Calhoun's Can(n)s for Sept 27, 2014
There's never a wrong
time to do the right thing.
Anon
Former RWQCB Chairman, Jeffery Young, wasn't man enough to
show up. He left it to Vice Chair, Dr. Monica Hunter, to do the right
thing: Vote (which was unanimous) to
rescind 45 CDO's and APOLOGIZE to The Los Osos 45 and to the community
for the cruel and pointlessly ridiculous "Mad Hatter Tea Party and
Torequemada's Auto de Fe Trial," inflicted on them by the previous Regional
Water Quality Control Board.
Dr. Hunter had recused herself when the mad
"trial" was underway because she lives in Los Osos and so had a conflict
of interest on that proceeding. Which
was a shame because she alone apparently knew what the rest of that Board refused to know: They had swallowed a false Kool-Aid narrative about the
community, carefully fed to them by the former Chief of Staff, a furious,
incompetent and equally uninformed Roger Briggs, and his clockwork second-in-command,
Harvey Packard. This false narrative was
that Los Osos was some kind of Dogpatch filled with urine-swilling
"Anti-Sewer Obstructionist" scofflaws.
Naturally, urine-swilling scofflaws, whose only sin was
voting to move a sewer plant out of town, needed punishment in order to bring
them to heel. And what better way to do
that than singling out 45 hapless residents, very publicly slap a Cease and
Desist Order on their homes, put them through a ridiculous "trial,"
threaten their homes, and disrupt their lives, in a little piece of illegal
electioneering which would, as then-Chairman Young brazenly put it from the
dais, get the community to "vote the right way."
The Mad Hatter Trials were reported on here and the whole
sewer debacle thoroughly documented on Ron Crawford's blog at
www.sewerwatch.blogspot.com so there's no need to rehash the insanity. Except to note how these unfair CDOs on only
45 people serves as a window into how looney the Regional Board's policies and
procedures had become.
Unlike everyone else in the PZ, The Los Osos 45 were required
to pay big bucks to inspect and pump their tanks every three years (despite
expert testimony that unnecessary pumping made wastewater discharges worse, not
better, and despite the fact that nobody else in town had a similar burden.),
send that report to the Board and notify the Board if the property was sold. So,
clearly the Board was trying to make some sort of vague "scientific"
connection between "water quality" and pumping and inspecting a
septic tank on a piece of property that would justify that CDO.
But here's the kicker. The CDO's
were put on an individual, not on the property.
If a CDO recipient sells their house,
the CDO goes away. Poof!
A new family moves in. Same
house, same tank, same leach field, same discharge, but no CDO,
no expensive pumping, no reporting, nothing.
This, of course, is pointless incompetent bureaucracy run
amok. And has been the operating methods
of the Regional Board from day one.
Under Chairman Young's leadership, the Board chose to ignore science,
ignore practical reason, ignore common sense and instead allowed frustration,
anger, misinformation and their own incompetence and ignorance to lead them
into a farce -- "The Mad Hatter Tea
Party Trial" -- a piece of lunacy that would have been genuinely funny had
not the consequences to 45 real people and the community been so wasteful and
so harmful.
And now, here it was, the final chapter in this epic piece
of embarrassment and ex-chairman Young didn't have the guts to even show
up. But Dr. Hunter did and she alone had
the courage and decency to acknowledge and apologize to those 45 and to the
community as a whole. The apology was
too late, but it was no small thing.
Except to our newspaper of record. Two days after the meeting the Tribune carried not one word about the vote, or about the
apology. Nothing. Not a surprise, seeing
as how they, like the Board, had already swallowed that same false narrative
about Los Osos and became water-carriers for the Board. And now,
when the community finally received an
apology --an acknowledgement by the Vice Chair that The 45 and the community had been wronged by the Water Board -- the community
won't read about it in the Tribune.
While deliberately blinding yourself, silencing your critics
and burying your mistakes is par for the course for bureaucrats and Boards, for
a newspaper, it's inexcusable.
So, congratulations to The
Los Osos 45. While the community
(and the Tribune) have forgotten you,
Dr. Hunter did not. While the apology
was too late in coming, it did finally arrive and that in itself is no small
thing.
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