Governor ousts flood board

[Ernesto]

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday replaced all seven board members of the state's top flood-control agency. Some questioned the timing of the change in light of the board's recent decision to review urban development in flood-prone areas.
The seven people appointed to the unpaid board by Schwarzenegger, a Republican, assume their roles immediately. They largely represent land owners and business interests.


http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/ca/story/13636277p-14478776c.html

[rodeodance]

1. They largely represent land owners and business interests.--

[tularetom]

2. This is a real shame

The previous board was beginning to make some real progress in what might be called non structural flood control methods including lowering and removing levees and returning riverside lands to overflow areas. This act will pave (no pun intended) the way for future New Orleans style situations as levees fail in urban areas. Sacramento is vulnerable being only a few feet above sea level and many islands in the California delta are as much as thirty feet below sea level.

[ourbluenation]

3. Wish he's do the same to the North Coast Railroad Authority board

I'm a lib who sadly has come to the comclusion that this is a huge waste of tax money. It's too bad.

[tularetom]

4. It's almost like the NCRA was set up for failure

It was a governmant bailout of private railroads that had lost their commercial revenue generating base and could no longer operate at a profit. If it had succeeded it would have proven that government could do a better job of operating a transportation network than the private sector and we couldn't have that could we. The resource based economy of the north coast was in the crapper and much better for the taxpayers to foot the bill than those who had profited from resource extraction for decades.

It was a good idea poorly executed. I agree it needs to be put out of its misery.

[ourbluenation]

5. The repub gov at the time (Deukmajian) set it up, but gave it no

administrative funding. The agency has been robbing Peter to pay Paul ever since and in the process acquired a horrible reputation. They will most likely never get rid of their hish risk grantee status or the layers of beurocratic oversight that comes with it. It's too bad. There seems to be an interest in hauling Sonoma Co trash out south on the line...wonder how the Marin-ites would like that?

Anyways - I think the particular characters on the Board are completley innefective, safe a few, and their attorney is more of a hindrance than a help. The entire thing should be decommissioned, imo, and the right of way given to the people for trails, etc...to abandon the line would be fiscally impossible to achieve with the environmental processes that that would involve.

[Oerdin]

6. Basically...

It looks like the board wanted to make it harder to put subdivisions on flood plains since that always creates flooded subdevelopments whose owners demand government bail outs. They're built on a flood plain so of course it floods!

[Ernesto]

7. but, but our governator is opposed to "special interests" n-t