The rising tide of big money

May 20, 2017 by Fred Allebach

After 20 years living in Tucson, AZ, and watching the planning and development dynamic there, and seeing the same patterns unfold here in Sonoma Valley, I have come to the conclusion that money rules over all. The desires and ambitions of big money are a tide than never stops, regardless of negative impacts on society and the environment.

This has been a long-term, nationwide battle over controlling growth and development. The fight is mainly over the location and scope of projects, and in many cases, if the projects are even appropriate at all. The same tension over “growth” continues today under the rubric of sustainability. But sustainability is a more substantial and inclusive frame than environmentalism alone.

The main difference is that with sustainability, systemic negative costs are much more clearly demonstrable and quantifiable. Locally, costs are a growing poverty amidst a booming luxury economy. This poverty magnifies other costs such as health care, and high Green House Gas transportation impacts, that result from high cost-of-living and unaffordable housing. Environmentally there is groundwater depletion, and collapse of the Bay estuary ecosystem: dry state, too many people, not enough water.

In spite of these clearly known costs, the same old ineffectual supply-side arguments, and lame diatribes against “regulation” are used to justify economic exploitation and inappropriate development.

And while negative costs are known, big money works in the background to pressure planning staff, and to ensure a voting majority of electeds. The influence of money is clear to see in the federal government. Fractals of this same pay-to-play pattern exist down to county and city levels.

The Tucson pattern is evident in Napa and Sonoma Counties. Big money came out for Lynda Hopkins, James Gore, Bill Dodd, for the No on B campaign, and for no limits on wine tasting on the Plaza. Big money is squarely against the sustainability-focused NapaVision 2050 coalition. For big money, getting control of critical votes is paramount. If big money might lose, the politics start to get really nasty. This is happening in Sonoma with the First Street East hotel and market rate housing project.

The Tucson pattern is also manifested by groundwater profligate proposals currently in the works. These are the huge Wing and Barrel event center south of Sears Point, the Tolay Creek gigantic wine production facility and event center just north of the raceway, and the five-acre-feet-a-year 8^th Street East wine production facility in the middle of the East Side pumping depression. The city has luxury hotel/ restaurant projects proposed, each with inadequate provisions for much needed Area Median Income affordable housing.

Wall Street values have run amok, with a local flavor of the wine-tourism-hospitality combine. Main Street has suffered. The combine then produces economic ‘experts’ who spout how great everything is, and how the projects and underlying kleptocracy are a public benefit.

What you don’t see out of the bulk of growth and development big money is an attempt to address social and economic equity. The Valley’s core problems — an aging population, unaffordable housing, low pay, and ecological degradation — continue to be back-burnered while the people with the resources to really do something enrich themselves even more.

Meanwhile, regulatory system actors seem like deer in the headlights, unable to control the impulses of me-first money makers who not only fail to address the most salient social and environmental issues, but make them worse.

We are trapped by an undemocratic, maladaptive system that puts the liberty of the few and powerful over the good of the many. We’ve been dominated by Wall Street Alpha males, who exist in a rarified, uncaring bubble of selfishness.

The people are getting ripped off. The environment suffers. The significant negative costs of the big money ethos are the antithesis of sustainability. A service-oriented, financialized economy produces nothing of value other than to enrich the one percent even more, and allow them to have the extra cash to jury rig the whole system to their continued advantage.

Why would things that benefit the little guy, like a $15 an hour minimum wage, or rent control, or universal insurance, or clean air, be fought tooth and nail? There is really no good explanation other than ignorance, selfishness and immoral greed.

Maybe the objective criteria in the Sonoma Valley Fund’s new “Hidden in Plain Sight” study (see page 16) along with the County Economic Development Board’s Sonoma Valley-specific study, will give some impetus for more equitable action. This is a study by top-level, respected local people. The data here might help tip all relevant actors to make sustainability the prime directive. That would be doing the right thing.

Currently, all the evidence for systemic business as usual points to that money rules, while social equity and environmental integrity lose. The arguments for widespread benefit trickling down still don’t add up. For real public benefit, social justice, and environmental protection, a more equitable distribution of wealth is called for. This can start with the one percent of people who have the resources to wake up and shift their focus back to benefiting Main Street.