Last August, I wrote about how shadowy plaintiffs were suing to halt the changeover of the vacant Meryvn’s store to a WinnCo supermarket.  A group called “Venturans for Responsible Growth” supposedly filed the lawsuit, although no

Proposed facade improvements for WinnCo store

actual Venturans ever appeared at the public hearings on a minor facade upgrade before the Design Review Committee.  Instead their lawyers testified on their behalf — and their lawyers pursued an appeal before the City Council and their lawyers filed suit in SuperiorCourt alleging violations of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA.)

The CEQA violations in the lawsuit were essentially bogus since there really is no impact to the environment to replace one medium sized retailer with another medium sized retailer.  Fortunately a judge has preliminarily come to that exact conclusion — last week Judge Glen Reiser denied a request for a Temporary Restraining Order to prohibit WinnCo from proceeding with interior modifications of the building.  He also refused to schedule a hearing for a preliminary injunction.

While this allows WinnCo to proceed with their revised schedule of opening the store early next year, they do so at their own risk.  Conceivably, at the trial later this year, the judge could rule against them on the merits of the case.  While a ludicrous stretch of the law, CEQA has been repeatedly been bent to the interests of high-powered special interests with the resources to pursue litigation. And there is nothing to prevent “Venturans for Responsible Growth” filing appeals all the way up to the California Supreme Court — over changing the signage and adding a modest tower element to the facade of the building.

This tactical victory against CEQA abuse only underscores the need for more fundamental reform.  There are lots of factors working against business success in coastal California — and CEQA is not the most important.  But unlike relative housing prices or the costs of actually protecting our fragile environment, fixing CEQA abuse is the one that offers the greatest cost-benefit advantages.  Our high standard of living and quality of life are worth protecting.  But frivolous or specious lawsuits protect no one — and actually undermine our standard of living and quality of life.

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If you are as old as me, there was a “good old days” when it came to transportation in Los Angeles.  Wide open freeways, a space age international airport and trains from Union Station across the region and the nation.  We forget (or take for granted) the far-sighted investments that made that possible.  In the decades since, we’ve neglected transportation investments that serve our existing communities, often in favor of facilitating suburban sprawl.  Today, just to keep Southern California moving will cost more than half a trillion dollars over the next 25 years.

SCAG Director Hasan Ikhrata

“We have to look at transportation in a real way,” Hasan Ikhrata told a panel of Ventura County elected leaders this morning at Camarillo City Hall.  Ikhrata, who is the director of the Southern California Association of Governments, is unveiling his organization’s new “Regional Transportation Plan/Sustainable Communities Strategy.”  He started today in the smallest of the five counties that make up the SCAG metropolis where 18 million people live in nearly 200 cities that stretch from our coast to the Mexican border near the Salton Sea.

Ikhrata pulled no punches in a blunt, persuasive and passionate appeal to invest in our future.  “Growth has slowed down, but we are still one of the fastest growing regions in the country,” he told our County leaders.  SCAG projects population growth of an additional four million over the next 25 years, including 150,000 more residents of Ventura County.

“With four million more people, how many new freeways will we be adding?  Zero,” he pointed out.  “I’m not talking about the cost of building new things, most of the money we need will go to maintain what we already have.”

He cited the chronic shortfall in maintaining our region’s 60,000 lane miles of highways.  Statewide, California is spending six billion less a year than is needed for repairs.  He noted 125 highway bridges in Ventura County alone are structurally deficient or obsolete.  “These are real things — we’re not in the business of scaring people.”

“Let’s not be short-sighted,” Ikhrata warned.  “It takes leaders with vision.”  Irkrahta was blunt that while “taxes are not a popular topic, somebody has to put that on the table.”  Existing gas taxes will decline as fuel economy improves since they are pegged to the number of gallons sold, not the price of gas.  Ventura County is the only one in the SCAG region that doesn’t have a local sales tax for transportation projects, transit and local road maintenance.  He stressed the need to spend money efficiently, to look past boundaries on the map to recognize our interconnections. But even improved efficiency still doesn’t approach the scale of the challenge.  “The revenues have to come from somewhere.

