Members of the San Joaquin Valley public would like to invite you to the first annual UC Pombozastan Pot Luck.
We’ve got the barrel; you bring the pork.
Public/private partnerships get preferential picnic tables behind gated, straw-bale walls, just like they did it at the old-time Condit Country extravaganzas.
The Valley public would like to invite you all to Merced to help us get this UC Merced 900-acre expansion past them damn federal environmental regulators. Our largest developer, the University of California Board of Regents, is having trouble getting a pesky little Clean Water Act permit out of the Army Corps of Engineers so they can build on land in a ESA designated critical habitat area containing the richest fields in the state of vernal pools, environment for 15 endangered species of flora and fauna, for which one cannot help but think a responsible, institution of public higher education would have secured a permit before commencing construction. The UC Regents are not supposed to be typical California fly-by-night developers.
But, who cares?
COME ON DOWN! Bring the People’s Money, we’ll run it through UC and it will pick up your tab. Stay anywhere, pay as much as you want for breakfast, lunch and dinner, rent only the most expensive cars — if you need further instructions we can refer you to UC consultants, who can teach you also how to add that absolutely mandatory 10-20 percent on every expense chit.
COME ON DOWN and see UC Merced, which the last state Senate Pro Tem called the “biggest boondoggle ever.”
“I don’t know why anyone would be surprised,” said Patrick Callan, president of the nonprofit National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. “It was just the wrong campus in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was pork-barrel politics and institutional arrogance that led us to this. There was a belief at UC that you could just hang a UC shingle out and that would attract students.”
And, hey, be sure to bring the People’s Money with you, because UC Merced wants all of it. UC’s talented team of tax-paid flacks and lobbyists can give you all the details. The effort will no doubt be headed by Rep. Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer –Merced Division. Surely, you know the Shrimp Slayer – he’s the guy who’s making Rep. RichPAC Pombo, Buffalo Slayer-Tracy’s war against the Endangered Species Act “bipartisan,” on behalf of a few developers, large landowners, financial institutions and realtors in their adjoining districts.
Down here we started calling them the “Pomboza” soon after they strolled arm-and-arm out of a little fundraiser at San Joaquin County developer Fritz Grupe’s ranch and split $50,000 in what Cardoza called an act of “aggressive cooperation.” It may not have been accidental that a few months later the Pomboza co-authored what is known in environmental circles as the Gut-the-ESA bill, now languishing in the Senate. What Cardoza calls aggressive cooperation, we call the Pombozation of the San Joaquin Valley.
COME ON DOWN TO POMBOZASTAN and watch Pombo and Cardoza pombozate the West’s federal resource agencies.
COME ON DOWN and bring us the People’s Money. We don’t have enough of it. You’ve no doubt read the Congressional report about how the San Joaquin Valley is poorer in some ways than Appalachia. We appreciate our subsidized water, our subsidized cotton, dairy and cattle industries, and all the health and human services aid you’ve been sending. But we need more of it, more and more and more of it. We can’t make it without more and more of the People’s Money down here in Pombozastan, the former San Joaquin Valley. And if we don’t get it, we’re going to pave over the largest, richest agricultural valley in the West.
So there!
COME ON DOWN!
Listen to the UC Merced Chancellor (until she quits at the end of the month)! We need a UC Merced research medical school down here to specialize in respiratory illnesses, cancer clusters, pesticide-related diseases, diseases related to contaminated ground water, drug addictions, rural mental illnesses and disorders arising from bovine flatulence here in the epicenter of the dairy industry in the nation’s top dairy state. Until recently, under the Bush administration, the fortunes of this industry were jealously guarded by Modesto’s own USDA secretary, Annie Veneman. Pledge the People’s Money to build out UC Merced, which will stimulate a tremendous amount of growth because it will be the anchor tenant for development down the east side of the Valley from Sacramento to Kern counties along a planned eastside Highway 65 and an Eastside Canal.
COME ON DOWN TO POMBOZASTAN and help replace Valley life with mega-dairy subdivisions-in-waiting and slurbocracy. And while you’re at it, explain why you’re doing it, because we really don’t know and the Pomboza won’t tell. Nevertheless, Cardoza provides thoughtful continuity for the slurbocracy from his top floor offices in the Merced County Administration Building.
COME ON DOWN! We know this all sounds a little grim, but we want to assure you that the Valley is a really funny place. We’ve got comedians galore here in Merced. Consider the UC Chancellor Until the End of the Month, Carol Tomlinson-Keasey, for example. She had the whole Valley rolling on the floor in helpless mirth this week when she told the McClatchy chain reporter:
“I needed to make (congressmen) aware that this is the beginning of the process,” Tomlinson-Keasey said. “People speak out all the time and say their opinion, (but) I have talked with the Corps, and they have assured me they will play by the rules.”
