Environmental costs have real impact

BY MICHAEL HALEY

Tuesday, the Napa County Board of Supervisors will look at the principles guiding them in this years budget preparation process, and one thing on the agenda giving me pause is the statement "Pursue new revenues to the fullest extent possible for all services.”

My view is that fees for any kind of permitting process here are too high already.

It is true the county is facing reduced revenue collections due to the economic slump, but increasing fees for people is going to slow the economy even more.

We have a small rental house that we were thinking of putting a new roof on, for appearances sake. The quote for the roof was $7,500, and the fees involved to the county would have totaled $2,300 just for the privilege of doing it. The contractor told me what the county would do for that $2,300 was send an inspector by to make sure the nails were in it. Takes about five minutes. When I saw that I just thought it was too much and didn’t do the roof.

How many other things don’t get done because of high fees?

One of the misconceptions people have about Proposition 13 is that it lowered taxes permanently, and that has just not happened. One of the ways government has made up the lost tax money is through development fees, a kind of property tax. A new house in Napa has about an average close to $45,000 in permit fees.

The biggest area of cost in regulations are due to environmental issues. The Metropolitian Transportation Commission says that one in three dollars spent on transportation improvements are due to environmental regulations.

Huge amounts of money are being spent on environmental issues in the Jamieson Canyon improvement, over the red legged frog for instance. At what point do you have to say that a few might get killed and the rest will just have to shove over a bit? The expanded width of this highway is not much, yet $46 million out of the $139 million cost would be enough to put in the two frontage roads along 29 in American Canyon, which would relieve the traffic congestion there.

We can’t do it because the red legged frog might live along the Jamieson Canyon corridor?

It really gets worse than this, because there are layers of unneeded bureaucracy that cost a fortune on top of silly rules that don’t do much. There is an ongoing project to improve the Napa River along a four-mile stretch known as the Rutherford Dust project. This was started by the landowners as a good Samaritan effort to improve the ecology of the river, and is supported by just about everyone from the John Birch Society to Earth First. Yet we are so bogged down in environmental bureaucracy and territoriality that one wonders if it will ever even get done.

It has been one thing after the next, but the main problem is there are so many different government agencies who want say so over what is done, County public works of course, but also Fish & Game, NOAA, Coastal Conservancy, Bay Area Water Quality Control District, FEMA, and a few more, I can’t even remember all of them.

A design gets done then one of the other groups steps in and doesn’t like something about it, so it has to be redone, but then someone else doesn’t like that, they disagree among themselves about what the regulations even say, and on and on it goes. We should have one governmental organization with the authority to make these decisions and the thing would have been done by now. Instead five years and about five million dollars later, nada.

People, good grief, we are talking about moving the rocks around on a riverbank here. This has gone from being a $3-4 million project that was supposed to be done by now to a $9 million project that has already spent $5 million and nothing has been done yet.

Last week I was told about a Calistoga bike trail that had a bridge consisting of the bottom of an old rail car laid over a gully. Federal and State inspectors came in and looked at it, found out it was 100 years old and said before you can approve a bike path over this you need to spend two years and a million dollars doing an historical study. I say, why do we even have Federal regulators in Napa running our bike paths? What a waste of money.

Human beings are going to have some impact on the environment no matter what we do, and we have reached the point of stupidity with these regulations and the attendant expenses. When I was up in Yosemite, the Rangers told me not to drink the stream water because bears will poop in it and put bacteria in the water. If those bears were human they would probably put nets up all along the riverways to keep them out, and fine them every time they relieved themselves. Where is the environmental outrage over that? Apparently that is a level of pollution that we can live with. Are people really so much different?

Well, I drank the water anyway and am here to tell about it. There has to be a balance somewhere between meeting human needs and fixing our California economy, and right now we are so way out of balance with overwrought environmental regulations that it is a major part of our budget problem. Gov. Schwarzenegger knows it, but the religious fervor surrounding any attempt to do rational decision-making over environmental costs and benefits stops him.

People get really hurt by this, you can save a square yard for micro invertebrates yet ruin an economy that causes tremendous hardship. It is always the people at the bottom who end up getting hurt the most. We will spend the $9 million on the Rutherford Dust project, what would that do for coming health and human services cuts in the County? Those are the real choices that we are about to find ourselves confronting.

Michael Haley is president of the Napa Valley Taxpayers Alliance. He writes a weekly blog at NapaValleyRegister.com on local, state and national issues. He can be reached at napaeagle@hughes.net

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