Real nice
The cities and counties of the San Joaquin Valley have been promoting rampant growth at the expense of the common air quality and asthma for children and elders for 30 years. Part of the reason they get away with it is because their officials control the regional air pollution control district. Within a week of his virtual sponsorship of a proposed 1,200-acre auto-racing facility, including eight tracks designed to draw visitors from a 100-mile radius of central Merced County, former Chairman of the Merced County Board of Supervisors Mike Nelson was appointed to the regional air board.
Last night, before a city council that will shortly decide on a WalMart distribution center that will draw at least 1,000 diesel truck trips a day, the air district executive director had the gall to describe Merced air as "virtually clean." While even the council members would have had trouble choking that down, his real argument was that he estimated that $2 billion in federal highway funds were at stake if the air district did not accept the worst air quality standard the Environmental Protection Agency until 2023 bestows rather than rush to clean up the air quality by 2013.
When it was suggested that, via the politicians on the board, Valley air quality policy was really controlled by business interests (finance, insurance and real estate [FIRE]), the executive director righteously defended business, saying it stood to lose $20 billion under new air pollution laws.
We just love to hear those rhetorical billions thrown all around City Hall.
A representative for Moms Clean Air Network led the attack against FIRE propaganda, quoting the American Lung Association's 2007 report, ranking Merced the sixth highest city in the nation for ozone. By chance, this is about the ranking Merced has for mortgage foreclosures and sub-prime loans in jeopardy.
This fight is going to take more than testimony before bought-and-sold local politicians, or even apple-pie tossing parents of asthmatic children. The Moms are going to have to learn that if you can't break bread with the politicians and sue them the next morning, asthma rates for their children and for their parents will just keep rising. The Mother's Milk in this game is the same-old, same-old cash, courtesy of finance, insurance and real estate interests.
We can understand the desire nice people have to believe nice visions. We want to believe that our Valley towns and cities still hold out some care for the common good and that we can still bury our differences and speak with One Voice to the real enemies (according to our leaders) in state and federal government, enemies who plot 24/7 to steal from the Valley, impoverish our people, lower our quality of life, deny our children opportunity, etc. Of course, THEY have always been after our water.
The problem is that nice is not always the same thing as true.
Top finger pointer of the City Hall event was Councilman Bill Spriggs, chairman of the unsuccessful Measure G campaign to hike sales taxes to develop funds to match federal highway funds to build more highways and expressways in Merced, to encourage more growth as well as service the growth Merced city and county permitted on the come, hoping for those highway funds despite air quality that is a national scandal. Spriggs blamed our dangerous air quality on the Bay Area's failure to build affordable housing, thus causing massive commuter traffic, for our air pollution problem. Last year the National Association of Homebuilders and Wells Fargo Bank ranked Merced and Modesto the fourth and fifth least affordable housing markets in the nation. There were no Bay Area cities in the top 10 least affordable US housing markets. Salinas ranked third. This pathetic apologist for local development interests with national and international ties is peddling a line of the well known substance. This line is intended to make the local citizen feel better -- maybe even nice -- about our poor, overwhelmed but nice city council that so valiantly looks out for our interests. Neither city council members more county supervisors can be held responsible for permitting all the growth. It is a nice belief. It is nice to believe that we can come together and reason with our elected officials and their staff about issues that threaten our common health and safety.
It's not true, but it's real nice.
But, lest the ordinary citizen become dismayed, that nice new UC Merced campus is planning a nice medical school to do some real nice research on respiratory disease. And that's why so many people want to move to Merced to live. And, if that isn't nice enough, UC/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory wants to put a real nice biosafety-4 biowarfare lab in the hills behind Tracy to do nice studies on the most deadly disease known to man and beast. Real nice.
Badlands editorial staff
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5-8-07
Merced Sun-Star
Some want polluted Valley air cleaned up sooner...Leslie Albrecht
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/local/story/13562018p-14163799c.html
Valley's polluted air drew sharp criticism at Monday night's City Council meeting...Air District Executive Director Seyed Sadredin presented the new cleanup timeline to the council as part of a 58-city tour he's making to promote the plan...told the council that Merced's air is "virtually clean," and that a child born today breathes air that is 50 percent cleaner than 15 years ago. But the region is still plagued by dirty air...conditions that we have no control over," such as the Valley's bowl-like geography. Lisa Kayser Grant, a member of the Moms Clean Air Network, noted that the American Lung Association's 2007 State of the Air Report ranked Merced as the sixth most ozone-polluted city in the nation.