No Lane? No Train!

Santa Barbara County

Volume 2

Issue 11

The Ebola Crisis Magnified By Incompetence

3

California Faces Death By Pension

4

The Phantom

Runs Again

6

Proposition 47:

Recipe For Risk

Free Crime

Sprees

8

Of Measure P,

Santa Barbara

Luddites And The

People’s Republic

Of California

9

How Dry Is My Valley

11

Medicine’s New Frontier

12

What’s Better For

The Environment

Than Capitalism?

13

Inside the

November Issue:

November

2014

COLAB

PO Box 7523

Santa Maria, CA 93456

Phone:

805-929-3148

E-mail:

[email protected]

Twenty years overdue, the years of painstaking negotiations involved a fierce debate

concerning the competing interests of commuters, public transportation advocates, local residents and various community interest groups. In the end, it was an agreement ratified by nearly 80% of the electorate after having been approved by every city council and the entire board of supervisors. It was precedent-setting and should be considered inviolate.

Of course, what I am discussing here is the promise to widen the 101 freeway as the top priority project of Measure A, a half cent sales tax measure that also provides money for safe routes to schools, bus transportation, bicycle lanes and, important to this discussion, an attempt to create commuter rail service between Ventura and Santa Barbara.

In essence, the grand compromise that was ratified by everybody and their mother was dubbed “A Lane and a Train”. The classic battle played out here was a debate over wid-ening the 101 to accommodate commuters in cars and buses, versus alluring them to tak-ing a commuter train that we would have to create ourselves! In the end, we thought we did both. That is, until Mayor Helene Schneider and her minions decided to violate the accord and break their promise to the voters and all the other jurisdictions in the region.

Mayor Schneider would have you believe that the City never agreed to have the widening take place unless certain other projects occurred simultaneously. Her position is com-pletely untenable and her umbrage a complete fabrication. I know because I sit on the 101 Oversight Committee and I was part of the deliberations that served to create the grand compromise. The fact of the matter is every single major project that was to be paid for with Measure A proceeds was spelled out in infinite detail for the voters to ap-prove and that same record is available for review to this day.

Mayor Schneider, being too clever by half, has obviously supported the creation of a law-suit by a lawyer with a penchant for extreme causes. She has also threatened to with-hold a development permit for the widening should the legal challenge fail to accomplish her goals of blackmailing and extorting more money out of the Measure A funds and Cal-trans. Her actions are reprehensible especially in light of the fact that both the Santa Bar-bara Association of Governments (SBCAG) and Caltrans have indicated they would duti-fully pursue alternative funding sources for her pet projects, only please don’t hold the widening project as a hostage!

I believe the only way to move Schneider and company off of their untenable position is by resorting to the nuclear option. No lane? Well then, no train! SBCAG needs to halt all work on the train until Caltrans has the permit in hand they need to widen the free-way! Either that, or use the money that would have been devoted to the train to fund the Montecito projects Schneider wants completed. Finally, Schneider should be removed from the SBCAG board! First Published in the Santa Barbara News Press

No Lane? No Train!

By Andy Caldwell

Measure P Presents Problems Galore

By Andy Caldwell

Volume 2 Issue 11 COLAB Magazine Page 2

I believe all of us value a safe environment and a

healthy ecosystem, it is part of our DNA as Ameri-cans. Many conflicts and controversies today there-fore are not really about our environment per se, but more about how we live. Thus, the current debate having to do with Measure P, the oil and gas shut-down initiative.

The organization 350.org, which put Measure P on the ballot, believes we need to shut down all oil and gas operations immediately in order to save the plan-et, not out of concern for water resources, but be-cause of climate change, regardless of whether the rest of the state, nation and world follows our lead!

Yet, we Californians live in the most car centric socie-ty in the world! We use 14 billion gallons of gasoline to travel 330 billion miles a year. In reality, how soon do you think we are going to transition away from fos-sil fuels? In the meantime, if we shut down our local onshore oil and gas industry, where do we get the mil-lions of barrels of oil and the oodles of natural gas that will be lost in the process? It has to come from some-where! Do you favor us drilling more off shore oil? How about bringing the oil here by train? Did you know that California is already receiving fracked oil from the Dakotas by train? Or, how about sending even more oil tankers from the Middle East, which is where California gets most all of our oil from? Unfor-tunately, this war on oil brings us back to the predica-ment of war for oil as energy independence is our only hope of avoiding even more quagmires in the Middle East!

Meanwhile, young families, 70% of whom are Hispan-ic, grateful to be employed in the highest paying job sector in the county, rightfully fear losing their jobs and their homes should Measure P pass.

This fight goes back before climate change was a twinkle in Al Gore’s eyes. It has to do with our choic-es as consumers. Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org is a Malthusian. He doesn’t believe that the planet can support the demands of the world’s popu-lation. He wants to limit consumer choices by putting artificial constraints and inflated costs upon the use of natural resources, business and commerce via gov-ernment control, taxes and regulations. Unfortunate-ly, our local activists don’t have the temerity to come

out and admit this to all of you, so instead, they indi-rectly attack your freedom of choices and your pocket book by attacking the business sector that provides you with the products you desire and need. In this case, the boogeyman is “big oil”.

But, what or who exactly is “big oil”? Did you know that pension funds and mutual funds own over half the stock of American oil companies? The truth here is that most everybody has a stake in the production and availability of energy as consumers and stockholders!

Measure P is a destructive and flawed initiative. It deserves to be resoundingly rejected by vot-ers. Please vote no on Measure P. First Published in the Santa Barbara News Press

The Ebola Crisis Magnified By Incompetence

By Andy Caldwell

have we been caught so off guard? With no travel restrictions in place, did we not expect the disease to spread here? Why doesn’t every hospital in the land have a protocol, equipment and training in place to deal with this outbreak?

