Badlands Journal

Rep. Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer-Merced, is the principle co-author of the Gut-the-Endangered Species Act, whose No. 1 rightwing Republican promoter is Rep. Richard Pombo, Buffalo Slayer-Tracy. The "D" often put after Cardoza's name stands for Democrat, which makes him the symbol of bipartisan unity and "balance" among the ESA gutters. It's obvious why Pombo is in it: it's strictly a matter of his family's real estate business. Although Cardoza's family owns and sells some land, the Shrimp Slayer is in it mainly for UC Merced and developers that would make Merced as large, chaotic, crime-filled and polluted as Fresno. Cardoza carries the local rightwing agenda so well they can't find anything wrong with him. He's exactly their kind of Democrat, a good little functionary for whoever has the money to pay for the tune.

People look at the Pomboza and wonder how any collection of communities could be dumb enough to elect such an unlovely pair to Congress. There must be something in the water. Or is it the air?

Bill Hatch
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Rep. Pombo’s bill an ‘act’ that betrays ecology of the earth
by David James Duncan

March 1, 2006

I am a lifelong fisherman. I became one as a boy out of love for salmon, and also out of love for the fact that Jesus and many of his disciples were fishermen. I feel I owe it to Peter, James and John to protect our increasingly endangered line of work.

I mention this because U.S. Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., has pushed a bill through Congress that would gut the Endangered Species Act, a globally admired law that has kept several thousand ark-loads of plants and animals---including wild salmon, sea otters, lynx, eagles, bighorn sheep, condors---from being driven to extinction. If Pombo’s bill becomes law, endangered species will lose to developers, the extinction of wild salmon will in many places be guaranteed, and the ancient trade of Peter, James and John will vanish with the salmon.

At the time I learned of the Pombo bill I was studying recent salmon and river restoration projects in the Pacific Northwest. The contrast is stunning! When even a few tax dollars are spent on restoring life instead squandering it, Americans go bananas in wonderfully altruistic ways. When Washington State was offered a federal grant of just $13 million for wild salmon restoration, the people and businesses of that state answered with over $30 million and hundreds of thousands of volunteer hours of their own. Restoring even 10 yards of ruined riverbank is an arduous undertaking. In five years Washingtonians enhanced some 1,755 miles of spawning and rearing habitat. Some 200,000 native trees have been planted to cool streams and shade out invasive plants. Fiftyfour million salmon have been released into state streams. These united efforts are a labor of love that costs U.S. taxpayers nothing. Tens of thousands of the hero-hours have been logged by school children, whose sole motivation is their yearning to keep salmon alive in our world with them.
What a stick in the eyeball to turn from this to Pombo’s so-called “Endangered Species Recovery Act.” What this Act would really do is terminate America’s long-standing commitment to endangered species by removing the link between wild creatures and their habitat---as if wild animals and birds can live in a bulldozed vacuum. The Act’s veiled purpose is to force Americans to pay developers simply to obey conservation laws the rest of us gladly honor. To accomplish that end, it will prostitute by law the science that protects endangered and threatened species. Getting back to the apostle fishermen, Pombo’s Act will also betray the teachings of the Bible, which tells us that “the Earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof” (Psalms) and that humans are mere “tenants” (Leviticus) placed here as “caretakers” (Genesis), to rule not as the greed-driven would have it, but “on earth as it is in heaven,” as the Father who created and blessed all forms of life would have it.

There are a few among us who still believe in “infinite exploitable resources” despite the finiteness of Earth. There are a few who still believe in the Easter Bunny. The fact remains that industrial civilization has long been engaged in a war not against foreign enemies, but against the life support systems of our world. The 21st will be the century of the Great Cease-Fire in this war, or it will be a century of the kind of environmental terror, havoc and dearth we are now repeatedly witnessing not just in foreign lands, but right here in America. The thousands of businesses recently destroyed by hurricanes, floods, wars and social chaos directly related to fossil fuel overdependence are dire proof that the planet’s life support systems and our economic activites are directly related. The emissions of my car in seemingly clean-skied Montana merge with a carbon dioxide cloud that encircles the globe, contributing to superheated oceans, storms of record-breaking force, the annihilation of commerce, the loss of biological diversity, and increased human suffering. Every nonsustainable act we commit and every shortsighted policy we sign into law now threatens to eliminate long-term business profits.

It’s hard to imagine a more shortsighted policy than Pombo’s “Endangered Species Recovery Act.” This bill is indeed an act. While sucking like a leech at the integrity of the word “recovery,” it in fact betrays endangered plants and wildlife and erodes biological, religious and economic integrity by attacking the life support systems and truth-telling that make life and commerce possible.
Please ask Senator Burns and Baucus to send Pombo’s Act back to whatever dark cave it came from.

David James Duncan is an author, fly fisher and educator. His novels include The River Why and The Brothers K. His forthcoming book is God Laughs & Plays: churchless sermons.
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Republican Pete McCloskey Talks about GOP Corruption and the Environment
By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Interview

Tuesday 28 February 2006

On February 12, I sat with Pete McCloskey at a public park in Lodi, California, to ask him a few questions about his race against the most anti-environmental congressman in history, Richard Pombo. Mc Closkey is challenging Pombo in the Republican primary, adding a lot of spice to the race, which includes three Democratic challengers as well.

Note: Parts of this interview will appear in an upcoming program on Free Speech TV: SourceCode Episode 3 - Enemies of the Environment. SourceCode teams up with TruthOut to give you the scoop on the biggest threats to preserving our country's public lands, endangered animals, and last wild spaces. Tune into Free Speech TV, Dish Network Ch. 9415, Sunday, March 5, at 9 a.m. and noon, or Monday, March 6, at 8 p.m. or 11p.m. (all times Eastern). Visit sourcecode.freespeech.org to view past shows.

Kelpie Wilson: What was your greatest accomplishment for the environment when you were in Congress in the 1960s and '70s?

Pete McCloskey: I suppose I tried to protect a few porpoises when the tuna fishermen were catching the porpoises in their nets. We tried to reduce the taking of endangered whale species, something my opponent Mr. Pombo now supports the increase of. Japanese whaling is one of the issues between me and him.

KW: What about the Endangered Species Act? What was your role in that?

McCloskey: Well, perhaps the greatest achievement, and we didn't know it at the time, was we held an Earth Day in 1970, and out of that Earth Day a lot of students got involved in saving the environment, or trying to. They listed 12 of my colleagues, the Dirty Dozen, and took out seven of them in the next election. The result was, when Congress convened in January 1971, everyone was now an environmentalist. They had seen a new force, college students, who favored the environment. Out of those next four years, we passed the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Amendments, the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Estuary Protection Act, the Coastal Zone Act; all of those came through my subcommittee, Fish and Wildlife, a subcommittee which is now under Pombo's jurisdiction as chairman as the House Resources Committee.

KW: So the ESA is now 34 years old, and even environmentalists agree that some changes are needed. Pombo wrote and passed a reform bill through the House. What is in that bill?

McCloskey: If it passes in the form that Mr. Pombo got it though his committee, it would gut the ESA, and it would gut the whole scheme of protection for endangered and threatened species. Pombo announced that this was nothing new; he wrote a book in 1995 saying that he wanted to abolish the Endangered Species Act. But he didn't just change those provisions that should be changed, and I can give you a few: we would like to make them more farmer friendly; we would like to make them so that, when the government gets an application to develop endangered species land, the government comes in right at the start and says you can do this or you can't do this or you have to mitigate what you're going to do. It's been hard to get though the bureaucracy.

What Pombo wants to do is make it even tougher to get through the bureaucracy. You could use the entire budget of the Fish and Wildlife Service just to pay off developers. He's put a provision in there that a developer who is restricted by endangered species concerns should be compensated for all future loss of profit for any project he might propose to develop that land. Well, he'd bankrupt the agency with that, and I think that's his purpose. Again, it's not just to end the problems of the Act, it's to abolish it or make it ineffective.

KW: Who are the top Republicans in history who've made important contributions to conservation and environmental protection?

McCloskey: The father of Republican environmentalism is Teddy Roosevelt, who, with Gifford Pinchot, started to set aside wilderness and national forests and national parks. Teddy Roosevelt Island has become a national park in the middle of the Potomac River, right across from the Watergate Hotel. Pombo wants to sell Roosevelt Island for development for residential purposes, along with fourteen other parks, one of which is in his own district, in the town of Danville. He believes that the solution to this country's ills is to take all of the public lands and turn them into private development. Well, the beauty that we have here, half of northern California, is in public lands. If you develop it, you lose the priceless privilege of kids out there that are looking for crabs or frogs or something of that kind, growing up near flowing rivers, or swamps, or tidelands, particularly the High Sierra. He's got a bill to put 18 dams in the Immigrant Wilderness. Well if you ever backpacked up there, the idea of one more dam in the High Sierra is crazy, but that's his view, and that's his belief, and that's why I'm running against him.

KW: So what are the Republican values that you represent and how are they different from Richard Pombo's?

McCloskey: In my time, we served with noble and ethical leaders: Gerry Ford, Bob Michael, John Rhodes, men of impeccable honesty. We didn't have anybody locked up for a violation of ethics. Of course we were in the minority, nobody wanted to bribe a Republican; you bribed the Democrats in those days. We had 36 or so congressmen indicted, and all but one of them was a Democrat. But now the Republicans have had the power for the last 13 years, and I believe they've been corrupted: the arrangements between Tom DeLay, the majority leader, and Jack Abramoff. Remember, Tom DeLay jumped Pombo over six other congressmen to make him chairman of the Resources Committee.

The values that we had were, first: honesty and ethics. Second: we wanted a balanced budget; we had fiscal responsibility. Pombo and his allegedly conservative friends have spent us into the greatest deficits in history, trillions of dollars in deficits. That's no Republican value. We were environmentalists of the Teddy Roosevelt theory. We believed in separation of church and state. We believed in the independence of the Supreme Court not being subject to politicians. Now you've got Pombo introducing a bill ... he wants to give Congress the right to overrule Supreme Court decisions on constitutional issues. That's not a Republican value, that's almost radical. That would destroy the checks and balances that the Constitutional forefathers provided.

I suppose the worst value of all is that he wants to give away the public lands for development. My wife and I have spent half our lives, half our adult lives, trying to save special parts of California. I'll give you examples: the Bridgeport Valley over in Modoc County; the Bear Valley up in Calaveras County. We've managed to set those aside in conservation. Most recently, the Hearst Ranch, 82,000 acres. That preserves 15 miles of pristine beach. That's worth doing. It's worth preserving the remaining public lands of California, for your kids and my kids and grandchildren. Pombo wants to destroy all that. He really thinks development is the key to Northern California. You've seen what it's done in Southern California. A lot of us are fugitives from Southern California, trying to preserve the last of Northern California's open space wilderness.

