bob Cuddy The Tribune
Declaring themselves “insulted” by a proposal considered lowball, the Board of Supervisors this week declined to shrink a fine levied for illegal grading that damaged an archaeological site adjacent to Mission San Miguel to $13,000 — down from $1.8 million first sought six years ago.
“There has been something done there that was wrong,” said Supervisor Frank Mecham, referring to the illegal grading, and there has to be genuine accountability, not the “kind of an insult” manifested in the $13,000 number.
Similar stories:
Tenacious neighbors delayed quarry in Santa Margarita
Tenacious neighbors delayed quarry in Santa Margarita
In what could be a preview of rural planning battles to come, a determined group of neighborhood opponents to a proposed North County quarry has managed to slow — although not kill — the project early on through a relentless, aggressive and well-researched attack.
“There has never been this level of interest in choosing a consultant,” said county senior planner John Nall. “Folks became a lot more informed. They grew to be very vocal.”
The project in question is the so-called Oster quarry, a proposed 60-acre hard rock and aggregate operation on a 260-acre parcel four miles east of Santa Margarita. The site would be located at 6660 Calf Canyon Highway — which is also Highway 58 — just east of the Salinas River bridge.
Los Osos woman loses lawsuit aiming to stop sewer project
Los Osos woman loses lawsuit aiming to stop sewer project
A Superior Court judge has ruled against a Los Osos woman seeking to stop the ongoing sewer project in Los Osos.
Judge Charles Crandall on Friday denied the assertion by Jiordana Stark that fees authorized to pay for delivery of sewer services were an illegal tax.
In his 12-page decision, Crandall characterized Stark’s legal arguments as inadequate. At one point he wrote “petitioner’s argument is entirely lacking in evidentiary or factual support.” Elsewhere, he called her case “frustratingly thin on content” and her arguments “vague.”
AP IMPACT: Some 9/11 charities failed miserably
AP IMPACT: Some 9/11 charities failed miserably
Americans eager to give after the 9/11 terrorist attacks poured $1.5 billion into hundreds of charities established to serve the victims, their families and their memories. But a decade later, an Associated Press investigation shows that many of those nonprofits have failed miserably.
Letters to the editor 4/3
Letters to the editor 4/3
Social Security fraud
Charles Krauthammer’s premise that Social Security should find new funding because we, the Unites States, can’t or won’t repay the money we borrowed from it is nonsense. The problem isn’t with Social Security or, as he puts it “unsustainable pension liabilities”— it is with the unsustainable borrowing from what would otherwise be a healthy social security system.
This fraud started with Reagan unlocking the lock box and has continued to the present. Note that all the reforms Krauthammer suggests for ‘saving’ Social Security are aimed at raising more revenue. What he doesn’t advocate is relocking the lock box. If the Treasury can’t and won’t pay back the bonds, wouldn’t the first step be to cut off lending? And if the Treasury can’t repay those bonds, why, despite the fictitious AAA rating, should we continue to allow it to borrow money from other sources?
Properties fail to attract bidders
Properties fail to attract bidders
Unable to find a taker for either its old Paso Robles courthouse or some land in the Carrizo Plain it is trying to unload, the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday postponed the respective auctions until September.
The board was hoping to auction off its former courthouse at 549 10th St, a 3,185-square-foot building that sits on a 15,682-square-foot lot. There are two modular buildings on the site.
The county set a minimum price of $450,000. The list price is $550,000. The county hopes to use the money to defray some of the costs of its new courthouse, which it opened in 2008.
The board’s decision is the latest episode in a long-running saga involving a would-be 58-unit housing project called Mission Gardens Estates.
The location — across Mission Street and the railroad tracks from the mission — is one of the few sites in the state where archaeologists can learn about “neophytes,” which are Indians preparing to become Christians.
But the developer graded illegally there on a scale that appalled archaeologists and Native Americans. The county has sought unsuccessfully for years to collect “mitigation” money.
The board’s refusal to go as low as $13,000, and applicant Coast National Bank’s refusal to negotiate, left the project in limbo.
Coast National Bank, which foreclosed on the property in 2008, has been trying to sell it, and lowering the long-standing “mitigation” or fine would make it more attractive to a buyer.
The bank had a potential buyer in tow Tuesday: Robert Laing of the Pacific Southwest Community Development Corporation, or PSCDC, who builds affordable housing.
The board’s decision followed a complex three-hour hearing that asked policy makers to weigh the importance of providing possible work-force housing against the importance of making developers pay for disturbing irreplaceable cultural resources.
It also touched on many other policy questions, as well as legal ones, as Coast National’s attorney Sophie Treder traded legal opinions with Whitney McDonald of the county Counsel’s Office.
The tangled Mission Gardens Estates project entered the public pipeline in 2003, when the earlier developer submitted an application to develop the site.
After the illegal grading came to light in 2005, the Planning Commission said that under the law the developer must pay to mitigate the damage or, as environmental planner Steve McMasters described it, pay to a “compensatory mitigation fund that (that would) offset the impact to cultural resources.”
The money collected would, generally, go toward education, mapping cultural resources and other such endeavors, distributed in a manner to be decided by a committee that included Native Americans.
The Planning Commission in 2006 calculated the damage done by the illegal grading at $1.8 million. The then-Board of Supervisors cut that in half.
Meanwhile, the project was moving forward on the planning front. Supervisors approved it in 2006. Then the economy went south, and in 2008 the bank foreclosed on the property.
Last year Coast National Bank, which still owns the property and still has approval for it, sought to change some of the conditions of approval. That led to Tuesday’s hearing.
Some of the proposed changes were relatively minor, such as fiddling with secondary access and tinkering with park fees.
But the greater part of the lengthy afternoon was devoted to the illegal grading and whether the bank should pay to mitigate it and, if so, how much.
Treder and other bank representatives argued that the previous contractor, Gordon Marshall, not the bank, graded illegally, and they shouldn’t be held fully accountable.
However, Supervisor Bruce Gibson noted that the bank had made the loan to the developer in fall of 2005, after the illegal grading had been made public. The Tribune ran a front-page article about it July 12, 2005.
If the bank didn’t know, it should have, several supervisors implied.
During the discussion, the bank pointed out that the county had a long-stated goal of providing work-force housing, which Laing said he might be able to do should he take over the project.
However, under questioning from Supervisor Jim Patterson, Laing could provide few specifics on where his financing would come from, whether he would limit the housing to low-income people, whether some of the homes might be rentals and similar questions.
When supervisors asked Laing if building the project was a sure thing, he said, “There are no guarantees in life.”
Supervisors also stressed the importance of acknowledging that, as Mecham put it, “There has been something done there that was wrong.” In addition to the site’s historic value, Mecham spoke about its spiritual importance for Native Americans.
Mecham asked the bank if it would settle for a $450,000 mitigation fee over five years, and Gibson, made wary by the extended legal back-and-forth between Treder and McDonald, added that the bank should also guarantee the county that it wouldn’t sue over the question.
Coast National said no on both counts. They also turned down Mecham’s suggestion that the board delay a decision and try to reach a middle ground.
“The board’s come a long way,” Patterson said. The bank “came to us with an ‘all or nothing’ proposal.”