He acknowledged the partisan divide when it comes to taxes.  “But there is no such thing as a Democratic bridge or a Republican bridge, there are just bridges that everyone uses regardless of party,” he joked.  He was joined at the podium by Simi Valley Councilmember Glenn Becerra, who will be SCAG’s next president.  Although serving in a non-partisan role, it is no secret that Becerra is a Republican often mentioned as a future candidate for higher office.  He addressed the tax issue directly saying, “Before we ask for an additional penny, we need to ensure that government is spending all of our tax funds, wisely, efficiently and responsibly.”  Yet Becerra also tacitly agreed with Ikhrata that new or at least restructured taxes will be needed to avoid a transportation crisis.

Ikhrata also addressed the need to better target how and where we spend transportation dollars.  “Let’s link transportation and land use,” he urged.  If implemented the new regional plan will put twice as many households within reach of affordable transit alternatives to driving.  “I’m not a betting man, but I would bet you that gas prices are going to continue to go up,” he asserted.  That means pursuing better ways to get around.

Irkhrata didn’t promise any easy answers.  But to a Councilmember who doubted whether there’d be voter support to pay for transportation needs, he responded, “We don’t give people credit.”  He was clear that if officials clearly make the case, detail specifically how the money will be spent and follow-through and keep their word, voters will increase or extend transportation taxes, as they have recently done in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Orange Counties, despite the hard economic times.

The draft Regional Transportation Plan is available on SCAG’s website, along with additional information on the process for debating and adopting it.  The next local opportunity to learn about and comment on the draft takes place at 12:00 noon on Thursday, January 19th in the Camarillo Library.

With Ikhrata at the helm, the region has a sensible and sustainable “blueprint” for improving our standard of living and protecting our quality of life.  It will be up now to elected leaders not only to debate that plan, but once ratified, get serious about making it happen.

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California Supreme Court deals blow to redevelopment

What’s next? It’s the question dominating discussions about cities as 2011 comes to a close.  This week’s Supreme Court ruling on a lawsuit brought by cities and their redevelopment agencies backfired.  Instead of clawing back the $1.7 billion the State extorted from cities to keep redevelopment alive, it now appears that Redevelopment in California is headed for extinction.

“Appears” is, of course, the key word.  Getting rid of redevelopment now seems a real probability — but that only magnifies the incredible challenge of doing it in a fair and orderly way.

The political hurdles are obvious — cities are virtually united in their outrage at this latest blow from the State — and bewildered that their number one economic development tool would be dismantled when it has never been more needed.  On the other hand, having taken their case to the Supreme Court and lost, cities have put themselves in a poor bargaining position with the Governor and his legislative allies.  With so many other interests unhappy with the budget choices, cities will get little sympathy — and redevelopment abuses, while largely curtailed in recent years, still make redevelopment vulnerable to the budget vultures.

So this unresolved clash will be the background of trying to dismantle the very complicated financial structure of redevelopment agencies by yet-to-be named “Oversight Boards” where cities will be the minority voices.  Expect city by city, county by county wars over the vague and legally-suspect dissolution of agreements and contracts between cities and their redevelopment agencies.  Billions are at stake statewide — and the potential for wildly different outcomes up and down the state virtually guarantees further litigation.  It could be the biggest fiscal scramble since the days immediately following the passage of Proposition 13, when cities, counties and special district representatives camped out in Sacramento while emergency legislation was thrown together to redivide the shrunken property tax pie.

And that’s just the money side.  The even bigger question is: how do cities finance economic development at a time of high unemployment, stretched budgets and strong public demand to “do something” to put people back to work and balance budgets without raising taxes?  The Governor and Legislature have devoted exactly zero thought to this challenge, beyond some murky early talk about making it easier for cities to go to their voters to go into debt for infrastructure investment (and good luck with that idea.)

So, as usual, our polarized and short-term politics in California have created a mess that will have to untangled quickly with little chance of it being done well.  The best hope would be for the Governor to call together some sort of summit or working group of thoughtful State and local leaders to hammer out an actual plan for either an orderly end to redevelopment and a reasonable economic development toolbox to succeed it.  Given everything else going on in the State, such a notion stands small chance.  But in terms of what’s in the long-run best interests of California, its people, businesses, cities and future prosperity, it surely beats further court battles and chaos.

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A year ago, 60 Minutes aired a controversial 11 minute feature on the “Day of Reckoning” coming for state — and especially local — governments.  It featured two grim Cassandras: New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Wall Street analyst Meredith Whitney.  Host Steve Kroft reported that during the recession, states had collectively “nearly a half a trillion more” than they collected in revenue and faced a “trillion dollar hole in their pension funds.”

