Are Local Issues Affecting Your Family, Home and Resources?

Posted on Freedom Advocates on March 18th 2009

By [post_author] –

Boulder Creek, CA: Troubled by local government decisions affecting your family, home and neighborhood? Wondering about the competency of agencies managing (controlling) water, housing and transportation?

For the last 30 years, Santa Cruz County government has followed a ‘global to local’ agenda designed by the United Nations that has outwardly been marketed as a program to achieve ‘sustainability’. In the hands of some knowing and some bungling local bureaucrats, ‘sustainability’ has simply become a venue for control over citizens while providing a benefit to selected special interest groups.

Worldwide this agenda is known as Sustainable Development or United Nations Agenda 21.

In Santa Cruz County savvy groups saw early on that incompetent bureaucrats were attempting to implement a global socialist/fascist agenda. This exposure caused local officials, like Sam Farr, to feign ignorance.

Today, while the United Nations continues to promote Agenda 21, local Santa Cruz County officials are implementing the program via initiatives such as AB32, known as the Global Warming Solutions Act, and SB375 which is crafted to control housing. These programs are more colloquially known as Sustainable Communities Strategy. (More here and here.)

Implementation of Agenda 21/Sustainable Development policies, no matter how deftly worded, affects all of us.

In Felton, we’ve witnessed the government takeover of a local water system and an attempt by the county’s favored subsidized housing developer to build 60 houses on 4 acres in a community where the county has allowed individual residents only 1 building permit per year and even then only on parcels greater than 1 acre.

In Seacliff, the much ballyhooed affordable housing complex turned out to be an intricate scheme whereby the county gave the developer money to buy the land which the developer later sold back to the county. All on taxpayers’ backs.

In Watsonville, a ‘public private partnership’ (remember economic fascism?) between government and a favored developer forged a plan to build 500-600 units while proclaiming water shortage and salt water intrusion. Public subsidies are typically paid to ‘public/private’ developers.

In Aptos a predetermined ‘consensus’ process was used to suggest support for a cramped housing project.

How did we get here?

For years the pervasive belief in Santa Cruz County was that growth limitation would preserve the rural and small town character of our county. Unfortunately for local residents, the opposite has occurred specifically because we relinquished control over markets and building issues to problematic county government officials.

Eventually that misguided preservation effort manifested itself as Measure J, (click here for an in-depth article on Measure J’s affect on housing) an initiative which purported to limit new homes, but ended up increasing so-called ‘affordable’ subsidized units and limiting market rate units thereby driving up the rate of market rate homes and justifying the county’s self-created housing crisis and development bent. So much for slow growth.

Read here and here and here for articles on the impact of Measure J on local transportation issues, transit-oriented development, “Smart Growth” and the county’s favored-developer policy. What was described by Freedom Advocates’ reporters in 2004 has come to pass in 2009 with the recent activities of the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission regarding the purchase the Union Pacific rail right-of-way.

These are concrete examples of Santa Cruz County’s overreaching and incompetent manipulation of local families, housing and resources. Click here for more information. Also click here for free downloadable reports and neighborhood tools.


Are Local Issues Affecting Your Family, Home and Resources? by Andrea Sanchez

Other Andrea Sanchez articles:

Code Enforcement Working to Abolish Private Property

Personal Tax Liens Recorded Against Individual Property Owners

Andrea Sanchez can be reached at ansan@cruzio.com

 

This article contains links to outside sources not controlled by Freedom Advocates and therefore are subject to change.

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