Why I am not a liberal; part XXXVVVIII
by davidthayer
Here is a great example of why I am not a liberal. Kevin Drum in the The Washington Monthly:
Wal-Mart’s plans to open 40 Supercenters in Southern California got off to a slow start yesterday: voters in Inglewood (former home of the Lakers) told them to get lost. By a huge margin they voted down an initiative that would have allowed Wal-Mart to open a “colossal retail and grocery center” without an environmental review or public hearings. Hey, why would anyone object to that?
I think James Joyner hits the nail on the head:
Actually, outside of California, just about everyone. Who ever heard of an environmental review to open a grocery store? Are they selling plutonium now? Or public hearings, for that matter? What business is it of the public whether a property owner in a commercial district opens a grocery store
Sometimes it seems that Californians fail to understand basic ideas about the free market – make things harder to get, you get less of it. This often seems fine on the surface but then you need something and can’t get it (gasoline, electricity, teachers, etc.). No wonder people are flooding to Utah, Nevada, etc.
Hrm…
If you want to build anything in most parts of Oregon, you need to get permission. If the area is already zoned for what you want to do, most of the process is done. But, if you want to build outside of that area, you need to get the corps of engineers to do an impact study, first.
It’s a balancing act, I agree. But I think it’s a good thing that we put a check on greed.
The site is currently a 60-acre parking lot. What kind of environmental impact study are they thinking about? “The Effect Of Non-Union Retail Shopping On The California Concrete Warbler?”
Um, the enviromental review isn’t for making sure that natural habitat isn’t destroyed. (It can be, but obviously isn’t in this case.)
Please try not to get you news from the Daily Show.
The purpose of an environmental review, in cases like this, would be to determine how much of an increase in traffic the store would generate and how much the roads would need to be improved throughout the city to accomodate said traffic. Stuff like that.
FYI: In most (all?) of CA an enviromental review is different from an Environmental Impact Report. All applications that are big enough to require planning (and not just building) deptartment approval require an environmental review for reasons such as those mentioned above, and to determine if further study (an EIR) will be needed.
I have no problem with site and neighborhood planning and/or zonning issues (although they can be abused). But Drum was talking about environmental review and public hearings. Having read more about this I agree that some of the planning issues are legitimate but I also think that the unions are the real force behind this move to block Wal-Mart.
In the end, if you make it hard to do business you will get less of it.
Good point, Jenny. However, the idea of such an environmental review is sort of ridiculous in this case, given the history of the area in question. It’s literally down the block (albeit a long block) from the Forum, where the Lakers and Kings used to play. The Lakers used to sell out routinely, and even the Kings would sell out from time to time (especially when they got Gretzky). The traffic for such events would be, I would have to think, much worse than any WalMart could be even in WalMart execs’ wildest dreams.
In addition to Lakers and Kings games, the Forum used to host all sorts of other events: concerts (Kiss Alive II was recorded there), circuses (the only time I’ve ever been to a circus was the Ringling Bros. at the Forum), and the like. Again, the traffic for such events had to be much worse than the WalMart could generate.
I think the whole call for an environmental review is a smokescreen.
I don’t think it’s a smokescreen. I think it’s a legitimate balance to free growth. A community should have the right to decide what they do or do not want built in their presence.
Businesses have rights. So do residents. There needs to be a system where competing rights can be judged. I won’t claim it’s a perfect system. But, just letting any company build anything it wants whereever it wants (yes, I know this is an extreme, as well) isn’t a good solution, either. Money and power should not be able to purchase all the votes.
Tom,
EVERY application that goes through planning departments in California requires an environmental review to determine if an Environmental Impact Report is needed. That’s the law, not a smokescreen.
It doesn’t matter if the Lakers or anyone else played or plays across the street, the point of an ER and an EIR is to look at how the proposal will add to the existing traffic and change traffic patterns, and a Wal Mart supercenter most certainly will do both of these in significant amounts; not just for the few blocks around it, but for the whole area.
And, of course, traffic was just one example: sewage, electricity, garbage, etc. are good ones also.