Archive for October, 2011
This DUI I Can Understand
Oct 28th
Sometime in the nether-hours of very late night Thursday or very early today, State Finance Director Ana Matosantos was pulled over by one of Sacramento’s finest (and I don’t mean legislators or bureaucrats here) and written up for driving under the influence.
Matosantos was appointed to the thankless Finance Director job by Schwarzenegger and retained by Brown in one of his better moves since taking office. By all accounts she has approached her impossible job of grappling with the state’s $20+ billion deficit with intelligence and aplomb, character traits that were exhibited today when she offered up a quickly rejected letter of resignation, in which she took full responsibility for her actions.
In the strictest since she does have full responsibility, and contrition and penalties are appropriate, but really, is anyone buying that “I take full responsibility for my actions” line? This is the Finance Director of California for crying out loud! Don’t you think the legislature, with its failure to come to grips with the effect its liberal/environmental agenda is having on the state’s finances, is a bit to blame for her needing a drink? And the people of California, who elect spendthrift liberal legislators and pass propositions that make the state financially untenable – didn’t they figuratively pour her another glass? And the bureaucrats, who continue to ratchet up regulations even as the economy ratchets down, shouldn’t a mea culpa be heard from them as well?
I don’t support preferential treatment for anyone who drives drunk, but if ever there was anyone who was entitled to having a very small book thrown at them very lightly, it is Ana Matosantos.
Regulating the Rocket’s Red Glare
Oct 25th
The Daily Caller picked up my latest opinion piece, Regulating the Rocket’s Red Glare, about California’s war against fireworks shows. I’ve written a lot about this phenomenon, and it’s recently taken a turn for the worse with a decision in San Diego that could have statewide ramifications. Here’s the lead:
It should come as no surprise that the leftist legislators and authoritarian bureaucrats who run California are vehemently opposed to fireworks shows. After all, the shows are always fun and usually patriotic.
And against them they are. The California Coastal Commission has led the charge with a multi-year assault on the Sea World theme park in San Diego, which blasts fireworks over Mission Bay every night. That effort shipwrecked on the rocks of Sea World’s considerable political clout and even more considerable legal budget, so the Commission looked for a more vulnerable, less wealthy target.
It found that in the Fourth of July fireworks show put on by local business owners in the tiny, picturesque hamlet of Gualala on the northern California coast.
Please click through to read the entire piece here.
CalWatchdog on Crazifornia’s Regulatory Reform Charade
Oct 24th
CalWatchdog recently picked up my column on the charade of regulatory reform in California, which points out how recent efforts to reform the California Environmental Quality Act are limited, complicated and indicative of just how crazily over-regulated California has become. Here’s the lead:
California Gov. Jerry Brown may try to make political hay out of his recent signing of three “regulatory reform” bills into law. But the bills (AB 900, SB 292 and SB 226) really serve best to illustrate just how grossly over-regulated California has become.
Take AB 900, for example. Please. It specifies certain types of projects that can qualify for expedited processing under the onerous, labyrinthine California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). But — no surprise — it’s really more complicated than that. It’s more like it designates projects that can attempt to get through CEQA easily, but the reforms themselves are complicated and, worse, they’re untested by California’s green-leaning courts.
Among projects eligible for supposedly expedited processing under AB 900 are infill projects that are highly energy efficient. Never mind that vacant hulks of these sorts of projects clog the California cityscape, unrented and unloved. The California dream remains a suburban one of back yards and cars. And despite what urban planners and environmental activists preach, we’re not yet ready to emulate New Yorkers and Inside-the-Beltway folks and live in cramped high-rises by train stations. Does AB 900 make it easier to process suburban subdivisions? Oh, please. Do you have to ask?