Our vulnerability is worse than you know. A radio guest, a professional in the field of disaster prepared-ness, revealed the fact that not only do we not have a cure for Ebola, we have for a very long time been suf-fering the effect of a critical shortage of saline solution to deal with this outbreak and other common mala-dies. Thus, here we have all the ingredients for a massive disaster of biblical proportions. First Published in the Santa Barbara News Press

Page 3 Volume 2 Issue 11 COLAB Magazine

Unfortunately, what goes around comes around

and what is going around right now is Ebola!

Ebola is just the latest tragedy in Africa, following the otherwise preventable devastation of AIDs, Malaria and Dengue fever that have taken over 50 million lives. However, I am not sure if we have had a scare like this here in the United States since the pandemic flu of the early twentieth century. The 1918-19 pan-demic killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, and simultaneously killed tens of millions throughout the rest of the world!

It is hard to accept the fact that in this day and age we are potentially at a loss as to how to deal with Ebola in a continent such as Africa which has an abysmal rec-ord of dealing with routine health issues in part due to overwhelming poverty abetted by war, traditions and biases. In view of the fact that people can easily transmit the disease through blood and body fluids, including breast milk and semen, in this day of rela-tively easy global travel, the ability of this disease to spread quickly cannot be underestimated, especially when the initial signs of the disease mimic ordinary relatively benign illnesses such as the flu. Regard-less, Africa’s problems are now our problems.

I find it appalling that the Obama administration is sending vulnerable American troops to Africa instead of allowing the United Nations and the World Health Organization to take the lead in this matter as we de-mand greater accountability and efficiency from these organizations. The World Health Organization al-ready has a presence in Africa albeit they have now admitted to having botched the opportunity to prevent this outbreak. There is no excuse for this failure to have crafted and implemented a plan to deal with Ebola as this disease has been attacking people since 1976! The agency has now admitted that some of the people in charge in Africa were political appointees who lacked the qualifications necessary to nip the out-break in the bud, a lesson obviously also lost on the Obama Administration!

It is not hard to perceive the incompetence of the Obama administration in their ability to deal with the Ebola crisis as with virtually any type of crisis. With respect to the Center for Disease Control and the state of preparedness here in the United States, why

805-937-6151


When the November election was still a long way

off, Sacramento-area streets were already plastered with campaign signs for a little-noticed political race: candidates are running to serve on the board of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, bet-ter known as CalPERS. While not as high-profile as the statewide and congressional races, these seats are arguably of equal importance to Golden State tax-payers. CalPERS, the largest state pension fund in the country, not only manages more than $257 billion in assets, but also loves to use its political muscle to prod corporate America into “socially responsi-ble” (read: leftist-friendly) investing.

Sacramento, as the state capital, is Public Employee Central, so the race has become heated and costly. The campaign signs that caught my eye promised “pension security” and were paid for by the Service Employees International Union. This election is a touchstone for the entire pension issue in California—and, per usual, it doesn’t look good for the taxpayer.

In short, the people who benefit from CalPERS have complete control over it. Those who pay the tab have little if any say. Six of the board seats are set aside for various groups of CalPERS “members”—for example, one for retirees who receive pensions, one for eligible current state employees, and so on. Then there are three members appointed by the governor and the legislature, both of which are wholly owned subsidiar-ies of California’s public-sector unions.

And there are four “ex officio” members: state officials and employees that also—surprise!—have close ties to the union movement. That includes state Treasurer Bill Lockyer, who in a 2011 speech about CalPERS had this to say about the daunting unfunded liabilities that might force pension reform:

If we need to do it, then we ought to do it—but on our terms. We must not allow the debate on retirement security to be framed by those who simply seek to eliminate altogether defined benefits, the social and economic power of public pension funds in the mar-ket, and the power of workers and their unions to be a balancing force to business and the unregulated mar-ketplace in American life.

The treasurer’s staff underlined those words in the

official text of the speech. When Lockyer said reform should only be undertaken on “our” terms, he meant those of the public sector unions and the government workers. He clearly was not sympathizing with Califor-nia’s hard-pressed taxpayers. The governor and most others in state government have the same attitude. They don’t care about pension debts and the burden on taxpayers. They care about protecting the current system as it now exists.

And what a system that is, if one happens to be a government employee. California’s entire public-sector compensation system is absurdly generous. For instance, the median pension for a recent state Highway Patrol retiree is $98,000 a year—available at age 50, and paid for the life of the retiree and that re-tiree’s spouse. The median pay and benefit package for a California firefighter is more than $175,000 a year.

As the Orange County Register reported in 2011, the city of Newport Beach had fourteen full-time life-guards, with thirteen of them earning more than $120,000 a year in total compensation. “More than half the lifeguards collected more than $150,000 for 2010 with the two highest-paid collecting $211,451 and $203,481 in total compensation respectively,” ac-cording to the report. These are not aberrations.

California salary schedules are filled with city manag-ers earning $300,000 or more a year and low-level administrative employees earning around $100,000 a year. This is true at the state-government level and even in the poorest cities. The San Joaquin Valley city of Stockton paid its workers at 125 percent of the Cali-fornia state average—and gave them a “Lamborghini-style” health-care plan that provided lifetime benefits after working for the city for as little as two months. Big surprise that Stockton now is in bankruptcy court.

In the private sector, most workers receive 401k-style defined-contribution plan, in which final retirement in-come is based on the amount the worker puts in and the success of the stock market. California’s public workers, in contrast, receive what are called defined-benefit retirement plans, in which guaranteed pay-ment amounts are based on a formula. Most so-called “public-safety” employees—police, firefighters, prison

(Continued on page 14)

California Faces Death By Pension

By Steven Greenhut

Proposition 46: Trial Lawyers Dream Initiative

By Andy Caldwell

alcohols in critical care situations. All it takes is a charge!

Neither are we reluctant to charge people who shop for doctors in order to get prescriptions to feed their addictions, e.g. Rush Limbaugh! And, what about the doctors who willingly provide services as defacto drug traffickers? The fact is we had a case here locally where a physician, known as the “candyman”, was arrested and successfully prosecuted for this type of practice and there is nothing stopping prosecutors and victims from holding pharmacies responsible for willfully and knowingly participating in these types of crimes.

