Not in My Back Yard

Eric Anderson made some pictures that illustrate how Tejon Ranch Company is acknowledging its debt to The People. It is good to know that they kept some memorabilia after removing the Native Americans forcefully from their land. Clearly they have feelings too.

Right at their corporate headquarters they have conveniently organized an exhibition of beautiful bedrock mortars. Unlike for Tejon Mountain Village, there is easy public access and no admission fee.

Click a picture to enlarge

deleeuw All In Here

It is always surprising how biased lead agencies are in favor of the project alternative in the DEIR, especially for science-based chapters like hydrology, geology, traffic analysis, water quality, or air pollution.

But if you think about it, it makes perfect sense. It is because the system is rigged. The county, for example, does not have its own science experts, they only have planning experts. Their EIR is written on the basis of the reports from the science experts. The experts are paid by the developer. So if the developer’s experts present a biased picture, the county has no way to disagree with it. And they have no way to find out if the picture is biased, unless it is too blatantly so, or it contradicts what other experts say or have said. The county cannot go out and drill or dig trenches or do biological surveys. This is also why they so desperately have to believe the developer’s experts and defend their integrity. It’s all they have.

Of course I am not saying that all environmental firms working for large developers are corrupt. The only thing I am saying is that it is clearly against their interest to present a report that supports those opposing the development. Also, note that these reports are not science, because they are not peer-reviewed, or even read critically by other scientists. The consultant does not get promoted by writing excellent science, and becoming a widely quoted authority on the Cuddy Canyon Groundwater Basin or the Tehachapi Tender Salamander. The consultant gets promoted by making sure the project of the person who pays the bills is approved. And that, of course, is how it should be. If you buy dinner in a fancy restaurant, you do not expect the waiter to deliver the food you have paid for to your neighbor’s table.

CEQA assumes that those who build the project and those who oppose the project have the same amount of resources available, just like in a lawsuit the prosecution and the defense have the same amount of resources available (I am joking, of course). Behind this lurks the assumption that justice is blind and that the truth will always prevail. In science, we would just call this assumption obviously false, and ignore the results from the publication because they are based on completely false assumptions. Not so in CEQA. Basically, from the very start, the process is driven by overriding considerations, in particular the overriding consideration that a large developer has a lot of money to spend. Tejon Ranch invests $ 100M in their entitlement process. One could assume that this does not make a difference, because ultimately the scales will fall from people’s eyes, and they will see the projects for what they really are. But that would just be another patently false assumption.

In sports there was, for a long time, the illusion of amateurism, to guarantee an equal playing field. An illusion like that is not even plausible in adversarial areas driven by big money, such as CEQA. Why are experts so expensive ? For the same reason why country club membership is so expensive. To make sure the people opposing the development cannot hire them. To keep the riff-raff out.

The only way to counterbalance the developer’s experts is to have opposing experts, and they are hard to find if you don’t have money. This is less true for economic impacts, visual impacts, or sprawl impacts, because on those issues everybody and her/his sister/brother is an expert.

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Plans to build houses around Castac Lake have been around for a long time. Samuel Bishop talked about in 1860, the Holabird appraisal in 1891 talked about it, and Harry Chandler thought about it around 1930. But the first serious plans were proposed in 1972. This resulted in the Tejon Ranch Lake DEIR and Specific Plan.

The project area was 8,100 acres, which includes Castac Lake. Of this 2,800 acres were to be developed, with about 6,000 dwellings. The four categories were

• Lake Core Area (mobile homes, condos, resort commercial, multiple family, recreation);
• Lave view oriented sites;
• Golf and country club sites;
• Equestrian Estate Sites.

Although today’s Tejon Mountain Village is definitely more upscale, catering to the more expensive tastes of our new elites, the Orwellian double-speak has not changed.

The community will be designed with an orientation toward recreation and enjoyment of the natural features of the property.

In the cultural section of the DEIR we see the usual historical distortions. That has not changed either. There is a minimal description of the site CA-KER-307, at the north-east end of Castac Lake, the former Chumash village of Kashtiq, now under water.

The hydrology section is of some interest. The project was mostly in the Castac Lake drainage area, which is about 26,000 acres. There are studies by Morley and Associates on the hydrologic balance of this drainage area. Precipitation and inflow are estimated as 29,130 acft, and evapotranspiration, consumptive use by vegetation, and outflow at 27.665 acft. This leaves an amount available for beneficial use of 1,465 acft. Virtually nothing if you have a 400 acre lake to fill.

