Dysfunctional??
Editor:
The Kauai community deserves forewarning of its newest resident, Mr. Lee Ulansey, who oddly refers to his former home, here in Humboldt County, California, as "dysfunctional" ("I Passed Notes," Nov. 16).
In his parting salvo to this local news magazine, Mr. Ulansey fails to mention his lobbying organization and publication the Humboldt Coalition for Property Rights that successfully won a majority on the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors, which subsequently appointed Mr. Ulansey and other large land owners, developers and realtors to the planning commission. Their radical deregulatory agenda has been described as a "boon for rural development" by easing building fees and fines while issuing amnesty for non-permitted, remote structures and allowing thousands of commercial cannabis operations in our headwaters without a single ordinance to base permits upon professional testing for water carrying capacity.
Like most other regions in the U.S., Humboldt County is not "dysfunctional," it is corrupted by money and long-abandoned by 70 percent of potential voters. Thus, it is working perfectly to serve a minority of entrenched financial interests like Mr. Ulansey's by ensuring that local government will not enact a single mitigating measure that could potentially interfere with the third looming "housing bubble" and bailout since the 1980s.
The result of Mr. Ulansey's political shenanigans in Humboldt County is more of the same ... more bankruptcies, foreclosures, unfunded infrastructure liabilities, disastrous increases in poverty and homelessness and the inevitable violence accompanying increasing competition for limited clean water.
The island community of Kauai is probably far more averse, but not immune, to such blatant corruption as it struggles with similar issues of unbridled greed, limited resources, homelessness and public divestment.
Every community must redouble efforts to hold its local institutions and individuals accountable to the growing public realities of environmental, economic and social crises we're facing.
George Clark, Eureka
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I Passed Notes
Nov 16, 2017
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