Another famous local example of drug abuse via doctor’s prescription has to do with the circumstances surrounding the death of Michael Jackson and the fact is his physician went to prison for involuntary manslaughter.

Proposition 46 pretends to address problems which are already covered by our laws. The real goal? Line the pockets of ambulance-chasing attorneys with cash. First Published in the Santa Barbara News Press


California already enjoys the unique distinction of

being ranked as the #1 Judicial Hell hole in America by the American Tort Reform Association. If voters approve Proposition 46, we can be sure no other state in the nation will ever overtake us in the rankings. This proposition also ensures the doctor shortage we are experiencing in the state right now will become exponentially worse over time.

Proposition 46 proposes to increase the state’s cap on non-economic damages that can be assessed in medical negligence lawsuits to over $1 million from the current cap of $250,000. The current law, mind you, does not impose a cap on economic damages or lost wages, just non-economic damages. The initiative is expected to raise the cost of providing medical care by hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

As you can imagine, a number of ambulance-chasing attorneys are funding the initiative, whereas, virtually every single type of association of physicians, hospitals, doctors, chiropractors, dentists, nurses, therapists, pharmacists, et al, are in opposition to the initiative. This initiative is so bad that both the republican party and virtually every union in the state, including SEIU, plumbers, electricians and the construction trades have joined forces to defeat it. That right there should tell you something.

Of course, the campaign for Prop. 46 won’t be focusing on the cost of this program to our health delivery system. No, they made sure to put some lipstick on this pig before they drop it out of the sky hoping people will think it is flying as it comes crashing down on providers and consumers. The lipstick has to do with a provision to hold physicians increasingly responsible for patient safety by randomly testing doctors for drug and alcohol abuse and impairment on a routine basis regardless of the lack of reasonable cause for suspicion! It will also create a database designed to prevent prescription drug abuse by people who doctor shop to feed their addictions.

Our court system does not have much of a problem right now punishing doctors guilty of malpractice, nor as a result of being under the influences of drugs or

Health Sanitation Services

(805) 922-2121


Republicans and conservative-minded independ-

ents have problems winning elections that have noth-ing to do with the democrat party. Whereas, most democrats have few if any special interests in com-mon yet remain united due to their willingness to com-promise, conservatives have relatively few areas of disagreement but remain resolute to fight to the death among themselves over their perceived differences!

Answering the call to run for office as a republican is akin to facing the party’s circular firing squad! You can take your pick on any number of death knell is-sues to party cohesion as conservatives are loathe to compromise on a variety of issues. There is a saying, “Don’t let perfection become the enemy of good” that comes to mind here. That and the savvy to be willing to win incremental victories over time. Both lessons obviously lost on the grand old party!

Our current election pits phantom Congresswoman Lois Capps against Chris Mitchum. Capps’ record in congress is nothing short of abysmal. She has no major legislative accomplishments to speak of and in actuality you would be hard pressed to even find a record of her taking a leading position on any of the controversies affecting our nation, state and re-gion. Avoiding controversial issues may be a com-mendable and safe trait for party line foot soldiers, but what we need right now is real leadership and repre-sentation!

Truly, what do you know about Capps’ position on how the federal government is handling the Ebola cri-sis? ISIS? Our porous border with Mexico? Our local drought and federal water releases from Lake Cachu-ma for fish? Finally, whatever became of the investi-gation concerning the staff cover-up emanating from Capps’ office, this having to do with the tragedy in-volving her now imprisoned former staffer Raymond Morua who took the life of Mallory Dies?

Not only does Capps have a penchant for dodging controversy she also has a tendency towards rewrit-ing history or at a minimum glossing over inconven-ient truths. This began when she signed a three term limit pledge and then refused to abide by the agree-ment or return the campaign cash she got for signing the pledge. Neither has she ever confessed that her assurances in endorsing Obamacare that we could keep our doctors was a prevarication. And perhaps in

one of the most egregious grandstanding opportuni-ties ever, she recently supported naming the Lompoc Post Office in honor of Scott Williams, a custody of-ficer who was brutally murdered, while she has done nothing to help bring his murderer to justice! I could go on and on, but you get the picture.

With respect to Mitchum’s candidacy, Capps singled him out in the primary by running ads touting Mitchum as the tea party candidate. But Mitchum has never identified himself as a tea party candidate, so why did she do this? Because she knows there is a rift within the republican party ranks between the tea party and the “establishment” republicans. Unfortunately, simp-ly tossing the label into the midst of feuding republi-cans and a genuinely uniformed electorate is about all it takes to effectively undermine a viable candi-date! But, please, let’s be smarter than that!

I am of the firm opinion that the majority of citizens are clearly dissatisfied with Capps and this election could provide the opportunity to finally send Capps into her long overdue retirement. Whether you vote against Capps or you vote for Mitchum, the results will be the same!

Let’s take advantage of this opportunity to elect a vig-orous representative willing to tackle a crisis and pro-vide genuine leadership in the halls of congress, something we have been missing for nearly 20 years! Vote for Chris Mitchum. First Published in the Santa Barbara News Press

The Phantom Runs Again

By Andy Caldwell

The One Name In Crop

Production Inputs 1335 W. Main St. Santa Maria, CA. 93454

(805) 922-5848

Measure P DesPeradoes

By Andy Caldwell

respect to using fresh water to frack, I can tell you that I myself would never be in support of using fresh water because I too consider water more precious than oil. Having said that, the oil industry has more saline water coming out of the production zone than they know what to do with to utilize for production purposes, so again, all this talk about guarding fresh water amounts to nothing less than another specious argument.

Measure P is nothing less than an oil and gas shutdown initiative. It will hurt our area schools, our fire department and a predominantly Hispanic workforce. The measure is costly, flawed and deceptive. Vote no on Measure P! First Published in the Santa Barbara News Press


An aging actor was recruited to send out a request

to help fund the Yes on P campaign. The appeal was replete with factual inaccuracies and gross exaggeration in an outright attempt to solicit money from people who are not familiar with our community.