KW: What he's trying to do is kind of like selling off family heirlooms to pay the rent.

McCloskey: I've differed strongly with the Bush administration. It's cut back all of the money for the parks and the forests. They want to put snowmobiles in Yosemite. What they want to do is roll back the environmental progress of 30 years, and it's just wrong. Pombo is their chief operative in doing that, so I'd like to take him out of the Congress and maybe restore a Republican value of the preservation of open space in wilderness. He thinks wilderness is bad because no people are allowed to go into the wilderness. Well, that's baloney, you go into the wilderness like Mohammed went to the mountain or Moses went into the desert. You get inspiration from the wilderness. It is not in this man to preserve and protect wilderness.

KW: Getting back to Republican values, what are the worst examples of Pombo's corruption?

McCloskey: His corruption: Here's a man, Jack Abramoff with his K Street Lobbying project, who has given all this money to Pombo - $54,500. Well, we say, what? Why Pombo? Why would Mr. Abramoff bestow this largess on Pombo? Why would Pombo's staff get these thousand-dollar seats to this skybox? What did he give up for that? We don't know the answer to that yet, the grand jury or the federal attorney hasn't told us, but one example is the Marianas Islands. Abramoff started in the 1990s to try to shield the Marianas Islands from US immigration and labor laws. A man named Willie Tan, who ran this sweatshop operation, brought in young women from all over China and Southeast Asia and the other islands, saying: "Come to America and sign this paper that you'll pay $5,000 for the privilege of going to America." Well, they got them to the Marianas Islands, which is a US trust territory, which can use the label "Made in America" on the clothing it manufactures. Pombo went to the Marianas in 2004, and suddenly gets nine contributions in the thousands of dollars from Marianas businessmen. Now why are they giving Pombo that money? Pombo absolutely refuses to investigate Abramoff and his connection with the Marianas, the sweatshops, the prostitution, and these girls being lured into coming there. Why won't he investigate it? That's what Congressional committees do when sweatshops or fraud are brought to your attention, and a man goes to jail for pleading guilty to bribing congressmen. You investigate that. Pombo won't. That's corruption.

KW: Anything else?

McCloskey: I'll tell you one other thing, that is corruption. When he put in this bill to amend the Endangered Species Act, he not only took out habitat protection but he put a provision in there to exempt farmers from using pesticides for five years in endangered species areas. We wonder: why would a California congressman do that? Then we see suddenly that he's funded in his travel, illegally, by a private foundation. He gets $23,000 from this foundation to travel, which you can't accept. He's a founding governor of the foundation; he can't deny he knew it was a private foundation. But this foundation, who is it funded by? The Japanese Whaling Association, the Association of Fur Traders - these are the guys that import elephant tusks or endangered parrots, and finally, Monsanto gave this foundation $115,000. Well, who benefits from the allowing of the use of pesticides? Monsanto. Whenever you find Pombo doing or not doing something, you chase it down to his contributors.

Big mines: He tried to get hundreds of thousands of acres of mining lands transferred to mining companies for development. Even the Congress couldn't accept that. They took it out of a bill he inserted it in privately. We have about 200,000 of those acres in Northern California; he was going to put it up for sale to mining companies. You follow his contributions: half of those were from big oil, big timber, big railroads, and big mining companies. I'm not going to take any PAC money. I may lose, because I won't get as much money as he does. I'd like to draw the distinction between congressmen who are on the take and whose positions reflect their largest contributors and those who don't. Here is Abramoff going to jail for bribing congressmen and Pombo. You ask him ... "Oh, he never lobbied me." Baloney.

KW: Why won't Pombo debate you?

McCloskey: I don't know that he won't debate me. He always speaks through spokesmen. The spokesman says: We don't want to debate McCloskey; he's way back in the 70s. Those values of his, about honesty and not being controlled by lobbyists, that's the seventies, and he's unworthy to debate. Well, if you're running for the Great Debating Society of United States, the United States Congress, I think you would want to debate your opponent. I always did. I served in the House 15 years and when someone ran against me, I'd say, I'll debate you every two weeks between now and Election Day. Let the public learn from hearing the debates. I won't say he's afraid to debate, but it looks that way.

KW: A final question. What are some of the ways that Pombo has been neglecting the district here, his own district?

McCloskey: There's the water quality in the San Joaquin River, the levees, and the strength of the levees in the Delta, most of all the traffic. Half of my old district seems to be moving from the Peninsula and the East Bay over here for affordable housing. The other morning, I drove out at 5:30 in the morning coming to Stockton on Route 580; cars were ten feet apart, four lanes abreast. At 5:30 in the morning there's an absolute traffic jam. He hasn't brought in any money to widen those highways. He really has not paid attention to this district. One child in six is getting asthma as a result of the air quality. He refuses to accept that global warming is an issue. He says that certainly automobile emissions are not creating greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. That's a head-in-the-sand attitude for this valley, in which traffic and air pollution are crucial issues. San Joaquin County is part of the poverty belt of California. They're below poverty level, way below the average in California. He's just voted to cut Medicaid and Medicare and Head Start programs. That's not what a congressman from this district ought to be doing.

FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT

Loose Cheeks: Hot Tips

By Lucas Smithereen
Loose Cheeks Senior Editor

Got a hot tip for Loose Cheeks? Call the Loose Cheeks hot-tip line: (000) CHE-EEKS. We’ll get back to you whenever.

Bobcat flaksters on the march!

Loose Cheeks got a hot tip that UC Merced Environmental Manager Rick Notini, UC lawyers and consultants, cancelled a meeting with federal and state officials and national, state and local environmental groups to discuss UC Merced’s on-going lack of compliance with environmental law and mitigation.

UC Merced had another – much more important meeting – with a local farm group right here in Merced.

Notini, UC Merced Assistant Chancellor Janet Young and county Supervisor Kathleen Crookham met the farm group to sensitize the group for its next meeting.

UC is lobbying farmers not to object when – Hush! Hush! -- the second phase of the campus drops down on the land presently planned for the University Community because UC Merced is unable to get Clean Water Act permits for its original site.

You wudda thought they shudda thought about that a few years ago.

But hey, it’s UC, what are you gonna do?

Valley politicians and judges just love that UC. Our rich Republican landowners, local and out-of-town developers see the campus as the anchor tenant for a building boom down the whole east side of the San Joaquin Valley, which means big bucks for them – but not for us, caught funding the public works projects and schools the development will require and do not pay for because development corporations own the Legislature composed of corrupt, elected Yes-people.

Meanwhile, local environmental groups have filed suit against the University Community Plan because agricultural groups would not sue to protect prime farm land. The public claims in its suit that the UCP is a plan to make a plan and violates the California Environmental Quality Act.

UC Regents and the University Community Land Co. (that’s UC and the Smith Trusts) have intervened in the suit. Wonder whose indemnifying the county now?

But Notini will tell you any time you ask that UC is not a developer.

Anyway, the next night, Notini and Crookham were joined by none other than Chancellor Carol Tomlinson-Keasey and Rep. Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer-Merced, to pitch the farm group. Farmers shouldn’t object to the taking of hundreds more acres of prime farm land … because it’s UC doing the taking.

Right!

Loose Cheeks hasn’t seen so much UC Merced/politician manipulation since an east side conservation district was pressured a few years back to run a resource-mitigation scheme for the campus alongside The Nature Conservancy .

So, that’s why Notini wasn’t in Sacramento fielding embarrassing questions about UC Merced’s inability to comply with federal environmental law and land mitigation.

Plans to make plans to make plans to make plans!

Loose Cheeks got these hot tips from a discarded Golden Bobcat book bag found outside the Applegate City Zoo.

“Hopefully, the local nitwits won’t find out that UC still hasn’t done its federal process and future campus phases could still be built elsewhere,” was the last entry found in the notebook.

Local yokels get hoodwinked by Hope ... again

Merced Alliance for Responsible Growth (MARG) is Merced County through and through, according to a Harvard PhD Valley Hopeful. MARG is co-chaired by a local farmer and a retired educator. Members include the local progressive Democratic group, which has been meeting since 1968, the Community Alliance with Family Farmers, the Valley Hopefuls, which is mostly old time Mercedians, the grassroots citizens group fighting the Riverside Motorsports Park, the local Sierra Club, the local labor council, and "on and on".

Loose Cheeks calls for an immediate investigation of this on-and-on group. We think it is probably too progressive for our Valley Way of Life.

The Hopeful guessed yesterday in a letter to the local Daily Bobcat (formerly the Merced Sun-Star) the average MARG members have lived in the county is 10-15 years.

The Hopeful’s yokels believe in responsible growth that promotes quality of life, clean air, farmland preservation and that pays its own way, businesses that offer good quality jobs, good pay and benefits. The WalMart distribution center would be an “atrocious” entrance to the beautiful new UC Campus Parkway to UC Merced.

The Hopeful thinks the appropriate entrance to the Parkway would be a “responsible” bio-technology firm that could partner with the university.

Well, it could be too late to save the beauty of the Mission Interchange, but, if we play our cards right maybe we could get a bio-pharm lab up at the interchange for the Atwater-Bellevue Loop.

Are there human genes in our food yet?

Don’t ask the UC Merced-based Hopeful Couple. They’ll soon be fleeing suspicious pollen pools back to the Bay Area.

The local yokels got hustled by an out-of-town Hopeful with an agenda minted by the UC Regents.

The Shrimp Slayer solves the Delta dilemma!

Special to Loose Cheeks from Juan de la Rana-Salto:

I went to the Delta hearing yesterday. Cardoza was such a fool - but playing for the cameras and media the whole time. At one point he even had the audacity to call himself the "raging moderate." But his questions were stupid - "could it be car batteries causing the collapse of the Delta?"

Loose Cheeks speculates Cardoza has been snorting too much selenium with his Big Water buddies at Delta-Mendota and Westlands.

Did he eat duck?

Where are they now?

Ex-county Supervisor Gloria Keene is looking good in the ERA Land Co. ad in this week’s Valley Values. In fact, in the picture she looks like she just got out of high school instead of jail, where she went briefly in an arrest last year for auto-insurance fraud. In January, she pled guilty to a misdemeanor and got community service time.

“BRAND NEW HOME! Beautiful, 1,395 sq.ft. home with tile floors, dual pane windows, extra large lot, on it’s own foundation …$325,000”

Better than on somebody else’s foundation.

City of Livingston seeks miracle!

After the powerful letter of legal instruction Merced County Counsel Ruben Castillo wrote to the City of Livingston, the city appears to have adopted a solution they attribute to St. Francis of Asissi: turning a blind eye to the Ranchwood mile-long sewer trunk line and begging forgiveness -- for numerous violations of planning, land-use and environmental law in return for gifts. Loose Cheeks' hot tipsters say the gifts include everything from plane rides to swimming pools.

