I went to a San Diego city council meeting today to vote against a seemingly pro-environmental choice.
To be clear, I'm a total nature loving tree hugging hippie. In this particular case, that of saving vernal pools so that fairy shrimp can continue living their short and ephemeral lives, I'm all in favor of the environment, right down to a land-bound shrimp that, whether it lives or dies, probably won't ever effect my material life.
With that said, I walked in and ceded my time to speak over to my friend Dave Hogan, an environmentalist and vernal pool expert. As a resident, you can give your time (1 minute per resident, the city is stingy with time limits for public commentary) to another speaker.
He spoke eloquently with the miserably short time he had explaining that the Vernal Pool Habitat Conservation Plan had a nice sounding name but was actually a piece of legislation written in favor of developers. That's why I oppose it.
It puts greed over good, money over nature.
The city council listened to him explain that their own planning board was misrepresenting the costs of this plan by 14 million dollars (WTF!!!?), listened to him calmly explain that these vernal pool habitats are a jewel in the San Diego environmental crown and one of our last pieces of fragile nature left to preserve, and then the fuckers voted to bulldoze the pools and plant more houses instead of caretake vernal pools.
By the way, where else can you find vernal pools that have the San Diego Fairy Shrimp (what a name!)?
Oh, nowhere else on the planet.
Yep, SD Fairy Shrimp are only found here in San Diego, in just 137 locations.
Mind you, this was after I'd listened to the City Council laugh (laugh!) at having to plan around an endangered migratory bird, show only mild embarrassment at having to rebuild an ADA (that's American Disabilities Act) ramp three (3!) times because the contractor couldn't get right, and admit that maybe they should have involved the lifeguards and all stakeholders in the building of a lifeguard tower and public restroom.
Weird how the lifeguards might actually have some input on a lifeguard tower, right?
By the way, the problem with the public restroom was that the builder they chose decided to design in small pipes with no garbage disposal, no way to grind up any one of a number of things the general public is known to throw into public toilets.
It's like me designing a house and using a garden hose to drain a sink, AND figuring, hey, this garden hose is wide enough, there's no need to build in a garbage disposal. What could possibly clog a garden hose?
Watching these hearings was a jolt.
It makes me sad to see such incompetence, ignorance, and apathy in our elected officials. Sure you can vote the bums out, but who but a bum wants to be voted in?
My hope is that this whole blockchain thing may actually someday hold people accountable for their rotten decisions, and reward or punish those responsible by tying their actions to a public ledger that (gasp) affects their actual job instead of just getting a pen-lashing on Steemit.
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Thanks for the upvote! Hopefully by all working together we can make the world a way better place.
Glad to hear we are not alone here in having the Department of Dumb Decisions being in charge of public decision making...
Not even close. It's wild, damn near any joke you can make about government (thousand dollar toilet seats, incredible incompetence, rebuilding something 3 times because you didn't plan) turn out to be not-jokes.
Your last paragraph is why Im here too!