The biggest prevarication in the piece? “Chevron destroyed Santa Barbara with the 1969 oil spill. We can’t let them do it again”. Really? Santa Barbara is a destroyed community and Chevron is to blame? First, everybody here knows it was Unocal who suffered the 69 pipeline blowout, not Chevron. This particular point also neglects the fact that the Unocal blowout involved an off shore oil operation, whereas Measure P applies only to on shore oil production. Finally, considering that the majority of the oil California uses every day must be tankered from the Middle East, local oil production is the most ecologically friendly source of oil available to meet our everyday needs!

This attempt to blame Chevron reminds me of a racketeering and corruption case in which a US environmental lawyer was convicted of racketeering, extortion, witness tampering, money laundering and even bribing the judge in trying to win a judgement against Chevron for damages to the environment in Ecuador. The related irony to this Measure P hit piece? Chevron had never done business in Ecuador! Nevertheless, this same actor was sympathetic in defending that bogus case too!

The Measure P campaign is obviously desperate to paint their current disinformation campaign as being against big oil. Why? Well, the oil companies who remain in our region are primarily small independent oil companies, several of which are locally owned! But alas, these local companies have no name id among would-be donors from outside our area, hence, the campaign twists the facts to appeal to people who don’t know any better.

The campaign literature also repeated all the shrill and false accusations having to do with fracking and water impacts, again none of which have anything to do with our local oil operations. For the record, the oil industry does not need to fracture rock to get oil out of the ground here because our rock comes fractured courtesy of Mother Nature. Further, fracking is already heavily regulated in our county and permits will never be granted for a frack job. Moreover, with


Proposition 47 proposes to reduce penalties for

many crimes, including retroactively reducing the sen-tence for upwards of 10,000 felons currently incarcer-ated in our state prisons. Why would anybody sup-port this initiative? There are three main rea-sons. One is the penchant for some in our society to be soft on crime. The second reason is to save mon-ey from incarceration costs. The third to is to divert the resultant savings from public safety to other politi-cally correct programs that ostensibly promise to help prevent crime and treat criminals, i.e., mental health programs and public schools.

Proposition 47 is another attempt to reduce the power of the three strikes law but it is even worse than that! It would reduce the following very serious crimes to misdemeanors if the amount of money involved in the crime did not exceed $950; shoplifting, grand theft, receiving stolen property, forgery, fraud, writing a bad check, theft of a firearm, personal use of most illegal drugs (including meth, heroin and cocaine!) and even being in possession of a date rape drug!

Reducing the penalty for these crimes means that vir-tually nobody will go to prison, no matter how many times they break these particular laws. Further, it means that some career criminals now serving a three strikes sentence will be released. Finally, in reality, it also means that most of these criminals will not even go to jail! Why? Because Governor Brown has al-ready dumped so many felons out of state prisons into our county jails in order to alleviate overcrowding that our county jails are filled to the brim. We scarcely have any cell space to incarcerate misdemeanants.

With respect to saving money by lowering the classifi-cation of these crimes, is that what California has come to? We are too broke to ensure public safety and civil order? An alternative? There are known methods to lower the cost of incarceration as our state has some of the highest costs in the nation!

In my opinion, with respect to exploiting the notion of going soft on crime in order to divert funds to public schools and other programs, I find the notion nonsen-sical! Seventy-five percent of the crimes committed in America are committed by dropouts. I don’t believe the reason we couldn’t keep these people in school and out of jail is a result of not spending enough mon-ey on education.

Further, our state is already sending most drug ad-dicts, who typically commit crimes to fund their habit, to alternative drug treatment courts, which helps them avoid jail time. We also already have a special tax to help fund mental health programs on top of the bil-lions of dollars a year spent directly for these pro-grams.

Somebody, show us a program that is working right now! Show us a program that works to reform career criminals, gang bangers, drug addicts and people af-flicted with mental illness before we throw even more money and add even lighter sentences into the mix.

As I wrote a few weeks back, I understand and agree with the assessment of Frederick Douglas that it is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men as I spent a significant part of my life volunteer-ing in a prison ministry and also at the county juvenile hall. I understand that a lot of people grew up in a troubled home, ran with the wrong crowd, and made stupid decisions that ended up ruining forever their lives and the lives of others, including their own fami-lies and that of their victims. But, the question re-mains, how does lowering the classification of these crimes help break this cycle? It doesn’t! First Published in the Santa Barbara News Press

Proposition 47: Recipe For Risk Free Crime Sprees

By Andy Caldwell

Of Measure P, Santa Barbara Luddites And The People’s Republic Of California

By Alex Alexiev

Technology (CCST) which found “no instances of harm,” as have numerous other studies of the over 1 million cases of fracking to date. This, according to the BLM, clears the way to resuming oil and gas leasing of public land in California next year.

What this could mean to California, which reportedly has the greatest shale resources in the country, becomes clear from a quick comparison with Texas. In 2013, the oil and gas industry there added 23,000 jobs paying an average of $103,000 per year and paid 13.6 billion to the state in taxes.

Elsewhere, the news for the green utopians is even less sanguine. It was just a few years ago that President Obama urged Americans to follow the lead of countries like Germany and Spain in renewable energy or risk falling hopelessly behind. Today the great European experiment in green energy requiring heavy government subsidies looks more and more like an unmitigated disaster. In Germany, electric energy now costs three times more than in America and 800,000 “energy-poor” households had



And so it has come to pass that California’s Santa

Barbara County has put on the ballot a ‘Measure P’ that, if voted in, would essentially do away with the oil and gas industry in the county. This at a time when America is becoming the envy of the world as the largest producer of oil and gas thanks to the shale revolution and the country with the cheapest energy among industrial nations, giving it an unbeatable comparative advantage.