Paul Craig Roberts (see bio below) is someone who knows how to read Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. He also has a sharp nose for hype – from corporations, the Bush regime and universities – on the job prospects for American youth.

Here in Merced, we have been subjected to nauseating quantities of Bobcat flak from UC Merced. Some of it is adult stuff and that’s OK. Well, not really, but Americans expect flak from all public institutions and corporations. But what ought to make us mad as hell is the exploitation of Valley youth. Ever since UC, the Smith Trusts and their lawyers, Mr. UC Merced the local businessman, the various Mr. UC Merceds who have served UC in public offices from this district, numerous Ms. UC Merceds, the UC Merced Boosters and their more recent organizational incarnations (One Voice for One UC Merced Campus Parkway), local, national and international development corporations – ever since the Big Merced Land Deal took off around UC Merced, every kid in this town without the interest and vocation for university academic work has been made to feel like a failure. Big landowners, developers, lenders, commercial business, and realtors have been running a speculative housing bubble around the university. Special interests behave that way, and we know it.

It is not OK to pimp minority youth or to promise kids careers when the real intent is just to hustle a speculative real estate bubble. But, what else could we expect out of our Valley “leaders”?

We all want education for ourselves and for our children. We all need it all our lives. One of the sadder sights in America is an unemployed, educated middle-aged American who is bitter and has lost faith in the whole enterprise of learning anything. We especially want our children to have both an education that will give them broad, deep minds fitted for social and political survival, and hopefully some civilized enjoyment in their adult lives, and the practical training based on a realistic assessment of where jobs and careers will exist so that they can flourish economically.

Social, political and economic survival is hard in the Valley. It’s no joke and we don’t appreciate arrogant UC administrators’ condescension and exploitation of our ethnic complexity. We don’t need nanotechnologists or biotechnologists. A few good, homegrown scientists would be great, people with true concern for Valley scientific problems. Environmental health scientists would be useful, if they didn't turn into developers' consultants. We especially need talented social scientists to create an accurate portrait of who we are – not what our various exploiters portray us to be for their own interests. We need a new generation of union leaders with courage and principles. We need a whole new attitude toward farming and a radical change in direction of agriculture. We need environmentalists who will stand up against the special interests that have turned this into the worst air pollution basin in the country. We need a generation of politicians who aren’t corrupt whores of special interests.

Partly because we have not – until recently – been overly molested by our great public research university, it’s possible we still possess the combination of energy and common sense that, combined with the right kind of reading and some encouragement, could produce realistic analysis of problems and solutions. What we get from UC Merced is increasing doses of hysterically arrogant, defensive flak as the truth slowly dawns on its crew: the Valley is somehow real; it isn’t what the Great Valley Center, the politicians and confidence men and women in business said it was. The Valley isn’t the California Dream. The Valley provided the work and the produce that fed the Dream. Now it is providing cheaper housing for the dwindling, commuting American high-tech labor force.

What is university technical training worth to Valley youth? What does the Bureau of Labor Statistics say on the subject? What real relevance does UC Merced have to the Valley, in the midst of a national jobless economic “recovery”? We’re from agriculture. We know about hard work, low wages, union busting, low commodity prices, booms, busts, phony economic recoveries and massive environmental destruction. From everything one reads about UC Merced, it would seem it isn’t set up to be of any help at all to Valley reality. It seems likely it will remain an irrelevant island of privilege and anchor tenant for huge urban growth on prime farm and ranch land.

It is extremely politically correct for hip leaders and value-free facilitators to mimic Cesar Chavez, saying, “Si, se puede” (Yes, it can be done) without the least clue about what that phrase meant in its day.

But there is another old California phrase almost like it: “Sal si puedes!” (Get out if you can.)

In other words: Get out – don’t let your child become a statistic of the Tomlinson-Keasey-Cardoza-UC Merced Memorial Respiratory Research Institute, find a job at a living wage, decent shelter, water and air quality – if you can.

Bill Hatch
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http://www.counterpunch.com/

March 6, 2006

A Nation Polarized Between Rich and Poor
America's Bleak Jobs Future

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

On February 20 Forbes.com told its readers with a straight face that "the American job-generation machine rolls on. The economy will create 19 million new payroll jobs in the decade to 2014." Forbes took its information from the 10-year jobs projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor, released last December.

If the job growth of the past half-decade is a guide, the forecast of 19 million new jobs is optimistic, to say the least. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics payroll jobs data, from January 2001 - January 2006 the US economy created 1,054,000 net new private sector jobs and 1,039,000 net new government jobs for a total five-year figure of 2,093,000. How does the US Department of Labor get from 2 million jobs in five years to 19 million in ten years?

I cannot answer that question.

However, the jobs record for the past five years tells a clear story. The BLS payroll jobs data contradict the hype from business organizations, such as the US Chamber of Commerce, and from "studies" financed by outsourcing corporations that offshore jobs outsourcing is good for America. Large corporations, which have individually dismissed thousands of their US employees and replaced them with foreigners, claim that jobs outsourcing allows them to save money that can be used to hire more Americans. The corporations and the business organizations are very successful in placing this disinformation in the media. The lie is repeated everywhere and has become a mantra among no-think economists and politicians. However, no sign of these jobs can be found in the payroll jobs data. But there is abundant evidence of the lost American jobs.

Information technology workers and computer software engineers have been especially heavily hit by offshore jobs outsourcing. During the past five years (Jan 01 - Jan 06), the information sector of the US economy lost 645,000 jobs or 17.4% of its work force. Computer systems design and related lost 116,000 jobs or 8.7% of its work force. Clearly, jobs outsourcing is not creating jobs in computer engineering and information technology. Indeed, jobs outsourcing is not even creating jobs in related fields.

For the past five years US job growth was limited to these four areas: education and health services, state and local government, leisure and hospitality, financial services. There was no US job growth outside these four areas of domestic nontradable services.

Oracle, for example, which has been handing out thousands of pink slips, has recently announced two thousand more jobs being moved to India. How is Oracle's move of US jobs to India creating jobs in the US for waitresses and bartenders, hospital orderlies, state and local government and credit agencies, the only areas of job growth?

Engineering jobs in general are in decline, because the manufacturing sectors that employ engineers are in decline. During the last five years, the US work force lost 1.2 million jobs in the manufacture of machinery, computers, electronics, semiconductors, communication equipment, electrical equipment, motor vehicles and transportation equipment. The BLS payroll job numbers show a total of 70,000 jobs created in all fields of architecture and engineering, including clerical personal, over the past five years. That comes to a mere 14,000 jobs per year (including clerical workers). What is the annual graduating class in engineering and architecture? How is there a shortage of engineers when more graduate than can be employed?

Of course, many new graduates take jobs opened by retirements. We would have to know the retirement rates to get a solid handle on the fate of new graduates. But it cannot be very pleasant, with declining employment in the manufacturing sectors that employ engineers and a minimum of 65,000 H-1B visas annually for foreigners plus an indeterminate number of L-1 visas.

It is not only the Bush regime that bases its policies on lies. Not content with outsourcing Americans' jobs, corporations want to fill the remaining jobs in America with foreigners on work visas. Business organizations lie about a shortage of engineers, scientists and even nurses. Business organizations have successfully used pubic relations firms and bought-and-paid-for "economic studies" to convince policymakers that American business cannot function without H-1B visas that permit the importation of indentured employees from abroad who are paid less than the going US salaries. The so-called shortage is, in fact, a replacement of American employees with foreign employees, with the soon-to-be-discharged American employee first required to train his replacement.

It is amazing to see free-market economists rush to the defense of H-1B visas. The visas are nothing but a subsidy to US companies at the expense of US citizens.

Keep in mind this subsidy to US corporations for employing foreign workers in place of Americans as we examine the Labor Department's projections of the ten fastest growing US occupations over the 2004-2014 decade.

All of the occupations with the largest projected employment growth (in terms of the number of jobs) over the next decade are in nontradable domestic services. The top ten sources of the most jobs in "superpower" America are: retail salespersons, registered nurses, postsecondary teachers, customer service representatives, janitors and cleaners, waiters and waitresses, food preparation (includes fast food), home health aides, nursing aides, orderlies and attendants, general and operations managers. Note than none of this projected employment growth will contribute one nickel toward producing goods and services that could be exported to help close the massive US trade deficit. Note, also, that few of these jobs classifications require a college education.

Among the fastest growing occupations (in terms of rate of growth), seven of the ten are in health care and social assistance. The three remaining fields are: network systems and data analysis with 126,000 jobs projected or 12,600 per year; computer software engineering applications with 222,000 jobs projected or 22,200 per year, and computer software engineering systems software with 146,000 jobs projected or 14,600 per year.

Assuming these projections are realized, how many of the computer engineering and network systems jobs will go to Americans? Not many, considering the 65,000 H-1B visas each year (650,000 over the decade) and the loss during the past five years of 761,000 jobs in the information sector and computer systems design and related.

Judging from its ten-year jobs projections, the US Department of Labor does not expect to see any significant high-tech job growth in the US. The knowledge jobs are being outsourced even more rapidly than the manufacturing jobs were. The so-called "new economy" was just another hoax perpetrated on the American people.

If offshore jobs outsourcing is good for US employment, why won't the US Department of Commerce release the 200-page, $335,000 study of the impact of the offshoring of US high-tech jobs? Republican political appointees reduced the 200-page report to 12 pages of public relations hype and refuse to allow the Technology Administration experts who wrote the report to testify before Congress. Democrats on the House Science Committee are unable to pry the study out of the hands of Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez. Obviously, the facts don't fit the Bush regime's globalization hype.

The only thing America has left is finance, and now that is moving abroad. On February 22 CNNMoney.com reported that America's large financial institutions are moving "large portions of their investment banking operations abroad." No longer limited to back-office work, offshoring is now killing American jobs in research and analytic operations, foreign exchange trades and highly complicated credit derivatives contracts. Deal-making responsibility itself may eventually move abroad. Deloitte Touche says that the financial services industry will move 20 percent of its total costs base offshore by the end of 2010. As the costs are lower in India, that will represent more than 20 percent of the business. A job on Wall St is a declining option for bright young persons with high stress tolerance.

The BLS payroll data that we have been examining tracks employment by industry classification. This is not the same thing as occupational classification. For example, companies in almost every industry and area of business employ people in computer-related occupations. A recent study from the Association for Computing Machinery claims:
"Despite all the publicity in the United States about jobs being lost to India and China, the size of the IT employment market in the United States today is higher than it was at the height of the dot.com boom. Information technology appears as though it will be a growth area at least for the coming decade."

We can check this claim by turning to the BLS Occupational Employment Statistics. We will look at "computer and mathematical employment" and "architecture and engineering employment."

