C2
SANTA BARBARA NEWS-PRESS
VOICES
SATURDAY, MARCH 18, 2023
Legislators introduce bills to expand state control
W Wendy McCaw Arthur von Wiesenberger
Co-Publisher Co-Publisher
GUEST OPINION
COURTESY PHOTO
Goleta Valley: South County’s stepchild
T
he California Quite typically, a piece Department of of land that could easily Housing and accommodate dozens of Community homes was downgraded in Development, scope to a handful of homes since 1969, has required a while the rest of the property California Regional Housing was forced into some type Needs Allocation, of conservation which requires that easement meaning all local governments the rest of the (cities and counties) property could not adequately plan to be developed in meet the housing perpetuity. Rancho needs of everyone San Marcos and in the community, Ellwood Shores are Andy Caldwell including the but two examples requirement to build of this status quo affordable housing. approach to prevent housing California’s local from being built on the South governments then adopt Coast. housing plans as part of their Now that the state mandate general plan to show how the with teeth has kicked in, jurisdiction will meet local Santa Barbara County is housing needs. doing what it has always done However, it wasn’t until when it is in a pinch. Dump 2019, when Assembly Bill 101 the housing into the Goleta was enacted, that the state Valley in much the same put teeth into all the above. manner as the city of Santa Before 2019, communities Barbara located its airport in like the city and county of the valley, by hook and crook. Santa Barbara, especially One would think that the Montecito, considered residents and city officials of the housing requirements the “Good Land” would wake “advisory,” as they had no up and realize that “with intentions whatsoever of friends like that, who needs complying with RHNA. enemies?” However, via AB 101, the What about Montecito? state threatened to take Well, both the city and authority over local planning county of Santa Barbara functions to ensure the have always pandered to housing gets permitted while the elites in Montecito by simultaneously threatening way of the Montecito Growth to fine the bejesus out of Management Ordinance, jurisdictions for every month which conveniently declared they stall (upward of $100,000 that growth in Montecito a month). was a threat to public health Previously, whatever and safety, albeit county affordable housing was built Supervisor Das Williams in no-growth communities may have been shamed into like the South County came approving at least one project at the expense of developers in Montecito this time around. and their clients. The way What’s worse? It was the system worked is that the always left to Ventura County, developers either had to build Lompoc and Santa Maria x number of affordable units to bear the brunt and the as part of their projects or impacts of growth, commuters pay an in-lieu fee that would be damned. Hence, Ventura, be used to build affordable Lompoc and Santa Maria units elsewhere. Then the have built their fair share jurisdiction would have of housing, including family a lottery to give away the housing, which has been to the affordable unit to some lucky advantage of their economy person, including someone and quality of life. who may have just arrived The same cannot be said here, with the caveat that the about the South County, in winner couldn’t sell or rent general, which will now end out the unit for the next 30 up with extremely highyears or so. density neighborhoods, Many jurisdictions, including high rises that including the city and county have always been anathema, of Santa Barbara, also threw because the failure to plan is all sorts of roadblocks in always a plan to fail. front of developers, including exorbitant fees, conditions Andy Caldwell is the COLAB of approval, inordinate time executive director and host of delays in the permitting “The Andy Caldwell Show,” project and severe limitations airing 3 to 5 p.m. weekdays on how many units could be on KZSB AM 1290, the Newsbuilt. Press radio station.
