Calhouns Can(n)ons

Less Coal! Switch Tracks! Part Duh!

When we last left the Sewerville Express (see previous posting), the residents were snoozing and reading and watching TV whilst sitting in the club car of a runaway train hurtling straight for the cliff -- again.

Last night, the unconscious engineer, who had been slumped over the wide-open throttle bleeding out on the floor from knives stuck in his back from a variety of Usual Suspects, roused up long enough to vote to send a signal to the trackman up ahead to switch tracks. Within feet of the cliff, the train lurched onto the new track and headed away from the immediate danger.

In the coal car, the battling citizens were strangely subdued, their thrashings at each other distracted and dreamlike. It was a rote slo-mo ballet of tired, muffled waffle-bat thumps instead of the usual vigorous, wood-on-skull thwacks.

Pauline and her Perils would have been proud. Close to death, our CSD Board kept their eye on the main thing and voted 4 -1 to support Assemblyman Sam Blakeslee’s bill – still subject to amendments and revisions and/or sudden death as it makes it way through the Sausage Factory of Sacramento to become law – a bill that will give the County the legal mechanism to separate out the Hideous Sewer project from the CSD’s official responsibility and control. It also sets up a process for inter-agency collaboration, community input and a final citizen’s vote on any project before anyone starts digging holes in the ground.

The bill also originally contained a lot of troubling details that an ad hoc citizen committee, the CSD and others worked hard to amend so as to get the CSD the best deal as possible without having the whole thing collapse. What now happens in Sacramento remains to be seen.

The bill also contained some very unpleasant lumps of coal for Los Osos. But those lumps existed with or without the bill and presented the community with an interesting set of Hobson’s Choices – all about equally bad and limiting in their own way – which is why I believe the CSD made a very difficult but a very smart decision by realizing that sometimes you have to lose a battle in order to say alive long enough to win the war.

Of course, since only about 50 people attended the meeting, it’s possible that the rest of the community is absolutely indifferent to lumps of any kind, even those that will have a direct and profound impact upon their home and pocketbook. Not even train wrecks or avoided train wrecks caused them to look up from their TV.

Which means that the upcoming Ripley Project Report workshop and presentation of the Wastewater Management Plan Update at the Community Center, August 4th at 6 pm, will be a real snoozer.