Posted on 12/30/2004 5:10:03 PM PST by BenLurkin
I ain't in a charatable mood.
I take it that you live in CA?
No way.
Much too crowded.
Ah. Now your post makes sense. ;)
There was planning and zoning back in the days of small permit fees and one day turnaround for review. Don't give me that malarkey. I built many safe, modern homes that people still habitate successfully. What has changed are the mountainous number of hurdles needed to plat and develop land.
Charge people for the cost of water and other public services including schools. But $100,000 in any locale is government-gone-insane. Between planners, biologists, and lawyers, people have to work at least an extra year in order to pay for the permit that puts zero extra value into a home.
The project calls for 132 condo units, a marina and tennis courts. Developers plan to raze more than 300 pine trees that provide winter shelter to the bald eagle, which is protected under the Endangered Species Act.
From what I've read, that is an assertion by the Eliasons that has since been disproven.
If he had any cojones he'd be suing the government, not the employees.
From what I know of this case, they deserve it, richly. This guy did everything imagineable and then some to produce a product that would enhance environmental quality, including habitat restoration projects on property he otherwise could have developed. IIRC, he's been held up for nearly sixteen years.
I would imagine this happened because the developer's lawyer neglected to research the matter to discover that the government generally will provide legal counsel to it's employees (or witnesses or contractors) who are sued by third parties in such cases.
Building your case upon imaginings? That's pretty desperate and, in this case, dead wrong.
There is, of course, a never-ending supply of stupid lawyers who will keep trying this trick in the hope that a federal judge can be tricked.
BS, again. Most lawyers and developers know better than to take on a bureaucracy with virtually infinite funding, but this guy is at the end of his rope.
Regulatory takings with corruption involved are becoming extremely common. It's high time RICO was employed, as I recommended over five years ago. I know of one recent instance where an agency redrew an owner's property, taking about a third of it and he couldn't even bring the case because the surveyors wouldn't touch the job. The power the Open Space District wields is too great. That was in the SF Bay Area so you know how much money was involved.
Nope, from what I know of this the Eliasons should swing, not that I want to see more condos on Big Bear Lake either.
You are full of crap and clearly incapable of Reason. There are so many overstocked forests in California about to blow sky high that the forest management infrastructure can't begin to keep up with the rate of growth. Where I live the rate of growth exceeds harvesting by a factor of five even on managed lands. In the aggregate, less than 0.5% of the volume gets harvested annually while volume accrues 3% annually.
When the San Bernardino Fire blew a couple of years ago there were places with 2,000 trees per acre where the pre-Columbian stocking levels were 15-45 trees per acre.
You should try the hard work of restoring land before flapping your jaws about National Forest policy, much less tell someone else what they can or cannot do with their land.
That would be bad because???
BTT!!!!!
They are going to be represented in court at the cost of the taxpaying public anyway.
Then, some folks wonder why permits cost so much these days ~
Water and schools, of course, should be PRIVATE SERVICES!
God these threads suck. What happened to reasoned opinion?
The US government isn't bound to defend criminal activity, which of which the Eliasons are accused. If all you are bitching about is that the taxpayers are footing the bill, then bitch about the bureaucrat who signed the requisition for Eliason's attorney.
When the San Bernardino Fire blew a couple of years ago there were places with 2,000 trees per acre where the pre-Columbian stocking levels were 15-45 trees per acre.
You should try the hard work of restoring land before flapping your jaws about National Forest policy, much less tell someone else what they can or cannot do with their land
If there weren't so many people in California, you could afford to let the forests manage itself: It wouldn't matter if millions of acres of forests naturally burned down, because there would still be so much left. It would just be nature following a natural cycle.
Nature is able to take care of itself--as it demonstrated for billions of years before man set foot on North America.
This is horse feces too. Since the last ice age, forests have never operated in North America without massive human intervention. You should read America's Ancient Forests, from the Ice Age to the Age of Discovery by Dr. Thomas M. Bonnicksen, a forest archaeologist.
You don't go backwards in nature. We have suppressed fires for a hundred years. Meadows have been lost. Chaparral and broadleaf stands destroyed. Most influential is that the rate of growth has been accelerated by carbon dioxide.
Forests will never again operate as they had.
Worse, the importation of exotic weeds will take over many of those forests after a fire. You have only to go to Montana to see the knapweed stands where forests once stood to see it, with 135% faster erosion to boot.
Your "leave it to nature" preference would be disastrous to forests.
Nature is able to take care of itself--as it demonstrated for billions of years before man set foot on North America.
As if nature and humans were necessarily separate. This is just goofy and uneducated misanthropy.
They're only weeds if you want them to be. Otherwise they're just different plants.
You can come down on both sides of the argument.
Besides, that which might be claimed to be "criminal" by an agrieved person's counsel may well be a "legal requirement", or merely something considered customary.
The government is bound to provide counsel to the government's own employees unless and until the deed is found by appropriate authority to be a crime. And your immediate supervisor is usually not such an authority (although some here have literally argued for providing higher level government bureaucrats with extraordinary judicial powers so they could find their subordinates guilty of crimes even without a trial).
BTW, if they'd developed the Santa Monica's and left the orange groves intact, California would appear to be much more open, social services could be provided to the present population living on a smaller area, and everybody would be much happier.
Was it something the developer submitted in support of his proposal?
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