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By KEVIN McCALLUM
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
Just as Al Gore can buy carbon credits to offset the damage his globe-trotting causes to the atmosphere, the City of
Laguna de Santa Rosa (PD FILE, 2011)
Santa
Rosa is exploring ways to offset the damage its wastewater causes to the Laguna de Santa Rosa watershed.
The Sotoyome Resource Conservation District has won a nearly $600,000 federal grant to establish a water quality trading market with the city.
The market, the first of its kind in California, would allow the city to purchase credits to help fund conservation projects that improve the health of the watershed.
Those credits would in turn be used to avoid fines stemming from future discharges of treated wastewater into the laguna, explained Glen Wright, the city’s deputy director of water resources.
New state regulations on the city restrict it from adding any additional nutrients to the watershed, specifically nitrogen and phosphorus, Wright said.
The city has made huge investments to avoid discharging treated wastewater into the laguna, which empties into the Russian River. These include piping the effluent to the Geysers steamfields and recycling the water on local agricultural lands.
“We we have a very low nutrient load, but it’s hard to get to zero,” Wright said. “It’s a problem for us and we want to solve it.”
In 2002, the treatment plant on Llano Road discharged 2.8 billion gallons of water to the laguna. By 2009, that figure was down to zero. Last year, a wet year, it rebounded to 744 million gallons.
In anticipation of additional restrictions, the city has been working with the conservation district on two projects to improve the health of the watershed. One involves reducing sedimentation into local creeks at Pepperwood Preserve, the 3,120-acre nature preserve northeast of Santa Rosa. Another is a project to improve the handling of manure at the Beretta dairy on Llano Road near the treatment plant.
But the district and the city’s consultant, Kieser & Associates, recognized that more projects needed to be identified, vetted and assigned a value in order for any credit market to be viable.
“The whole idea of this marketplace and this tool is we’re going to quantify the benefits of these conservation projects,” said Kara Heckert, the district’s executive director.
The North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board is currently considering whether the projects will quality as offsets.
Currently, there is a “tiny bottleneck” of such projects in the area, said Valerie Minton, the district’s program director. But the hope is that the marketplace can increase the number of projects that would improve water quality in the laguna, and expedite their implementation, Minton said.
Some of the grant funding will likely go to Kieser & Associates, as well as a software vendor that will set up the local program and database, Minton said.
“It’s kind of the future of conservation, where you are putting a value on the benefit to the environment,” Heckert said.
The award was announced Monday by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and is one of $2 million worth of conservation grants for projects in California that will be managed by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service.
You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com.
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OMG..I feel that all of sonoma county officals are running the towns and dont have a clue HOW!! HEALDSBURG is not making money to support what the officals want, so they want to tax us 1/2 more to pay for their mistakes again..So unfair to the people…I owned a BUSNESS AND WHEN YOU HAVE ONE YOU PAY YOUR BILLS AND SET ASIDE FOR EMERGENCE FUNDS FOR WHEN YOU SCREWW UP ..YOU DONT EXPECT OTHER PEOPLE TO PAY FOR YOUR MISTAKES THE CITY OFFICALS SCREWWED UP AND THEN THEY GIVE US SOME EXCUSE TO MAKE US BELIEVE THEM WHEN ITS THERE DOINGS NOT YOURS….and I’m getting pretty sick of paying what the officals do because they dont have a clue how to run a city and to make that city make money…so they raise our utilities in Healdsburg SUMMER RATES WHATEVER THAT MEANS TO ABOUT 150% MORE THAN ANY OTHER TOWN IN SONOMA CO0UNTY…$200.00 FOR WATER & SEWER ETC. wHO DO MTHEY THINK THERE KIDING ???
remember : the political organizations includes: federal,state,local goverments..
of the people
by the people
for the people
the will of the people prevails
the men & women who make & carry out the laws come fron the people…
remember now people??!!! We cant let these officails do this to us anymore..make them pay for their mistakes becausae we sure didnt do them….
your truly
connie george (williams)
little miss healdsburg 1949
and our bridge is find too…
please we need to stick together ..I cant do this myself…
This is the FUZZY MATH that one of our past presidents was talking about. Somehow 2 plus 2 equals something else other than 4 in base 10. How the hell do they justify this crap to themselves?
Another way to appropriate our federal grant money to un-elected boards/commisions/councils and NGOs.
Another way to pick winners and losers outside our accepted civil framework.
See how a lot of these new p
‘programs’ blur the line between public and private?
Incentivizing and creating ‘consensus’ outside publically approved mechanisms.
With a little piece of soft pedal propaganda so nobody can say they didn’t ‘tell’ us.
I’ll give ‘ya a ‘credit’.
Work for the people and we’ll re-elect you. Give you credit for doing your job.
Our system is in a take over.
“Another is a project to improve the handling of manure at the Beretta dairy on Llano Road near the treatment plant.”
Well this ones a no brainer. The city pays the farmer to irrigate his pasture with tertiary treated wastewater resulting in the runoff of raw cow manure into the creek.
Here’s another story on the same subject that offers more information.
http://www.sacbee.com/2012/08/27/4761291/nrcs-partners-receive-2-million.html
Our Country, Freedoms, resources and any chance of financial abundance are being gutted like road kill. Through an alphabet of agencies, coalitions, ‘advocacy’ groups and NGOs who’s lineage connects to the United Nations orchestration. Under the guise of environmental conservancy our public officials all have ‘go-along-itis’.
