Prudent land-use policy does not promote sprawl. Political opportunism must be dead-ended, as such was the misguided recent effort to gut and amend defeated legislation, in which the elected office holder accepted a developer's campaign donation in return for allowing the same developer to sponsor Assembly Bill 212 (to limit the municipal powers of the City of Los Angeles to control land use) favoring the same developer whose sprawling 229 single-family home Tujunga project would benefit from the legislation.
Respecting and seeing a renaissance of the watershed's carrying capacity presents a powerful argument for neighborhood empowerment to reject payola politics: the greed and corporate-personhood of the developer greasing the skids by writing the legislation, then profiteering from that legislation, after paying the politician, with both the developer and the compromised politician threatening, exhorting and coercing the constituency to share their viewpoints with bureaucratic layers of immunity provided by the one-party town politic.
Surely, once payola politics borne of a tryst between politician and developer is extinguished, dialog of communitas in the public forum around aesthetic, life-safety, and other community impacts will resurge and negotiation between all concerns will be voiced, but the nature of bio-regional determinacy will leave the decision-making about restricting sensitive, ecologically vital land areas from urbanization up to a map generating process of overlaying various map overlays of hydrologic, ground water recharge, riparian, chaparral, flora, fauna, woodland, forest, geologic, landslide-prone, seismic off-limits-to-urbanization preserves to be maintained for the overall carrying-capacity of the watershed.
Without human intervention, an emergent composite will reveal those least ecologically sensitive areas remaining as suitable for green-collar, 100% renewable energy source economic and built-form development.
Once crass developer payola-inspired politics are removed from the State Legislature, California can proceed to mitigate and cope with global warming and act to pull the human species back from the precipice of extinction. Payola politics does not allow adequate funding to restore our watershed and provide for a relocalization of our unsustainable, failed global economy based on the local production of food, energy, and goods and the local development of currency, governance and culture.
Reuse, reduce, recycle, restore--have to replace the one-party town payola mantra of denial, distraction, disruption, distortion, and diversion.
Healthy watershed means healthy neighborhood means no payola politics.