[Occupymendocino] Rex Gressett about the Coastal Commission & the city, not totally accurate, but close

[Eduardo Oberweiser]

Thanks Rex,

Four of us (including Leslie Kashiwada our envronmenal science expert) went
to a Coastal Commission in Ukiah in November and registered our problems
with the Hare Creek atrocity. Myself, Ann Rennacker and Sheila Dawn Tracy
were the others. If we are to have any chance at stopping this scam, I
think we all need to flood the Coastal Commission with phone calls and
letters and demands that they come here. Screw them and their too busy
bullshit.

Ed Oberweiser

On Sun, Jan 29, 2017 at 7:59 AM, Annemarie <aweibel at mcn.org> wrote:

> from Anderson Valley Advertiser
>
> FORT BRAGG NOTES
>
> by Rex Gressett
>
> You can't trust the government. Duh. Apparently you cannot trust any of
> them, and least of all the Coastal Commission. Does everyone know this
> except me?
>
> In Fort Bragg the city Development Director has been conducting a series
> of meetings behind closed doors with the Coastal Commission effectively
> acting as the working representative of Group 2 developers. They are
> meeting to slide a shopping center quietly into existence. They are doing
> it behind our backs because they have to. They are trying to get a
> grotesque project safely past the scrutiny and the outrage of the people of
> the city because the people were annoyingly effective. Now they have
> brought out the long knives. They want a shopping center dammit. It is not
> a clever project I’ll admit. It is usually described as big dumb and ugly
> and in reference to conscious and intelligent city planning: stupid. But
> they want it. They know how to get past mere public agony.
>
> The people of the city of Fort Bragg and particularly the folks in the
> area proximate to the city heard about this elephantine outrage when it was
> first proposed about a year ago. At the last minute and by a kind of
> miracle the community stopped it in its tracks.
>
> Derick Hoyle, Mark Hannon, Teresa Rodriguez and Stan Miklose, the folks
> appointed to the planning commission were set up by city development
> director Marie Jones like bowling pins to put this wickedly bad idea
> through the net before too many people got wind of it. They were all ready
> to do their job they way they were instructed.
>
> Social media screwed that up. Prior to that memorable night two or three
> people in attendance at a planning commission meeting was about all you
> would expect. Listserve, Wellness and mendocinosports+ packed the hall that
> night and started something altogether new in local politics. If things had
> been different Fort Bragg would have lost this pristine and highly valued
> land right then.
>
> When the developers failed in an easy slam-dunk the Coastal Commission got
> into the act and started spinning it with an experienced sure hand.
>
> I humbly admit that I once stupidly believed that the Coastal Commission
> had our backs. I naively thought that they were a kind of noble agency,
> surely impartial, established and concerned to protect the interests of the
> people.
>
> They will never get this past the Coastal Commission, I would say to
> people when we walked on the great green grassy expanses of the property,
> watching the surf, hearing it, feeling the wind from open spaces on our
> faces. Watching the wild turkeys and deer and the birds. I had a kind of
> Boy Scout confidence in the original vision of the people of the state when
> they established a special commission as a watchdog and guardian for
> California's beloved and vulnerable coastal beauty. I believed a lie.
>
> The Coastal Commission will not meet with the people of the city. They
> will not come here. They do not want to know what the public temperature
> is. They will not listen to what the people have to say, unless we say it
> in proscribed fashion and don't upset them with out of the box enthusiasm.
> They have a system to keep public opinion carefully controlled. They will
> listen to us, if we come to them on bended knee and are careful not to
> upset their well-paid bureaucratic serenity.
>
> The Coastal Commission has been invited to come to Fort Bragg and talk to
> us. We asked them to attend our town hall. In fact we begged pleaded and
> implored. No dice. They will be invited again before this is over by
> various members of the Fort Bragg city council and by the county board of
> supervisors but they will not come. Bob Merrill, Coastal Commission head
> honcho in the Eureka office, put me straight to the way things are. They
> don't care, they don't have to.
>
> Marie Jones our development director is paid by the city but works for
> developers to advocate, manipulate, prevaricate, and weasel into existence