Choking back life-threatening guffaws, members of the public asked: “What rules could she possibly be talking about?”
Surely, she could not be talking about local, state or federal environmental law and regulation. Beyond urging the Pomboza onward to alter it to suit UC’s needs in eastern Merced County, she has no tolerance for it.
Surely, she could not be talking about the rules of good taste, whose university campus sponsors a yearly Fairy Shrimp Festival, hosted in its inaugural year by the son of a recently ousted provost.
Surely, she could not be talking about those rules of candor said to govern testimony before legislative committees.
Surely, she could not be talking about regulations governing the rehabilitation of wildlife, when she purloined a bobcat for the UC Merced mascot that should have been rehabilitated and released back into the wild.
Surely, she must be speaking about the UC RULE: UC is sovereign and gets what it wants.
Another great Merced comedian is the businessman Mr. UC Merced, Bob Carpenter, who appeared in the pages of the Los Angeles Times recently.
So why didn’t the university secure permission to build the entire campus before beginning work? “It’s easy to criticize after the fact,” said Bob Carpenter, a Merced resident who has helped with university planning for 18 years. “But you could argue that if you wait until all the I’s are dotted and all the Ts are crossed, probably no projects would ever get done.”
But then, the chancellor, not to be trumped in the comedy game by a mere UC Merced booster, even if Carpenter could be called, justly, The UC Merced Booster, got the last word:
“We’re contributing enormously to the community. We believe we deserve an Olympic gold medal, and not have every bump being foreseen as some Mt. Everest to climb.”
An Olympic gold medal, some would say, requires a sports team of some sort. The UCM Golden Bobcats are undefeated so far, but they remain in smoky backrooms rather than taking the field in any sport in which they would have to play by any rules other than their own.
UC built the first phase of the Merced campus without getting a Clean Water Act permit. They spent millions in state funds on conservation easements to mitigate for wetlands habitat, as the result of backroom deals in the state Capitol between the governor, congressmen, state legislators vying to see who was the Biggest Mr. UC Merced of them all, state and federal resource agency officials, The Nature Conservancy, the Audubon Society and other prominent state and national level environmental sluts.
Yet, today, when federal agencies look at these easements, they discover many of them aren’t on the right land and have no financial mechanism for monitoring. In some cases, landowners are under the impression they can take millions in public funds for easements yet refuse to let resource officials on the land to observe the condition of the natural habitat.
The chancellor has announced she plans to take a year off to write a book about the founding of UC Merced, before returning to teaching. However, some speculate that in the current crisis she will continue at the helm as Chief Bobcat Lobbyist. Historians will probably prefer legal briefs on the project to pure Bobcat flak anyway.
COME ON DOWN! The pombozated federal resource agencies are holding a raffle on our remaining natural resources, wildlife habitat and wetlands – piece by fragmented piece.
COME ON DOWN TO POMBOZASTAN! Watch the Developer Dutch Auction on San Joaquin Valley land-use planning.
COME ON DOWN! Watch the sales-tax increase sweepstakes so that the Valley can match funds with the federal government on new freeways, highways and loop roads to stimulate even more growth, as the rural county roads crumble before your eyes. Come on down and watch them fill the potholes in front of the Merced County Association of Governments office!
COME ON DOWN and learn the mystical process of making plans to make plans to make plans to make plans and get public funds to do it.
COME ON DOWN and listen to some whoppers about the Merced County water supply plan, which ain’t, but they all say it is.
COME ON DOWN TO POMBOZASTAN and observe, first hand, the latest design in up-scale yuppie labor camps – zero lot lines, no yards, parks and play areas closer to the freeway than to the home. Watch childhood asthma develop before your very eyes as you are stalled in freeway traffic.
COME ON DOWN and join the fun, if you want to play by the rules UC, the Pomboza, the developers and our wise, far-seeing local governments make up as they go along for the benefit of themselves and their families.
COME ON DOWN! Maybe you can be an early student in UC Merced’s Coelho Institute of Honest Graft (and public policy), or the McClatchy/Singleton School of Conglomerate Media Management, or study the nanotechnology of nuclear weapons triggers. If you’re lucky and everything goes right, you might get a joint appointment with UC Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to study Ebola and Anthrax in a genuine safety level 4 biowarfare lab.
COME ON DOWN TO POMBOZASTAN!
We got the barrel; you bring the pork.
BILL HATCH is a member of the Badlands Journal editorial staff, a San Joaquin Valley-wide group that publishes news and commentary on Valley issues at badlandsjournal.com.
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