COUNTY TO RECYCLE LESS, SPEND MORE ON 'RESOURCE' PROJECT! (IT'S NOT A PROJECT, OKAY?!)

The Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors, in their infinite wisdom, just gave the green light to advertise bids for the 'ReSource Center Non-Organic Waste Recovery Project.' Sounds grand, doesn't it? What the other fellows – bless their hearts – at the daily papers might miss is that this 'recovery project' appears to be recovering something else entirely: taxpayer dollars, straight into the pockets of whichever crony contractor bags this sweet deal. Because, you see, the *real* resource being managed here isn't trash, it's public funds.

And for the pièce de résistance, our Supervisors have declared this massive undertaking—which, let's be honest, involves a whole lot of digging, building, and, well, *stuff*—is definitely, absolutely, positively *not* a 'project' subject to environmental review. According to their interpretive dance of CEQA guidelines, it's just an 'administrative activity.' One can almost hear the gears grinding in the back rooms, figuring out how to sidestep environmentalists while simultaneously claiming to be the greenest county since Eden. It's a miracle of modern bureaucracy: if you call it administrative, you don't have to study its environmental impact. Genius!

So, while the folks at the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors are busy pretending pouring concrete and moving mountains of waste is a mere clerical task, the rest of us can wonder who’s getting rich off this 'non-project project.' We're not saying it’s a setup, but when a supposedly environmentally conscious county builds a massive waste facility and then deems it not worthy of environmental inquiry, one has to wonder if the real 'recovery' being prioritized here is the recovery of someone's campaign war chest from a friendly developer. Just another day at the county, where 'resourcefulness' means finding loopholes for your buddies.