> projects opposed by community consensus such as this one. That is her
> actual job. She is writing the EIR, a document that is a kind of a tip of
> the hat to the people so they can feel better before they are discounted by
> the greater efficacy of real money.
>
> It is a very theatrical process, filled with illusion and falsehood and
> guided by the Coastal Commission. The Process is a way to stall the people
> and fleece the developer until the project has been suitably massaged.
> Folks get to participate by writing comments into this document. How does
> that work? Mr. Merrill? What do you do with those comments before you throw
> them away? According to what criteria are they evaluated? Do you count them
> up, pro and con? Do you peruse them for poetical sentiment? Do you look for
> good grammar and penmanship? Do you search for new ideas that no one
> thought of before and perhaps chart those on a graph? Do you put them into
> a shoebox and shake them and then pull one out? Or do you just read them
> and throw them away?
>
> Mere comments are not adequate for the developers. They get meetings. They
> have had quite a few already. The people of the city that the Coastal
> Commission is busy cheating (that would be you) pick up the tab to send the
> development director (developer advocate) up to hobnob with Mr. Merrill. We
> pay for lunch. They must love that.
>
> The Coastal Commission and the developers have it all pretty well worked
> out already. I spoke with Crista Faust who is Bob Merrill’s associate at
> the Commission tasked with driving in the last nails. She told me she had
> seen a revised version of the project and told them (I guess she means the
> developers or their representatives) that it “looked alright.”
>
> When outraged citizens stopped a project that no one wanted we thought for
> a golden moment we had won something.
>
> We believed that the overwhelming logic of the property would count. We
> expected everyone would understand it was rare, nay unique. We thought they
> would understand that it is an ocean accessing green space beloved by all
> the people of our city and all of the people of the region. It did unite us
> as a community. And maybe that will mean something before the end. I am
> very certain it showed city hall what we could do with social media.
> Outrage generated unprecedented numbers self equipped with unstoppable
> community attitude.
>
> But really it got us nothing. The development team did not panic. They
> have money and they spent it. Hell, they were ready for us as a matter of
> course. They have done the dirt on lots of towns and communities. We just
> thought we won. Now we know. We know also that the Coastal Commission we
> were counting on is utterly unconcerned with our community. We know now
> that the agency of the people of California specifically tasked with
> protecting precisely this kind of property in exactly this kind of a
> situation has no problem telling the people of the city they are too busy
> or too engaged to meet with us, or are they saying that they don’t need to
> talk to us because they already know what we think from our stack of
> comments? I guess that is it.
>
> They call this slide behind our backs “The Process.” They want us to trust
> it. They are indignant when we don't. But they are also very clear that The
> Process does not include community meetings, and they are not open to a
> compromise.
>
> “The Process” is a cakewalk for the professionals who make their daily
> bread circumventing the Coastal Act. When you think you can trust the
> Coastal Commission walk up and take a look at the developments that front
> the beach north of Mckerricher. Go count the McMansions with their
> backyards fronting the ocean. When this fight with Group 2 is over and if
> we lose, which we might, then we will know how things work a little better.
> Of course for Fort Bragg it will be too late.
>
> When they are loading armored cars outside the new strip mall to take our
> money out of the city (as they do to the tune $45 million bucks a year from
> Safeway) we can still grumble. When you tell your grandkid that you used to
> be able to see and to smell and to hear the ocean from a hill that was once
> right where this parking lot is now, When you tell them wild turkeys lived
> here… What will they say? When the money boys and their operatives at the
> Coastal Commission have botched and degraded perhaps the most singularly
> defining piece of paradise we have in our little town, what will we have
> left? I don't know. But our illusions about the Coastal Commission will be
> history.
>
> ---
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