Posted on 01/06/2005 4:43:53 PM PST by nickcarraway
BRIAN SCHMIDT has a problem with the county. And the city. And, well, most other municipalities in California. Schmidt, a staff attorney for the Committee for Green Foothills, a local environmental organization, tells Fly that Santa Clara County isn't playing fair. His concern involves environmental impact reports (EIRs) that local governments draft prior to large-scale developments. Normally, after the EIR is written, the public and developers are permitted a specific amount of time (usually 45 days) to review the report. Then, the local government publishes a revised EIR, which answers questions and makes necessary changes. The two reports—the draft and the revised EIR—are finally submitted together as the final report. The problem, says Schmidt, is the county shares "administrative" drafts with developers before the first draft is published for comment. Schmidt has no quarrel with sharing working drafts, but he draws the line at not permitting other interested parties access to the working drafts as well. That, Schmidt believes, is illegal; and, if not illegal, it's certainly unfair. LIZANNE REYNOLDS, a land-use attorney in the county counsel's office, responds that developers possess "unique" information that aids county staff during the EIR process. Opening the working draft process to everybody would create "inefficiency," forcing the county to handle a barrage of comments about a report in the working draft phase. Further, she claims, cooperating with developers during the environmental report process is common in municipalities across California. Nonsense, responds Schmidt. What if environmental groups are more qualified to give the county advice during the draft process? Also, says Schmidt, when he officially requested to see the working draft EIR for a Stanford University expansion plan the county had shared with university officials, he was given the decidedly fishy explanation that the working drafts were destroyed during routine house-cleaning. Meanwhile, unlike San Jose and Oakland, the city of Palo Alto has a policy of never showing anyone working drafts of the EIR (except for the project description). But don't they suffer from the lack of "unique" information that developers provide the county? "The developer always cooperates," explains DAN SODERGREN, a Palo Alto special counsel. "If the city or the city's consultant needs information, we just ask the developer for it. That's usually never a problem."
I thought that this was gonna be about Little Green Footballs.
Foothills...
That's very different.
Never mind.
Excuse me, that is the format the Metro put it in. It's not my job to edit their stuff.
Having lived with those lowlifes (environmentalists) for all of my working life I can identify the purpose behind their whine immediately. Their biggest weapon is time. Delay any project long enough and most applicants will go broke, or abandon a suddenly too-expensive project.
Give them access to the working documents and you can expect total and eternal paralysis of all projects, by the simple means of questioning every comma and chart color in the EIR process.
Screw 'em!
Really! Ugh. You're exculpated. *\;-)
aren't these the same people that complain about affordable housing availability? kind of ironic that the anti-development tactics also drive up the cost of adding more housing huh? maybe the goal is just one huge slum? i stopped paying attention to them long ago... somewhere around the time they demanded an EIR for development on moffett field (already a superfund site).
I once saw someone, cleverly and sarcastically refer to them as "The Committee For Brown Foothills" since that's our hills' true color most of the year. I mean, how special are those brown hills (which I literally own a small piece of and manage)? They've locked up so much land that this area has reached its economic peak.
Only because most of the foothills are over-run with an exotic grass Avena fatua (wild oat). Many perrenial native bunch grasses stay somewhat green all year.
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