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HomeMy WebLinkAbout1/16/2018 Item 9, Schmidt From:Richard Schmidt < To:E-mail Council Website Subject:Item 9 Night Use of Natural Reserve Dear Council, Please see comments below ------------------------ Nocturnal Disruptions by Humans of Native Fauna in Natural Reserves Please vote NO on this perverse anti-environmental proposal. • It violates your own laws. • It violates CEQA. • It’s really bad environmental policy destroying what has been till now good environmental policy. • It cuts to the claim all of you made when running for office that you are good environmentalists. If approved, it would demonstrate quite the opposite. Please consider the following points: 1. The LAW. City law is quite clear – people off the mountain sundown to sunup. Why would a previous Council put that into law if they didn’t mean it? Staff’s deliberate effort to deceive you on this is a lie. The clause about the parks director’s control of hours is proven – by its subordinate wording AND by legislative history – to be solely to permit temporary exceptions in cases of dire need, not to change the law itself to permit night-time wreckCreation. If you buy staff’s lie, you are basically saying: “I think the previous Council wrote a meaningless law that I can ignore despite my oath to uphold the law.” 2. CEQA. You have no legitimate CEQA documentation to support your action. The purpose of CEQA is to lay before decision-makers ALL the environmental information they need to evaluate and minimize or eliminate environmental impacts of their pending actions. You don’t have that. The basic information about fauna on the mountain doesn’t exist. You have an alleged CEQA IS-MND that relies on a future study of impacts which, far from being laid out in front of you, are completely unknown. This is not a case you can “logic” yourselves out of. Future studies are illegal for CEQA compliance. Your IS-MND is therefore illegal, as would be any CEQA determination you might make based upon it. 3. Social Justice. Really? People with good jobs and good lives are being denied social justice by not being able to rip nature and the earth apart at night? Only in a place with as mediocre a mind as SLO could such perversion of a noble idea be framed this way. 4. Wildlife Protection. The main purpose for our Natural Reserves is to protect natural resources from human interference and encroachment. That’s not my opinion, it’s the law. The existing prohibition on night use is to protect wildlife who are active after dark from disturbance by ignorant and indifferent humans, like speeding night bikers. These reserves are not wreckCreation lands, they are natural reserves. The proposal turns this purpose around 180 degrees. It is just plain wrong, and you need to stand up for what’s right. 5. Environmentalism. If we don’t let people rip the earth apart with their speeding bikes at night, we’ll miss the opportunity to bring up the next generation of people who love nature. Right. From my speeding bike, running down bunnies in the dark, I’m learning to appreciate nature. And if we don’t let people rip up the earth and everything that lives on or in it with their 4-wheelers, ditto. It’s a slippery slope you go down with this one. The argument’s so perversely unintelligent, it’s hard to imagine anyone’s making it. 6. Enforcement. We’ll keep this under control with good enforcement by our rangers. You can’t enforce an outright prohibition at present, so how will you enforce the complex scheme that’s proposed? Fact: There are at least a half dozen access points to the mountain, and your rangers don’t know that (learned by asking one who had no idea). Fact: With a 1 clear view of the east side of the mountain, I see lights up there every single night when access is “prohibited.” And that’s on a secondary trail, not the main one. Fact: On social media, it is clear that your mere talking about this has left much of the ignoranti with the notion it’s already legal to be up there at night. Fact: Just ask the neighbors of Bishop’s Peak where this leads: trespass through yards, strangers in your yard, bonfires on the mountain, overnight campouts, you name it. None of that gets “enforced.” “Enforcement” of this scheme will not occur. Talk of “enforcement” as a solution is nothing more than the persiflage of staff’s propaganda machine. 7. Experiment. This will be an experiment, and if there are problems, we’ll shut it down. Nonsense. Once this genie is out of the bottle, there’s no putting it back. What this “experiment” is really about is setting the stage for the city to open ALL Natural Reserves for nocturnal human incursions – in other words, to transform our Natural Reserves from places where nature reigns to active parks. This is the goal of your parks director who agrees with the “concerns” of the “concerned” mountain bikers – that they be allowed to maximize and extend their footprints upon the face of Nature everywhere. The Council needs to do the right thing, and Just Say No. Richard Schmidt 2