1 minute read
GUEST OPINION
Private schools choose their students
Re: “School Choice is the New Civil Rights Movement,” by Chris Talgo, News-Press, March 25.
Advertisement
Pompous persecution and prosecution comes back around!
After decades of pompously persecuting and prosecuting various business interests throughout the county for mere accidents and happenstance, Santa Barbara County itself is finding out the hard way that what goes around comes around.
While county supervisors have historically liked to claim the moral high ground as protectors of the environment, via sanctimonious proclamations at press conferences, and litigation, now it is the county that is lawyering up for their own misfortune.
This time around, because there was no press conference, we must surmise the details of two incidents that have prompted the county to hire the law firm of Perkins Coie. (Yes, that is the same firm that Hillary Clinton used to launch her dirty tricks campaign against Donald Trump ala the fake Russian dossier.) The lawyers from Perkins Coie are trying to get the county out of hot water as it affects two cases of hazardous chemical contamination.
The first case has to do with a somewhat natural oil seep in Toro Canyon that has been leaking for decades. Years ago, the federal government came in and cleaned up a huge mess in the canyon and then handed responsibility for future seeps to the very reluctant county of Santa Barbara. Due to the happenstance of a wildland fire that burned through the area, the equipment the feds placed there got damaged while nobody from the county bothered to monitor and maintain the equipment. As a result, hundreds of gallons of oil flowed freely down the canyon. The county is being prosecuted accordingly.
The second case is in Santa Maria where there is alleged contamination of the aquifer at the site of the former Semco company. Albeit most people believe that most of the contamination originated long before Semco located there by way of a Department of Defense World War 2 air training base that had no less than 250 tanks of all sorts of bad stuff including, of course, various aviation fluids. In this case, the Regional Water Quality