hen will ridiculous government mandates and requirements end? When will Californians stop forcing their beliefs/ faith/ideology on others? Shame on the California Legislature Women’s Caucus for introducing 12 of 15 bills to expand state control that include no exemptions for local governments, school boards, private employers or residents. Please make time to oppose two newly introduced bills: 1) Assembly Bill 598 (sponsored by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland) requires all California public school districts to survey all seventh Denice through 12th graders under Spangler Adams the California Healthy Kids Survey and requires student The author participation! This is unlawful! lives in Surveying students is not the Montecito role of schools. Requiring student participation is a violation of their constitutional rights, the California Education Code, student and parent rights to privacy, and freedom of participation while captive on campus. Schools must stick to academics, vocational training and instruction. We must demand local control of our public school districts by our elected trustees. Push back. 2) Assembly Bill 1432 requires all insurance coverage in California to cover gender affirming care, abortions. California employers and California residents must demand the right to have options in insurance coverage or no coverage. This is another example of overreach. I write as a lifelong advocate of medical autonomy, privacy, freedom of individual choice, and not wanting to pay for the choices of others. As a local Planned Parenthood director in the 1980s, I advocated for teen opportunities to learn from qualified medical instructors to get questions answered. The religious community supported my efforts. I understand and support the need for every resident to have access to reproductive medical information and care. As a gerontologist, I worked years for the right to Death with Dignity, end-of-life care; for each person’s needs and written wishes to be honored; and for no licensed medical professional to be mandated or coerced to provide medical intervention. I do not support government overreach, dictates, mandates, control or violations of constitutional rights. Dogma from both the right and left certainly fuels voter registration of No Party Preference locals and is divisive. I encourage tolerance. Please note: Assembly Bills 352, 793 and1194 address in some form the California Privacy Rights Act protections of electronic, digital data sharing of medical records and/or internet searches. Here is a list of 25 bills being considered in the Legislature and their sponsors. • AB 90 (Petrie-Norris): Improves access to longacting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) for those seeking abortion services. • AB 254 (Bauer-Kahan) Adds CMIA/HIPAA protections for data collected by menstrual, fertility, and sexual health apps and websites. • AB 352 (Bauer-Kahan) Enhances privacy protections for medical records related to abortion, pregnancy loss, and other sensitive services through electronic health record sharing and health information exchanges. • AB 571 (Petrie-Norris) Ensures that medical malpractice insurance includes coverage for comprehensive sexual and reproductive health care. • AB 576 (Weber) Aligns Medi-Cal coverage of medication abortion with evidence-based clinical guidelines. • AB 598 (Wicks) Requires school districts to participate in the California Healthy Kids Survey and include a module on sexual and reproductive health care as one of the core survey modules.
Henry Schulte
The author lives in Solvang
Letter to the president
D
away. Hospitals as far apart as Brownsville, Texas, and Yuma, Ariz., are completely overwhelmed and unable to provide medical care for the law-abiding U.S. citizens who live there. And as we were reminded last week, American citizens are being killed. It is a disaster. And such a disaster — especially one in our own backyard — requires a clear, unambiguous response from the putative greatest nation on Earth. As this column noted recently, one straightforward and potentially highly effective policy the Biden administration should announce would be to designate the leading drug cartels as State Department-recognized Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Doing this would allow the U.S. government to use various means to financially suffocate the cartels and deprive them of their funding sources. It would also aid law enforcement. Democrats’ typical response is that such a formal designation would complicate diplomatic relations with Mexico, but that barely passes the laugh test. Mexico has just as much — if not more — of an interest in cracking down on the cartels as the U.S., but it cannot publicly say so, let alone act upon that interest, due to the cartels’ successful bribery and corruption of the all-too-venal Mexican government. Crucially, a formal Foreign Terrorist Organization designation for the leading cartels, such as Sinaloa and Jalisco, would also permit the U.S. to go even further. Consider the fact that, as
ear President Biden, I am obligated to call you president out of respect for the office, though in my heart I don’t feel your actions warrant the title. Do you remember when you won the election by 83-plus million votes, more than your former boss, Barack Hussein Obama? President Obama ran a powerful campaign and drew large crowds of tens of thousands and won nearly 70 million votes, the highest number in American history up to that point. I’m curious if you know how you won by such a wide margin running your campaign from your basement. And on the very few occasions when you did venture out for a “rally,” you only managed to muster a few dozen supporters. When you were sworn into office, and even sooner during your limited periods of public appearances, you promised you’d bring the country together. I’m wondering, do you think you accomplished that campaign promise? After all, there were another 73 million who didn’t vote for you. They had no choice but to hold you to your word and give you that chance to close the divide. Do you think you united the nation? The word on the street is that we’re more divided than ever. I’m also curious if you’re aware how badly you have jeopardized the security of the nation you had sworn to protect. Actually, it’s about the only thing required of your job. Are you aware the people in your administration did away with the southern border right after you were elected? Has anyone filled you in on that fact? Have they told you that since you took office, hundreds of thousands of American citizens under your watch have died of fentanyl as a direct result of the open border? Last year you paid a cursory visit to El Paso to see for yourself. Sadly, you were robbed of the true picture since the town was sterilized before your arrival, and you were led to a spot on the border with no activity. If you want to see the real picture, I’ll be happy to drive you down there, but you have to pay for the gas. Your own son is a victim of drug and alcohol abuse. I would think you would have a great deal of compassion for those families dealing with the same serious problem and want to help prevent more deaths from occurring. Those on your side of the fence love to blame the user. Do you blame your son? A poor woman lost her two sons on the same day to fentanyl. Your retort was to blame former President Donald Trump. Real leaders man up, and it’s not toxic masculinity. It’s called being a man. Are you aware that your massive spending made everything cost tons more and people are barely getting by because of it? I understand you were surprised one time how much a hamburger cost. And that was two years ago. Under your leadership because you put the kibosh on oil, the cost of gas soared to heights never seen before. Next time you get in the “Beast,” stop at a station and fill it up yourself. The prices are now down from the highs, but you’ll still get a first-hand understanding how much fuel cuts into the cost of living for the average American. If you really want to see how bad, fill up in California. One of those massive spending programs you gave your John Hancock to was supposed to fix the roads, but did you know it wasn’t going to do that at all? You stood at a podium and were pleased how the money was going to really improve our infrastructure.