What Santa Barbara County does or does not do is, of course, the business of its voters, but there is no escaping the fact that this is yet another proof that the once Golden State is marching bravely over the economic cliff. As in all similar paradigm-changing political efforts, the true objective of this measure is carefully camouflaged behind noble-sounding if fraudulent calls for clean water and air by prohibiting “high intensity petroleum operations,” such as hydro-fracturing (fracking) and steam injection. Yet, even a perfunctory look at the “water guardians,” as proponents of the measure call themselves, reveals a dyed-in-the-wool, anti-capitalist, motley crew of democrats, former comrades, green fruitcakes and assorted nuts of many colors. Absent among them for the most part are labor unions, half a dozen of which fill the ranks of the opposition alongside firefighters, cops and chambers of commerce.

This last point may be the real answer as to why the “guardians of water” are trying to outlaw a legitimate and promising industry. It is an act of desperation, for the Left sees its fondest dream of defeating capitalism through the false promise of green nirvana blown away by the economic rationality of the shale revolution. And this is the case even in a state with a governor called Moonbeam, where oil production is now less than half of what it was 30 years ago, where electricity costs 50% more than the US average and where oil imports from the likes of Saudi Arabia and Ecuador are up 50% even as they have gone down 30% in the rest of the country. In what may be the coup-de-grace for Measure P, in late August, the US Bureau of Land Management released an extensive study of the effects of fracking and other techniques targeted by Measure P, by the California Council on Science and

Independent Optometrists

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805-925-1092

San Luis Obispo


Over the past few weeks, I have used various in-

stances of zoning violations to reveal the absurdities associated with local attempts to control the use of property. The cases involved the artist who was caught painting in her barn and the folks who run an animal rescue operation and who have been charged with operating an illegal petting zoo. Part of my con-cern with both of these issues has to do with the poli-cy that allows complainants to remain anonymous. I consider the right to face your accuser as being fun-damental to our country’s DNA and I also believe the complainant should have to prove they are being harmed by the alleged zoning violation. Last week, another egregious example of bureaucracy and exor-bitant control was manifest at the Board of Supervi-sors hearing.

The Crane Country Day School in Montecito was forced to apply for an emergency permit in order to remove an oak tree that was determined to present an imminent danger of toppling due to numerous de-fects. The tree had a hollow center, extensive root fungus and a four foot open crack in the trunk. In oth-er words, it was diseased and about to fall over dead! You would think that the property owner would have a right to remove this tree forthwith without con-ditions, but such was not the case! That emergency permit came courtesy of $2,623.31 fee plus an appli-cation for a Coastal Development Permit by a land use professional, a report from a certified arborist, a site map, notices to the neighbors and notices posted at the location of the tree! That my friends, is the

The Dead Tree Fee!

By Andy Caldwell

“permit path” to remove a tree that presents an immi-nent danger to children.

As a result of my asking the board to comment on this item, Supervisor Carbajal went into a canned speech about how everything needs to be balanced. After all, the citizens of Montecito approved the community plan by which oak trees are protected. Carbajal agreed the fixed fee seemed a little much but this may be what it costs to protect and preserve our communi-ty resources. I replied that no plan should be protec-tive of imminent dangers and no permit or fee should be required to remove the same!

At this same hearing, the Board of Supervisors con-sidered an item that would petition the State legisla-ture to allow them to charge more money for various zoning violations. They want to be able to charge up to ten times the amount of a permit fee if a scofflaw didn’t apply for a permit and up to $25,000 if the activ-ity in question couldn’t be permitted at all. This will only make matters worse because the $2,623.31 fee for the tree is an example of why people don’t bother applying for permits! Some people simply can’t afford to ask for permission.

Meanwhile, the board continues to ignore a practical and reasonable good neighbor policy put forth by pri-vate citizens that could help to diffuse these ginned up land use controversies! First Published in the Santa Barbara News Press

How Dry Is My Valley

By Andy Caldwell

burns. Chaparral and brush take up an inordinate amount of water and their presence constitutes a serious fire hazard. Clearing the area of excess growth will benefit wildlife by increasing grass foraging and it will increase our area’s water supplies at the same time. A win-win situation.

Let’s resolve to quit studying things to death, spending an inordinate amount of money to confirm what we already know. We live in a semi-arid climate subject to multiple years of drought and we desperately need to retain as much rain water as we can. This holds true for all of California, not just one little valley in the North County. First Published in the Santa Barbara News Press


Next week, the Board of Supervisors is going to

consider initiating a four year/$2.5 million study of the San Antonio Groundwater basin. This basin serves Los Alamos, VAFB and numerous farming operations in the area. The county’s share for the study is $1.5 million, with the rest of the money coming from VAFB and the United States Geological Survey.

I can save taxpayers a boatload of time and money by informing the Board of Sups what the results of their survey will be right now. The basin’s water is used by urbanites, farmers, habitat uptake, and VAFB. It is replenished by rainfall. When we get a lot of rain, the basin is fine. When we have long periods of drought, we face declining water levels. There you have it. What else do we need to know?

So, now that we have accurately assessed the problem in forty seconds instead of four years, let’s get to work and spend the money on hand to actually alleviate our problem. There are several things we can do.

First, let’s survey the area in order to properly locate and build percolation basins and reservoirs to capture water in order to replenish the basin to the maximum extent possible. The reason this area has potential problems as does the Cuyama Valley (another area that was just studied to death) has to do with the fact that it is not served by any dams or reservoirs. There is absolutely no excuse for not capturing an overabundance of rain water and stream flows in extraordinarily wet years in order to maximize the use of this water when we need it most.

Second, let’s immediately explore the possibility of increasing the size of the pipeline that Santa Maria Energy plans on building to bring wastewater to the area for their oil operation. One enterprising ranching and farming family has already made arrangements to tap into this water in order to sustain their agricultural operation. This water may not be able to be used on all crops grown in our area, but it is fine for pasture land, at a minimum. And, there remains a possibility that a cooperative arrangement with Santa Maria Energy could facilitate cleaning the water to a higher standard that would allow it to replenish the basin and be used for additional crops.

