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VERTICAL SPRAWL IN ELNOKA

3/28/2011

Last year, Rosa Koire coined the term 'Vertical Sprawl' for the new urbanist high density development being touted as the solution for a non-existent problem of too many homes in the suburbs. Unless the problem is that not enough tax revenue is being siphoned off to crony-developers who expect to get big subsidies from Redevelopment Agencies. Locals like Laura Hall and Lois Fisher have made a business out of redesigning city centers and selling form-based zoning codes (a one-size-fits-all model) to brainwashed city officials all over the nation. Now that this top heavy style of bloated government/public partnerships is failing some 'environmental crony groups' like LIEE, Sonoma County Conservation Action, and Greenbelt Alliance are whining that there might not be enough money for them in the future.
They're counting on your ignorance and compliance to swallow the empty so-called green rhetoric that they're pushing.
High density urban development like the 4 story Moore Building that sits nearly empty on Healdsburg Avenue and 10th in downtown Santa Rosa. The family that built that with their savings lost everything. Crony developers and the groups they fund, like Sonoma County Conservation Action, along with the fake greens, the train proponents, are in it to influence politicians, get contracts, get subsidies, and manipulate regulations.
Who gets hurt?
You.
Elnoka is a perfect example. The high density housing project to be built against the wishes of the neighboring low density senior development. Where is it? Out in the boonies. No need for high density there, but the developer wants it and has the rhetoric to get the green power trippers on his side.
Green: the color of money.
It's for your own good---it's Communitarianism and UN AGENDA 21.

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SUMMER CONFERENCE IN SANTA ROSA

3/15/2011

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This summer, the Post Sustainability Institute in collaboration with SRNC will be hosting the Behind the Green Mask Conference in Santa Rosa, CA.

With leaders and activists speaking on topics ranging from UN Agenda 21 to Redevelopment Reform to Exposing New Urbanism to SMART METERS, to Recognizing Communitarianism, the conference will be a forum for those in Northern California and beyond to share information and learn more. This is a non-partisan event.

Contact us for details.

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You just can't make this stuff up

3/7/2011

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The more you know the harder it is to just condense UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development into a short paragraph. On the one hand we just want to say: 'Take my word for it,' and on the other hand there are the skeptics who think we’ve made it up since they didn’t read it in the local paper or see it on FoxNewsCNNMSNBCCSPAN.

Everyone is being impacted by it, but since your government uses different names for all of the programs (it’s alphabet soup), you don’t recognize that there is a connection when you hear, for instance:

Your 10-year old child won’t be automatically going to the middle school in your neighborhood but has to apply for admission. S/he may end up across town where you’ll never attend parent/teacher night, never become friends with other parents, and not volunteer in the classroom (and hear the lesson) because you can’t make it home from your job in time.

Your business is being subjected to a Business Improvement Tax by your local government and you have to pay even though your customers now have to put money in the meters, pay huge parking tickets, and can go to the Mall with free parking.

You inherited a piece of land from your folks but now you find out that it’s impossible to build anything on it because the County has an ordinance that won’t allow you to install a septic system on your 40 acres. And the Biotic Resource Corridor that it’s in won’t allow development anyway. And besides you’re in the ‘viewshed’ so bicyclists can look at your land as they ride a nearby trail, and a building would ruin that.

You don’t believe that you’re being ‘forced’ out of your private vehicle but then you notice that even though Libya produces only 2% of the world’s oil your gasoline cost just jumped up 15% since Gaddafi started shouting. You also have noticed that there’s talk about a ‘Vehicle Miles Traveled Tax’ in your town council that would charge you for long commutes. You moved there to buy a house but the market has crashed and you’re not going anywhere for a while.

You, of course, were an avid fan of the Smart Train idea and voted for the 1/4 cent sales tax hike in perpetuity, but now the train is a distant hope since they underestimated costs, and the money went to repair the tracks (for freight) and big pensions for staff. All of those SMART Growth condos by the tracks are now going to hear freight train whistles and smell the fumes 6 feet away.

You’re sick of being called an “Oil Addict” and can’t understand why innovations for energy efficient vehicles have never been funded by your government. Until now, when you can pay $40,000 for a compact that gets 35 miles to the gallon…

You came home from work and noticed that your energy company had installed a SMART METER without asking you, and now you’ve heard that they can shut it off remotely, monitor your use, reduce your allotment, and generally mess with you any time.

You attend your church or civic organization meeting and find out that you're going to be walking around your neighborhood with an 11-page questionnaire that is so comprehensive that you'll be embarrassed to ask the neighbors to fill it out, but you have to because you're a MANDATORY VOLUNTEER. You'll be reporting back to the organizers of the Neighborhood Summit, the Leadership Institute of Ecology and Economy---it's a public private partnership that is all about getting as much information about you as possible and then using it to manage you.