Read the rest of the post – and some very interesting comments about the effect of over-regulation on California’s dairy farmers – here
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Crazifornia Scores Big at Daily Caller
Oct 24th
My recent op/ed on California’s passage of the nation’s first state-run cap-and-tax program proved very popular with readers at The Daily Caller – to date, 76 readers have recommended it, 41 have tweeted it, 5 have shared it on Linked In and 44 have posted comments. As expected with the Daily Caller’s audience, most of the comments are favorable, informed and even witty, like this one that starts with a quote pulled from the op/ed:
“AB 32, the state’s crusade to save the planet from the scourge of greenhouse gases”
Should read: “The scourge of unicorns and leprechauns” as there’s as much science behind it.
Mary Nichols, one of the most dangerous women in America, looked out into the packed California Air Resources Board (CARB) hearing room late Thursday after an eight-hour hearing and declared, “We’ve done something important.”
Nichols is the chair of CARB and therefore the person most responsible for implementing the California Global Warming Solutions Act, AB 32, the state’s crusade to save the planet from the scourge of greenhouse gases. A former assistant administrator of EPA under President Clinton, Nichols now controls multiple programs designed to penalize conventional energy sources to the benefit of not-yet-competitive alternative sources. She has already forced the toughest diesel engine standards in the country onto California — standards that will cost the state’s battered trucking industry $12 billion — and Thursday she trumped that by ushering in the biggest playing field-leveler yet, the nation’s first state-run carbon cap-and-trade program.
California, in going where no other state or the federal government has dared to tread, certainly has done something important, but just what “important” means is a question for the historians.
Read the rest of the piece here.
Regulatory “reform” shows how in need of reform California is
Oct 12th
Governor Brown may try to make political hay out of signing three “regulatory reform” bills into law, but the bills (AB 900, SB 292 and SB 226) really serve best to illustrate just how grossly over-regulated California has become.
The official CEQA process chart
Take AB 900 for example. Please. It specifies certain types of projects that can qualify for expedited processing under the onerous, labyrinthine California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Actually, it will be more like projects that think they qualify for regulatory relief will be free to attempt to get through CEQA easily, but the reforms themselves are complicated and, worse, they’re untested by California’s green-leaning courts.
Among projects eligible for supposedly expedited processing are infill projects that are highly energy efficient. Never mind that vacant hulks of these sorts of projects clog the California cityscape, unrented and unloved. The California dream remains a suburban one of back yards and cars, and despite what urban planners and environmental activists preach, we’re not yet ready to emulate New Yorkers and live in cramped high-rises by train stations. Does AB 900 make it easier to process suburban subdivisions? Oh, please. Do you have to ask?
The bill also gives a special blessing to wind and solar energy projects that will pump intermittent blips of high-priced power into the grid, but turns a cold shoulder on any sort of energy facility – including carbon-free hydro power – that actually can be counted on to consistently provide affordable energy. Green manufacturing also gets a pass – but California is a state that needs jobs desperately, so why should the Solyndras of the world get a break when old-school manufacturing, which actually turns out products that compete in the marketplace, does not?
SB 292 gives a CEQA break to great big projects, as long as they’re football stadiums in downtown Los Angeles. Because, heck, if we steal the Packers from Green Bay we’ll have new green jobs. At least for guys wearing jerseys.
Finally, and probably worst of all, SB 226 lets you sort-of off the CEQA hook if you’re putting solar energy cells on the roof or over the parking lot of an existing building. Or, put another way, California regulators currently can force you to do a costly, time consuming environmental impact report if you want to do what they’re harping at you to do and install solar.
By relieving solar installations from at least some CEQA grief, the bill is actually telling us that up to now, California has treated the savior of our heated-up world, solar energy, as something so nasty and dirty that it requires careful study, deep analysis and endless public comment before the state’s hyper-regulators would let you do something as potentially damaging to the Earth Mother as actually use it.
If these bills represent the best the legislature can do to streamline regulations in California, the armies of lawyers, lobbyists and consultants (myself included) who make a fine living off of trying to tame the state’s regulatory beast have nothing to worry about.
A hat-tip to three members of that army – lawyers at Allen Matkins – for their review of the three bills.
