I'm sorry to be such a "Johnny One Note," but this is huge and EVERYONE in both parties is afraid to speak-out and divert the Governor and the Legislature from this mistake that is far worse than the Humane Society thingy!!!
This is a threat to freedom in the whole of eastern CA!!! It is a threat to all local government revenues and thus a FURTHER CONCENTRATION OF POWER IN SACRAMENTO!!! To say nothing of a threat to any industry other than Eco-Tourism and CA's economy at the worst possible time... NOW!!!
You may think I'm protesting too much and overstating the case, but EVEN DUFUS DAVIS VETOED THIS ABOMINATION!!!
What do you all think is driving the Governator to put his political capital behind this abomination and causing Assemblyman Leslie to sponsor a bill in futile self-defense of the people he represents that don't want it, don't need it, won't heed it with their local elected boards voting against it???
It's insidious, to say the least, that FReepers shy away from even discussing this, let alone support a movement building a resistance to it, just to keep from embarrassing Arnold. That's the only reason I can conjure up, as to why.
Until he turns away from this, I for one will do everything I can to see to it that it bear's his name in perpetual infamy, because, right now, only he can stop it!!! (and he started it in his campaign web-site)
http://www.tahoedailytribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040611/News/106110011/-1/NEWS&template=printart
Sierra Nevada Conservancy in the works
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Gregory Crofton |
The California Farm Bureau Federation is against it, but Gov. Schwarzenegger, business owners and Assemblyman Tim Leslie support it.
Two bills have been introduced, one by Leslie, R-Tahoe City, that would create a conservancy to dole out money for projects that protect the 400-mile stretch of pristine mountain country that is the Sierra Nevada.
The region encompasses a third of the state and supplies about 65 percent of its drinking water, according to The Sierra Fund, a nonprofit group in Nevada City fighting to establish the conservancy.
Tahoe has had its own conservancy since 1984. With funds generated through public bonds, California Tahoe Conservancy delivers about $20 million a year in grant money to local governments on the California side of the Lake Tahoe Basin. The money is spent to conserve land as open space, install drainage systems that will help protect Lake Tahoe, and improve recreation.
A bill to create a Sierra Nevada conservancy, which would not eliminate the California Tahoe Conservancy, failed two years ago after Gov. Davis vetoed it.
This time around, legislation to create the organization has momentum because Gov. Schwarzenegger has said he wants to see the conservancy, the state's ninth, established during the first year of his term. The bills were approved by the Assembly last month.
The Senate Natural Resource Committee is expected to act on one or both bills - Assemblyman John Laird, D-Santa Rosa, introduced the other bill - when it meets June 22.
Leslie has been working closely with the state Resources Agency to make sure all the spending power doesn't fall into the lap of the state, according to Jedd Medefind, Leslie's chief of staff.
"From Assemblyman Leslie's perspective, local communities need to have a strong voice not only to ensure they are not taken advantage of but also to ensure that most effective conservation is carried out," Medefind said. "Effective conservation is built on collaboration not imposition."
Medefind said that Leslie is not against combining his bill with Laird's, but if local communities fail to adequately be represented in whatever bill gets heard, Leslie will "fight actively against" the creation of a conservancy for the Sierra Nevada.
California Farm Bureau Federation opposes both bills because the conservancy would mean less privately owned land and deprive local government of property tax revenue.
"Over 70 percent of the Sierra Nevada is already owned by the government," said John Gamper, director of taxation and land use for the California Farm Bureau Federation. "If they continue to acquire private land it will eventually take its toll ... and mean a loss of tax base. We think it is not a good idea, especially during very difficult fiscal times, for the state to create another state bureaucracy."
Elizabeth Martin, of The Sierra Fund, has pushed for the creation of a Sierra Nevada Conservancy for almost five years and says she is confident the governor will approve the legislation this year.
"It has no regulatory authority," Martin said. "All it really does is give money away.
- Gregory Crofton can be reached at (530) 542-8045 or by e-mail at gcrofton@tahoedailytribune.com
(SierraWasp: quit apologizing! Anyone who thinks you are just ranting should read this material and Wake Up! IMHO. Keep using that ping list!)
This one goes through a short history of the "new environmentalism" concluding with:
"The message I want to leave you with is that for about 25 years we've had a long and very careful and very sophisticated effort by leading environmentalists and by national land-use planners to develop a blueprint for how they would take America's private lands and how they would circumvent the tricky little problem of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution."
This one hits the issues directly (written by a self-described bleeding heart liberal, no less):
"It is known that the founding fathers who wrote our Constitution and the Declaration of Independence suffered greatly for their wisdom and their long-sighted view. Most of them ended up losing what money they had, often losing their families, often losing their lives. The battle for freedom, the battle for individual rights is a never-ending battle and we are in the middle of a resurgence for socialism and central government control that wishes to eradicate all of your rights and in greater strength than we have seen in many a decade, in greater strength than Stalin had in Russia or Hitler had in Germany.""I'm going to describe to you the state of the nation's environment. The marvelous job that our nation has done in righting wrongs of ignorance in fouling our environment and now thirty years later bringing it to its cleanest and safest condition in man's history. I'm going to describe to you a number of the unfounded theories. I'm going to close by describing just who we are battling and the nature of the enemy." (snip)
He closes by quoting from the book George G. Reisman, ”The Toxicity of Environmentalism,” Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns, ed. Jay H. Lehr (Van Nostrand Reinhold, NY 1992) p. 836:
"In my judgement, the ‘green’ movement of the environments is merely the old ‘red’ movement of the communists and socialists shorn of its veneer of science. The only difference I see between the greens and the reds is the superficial one of the specific reasons for which they want to violate individual freedom and the pursuit of happiness. The reds claimed that the individual could not be left free because the result would be such things as ‘exploitation’ and ‘monopoly.’ The greens claim that the individual can not be left free because the result will be such things as destruction of the ozone layer and global warming. Both claim that centralized government control over economic activity is essential. The reds wanted it for the alleged sake of achieving human prosperity. The greens want it for the alleged sake of avoiding environmental damage. In my view, environmentalism and ecology are nothing but the intellectual death rattle of socialism in the West, the final convulsion of a movement that only a few decades ago eagerly looked forward to the results of paralyzing the actions of individuals by means of ‘social engineering’ and now seeks to paralyze the actions of individuals by means of prohibiting engineering of any kind. The greens, I think, may be a cut below the reds, if that is possible."
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