Computer and mathematical employment includes such fields as "software engineers applications," "software engineers systems software," "computer programers," "network systems and data communications," and "mathematicians." Has this occupation been a source of job growth?

In November of 2000 this occupation employed 2,932,810 people. In November of 2004 (the latest data available), this occupation employed 2,932,790, or 20 people fewer. Employment in this field has been stagnant for the past four years.

During these four years, there have been employment shifts within the various fields of this occupation. For example, employment of computer programmers declined by 134,630, while employment of software engineers applications rose by 65,080, and employment of software engineers systems software rose by 59,600. (These shifts might merely reflect change in job or occupation title from programmer to software engineer.)

These figures do not tell us whether any gain in software engineering jobs went to Americans. According to Professor Norm Matloff, in 2002 there were 463,000 computer-related H-1B visa holders in the US.
Similarly, the 134,630 lost computer programming jobs (if not merely a job title change) may have been outsourced offshore to foreign affiliates.

Architecture and engineering employment includes all the architecture and engineering fields except software engineering. The total employment of architects and engineers in the US declined by 120,700 between November 1999 and November 2004. Employment declined by 189,940 between November 2000 and November 2004, and by 103,390 between November 2001 and November 2004.

There are variations among fields. Between November 2000 and November 2004, for example, US employment of electrical engineers fell by 15,280. Employment of computer hardware engineers rose by 15,990 (possibly these are job title reclassifications). Overall, however, over 100,000 engineering jobs were lost. We do not know how many of the lost jobs were outsourced offshore to foreign affiliates or how many of any increase in computer hardware jobs went to foreign holders of H-1B or L-1 visas.

Clearly, engineering and computer-related employment in the US has not been growing, whether measured by industry or by occupation.
Moreover, with a half million or more foreigners in the US on work visas, the overall employment numbers do not represent employment of Americans. Perhaps what corporations and "studies" mean when they claim offshore outsourcing increases US employment is that the contacts companies make abroad allow them to bring in more foreigners on work visas to displace their American employees.

American employees have been abandoned by American corporations and by their representatives in Congress. America remains a land of opportunity--but for foreigners--not for the native born. A country whose work force is concentrated in domestic nontradable services has no need for scientists and engineers and no need for universities.
Even the projected jobs in nursing and school teachers can be filled by foreigners on H-1B visas.

In the US the myth has been firmly established that the jobs that the US is outsourcing offshore are being replaced with better jobs.
There is no sign of these jobs in the payroll jobs data or in the occupational statistics. Myself and others have pointed out that when a country loses entry level jobs, it has no one to promote to senior level jobs. We have also pointed out that when manufacturing leaves, so does engineering, design, research and development, and innovation itself.

On February 16 the New York Times reported on a new study presented to the National Academies that concludes that outsourcing is climbing the skills ladder. A survey of 200 multinational corporations representing 15 industries in the US and Europe found that 38 percent planned to change substantially the worldwide distribution of their research and development work, sending it to India and China. According to the New York Times, "More companies in the survey said they planned to decrease research and development employment in the United States and Europe than planned to increase employment."

The study and discussion it provoked came to untenable remedies. Many believe that a primary reason for the shift of R&D to India and China is the erosion of scientific prowess in the US due to lack of math and science proficiency of American students and their reluctance to pursue careers in science and engineering. This belief begs the question why students would chase after careers that are being outsourced abroad.

The main author of the study, Georgia Tech professor Marie Thursby, believes that American science and engineering depend on having "an environment that fosters the development of a high-quality work force and productive collaboration between corporations and universities."
The Dean of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, thinks the answer is to recruit the top people in China and India and bring them to Berkeley. No one seems to understand that research, development, design, and innovation take place in countries where things are made. The loss of manufacturing means ultimately the loss of engineering and science. The newest plants embody the latest technology. If these plants are abroad, that is where the cutting edge resides.

The United States is the first country in history to destroy the prospects and living standards of its labor force. It is amazing to watch freedom-loving libertarians and free-market economists serve as full time apologists for the dismantling of the ladders of upward mobility that made the America of old an opportunity society.

America has begun a polarization into rich and poor. The resulting political instability and social strife will be terrible.
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http://www.vdare.com/roberts/bio.htm

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor’s Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department’s Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts’ latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions—The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx’s Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper’s, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence.

Rev. Jesse Jackson used to describe development in rural US counties: "First you get your prison, then you get your WalMart."

In Merced, first we got UC, now we'll probably get a 1.1-million square foot Wal-Mart distribution center at the UC Merced off-ramp. This will set a new basement for county wages and Local Business is wildly enthusiastic about it. The representative of the Alia Corp. and the Greater Merced Chamber of Commerce, two of the three authors of a recent Sun-Star guest commentary accused "outside organizers" of obstructing the project, claimed to represent best the interests of the local community. Alia actually represents two global corporations, McDonalds and Chevron, while numerous national and international corporations have memberships in the GMCC, including Wal-Mart.

Rebecca Solnit describes how Wal-Mart heiress, Alice Walton, is spending some of the corporation's unpaid wages and benefits.

The Wal-Mart Biennale
By Rebecca Solnit
TomDispatch.com -- Feb. 16, 2006

It isn't that, when Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton purchased Asher B. Durand's 1849 painting Kindred Spirits last year, she got the state of Arkansas to pass legislation specifically to save her taxes -- in this case, about $3 million on a purchase price of $35 million. It isn't that the world's second richest woman and ninth richest person (according to a Forbes magazine 2005 estimate) scooped the painting out from under the National Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which had banded together to try to keep it in a public collection when the New York Public Library decided to sell it off. It isn't that Walton will eventually stick this talisman of New England cultural life and a lot of other old American paintings in the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Walton family museum she's building in Bentonville, Arkansas, the site of Wal-Mart's corporate headquarters -- after all people in the middle of the country should get to see some good art too. It might not even be, as Wal-MartWatch.com points out, that the price of the painting equals what the state of Arkansas spends every two years providing for Wal-Mart's 3,971 employees on public assistance; or that the average Wal-Mart cashier makes $7.92 an hour and, since Wal Mart likes to keep people on less than full-time schedules, works only 29 hours a week for an annual income of $11,948--so a Wal-Mart cashier would have to work a little under 3,000 years to earn the price of the painting without taking any salary out for food, housing, or other expenses (and a few hundred more years to pay the taxes, if the state legislature didn't exempt our semi-immortal worker).

The trouble lies in what the painting means and what Alice Walton and her $18 billion mean. Art patronage has always been a kind of money-laundering, a pretty public face for fortunes made in uglier ways. The superb Rockefeller folk art collections in several American museums don't include paintings of the 1914 Ludlow Massacre of miners in Colorado, carried out by Rockefeller goons, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles doesn't say a thing about oil. But something about Wal-Mart and Kindred Spirits is more peculiar than all the robber barons and their chapels, galleries, and collections ever were, perhaps because, more than most works of art, Durand's painting is a touchstone for a set of American ideals that Wal-Mart has been savaging.

It may be true that, in an era when oil companies regularly take out advertisements proclaiming their commitment to environmentalism, halting global warming, promoting petroleum alternatives, and conservation measures, while many of them also fund arguments against climate change's very existence, nothing is too contrary to embrace. But Kindred Spirits is older, more idealistic, and more openly at odds with this age than most hostages to multinational image-making.

Kindred Spirits portrays Durand's friend, the great American landscape painter Thomas Cole, with his friend, the poet and editor William Cullen Bryant. The two stand on a projecting rock above a cataract in the Catskills, bathed like all the trees and air around them in golden light. The painting is about friendship freely given, including a sense of friendship, even passion, for the American landscape itself. In the work of Cole, Durand, and Bryant, as in the writing of Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, you can see an emerging belief that the love of nature, beauty, truth, and freedom are naturally allied, a romantic vision that still lingers as one of the most idealistic versions of what it might mean to be an American.

Cole was almost the first American painter to see the possibilities in American landscapes, to see that meaning could grow rather than lessen in a place not yet full of ruins and historical associations, and so he became an advocate for wilderness nearly half a century before California rhapsodist and eventual Sierra Club cofounder John Muir took up the calling. Bryant had gained a reputation as a poet before he became editor-in-chief of the New York Evening Post and thereby a pivotal figure in the culture of the day. He defended a group of striking tailors in 1836, long before there was a union movement, and was ever after a champion of freedom and human rights, turning his newspaper into an antislavery mouthpiece and eventually becoming a founder of the Republican Party (back when that was the more progressive and less beholden of the two parties). He was an early supporter of Abraham Lincoln and of the projects that resulted in New York's Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum -- of a democratic urban culture that believed in the uplifting power of nature and of free access. Maybe the mutation of the Republican Party from Bryant's to Walton's time is measure enough of American weirdness; or maybe the details matter, of what the painting is and what Wal-Mart and its heiress are.

Kindred Spirits was commissioned by the wealthy dry-goods merchant Jonathan Sturges as a gift for Bryant in commemoration of his beautiful eulogy for Cole, who died suddenly in 1848. Bryant left it to his daughter Julia, who gave it in 1904 to what became the New York Public Library. It was never a commodity exchanged between strangers until the Library, claiming financial need, put it and other works of art up for sale. So now a portrait of antislavery and wilderness advocates belongs to a woman whose profits came from degrading working conditions in the U.S. and abroad and from ravaging the North American landscape.

Maybe the problem is that the Crystal Bridges museum seems like a false front for Wal-Mart, a made-in-America handicrafted artifact of idealism for a corporation that is none of the above. The museum will, as such institutions do, attempt to associate the Wal-Mart billionaires with high culture, American history, beautifully crafted objects -- a host of ideals and pleasures a long way from what you find inside the blank, slabby box of a Wal-Mart. One of the privileges of wealth is buying yourself out of the situation you help to make, so that the wealthy, who advocate for deregulation, install water purifiers and stock up on cases of Perrier, or advocate for small government and then hire their own security forces and educators.

Walton, it seems safe to assume, lives surrounded by nicer objects, likely made under nicer conditions, than she sells the rest of us. I have always believed that museums love artists the way taxidermists love deer. Perhaps Alice Walton is, in some sense, stuffing and mounting what is best about American culture -- best and fading. Perhaps Crystal Bridges will become one of the places we can go to revisit the long history that precedes industrialization and globalization, when creation and execution were not so savagely sundered, when you might know the maker of your everyday goods, and making was a skilled and meaningful act. One of the pleasures of most visual art is exactly that linkage between mind and hand, lost elsewhere as acts of making are divided among many and broken down into multiple repetitive tasks.

