An open letter to Megan Fluke Medeiros, conservation and development manager for the Sierra Club Loma Prieta Chapter:
I read your observations on San Benito County’s 2035 General Plan Update and, frankly, I wondered what plan you were writing about. You claim the plan, “encourages substantial urban development on agricultural lands and will allow tens of thousands of people to sprawl on the 800,000 acres of farmland.” That is a gross misrepresentation, and you know it.
Your harking back to the visions of California of 100 years ago also left me wondering just what world you are living in. Then it hit me – you want to live in the California of 1913.
It is good to see a “progressive” organization such as the Sierra Club wants to return to 1913, because many of California’s fiscal conservatives want to go there, too. If you’d be willing to bring the economy, population, cost of government, restrained federalism, limited state and local government, mandated programs, taxes, fees and all the other things that impact the county’s residents back to the 1913 levels, I’m sure you’d garner much support.
However, as I understand it, that is not what you are proposing. You want to stifle 20-plus years of future economic development while allowing everything else to remain as it is or get worse. It can’t be done. It’s all hooked together, sort of an eco-system for people, and I’m surprised environmentalists are so unaware of all those other impacts on the human environment. Until you can turn back the clock on EVERYTHING, we have to find a way to pay our public and private bills. Living in California in 1913 without indoor plumbing and plowing behind horses was a miserable experience and there were only a few million people in the state. Great views – tin shacks – early deaths!
We (the voters) control almost none of our costs. Impact fees are set based on how much it costs to pave a mile of road, build a fire station, or hunt for and protect red-legged frogs. And the federal government simply will not allow us to print our own money – although some people have tried. It costs a fortune to do everything, from building a motel to putting in a new water heater. The environmental lobby, and to be honest everyone else, have used those massive costs to bludgeon anything they oppose into submission, from highways to solar farms to accommodations.
The rural areas are being sentenced to perpetual poverty by these state and federal policies. Places like San Francisco can just add enormous “welcome stranger” taxes while we forage for money to fund public protection. The attraction of the ocean is worth tens of millions in visitor sales taxes to Santa Cruz and northern Monterey County while we have to increase tax rates on our struggling local residents just to get by.
The vision of some kind of never-been-produced sustainable local utopia is not matched by the reality of high unemployment rates, limited markets, agri-business economics and the cost of every single government service from a plan review to a farmer’s market inspection by environmental health. Now you want to limit our income putting us into poverty and condemning our future generations to being third-class citizens within the state and the nation.
I have no personal financial interest in this issue except for the progress of the community – a community that has to beg for funds to keep its one library open.
Come to the meeting – but bring jobs and money, not just visions of the old 1913 California.
It’s not 1913, and visions won’t pay the bills.
Marty Richman is a Hollister resident.
