in their districts by a barrage of secret memos and and diktats by Greenhut and his ilk.

Time to show the Register that it's a new county, and, if they don't realize it, they will lose their relevance.

The public hearing was attended by 80 people who signed up to speak, but only about half actually did speak, most of them trying to make a case for continued under-funding of the sewage district. When the Sierra Club attended during the anti-waiver campaign, more than 300 attended, and they cut our time down to 2 minutes. They didn't dare do that to the Register's minions.

One developer, speaking for the "poor" apartment house owners, who by the way have received a windfall from falling interest rates and soaring rents, sang the weeps for the effects on "low income housing" -- as if your standard slum-lord does anything but pass the increase on to the tenant, and charge just a little more than the traffic can bear. Of course, the responsible apartment house owner wants to perform an equitable service, maybe did not attend this meeting.

One retiree told me that his aged mother would have to sell her $2.5m house because property taxes had risen to $18,000 per year, and she could not meet that out of social security. We are driving those poor folks to Nevada, he stated, where they don't have to pay taxes. But there is no such thing as a free lunch, if you want the services, someone pays. There is no Freddie the Freeloader.

Others decried, in barely disguised racist tones, the "17 Mexicans" who crowd into one-room flats due to "laws passed" apparenly by "them". After all, these guys seemed to imply, a "normal" guy might only flush twice a year, why should they pay for all that chorizo going down the drain? Or so they seemed to say.

Considering the level of expenses of most of those attending, and considering that the sewage rate, even after all the raises up to 2020, will still be less than the current average rate in today's dollars, these arguments did not seem convincing.

Yet the Register, under the guise of protecting the taxpayer, is actually opening us up to a much greater public health disaster potential. Water policy is critical for the coming years, both fresh and waste water, with ancillary issues such as salt water intrusion, aquifer contamination, urban runoff of contaminants and trash, and deteriorating and untended infrastructure such as broken and leaky pipes and untended grease traps.

In the words of one Garden Grove resident, if you don't think it's important, try disconnecting your sewage line and treating the stuff yourself. After all, anyone can do so, and save a couple hundred bucks a year. Try that for about a week, and even OCR might realize that the benefits of a common sewage treatment agency far outweigh the illusions of Greenslut (oops, meant Greenhut), who, it seems, does not even live in O.C., and probably as ignorant as a dirt-clod about our history.

The new mantra of the sewage district is "generational equity", which expands and supercedes "balancing impacts". The idea is that we should pay for these services in a way that is fair to our descendants -- neither burdening them with our debt, nor
dumping on them our untreated sewage liabilities.

In fact, if sewage rates were increased to $400 per year, it still would be a bargain. You don't have healthy $1m houses, row after row, without gardening, electricity, police and fire, and adequate sewage services. Contrary to Greenslut, it's just common sense.

Doug

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