New Jersy Governor Chris Christie

Christie was one of several Republican Governors elected in 2010 on a platform to do things that, as he described them on Sixty Minutes, “people previously said were politically impossible. “  Now, he argued there was no longer any alternative.  Analyst Whitney was even more apocalyptic.  “There is not a doubt in my mind that you will see a spate of municipal bond defaults,” she told Kroft.  Pressed on what a “spate” meant, she claimed “you could see hundreds of billions of dollars of defaults” on local government debt.  She then put a time frame on her concerns: “twelve months.”

Financial analyst Meredith Whitney

Whitney was wrong.  According to the Wall Street Journal, the amount of defaulted debts was $2.1 billion.  While that certainly sounds like a big number, it is actually less than the $2.8 billion in defaults the year before — in a $3.7 trillion market.  A far cry from “hundreds of billions of defaults.”

So was 60 Minutes wrong about a Day of Reckoning?

Not really.  As I wrote last December, “the crisis is real.”  States and cities forestalled bankruptcies because they made hard choices.

New York’s two parties came together under a new Democratic Governor and made cuts and raised taxes.  A new Democratic Governor in California couldn’t enlist GOP support, so he enacted cuts and bought time to take his tax package directly to voters.  Republican Governors across the country pushed through cuts — and occasionally new or extended taxes.  A couple overreached — with a referendum overturning anti-union legislation in Ohio and a recall looming for the Governor of Wisconsin.  But despite the varied politics, state (and local) politicians by and large faced up to the Day of Reckoning and took decisive action to balance the books.

Few of the solutions undertaken by states and cities are sustainable if the economy continues to sputter.  Yet where U.S. and European national leaders have largely failed to come to grips with the crisis, there is some solace in the efforts of state and local leaders across America.

We are pretty much in the same boat in Ventura.  It was ironic that because we moved more quickly and decisively to make cuts early in the economic crisis, we initially were labelled as being in worse shape than many other cities in Southern California.  That has faded as the crisis has affected every local government in varying degrees.  The City Council’s unanimous actions to “live within our means” kept us out of trouble.

But it’s not over.  Local government revenue lags economic recovery — and the recovery is an anemic one.  A particularly disturbing trend has been property tax revenue.  The forecasts we get from the County Assessor for our share (16%) of property taxes have reflected the drop in property values during the recession.  But in relying on these conservative projections, what we didn’t anticipate was how many property owners wouldn’t pay at all.  Last year’s collections for Ventura fell nearly a million dollars behind budget estimates.

This means another tough budget year ahead.  While sales tax has been exceeding projections, almost every other revenue source has been lagging.  We face a continuing imbalance between ongoing revenues and ongoing expenses.  Unless a roaring recovery is around the bend, it’s irresponsible to rely on one-time fixes.

Further cutting services to the public or further cutting pay and benefits in Ventura will not only be unpopular — many will argue that after $15 million in cuts, we’ve reached a point of diminishing returns.  Raising taxes is equally problematic — residents and businesses face their own hard choices.  Candidates in the election focused on economic development to put us on the road to enduring prosperity — and they’re right.  But we all know that sparking a local boom times in the face of the sluggish national and state economy is not in the cards.  It will take a long and patient commitment to strengthen Ventura’s economic base.

Perhaps the most important lesson learned from the Year of Reckoning now passed is that simplistic, partisan stances are not the answer.  We need decisive action, not divisive action.  When people from different points of view and different interests come together (as the Ventura City Council has unanimously done on the past three budgets), there is a basis for consensus and common cause.  When you face a real crisis, you have to get real.  The only way to accomplish the “politically impossible” is for everyone to re-evaluate the possibility of working with people with whom they disagree.  That’s the answer that remains elusive in Washington, but has been the basis for our success so far in Ventura.

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Just a couple of days left to snag an Apple IPod, Nintendo Wii Game Console or one of those cool remote controlled Syma helicopters.

I admit to being dubious of frantic Christmas buying.  Although I vividly remember the thrill of the red Schwinn three-speed bike under the tree when I was a kid, I agree with those who think that Christmas is over-commercialized.

