SUPERVISORS INITIATE MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR 'CLEANUP' FOR... PAPERWORK?

It seems the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors, in their infinite wisdom, has decided that the best way to handle a problem created by government overreach is to throw millions more taxpayer dollars at it. Our crack team at The Whipping Post, always vigilant for the quiet moves behind the curtain, noticed a rather hefty agenda item that slipped through the County’s digital fingers, masquerading as a mere administrative formality. This gem proposes handing over a cool $2.3 million to a company called WEST Environmental Services and Technology Inc. not to clean up actual pollution, mind you, but to 'respond to Cleanup and Abatement Order No. R3-2023-0070 and Monitoring and Reporting program Order No. R3-2023-0071.' Translation: we’re paying for paperwork cleanup, a problem born from the progressive regulatory labyrinth itself.

Yes, for over two million dollars, we get a six-year 'agreement' to deal with a 'settlement' from 'litigation' over some 'orders' issued by the Regional Water Quality Control Board. It’s like a Russian nesting doll of bureaucracy, each layer costing more than the last. And who benefits? Not the taxpayer, certainly. Not the local businesses struggling under the weight of these very regulations. No, the beneficiaries are the 'environmental services' consultants who get to milk the county's coffers dry, all while our Supervisors pat themselves on the back for being 'environmentally conscious' – which, coincidentally, also means 'fiscally unconscious.'

The real kicker? This entire bureaucratic boondoggle is deemed 'exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).' So, the very people who champion CEQA as the arbiter of all things green are now declaring their own self-serving paperwork party to be above its purview. It’s classic progressive doublespeak: rules for thee, but not for me. While the left insists on paralyzing development and energy production with endless environmental reviews, they're perfectly content to drop millions on managing a 'cleanup order' without a peep. It’s almost as if the 'environment' is just a convenient excuse for transferring wealth from the public to their favored consultants, rather than actually achieving anything meaningful.

Meanwhile, hardworking families and small businesses in Santa Barbara County continue to pay the ever-increasing tab for this administrative theater. One can only imagine what practical, tangible benefit that $2.3 million could have provided if it weren't being spent on bureaucratic busywork. Perhaps, just perhaps, if the state and local governments stopped creating these tangled webs of regulations, there wouldn't be such lucrative opportunities for firms to untangle them, all on the taxpayers' dime. But that would require common sense, and common sense rarely makes it onto a Board of Supervisors agenda in this county.