Badlands Journal

Members of the public who make comments on projects before the Merced County Board of Supervisors are routinely chastised by supervisors for sending in their written comments late. This letter by attorney Marsh Burch explains the problem. Because the County could not produce a coherent packet of information for the July 1 board meeting, three items had to be continued.

To Supervisor Jerry O'Banion, who at the June 10 board meeting, accused the public of using late submissions (at the perfectly legal time of a public hearing) as a "ploy" and a "tactic," we suggest again that the ploy and tactic is the County government's, not the public's.

Since every ploy and tactic imply a strategy, citizens of Merced County must assume that the strategy of County government is the strategy of finance, insurance and real estate special interests which has produced our present national shame, our mortgage foreclosure rate. Nowhere is that clearer than when the public tries to obtain documentary background to special interest projects in Merced County.

However, today, July 1, 2008, the supervisors sullenly blinked.

Badlands Journal editorial board
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The California Department of Water Resources announced on June 27, after the largest fire in Northern California history had been raging for a week:

At the end of Joseph Kanon's The Good German (Picador, 2001), there is an interview with the author. The interviewer asks Kanon, whose novel superbly depicts the labyrith of bureaucracies among Allied Armed Forces in the first weeks of the occupation of Berlin at the end of WWII:

As a writer whose work often centers on shrouded governmental activity, do you consider yourself prone to conspiracy theories?

Kanon. No. Conspiracies exist largely in the world of melodrama. In the real world of government, we're more likely to find the less exciting mix of incompetence, special interests, political expediency, and plain, dumb carelessness.

Badlands is declaring the coming days a Sunshine Week to post a number of documents submitted to Merced County government in the last few months. Some of these documents have been included in the official packets of information for Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission meetings. Others have been suppressed.

Badlands is declaring the coming days a Sunshine Week to post a number of documents submitted to Merced County government in the last few months. Some of these documents have been included in the official packets of information for Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission meetings. Others have been suppressed.

Badlands is declaring the coming days a Sunshine Week to post a number of documents submitted to Merced County government in the last few months. Some of these documents have been included in the official packets of information for Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission meetings. Others have been suppressed.

Badlands is declaring the coming days a Sunshine Week to post a number of documents submitted to Merced County government in the last few months. Some of these documents have been included in the official packets of information for Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission meetings. Others have been suppressed.

Badlands is declaring the coming days a Sunshine Week to post a number of documents submitted to Merced County government in the last few months. Some of these documents have been included in the official packets of information for Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission meetings. Others have been suppressed.

Badlands is declaring the coming days a Sunshine Week to post a number of documents submitted to Merced County government in the last few months. Some of these documents have been included in the official packets of information for Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission meetings. Others have been suppressed.

Badlands is declaring the coming days a Sunshine Week to post a number of documents submitted to Merced County government in the last few months. Some of these documents have been included in the official packets of information for Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission meetings. Others have been suppressed.
This material is best understood by reference to the audio or video archives of supervisors’ and planning commission meetings and we encourage readers seriously interested in understanding their local government to go to the Merced County webpage, http://www.co.merced.ca.us/CountyWeb/, to seek out these hearings, particularly the two board of supervisors meetings on July 1 and July 8.
The following correspondence and public comment letters concern the approval of a Merced County Housing Authority project.