A degenerative disease that attacks the spine, loyalty and moral judgement.
Will we find a cure?
Un-elected boards and commissions levying ‘penalties’ wherever they can. How can this even be legal ? Our own Government charging us through sweetheart ‘consulting contracts’ with ZERO accountability or how they ‘paid to play’ in the overall scheme.
This sounds like public funds robbery by a few connected consulting ‘businesses’.
Which reminds me– The Sonoma County Airport runway work, new tower and other work is said to cost $53.8 Million.
This is from a July 30th PD article:
” Overall, environmental mitigation costs linked to the runway improvements now amount to more than $20 million of the project’s $53.8 million cost.
Design, engineering and construction costs are estimated at just less than $28 million.”
Another quote from the article:
”
The new requirements include larger habitat offsets for a pair of endangered plant and animal species — Burke’s goldfields, a small wetland flower, and the California tiger salamander. Neither species is known to exist in the 100-acre construction zone, Stout said, but federal regulators have required the county to presume that they do because they are known to exist in the area.
____________
So, the ‘environmental cost’ is MORE than 1/3 the actual costs, which are already bloated !!!
Who gets that money ? Can I get some ? Oh my
No.
More Treasonous Triangles.
Another ‘Cap ‘N Trade’ scheme.
Another ‘Public Private Partnership’.
Another way to have our consumption, resources and waste reconciled through a non-elected third party.
This is soft-pedal propaganda toward more Agenda 21 shenanigans.
Someone’s ‘gonna make lots of money.
Someone’s ‘gonna pay (guess who?).
We go to work to be service, make a product.
These people go to work for an NGO who’s tasked with taxing and oppressing us.
It’s so far out there, no one’s even commenting on it.
In the mean time the ‘Rat Pack’ (North Bay Corporation/Unicycler) with their fascist deal in Sonoma County create ‘Carbon Credits’($) out of capturing methane gas from the their landfill.
We’re taxed for the inhale, they profit from the exhale.
All rooted in a contrived premise that’s all about an instrument of our undoing.
We used to be who the Country looked to for popular culture and trends.
Now this is where they can learn about all the ‘pilot programs’ of oppression.
I’m glad they get the weekends off, or we’d get screwed 14% faster.
Instead of keeping our wastewater out of the Laguna we will pay using taxpayer dollars some private groups to clean up something somewhere else. What geniuses thought of this dumb plan? Sounds like robbing Peter to pay Paul. The carbon trading scheme is the cornerstone of the final implementation of UN Agenda 21. Why should we be paying so that sewage can be dumped into the Laguna?
The carbon-dioxide global warming scare has enabled the global elites to impose their draconian plan on the people. Our money is to be given to unaccountable private non-profit groups of which we have no oversight. How do we know where the money really goes. We know that the uber rich are getting richer while we have lost 40% of our wealth in the last 4 years alone. The carbon trading scheme/scam will be the final blow to America as we know it.
Carbon dioxide makes up three hundreths of one percent of the atmosphere. That’s 3 parts out of ten thousand. Oxygen is around 12%. The fear is that we will get to 3 and a half parts of carbon dioxide per 10,000. We are supposed to be very afraid about this, so much that we are willing to give up our property rights, our privacy rights and prosperity. In fact, under the carbon trading scam most of what people do would be a taxable event. It even sets up a new kind of morality where using energy is bad and doing nothing is good. Human life is viewed as a bad thing. It turns morality on its head thus becoming the new State sponsored religion.
Our nation was founded on Christian morality honoring the individual and embracing the Ten Commandments as the moral guide to our behavior. When the production of carbon dioxide becomes the thing that’s bad because it hurts the earth, then we become earth worshippers instead of God worshippers, thus the GAIA religion. That’s where this is going. The earth worshippers following UN Agenda 21 advocate going backwards technologically speaking to a time where most things were done by manual labor. They actively discourage advancement of the developing nations and want us to give up our modern lifestyles including giving up our cars, single-family homes, meat-eating, air-conditioning and other modern conveniences. Instead of relying on technology to figure out ways to do more with less energy and fewer emissions, they want us to give up these things entirely. That’s why they are promoting bicycles even though there has been a recent spate of deaths resulting from these new policies. These ideologues are not even moved by death!
Once the carbon taxing is implemented it will entirely change our lives going from a world in which we improve the lives of everyone to one in which all forms of human activity are suspect and most things are either taxed or are crimes against nature. Will you still go to a friend’s house for dinner if it’s across town and you have used up your vehicle miles already? Will you put in a pool or a hot tub when water and utility costs skyrocket? Will you heat your grandmother’s home or tell her to wrap herself up in blankets instead?
This is crazy but it’s real. they are starting to do it. It doesn’t take a genius to see where this will lead. UN Agenda 21 isn’t even the real plan because they would never write down or allow us to see what they really have planned. UN Agenda 21 is the mask covering their real intentions that are far more devious and ruthless than the words of Agenda 21. But even if you take Agenda 21 on face value, it is still scary. UN Agenda 21 never mentions God, never mentions individual liberties and is opposed to private property ownership. Basically, UN Agenda 21 is opposed to everything we do in the United States and is advocating a new world-wide system that replaces all sovereign governments.
We will not be overthrown without a fight.