Pinocchio Chronicles 14: County Cancels Palomar Hearing, #302

County's Palomar November 3, 2021 Hearing Cancellation

Two days ago, Carlsbad asked county to cancel its November 3, 2021 Board of Supervisor Hearing Item 2 related to readopting the McClellan-Palomar Airport Master Plan (PMP) and Program Environmental Impact Report (PEIR). Yesterday, county agreed.

A rehearing is needed because Judge Pollock in January 2021 voided the 2018 PMP and PEIR.

No one yet knows the new hearing date. If county takes the criticisms of Carlsbad and of more than 2000 county residents who signed a Palomar anti-expansion petition to heart, a revised-revised PMP and PEIR will recirculate to the community in late 2022.

If county schedules an earlier hearing, county is tap-dancing and triangulating -- seeking a political solution to a thorny problem with the goal of offending as few people as possible. County needs to seriously reexamine the fatally flawed PMP and PEIR. County also needs to prepare a proper Palomar Airport Benefit-Cost Analysis to determine whether it should spend $150 million (county's 2016 project prediction cost escalated by a conservative 2% per year) to benefit a few corporations who prefer to fly out of Carlsbad when they could easily fly from Lindbergh Field.

What’s wrong with Government?

Read the staff reports for 50 state, county, and city big projects involving big dollars. You will find glowing project praise. The proposed project is a game changer. Workers will work. A lot. Business will benefit. Only blue skies will shine down on you. If you want, a few, fluffy, white clouds can be arranged. No dissents cloud the staff reports.

We’ll build the fastest train ever and solve homelessness.

Instead, what do you get? Bullet train construction snailing along 10 years behind schedule with costs skyrocketing far above what voters approved and some-day trains averaging freeway speeds rather than over 100 m.p.h. And homeless apartments costing $540,000 each with drug addicted homeless dying in them.

And a McClellan-Palomar Airport passenger terminal ghost town and a lower terminal passenger parking lot rented to Car Country Auto dealers – even though Palomar today, with no changes, can serve aircraft with destinations almost anywhere in the U.S.

So what went wrong? State and local agencies need an “Office of No” – an office whose sole purpose is to objectively question and analyze and publicly report on every negative aspect of projects that the California legislature and city councils and boards of supervisors want. That does not happen today.

In other words, politicians need a Supreme Court model. Thousands of U.S. Supreme Court 5-4 decisions and California Supreme Court 4-3 decisions exist. Someone wins. Someone loses. But the cards are on the table. The majority makes its case. The dissenters make theirs. The process is transparent. The public knows what happened.