Perhaps she could build us the Museum of When Americans Made Stuff Locally by Hand for People They Knew or perhaps that's what Crystal Bridges, along with the rest of such institutions, will become. Or Walton could just plan to open the Museum of When Americans Made Stuff at some more distant date, though less than half of what's in Wal-Mart, sources inform me, is still actually made here -- for now. The world's richest woman, however, seems more interested in archaic images of America than in the artisanry behind them.

Walton has already scooped up a portrait of George Washington by Charles Wilson Peale and paintings by Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper for her museum. That museum, reports say, will feature many, many nineteenth-century portraits of Native Americans -- but it would be hard to see her as a champion of the indigenous history of the Americas. The Wal-Mart that opened last November in Teotihuacan, near Mexico City, is built so close to the Aztec's Pyramid of the Sun that many consider the site desecrated. The Wal-Mart parking lot actually eradicated the site of a smaller temple. "This is the flag of conquest by global interests, the symbol of the destruction of our culture," said a local schoolteacher. Thanks to free-trade measures like NAFTA, Wal-Mart has become Mexico's biggest retailer and private-sector employer.

Imagine if Walton were more like Sturges, supporting the art of her time. Imagine if she were supporting artists who actually had something to say about Wal-Mart and America (and Mexico, and China). Imagine if, in the mode of the Venice Biennale or the Sao Paolo Biennale, there was a Wal-Mart biennale. After all, Wal-Mart is itself China's seventh-largest trading partner, ahead of Germany and Russia and Italy; if it were a nation, it would be the world's nineteenth biggest economy. If it's on the same scale as those countries, why shouldn't it have its own contemporary art shows? But what would the Wal-Mart nation and its artists look like?

Rather than the open, luminous, intelligent architecture Moshe Safde will probably bestow on Bentonville, Arkansas, imagine a shuttered Wal-Mart big box (of which there are so many, often shut down simply to stop employees from unionizing) turned into a MOCA, a museum of contemporary art, or better yet a MOCWA, a Museum of Contemporary Wal-Mart Art. Or Wal-Art. After all, Los Angeles's MOCA was originally sited in a defunct warehouse. You could set the artists free to make art entirely out of materials available at Wal-Mart, or to make art about the global politics of Wal-Mart in our time -- poverty, consumerism, sprawl, racism, gender discrimination, exploitation of undocumented workers.

Imagine a contemporary artist, maybe with Adobe Photoshop, reworking Kindred Spirits again and again. Imagine that Cole and Bryant are, this time, standing not on a rocky outcropping but in, say, one of the puzzle and art-supply aisles of a Wal-Mart somewhere in the Catskills, dazed and depressed. Or imagine instead that it's some sweatshop workers, a little hunched and hungry, on that magnificent perch amid the foliage and the golden light, invited at last into some sense of democratic community. Imagine paintings of Edward Hopper's old downtowns, boarded up because all the sad and lonely people are shopping at Wal-Mart and even having their coffee and hot dogs there. Imagine video-portraits of the people who actually make the stuff you can buy at Wal-Mart, or of the African-American truck-drivers suing the corporation for racism or of the women who are lead plaintiffs in the nation's largest class-action suit for discrimination. Against Wal-Mart, naturally.

Imagine if Alice Walton decided to follow the route of Target with architect Michael Graves and commissioned some cutting-edge contemporary art about these issues: videos and DVDs you could buy, prints for your walls, performance art in the aisles, art that maybe even her workers could afford. Imagine if Wal-Mart would acknowledge what Wal-Mart is rather than turning hallowed American art into a fig leaf to paste over naked greed and raw exploitation. But really, it's up to the rest of us to make the Museum of Wal-Mart, one way or another, in our heads, on our websites, or in our reading of everyday life everywhere.

Rebecca Solnit's Tomdispatch-generated Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities is out in a new and expanded edition. Her other recent books include A Field Guide to Getting Lost and, with Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe, Yosemite in Time: Ice Ages, Tree Clocks, Ghost Rivers.

Copyright 2005 Rebecca Solnit

This is a pass-along post from the national Endangered Species Coalition urging you to call your U.S. Senator today to oppose the gutting of the ESA by legislation shamefully cooked up in the two adjoining districts of representatives RichPAC Pombo, Buffalo Slayer-Tracy, and Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer-Merced.

Talk to your senators' staff today. Numbers below.

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

National Endangered Species Act Call-in Day: Thursday, March 9th

Please Call Your Senators Today!

We need your help to make sure the Senate supports the Endangered Species Act. The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee may take action on an Endangered Species Act bill in the next few weeks. Please call your Senators today!

For over thirty years, the Endangered Species Act has been a safety net for wildlife, fish and plants on the brink of extinction. It has been successful in preventing the extinction of the American Bald Eagle, the gray wolf, the Pacific salmon and many other species.

However, the Endangered Species Act is under threat from special interests, and the politicians they give money to. The House of Representatives has passed a bill that would significantly weaken protections for endangered species and habitat. It is now up to the U.S. Senate to save the Endangered Species Act!

It is critically important that your Senators hear from their constituents that Americans support the Endangered Species Act. Please join the Endangered Species Coalition, other organizations and thousands of Americans across the country by calling your Senators on Thursday, March 9th. Please ask your friends, relatives and colleagues to join you in calling. It only takes about 3 minutes of your time, but the results could last a lifetime.

Thank you for your help in ensuring the Endangered Species Act continues to protect our nation’s most imperiled fish, plants and wildlife so that future generations are able to enjoy their beauty!

Sincerely,

The staff of the Endangered Species Coalition
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ACTION: On Thursday, March 9th , call your Senators in support of a strong Endangered Species Act and urge them to oppose any efforts to change the Act.

PHONE NUMBERS FOR CALIFORNIA U.S. SENATORS

Sen. Barbara Boxer: (202) 224-3553
Sen. Dianne Feinstein: (202) 224-3841
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BACKGROUND:

The House of Representatives passed a bill in September of 2005 that would significantly weaken protections for endangered species and habitat. If Representative Pombo’s bill (HR 3824) becomes law, it would eliminate habitat protection, abandon the commitment to recovering species on the brink of extinction, repeal protections against hazardous pesticides, and politicize the scientific decision-making process. In addition, it would set up an unprecedented entitlement program that would require the federal government to use taxpayers dollars to pay developers for complying with the Endangered Species Act’s prohibition against killing or injuring endangered species.

Pombo's top Democrat supporter and first co-author is Rep. Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer-Merced. Calls from Pombo and Cardoza districts should carry special weight. - Bill

It is now up to the Senate to save the Endangered Species Act. Senators need to stand up and support the Endangered Species Act.

The Endangered Species Act is a successful law. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, over 99% of species given the Act’s protection are still with us today; their extinction has been prevented. In addition, the American public supports the Endangered Species Act. A poll by Decision Research illustrated that 86% of American voters support the Endangered Species Act.

The Endangered Species Act is a safety net for wildlife, plants and fish that are on the brink of extinction. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to be good stewards of the environment and leave behind a legacy of protecting endangered species and the special places they call home.

For more information, visit the Endangered Species Coalition's webpage.

San Joaquin Raptor/Wildlife Rescue Center and other members of the concerned public always wondered how developers in Merced County rode roughshod over local, state and federal environmental laws, regulations, agencies and its own public. But, rarely have they been granted the insight provided by this telephone message, recorded on Feb. 3, 2006.

Badlands has blocked out the last two numbers of the telephones the developer left for return calls from the supervisor he thought he'd called as a courtesy to the developer.

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!

End of message…to erase this message press 7, to save it press 9, to hear more options press 0. To replay this message press 4, to get envelope information about this message press 5. To…. Sent February 3rd, at 11:48 am from phone number 704-13** duration 1 minute 14 seconds. To erase this message press 7. To save it press 9. This message will be saved for 21 days. End of messages.

On Feb. 9, City of Livingston Mayor Brandon Friesen wrote San Joaquin Raptor/Wildlife Rescue Center and members of the public, accusing them of “conducting a documented pursuit and vendetta against Ranchwood Homes.” The mayor said public questions raised and public requests for documentation on this project have "placed our City in the middle of mud slinging and we will not stand for it.”

· The 42-inch sewer trunk line from the City of Livingston: Mr. Hostetler, who does business as Ranchwood Homes, is referring to a mile-long sewer trunk line he built from the corner of the Livingston wastewater treatment plant to a few yards away from where he plans to build a subdivision. The trunk line is built entirely outside the jurisdiction of the City of Livingston in land under county jurisdiction. On Feb. 16, when the project was still incomplete, County Counsel Ruben Castillo wrote a letter to the city attorney of Livingston instructing him in the number of laws the city had broken by "approving" this project beyond its jurisdiction. However, by Feb. 28, the project was completed and the 42-inch, mile-long sewer pipeline was covered over. The public has been granted access to neither city, county nor LAFCO files on this project, despite requests to county CEO Dee Tatum, county Counsel Ruben Castillo, county Director of Planning and Economic Development Robert Lewis, Local Agency Formation Commission Director John LeVan, and the county Board of Supervisors. A request for a meeting with CEO Tatum and department heads has also gone unanswered. The County has taken no action.

· 1,000 acres in North Merced: Ranchwood cleared approximately 1,000 acres of pasture bounded by G Street, La Paloma, Merced Country Club and Old Lake Road, north of Merced. The field crossed Fahrens Creek. Ranchwood put in field roads crossing the creek at two locations, tore out all vegetation along the creek and pushed freshly disked dirt into the stream. The land contains wetlands, is probably habitat for federal and state protected species. There are probable violations of the federal Endangered Species and the Clean Water Act. The public filed a request for code enforcement with Merced County. The County took no action.

· 300 acres near Le Grand: Ranchwood disked and deep-ripped a portion of a 300-acre field on the corner of White Rock and Le Grand roads in county jurisdiction. The land contains wetlands, is probably habitat for federal and state protected species. There are probable violations of the federal ESA and CWA. The public filed a request for code enforcement with Merced County. The County took no action.

· 1,100 acres near Le Grand: Ranchwood deep-ripped, leveled and disked approximately 1,100 acres of seasonal pasture land on the SE intersection of Buchanan Hollow and White Rock roads, also near Le Grand. The pastures contained small streams, wetlands, vernal pools and federal and state protected species. The public filed a request for code enforcement with Merced County. The County took no action.

These are significant conversions of land. Merced County should have directed Ranchwood to do proper environmental review before proceeding. Instead Merced County turned a blind eye to these significant conversions.

State and federal agencies were notified and are expected to uphold regulatory compliance on these projects.

· Franklin County Sewer District: Ranchwood excavated two additional percolation ponds in a field west of Santa Fe Road north of Highway 59 to service a subdivision Ranchwood is building in the Franklin-Beachwood area. The public has requested documentation on this project.

