SUPERVISORS DECLARE THE END OF REGULATION
by Richard Johnson, June 1, 2007
    In one of the most important county government decisions in decades, supervisors instructed staff to halt any further work on a grading ordinance for Mendocino County on May 15. The vote was unanimous, taken on a motion by supervisor John Pinches, seconded by supervisor Wattenburger.
    While such such an ordinance would regulate all large scale landmoving operations in roadbuilding, agriculture, construction and other development activitiesm the main benefit would be to prevent the wholescale conversion of hill sides to vineyards and protect riparian habitat from farmers attempting to maximize their productive land base at the expense of natural diversity.
    Mendocino County is alone north of Santa Cruz in not having such an ordinance. The sad story of the Mendocino County grading ordinance is only one of a series of refusals by elected officials to adopt effective natural resource protections here.
    In the last 20 years we have seen furious environmental activism here. There have been lawsuits and direct actions that temporarily stopped bad projects. We have passed voter initiatives by large margins, but we have not elected even one real environmentalist to the county board of supervisors.


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Supervisor Kendall Smith, supervisor David Colfax no less than supervisor Johnny Pinches, supervisor Jim Wattenburger and the irrepressible agri-finance and Religious Right spokesman Michael Delbar represent the exploiters, the despoilers, the controllers and investors whose only desire is to turn all nature into money and garbage, and for whom America represents absolute freedom from any limits whatsoever.

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Paralysis by Design;
    In 1981, in response to citizen lawsuits, an appeals court required Mendocino County to cease issuing building permits because its General Plan was inadequate. Part of that inadequacy was the lack of a grading ordinance which is also required by CEQA.
     The Employers' Council, the Building Exchange, the Farm Bureau and various financial institutions and their captive politician were able to kill draft grading ordinances in 1991, and again in 1996.
    In 2001, two citizen lawsuits asked courts to intervene. While they were both ultimately dismissed, these legal actions prompted the county to initiate a protracted negotiating process in the hopes that opponents and advocates of a grading ordinance could agree on language. A seventeen person committee involving  environmentalists, developers, the farm bureau, the timber industry along with county and state agency officials was appointed by the board. Like the attempt to draft Special Forest Practice Rules, the Grading Ordinance Committee process was intended from the beginning to frustrate environmental advocates and assure development interests that no ordinance of any kind would emerge.
    First of all, the rules set by county staff were designed to give those opposed to any regulations at all a veto over the final product. Not content with that,  agricultural and development representatives colluded to pass weakened regulations, then voted against them after months of fruitless meetings.
    The committee responded by passing still more watered down measures, so that by the spring of 2002, two environmental members dropped out of the committee in protest, and environmental support for the process evaporated.
    Just to make sure, however, farm representatives continued to meet with the public agency delegates with a clear agenda of weaking or destroying the grading ordinance.
    In June 2002, the committee submitted an unfinished draft ordinance to the board of supervisors. At the same time, the agricultural block and members of the Mendocino County Farm Bureau submitted an alternate ordinance, as did two separate environmental groups and Daniel Myers, an environmental member of the grading committee who was party to one of the original lawsuits.
    In the summer of 2002, the supervisors gave the committees' unfinished draft of the grading ordinance to the county planning commission, ignoring all the others.
     The planning commission discussed the ordinance on 20 occasions between August 2002 and February 2004, with agriculture still the only party at the table with agency officials. At times, members of the Mendocino County Farm Bureau simply dictated to planning commission members their preferred language which was then put directly into the draft ordinance.
    Then, in June 2003, Myers asked then-County Counsel Peter Klein to request an opinion from the state's Fair Political Practices Commission whether a conflict of interest existed for planning commission member Mark Edwards who runs an environmental consulting and landscape management firm with timber industry clients who could benefit from having a weak grading ordinance.
    The FPPC wrote back over a year later that it did not have enough information to determine if Edwards had a conflict or not Sept. 2004, the planning commission unanimously decided to stop work on the grading ordinance, because it had not been assured that individual members could not be sued for conflict of interest.
    In April, 2005, the board directed Planning and Building Services Director Ray Hall to continue to work on the ordinance, and Hall thereafter initiated a series of five meetings with county staff and representatives from the National Marine Fisheries Service and the California Dept. of Fish and Game.  A public workshop on the grading ordinance was held in September of last year.

Greenwashing the Deregulators:
        Starting in 2005, a committee made up largely of Democrat women launched a campaign to get the county to adopt the Precautionary Principles, a set of high-sounding overarching guidelines intended to direct public policy decisions toward proactive concern for human health and the environment. The development interests opposed this effort, which was studied by a board committee under fifth district supervisor Colfax for many months before emerging and being adopted in April of last year, just in time to greenwash Colfax in the primary elections.
    They shouldn't have worried, because the socalled Precautionary Primciple was only passed as a pilot program under the absolute control of Al Beltrami, the perpetual County Executive Officer. Under his benign guidance the Precautionary Principle is currently limited to the department of public health's mosquito abatement program, and the water agency's stormwater management program.
    It was only after supervisor Colfax had won his third term that representatives from the Mendocino Redwood Company and a timber industry attorney expert on California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) law persuaded the new Mendocino County Counsel Jeanine Nadel that a grading ordinance  would have a significant environmental impact on county agricultural and timber lands, and that therefore, an Environmental Impact Report on the proposed regulations was required.
    After the November election, the board with the concurrance of defeated lame duck third district Hal Wagenet took the absurd action of requiring an EIR on an ordinance whose terms were yet to be determined, a move which all knew at the time was designed to prevent such an ordinance from ever emerging.

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Supervisor Smith regretted that a better grading ordinance was not ready. So she voted to stop work on it. RJ photo, 2007
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Open for Business:
    The May 15 action to finally kill the grading ordinance is the sounding of the clarion of Total Victory by the bourgeosie over government regulation in Mendocino County. It exposes the Precautionary Principle as the kind of hypocritical hogwash Democrats are famous for, and is an open invitation to Southern California developers that Mendocino County is wide open for business.
      There are no liberals or conservatives in Mendocino County government, only the Establishment Party. We the people elect them, but they do not represent us.     This single vote shows that Supervisor Kendall Smith, supervisor David Colfax no less than supervisor Johnny Pinches, supervisor Jim Wattenburger and the irrepressible agri-finance and Religious Right spokesman Michael Delbar represent the exploiters, the despoilers, the controllers and investors whose only desire is to turn all nature into money and garbage, and for whom America represents absolute freedom from any limits whatsoever.
    The following week, supervisors voted themselves a 43% pay raise to the applause of both Republicans and Democrats.