Third, lets reinitiate a vigorous policy of prescribed

Thursday, November 6th

MOSCOW BALLET’S ROMEO & JULIET

Thursday, November 13th MC MAMMER

Thursday, November 20th

CULTURE CLUB

Volume 2 Issue 1 0 COLAB Magazine Page 1 2

Robert Graboyes Ph.D is a research fellow who

specializes in health economics. He recently wrote a piece explaining why a repeal and replace strategy to deal with the faltering Affordable Care Act is “hopelessly utopian, strategically suicidal, emotionally deadening, operationally hollow and needlessly parti-san”.

In essence, Graboyes contends that most of the sug-gested fixes to Obamacare is just more of the same in that it doesn’t change the flawed paradigm which pre-vents us from innovating our health care system which would require us to address government inter-ference and intransigence. In other words, we can’t rely on government to help solve our health care prob-lems because government itself is a big part of the problem.

Specific structural problems Graboyes identifies in-clude wasteful Medicare formulas, slow and skewed drug and device approvals from the Food and Drug Administration, and the resistance to change from the people who are empowered by government to control and comprise the status quo.

What I really liked about Graboyes suggestions to fix healthcare are his two reference points of the fortress and the frontier. He describes the fortress as the ha-ven of those who fear risks and protect insiders. The frontier is the place to be for those to tolerate risk and welcome competition.

Graboyes likens health care in 2014 to where comput-ers were in 1964. Graboyes points out that what real-ly revolutionized computers did not come out of the board rooms (fortress) of corporate America but gar-ages (frontiers) in the Silicon Valley. He then goes on to explain that the thing standing in the way of techno-logical transformation of medicine is a regulatory jug-gernaut that stifles innovation and competition. He cites a number of examples of radical medical break-throughs that are being stymied from being brought to the market by regulatory burdens ostensibly put in place to protect the public.

The main question we need to ask ourselves is how much protection from the government are we willing to tolerate if the so-called protections actually increase risk to society? The FDA serves to protect the public in two primary ways. The agency guards against meds, procedures and devices that present a danger

Medicine’s New Frontier

By Andy Caldwell

in and of themselves that outweigh the supposed ben-efit of employing the same. And, the agency seeks to prevent ineffective treatments from being foisted on the unsuspecting public.

In practical terms, this means the agency requires years of testing, that can cost billions of dollars, be-fore they allow products to come to market. Yet, the current system does not completely shield us from unintended consequences of harmful side effects de-spite the rigorous requirements in place. In the mean-time, we prevent wide-spread experimentation, in the form of the tried and true research method of trial and error, from being employed on a mass scale in real time.

As a society, we need to realize that seeking to elimi-nate all risk in the market place is congruent with sti-fling innovation, production, and progress. A risk-free society remains stuck in an ill-fated rut of perpetual mediocrity. First Published in the Santa Barbara News Press

What’s Better For The Environment Than Capitalism?

By Andy Caldwell

oligarchies, despots, and tyrants who rape, pillage and plunder their people and resources on a daily basis for personal gain? Moreover, even the developed countries with absolutely atrocious environmental records, namely China and Russia, are already run by socialist and communist regimes. Conversely, Europe and North America, which still have a semblance of capitalistic free enterprise, employ the best environmental practices on the planet.

How can these activists and academics not realize that the very same 1% of the world’s wealthiest people, who comprise even the upper echelons of their own movement, are at the same time positioning themselves to take advantage of the growing markets in China and India, despite the fact that the results will be exponentially more greenhouse gas emissions?

For example, did you know that for every ton of greenhouse gas we propose to reduce here in America that the rest of the world will increase their output by sixteen tons? The world’s emerging economies are intent on growing and to grow they need to consume more energy. Consuming energy, with the notable exception of nuclear power, means more carbon emissions. China’s economy is growing so fast that all our emission reductions will simply offset 13.5 days of their output. Ironically, they are utilizing the same energy that could have helped our own economy grow! First Published in the Santa Barbara News Press


You can call them useful idiots or crash dummies,

take your pick. Regardless, it is a shame that so many people in America are being taken for a ride by the very people they claim to loathe at the expense of their own future and our nation’s vitality.

A little over a week ago, several thousand people held a rally in New York City to demand system change not climate change. What exactly does that mean? One protest banner summed things up quite nicely. The banner read, “Climate change is the symptom. Capitalism is the problem. Socialism is the cure.” Another read, “End Capitalism Before It Ends Us”.

This very same philosophy is taught to UCSB students by Professor John Foran who proudly attended the rally. He believes our core problem has to do with the fact that capitalism is dependent upon consumerism and consumerism puts too many demands on the planet’s finite resources. Therefore, capitalism is what ails the planet. He wants a new world order based on something other than free market enterprise. This crusade is a version of the Occupy Movement with an ecological twist.

Another major proponent of this philosophy is Bill McKibben who created the organization 350.org. 350.org Santa Barbara is the primary force behind local ballot Measure P which will shut down our local oil and gas industry in order to make a statement to the rest of our country and the world that we are committed to living a fossil free existence.

To tell you the truth, it is really hard for me to believe that academics like Foran and the activists behind Measure P, that is the leaders of this movement, are really as naive and gullible as they seem to be. The only other possible explanation is that they are simply hiding their real goals as they seek to deceive, exploit, and manipulate the unsuspecting masses. The point here is why blame companies for producing products demanded by consumers sold at market prices? Why not hold the consumers directly responsible for their own insatiable appetites and lifestyles? Foran and McKibben, et al, should explain their reticence to do that!