· Land swaps in Planada:

On April 22, 2003, J&J Family Trust sold a parcel of approximately 20 acres on Gerard Road to the Central Valley Coalition for Affordable Housing for $300,000 (approximating from the tax assessment of 1 percent).

On October 10, 2003, CVCAH sold the parcel to the Merced County Housing Authority for $300,000 (according to what MCHA official Nick Benjamin told members of the Planada public).

On Dec. 2, 2004, a complex land swap took place in Planada.

A. MCHA sold the same parcel (APN# 053-145-024) to the Pacific Holt Corp. for $550,000 (according to the tax assessment).

B. A.K. Karmangar, a Planada farmer, sells two parcels (approximately 20 acres) to the MCHA for $550,000 (according to the tax assessment).

C. Pacific Holt sells parcel APN# 053-145-024 to Mr. And Mrs. D. Tatum (CEO Merced County) for $269,500.00 (according to the tax assessment). This is apparently a savings of $280,500.00 to the Tatums for a piece of property Pacific Holt bought the same day for approximately twice as much as they sold it to the Tatums.

On Sept. 29, 2005, Hostetler Investment, LLC filed a memorandum of right of option to Pacific Holt Corp to purchase 50 percent of any or all Wallace and Karmangar property actually acquired by Hostetler, and at the actual gross per-acre price. “For instance, if, as expected, Hostetler actually acquires the entirety of the Karmangar Property containing 410+/- gross acres, the Option would apply to 205 +/- acres. The purchase price for both the Wallace Property and the Karmangar Property shall be the actual gross per acre price paid by Hostetler to purchase the Wallace Property and the Karmangar Property which shall be payable in cash on or before the close of escrow.”

On Dec. 23, 2005, a new entity, Pacific Holt Residential Communities, filed for a county General Plan Amendment for residential construction as the owner of 1,390 acres to be added to the Planada SUDP and to be known as the Village of Geneva at Planada. The acreage is composed of Karmangar and Wallace contiguous parcels.

Pacific Holt Residential Communities consists of Hostetler Investments LLC, Pacific Holt Corp., Premiere Partners III of Illinois, Bear Creek Ranch Inc. and local land holders, Bud Wallace, Inc, Opie and Elizabeth Wallace, Partners, and Hare &Sessions Development, Seattle WA.

The County approved the 2003 Planada Community Plan Update to the Merced County General Plan. The PHR Communities property lies outside of the Planada SUDP except for a 20-acre parcel. The Planada Community Plan has been legally challenged and the case is now in state appellate court.

This is by no means all the Ranchwood Homes projects, even in Merced County alone. It’s just a few examples the public has been able to collect from the east side of the county.

Could county CEO, Dee Tatum, fill in the public (after he’s explained it to Supervisor Crookham) on leapfrog, chaotic, unplanned development – the low, cowboy standards of Merced County planning with an out-dated General Plan, speculation-driven development and a new, incompetent planning director? Why does the County routinely disregards proper public process, the protection of public resources? Why has it shown neither the political will nor the ability to plan coherently in the midst of a speculative real estate boom that began before UC Merced was a “done deal”?

Would CEO Tatum explain why he hired a planning director from Nevada who is incompetent in California environmental law or public processes like the Public Records Act?

Could Supervisor Kathleen Crookham illuminate the public on her special relationship with Ranchwood Homes? Would Supervisor Jerry O’Banion of Los Banos explain how Ranchwood Homes does business, since O’Banion knows all things that occur on the west-side turf he shares with Ranchwood?

The Merced County public should ask how county government can do anything but build a reputation as the most corrupt local land-use authority in the state when the top Democrat opponent of environmental law and regulation in the House of Representatives and one of the key fixers behind UC Merced, Rep. Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer-Merced, is welcome to sit on the third floor of the county administration building.

The University of California, aided by Cardoza, former Rep.Gary Condit, Blue Dog-Ceres, the Condit children, Gov.Gray Davis and compliant state resource agency heads, railroaded (the term “fast-tracked” was substituted) UC Merced through environmental law, regulation and took local land-use authority, set the cowboy standards for development in Merced County. UC also acquainted local land-use jurisdictions with the magic of legal indemnification against legal challenges brought to protect Merced County natural resources, air, water, agricultural land, infrastructure, public health and safety, and endangered species as well as protecting proper public process.

Bill Hatch

Contributors to Badlands sent “Merced Development Rodeo: Ranchwood Event,” March 10, 2006, to a number of individuals, one of whom was Bobby Lewis, the recently hired county planning director who arrived from Nevada without a resume available to the public.

Lewis replied to the article:

----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert Lewis"
To:
Sent: Saturday, March 11, 2006 5:06 AM
Subject: Re: BadlandsJournal -Merced's Development Rodeo

Ranchwood homes was issued a stop work order. Based on findings ...
--------------------------

We decided to search for evidence of the stop-work order and the findings. The search took us back a couple of years.
--------------------------

Feb. 3, 2004:

MERCED COUNTY BOARD OF SUPERVISORS AGENDA
http://www.co.merced.ca.us/bos/boardagenda/current.pdf
10:30 A. M.
PLANNING - PUBLIC HEARING
Appeal of Planning Commission approval to approve Major Subdivision Application No. 03001- McPherson Subdivision submitted by Bryant Owens. Application submitted by Ranchwood Contractors to subdivide two parcels totaling 19.0 acres into 96 residential building lots on property located on the south side of Savanna Road and 580 feet west of Santa Fe Avenue in the Le Grand area.
----------------------------------------
Feb. 4, 2004:

http://www.mercedsun-star.com/news/newsview.asp?c=93758 Supervisors: Le Grand development may proceed…Ranchwood Homes
----------------------------------

Feb. 28, 2004:

http://www.modbee.com/2004/election/merced/supervisors/story/8190479p-9040645c.html 2-25-04
Candidate’s poll raises questions about support
Lee Neves says it was an innocent mistake when he attributed an $8,500 polling expense to a political action committee instead of local developers…six contributors: Bert A. Crane Jr., a Merced farmer and rancher; Rucker Construction of Merced; Ranchwood Homes of Los Banos; Trans County Title of Merced; Maxwell Enterprises of Merced, a construction and development company; and James Abatte of Merced, who owns a number of fast food franchises in the county.
--------------------------------------------------

July 22, 2004:

http://www.mercedsun-star.com/local/story/8882627p-9772671c.html …Melanie Turner…Donation brings UC gym bit closer…
University of California, Merced, got off to a strong start with a
$500,000 donation from Greg and Cathie Hostetler, Los Banos developers of Ranchwood Homes for a gymnasium, featuring a NCAA regulation-size basketball court and seating for 480. The university plans to fund the recreation center in large part with a loan from the UC office of the president, which would be paid back in student fees, Wyan said. Gymnasiums, dormitories, dining halls and other nonacademic facilities cannot be financed with state money, Wyan said. Campbell said there likely will be intramural sports in the 2005-06 school year, as well as sailing and other water sports at nearby Lake Yosemite.
--------------------------

Dec. 8, 2004:

http://www.mercedsun-star.com/local/story/9564250p-10454279c.html …Adam Ashton…Developer gets tacit OK for sewer pipe…
LIVINGSTON — Projections for growth on the city’s outskirts look so good that one developer is ready to build a sewer connection for a project that won’t
take shape for several years. Ranchwood Homes asked the City Council if it could move ahead with plans to build a nearly one-mile sewer extension south of Livingston for a planned 300-home development that is still in its concept stages. Council says it’s his risk if homes don’t win approval.
-----------------------------

Dec. 21, 2004:

Some sections from:

Agreement to design, construct and dedicate section of sewer pipeline by and between City of Livingston and Ranchwood Homes Corp.

… WHEREAS, City needs to add a pipeline section … to the System outside the City’s current boundaries to serve the City; and

WHEREAS, City has determined the New Section project is categorically exempt under the California Environmental Quality Act; and

WHEREAS, City does not currently have the financial resources to design, acquire rights of way and construct the new Section; and

WHEREAS, Ranchwood is willing to incur all of the costs to design, acquire the rights of way and construct the New Section then dedicate it to the City …

1. Ranchwood will use its reasonable best efforts to acquire, at Ranchwood’s expense, the necessary temporary construction and permanent utility rights-of-way necessary for the construction, operation and maintenance of the New Section and related pipelines and facilities, which may be required in the future. In the event Ranchwood is unable to acquire these rights-of-way, City may take the appropriate and necessary steps to acquire the rights-of-way …

3. Ranchwood agrees to defend, indemnify, and hold the City or its agents, officers and employees harmless from any claim, action, or proceeding against the City or its agents, officers, or employees to attack, set aside, void or annul, an approval of the City concerning this Agreement and/or the New Section, which action is brought within the time period provided for in Section 66499.37 of the Government Code of the State of California.

4. (Same language as above except) “prior to acceptance of the New Section to the City.”

5. Ranchwood agrees to dedicate the new Section to the City upon completion of the New Section and acceptance as complete of the New Section by the City’s public works director. Acceptance shall be timed to when connection to City System occurs.

6. City agrees to establish and maintain a mechanism to collect funds from new development, if any, which might be served by the new Section, to reimburse Ranchwood in full for the costs and expenses incurred by Ranchwood under the terms and conditions of this Agreement … so that all new development, if any, served by the new Section pays its pro rata share of the Reimbursable Costs and Ranchwood is reimbursed all of the Reimbursable Costs …

The rest of the agreement basically says that Ranchwood proceeds on this project at its own risk. There are risks: Livingston has no jurisdiction over the land through which the pipeline will pass.

CALIFORNIA CODES
GOVERNMENT CODE
SECTION 66499.37: Any action or proceeding to attack, review, set aside,
void or annul the decision of an advisory agency, appeal board or
legislative body concerning a subdivision, or of any of the
proceedings, acts or determinations taken, done or made prior to such
decision, or to determine the reasonableness, legality or validity
of any condition attached thereto, shall not be maintained by any
person unless such action or proceeding is commenced and service of
summons effected within 90 days after the date of such decision.
Thereafter all persons are barred from any such action or proceeding
or any defense of invalidity or unreasonableness of such decision or
of such proceedings, acts or determinations. Any such proceeding
shall take precedence over all matters of the calendar of the court
except criminal, probate, eminent domain and forcible entry and
unlawful detainer proceedings.