So I can save you a trip to the mall if you were thinking of finding something to put under our Christmas tree this year.  All I want for Christmas is a functional State of California.

Yes, I know.  It’s a lot for Santa to carry in his sleigh.  And I can’t really say we’ve been all that good this year.  But in the spirit of the holiday season, this is my Christmas plea:

Dear St. Nick, I know you get a lot of unrealistic requests at this time of year.  But on behalf of the 9,295,040 kids under 18 that the Census counted in California last year, I hope you and your elves can help us.

We have political problems, but we have always had political problems and we always will.  What’s really missing this holiday season is a shared belief in the California Dream. 

For generations, people have been coming here with the faith that if they worked hard and invested in their futures, they could make a better life for themselves and their kids.  “Investing in the future” was a real commitment.  We built a great system of free public education, we fostered entrepreneurship, we welcomed newcomers and we sought to protect our natural heritage.  It wasn’t all rosy — there were titanic battles over these issues.   But the spirit of working together always triumphed.  

We can do it again.  What we need, though, is the shared understanding and commitment that we are in this together.  Tough times have always evoked harsh polarization.  There are dark chapters in California history when hatred was unleashed, whether against “the Chinese” or “the Mexicans” or “the Oakies” or some other vulnerable target.  Yet we always came to our senses and found a way forward, together.

There are no easy answers to our State’s structural and fiscal challenges.  Yet we know that California emerged from a decade and a half of the Depression and World War II poised for its greatest triumphs.  Through hard work and common cause, we became the envy of the nation, overtaking the Empire State in population.  We  set the pace with our music, our technology, our movies, our lifestyles, our universities, our highways and, yes, even our government.

Grumpy baby boomers like me are tempted to look back on those days in nostalgic wonder.  Better that we look back in gratitude and humility.  Our parents were far more willing to make sacrifices — including my then single mom who put that Schwinn under our tree.

Santa, right now, many of us are feeling kind of blue and sorry for ourselves.  We blame our frustrations on “them” (pick your poison — “illegal immigrants,” “the greedy 1%,” “intransigent Republicans,” “spendthrift Democrats,” or “the illiterate young.”) 

So, Santa, if you could leave us just a little package of compassion, maybe we’d grow up and treat each other — Democrat and Republican, rich and poor, young and old — like fellow owners of the California Dream.  Maybe we’d focus on working our way out of the mess we are in and spend less time looking for someone else to blame for the mess we are in.

Thanks for listening, Santa.  Hope you enjoy the milk and cookies.

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There continues to be lots of ill-informed chatter on California pensions.  It’s a big, complex and critical issue for government at all levels.  What makes debate so distorted is that public pensions differ from agency to agency — and advocates on the issue often talk past each other.  Pension critics often point to outrageous outliers as if they were typical.  On the other hand, pension defenders often cite current averages that are often misleading about long-term costs. All this fuels the typical partisan gridlock that we all lament yet seem powerless to change in our state.

Governor Brown unveils his 12 point pension reform package in October

Credit Governor Jerry Brown for trying.  At least, so far, that’s what the majority of California voters are willing to do, according to a new poll.  His 12 point pension package that I wrote about when it was unveiled in October, is framing the debate — and enjoys encouraging support from voters.  I agree with them.  While Brown’s plan is far from perfect (as he acknowledged in presenting it as a way to build consensus) it sensibly tackles some of the most challenging areas where reform is needed.  Among the key reforms he’s proposed:

• Increasing the retirement age from 55 to 67 (with a lower age to be spelled out for public safety workers).
• Replacing the current “defined benefit” pensions with a hybrid program that includes a defined benefit component, but also a 401(k)-like defined contribution component
• Prohibiting retroactive pension increases.
• Requiring all employees to contribute at least 50 percent of the cost of their pensions

These generally follow the strong stand taken by the League of California Cities, based on recommendations from a committee of City Managers that I served on.  Our work was grounded in four core principles:

1. Public retirement systems are useful in attracting and retaining high-performing public employees to design and deliver vital public services to local communities;
2. Sustainable and dependable employer-provided defined benefits plans for career employees, supplemented with other retirement options including personal savings, have proven successful over many decades in California;
3. Public pension costs should be shared by employees and employers (taxpayers) alike; and
4. Such programs should be portable across all public agencies to sustain a competent cadre of California public servants.