They should also explain how they are saving the planet from capitalism when in reality most of the undeveloped countries in the world are run by

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guards, billboard inspectors, school security guards, cooks at prisons, etc.—are eligible for the “3 percent at 50” plan. That means they receive 3 percent of their final pay times the number of years worked, and it is available to them at age 50. (It’s usually calculated on base pay and not overtime, but overtime counts in some jurisdictions.) Thus, if a Newport Beach life-guard earns $150,000 a year, after thirty years he re-ceives 90 percent of that pay—or $135,000 a year—for the rest of his life and his spouse’s life. The retire-ment ages are so low that in some cities taxpayers are paying for an entire second ghost workforce be-hind the one that’s actually doing the job. (New York City already is past that tipping point, as taxpayers there pay more retired cops than active ones.)

Pension funds such as CalPERS invest the retirement contributions paid by workers or their employers (in many agencies, workers don’t contribute a cent to their own retirements) in stocks and bonds. They guess at how well those investments will do. The higher the forecast returns, the better funded the sys-tem; the lower the predicted returns, the bigger the “unfunded liabilities.” If things go well, the public em-ployees split up the loot. If they don’t go well, taxpay-ers must backfill the losses.

Union activists insist the average California pension is in the low $30,000s, but that includes people who re-tired eons ago and ones who worked only a short time in the system. The formulas are the formulas, and they have increased dramatically since the late 1990s.

(Continued from page 4) Some workers have figured out pension-spiking gim-micks, as well, ways to work the rules to inflate their retirements even further.

It’s also important to note that pensions are guaran-teed against any reductions once they have been granted. “Pension payments are senior obligations of the state to its employees and accordingly have priori-ty over every other expenditure except Proposition 98 [K-14 education] expenditures and arguably even be-fore debt service,” said David Crane, former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s chief pension adviser, in 2010 testimony before the state senate. Crane is a self-styled progressive Democrat, yet he is outraged at the way CalPERS has gamed the system—to the detriment of every public service. “All of the conse-quences of rising pension costs fall on the budgets for programs such as higher education, health and hu-man services, parks and recreation and environmen-tal protection that are junior in priority and therefore have their funding reduced whenever more money is needed to pay for pension costs,” he added.

This isn’t just a dire projection. Cities across the state are facing massive infrastructure breakdowns and they lack the money to fix them. Consider this picture painted by the New York Times earlier this year: “The scene was apocalyptic: a torrent of water from a rup-tured pipe valve bursting through Sunset Boulevard, hurling chunks of asphalt 40 feet into the air as it closed down the celebrated thoroughfare and inundat-ed the campus of the University of California, Los An-geles.” The key point was buried deeply in the news


California Faces Death By Pension Cont.


story: “And here, as in other cities, the demand for public works comes as the costs of municipal pension plans are shooting up—a confluence that has alarmed business leaders.”

Even when cities go belly up, they can’t dislodge the main expense that is pushing them over the brink, thanks to the power of CalPERS and to the elected officials who owe their seats to the state’s muscular public-employee unions. Three recently bankrupt cit-ies—Stockton, Vallejo, and San Bernardino—city offi-cials came up with recovery plans that did not touch public-employee pensions. City officials preferred in-stead to stiff bond-holders, raise taxes on residents, and slash city services. I know Stockton well—and that beautiful old Gold-Rush city on the edge of the California Delta is falling apart because of a lack of public services. Vallejo officials publicly stated that they were unwilling to challenge CalPERS, which holds that all pension promises must be paid in full come hell or municipal bankruptcy. San Bernardino halted its payments to CalPERS, but eventually buck-led under to that agency’s threats. When exorbitant pensions for an elite class of government workers are protected at all costs, everything else suffers.

A few years back, these realities were dawning on the state’s leaders. Even Lockyer’s “reform on our terms” speech was in the context of needing to reform. Cali-fornia faced a general-fund budget mess, and alt-hough only a small portion of the budget directly goes toward pension payments, it highlighted the problem to voters.

In June 2012, the electorates in the state’s second- and third-largest cities—San Diego and San Jose—approved significant pension-reform initiatives. Both cities have solid Democratic voting majorities, but both measures passed with around 70 percent sup-port. San Jose’s Democratic Mayor Chuck Reed pointed to his city’s 350-percent increase in pension costs over the past decade and to the declining public services. He championed the city’s reform as a model that could be followed in other struggling California cities.

Indeed, the public’s concern over pension debt was so noticeable that polling showed it endangering Gov-

(Continued from page 14)

ernor Jerry Brown’s signature initiative for the Novem-ber ballot—a large tax hike to help fill a red-ink-stained budget. Voters wondered why they should entrust this government with more of their money if it wasn’t even tackling the problem of big debt.

Late in the session, the governor and legislature threw together a modest pension reform bill that basically ended the practice of pension spiking— inflating a public employee’s final salary to enhance his retire-ment payments for life. It was political window-dressing that helped Brown and his fellow union-backed legislators get their tax hike. They since have echoed the dishonest mantra: we reformed pensions and the system is fine!

They’ve also since claimed to have “fixed” the debts faced by the state’s second-largest pension fund, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, or CalSTRS. Because of complex statutory reasons, CalSTRS is dependent on the legislature to backfill any losses, whereas CalPERS can simply raises its contribution rates on participating cities.

It became clear that CalSTRS would go belly up in




thirty years if the legislature didn’t start sending anoth-er $5 billion or so its way annually. So Brown and company concocted another plan to ratchet up state contributions. But it, too, was largely phony. Under the plan, the state sends a pittance extra each year to CalSTRS, with the really large bumps in contributions pledged to take place years from now when it will be someone else’s problem.

Frankly, Brown, Democratic legislative leaders, and even the courts have been doing everything to derail any manner of reform.

The courts gutted the most significant part of the San Jose initiative. And while San Diego continues to im-plement its reform, Brown’s appointees to the union-controlled Public Employment Relations Board have been suing the city to stop the voter-approved meas-ure. PERB claims the public vote was illegal because the city first had an obligation to negotiate with the unions representing the new workers who will face lower benefit levels. Union demands even trump the right to vote, in the administration’s view.

