Jan. 3
Chico Enterprise-Record on local national park fee hikes not being a big deal:
We find it hard to get worked up over the entry fee increase that went into effect Monday at Lassen Volcanic National Park and Whiskeytown National Recreation Area.
Likely if we hadn’t mentioned it, most people wouldn’t notice, at least not at Lassen Park.
The fee for a week at Whiskeytown doubled from $10 to $20 per vehicle, which might have caught some people’s attention. Lassen Park took that jump in 2015, and this week bumped up to $25.
But that’s for a week. The single-day use fee at Lake Oroville is $8, and it costs $12 to put a boat in Shasta Lake for one day. Even with the increase, Lassen Park and Whiskeytown are more than competitive.
The local fee hikes are not like the proposals the Donald Trump administration floated in October, where it would cost $70 to get into Yosemite and other popular national parks like Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon.
Those fees were clearly intended to keep people out of the parks, and by their nature the people they would keep out would be the poor.
America’s Best Idea would be limited to a more exclusive clientele.
Seems like a number of things are going that way these days in America.
The fee hikes at Lassen Park and Whiskeytown aren’t going to keep anyone out of the parks. And they are used for improvements within the parks.
For instance, Lassen Park entrance fees rebuilt the trail up Lassen Peak and along the Kings Creek Cascade just recently. They paid for creation of a youth camp at the Crags Campground.
The Bumpass Hell trail is in line for renovation next year, and there are quite a few places on that path that we’d be glad to get some attention.
At Whiskeytown the fees have replaced docks at Oak Bottom Marina, renovated the Whiskey Creek Day Use Picnic Area, and installed vault toilets and an asphalt parking lot at Crystal Creek Falls trailhead.
All those kinds of things take money, and it’s appropriate that the people using the public’s land pay more of the cost of maintaining it than those who don’t or can’t get into the great outdoors.
We haven’t heard a lot of complaining about the fee hike, which probably means most folks feel like we do.
They recognize what treasures our local national parks are, and what a bargain they are, for even a few dollars more.
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Jan. 2
San Francisco Chronicle on Trump’s tweets on Iran, North Korea being counterproductive:
Much as the notion might boggle President Trump’s mind, the popular protests against Iran’s regime have little to do with him. They nevertheless provided the latest unfortunate occasion for Trump to indulge his counterproductive habit of conducting foreign policy by ill-considered Twitter outburst.
An unorganized uprising born of economic and political frustrations, Iran’s worst unrest since 2009 has more to do with the going price of eggs than anything remotely connected to Trump’s provocative rhetoric or regional policy, such as it is. Rather than accept that, Trump in recent days has relentlessly inserted himself into events with pronouncements offering his half-baked analysis of the protests, attacking his predecessor’s policy and condescendingly congratulating the Iranians risking their lives to challenge the theocracy for “finally getting wise.”
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei predictably blamed external “enemies of Iran” to distract from internal disaffection and delegitimize the demonstrations. Trump’s tweeted rhetoric played into Khamenei’s claims by suggesting that the United States was somehow behind the strife. Nor are ordinary Iranians likely to regard the president who barred them from his country and disparaged their faith as a newfound global champion.
Meanwhile, Trump engaged in more name-calling and taunting of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un even as Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in moved closer to the countries’ first talks in two years, undermining his own secretary of state’s efforts to cool tensions. The point, beyond making Trump look tough while making diplomacy tougher, is anyone’s guess. Trump also reserved a tweet to lash out at Pakistan’s coddling of extremists, a long-standing, legitimate problem that won’t be solved via social media.
Regardless of the target, the trouble with Trump’s Twitter diplomacy was aptly expressed by a sometime golfing buddy, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Regarding Trump’s Iran commentary, Graham said on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” ’’You can’t just tweet here. You have to lay out a plan.”
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Jan. 2
Ventura County Star on time to prepare for debris, mud risks:
It’s a feeling Camarillo Springs residents know all too well. “Every time it starts raining hard, my stomach churns,” one resident told The Star a year ago.
Unfortunately, anyone who lives below one of the many hillsides burned in last month’s Thomas Fire may soon be feeling the same anxiety. But there are ways individuals and government can prepare for what might come next - post-fire mudslides, debris flows and flash flooding - and it was encouraging to learn in The Star last week that numerous agencies already are trying to get ready for winter rains.
The Thomas Fire, the largest wildfire on record in California, destroyed more than 1,000 structures, killed two people and scorched more than 280,000 acres in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.
Those denuded hills are now prime candidates for serious erosion if and when we get some significant precipitation this winter. Instead of soaking into soil and vegetation, the rain can rush down a bare hill and bring all that burned brush, trees and ash with it. “We’re going to worry every time it rains,” Ventura County geologist Jim O’Tousa told The Star last week. “It’s not just this first year or second year. It’s going to be a three- to five-year recovery.”
The county may have dodged a bullet this week when rain forecasts were downgraded to just a chance of light rain Wednesday night or Thursday in northern Ventura County. But January and February are normally our rainiest months, and forecasters say we still have a 50 percent chance of having a wet winter.
The Springs Fire scorched a wide swath of hills all the way from Highway 101 in Camarillo to Point Mugu State Park along the Pacific Ocean in May 2013. It wasn’t until almost 20 months later that heavy rains sent a river of mud, rocks and other debris down Conejo Mountain into a Camarillo Springs neighborhood, leaving 10 homes red-tagged as uninhabitable and damaging others.
The U.S. Forest Service said last week that state and federal teams were preparing to assess Thomas Fire burn areas for flooding and debris-flow risks. The Ventura County Public Works Agency was doing the same and planning to clear debris from channels and storm drains and install racks to trap branches and rocks, among other measures.