This section would apply if Livingston had the legal right to approve this project in the first place.
-----------------------

Dec. 22, 2004:

http://www.mercedsun-star.com/local/story/9652113p-10536591c.html Adam Ashton…
Work can start on Livingston sewer line…
The City Council and Ranchwood Homes agreed Tuesday night that the builder can proceed with its plans to place a 5,100-foot-long sewer pipe just outside of Livingston’s sphere of influence at its southwest corner
---------------------

Feb. 3, 2005

Investigation unit was on move before board vote…Scott Pesznecker
http://www.mercedsun-star.com/local/story/9885814p-10731412c.html
Merced County District Attorney Gordon Spencer was so confident the Board of Supervisors would OK a proposed move of his investigations staff that he had the office’s employees pack up their desks before supervisors even voted Tuesday. The day after supervisors approved his plans, more questions surfaced about $16,000 in renovations to the new office space made before supervisors signed off on the move. Spencer also mentioned using the asset forfeiture money at Tuesday’s supervisor’s meeting.
Merced County Auditor Stephen Jones said late Wednesday he couldn’t find any records of money drawn from the county treasury to be paid to Hostetler, Ranchwood Homes Corp. or Ranchwood Contractors, Inc. However, there are two other funds Spencer has access to that do not need Jones’ signature on a check, though they still need supervisors’ approval. Schecter, who is
also an ethics professor at CSU Fresno specializing in local government, said the lease agreement could have been handled better from start to finish. “Ethically, I think there are some problems,” he said.
--------------------------------------------------

April 25, 2005:

Development closer to reality…Adam Ashton
http://www.mercedsun-star.com/local/story/10373719p-11176985c.html
LIVINGSTON — Two major subdivisions on the outskirts of town are inching closer to reality with a city analysis of their environmental impacts expected at the end of the year. The Ranchwood and Gallo plans together make up about half the number of homes Livingston has on its books now with a mix of more than a dozen other subdivisions. That’s why the two companies are footing most of the bill for the city’s new master plan and environmental documents.
---------------------------------------

Oct. 19, 2005

Added funds propel Livingston Master Plan…Leslie Albrecht
http://www.mercedsun-star.com/local/story/11369021p-12116135c.html
Funding is now in place to create Livingston’s new master plan. With the presentation of a check for $155,760 to the Livingston City Council at last night’s meeting, developer Ranchwood Homes provided the last portion of funds need to create the new plan. Two other developers, Gallo and Del Valle, have already made major contributions to fund the plan.
---------------------------------------------

Nov. 16, 2005

Livingston OKs draft of city in 2025…Leslie Albrecht
http://www.mercedsun-star.com/local/story/11486665p-12225871c.html
The council unanimously approved a draft project description of a Master Environmental Impact Report…the consultants writing the impact report now have a map of where Livingston intends to develop and a timeline for when it will get there. …representatives from Ranchwood Homes and Gallo Homes, both of which are planning large subdivisions in Livingston, urged the council to move forward. Both Ranchwood and Gallo are paying for most of the consultants’ work on the city’s new impact report.
-----------------------------------------------

Dec. 13, 2005:

Merced County Board of Supervisors authorized the updating of its General Plan, absurdly outdated since UC Merced was amended in to a plan that emphasized the protection of Merced County’s rural, agricultural and natural resources.
----------------

Jan. 21, 2006:

Session to tackle city’s effort toward affordable homes…Leslie Albrecht
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/local/story/11714888p-12438920c.html
LIVINGSTON — New housing is popping up all over town, but how many residents can actually afford it? Ranchwood Homes president Greg Hostetler said forcing developers to keep prices low can backfire by driving up the cost of market-rate units. Hostetler said inclusionary housing ordinances are relatively new to Valley cities… Livingston is looking at inclusionary housing..
-------------------------------------

Jan. 24, 2006:

Loose Lips: Land baron becomes local celeb…David Chircop
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/local/story/11724259p-12448018c.html
When Merced land baron Greg Hostetler isn’t donating fists full of money to his pet charities, “Mr. Ranchwood Homes” is giving away his John Hancock. Hostetler, arguably the county’s most successful homegrown developer, said he was stopped recently by a man who wanted his autograph.
--------------------------

Jan. 25, 2006:

The General Plan Review Steering Committee, a shadowy, backroom body whose members are unknown to the public (Supervisor Deirdre Kelsey, however, is known to be a member) and whose meetings are not announced publicly, found it could not reach a consensus on the updating of the Planada Community Plan. A lawsuit on this plan is now in state appellate court. However, what concerned the committee that day was that developers, including Ranchwood Homes owner Greg Hostetler, of a 1,450-acre project called Village of Geneva at Planada,” outside of the Specific Urban Development Plan of Planada, were asking for a community plan update that would include their project.
-------------------------

Jan. 27, 2006:

Annexations OK’d; city grows by nearly 200 acres…David Chircop
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/local/story/11736481p-12459428c.html
MERCED - Two Merced annexations gained final approval from the Local Agency Formation Commission on Thursday morning and a third was tabled until next month. • The Ranchwood N Street Annexation • And the Mission Avenue Annexation. LAFCO commissioners held off on approving the Barnell Annexation, a 73 acre swath south of Cardella Road. That annexation proposal will be discussed at the next LAFCO meeting on Feb. 23.
----------------------------

Feb. 3, 2006:

Hostetler, thinking he is making a call to Supervisor Kathleen Crookham, leaves a message on someone else’s answering machine:

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!
----------------------------

Feb. 6, 2006:

San Joaquin Raptor/Wildlife Rescue Center, Protect our Water and Bryant Owens (Planada Community Association), wrote to Lewis, John LeVan (Local Agency Formation Commission), the Board of Supervisors, and Livingston Mayor Brandon Friesen. It was posted on Badlands, Feb. 7, “Mysterious sewer line leaps out of Livingston.”

Ladies and Gentlemen:

It has come to our attention that the City of Livingston has authorized a private developer to install a 42 -inch sewer main connecting a 300 acre parcel along Magnolia Avenue near Westside Blvd, in a portion of unincorporated Merced County adjacent to but outside the SUDP of the City of Livingston.

This is clearly a ‘project’ under CEQA, and must be halted immediately and the City of Livingston must be enjoined and required to follow all the appropriate protocols for environmental review of a project of this nature. In addition we request and require the County of Merced Planning and Economic Development Department to assert its land use jurisdiction in this matter.

It is our understanding that the installation of these municipal services is a prelude to annexation of this 300-acre parcel into the City of Livingston. As such the entire project is premature and represents a clear violation of LAFCo of Merced County’s jurisdiction and statutory authority with regard to out of boundary service extensions in Merced County.

The City of Livingston’s mistaken authorization of this project has allowed grading and deep ripping on agricultural land in violation of the County of Merced’s Williamson Act Zoning.

The particular parcel must be removed from the Agricultural Preserve according to a prescribed process adopted by the County Board of Supervisors in 2000. This has not been done.

The City of Livingston has acted irresponsibly and precipitously in authorizing non agricultural land uses on land not properly under its legal jurisdiction: Livingston may not act as lead agency with regard to any aspect of this ‘project’ without providing the appropriate Notice of Exemption to the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research, The EPA at the federal level, the County and the Local Agency Formation Commission. No evidence exists that any such notice of exemption has been filed with any of the aforementioned agencies. If such notice has been approved at any level of the City of Livingston City Council level, these commentators challenge the validity of such notice and ask that it be invalidated.

Proceeding in the aforementioned manner places the City Council of Livingston in violation of California Government Code 65402 requiring mandatory referral of such a proposal to the county LAFCo, and the county Department of Planning and Economic Development. This has not been done. If this project is to proceed correctly, given the total acreage involved, such project would definitely qualify as a ‘major expansion’ of an SUDP. Such a designation automatically triggers the need for CEQA review and an EIR is mandatory. The City of Livingston has previously attempted to annex agricultural land by designating it as blighted. This tactic was rebuked by the County of Merced and eventually rescinded by the City of Livingston.

There is no evidence of any negotiations between the County of Merced and the City of Livingston regarding tax and revenue sharing agreement, and consequently there have been no noticed public meetings to discuss those agreements, in violation of state law, local ordinance, and Merced County’s current General Plan. The county of Merced is currently in the preliminary stages of updating its General Plan. The City of Livingston has not yet filed even a notice of preparation for expanding its SUDP. The proposed project is therefore premature in that the context for approving such a major expansion does not yet exist for either jurisdiction. There is no notice of preparation on file with the county or the state reflecting any such intention on the part of the City of Livingston. We therefore request that this project be stopped until such time as the appropriate land use authority can be determined and that jurisdiction be asserted.

The commentators’ request, under the California Public Records Act, to inspect any indemnification agreements entered into by this developer, Mr. Hostetler and Co., and/ or any of his associates, specifically Mike Gallo and Co., ‘holding harmless’ the City of Livingston for any legal challenge to the environmental review of the proponent’s (s’) project. We also request to inspect any documents showing any other agreements between the two named parties and the City of Livingston. We also request to inspect any documents pertaining to any agreements between local business or industry (specifically Foster Farms) with regard to connection to the proposed wastewater conduit into the city of Livingston …

We have grave concerns over the lack of information concerning who will be allowed to access this new infrastructure. Can the City of Livingston WWTF actually serve the anticipated urban expansion? What funding source exists for other necessary municipal services? How does this proposed project coordinate with regional water and wastewater needs? If a municipality in Merced County becomes incapable of serving the WWTF needs of its customers and fails, does the responsibility for those services revert to the county? Can the county afford to assume that sort of infrastructure liability?

Have there been any Can/Will Server letters of agreement between the Livingston WWTF and this developer? Is a Will Serve letter valid in the demonstrable absence of capacity?

Given that this developer has a plethora of residential development projects in Merced County and elsewhere, and considering the abject indiscretion of the City of Livingston in lending its ‘approval’ to this developer (especially since the approval lacked jurisdiction or authority), we request that all development projects by this developer throughout Merced County and especially anywhere proximate to the City of Livingston or the surrounding unincorporated communities be red-tagged (administratively halted) until such time as the environmental review of each of those current projects can be reviewed for accuracy and compliance with the appropriate laws, codes mitigation measures and appropriate checklists, and until the public is assured that each project is under the inspection and review of the appropriate agency.

This hubris on the part of the developer coupled with the abject irresponsibility of those agents of the City of Livingston demands commensurate sanctions by the appropriate governing bodies and/or state agencies. We request that those authorized to do so pursue such sanction to the fullest extent of the law.