Our goal was to ensure the public pension system is reformed, instead of destroyed.  Our reform package mirrors Brown’s calls for a hybrid system, raising retirement ages and increasing the portion of pension costs borne by employees.  We also backed his bid to base retirements on the top three highest years of pay, curbing the abuses that often artificially raise final year salaries to “spike” pension pay-outs.

Typical of California’s other challenges, the issue faces long odds in the Legislature and uncertain fate at the ballot box.  Partisan Democrats are leery of crossing unions by embracing Brown’s package.  Partisan Republicans are demanding more far-reaching changes.  Brown hopes to bridge the differences to win majority support by drawing on moderates in both parties.  “He hasn’t riled up one side or the other,” noted Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo. “He’s managed to strike the middle ground on a very polarizing issue.”

Unfortunately, moderates are hard to find in Sacramento.

That leaves the roll of the dice that comes with ballot initiatives.  Since it takes millions to bankroll a successful ballot measure, few sensible measures get far without support from well-heeled interests.

In the eternal game of chicken that goes in Sacramento, the Legislature keeps one eye on those special interests.  About the only hope for reform is if a majority are worried that failure to act might spur an expensive ballot box war and an even worse outcome.

This issue might be the exception, however.  Public outrage is real.  So is the need for reform.  In Ventura, we took an early lead on this issue, first with our Compensation Policies Task Force, then union contracts that established a lower benefit and later retirement age for new hires and increased contributions from all employees of at least 4.5% of their pay.  But real reform to level the playing field can only come at the State level.

Legislators in both parties need to hear from all of us about the need to come together on sensible reform.  The Governor has put such a program on their desks.  Reasonable people can differ on the details.  But only unreasonable people want all-or-nothing victories.  This is an issue that both sides should be willing to compromise on.  The only way that will happen is if we make it clear that we expect them to find that compromise in the year ahead!

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As the father of three young teenagers, I’d be the first to admit that the challenge of 21st Century education is a daunting one.

It’s easy to proclaim the need for our youngsters to master the advanced skills and critical thinking needed for the competitive global economy. But in a wired world, just getting them to do their homework is no small accomplishment.

Part of the problem is that we think “education” is the job of the schools. Wrong. An educated society is everyone’s job — which is why Friday’s Pathways to Prosperity Conference is worth noting (and attending.)

Sponsored by Ventura County Civic Alliance as part of its focus on strengthening the local workforce, the conference will be keynoted by Ronald F. Ferguson, the Harvard educator renowned as the leading authority on the achievement gap between white and Asian students and their Latino and black counterparts.

How important is the issue of ethnic achievement? By most estimates, California remains the eighth largest economy in the world. In 2050, when today’s kindergarteners turn 50, more than 60% of our under 50 workforce will be Latino or black, compared to 37% white and Asian. So we have our work cut out for us to close the “achievement gap” for the groups that will make up the bulk of our workforce and citizenry in the decades ahead.

It’s especially urgent and compelling here in Ventura County.  We remain a relatively prosperous part of our state, bolstered by a high quality of life and active civic engagement.  The downside of those assets, however, is that it makes us a relatively expensive place to do business.   In a “flat” world where jobs can go anywhere, our best advantage lies with an educated workforce which can earn the “value added” of higher wages.  Surrender that competitive edge and we will be a County of low-wage jobs, primarily serving retirees and tourists.  Without entrepreneurial companies like Amgen and Patagonia — and successful start ups like the aspiring ones at the Ventura Ventures Technology Center, Ventura will rely on  healthcare, tourism, government and agriculture — hardly a viable base for supporting a million people with an attractive standard of living and quality of life.

Former Ventura Mayor Sandy Smith is one of the leading champions of focusing now on laying the foundation for future prosperity.  “Workforce education has been a core focus of the Alliance’s long term strategies for several years,” says Smith, the current chair of the Alliance.  “We see that a healthy workforce, and the resources to make local workers succeed in the challenging economy, needs to be a cornerstone of our strategies to strengthen the future of our region.”

Focusing on brains is not necessarily the first thing that comes to mind in a beach town.  But we can’t take our quality of life for granted just because we boast a spectacular natural setting.  In the 21st Century, the things we’ve long taken for granted are threatened by a global workforce that is leaping ahead in education and ambition. Failing to meet that challenge will consign us to a bleak future.

