Where else are you going to play?

Let's see.  Take a ride out by Buena Vista and check out Green Acres; the LA sludge dump.  How about Buttonwillow and the world's biggest toxic waste dump.   There are dozens of modern factory dairies in our county to ride by also and watch the happy cows.  Sometimes you get to see dead cows.  You always get a nice smell and plenty of flies to swat too.  Hondo Chemical is nice to ride by.  The recycling dump near Arvin is cool.  There is the abandoned Brown and Bryant toxic site near downtown Shafter.  Oh, I forgot, the Target distribution center is beautiful!!  The Kern Wildlife Refuge is great but don't go to the north side because the Honey Pot sludge dump is over there.  What is really interesting is riding around the two prisons west of Delano.  I don't recommend the oil fields because of the occasional toxic fumes that can overwhelm the  unsuspecting.

When you think about it, there are not too many places as nice as the bluffs within a reasonable distance.

this is why we cant have nice things

*smiles*~ so true PatFeelsAngst. As my dear Mom used to say"keep your things away,clean and ready to go". Or in this case stay. Hopefully.

Wow.  I'll miss Mr. Toad's.  Don't know why someone would want to build a development there now though.  Someone is looking for a huge tax loss.

You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round..... The Sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nest in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours....

Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves.


Crowfoot, Blackfoot warrior and orator

In a recent editorial, conservative columnist Marylee Shrider focused on a letter submitted to the City of Bakersfield’s Planning Division in regards to the adequacy of the Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) for The Canyons, a proposed housing project in the Northeast. In the letter, the Southern Sierra Fat Tire Association, a local mountain biking group, stated that the DEIR did not adequately quantify impacts to existing recreation resources on the proposed project site and provided conservative estimates of current recreation levels.

Shrider criticized the comments on the grounds that “bicycle rides don’t earn property rights,” and characterized our group as arrogant interlopers, facetiously describing our willingness to participate with project planners in finding acceptable mitigations as “magnanimous.”
 

Shrider’s opinions, while not particularly well-informed (she admitted during an interview that she had not read the DEIR), are much appreciated by our group because we believe in the principles of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), passed in 1970 for the purpose of mitigating or avoiding the significant effects on the environment of proposed public and private projects. A key feature of the CEQA process is making the EIR available to the public so that individuals or groups may comment on the adequacy of the report, effectively providing a venue for public discussion and input.

So despite Shrider’s wishes, the State of California indicates that property owners don’t have unlimited rights when it comes to projects that will significantly impact the environment; they are required to include the public in the planning process and as a result some projects financed with private money on private land are shelved. If this were not the case, any homeowner could build a small nuclear power plant or copper mine in his or her own backyard.

Even Shrider recognizes that it is reasonable to limit the ability of landowners to build facilities such as “a feedlot, rendering plant, or county dump,” three examples that while stinky, might be more necessary for the local economy than the project in question. According to Shrider, what this foreclosure-filled city needs is one more housing development adjacent to numerous similar projects that have been abandoned by their owners due to the slow-down in the local housing market. The SSFTA respectfully disagrees.

If Ms. Shrider feels that she is qualified to evaluate the technical merits of the DEIR or of the letter our organization submitted, she is certainly welcome to send her own comment to the Division of Planning and it will be included in the final EIR. However, criticizing the SSFTA's letter while the project is still in the public comment period (the Division of Planning is accepting comments until February 29) is irresponsible and hardly the kind of dialogue that the State of California had in mind when it passed CEQA almost 40 years ago.