the severity of vernal pool destruction in California and Oregon. As the 2002 Proposed Rule indicated, noted vernal pool expert Robert Holland estimates that close to 75% of the Central Valley’s vernal pool habitat was lost by 1997; the central coast has lost at a minimum 90%; southern California’s losses exceed 95%; and Oregon has had 60% destroyed with 18% of the extant habitat considered intact (2002). More recent estimates place the habitat losses at over 90% throughout the historic range of vernal pools (Wright 2002).

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

California Native Plant Society
Carol Witham, President
(916) 452-5440

Defenders of Wildlife
Kim Delfino, California Program Coordinator
(916) 313-5800

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

Vernalpools.Org
Carol Witham
(916) 452-5440

Sierra Foothillls Audubon Society
Ed Pandolfino, Placer County Conservation Chair
(916) 486-9174

Background

A January 14, 2002 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the ruling by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals affirming the protection of four federally listed fresh water crustaceans under the Endangered Species Act. The species were listed under the Endangered Species Act by the Interior Department’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) in September 1994. The California Building Industry Association sued to try to reverse the species’ protection in 1995. Two California organizations, the Butte Environmental Council (BEC) and the Environmental Defense Center of Santa Barbara, supported the listings as interveners all the way to the Supreme Court.

Judge Paul Friedman of the U.S. District Court of Columbia issued the initial ruling on July 29, 1997 that rejected the BIA request to de-list the shrimp, but his decision supported their petition requiring the Service to designate critical habitat for the shrimp species. When the Service failed to respond to the court’s direction, BEC sued on April 12, 2000 for critical habitat designation for the four crustaceans. On February 9, 2001, the District Court for the eastern district of California ordered the Service to complete a final critical habitat designation for the crustaceans. The Service requested an extension of one year past the court ordered deadline and BEC concurred when the negotiations created a more comprehensive benefit for the habitat by including 11 vernal pool plant species.

On August 6, 2003 the Bush administration issued the final critical habitat rule and justified the removal of one million acres and six counties on economic grounds. Their analysis was feeble and concentrated almost exclusively on the economic costs over the economic benefits, illuminating its bias. The list of economic benefits of the critical habitat designation that were ignored by Washington is quite extensive and includes flood control, water quality, tourism, animal husbandry, hunting, recreation, education, and all the species in the food chain. The counties omitted from the 2003 critical habitat designation are: Butte, Madera, Merced, Riverside, Sacramento, & Solano.

The counties with acreage in the 2003 critical habitat designation are: Alameda, Amador, Calaveras, Contra Costa, Fresno, Glenn, Kings, Lake, Lassen, Mariposa, Mendocino, Modoc, Monterey, Napa, Placer, Plumas, San Benito, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, San Joaquin, Shasta, Stanislaus, Tehama, Tulare, Tuolumne, Ventura, Yolo, Yuba, and Jackson County, Oregon.

In January 2004, BEC, the California Native Plant Society, and Defenders of Wildlife filed suit challenging the 2003 VPCH Final Rule over the elimination of more than one million acres of VPCH for the 15 endangered and threatened vernal pool plants and animals and five entire counties.

Table 1. Covered Species Status and Listing Dates

Common Name Scientific Name Date Listed Status
Conservancy fairy shrimp Branchinecta conservatio September 19, 1994 E*
longhorn fairy shrimp Branchinecta longiantenna September 19, 1994 E
vernal pool tadpole shrimp Lepidurus packardi September 19, 1994 E
vernal pool fairy shrimp Branchinecta lynchi September 19, 1994 T*
Butte County meadowfoam Limnanthes floccosa ssp. Californica June 8, 1992 E
Colusa grass Neostapfia colusana March 26, 1997 T
Contra Costa goldfields Lastenia conjugens June 18, 1997 E
Greene's tuctoria Tuctoria greenei March 26, 1997 E
Hairy orcutt Orcuttia pilosa March 26, 1997 E
Hoover’s spurge Chamaesyce hooveri March 26, 1997 T
Sacramento orcutt Orcuttia viscida March 26, 1997 E
San Joaquin Valley orcutt Orcuttia inequalis March 26, 1997 T
Slender orcutt Orcuttia tenuis March 26, 1997 T
Solano grass Tuctoria mucronata September 28, 1978 E
Succulent (or fleshy) owl's clover Castilleja campestris ssp. succunlenta
March 26, 1997 T
(E* = endangered; T*=threatened)

Table 2. 2005 Rule acreage restored to counties indiscriminately omitted in the 2003 rule

County Proposed Acreage 2003 Rule Acreage 2005 Rule Acreage
Butte 58,849 0 24,247
Madera 95,802 0 48,359
Merced 194,335 0 147,638
Sacramento 68,820 0 37,098
Solano 67,961 0 13,415

Table 3. Counties that lost the valuable VPCH designation in the 2005 Rule

County Proposed Acreage 2003 Rule Acreage 2005 Rule Acreage
Fresno 32,218 32,228 19,200
Placer 58,849 32,134 2,580
San Luis Obispo 64,171 64,378 48,134
Stanislaus 132,708 128,035 67,462
Tehama 130,752 130,691 102,837