County officials also urged residents to do what they can, such as clearing debris from roof gutters, downspouts and drains and considering the purchase of flood insurance.
Officials say any home below a burned hillside could be in danger, as well as those downstream on flood-prone creeks and barrancas. We urge you to take their advice and learn more at venturacountyrecovers.org (click on the “Rain Ready” button).
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Jan. 2
Santa Maria Times on basing marijuana rules on science:
The legalization of recreational marijuana in California brings with it some baggage, not the smallest piece of which are the possible health impacts.
Perhaps more to the point might be - what are the effects on children?
We pose that question because it is a certainty that pot smoking will be done by under-aged users. That was true with alcoholic beverages and cigarettes, and it will be true with marijuana.
The big difference we see is that both tobacco products and alcoholic beverages have undergone decades of research and tough regulation. Marijuana’s overall effects on the mind and body - especially young bodies not yet old enough to obtain a driver’s license - are still mostly a scientific mystery.
Regular marijuana users will quickly tell you the effects, but that’s not real science. It doesn’t qualify or quantify the active ingredients of the plant. It only relates how the user’s mind and body react to smoking and ingesting marijuana.
The mysteries of marijuana are being demonstrated by local jurisdictions’ reluctance to give in to open marijuana-selling commerce. Local governments throughout Santa Barbara County are struggling with what degrees of regulations and enforcement to apply to the new state law.
Those policy makers really are not questioning marijuana’s therapeutic qualities, as the plant is being used with significant success to treat everything from childhood seizures to post-traumatic stress syndrome, especially with soldiers returning from war. Marijuana is also proving effective in helping people deal with pain, and it has been suggested that marijuana could be the less-dangerous answer to the nation’s opioid-use crisis, which is now killing more Americans a year than car crashes.
Van Do-Reynoso, director of the Santa Barbara County Public Health Department, predicts specific challenges in a lack of scientific information on marijuana’s overall effects on mind and body: “We won’t have good data until 2020. It’s really far out.”
And he didn’t mean that in a stoner way. There’s just too little hard scientific data on marijuana on which to base local policy decisions. That, too, is a bit odd, given that marijuana has been in fairly wide use for generations.
Still, Do-Reynoso and other county health officials will be working to review and reconcile the available hard-science, evidence-based research to determine the best message, and how to deliver that message to adolescents and young adults, which are the most vulnerable subgroups of marijuana users.
One general assumption about marijuana use is that it has a far greater effect on young minds than on those of mature adults. But even that assertion has been challenged as having little basis in fact.
That one claim is symptomatic of the overall issue, which is that there just isn’t enough solid evidence to go on, and it apparently will be up to government, at just about every level, to find answers.
As for young people, the majority say they’ve grown weary of hearing adults fret about marijuana use by mostly teens. They hear about it from teachers at school, and from their parents at home. Doctors tell them it will affect their mind and body, without explaining how and why. Law enforcement cautions them to make smart choices.
That latter piece of advice seems to be the best course of action. As most parents know, kids tend to make their own choices, so talking things out at home, beginning at a very early age, at least arms a young person with information and perspective.
Meanwhile, local governments should continue to set policy for legalized marijuana - carefully.
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Jan. 2
Los Angeles Daily News on the unintended consequences of our sanctuary state:
Consistent with campaign promises, the first year of Trump’s presidency saw a noticeable uptick in immigration enforcement - unfortunately, much of it was against noncriminal undocumented immigrants.
According to data released by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency last month, both arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants without a criminal conviction increased significantly from prior years.
Of the 143,470 administrative arrests made in fiscal year 2017, more than one in four of those arrested did not have a criminal conviction, with 10.8 percent not having any criminal record at all. Notably, “at-large” arrests, those which occur in the community, increased significantly - from 30,348 in fiscal year 2016 to 40,066.
Additionally, whereas just 5,014 of those deported from the interior of the country in 2016 were people without a criminal conviction, in 2017 that number jumped to 13,744, according to ICE.
“The president has made it clear in his executive orders: There’s no population off the table,” Thomas Homan, acting director of ICE explained at a Dec. 5 news conference. “If you’re in this country illegally, we’re looking for you and we’re going to look to apprehend you.”
This seems like a poor use of federal resources. While the priority of immigration enforcement continues, rightly, to be on removing people who engage in criminal activity in the U.S., the increased enforcement against non-criminal immigrants seems less likely to yield tangible benefits to the American people.
Interestingly, Homan also pointed out that “sanctuary” jurisdictions, in attempting to curtail state and local cooperation with federal immigration officials, have actually made it more likely that arrests of non-criminals will occur.
Sanctuary policies limiting federal immigration authorities’ access to jails and prisons, according to Homan, are merely pushing ICE to step up “at-large” operations.
“Chances are, when we go to their homes or places of business, we’re going to find other illegal aliens that weren’t even on our radar to begin with - now they’re on our radar,” Homan said, adding, “Sanctuary cities protecting their communities? No. They put communities more at risk for more arrests.”
At the very least, it is something that supporters of sanctuary policies should consider, especially in California, where Senate Bill 54 was recently enacted to limit state cooperation with federal immigration officials. The law, which was built up over the course of a year primarily as a show of some California lawmakers’ resistance to the Trump administration, could end up putting many non-criminal undocumented immigrants at risk of being caught up in immigration enforcement efforts.
That would be the sort of unintended consequence that on balance would benefit no one - those in support of creating a pathway for non-criminal undocumented immigrants to stay and those who want the focus to be on criminals alike would have their wishes thwarted for little more than political gamesmanship.
While the Congress sorts out its game of chicken on immigration, particularly DACA and the border wall, close attention should be paid to the effects of sanctuary policies on eliciting greater enforcement against non-criminals. We also encourage prioritizing serious and violent criminals for immigration enforcement efforts.
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