You’ve gone from saying you’d never bother to learn computers to checking your email every half hour, and your kids never look up from their I-whatever when you talk to them. Their classrooms are so crammed with kids that even you think remote learning might be a good idea, and, hey, textbooks on-line should save money—they can update them, change them, change history with a click of the mouse—Great!

You just came back from a vacation in Mexico and noticed the retina recognition and fingerprint readers at every customs officer’s station, and it made you nervous. Of course they’re not using them on everyone yet, but how long will it be? You’ve also read that they have miniature drone spy hummingbirds that can fly 8 miles, in and out of windows, and record sound and video! Who? Your government. What else do they have? Do they know you’re reading this?

You go to a neighborhood association meeting out of some sense of civic duty and see that they’re electing officers to the association. You’d like to nominate your neighbor but you can’t because the by-laws say that any candidate has to be okayed by the board first. You try to make a comment but you are boo’d by your ‘neighbors’ in bike helmets and spandex. It’s clear that they have a candidate who will be elected and claim to speak for the entire neighborhood.

Call it Smart Growth. Call it Sustainable Development. Call it Form Based Zoning. Call it Capacity Building. Call it Consensus Building. Call it Green Building. Call it Wildlands. Call it Homelands. Call it Outcome Based Education. ETC. Hey, it’s not “What is Agenda 21″, it’s “WHAT ISN’T AGENDA 21″ It’s not Republican, and it’s not Democrat. It’s not Libertarian, and it’s not Independent. It’s COMMUNITARIAN.

Satisfied? Are we making this up? Have you noticed? So? WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT IT? Listen, no one is holding a gun to your head; you’re not losing your job if you speak out. Will you please go and talk to your neighbor, friend, co-worker, partner, coach, financial advisor, lawyer, clerk, you get the idea…. SPEAK UP. SPEAK OUT. STOP AGENDA 21 NOW.

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Assemblyman Huffman's Communitarian Law

3/6/2011

1 Comment

From the Santa Rosa Press Democrat:
"Assemblymember Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, selected the idea for “benefit corporations” as the winning entry in his annual “There Oughta Be a Law … Or Not” contest, which this year garnered 120 entries.

Huffman introduced Assembly Bill 361 and very quickly picked up a powerful co-author in Assemblyman Bob Blumenfield, D-Van Nuys, who is chair of the Assembly’s budget committee.

The idea for the law came from Trathen Heckman, founding director of Daily Acts in Petaluma; Jeff Kletter, CEO and co-founder of Kinesys in San Rafael; Chris Mann, CEO of Guayaki Sustainable Rainforest Products in Sebastopol and Stuart Rudick, founding partner of Mindful Investors in Mill Valley.

Under the proposed law, owners of California businesses could voluntarily distinguish themselves as “benefit corporations” by operating with “an eye toward the triple bottom line of people, planet and profit,” as Huffman put it in a letter to his Assembly colleagues.

These companies could consider the needs of a community first, without fear of legal action from shareholders for not maximizing profits."

The following is a comment by Kay Tokerud, SRNC:
Ten percent of America’s workforce is for non-profits. Now, for profit companies want preferential treatment if they qualify as ‘community benefits’ corporations? Who decides what is beneficial for the community? This is a crude attempt by some to get on top of the heap by claiming that their company does something better than all the rest. Certainly they are after something. Jobs, contracts, political positions, perhaps?

Remember the Accountable Development Coalition? They have claimed to be the community and they, of course, are the community’s spokesperson who will decide what benefits the community. This is crazy. The community is made up of individual voters who will say what they want whenever there is an election. There is no legal definition of community benefits and there is no group of people who have the right to decide what benefits the community. This is part of the process of the blurring of lines between individual rights which are the law of the land and this new concept being promulgated by unelected people who want to have some additional rights to determine what is best for all.

I can’t call it socialism or communism because it isn’t. It does have a name however, it’s COMMUNITARIANISM. This is a hybrid form of government being pushed that ‘balances’ the rights of the individual with the rights of the community. Trouble is, there are no legal rights of the community in the law. That’s made up. Communitarianism has already advanced in the European Union and is taught at American universities as a form of governance. They will impose this on us if we let them.

Don’t be fooled. We are going down a slippery slope when individual rights can be balanced away because of someone’s idea that the community (whatever that is) is more important than an individual. There ought to be a law against this type of thing happening in America. Oh, there is, it’s called the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.

Why is it that everyone who refers to the Bill of Rights and the Constitution is considered to be an extremist now? As a liberal Democrat I don't see why the founding law of our nation is considered to be right-wing. It isn't. It's American.

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VERTICAL SPRAWL IN ELNOKA

SUMMER CONFERENCE IN SANTA ROSA

You just can't make this stuff up

Assemblyman Huffman's Communitarian Law

Eyes on Santa Rosa

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