Furthermore, a judge in Ventura County pre-emptively halted an election that would have asked voters to reform that county’s pension system. A Sacramento County judge even tossed the portion of the CalSTRS reform that required teachers to pitch in a little more toward their pensions (in exchange for vesting other benefits, given that it is illegal in California to reduce public-employee benefits without giving something equal or greater in exchange).

In late August, the CalPERS board—you know, the same board run by union activists and union-controlled politicians—voted on a measure that effec-tively obliterates even the modest pension reform that Brown and company passed as a tax-raising window dressing.

Here’s how it works: Currently, existing state and local employees get all sorts of special pay. There are nine-ty-nine extra-pay categories, most of which should induce mockery and anger. Librarians, for instance, are paid extra for helping library patrons find books. Police are paid extra for driving alone in patrol cars. Fire chiefs get special management pay. Gardeners


get paid extra for fixing sprinklers. Those categories have existed since the 1990s, but a few years ago CalPERS decided that they should also be used when it’s time to calculate an employee’s pension—thereby inflating the final base pay and ensuring higher pen-sion benefits for many years to come.

Brown’s ballyhooed reform applied only to new hires. So the CalPERS board passed regulations that allow these ninety-nine categories to be used in a pension-spiking bonanza for these new hires, too. It seemed like a giant middle finger to Brown, although the gov-ernor’s reaction suggests that he wasn’t upset by the scam.

Brown is joined at the hip with the unions, even if he talks a good game about fiscal responsibility. He claimed to be outraged by the CalPERS decision, but of the ninety-nine categories used in the scheme, he said that he only objected to one. He has yet to follow




even this half-hearted protest with any serious action. In other words, he seems fine with a CalPERS rule that destroys any gains made by his own pension re-form, even as he championed an end of pension spik-ing during his gubernatorial debate.

It keeps getting worse. In September, the California Supreme Court gave CalPERS the OK “to sue credit-rating giants Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s for hun-dreds of millions of dollars over the top ratings they gave to investments that collapsed in 2007-08,” re-ported the San Francisco Chronicle.

CalPERS is blaming the credit agencies for its poor performance, which has led to higher-than-expected unfunded pension liabilities. This really is something when you consider what CalPERS has been promis-ing taxpayers over the past many years. In 1999, for instance, CalPERS pressured the legislature to pass a massive pension increase—and to do so quickly and without all the normal committee hearings and vetting sessions. That CalPERS action has led to the bulk of the state’s current pension problems.

The law, SB 400, boosted California Highway Patrol pensions by 50 percent, instituting that “3 percent at 50” pension formula mentioned above. Legislators did so retroactively—meaning that even officers a day away from retirement got the boost going back to the day they started working. The law practically begged local governments to follow suit. I recall when even in conservative Orange County, Republican legislators tripped over themselves to offer the huge pension in-crease.

As Crane said in his senate testimony: “Promising that ‘no increase over current employer contributions is needed for these benefit improvements,’ and that CalPERS would ‘remain fully funded’ despite the in-creases, the CalPERS Proposal claimed that en-hanced pensions would not cost taxpayers ‘a dime’ because investment returns would cover the ex-pense.” Instead, it led to massive debts, billions of dol-lars in taxpayer expense, and obliterated public ser-vices.

Crane noted that CalPERS’s promises would have “required the Dow Jones to reach roughly 25,000 by

(Continued from page 16) 2009 and 28,000,000 by 2099 for no such deficiencies to rise.” He reminded senators that CalPERS never disclosed that its own employees would receive these massive pension increases.

CalPERS is suing the credit agencies, but no one is holding CalPERS accountable for the false infor-mation it provided in the capitol.

California pension reformers continue to come up with new ideas to rein in out-of-control spending, to protect public services, and to create a generous but sustain-able system. Every poll and indication shows that even the state’s Democratic electorate supports these efforts. A number of Democratic local officials such as San Jose’s mayor have the courage to try to reform their local systems. They are stymied at every turn by the union machine, and though they are a hardy group and they keep regrouping, it’s looking fairly hopeless.

Bankrupt cities are desperately afraid of standing up to CalPERS and its enormous political and legal might. Efforts to go around the machine and take the matter directly to voters via a statewide ballot meas-ure cannot get past the union favoritism. For instance, state Attorney General Kamala Harris gets to author the titles and summaries for all statewide ballot measures. Twice now, she has given such unfair bal-lot summaries to pension initiatives that even liberal editorial boards argued that they sounded as if they were written in the union hall.

What to do? In a recent verbal ruling, the federal judge overseeing Stockton’s bankruptcy said that pen-sions are not protected when cities go bankrupt—the first good news in a long time. It’s the only hope left to keep California from being doomed to a slow destruc-tion of its public services and an ev-er-increasing tax burden to fund these lush retirements. But maybe pol-iticians and voters in other states can take heed of the situation and learn that all is lost once the looters are given complete control of the treasury.

Steven Greenhut is the California columnist for U-T San Diego

First published in ‘The American Spectator ‘ October 29, 2014



Of Measure P, Santa Barbara Luddites And The People’s Republic Of California Cont.

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their electricity turned off for non-payment. The government is now drastically cutting down the renewable subsidies and encouraging the building of coal-fired stations. The road to green heaven there, it now seems, is paved with….lignite! In Spain, the government promise to solar


companies of 15%-20% profits guaranteed for 20 years was rescinded retroactively, leading to a collapse in the sector with investment shrinking by 90% and employment falling from 60,000 to 5,000 virtually overnight. Similar cuts are now being reported in Italy, Britain, Czech Republic etc as Europe tries to lick the self-inflicted wounds of its renewable folly.

Back in California, the Luddites of Santa Barbara are facing stiff opposition to their radical Measure P agenda and the long-entrenched democratic Congresswoman and anti-fossil fuel zealot, Lois Capps, for the first time faces a tough reelection challenge by conservative republican Chris Michum. Hard to believe as it is, it appears that common sense and economic rationality might sooner or later triumph even in the People’s Republic of California. Alex Alexiev, a resident of the California’s Central Coast is a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center (IASC) in Washington D.C.

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