We appreciate your consideration of this information and request to be notified in writing prior to deliberations and/or actions pertaining to this information by each of the notified agencies. Regarding inspection of the documents requested above, we reserve the right to inspect any documents identified subsequent to the above request, prior to any copies being made. We will give specific instructions as to which documents we need copies of when they have been identified and are available for inspection. It is our understanding that each agency notified in this document is responsible to respond to our request, within the statutory time frame with any identifiable documents described herein.
Sincerely,

Lydia M. Miller, President Steve Burke
San Joaquin Raptor/Wildlife Rescue Center Protect Our Water
Bryant Owens- Chairman Planada Community Development Corporation
Cc: Interested Parties
--------------------

Feb. 7, 2006:

Sent By: County of Merced; 209 726 1337; Feb-7-06 4:16PM; Page 2/2
j14 EIjlEIJra4st Ruben CastiIlo

COUNTY COUNSEL County Counsel
COUNTY
February 7, 2006
Transmitted bythcsirnile &U.S Mail

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

Steve Burke
Protect Our Water (POW)
3 105 Yorkshire Lane
Modesto, CA 95350

Bryant Owens
Planada Association and Planada
Community Development Corporation
2683 South Plainsburg Road
Merced, CA 95340-9550

Regarding: Sewer Line Extension to the Ranchwood Homes Development located in or about the City of Livingston

Gentlepersons:

This letter is sent in response to yours of February 6, 2006. We have careftilly considered the information contained in your letter and value your input At this point, the County is in the process of gathering information regarding the status of the installation of this sewer line and the development project that it serves. We would appreciate your relaying to us any further information you have concerning these matters.

Sincerely,

RUBEN E. CASTILLO
MERCED COUNTY COUNSEL

WALTER WILLIAM WALL,
DEPUTY COUNTY COUNSEL
WWW/jaf
CC: Robert Lewis, Development Services Director
-----------------------------

Feb. 8, 2006:

Groups Aim to Stop Sewer Line Construction …Leslie Albrecht
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/local/story/11781260p-12500357c.html
Environmental groups want Ranchwood Homes to halt construction on a sewer line in Livingston, according to a letter released Monday.The San Joaquin Raptor Wildlife Rescue Center, Protect Our Water, and Planada Community Development Corp. say that Livingston shouldn’t have approved construction of the sewer line because the project is on county land.
“The city of Livingston should not have given Ranchwood any authority to do anything out there,” said Bryant Owens of the Planada Community Development Corp. “Ranchwood needs to stop what they’re doing and come back to the county and get an annexation.”
The mile-long sewer line between Vinewood and Magnolia Avenue could eventually connect a proposed 420-acre Ranchwood Homes subdivision to Livingston’s wastewater treatment plant.
The environmental groups say the sewer line can’t go in until Ranchwood gets permission to annex the land, meaning that the land would be brought into Livingston’s city limits. But Livingston has been following the rules, according to Interim City Manager Vickie Lewis.
“We followed every regulation that was required of us,” said Lewis. “We have only gone as far as phase one, which is our only responsibility at this time. Anything beyond that is between the county and (Ranchwood).”
Ranchwood has received three encroachment permits from the county so far, but the county won’t issue any other permits until the county responds to the environmental groups’ charges, said Development Services Director Bobby Lewis …
Ranchwood Homes officials could not be reached for comment.
--------------------------------

Feb. 9:

A number of local agriculture and environmental groups had been debating whether to call for a moratorium on the approval of new projects before the General Plan update. Prior to meeting on this day, there was momentum to call for a moratorium both on approvals of new projects and on bringing an end to the habit of developers (either public like UC or private) indemnifying local land-use jurisdictions for legal expenses arising from lawsuits brought against them for approving arguably bad projects. Special interests, however, won the day by managing to orchestrate the defeat of the call for a moratorium. Nevertheless, as readers will not below, not all was lost.

Meanwhile, the City of Livingston wrote a letter to San Joaquin Raptor/Wildlife Rescue Center et al, expressing outrage that their civic wisdom should be questioned by “outsiders.”

RE: Your February 6, 2006 letter

Dear Sirs and Madam,

This letter has been prepared in response to the allegations contained in your letter dated February 6, 2006. You state that the City of Livingston has authorized a private developer to install a 42 inch sewer main outside of city limits and our sphere of influence. This information is incorrect. The project in question is a private pipeline within an easement-secured right-of-way, on private property within the County. The City did not authorize its construction. The City of Livingston agreed to be the lead agency for the environmental review of a portion of the pipeline because the pipeline may eventually be dedicated to the City. The City’s only role at the jobsite is to inspect the pipeline to determine if it would meet City standards in the event it is dedicated to us. Period.

You claim that the City did not follow the appropriate environmental review protocols. This too is an incorrect assumption. The project was reviewed in detail by the City’s consultants. Meetings and discussions were held with City Council before a determination was made that a statutory exemption under Public Resources Code 21080.21 could apply. The resulting Notice of Exemption and a Design, Construct, and Dedicate Agreement were presented by our City Attorney and approved by City Council at their regular meeting of December 21, 2004. You further state that the installation of these municipal services are a prelude to the annexation of Ranchwood land on Westside Blvd. This also is incorrect. This is a private, not municipal, pipeline and item #7 of the Design, Construction, and Dedication Agreement states: Nothing in this Agreement shall be construed to obligate the City to approve any future land use projects proposed by Ranchwood.

Your letter goes on to state that the City’s authorization of the project allowed grading and deep ripping to occur on agricultural land in violation of the County’s Williamson Act Zoning. Again, the City did not authorize this project located outside of city limits, and no grading or encroachment permit applications were submitted for our review and approval.

You claim that neither a Notice of Exemption for the pipeline nor a Notice of Preparation to expand our Sphere of Influence was filed. According to CEQA guidelines, the City is not required to file a Notice of Exemption. The appeal deadline for this Notice of Exemption was June 20, 2005. The City has recently released our Notice of Preparation of a Master Environmental Impact Report (MEIR) for our General Plan Update and proposed changes to our Sphere of Influence. The comments deadline for this MEIR Notice of Preparation was February 2, 2006.

You have made allegations that the City Council violated California Government Code 65402 which requires mandatory referral to LAFCo and Merced County Planning. There was no submitted project application to refer to these agencies. Our consultants contacted both agencies concerning the CEQA exemption. In discussions with County Planning staff, it was suggested that the City be the lead agency but that the County would require the applicant to apply to them for any encroachment permits necessary to disturb County-maintained roadways. County staff indicated that LAFCo would not serve as the lead agency because the project is a “dry pipe” that will not extend sewer services. From a City staff position, utilizing the City as lead agency was preferable in that we could inspect the pipeline for compliance with City standards and codes before possible dedication.

You claim there is no evidence of a tax and revenue sharing agreement between the City and County. There is nothing for the two agencies to agree on. These agreements happen during the annexation process, which would be premature at this point in time. Should annexation happen, the public hearing process will be followed.

Your letter questions the employment status of a Donna McKinney. Ms. Donna M. Kenney (correct spelling), our Community Development Director, has been employed by the City of Livingston since April 11, 2005. She is not acting Director of Planning and has never worked for our consultants, PMC. She was hired four months AFTER the City and Ranchwood signed the Design, Construct, and Dedicate Agreement for the pipeline. To imply that she has been collaborating with Ranchwood Homes is ludicrous and slanderous.

Your allegation that our City Council has violated the Subdivision Map Act is baseless. The Subdivision Map Act applies to parcel maps and subdivision maps. No subdivision of land has been proposed or considered by the City or the County in connection with this pipeline.

Your letter further states that Ranchwood has requested prezoning prematurely. The City requires that prezoning and General Plan amendment applications be filed and approved concurrently with annexation applications. Although the City received and reviewed a concept plan from Ranchwood for land use assumptions for its General Plan update, there are no active applications in process for the 300 acres at Westside Blvd.

You question whether or not the City will be able to provide services to areas proposed to come into our Sphere of Influence. The City is currently updating its five Master Plans: Water, Wastewater, Stormwater, Parks, and Roadways. These Master Plans will tell us and LAFCo whether or not we can provide those services. No Will Serve letters have been issued to Ranchwood.

Finally, Mr. Owens was quoted in the Merced Sun-Star newspaper on February 8, 2006 as stating “There’s got to be some kind of money changing hands” between the City and Ranchwood. This is an absolutely irresponsible and untrue comment aimed at damaging our community and we demand an apology. Your documented pursuit and vendetta against Ranchwood Homes has placed our City in the middle of mud slinging and we will not stand for it. Most of our department heads have been with the City less than 2 years. This new staff has worked long and hard to earn the trust of our citizenry with meetings and workshops and you have managed to push us back to square one with one thoughtless and inflammatory comment. Had you the dignity to come into our City and ask us for this information directly, we would have gladly met with you and provided you with the answers you seek. Instead, you have managed to tarnish the reputations of all the environmental groups with which you claim association.

Sincerely,

Brandon Friesen
Mayor, City of Livingston

cc: Robert Lewis, Director of Planning and Economic Development, Merced County
John LeVan, Local Agency Formation Commission, Merced County
Merced County Board of Supervisors
Livingston City Council
Livingston Planning Commission
Merced Sun-Star
Livingston Chronicle
Channel 30 News
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Feb. 14, 2006:

The General Plan Review Steering Committee couldn’t decide if it could recommend the Hostetler et al developer-sponsored Planada plan update before completion of the county General Plan Update. So, it threw the problem to staff. Staff advised the supervisors that either they could continue to process community plan updates (there are at least three currently driven by developers) while updating the General Plan, or it couldn’t. Or it could except where prime farmland would be involved (as in the Planada project). Or, it could hold “in abeyance any and all General Plan amendment applications.”

The board continued discussion of the issue for two months.

Valentine’s Day at the Merced County Board of Supervisors meeting was lively. The supes, staff and developers were trying to sneak through a plan to make a plan about how, maybe, someday, they’d update the county General Plan, but in the meantime developers and their friends in the county Administration Building wanted to make certain the chaotic process of growth would continue unabated with as little regulation as possible. This involved fixing a shadowy, backroom committee called the General Plan Steering Committee, which had recently stubbed its toe on Planada development.

San Joaquin Raptor/Wildlife Rescue Center, Protect Our Water and the Planada Community Association replied to the scheme with the following letter. Attached to the letter was a statement from a coalition of local groups calling for a moratorium on new projects until a general-plan update is completed, and a moratorium on any further legal indemnification of local land-use agencies (cities and the County):

On Item 31: General plan amendment policy and procedures (Badlandsjournal.com, Feb. 14, 2006)
Letter to the Merced County Board of Supervisors on General Plan Amendment Policy and Procedures during the General Plan Update Process

Re: General Plan Amendment Policy and Procedures during the General Plan Update Process

Agenda Item 31

Date: Feb. 14, 2006

Members of the Merced County Board of Supervisors:

This policy and its procedures are nothing but a license for developer-driven growth with impunity for three or more years. County planning staff apparently has written Item 31 to implement unfinished, developer-funded, community plans while the county general plan update process is going on. It will not wash.
Item 31 is unacceptably vague. It sounds like a plan for a bunch of “updates.” However, it isn’t stated whether there are major zoning changes, added densities, or what. If we had to guess, we would say the steering committee, board of supervisors, planning commissioners and planning staff are laying the groundwork for a bunch of major residential and commercial projects, but they want to front load a lot of the work, so that by the time they hav