ojai news at The Ojai Post :: blog, newspaper, events in Ojai, California

My name is Michael Shapiro and I’m from Ojai. I’m the current Chair of The Stop the Trucks! Coalition – a widely represented, grass-roots coalition with an Executive Committee coming from the ranks of Ojai’s major political, educational and economic interests. Former Mayor and current City Council member Carol Smith; current president of the Ojai Unified School District, Tim Baird; and current CEO of The Ojai Chamber of Commerce, Scott Eicher, are but a few of my colleagues on the Stop The Trucks! Coalition’s Executive Committee.

Having some history of striving to work with the Ventura County Planning Division dating back almost 15-years now – beginning when I was a Chair of the Coalition to Stop Weldon Canyon Landfill – and more recently during the current challenges dealing with various rock and gravel mining interests up in the Los Padres National Forest – I’ve always been, and continue to be struck by how much it has appeared that the County Planning Division, rather than working closely, cooperatively and diligently with citizens to safeguard health, safety and welfare, and specifically to protect Ojai from certain degradations, dangers and environmental threats -- have, instead – more often seemed to posture and behave as if their only allegiance was to industry, business and special interests.

Indeed, it has always been my experience that whenever we’ve questioned the validity, safety and efficacy of an industrial project vis-à-vis the impact upon the Ojai Valley – it has more often than not appeared as if the Planning Division viewed us as pariahs or obstacles to what they perceive as some economic end-game.

For example: When it was pointed-out that the Weldon Canyon Landfill project proposed by Waste Management posed a grave and unmitigable threat to the air quality of the Ojai Valley – already the second worse air quality in Ventura County – the Planning Division reacted with denial and stonewalling. It mattered little that the original EIR submitted by Waste Management didn’t come close to examining air quality impacts upon the Ojai Valley. It took one of our esteemed Ojai citizens – not even a member of the Weldon Coalition, but a prominent, widely-respected business developer, a Republican and long-standing Director of the Board of California Edison – Carl Huntsinger – to fund a study by the Los Angeles environmental consulting firm, Environ, to prove that a landfill located at Weldon Canyon would be an air quality disaster for the Ojai Valley. The rest, as they say, is history.

More currently – after countless reports of severe violations of their CUP by the Ozena mining operation, we’ve yet to see any penalties, and certainly no ongoing enforcement to require the mine operator to remain on the straight and narrow.

After information was brought to our attention regarding significant – if not massive violations of both the general law, as well as specifics of Ozena’s CUP – the Stop the Trucks! Coalition had to invoke The Freedom of Information Act in an attempt to acquire public documents that the Planning Division should have ready access to and be willing to give to us. Instead, the Planning Division has employed tactics to deny and/or stall making those documents public. At one point, the Planning Division expressed the rationale that complying with our document request might reveal some proprietary business information. As if! Surely the gravel and rock industry does not relate to issues of national security; rock and gravel mining is not high-tech, nor is it rocket science.

We believe such industrialization is not only detrimental to the economy of the valley, which is solely based on Tourism, Education and the Arts. Such industrialization will also inevitably trigger widespread and serious environmental, road safety and health concerns.

I would like to first thank the Board of Supervisors for listening to us today and also to Tom Berg for meeting with several of us in the preparation of his report.

We understand that Mr. Berg’s analysis and report was intended to address systemic concerns about Land Use Planning and the operation of the Planning Division. We agree that the system needs to be “Transparent, Predictable and Accountable” for the benefit of all concerned...

Based on Ojai’s experience over the last 15 months with the County Planning Division -- we would like to share – in the spirit of this report – some of the generic issues that have come to pass, AND hopefully shed some light on departmental operations.

First, and perhaps contrary to some of the public opinion voiced about our Coalition, we do believe that the Planning Division is comprised of good, honest, sincere and hard working staffers who are caught between a rock and hard place.

Mr. Berg’s report he cites two issues that we believe are at the root cause of this institutional headache. First is the need of a Code Enforcement Division and second is the heavy – and I stress heavy – emphasis on funding the Division based on the concept of cost recovery.

One thing I know with certainty from my experience is that if you want to know how something works, you “Follow the Money.” And the way the Division and Resource management are currently structured, money comes into the department through general fund tax dollars or through the processing of applications, particularly applications for large and complex projects.

But the frightening truth of this structure is the simple caveat that” “THERE IS NO MONEY IN ENFORCEMENT.”

No Money, means no incentive for overworked staff to undertake reviews of existing projects.

But let’s take this one step further and see what that means. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said that you should never pass a law you can’t enforce because it only breeds disrespect for the law.

As Mr. Berg indicated in his reports, the approval of a large and complicated project can take several years and cost the applicant hundreds of thousands of dollars in obtaining necessary permits and environmental reports, etc. An incredible amount of expertise and energy is invested in meeting the multitude of standards that exist.

And we force Permit holders to meet these standards because – whatever they are – they are deemed important to the health, welfare and safety of the people of this county.

But if you fail to monitor compliance, then all you’re doing is making a mockery of the whole process by throwing away all of that expertise, along with the health, welfare and safety of your constituents.

That is what is happening now. The citizens of the Ojai Valley are up in arms over what we perceive to be massive violations of CUP standards regarding a particular applicant. When we have turned to the Planning Division to ensure enforcement of those standards, we have been met with the proverbial stone wall of built with silence, denial, ineptitude, secrecy and at times outright incompetence.

After nine months of pressure by “Stop the Trucks,” the Division finally informed the CUP holder in question that they would be held to a “strict” interpretation of the CUP conditions, despite the fact that the department does not even have the tools or wherewithal to actually monitor that compliance.

The situation gets even more ironic when just a few days ago, the CUP holder apparently filed suit against the county for actually suggesting that the Permit holder must comply with the terms of their seven year old CUP.

Isn’t that a bit like a habitual speeder suing the police for warning them not to speed?

In the case of the Planning Division, the only “radar gun” staff have to insure enforcement is little more than a cardboard cutout.

The next irony will occur if “Stop the Trucks” loses patience with the Planning Division and ends up suing the county for a multitude of sins related to the department’s inability and unwillingness to actually enforce CUP requirements.

In conclusion let me express a contrarian view: If you do not insure a viable means to enforce all CUP’s -- as Mr. Berg suggests -- you might as well save everyone -- applicants, permit holders and taxpayers alike -- millions of dollars a year by simply getting rid of the entire Resource Management Division.

Why waste so much time, effort, expertise and money, when all that is apparently being done is the patting of applicants on the back and in a way saying, “Just go through the process, pay us a ton of money to justify our jobs and then you can do whatever you want because no one in government is really watching you anyway!”