Calhouns Can(n)ons

Quick, Get Me Rewrite!


I don’t know how it’s possible to misquote from a letter, but that’s what happened in the Tribune’s April 4th story headlined, “Sewer costs could shift to county taxpayers.” In that story, it was reported that in a letter to LAFCO from Assistant County Administrator Gail Wilcox, that “Wilcox told [told? or wrote?] the Local Agency Formation Commission that county staff believes the district was adequately serving Los Osos residents and that there would be no advantage to the county taking over its responsibilities.”

In a “Correction” the next day it stated that the “letter to the Local Agency Formation Commission . . . did not say that the county staff believes the district is adequately serving Los Osos residents. Instead, she more narrowly addressed the question of whether ‘there is something about the structure or legal authority of the CSD that is inadequate to address the needs of the residents.’ She concluded that, in the opinion of county staff, there is not a structural or legal inadequacy.”

Ah, and there it was, the most interesting question that LAFCO and the community have to answer: Is the Dissolution Group claiming that the structure and legal authority of the CSD is so flawed that it must be dissolved? Or, is the structure and legal authority functioning just fine, but it’s the POLITCAL results that the Dissolution Group doesn’t like. If that’s the case, does LAFCO have the legal power to dissolve a properly functioning structure just because certain folks don’t like the POLITICAL results?

And that’s what’s been so weird about the Dissolution Group from day one – Instead of using the structure to change the political results – public comment and input, serving on advisory committees to effect change, starting a new recall petition, or starting some initiatives, or even fielding candidates for November’s board election -- the Dissoution Group moved immediately after the recall votes were certified to remove the entire structure altogether.

Which is sort of like people saying after the re-election of President Bush, “George is a really, really bad political result, so let’s dissolve the U.S. Government and petition Queen Elizabeth to take us back into the Commonwealth.”

In effect, that’s what LAFCO must decide: If the structure is fine, will LAFCO declare that The People must have to work within that structure FIRST to effect the POLITICAL changes they want to see? Or, can LAFCO step in and remove a perfectly good working structure in order to effect a POLITICAL change, even though the various mechanisms for political change were never even tried in the first place?

We may have an answer in June. Stay Tuned.