At that point in time there was no overflow into Grapevine Creek. Castac Lake was “dry during the late summer and early fall”. The plan called for expanding Castac Lake to 200 acres and keeping it at a depth of 20 feet. The lake bottom had to be scraped of salt before the lake could be refilled. The DEIR observes drily that this will improve the water quality in the lake.

As for groundwater

Like the Castac Lake surface drainage area, the groundwater basin extends to the west out of the project area to include a considerable portion of Cuddy Canyon.

A study by McIntire and Quiros guesstimates a safe yield of the groundwater basin of 1600 acft. They assumed 5 feet per acre evaporation for a 250 acre lake, and put the water demands of the project at 3200 acft per year. So state water, out of the brand new aqueduct, was clearly needed.

Not much attention was paid to biology at the time. The condor gets one heart-breaking paragraph.

The Tejon Ranch plays a vital role in the survival of the endangered California Condor. A section of the ranch to the north and northeast of the project property has been identified as critical condor feeding and roosting habitat. John Borneman of the National Audubon Society, an authority on the California Condor, states that the continuation of cow-calf operations over much of the Tejon Ranch is vital to the survival of the condor. He further states that during October as much as 90 percent of the entire condor population can be found on Tejon Ranch property.

There are some interesting accompanying documents. They are connected with the history of the DEIR, which is outrageous and hilarious at the same time. Kern County did not have a planning commission or a planning department at the time. Who needs planning, anyway. They just had a Board of Supervisors, and we all know how they thought and what they looked like.

There was, however, a group of mostly local Sierra Club members, Project Land Use, among them Frederic and Joy Lake, Joe Fontaine, and Frank Falero, a CSUB economics professor. They asked for an extension of the comment period. The board immediately denied the extension and at the same time approved the cancellation of the Williamson Act contract. But in the meantime CEQA had kicked in, and to everybody’s surprise the developers now had to abide by some rules and prepare an EIR.

Project Land Use objected to the proposed project because there was not enough water. It turned out that Tejon could not use aqueduct water because it was not drinkable. In their report The Tejon Ranch Lake Project: An Evaluation of its Impact on Kern County Tax Payers, based on extensive calculations by Falero, they also noted

.. the taxpayers of Kern County will be providing a direct subsidy from revenues collected elsewhere in the county of between $ 55,000 and $ 9,103,000,000 per year, depending on which scenario actually occurs.

This is despite the fact that Tejon Ranch Lake would have its own Community Services District for water, sewage, drainage, and roads. The calculations are in 1972 dollars, the upper bound would be $ 45,000,000 now. The supervisors, of course, ignored the objections and certified the EIR.

Project Land Use sued in 1973, and got the court’s attention because the DEIR proposed housing directly on top of the Garlock Fault. Geologist Pierre St.-Amand from the Naval Weapon Center was called in. Among other things he concluded, in his report Investigation of Seismic and Geogic Hazards on the Tejon Ranch Development Project,

Because of the high accelerations to be expected in the project area, and indeed because recent earthquakes have shown much higher accelerations than those for which earthquake codes have been designed, it is reasonable to consider updating the earthquake code for the whole Kern County.

Reasonable, indeed. Some houses were shifted around, and the supervisors approved the project for a third time, in a thirty minute meeting.

But Tejon’s luck, or leverage, ran out. The California Attorney General sued the Kern County Board of Supervisors under CEQA, of behalf of the Girl Scouts, over the Rancho El Contendo project in Cuddy Valley. The Girl Scouts won because there was no comprehensive water study for the whole Cuddy/Castac area, and because the Board of Supervisors consistently ignored all the public comments, including the ones by (again) Project Land Use. The judge in the Tejon Ranch Case agreed with the water study argument (see the blog entry Time Sure Flies).

