SUPERVISORS SPEND ANOTHER $30K FOR LAWYERS TO NOT DO ENVIRONMENTAL STUFF

It seems Santa Barbara County’s Board of Supervisors, in their infinite wisdom, can’t manage to approve a paper clip without calling in the big guns. Their latest fiscal masterpiece, unearthed from the September 1, 2026 agenda, is Amendment No. 4 to the outside counsel contract with Rimôn, P.C. Because apparently, the legal talent already on the county payroll is too busy counting environmental impact statements to handle mundane tasks like... extending a contract.

The real genius here? They've allocated another $30,000 for lawyers to ensure that the administrative act of *extending a contract* is definitively *not* a project under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). One must marvel at the foresight required to pay top dollar for legal minds to confirm that shuffling papers in an office doesn't, in fact, cause wildfires or flood plains. It’s almost as if the entire CEQA apparatus has become so absurdly broad that bureaucrats now need to legally declare that breathing isn't an 'environmental impact.'

This isn't about legal necessity; it's about a bureaucracy so bloated and risk-averse that it would rather pay boutique law firms exorbitant sums to tell them what common sense already dictates, than risk the ire of some progressive activist group or another. It's a gold-plated liability shield funded by your property taxes, ensuring that even the most benign administrative task is cloaked in enough legal jargon to ward off any potential lawsuit from the 'everything is an environmental catastrophe' crowd. Meanwhile, real environmental issues, like, say, the endless permitting delays for actual energy projects, continue to fester.

The Whipping Post hears rumors that next week the Board plans to hire another firm, at $50,000, to determine whether their next lunch break qualifies as 'habitat destruction.' Rest easy, taxpayers, knowing your money is hard at work preventing lawyers from physically changing the environment by, well, doing paperwork. At this rate, the county will run out of money long before it runs out of things to *not* do environmentally.