Yesterday’s Tribune had a glowing paean to retiring
Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board executive officer Roger
Briggs. Supervisor Bruce Gibson’s
typically smarmy, oleaginous pull quote was featured. Said Gibson, “I know him [Roger] as an
executive officer who is deeply committed to preservation of groundwater
quality. I think he pursued his job with
a great deal of integrity.”
Really? I daresay there’s a great many people here in
Los Osos who would beg to disagree. And
anyone who sat through Roger’s Mad Hatter Tea Party and Torquemada’s Auto de Fe
Kangaroo Kort of The Los Osos 45
would snort through their noses at such an idea of . . . integrity.
For those who have forgotten,
when the good citizens voted to move their sewer plant to a site out of town (a
not unreasonable idea, in a sane world) Roger cooked up his Mad Pumping Scheme
and presented it to the full Board. In a
fit of pique and with an astonishing lack of knowledge of how septic tanks
actually work, Roger presented for Board approval a plan to have everyone in
Los Osos pump their tanks every two months.
The septage would be hauled to Santa Maria for disposal, thereby removing gazillions of gallons
of water from an already overdrawn water basin.
This looney scheme made absolutely clear that Roger didn’t have a clue
how septic tanks worked. Neither did the
Board itself, which is absolutely astounding in a Board that had life and death
power over a community made up entirely of homes on . . . septic tanks.
During the Mad Pumping Scheme
hearing, citizens after citizen rose to tell Roger and the Board what they
already should have known: Too rapid a
pumping schedule disrupts the flora and fauna of a properly operating tank and
results in worse discharges and hampered leach fields. It’s the worst thing you can do if you want to
“preserve groundwater quality.” Only a complete incompetent could have come up
with such a hair-brained scheme and only a dangerously uninformed Board would
have sat there with their fingers up their noses seriously considering such
nonsense.
Finally, into the fray,
appeared Dr. Wickham, CEO of Sludgehammer Septic Systems, a guy who does know
something about septics. He cleaned
everybody’s clocks and made clear to the world what idiots were in charge of
this Board.
Then the head of the regional
air quality board wandered up to the podium and put the hammer down: Gazillions of trips with pumper trucks into
and out of Los Osos times 4,500 homes would spew out gazillions of tons of
pollutants and that was soooooo not gonna happen on his watch. Which stopped the
whole ridiculous dog and pony show cold.
Now, really, really miffed,
Roger, “committed to preservation of groundwater quality,” came up with an even
more damaging scheme: He singled out 45
happless citizens, The Los Osos 45, by
a process that to this day remains unexplained, the documents to the selection
process conveniently having been destroyed.
Then he slapped CDOs (cease and desist orders) on the 45 and set up the
biggest looney-tune Mad Hatter CDO trials the world has ever seen. Nobody who sat through that mad proceeding
could believe their eyes. It was beyond the looking glass.
For months and months, 45 citizens
were jerked around, their homes threatened, their health damaged, their peace
of mind ruined, their lives turned upside down. At least one premature death
was, from all reports, a direct result of Roger’s pique and ire. The “case”
started lumbering, huge reams of testimony was duly recorded, vast piles of
money was expended, tax-payer money, then the attorney for the terrified 45
pointed out a few legalities and the whole thing came to a screeching
halt.
Do over! Do over! yelled the
Board, as if you can un-ring a bell. So
the whole shambling show rumbled back to life, now more confusing than
ever. To this day nobody is sure what
testimony was in or out, one CDO recipient is still in limbo, and now the whole
thing sits on appeal, having cost the State of California at least $500,000, likely closer to a cool million.
And what was the “trial” all
about? Well, Roger told the Board that
it was about “water quality.” But the
CDOs put on the homes of The Los Osos 45
disappear when they sell their homes. Since nobody digs up their septic tanks
when they move, the tanks remain behind, but with no onerous CDO on them. Same tank.
Same discharge. So, no. The Mad Hatter Trial and the CDO’s had nothing to do with water quality. They were, plain and simple (and made
clear from the dais by board Chairman Young) electioneering blackmail to get
the community to vote the “right way” on the sewer bond issue. (Something the
community was going to do anyway, without threats.)
And that small inconvenient
fact illustrates the truly despicable
element of the whole behavior of the Regional Water Quality Control Board and
Roger, their CEO: They believed a false
narrative about Los Osos. They believed
that false narrative, fed them by Roger and other certain groups, primarily
among them the Pandora Nash-Karner-led “Dreamers,” that anyone who opposed a
sewer in the middle of their town was “an anti-sewer obstructionist;” that the
whole town was anti-sewer, that we were a community full of Moonbeam McSwines
willfully rolling around in our own urine, scofflaws and miscreants who deserved
to be punished and “fined out of
existence,” as Pandora so sweetly put it in an email to her good buddy, Roger.
That was a lie. That was a lie that Roger fed the Board
repeatedly and it was a lie that the Board didn’t bother to examine for themselves. Which exposed the Board as a gaggle of
incompetents who were not willing to do their due diligence. In a sane world,
Roger Briggs should have been fired after Dr. Wickham got done with him and his
staff. And for agreeing to go forward
with the whole looney Mad Hatter “trial,” the entire Board should have had
brown paper bags popped over their heads and been frog-marched into
resignations, to be replaced with a competent Board that put science and facts
and common sense pragmatism before pique and lies.
But we don’t live in a sane
world. So we got Board failure, CEO
deception, staff and Board incompetence, illegal electioneering, a huge waste
of public funds on a nonsense fake “trial,” and none of it –
none of it – had a beneficial effect on so much as a single drop of water.
Indeed, Roger’s lunacy and the Board’s failures and incompetence made things
worse by delaying progress on the sewer, diverting time and energy and money, and
fueling an already frightened, divided community into hostility and unnecessary
opposition instead of working for a unified effort focused on moving forward.
Not to mention, Roger’s pointless mad schemes hastened the death of at least
one person and damaged the health and lives of many more.
And now Roger’s off on a happy
retirement, not a care in the world, Supervisor Gibson’s smarmy words in a bold
pull-quote on the front page of the local section of the newspaper, complete
with a picture of Roger, smiling.
Oh, and yes, the Tribune does note, “Briggs described the
controversy caused by his agency’s efforts to stop the water pollution in Los
Osos as ‘not a happy memory.’” No,
indeed not.
Well, good riddance,
Roger. I hope your replacement as CEO
will be someone who has more integrity and common sense than you did and
understands that false narratives (lies) and Mad Hatter Trials and Mad Pumping
Schemes don’t do a lick of good to keep our waters clean. They just damage the
organization you work for and can do untold damage to a whole community.
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