Congresswoman Jackie Speier, US 12th Congressional representative (representing south SF, SSF, Daley City and south through San Carlos), recently proposed new legislation to restore San Francisco bay tidal marshes, reduce bay contaminants and improve the health of the San Francisco Bay.
On the surface, not many bay area residents can criticize a billion dollar ‘feel good’ hand out from the federal government to clean up our bay.
Unfortunately it is not so simple. The bay is important, of course. But we don’t use the bay for drinking water; we haven’t dumped raw sewage into the bay for 30 years; there have been no large fish kills from pollution, disease or suffocating algae blooms.
In her press release announcing the measure, Rep. Speier claimed it will help to preserve the $8 billion dollar tourist industry, but how many tourists have refused to visit San Francisco or San Jose because of bay pollution?
In her announcement, Speier also said " there is a lot of dirt, sludge and toxic substances that are probably getting into the bay". Part of her billion dollar solution is installing filters on bay discharge. Rainer Hoenicke, an environmental scientist with the San Francisco Estuary Institute, an East Bay organization that monitors the health of the bay-Delta system, said "point" sources of water pollution — pipe discharges — have been regulated to the degree that additional controls would provide little benefit. Some of the lack of water clarity is due to sediment erosion from the Sierras. This legislation will not attempt to regulate the mining practices in the Sierra foothills.
Most of the pollution concern in the bay today is from petrochemical rain runoff from the 10 million surrounding inhabitants, a technically challenging source of pollution that this legislation does not solve.
Of course a few jobs will be created by the $100M investment per year. But if the $787 billion "shovel ready" stimulus bill hasn’t decreased unemployment in California, it is unlikely that a ten year bay bioproject will have any meaningful effect.
At this point a Congressional spending freeze can’t contain things. Even if our Bay Area Congressional representatives were to control themselves and freeze non-defense spending for three years, deficits would average nearly $1 trillion for the rest of the decade. What is the probability of Congressional democrats freezing spending? Well…. look no further than Speier’s Bay Renewal Plan. These fiscal deficit projections for the United States are truly stunning, but apparently not nearly as stunning to Speier and the Bay Area Congressional delegation as protecting the eco habitat of the Clipper Rail and having the US taxpayer pay to restore the Cargill salt flats. If corrective action on the federal deficit is not taken preemptively very soon, the United States risks precipitating its own Greek meltdown. And we are focused on a Clipper Rail?
Urgent note to the Bay Area Congressional delegation: the country desperately needs you to focus on your ethical fiscal responsibilities to the country, and not spend another billion dollars on the anticipation of a climate change effect that may or may not happen in the next century. Stop spending. Better yet, actually try cutting the budget and the deficit. Even better- start paying down the huge public deficit.
Starting today, projects like the Bay Renewal Plan need a zero cost basis. Maybe a history lesson on the bipartisan Gramm Rudman bill would also be in order for our delegation. And let’s face it, even though there have been other federal government-supported reclamation projects in the Great Lakes and Chesapeake Bay, it is fundamentally unfair for taxpayers in Maine to support a San Francisco Bay ornithology project. It would be interesting to see the local response to Speier’s proposed legislation if it required self funding rather than just another ‘feel good’ billion dollar hand out from the federal government. That would mean increasing all of the bridge tolls across the bay by 20% (an estimate based on the ~$500 million in annual revenue produced by the bay bridge network).
There is another interesting and not-so-obvious drama behind this proposed legislation. Given the exploding federal deficit, there is zero chance for this proposal to pass Congress. So why in the world did Speier and the Bay Area delegation propose it? A not so cynical interpretation would be that it was proposed for re-election just in time for the June primary and the November election. Career politicians know that they need to feed the electorate some ‘feel good’ pork before the election, especially if it distracts voters from their cataclysmic financial mismangement in Washington. Again, who can complain about another ‘feel good’ billion dollar handout for bay cleanup, especially if it keeps the runways at SFO open for the tourists in 2100?
Sorry to rain on the airport levee, but the electorate IS complaining. Public polls are showing a stunning and unprecedented outrage towards its Congress. The latest Gallup poll shows Congressional approval at 16%. And Rasmussen polling reveals just 11% of all voters rate Congress’ job performance good or excellent. To give you a perspective of this magnitude, depending which of these two polls you care to use, that’s either one half or one third of Bush’s absolute nadir in popularity during the height of the Iraq insurrection (32% approval). Most dramatically, an NBC poll taken in March showed that, given the opportunity, half (50%) of the voters said that they would vote to defeat every single member of Congress, including their own representative. And asked if they would still vote to replace every member if that resulted in Republicans controlling Congress, seventy three percent (73%) said yes.
Why so angry? Even after passage of the health care reform, a majority (56%) of voters say Congress has not passed any legislation over the past year that has significantly improved the quality of life, according to Rasmussen. Well, maybe we can all rally around an airport levee and brackish salt pond. A Pew Research poll asked voters what single adjective would describe their Congressional representative. The results were all highly negative and when ranked in popular order were: dysfunctional>corrupt>self serving>confused. Voters now rate government ethics and corruption as the single most important issue regularly tracked by Rasmussen Reports. But to the key point around the probably true intent of Speier’s legislation, an additional Rasmussen poll this past week showed 78% of the electorate believes politicians put their own careers ahead of helping people, with only 12% of voters saying the opposite is true. Maybe the 12th district electorate will connect the dots. If so, the Bay Area delegation may get its own tidal wave of remediation and cleansing this November.
We all understand that the San Francisco bay ecology needs further improvement. But so does Puget Sound, San Diego Bay, and hundreds of other bays, estuaries and harbors across the US. The country has many ecological priorities, many much more pressing than the San Francisco Bay. We should debate the risk and benefits to a scientifically based remediation program that is not driven by the hysterics and potential inaccuracies of global warming effects that may or may not occur a century from now, and be prepared to be responsible enough to pay for the project at a local level. Given the crisis of confidence and massive, unsustainable debt produced by our current free spending Bay Area Congressional delegation, our representatives should be singularly focused on aggressively cutting federal spending, not aggressively expanding it. Speier’s bill is irresponsible and its timing cynical.
The legislation is a ‘shovel ready’ paradigm for what is broken in Washington. Its time for the Bay Area delegation to get on the spending ‘wagon’ and into ‘tax and spend’ detox. We expect our Congressional delegates to make hard choices and surprise the electorate with responsible and ethical fiscal governance in Washington. Our Bay Area Congressional delegation needs to prove to us that they have the courage and fortitude to put our country ahead of their self-serving political biennial re-election addiction.