The board then proceeded to make fools of themselves by trying to bully the Superior Court judge. They used the famous arguments that (a) in the past there had been enough water in Cuddy Valley for 100,000 turkeys, and (b) the developer could not be denied his permits because he had already invested so much money in the project. They clearly were not yet used to the fact that not everything could be decided in their usual backroom deals any more (see the blog entry The Supervisors and 100,000 Other Turkeys). So the supervisors could not help Tejon this time, no matter how much they wanted to, and the Tejon Ranch Lake project went away. Until recently, of course, when it came back with a vengeance.

deleeuw All In Here Board of Supervisors, California Environmental Quality Act, Castac Lake, DEIR, Kern County California, Tejon Ranch

Tejon Ranch Company is controlled by two large hedge funds. Third Avenue bought the Chandler shares in 1997 and owns about 30% of the company, Wesley Capital Management bought the Sherman shares in 2005 and owns about 13%. What these funds are interested in, by their very nature, is the value of the TRC stock. Third Avenue bought it’s nearly 5 million shares at $ 13 a piece, and if they can sell for $ 100 they have a 800% return on their 1997 investment.

The hedge funds are run by people who live elsewhere, thousands of miles away. Are they interested in preserving our heritage ? Of course not. Only in as far as it enables them to rapidly get their entitlements and building permits. Are they interested in building beautiful homes ? No, not at all. Only in as far as it increases the value of the TRC assets, and thus drives up the share price. What happened in 1997 is basically that the new owners hired a building crew from Orange County, headed by Mr. Stine, to help them get to these higher stock values. Are the funds interested in making a profit on operations ? Again, not really, only is as far as it makes it more attractive to outside investors to buy a piece of the float and drive up share value.

Just join me in a little thought experiment. What will happen when TRC has all its entitlements and it’s stock price goes up ? The hedge funds will sell, because that is what they do. They hedge their bets, they speculate. They don’t do anything real, they just buy paper and then sell it with a profit. They are not interested in owning a new town or a bleeding conservancy. They are not interested in raising cattle, pumping oil, or growing pistachio’s. They may hang around for a while, because developing Grapevine and TIC East may further increase shareholder value. And they still have to unload the 240,000 acres to these so-called conservation groups, or to the state and the feds. But then they leave this godforsaken land as rapidly as possible and go back to whatever gated community they crawled out of. To be replaced by Fidelity or Calpers or a similar bunch of hapless burocrats. That is why they want the entitlements, and they want them fast. The sooner they can get out of here, the better.

And then there is the building crew. Their interest is simply to keep their executive compensation and private benefit plans high, and to help to raise the stock so they can profitably cash in their options. Their spin-offs (LLC) are there to sell these homes, so the executives get performance bonuses in the form of more options and more money. Nothing complicated about that. That is what they do. They did Orange County, they did the Santa Clara River, and now they are doing Tejon Ranch. When they are done building they will leave, retire when they are old, and go and despoil some other area when they are still young.

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Tejon has been pretty successful is promoting this image of a bunch of friendly neighbors, who will build beautiful homes to improve the neighborhood, make some money in the process, and then hang around smiling and enjoying their good works. As Harry Frankfurt says in his classic book “On Bullshit”, one of the more important books to come out of Princeton University in the last 25 years,

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes its share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained enquiry.

And yes, when Third Avenue came in, they did not only hire a building crew, they also recruited a local bullshit crew, headed by Mr. Zoeller, drawn from the circle around our esteemed supervisor. People around here have been used to having Tejon Ranch around, run by an arrogant and corrupt but at least steady bunch of plutocrats. No more. Welcome to the 21th century. Now it’s hedgefunds, homebuilders, and bullshit producers, making big bucks and then getting out of here, leaving gridlock, air pollution, 30,000 stucco homes, and some big dead birds.

deleeuw All In Here Bullshit, Hedge fund, Stock, Tejon Ranch, Tejon Ranch Company, Third. Avenue Holdings Delaware LLC

Within 60 days the Public in our area, a ragtag bunch under the best of circumstances, is supposed to write thoughtful and constructive comments on the Tehachapi Uplands Multispecies Habitat Conservation Plan (which includes the Draft Environmental Impact Statement), on the Tejon Mountain Village Draft Environmental Impact Report (which includes the Tejon Mountain Village Specific Plan), and on the Frazier Park Estates Draft Environmental Impact Report (which will be out later this week).

Printed copy of these documents would amount to perhaps 20,000 pages, or eight feet of shelve space. The agencies distribute hundreds of copies on CD, which does save trees and money, but makes the material much less accessible. Yes, you need a forklift truck to get the paper into your house. But if you want to make comparisons within or across reports with paper you can just open the reports and compare. With CD’s you need two computers. Paper browsing is also much quicker and much more efficient, even in a eight feet stack.

