With all due respect to my friends Mark and others – any idea I may have had about Council Change was lost with this article in the Sacramento Bee and how it correlates to a column written in the Auburn Sentinel by one of their leaders Duane Wilson: LINK

In Duane’s article – he enumerates that his primary issue with the Rocklin City Council is their planning which is Wilson’s Words – “This despite recommendations by the Sacramento Area Council on Governments (SACOG) urging local communities to incorporate planning that emphasizes clustering places where people live close to businesses where they can work and stores were they can shop.”

SACOG’s recommendations are eerily similar to the big
government measure by soon-to-be Senate Leader Darrell Steinberg, SB 375. Basically, SB 375 would create a California Coastal Commission like board to throttle development in the Sacramento Area – giving them dictatorial powers to rip funding away from municipalities that aren’t green enough.

We didn’t learn from the days of Jerry Brown – who is the architect of our current traffic problems. In the 1970’s he deep-sixed freeway construction and now improvements are costing as much as $1 Billion per mile to our freeways.

Am I taking a reach? Look at this Sacramento Bee Article

The primary quote in this article has very similar roots to what Duane Wilson wrote:Describing SB 375 as controversial would be the understatement of the year. By directing the state Transportation Commission to use billions of dollars in transportation funds to change land use patterns throughout the state, moving toward a “sustainable communities strategy … designed to achieve certain goals for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions,” the measure touches some very sensitive political nerves.

Let me quote Tom McClintock later in the article:

Finally, there are a lot of folks who simply don’t like the notion of having land use policy dictated from Sacramento, as Republican Sen. Tom McClintock told Steinberg when the bill was on the Senate floor last year.

McClintock accused Steinberg, in a series of questions beginning with “who the hell are you to … ,” of wanting to dictate how Californians lead their lives. That criticism mirrors the decades-long angst engendered by two state-created bodies that already wield tight land use controls, the state Coastal Commission and the Tahoe Regional Planning Commission.

If this is not enough of a reason to dismiss the Rocklin Citizens for Council Change over their NIMBY, Anti-Growth motives… take a look at the end of the Bee’s Article -

Steinberg, not surprisingly, enjoys universal support from environmental groups. More than likely he can move his bill to Schwarzenegger’s desk. But whether the governor will sign it, his oft-stated passion for curbing global warming notwithstanding, is uncertain.

While Schwarzenegger touts reducing greenhouse gases on one hand, he also crows about spending billions of dollars to expand the state’s highway network to reduce congestion – exactly the opposite of the mass transit-oriented scenario the Steinberg bill envisions.

The message from Rocklin Citizens for Council Change is clear – get out of your cars, and we are going to fight measure H (and anything else resembling growth) all over again.

Please re-elect Storey, Magnusen and Hill – good Lord, the whole thing has gone berzerk!