Will it never end?

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    From the Publisher/Arnold G. York

    I’d like to welcome back my son Tony (who’s byline is Anthony York). Tony recently left the online magazine Salon.com, where he was the associate news editor and, most recently, its national correspondent. Tony is now a freelance journalist, having pretty much recovered from his unfortunate bout with the York Fire God Curse, and he’s going to be covering some Sacramento legislative news for us. Tony’s an experienced Sacramento hand, having spent several years covering both the Assembly and the Senate for the Sacramento Bee online and the California Journal.

    You might well wonder why it is we even need anyone covering the Legislature considering we’re just a wee bitty town 500 miles or so from Sacramento. Well, I’m sorry to report that, just about the time you thought it was safe to go back into the ocean, that big hungry voracious and insatiable Coastal Commission shark started cruising by again. And, to no one’s surprise, there is a new bill making its way through the legislative hopper called AB 947, which, despite protestations to the contrary, I believe is a broadside to eliminate seawalls from the California coastline. Tony’s story in this week’s paper is written in a much more objective fashion than I probably would write. It outlines the battle over AB 947, authored by Democrat Assemblymember Hannah-Beth Jackson from Santa Barbara, who is also chair of the Assembly Natural Resources Committee.

    The bill is actually a replay of a similar bill that died in the last session, so legislators are attempting to fix it by bringing it back with a new cover and some new, pretty and somewhat vague language.

    I must confess, the reason I’m not so objective about the Sacramento enviro lobby is that we’ve been burned before. I watched a rather innocuous enviro housekeeping bill last session, authored by Assemblymember Paul Koretz (D-West Hollywood), suddenly morph into a major giveaway to Joe Edmiston and the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, which wanted to turn the old Streisand Center in the back of Ramirez Canyon into a catering house. They needed to make a bunch of dollars to finance that white elephant they took as a donation, and were going broke trying to keep it running. The only thing that stood in the way was a court decision in Malibu’s favor. No one seemed to know exactly how that Koretz bill got changed on the Senate floor as it made its way through the process, and how it is that no one caught it. But the bill reversed, we think, the court decision that was in Malibu’s favor, and the governor signed it and everyone said, “Sorry, we were looking the other way.”

    The enviro lobby is playing the same game again. AB 947 doesn’t say we all have to remove our seawalls in 50 or 20 years-yet. Jackson’s office claims it’s not an anti-seawall bill, it’s just a protect-our-beaches bill. It even has some good stuff in it, like getting sand to replenish the beaches. But make no mistake about it. That’s the same type of tune they played last time. And the tune can change in the blink of an eye. They charge that we are overreacting, or the bill isn’t what you think it is.

    Well, I beg to differ. The truth is, it is a vehicle for taking control of all your seawalls and ultimately getting rid of them. I don’t trust them. Given the slightest opportunity, that bill will morph into a virulent anti-seawall disease based on, at best, iffy science and some very tough coastal politics.

    Based on the enviro lobby track record, there is little reason why any of us should believe the author or her cronies, which I suspect is why there isn’t much negotiation going on. You can bet if they have the legislative muscle, they will amend everything they can to eliminate the seawalls. If they don’t, the bill will die or will stay very vague and then the Coastal Commission will try to do it by edict, or imposing conditions on permits and claiming it had the authority all along. If the author and the enviro lobby lose, and all they end up with is a vague, meaningless bill, they’ll turn to us and say, “See, there was really nothing to worry about.”

    P.S Stayed tuned. There are other bills in the legislative hopper that are directed at ridding the coast of we, the people. Sara Wan (remember her, former chair of the Coastal Commission) is pushing an archeology bill, which would just about turn the entire coastal zone into an archeological preserve and make it off-limits to just about everything. More about that later.

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