Free Republic

The California Air Resources Board is on the verge of destroying the collaborative work of an unlikely coalition of environmentalists, labor, employers and municipalities. These diverse interests worked together to pass SB375, a bill to create more sustainable communities through regional planning. Now, CARB staff have issued SB375 greenhouse-gas emission targets that were never considered by stakeholders to the SB375 implementation process. Rather than keep all parties involved, the CARB staff has set lofty goals that communities realistically won't be able to achieve. ... The higher targets would have severe ramifications for our state's economic recovery. The MTC analysis indicated...

SAN DIEGO ---- Regional planners are polling San Diego County residents to see if they would support a special "quality of life" tax to fund beach-sand replenishment, open-space purchases, habitat restoration and water-quality programs, an agency official said Thursday. The funding source could come in the form of a sales, property, hotel or rental-car tax, and could appear on the county ballot in 2008, said Rob Rundle, principal planner for the San Diego Association of Governments, the county's regional planning agency. Rundle said results of the telephone poll of 2,000 county registered voters will be reported to the association board...

Please help. I have been doing some research on this SMART GROWTH epidemic sweeping through America, a plan that aims to regulate all land use in the country from the top down. It starts innocently enough. Local governments are told they should come up with a plan to map out the future growth and development of their communities, and often an outside entity offers a sizable financial incentive to help with the anticipated costs. As these local plans are drawn up, they become collected by the next step in the government, usually at the county level, as the local county...