A Debate About Values

Newhall Ranch is a shuck from beginning to end, a triumph of slick marketing over sound planning. Officials owe it to us to poke all of its claimed benefits with a sharp stick to see if they don’t blow up.

The developer is a huge political player, giving more than $250,000 in local campaign contributions in a single year. It does not scruple to employ ugly tricks, from late reporting of campaign contributions to publishing misleading tabloids. So it’s not surprising that the environmental documents prepared for Newhall Ranch are masterworks of omission and misstatement.

Los Angeles County has failed to correct or even notice the problems in the project’s claims. Among them:

* Live close to nature? Newhall Ranch will pave over, riprap and otherwise replace nature with miles of pavement, 5.6 million square feet of industrial / commercial space and 24,000 dwelling units. No amount of fancy talk can turn this into “nature.”

* Master-planning to handle population growth? Master-planned sprawl is still sprawl; bad planning for 12,000 acres is still bad planning. Population projections are self-fulfilling, not based on proactive planning.

* Improve traffic? No matter how many paper credits Newhall Ranch generates, it still increases the overcapacity on Interstate 5 from the current “acceptable” 125% to 131%. Who benefits? Who pays?

* A financial boon to Los Angeles County? Amazingly, Newhall’s financial studies have never been reviewed for the county by a municipal finance consultant not beholden to the developer.

* Improve downstream flooding? The developer claims benefits by comparing projected future flooding to a hypothetical current situation in which the watershed is burned to the ground and subjected to a 50-year storm. Isn’t that weird enough for officials to object?

* Adequate water supply? If you or I proposed a development and said, “We’re confident that the water will be there when the time comes,” how far would we get? But for Newhall Ranch, it seems jes’ fine.

Los Angeles County is about to give away all future rights to modify the project. A proposed “development agreement” would give the developer a contractual right to build the entire project as described in environmental documents, no matter what changes in the next 30 years. This wholly evil maneuver must be rejected.

Serious issues of traffic, air quality, water, flood control, seismic safety, wildlife, the Santa Clara River, municipal finance, school finance, solid waste disposal and more that have been “solved” in the environmental impact report will come back to haunt us for generations if someone with authority and an independent mind doesn’t actually read the absurd documents proposed for approval. L.A. County Supervisors should reject the current proposal and have Newhall Land come up with a project whose impacts can reasonably be borne by the tax-paying, commuting, air-breathing, water-drinking citizens of Los Angeles and Ventura counties.