Friday, October 25, 2002
By EDWARD SCHULZ
You owe readers an impartial review of the proposed new stream setback provision. The Oct. 8 letter you published from John Stephens offers glaring factual errors and alarmingly dissociative ravings as purported justification to enact a dangerous set of measures.
There are a number of exemptions from the new proposed setback provisions, but small parcel owners are nowhere listed as such. Mr. Stephens' letter states "Small parcel owners are exempt from these regulations." Mr. Stephens is completely and dangerously wrong. Small parcel owners face a veritable gauntlet of bureaucratic permission-asking and permit-seeking in order to do perfectly ordinary things they currently do as a matter of right
Notably, timber harvesting is exempt from these proposed provisions. But much of Mr. Stephens complaint is that wanton logging of old growth redwoods has impaired water quality -- in the Napa River watershed, we are supposed to infer. So why support "conservation regulations" that don't conserve the resource, namely timber?
Another Stephens complaint, "We have allowed the plow free rein and the coho salmon have vanished from the Napa River." What science-based inquiry connects free-running plows to disappearing fish is not shared. But I note that ongoing agricultural operations and agricultural replants are exempt from the new provisions. So why support "conservation regulations" that don't address the complaint? Those menacing plows are still going to threaten Mr. Stephens' sanity.
Let's see, for over 100 years, until very recently, various tanneries polluted the Napa River. All the gravel fines that once settled sediments and allowed the river to run clear were dredged out, and the replacement fines are now firmly trapped behind municipal dams. The urban stretches of the River, Napa Creek and other feeder streams are characterized by streamside displays of gut wrenching garbage, human excrement and eroded banks devoid of vegetation. But it's the plows that killed the fish. And the new "conservation regulations" deal with this atrocious urban assault? Sorry, cities, city projects and small-lot subdivisions are exempt.
The sad truth is that these "conservation regulations" aren't going to conserve anything so well as the lifetime employment by a new army of public officials who will be required to oversee the fee-taking, expert-opinion report submittal, permit processing and protocol interpretation that will be newly required. This vast new bureaucracy, hungry for a fattening fee-extraction structure, is danger to economic freedom, and private property rights.
Conspicuously absent from these new "conservation regulations" is a performance-based standard of any kind. Current Napa County stream bank setbacks could be improved with vegetation and runoff standards, which can be computed by density, slope and soil composition. This kind of performance-based standard is easily developed, (examples abound elsewhere in the United States), and should be applied uniformly to all streamside parcel owners. These would include all of the most egregious current ecological violators, who are proposed to be exempted from the new "conservation regulations" which Mr. Stephens incomprehensibly supports.
The Sierra Club should be leading the charge for enactment of meaningful, science-based conservation measures that lead to actual ecological improvement. Most parcel owners in the County would voluntarily improve any streamside condition that did not meet a legitimate performance-based standard. Currently there is no benchmark to measure from. The Sierra Club should be leading the charge to restore the Napa River gravel beds, the easiest, cost-effective and dramatic improvement to water clarity and fish spawning grounds. John Stephens is leading the charge into a parcel-owners wasteland that coddles the worst violators of the environment, requires unreal amounts of paper (cut more trees?), employs more public officials and achieves no specific environmental improvement.
That's worth repeating. The proposed "conservation regulations" achieve no specific environmental improvement. Enactment of this ordinance cannot be shown to improve water quality or clarity or quantity or anything else to any measurable degree. No real inquiry, no facts, no specific goals were established, no environmental impact report was done, so no one, least of all Mr. Stephens, is in any position to say the new ordinance will, for example, restore coho salmon. Far simpler measures, like restoring the gravel beds the fish used to spawn in, might reasonably accomplish that.
Educate people and dramatically wonderful things happen. Few wouldn't support a carefully reasoned program leading to demonstrable environmental gain. Bash them over the head with nonsensical, self-contradictory, inherently stupid fee-extraction schemes and people will respond in kind.
(Edward Schulz lives in Napa.)
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