Please see HAMMER on C4
Please see SCHULTE on C4
COURTESY PHOTO
Montecito resident Denice Spangler Adams is concerned about government outreach in some of the legislation being endorsed by the California Legislative Women’s Caucus.
• AB 710 (Schiavo) Launches a public information campaign to provide women with accurate information regarding access to abortion care at crisis pregnancy centers. • AB 793 (Bonta) Provides privacy protections for digital data related to patients accessing abortion services in California. • AB 1194 (Carrillo) Ensures that California Privacy Rights Act protections always extend to accessing, procuring, or searching for services regarding contraception, pregnancy care, and perinatal care, including abortion services. • AB 1432 (Carrillo) Requires every health insurance policy or certificate that is issued, or delivered to a resident of California, regardless of the situs of the contract, to comply with California laws that require coverage of abortion services and gender-affirming care. • AB 1481 (Boerner-Horvath) Clarifies Presumptive Eligibility for Pregnant Individuals (currently called PE4PW) coverage policies and ensures PE4PW patients can access abortion services regardless of other health coverage. • AB 1646 (Nguyen) Expands access to abortion and gender-affirming care by allowing out-of-state medical school graduates to practice in California for up 90 days. • AB 1707 (Pacheco) Provider Protections. • SB 36 (Skinner) Strengthens safe haven protections by making it illegal for bail agents or bounty hunters to apprehend people in California and protect access to public benefits. • SB 345 (Skinner) Provides legal protections for medication abortions and gender-affirming care. • SB 385 (Atkins) Seeks to extend many of the updated training rules from SB 1375 last year to additional providers (i.e. physician assistants, etc.) • SB 487 (Atkins) Provides additional safeguards for California abortion providers and other entities and individuals that serve and support abortion patients that reside in states with hostile abortion laws.
Destroy the Mexican drug cartels
T
he tragic killing of two through the Mexican interior U.S. citizens last week and right up to the border. The in the border town of humanitarian conditions on these Matamoros, Mexico, migrant “caravans” are typically should, in a just world, abysmal. Drugs are rampant, refocus American attention on the children are exploited and far too glaring problem of transnational many women are raped. drug cartels’ de facto control of Drugs flow across the border large swaths of our perilously like never before. The U.S. drug porous southern border. overdose crisis, which is primarily That the two Americans killed a fentanyl crisis, is nearly may have been mistaken exclusively a phenomenon by warring cartel clans for of the cartels. Drug Haitian drug smugglers, overdose deaths in as The Dallas Morning America last year reached News reported, hardly an unconscionable ameliorates the awful 106,000-plus or more situation or lessens our than 290 daily. That is the imperative to recalibrate functional equivalent of attention away from a mid-size commercial Josh Hammer faraway proxy wars of airliner falling out of the dubious national interest, sky each day. And here, and toward the very monsters as is the case with fentanyl, those in our own backyard, who run proverbial airliners falling out of the Western hemisphere’s worst the sky would be predominantly human trafficking rings and flood packed with those under the age of the U.S. interior with the most 35. This tragedy is America’s single lethal drugs known to man. greatest humanitarian failing, at It is not an exaggeration to say the present time. that the U.S.-Mexico border, at this It is also de facto chemical point, is one of the most chaotic, warfare waged against the over-trafficked and outright United States by the criminal dangerous borders in the world. drug cartels that operate on our Vicious cartels, such as Sinaloa southern border. And the Mexican and Jalisco, engage in gang government, which especially in shootouts in outlaw fashion, with the northern part of the country nary a Mexican law enforcement nearest the border resembles a agent in sight — and even those failed and deeply corrupt narcoin sight are more likely than not state, is both unwilling and to be bribed, and in the cartels’ powerless to put a stop to it. pockets. Human trafficking rings, The situation at the border, often working hand in hand with overall, is nothing less than the cartels and opportunistic deplorable. “coyotes” who promise to smuggle Ranchers in southern Arizona vulnerable migrants into the can hear gunshots and spot cartel U.S., parade hordes of Central thugs strategically perched in the American and Caribbean migrants desert hills a few hundred yards