Your future, America, under the Obama EPA-centric oligarchy...
THE PURPOSE: TAXATION AND LAND USE CONTROL
Los Angeles might require rainwater capture
Proposed law would apply to new home-building, larger developments and some redevelopment projects to prevent runoff from reaching the ocean. A builders group has voiced some objections.
February 01, 2010
By Susan Carpenter
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/01 ... -2010feb01
A proposed law would require new homes, larger developments and some redevelopments in Los Angeles to capture and reuse runoff generated in rainstorms.
The ordinance approved in January by the Department of Public Works would require such projects to capture, reuse or infiltrate 100% of runoff generated in a 3/4 -inch rainstorm or to pay a storm water pollution mitigation fee that would help fund off-site, low-impact public developments.
The fairly new approach to managing storm water and urban runoff is designed to mitigate the negative effects of urbanization by controlling runoff at its source with small, cost-effective natural systems instead of treatment facilities. Reducing runoff improves water quality and recharges groundwater.
Board of Public Works Commissioner Paula Daniels, who drafted the ordinance last July, said the new requirements would prevent 104 million gallons of polluted urban runoff from ending up in the ocean.
Under the ordinance, builders would be required to use rainwater storage tanks, permeable pavement, infiltration swales or curb bump-outs to manage the water where it falls. Builders unable to manage 100% of a project's runoff on site would be required to pay a penalty of $13 a gallon of runoff not handled there -- a requirement the Building Industry Assn. has been fighting.
"The Building Industry Assn. is supportive of the concept of low-impact development and has invested a lot of time and energy in educating our members on those techniques and advancing those technologies," said Holly Schroeder, executive officer of the L.A.-Ventura County chapter of the association.
"But when we now start talking about using LIDs as a regulatory tool, we need to make sure we devise a regulation that can be implemented successfully."
Schroeder said that some building projects, such as those in downtown L.A. or areas where the soil is high in clay, would have difficulty with the 100% retention rule and that the $13-a-gallon mitigation fee is too high. A one-acre building on ground where runoff could not be managed on site, Schroeder said, could pay a fee as high as $238,000.
"We're seeking flexibility to reflect the site circumstance," she said.
At the urging of business groups opposed to an earlier draft, the Board of Public Works has acquiesced on some points.
"We worked out something with the business community that they can release the runoff if they first run the water over a high-efficiency bio-filtration system," Daniels said. "In other words, they have to clean it first."
The board also decreased the per-gallon mitigation fee from $20 to $13. The mitigation fees would fund public low-impact developments, such as the Oval Street project planned for Mar Vista, where 24,000 linear feet of parkway will be retrofitted with porous pavement, bio-retention basins and other water infiltration strategies designed to capture 2 million gallons of storm water that would otherwise flow to the ocean.
Onsite bio-filtration, catch basins and mitigation fees are neither "cost-effective" nor defensible absent pre-construction percolation testing to determine natural runoff. In other words, they are regulatory taxation burdens needlessly imposed upon land users under the guise of environmental protection.
Next...
STEALTH IMPLEMENTATION: REGULATORY "BACK DOORS"
EPA navigates new policy designating Los Angeles River a 'traditionally navigable waterway'
July 8, 2010
Molly Peterson
http://www.scpr.org/news/2010/07/08/navigable-river/
Federal authorities decreed the Los Angeles River worthy of environmental protection while visiting one of its feeder creeks in the city of Compton. The policy shift settles a longstanding dispute.
Over and over, public officials – mayors, a county supervisor and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency – repeated the same phrase at the announcement in Compton. "Traditional navigable waterway." EPA chief Lisa Jackson drew knowing laughter and applause when she spoke that shibboleth, a legal phrase freighted with meaning. "What does that mean?" she laughed, too. "That means that we recognize that this is water. Not only is this water, it needs to be thought of as part of our ecological system that services us."
The magic phrase invokes the primary law regulating water pollution in the United States. Jackson says restoration plans, use of the river by watercraft and other factors make clear that the L.A. River must meet the Clean Water Act's strict standards for surface water quality. "It means that the entire 51-mile watershed is protected and it means that areas like Compton Creek will have the full protection of our nation's clean water laws."
That protection was in doubt after the U.S. Supreme Court moved to narrow the Clean Water Act four years ago. The court's decision in a case called Rapanos v. United States confused federal agencies and Western states where snow-fed spring rivers dry up in summer heat. When a rancher sought to fill in some mountain streams that feed the L.A. river, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed that the river, most of it, wasn't a body of water at all – just concrete used for flood protection...
...The Natural Resources Defense Council's David Beckman says the EPA's move at this river spotlights the chaos the Supreme Court's decision created in Western water policy. "So what we need is a change to the Clean Water Act to restore the traditional definitions," Beckman says, "and to make it clear that waterways like the L.A. River and similar ones around the West – arid waterways – are fully protected just like on the east coast."
The NRDC and Beckman are among those pushing such a law. In the Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains, builders may feel the EPA's decision first. They'll need permits to build roads and homes near seasonal streams.
Heal the Bay's Mark Gold says that will slow growth. "That development pressure should be greatly reduced within those small tributaries that really make such a difference and make those mountains special, that also drain into the L.A. River watershed," Gold says.
