Suppose that the State of California passes a law decreeing that each city must create a plan for defense against dragons. Cities that do not comply will be punished with loss of revenue, ruinous fines or lawsuits.
The probability of dragon attacks is perhaps very small. But the threat of financial loss resulting from noncompliance is large.
The path of least resistance is to have some personnel from your Public Works Department write a report on defending against dragons.
Since no one in public works has the experience or education or time to write a report on fighting marauding dragons, the next step will be to put out a Request for Proposals for outside experts to write the report. Various companies specializing in dragons will respond.
Public works staff will then review the proposals, make a recommendation on which one is the most comprehensive and cost effective, and send that recommendation on to City Council to fund the project.
City Council members, having been advised by the city attorney about the dire consequences of not complying, will authorize the expenditure, and, if the level of alarm in the community is high enough, possibly also form a city Subcommittee on Defending Against Dragons.
Various stakeholders from the city council, airport staff (dragons fly, after all), the planning commission and other affected agencies will be brought on board.
Several months later the consulting company will come back with a report, which will recommend various steps the city can take against the dragon threat. The city may decide to hire a full-time dragon defense coordinator to follow up on the report.
The City Council will then unanimously accept the report. Problem solved!
You may think it unlikely that any city would go along with such a ludicrous mandate, but every year cities throughout California, including ours, comply with mandates only marginally more grounded in reality.
There is a well-worn path, as just described, for complying with state mandates. As long as a city follows the process, it may never solve any real problems, and may squander millions of dollars on initiatives that never accomplish anything — but it will have avoided the financial or reputational penalties for not complying.
To pick at random an instance of this ritual behavior: the City of Santa Barbara’s just-adopted Sea-Level Rise Adaptation Plan, provided to us by the Los Angeles consulting firm ESA.
The original impetus for the plan appears to have been Assembly Bill 691 in 2013, that mandated that “addressing the impacts of sea level rise for all of its legislatively granted public trust lands shall be among the management priorities of a local trustee.” Santa Barbara is the local trustee of state tidelands, that is, our beaches.
The California Coastal Commission and the State Lands Commission also piled on to help specify exactly what “addressing the impacts” should look like.
You can read ESA’s 36-page executive summary of the report at the city’s Sea-Level Rise Adaptation website.
On page six of the summary is mentioned a NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) tides station in Santa Barbara. If you do a web search you’ll find NOAA has provided data on the sea level in Santa Barbara since 1973. They say that the sea level has risen steadily during those almost 50 years at a rate of 1.19 millimeters per year, for a total of about 2¼ inches since 1973.
It’s fortunate that the federal government has been tracking this, and you would think that people concerned about sea level rise would happily use this data in their projections. But the ESA report bases its near-term (by the year 2030) predictions on a worst-case scenario from our state government, estimating a sea level rise over the next 10 years of up to 9½ inches.
Think about that. We have historical data indicating that, should current trends continue, the sea level likely will rise about a half-inch in the next 10 years, but the Sea-Level Rise Adaptation Plan estimates a rise up to 19 times as great.
At the meeting where the 650-page Sea-Level Rise Adaptation Plan was adopted, no City Council member asked staff about the wide chasm between the historical data and the Adaptation Plan’s scary projections.
In a different world, one without multiple state and federal regulatory agencies vying for control of our coastline, without environmental law firms looking for opportunities for lawsuits, and without an ever-growing corpus of interlocking planning documents that requires highly trained, highly paid staff to oversee, there would be simpler solutions for cities wanting to protect themselves from coastal flooding.
Perhaps a junior engineer in the Public Works Department could be assigned to look at the NOAA data every six months and, if suddenly the rate of sea level rise accelerates, write a one-page report for the water resources manager.
Such a simple solution to a problem that has so far failed to emerge might seem like common sense, as opposed to the multiyear, staff-intensive, consultant-driven approach the city took.
But the purpose of the Sea-Level Rise Adaptation Plan is not so much to plan for sea level rise, which, if it continues at roughly the rate it has since the Spaniards arrived in Santa Barbara, won’t be a problem for another century or two.
The purpose is to ward off the wrath of the State of California and to forestall environmental lawsuits. For that it should be effective.
Who knows? It might even keep dragons away.
— Dale Francisco is a software engineer and former Santa Barbara city councilman. The opinions expressed are his own.
