From the Publisher/Arnold York
Let’s see the LUP in black-and-white
I known that some of you are puzzled by our coverage of the California Coastal Commission’s proposed draft Land Use Plan for Malibu due for a public hearing on July 10 in Huntington Beach.
In writing stories about the proposed plan, we typically we get quotes from two very different groups of people.
On one side are the Coastal Commission bureaucrats and the radical enviros who keep telling us they just can’t understand what we’re so upset about, its just a typical coastal plan to protect the environment and after all isn’t that what we all want?
On the other side are the City of Malibu and a growing group of local citizenry, both in Malibu and up in the hills, that have a totally different take on the situation. They don’t see an environmental protection law. They see an attempt by a radical seven-vote majority on the Coastal Commission to change their entire way of life and to mandate precisely how the new life should be lived.
Assuming no one is lying, how can two groups of people look at the same document and come up with such diametrically different interpretations of what it means?
To answer that question you need a little quick and dirty civics lesson on how laws are really made.
I think Bismarck once said, “You don’t want to see law or sausages being made.” When he made that statement I’m sure he had the California Legislature and probably the Coastal Commission in mind.
Once upon a time (too many years ago for me recount the exact number), I worked as legislative counsel to then California State Sen. Tom Rees, who represented all of Los Angeles County. (That was in the days before one man, one vote, and practically every cow county had their own state senator.)
Tom was a money guy, so he was a member of the senate Revenue and Tax Committee, on which the Democrats had a one-vote advantage-which meant you had to get every Democratic vote to get a bill through the committee, or convince at least one Republican senator to defect from their party line.
On a whole, the committee was a very bright group of guys. I say guys because, in those days there were no ladies, except for one senator (who shall remain nameless), who was a tall, handsome, avuncular guy’s guy with the I.Q. of a plant. And not even a smart plant at that. He was also a plant that required watering every day, preferably in bonded Bourbon, and for a while I drew the assignment of babysitting him until I complained to Tom I needed relief because my liver was giving out. As this senator was typically the tie-breaking vote on the committee, Tom was unsympathetic.
This particular senator had two little idiosyncrasies. One, he never read the bills so he never lost his objectivity, because he hadn’t the faintest idea what any of the bills were about. Secondly, before he would vote Yes on any bill, he always proposed an amendment that he typically drafted on the spot, which gives you a sense of the amount of thought that went into it.
He had a simple rule he followed. If you voted for his amendment, he voted for your bill. If you didn’t vote for his amendment, your bill was dead. Needless to say, his amendments always passed, even though no one had the faintest idea what they meant or what their impact would be.
The response was always standard. Well, we’ll vote for it now to get the bill to the floor, and then we’ll take it out in conference committee, which is where the assembly and senate committees get together to work out differences in two versions of a similar bill. But conference committees are often hectic affairs, often going into the late hours, dealing with lots of bills, and invariably something gets overlooked. And more often than I would like to admit, what was overlooked was senator Plant Head’s incomprehensible amendment.
Later, when the mistake was caught, usually when the bill was on the way to the governor’s desk, people would say, “Well, let’s get the governor to sign it and in the next session we’ll pass some cleanup legislation and fix it.”
The denouement was predictable. The next legislative session, of course, had it’s own set of problems, and last year’s laws were ancient history. So there the amendment sat, buried deep in the statute, unchanged and ignored until sometime later someone came along with a lawsuit and some judge finally was called on to interpret that incomprehensible clause, being mindful of what law professors like to call the “legislative intent.”
Of course, to really discern the legislative intent would have required the judge to enter the brain of a plant. So, typically, the judge sort of pays lip service to the legislative intent and then makes the rest of it up, and new law is born.
There is a moral to this story. What counts in making law is not what the people who wrote it meant, nor what some rogue retard on the committee thought when he amended it, nor what well-intentioned idealists out to fix the world think it means. What counts is what’s actually written on the paper, in the statute, because that’s the law and that’s what’s going to get enforced.
So when the Coastal Commission staff comes to meetings and says this is what it means, they’re right only if that’s what ‘s written in the document.
Unfortunately, what the coastal staff is telling us it means and what our reading of the document tells us is often very different.
At this point, we’re well beyond taking it on faith or on their professed good intentions. We want to see it in black-and-white in the document, or we’re going to fight.
And that’s what this battle is all about.