But obviously the whole exercise is futile. There is no way in which anyone can possibly read the materials, let alone comment on it. The Public does not have the resources to carefully read and research one single traffic or one single water report from one single project. There are not that many people who have the expertise and the interest in the first place, and those who do generally have day-jobs and are exhausted most of the time. The whole process seems a sham. The only people involved will be those who are paid to comment on a tiny piece of this paper mountain — bureaucrats in local and state agencies. Of course the supervisors will not even look at the CD’s, they will just read the executive summary of the executive summary of the executive summary.

Tejon Ranch has been working on plans for Tejon Mountain Village since the early 1970’s, in fact if one includes the Holabird Report since the 1890’s. Even if one starts counting in 1997, when Times Mirror sold and Bob Stine arrived, they have been preparing for more than ten years, investing millions and millions of dollars in consultants, lobbying, and PR. The Public has 45 days to comment, and no money to spend. It is just me, or is there perhaps a certain asymmetry in this process ? It is like a trial in which the prosecution has five years and file million dollars to prepare its case, and the defense has five minutes and five dollars. Fair ? I don’t think so.

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I have been pondering large-scale landownership by individuals or corporations. Specifically, here are some words of wisdom for the TCW board and the Resource Groups.

I will start by proposing some articles needed to complete your theory on property. Let this word alarm no one: muddy souls, who value nothing but gold, I do not mean to touch your treasures, however impure their source may be. You must know that the Conservation Agreement you have discussed at such length is just a phantom conjured up by rogues to scare imbeciles.

The quote (well, almost) is from the 1793 Propositions d’Articles Additionnels à la Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen by Maximilien de Robespierre. These amendments were added to the 1793 Jacobin Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which was itself a further elaboration of the more moderate 1789 declaration by the Marquis de la Fayette. I use the translation by John Howe. If you want to read the beautiful French original, you can find it at http://www.cuddyvalley.org/robespierre.pdf.

Robespierre has a rather poor reputation these days, partly because of counterrevolutionary propaganda, partly because of a string of rather bad movies, but his articles on property are still very much worth reading. They are a good starting point for any future Conservation Agreement.

Article I

Property is the right every citizen has to enjoy and dispose of the portion of goods guaranteed to him by the law.

Article II

The right to property is limited, like all others, by the obligation to respect the rights of other people.

Article III

It cannot prejudice either the security, or the liberty, or the life, or the property of our fellows.

Article IV

Any possession or any trade that violates that principle is illicit and immoral.

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This looks to be a pretty dismal year for California Poppies, at least on my land. That is unfortunate, for various reasons. Here is one: fewer girls will be ruined.

According to Fernando Librado, people used to say that poppies were the ruin of girls. Boys would take girls out gathering poppies, and the flowers’ beauty would overcome the girls and cause them to yield to the boys.

And here is a potentially more serious consequence.

After death, as the soul journeys to Shimilaqsha, the Land of the Dead, it must pass a place where two ravens peck out its eyes. There are many poppies growing there in the canyons on each side. The soul quickly reaches out its arms to each side, picks two of these poppy flowers, and puts one into each eye socket. Thus it is able to see again immediately. When the soul finally gets to Shimilaqsha it is given eyes of blue abalone.

From Thomas Blackburn, December’s Child, 1975, pages 100 and 171. Also in Jan Timbrook, Chumash Ethnobotany, 2007, page 86.

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On March 31 Tejon Ranch Company filed form DEF 14A with the SEC, describing, among other fascinating tidbits, their executive compensation. I had calculated some time ago that Mr. Stine, in his ten year rampage through our neighborhood, had so far collected about $ 20M in personal compensation (from TRC alone, of course, he sits on other boards as well). Given the SEC report, that still seems a realistic estimate. And it is probably not that far out of the ordinary for the CEO of a minor league company with a market cap of less than half a billion dollars. This form of robbery occurs pretty much across the board, since the money is provided by thousands of anonymous people who have no say in the matter whatsoever.

The compensation details for the five top executives in the last three years are in the table below.

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But interestingly the SEC filing also shows that the total compensation for TRC executives has gone down by about 30% over the last three years, although that is a slightly less steep decline than the price of the common stock. I thought it prudent to point out that there is also some minor stepping-back, belt-tightening, and battening-down-the-hatches in our local corporate boardroom. No pain, for sure, but maybe some slight discomfort. And on top of all that, these fine individuals, who trickle-down so much culture, sensitivity, opportunity, and wealth into our area, will be hit by the Obama tax increases (the ones that will finally put us on the road to socialism).