Ventura is still smarting from the self-inflicted wound of squandering the chance to have a state college.  Yet as part of a broader region, we can galvanize an effective strategy to ensure all our youth take advantage of educational opportunities.  That’s what Friday’s conference is aimed at achieving — providing a timely focus for our community as we look forward to celebrating our 150th birthday in 2016.

Pathways to Prosperity will take place at the Ventura County Superintendent of Schools Conference Center in Camarillo from 8 a.m. to noon on Friday, December 9.  Admission is free to current members of the Alliance.  Public admission is $45 and $10 for students.  You can register online here. If you live in Ventura and are not a member and the admission price seems steep, I’d be happy to pay your way to this important gathering.  Unfortunately because of a prior commitment I can’t be there, so contact me to arrange for me to send you instead!

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Everyone says that public safety comes first.  But people debate how to make Ventura safe — and what we can afford.

Most people think of Ventura as “safe” — especially when it comes to violent street crime like armed robberies, brutal assaults, homicides, rapes and drive-by shootings.  Those remain relatively rare.  But when it comes to overall crime, Ventura’s crime rate is actually the highest among the larger cities in our County.

That may reflect underlying demographics, including the number of visitors who flow through our beach community.  It also may reflect our scrupulous reporting of crime.  But what is worrisome are the signs of rising crime — and increasing fear of crime.  While still relatively rare, violent crime is running 26% ahead of last year — and more worrisome is the spike in gang crime since budget reductions led to the disbanding of our gang enforcement unit.

Hard data shows that adequate police staffing can reduce crime — and essentially pay for itself.  Yesterday’s Los Angeles Times summarizes a national study done by the Rand Corporation that demonstrates that “a 10% increase in the size of a police force decreases the rate of homicide by 9%, robbery by 6% and vehicle theft by 4% each year.”

Yet when it comes to assessing what we can afford in these lean times, the debate splinters.  Some say “no new taxes” and ask “What part of NO don’t you understand?”  Some insist we could pay for more police now if they didn’t have such costly pensions.  Some say public safety is important, but so are quality of life concerns.  Some agree on the need to invest in public safety, but insist that must include schools, recreation programs and other “preventive” approaches to crime.

With all these voices, it’s hard to read where we stand as a community.  In 2006, fully 62% of Ventura voters supported a sales tax increase that would have added 14 police officers and 11 firefighters.  Yet it fell short of the two-thirds majority needed for a tax “earmarked” for a specific purpose.  In 2009, after the Great Recession hit with full force, only 46% of voters supported a temporary sales tax measure to preserve city services (including public safety) as normal revenues plummeted.

Many call for making deep cuts in other functions of government instead of public safety.  However, police and fire functions make up 57 cents of every general fund dollar in the City’s budget — and an even higher share of the “discretionary” dollars that aren’t already dedicated to debt service or mandated payments to other government entities. To reduce spending by $15 million, the City Council cut more deeply into all the other city functions, but even police and fire had to be reduced.  Police staffing was cut by 12, from 134 to 122.

Even granting the argument that “public safety” is broader than the number of police officers, there clearly is a “tipping point” where the strength of the police force falls below the minimum needed to deal with crime.  We are probably at or near that tipping point.  The City Council has unanimously approved a push for “Safe and Clean Public Places” to reclaim areas like Plaza Park and the Promenade from the criminal and anti-social behavior of predatory vagrants.  But with our short-handed force, the Police Chief currently has no one to spare for the two-officer unit he wants to assign to the task.

We all wish there was an easy answer.  After all, taxes haven’t gone down (unless you bought your house during the housing boom, in which case your property taxes have been adjusted downward like the value of your home.)  But city revenue has clearly gone down as retail sales and construction have plunged — and both show no signs of an early recovery.

So without easy answers, we face hard choices.  Should we limp along with a bare minimum of police in the face of rising crime?  Should we further slash other programs like libraries and recreation?  Should we consider going back to the voters for a tax increase?  Should we force a showdown with unions to cut salaries and pension benefits?  It’s easy to find vocal support for each of these options — but difficult to find majority agreement for any of them.

Unfortunately, no consensus leaves us stuck hoping that the huge shift of inmates out of the State prison system won’t overwhelm our local police.  We all complain about political gridlock in Sacramento and Washington D.C.  But we are reluctant to accept that the voters themselves don’t necessarily agree on solutions.

