SUPERVISORS DECOMMISSIONING… THEIR BRAIN CELLS? MORE WASTE THAN WATER AT LAGUNA PLANT!

Your Santa Barbara County Supervisors, bless their cotton socks, are at it again – turning what sounds like a boring sanitation district item into a masterclass of governmental gaslighting. According to the Board of Supervisors' latest agenda item, a project to decommission the Laguna County Sanitation District's 'legacy facilities' is moving forward. This sounds innocuous enough, until you get to the bit where they approve plans, authorize bids, and then, with a straight face, declare the whole costly endeavor 'not a Project' under CEQA. It seems the only thing being decommissioned is common sense.

Now, for those of us who haven't spent decades inside the county's echo chambers, a 'decommissioning' that involves 'plans and specifications' and 'construction bids' for an entire treatment plant usually signals, well, a *project*. But not in the magical land of Santa Barbara County, where the Public Works Director can apparently wave a wand and make multi-million-dollar demolition jobs disappear from environmental scrutiny. One must wonder if this administrative sleight of hand is meant to fast-track something – perhaps clearing the way for a favored developer or simply avoiding the tedious public review that actual 'projects' often entail.

What the mainstream press, including our friends over at the Board of Supervisors' press releases masquerading as news, won't tell you is the real cost beyond the construction bids. The cost of this intellectual dishonesty, the cost of continually manipulating regulations to suit bureaucratic convenience, and the cost of the public's vanishing trust. It's a prime example of how local government, armed with legal jargon, can make anything disappear – except, of course, for your tax dollars, which are very much a 'project' when it comes to extraction.

So, as the Supervisors pat themselves on the back for skillfully navigating regulatory hurdles by simply redefining reality, the Whipping Post asks: what else are they planning to declare a 'non-project' next? Perhaps the county budget is just a 'fiscal activity' that 'will not result in changes in the environment,' meaning no oversight required. It’s all just business as usual in the People's Republic of Santa Barbara.