The correlation between executive income and stock price is not surprising, of course, since so much of the income is generated by stock options. It is also in line with the calculations that total household wealth in the US plummeted from $ 64.4 trillion to $ 51.5 trillion, a 20% loss for all of us together, including all of us lesser folks, without stock options and without stock portfolios (but with retirement and 401-K savings accounts, of course). Leading private universities are reporting endowment losses between 20% and 50%.

Given the fact that TRC executives get about half of their income from stock options, taxed at the capital gains top rate of 15%, one would expect and hope to see a somewhat larger reduction of income. But of course if they would trickle-down some more all would be alright. Maybe contribute to a new middle school, away from the freeway ? Or to a poppy reserve on Gorman Post Road ? Or to attaining federal status for the Tejon indians — how about a Sebastian Casino at the old Headquarters ?

It was a bad year for bonuses. The only executive who received one last year (a piddling $ 33K) was newcomer Kathleen Perkinson. The SEC filing tells us why.

Ms. Perkinson received a one time additional bonus related to her efforts on the 2008 Conservation and Land Use Agreement.

This reminds me of the old saying “One species’ meat is another species’ poison”. I guess next year Ms. Perkinson, who is ridiculously titled Senior Vice President for Stewardship, can look forward to a bonus related to her efforts on the Tehachapi Uplands Multispecies Habitat Conservation Plan.

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Let me take the liberty to move a little bit out of my immediate area. We go thirty miles south, forty minutes into my commute, just past the breathtaking glories of Castaic and the natural wonders of Valencia.

Newhall Ranch will release its draft EIR/EIS, with California Department of Fish and Game and the Army Corps of Engineers as co-lead-agencies, on Monday. It is in 16 binders and totals 16,000 pages. The strategy is the same as with Tejon Ranch or Irvine Ranch — if you listen to the developers they are basically creating open space, high country preserves, spineflower protection areas, and an interpretive center for whatever remains of the Tataviam. The 21,000 homes and the 70,000 people living in the Santa Clara River floodplain and gavotting on the I-5, which used to be a freeway once, are barely mentioned in the press releases.

It seems to me that it is yet another good example of the immorality of private ownership of large stretches of land. Too late, of course. These 20,000-home projects are the direct consequence of the creation of the Mexican land grants in 1830-1850, the illegal land grabbing of the “pioneers” around 1850-1880, the consolidation by the robber barrons in 1880-1950, and the concentration of wealth and land in the hands of “financial institutions” since then. Criminals and sociopaths, all of them. That is what weak central government gets you. Socialism and anarchy to benefit the rich, and weak regulation, protection, and oversight to benefit the rest of us. Powerless bureaucrats, living off the scraps thrown to them by crime syndicates.

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Sir, Your name is down amongst the Black Hearts in the Black Book and this is to advise you and the like of you, who are Parson Justasses, to make your wills. Ye have been the Blackguard Enemies of the People on all occasions. Ye have not yet done as ye ought…

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Captain Swing (1830)

You can download the 16,000 pages from http://www.dfg.ca.gov/regions/5/newhall/docs/ and you have 2 months to comment on a document that took them 15 years and tens of millions of dollars to gobble together.

Make no mistake, although the pretense is that the document is there to empower the public, its real function is to overwhelm you and to render you powerless. That is what these expensive consultants are paid for. That is why there is all this boiler plate, all this introductory material that everybody already knows, and all this wide spacing of text. You get a boulder on your plate, and you have three days to eat and digest it. Half a second before the earthquake hits your home you get a message from the lead agency to crawl under your desk. You don’t even have time to lay down the phone.

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deleeuw All In Here Castaic, Department of Fish and Game, Newhall, Newhall Ranch, Santa Clara River, Valencia

This year I did not renew my membership and/or support for the Sierra Club, Audubon, NRDC, and PCL. I do not assume, of course, that this will have those organizations shaking in their fancy tax-exempt hiking boots. I do not even assume it will be noticed. It is just a reminder to myself that acts should have consequences. And I have become a member of the Center for Biological Diversity, contributing the sum-total of the previous four amounts.

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