That’s not surprising.  Most voters are strapped trying to figure out how they are going to make ends meet for their families.  Expecting them to join together to make hard decisions for our community’s future is expecting a lot, especially when more than two-thirds of Ventura’s voters skipped the recent City Council election.  But the only thing worse than hard choices are no choices.  Like I said at the start, everyone says that public safety comes first.  As a community, we are going to have to work together to figure out how to put our money where our priorities are.

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So why do the long-vacant K-Mart and Mervyn’s stores in Ventura remain empty?

Former K-Mart on Victoria sits vacant despite initial City approval for Walmart store

The reason is not the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).  The two stores are empty because CEQA has been twisted like a pretzel into a tool to stop urban developments opposed by well-funded interests.  This week, the Los Angeles Times exposed the practice of developers to use the law to sue other developers to fend off competition.

The landmark law is the toughest state environmental protection statute in the nation.  Passed more than 40 years ago in the wake of the first Earth Day (and signed by Governor Ronald Reagan), “CEQA” has spawned an industry of specialist consultants, attorneys and planners.   As I’ve written before, its original laudable goals for managing natural resources have been obscured by the hard ball tactics of litigators in our state.

The vast majority of Californians support sensible environmental protections and are suspicious when business interests lobby to weaken them.  They remember oil spills and toxic dumps and slash and burn hillside developments.  Yet the case law that has grown up around CEQA is so burdensome that virtually any public or private project can be slowed or killed on bogus “environmental” grounds.

Yes, the law has protected stands of redwood trees from clear-cutting and sensitive habitat from suburban sprawl.  And there are David and Goliath stories where a little band of neighbors stop a mega-developer from flooding their neighborhood with traffic (although this is a long stretch from protecting “natural resources”.)  But it is now routine these days for special interests to hire high-powered law firms to exploit the law for their own economic interests.

Here in Ventura, lawyers for construction unions combed over the Environmental Impact Report done for the new Community Memorial Hospital project with the goal of seizing on any technical errors or ambiguities.  They fired off a thirty page “comment letter” which lays the groundwork for a lawsuit.  The goal was certainly not “protecting the environment” — it was to pressure the hospital to use union labor for the construction.  They were successful.

The proposed Walmart at the old K-Mart site is stalled after initial city approval because the company knows that even something simple as changing the facade on the building could trigger a lawsuit alleging inadequate “environmental review.”  So the project sits in limbo while Walmart analyzes its legal options.  What Walmart fears is exactly what happened to WinnCo grocery, which did see its proposed new signage and facade challenged by a CEQA lawsuit.

There are lots of things not to like about development in a city.  But that’s why we have planning commissions, public hearings and appeals to elected City Councils, along with detailed rules that must meet stringent legal guidelines for adoption and enforcement.  But why have an elaborate land use entitlement and permit review process if it can be superceded by anyone with the resources to file a CEQA lawsuit?  Democratic due process goes out the window, replaced by months or years of costly legal manuevering.

No sensible person advocates repealing CEQA.  But after forty years, it is past time to return to its original, laudable purpose and intent: to protect our natural environment and sustainably manage our natural resources.

Understandably, environmental advocates are skittish about tinkering with the law.  There is precedent, however, for consensus reform.  When the League of Conservation Voters was pushing a bill to curb greenhouse gas emissions and promote sustainable regional planning, they won the support of both the League of California Cities and the Building Industry Association by incorporating modest relaxation of onerous CEQA burdens on “infill development.”  There’s lots more room for common sense consensus to separate environmental protection from a racket for special interest litigation.

One of the worst ways to proceed is to pick out individual projects for favorable CEQA treatment.  That’s what’s happened on a couple of controversial stadium projects that won legislative relief.  Having to lobby Sacramento to pass a special law is a brutally stark example of special interest litigation.  Football stadiums are not the only or even the most important projects held hostage by CEQA abuse.  Comprehensive reform is long overdue.

In these economic times, the jobs lost to CEQA abuse aren’t offset by the ones created for CEQA experts and CEQA attorneys.  California led the nation in protecting our state’s environment.  Let’s lead the nation to a system that works for that goal without falling prey to being hijacked for other agendas.

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