You must look at the comments to "Spreading the gospel on the taxpayers' dime"

How about we mandate that all public debt (including all forward promises beyond the terms of any city council member) be reduced to zero no less frequently than once every twenty years? Then remix. It could be that simple.

Pro-anti-development and pro-anti-sprawl are two different but related inquiries. Less development reduces the pressure to consider sprawl as one way to accommodate supposed demand. If the ultimate consumer of the final product of a developer had to cough up the full cost of a project (UP FRONT without borrowed easy money), including the cost of public improvements demanded to accommodate the same, would this restrain development and thereby restrain the urge to sprawl or to restrain "sprawl?"

"We're On A Road To Nowhere" -- In Riverside County the collapse of the construction boom threatens the 25 percent of the employed population who's jobs depend upon more construction booming, for the sake of booming construction and no other. (The only Sustainability consideration is more growth at any cost and maintaining a lag time in discovery that the only thing in its wake is economic desolation.)

The transfer of the present costs of development to both public and private debt is like a cancer in that it is an economic policy that has lost the capacity to self-destruct. (In Federal Reserve banking terms it is a "credit" market and liquidity "problem.")

Sherwood,

I just spent the last two days trying to knock down some weeds in a hay field.

Is the use of such land for hay -- mostly for local horses today -- by definition underutilized? Or not being used for its highest and best use as measured by the market, quite irrespective of Land Use Planning?

Back when I was destined to be just some dumb farmer with chew and pointy boots, and a telltale farmer's tan, it became clear that money did not grow on trees.

Imagine trying to make a profit 2 to 3 years out of 5 doing something like raising milk cows or producing eggs or strawberries -- then compare to the amount of effort some planner must make to put in a request to go on a junket to Hawaii, as just some paperwork formality that must have taken no more than 20 minutes to complete.

Imagine racing to pickup an entire field of hay before an approaching storm threatens to cut its value to less than zero. (. . . all by yourself)

Imagine watching as incessant rain renders nice beautiful strawberries into little gray furballs. Or an ice storm takes a Marionberry field, the wires and the already strung canes for next year's crop, and lays both on the ground destroyed.

There is hardly any joy in the "urban" setting that can match having a dozen barn swallows swirl around your head and darting in front of a 50+ year-old tractor to catch the bugs as they try to jump or fly away.

Am I just a bug in front of a development train to nowhere?

The chore of shoveling manure out of a barn seems positively aromatic as compared to the prospect of cleaning out the graft and corruption represented by modern government.

Did someone forget that the UGB, and higher density within, was premised upon the notion of preserving farmland from the onslaught of developers, or at least forestalling it?

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