At Compton Creek, graffiti tags and cinderblocks are in a dead heat with a stubborn stripe of green plants in the water. EPA administrator Lisa Jackson said her decision tips the scales for urban environmental justice. "We have to think about a river with a concrete bottom that flows through one of our nation's largest cities and through this lovely city as well," Jackson said. "We need to think about urban areas and we need to make it clear to the residents who live here – our neighbors – how important these issues are."
South L.A. high school students enrolled in Agua University showed how they're learning to test water quality at Compton Creek – one of the L.A. River's major downstream tributaries. In a second announcement Wednesday, L.A. County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas announced the purchase of four acres of soft-bottom river here. "It will facilitate and afford interesting opportunities with economic development," Ridley-Thomas said. "And it should be said with this opportunity comes a significant challenge."
The challenge remains the same – funding for restoration and pollution enforcement is scarce. The EPA's announcement sounds a hopeful note for state and county agencies in the Los Angeles River's watershed. Local activists say that hope will be fulfilled when money flows even bigger than the river does.
"...slow growth..."
"...when money flows..."
...environmental protection? Kiss my ass.
THE REALITY: LAME-DUCK CONGRESS/EXECUTIVE ORDER EXPANSION
The Stealth Obama Ocean Grab
Michelle Malkin
Aug 20th, 2010
http://frontpagemag.com/2010/08/20/the- ... cean-grab/
It’s not enough that the White House is moving to lock up hundreds of millions of acres of land in the name of environmental protection. The Obama administration’s neon green radicals are also training their sights on the deep blue seas. The president’s grabby-handed bureaucrats have been empowered through executive order to seize unprecedented control from states and localities over “conservation, economic activity, user conflict and sustainable use of the ocean, our coasts and the Great Lakes.”_
Democrats have tried and failed to pass “comprehensive” federal oceans management legislation five years in a row. The so-called “Oceans 21″ bill, sponsored by Democratic Rep. Sam Farr of California, went nowhere fast. Among the top reasons: bipartisan concerns about the economic impact of closing off widespread access to recreational fishing. The bill also would have handed environmentalists another punitive litigation weapon under the guise of “ecosystem management.” Instead of accepting defeat, the green lobby simply circumvented the legislative process altogether.
In late July, President Obama established a behemoth 27-member “National Ocean Council” with the stroke of a pen. Farr gloated: “We already have a Clean Air Act and a Clean Water Act. With today’s executive order, President Obama in effect creates a Clean Ocean Act.” And not a single hearing needed to be held. Not a single amendment considered. Not a single vote cast. Who gives a flying fish about transparency and the deliberative process? The oceans are dying!
The panel will have the power to implement “coastal and marine spatial plans” and to ensure that all executive agencies, departments and offices abide by their determinations. The panel has also been granted authority to establish regional advisory committees that overlap with existing regional and local authorities governing marine and coastal planning.
No wonder the anti-growth, anti-development, anti-jobs zealots are cheering. The National Ocean Council is co-chaired by wackadoodle science czar John Holdren (notorious for his cheerful musings about eugenics, mass sterilization and forced abortions to protect Mother Earth and for hyping weather catastrophes and demographic disasters in the 1970s with his population control freak pals Paul and Anne Ehrlich) and White House Council on Environmental Quality head Nancy Sutley (best known as the immediate boss of disgraced green jobs czar/self-avowed communist Van Jones).
Also on the new ocean panel:
— Socialista and energy/climate change czar Carol Browner, last seen bullying auto company execs to “put nothing in writing, ever” and threatening to push massive cap-and-trade tax hikes during the upcoming congressional lame duck session.
— Dr. Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a former high-ranking official at the left-wing Environmental Defense Fund, which has long championed drastic reductions of commercial fishing fleets and recreational fishing activity in favor of centralized control.
— Attorney General Eric Holder, who will no doubt use his stonewalling expertise to shield the ocean council’s inner workings from public scrutiny.
— Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who apparently doesn’t have enough to do destroying jobs through his offshore drilling moratorium, blocking onshore development and wreaking havoc on the energy industry.
Given Salazar’s fraudulent book-cooking in support of the administration’s offshore drilling moratorium (Remember: Obama’s own appointed scientists blasted the Interior Secretary for unilaterally contradicting and misrepresenting their conclusions.), his comments on the new ocean grab are more threat than promise: “With two billion acres we help oversee on the Outer Continental Shelf, Interior is a proud partner in this initiative, and we look forward to helping coordinate the science, policies and management of how we use, conserve and protect these public treasures.”
“Helping coordinate the science,” as interpreted by Obama’s Chicago-on-the-Potomac heavies, means doctoring, massaging and ramming through whatever eco-data is necessary “to reduce conflicts among uses, reduce environmental impacts, facilitate compatible uses, and preserve critical ecosystem services to meet economic, environmental, security and social objectives.” Translation: drastically limiting human activity from coastal areas to seabeds to achieve the “social objective” of appeasing the enviros and their deep-pocketed philanthropic funders.
Even New York Sen. Charles Schumer slammed the administration’s junk science-based fishing limits at a meeting this week between NOAA’s Lubchenco and Long Island recreational fishermen. Draconian regulations, he said, according to the New York Post, “put the industry on death’s door.” Now, the same forces behind such job destroyers will have free reign over a national ocean policy established by administrative fiat. Viva la Summer of Wreckovery
