Newly Proposed ISAG Guidelines: 11 Reasons You Should Oppose Them

1.) The Board should not accept the guidelines as recommended by staff as they added 29 pages of new language and only gave VC COLAB 2 days to respond to it.

2.) These guidelines, as written, will make County Public works programs more expensive and place an unnecessary burden on Taxpayers by increasing the need for higher taxes to pay for these new costs. The County should be looking for ways to save money not take on new costs.

3.) The guidelines, as written, will cost the County jobs as more private projects that are necessary for businesses to expand and hire workers will not be economically feasible. In fact, more businesses will leave the County and jobs will be lost. You cannot say you are for bringing back jobs and vote for these guidelines.

4.) The guidelines were created by selectively receiving the input of local biologists rather than taking into consideration the input of all the biologists who met with County Planning.

5.) These guidelines referring to “Locally Important Species” go too far! They even restrict species that are not endangered, rare, uncommon or unique. This will raise the cost of reporting, mitigating and creating environmental documents for EVERY discretionary project with native vegetation in the County to accommodate common species.
(Think fire prevention!  Are you willing to let your house burn down to protect a common onion?) This language in the document is entirely unnecessary and unwarranted and has NO APPARENT GAIN even for County Planning.

6-a.) You cannot say you are for “preserving agriculture” if you adopt these regulations because the South Coast Missing Linkages project considers agriculture a barrier to wildlife movement, calling for farming to be restricted. Fully 26,000 acres of farmland in Ventura County touches these Wildlife Corridors!!!

6-b.) These guidelines threaten county agriculture because new food safety laws requiring no animal droppings in agricultural fields and orchards will eventually require fencing which will render the specific routes proposed by the linkage studies infeasible. Will farming have to halt in order to comply with both requirements of these proposed guidelines and existing food safety laws? Whether farmers put up fencing or not, either way, they would be in conflict with regulations somewhere if they were to continue farming.

7.) While protecting wetlands is an agreeable endeavor, the guidelines, as written, would create a moratorium on all county projects that impact waters and wetlands because the County has yet to setup a program for mitigating or restoring such wetlands.

8.) These guidelines will hurt low-income families and minorities because a large percentage of these groups rely on agriculture for their income and jobs in Ventura County. These guidelines would reduce agricultural activity and the need for labor due to unnecessary restrictions.

9.) County Planners and Save Open-Space & Agricultural Resources (S.O.A.R.) claim these regulations are necessary to “protect” farming and prevent urban sprawl, but they do just the opposite. Preventing farmers from building structures such as barns, storage sheds, and other facilities (with hyper-restrictive regulations) isn’t the “urban sprawl” most people are trying to avoid. They are necessary investments to produce the food we all eat.

10.) The definition of a wetland is so all-encompassing that common landscape features such as culverts can potentially be defined as wetlands. And what farm doesn’t have a culvert next to it’s fields?

11.) The guidelines are based on studies, some of which the public has not been allowed access to the underlying data or methodologies. It is irresponsible for the County Board of Supervisors to adopt new regulations where the public has not had a chance to verify whether the science is sound or not. Think Climate-gate scandal

12.) As a twelfth bonus reason, these guidelines are an affront to private property rights protected under the United State Constitution. Government is going too far.

“Key to sound environmental policy is respect for private property rights” -Ron Paul